A Complementary Tele-Working Platform for Data and Voice Networks

Abstract

Post, telephone, and telegraph (PTT) enterprises, due to the incessant advances of telecommunications, have to provide for novel value-added services and to be able to supply their customers with the means to reap the full advantages of new technology so both commercially survive (Kurland, 1988). On the other hand, the market trends that favored the birth of many dot.com companies asked for service providers (SPs) that lead PTTs to gradually extend their services towards e-business and become x-service providers (x-SPs); x-SPs mainly stand for Application (ASPs), Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRSPs), email/Messaging (eMSPs), Network (NSPs), Management (MSPs), Storage (SSPs), Data Center (DCSPs), Hosting (HSPs), and e-Commerce (eCSPs) ones. This chapter introduces the premises, the implementation, and the evaluation performance of a tele-working platform that was put into operation in order to equip the Public Bureaus of Thessaly’s rural county (Hellas) with the resources to build and provide their citizens those services. This novel platform complies with x-SP specifications and is built on a distributed computing basis.