Premises and application of a commercial tele-working platform

The explosive growth of tele-communication markets make clear to PTT (post–telephone–telegraph) enterprises the need to provide for novel value-added integrated services, in order to supply their customers with enough means to reap the full advantages of new technology and survive (Kurland and Bailey (2000), IEEE Eng. Man. Rev., 28 (2), 49–60). 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 and become x-Service Providers (x-SPs), among others they consist of Application SPs (ASPs), e-MAIL/Messaging SPs (eMSPs), Network SPs (NSPs), Management SPs (MSPs), Storage SPs (SSPs), Data Center SPs (DCSPs), Hosting SPs (HSPs), e-Commerce SPs (eCSPs). This paper presents the premises, the implementation, and the evaluation performance of a Tele-Working Platform (TWP) that supplied those services to the citizens of the Public Bureaus of Thessalyʹs rural county (Hellas). This platform complies with the ITU specifications for providing x-SPs and is built on a distributed computing system basis.