Setting up your own virtual office.

Working from home usually puts the fear of God up most employees. If you are fortunate to work from home here's real quick rundown of the essentials.

1. Talking to folk: most people use Skype in one wave shape or form. When you hook it up to a webcam you can watch them talk too.

2. You'll need a good email account, most of the search engines do their own. I've used Gmail for years and will never move from it. I liked Hotmail until it got taken over by Microsoft. With a Google account though you have more strings to your bow in terms of editing spreadsheets and Word documents online with their Software as a Service, "Google Documents".

3. For full conferencing for free I'm looking at Adobe ConnectNow which lets you invite users to your meeting place and conduct meetings online, show presentations, have webcam support and upload files.

Best thing about all of the above, they are free. Don't cost a penny. You can pick up a decent webcam for £15 (even Tesco has them for just over a fiver). If the thought of being watched doesn't appeal then you can get headsets just as cheap as well.

Any hitech company starting up right now would do no harm in preserving cash by letting folk work at home. Though some of the commercial rates are dropping if you are bootstrapping an business then you don't want to be spending any cash.