The Dieringer Research Group of WorldatWork estimated that in 2006 28.7 million American workers telecommuted at least one day per month, and that up to 100 million people may be doing so by 2010. The advantages of telecommuting are obvious: less employee time spent in traffic, lower gasoline consumption, fewer expenditures on office space, and the like.

Unified communications (Compare Unified Communications products) and unified messaging are technologies that can significantly improve the likelihood of a successful telecommuting experience. By integrating e-mail, voice, fax, presence, Web conferencing and other capabilities into a unified system, telecommuting employees can have at their disposal all of the communication tools they would have if they were at their desk in the office.

A critical component of a good unified communications and telecommuting experience involves giving people access to the data they need to do their work, including consistent versions of this data. For small businesses, a tool call SugarSync from Sharpcast works quite nicely. SugarSync works by continually backing up files to an in-the-cloud server using Amazon.com’s storage network. To get started, you install a small-footprint application on each Windows PC, Mac, BlackBerry device or Windows Mobile device on which you’d like to access files. You then specify the folders and files you’d like to share across these devices and these files are copied to SugarSync’s servers. Whenever you log in to any system in your network, the changes are automatically downloaded so that you always have access to the same files and versions, regardless of the system on which you’re accessing them.

I’ve been using SugarSync for several months and have been quite pleased with the performance of the system, although uploading files for the first time is fairly time-consuming. It allows me to access every file I need on my Mac and Windows desktops, as well as my MacBook Air, with the knowledge that I’m always working on the same version of the file.

For small businesses – particularly those with remote or telecommuting workers that need to share files – or for people who travel frequently and need to access their files using two or more computers, SugarSync is definitely worth a look.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.