I hope some of you technically astute readers can help me with this ,particularly those of you who work from home occasionally but use your laptops to access your company's internal systems and programmes.

How difficult is it to do the above, ie work from home on a part time basis but during that time, have access to all emails, intranet, and financial reporting systems that you would normally use when in the office. Do you need to have a dedicated server in the remote location?

My employer is saying its not possible for staff to work from home for reasons of technical impossibility. At present staff can only access emails remotely but not the archive email files. If I am working on a spreadsheet I need to email it to me at home and then open it and work from that. It is very limiting although manageable in the short term.

Do you think that its technically impossible, expensive or difficult to put into practice, or is it simply that its a good excuse to avoid any requests for home working? I think there are already some small offices within my organisation with pcs which are linked up to the server in the HQ only ie in another location, which seems to make a nonsense of their argument per se.

Any advice or information on other people's experiences appreciated , and thanks in advance.