UK CHANNEL OUTFIT Computacenter is keeping its staff's feet firmly on the ground by cutting back on overseas travel.

The company reckons it's chopped travel costs by 90 per cent following a pilot scheme using videoconferencing, smart whiteboards and data sharing.

While the project, put in place by Bagshot-based Steljes, is reducing Computacenter's carbon footprint and putting local travel agents out of business, we wonder if Computacenter staff such as Internal Sales Director Chris Hanson are happy to be stuck in an office in Birmingham rather than flying round the world to slightly more exotic destinations.

Hanson reckons he spent 17 weeks travelling an estimated 40,000 miles every year, a figure that has now dropped by 75 per cent. After the introduction of the whiteboards, his expenses dropped tenfold.

Call us old fashioned, but one of the things that makes working for a decent-sized organisation attractive is the opportunity for International travel and notching up the occasional meal in a flash restaurant.

While sitting in a Midlands meeting room with a cup of lukewarm instant coffee, a smart whiteboard and a video link may be good for the company's bottom line, it ain't doing a lot for staff morale.

When this hack worked at Intel, we had weekly video meetings with our counterparts in Munich. These were quite a hoot and usually involved zooming the remote camera in on people's cleavages and noses while pretending we were the jury in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Not a lot was achieved that couldn't have been done by email or phone, but every couple of months we flew out to Germany, had a series of back to back meetings that were actually useful, then went out in the evening. We achieved loads and enjoyed ourselves.

There's no substitute for being there, unless 'there' is Birmingham, of course. µ