There is an unprecedented amount of information available at our fingertips when we are at our desks. However, typical employees spend less time at their desks than ever before. In this article, we present our vision of the Ubiquitous Office, which offers mobile workers nomadic access to the key information and services that they need. By nomadic, we mean that they can travel light, taking nothing more than their mobile phone with them, and are still able to use network-connected peripherals around them. We have developed a prototype mobile solution including printers and mobile phones that tackles two important technical issues for the Ubiquitous Office: ergonomic search and browsing of documents on small appliances and secure transmission of documents to nearby peripherals.

IDC predicts that 66% of US workers (105 million) will be mobile by the end of 2006. In Europe, 100 million workers will be mobile by the end of 2007 [2].