Most workers will have an IR-capable desktop computer and an IR-capable portable computer. The portable is either "docked" to the desktop or carried with the worker as she roams between office buildings and labs.
To prepare for a meeting, the portable owner downloads the departmental project schedule information from a LAN database to the desktop, adds some late-breaking information that is only on her desktop PC, and then squirts a filtered set of schedule information to the portable using the IR link.
When she arrives at the meeting in a nearby building, all the attendees have IR-capable laptops loaded with their department's part of the schedule. During the beginning of the meeting each worker uses the laptop to check schedule facts, take notes, revise the dependencies in their schedules, and squirt schedule facts to each other as needed.
During the break, workers with access to an IR-capable LAN access point, which will be available in most meeting rooms, can use laptops to send and receive e-mail messages relevant to the meeting.
After the break, the attendees collaborate on a new schedule using IR-capable conferencing software on their portables. When a realistic schedule is hammered out, one worker with the agreed-upon schedule on her portable leaves immediately for the airport and flies to a board meeting to present the schedule.
In transit, she uses the laptop to continue exchanging e-mail messages in the airport and hotel using an IR-capable public phone. While in transit, she receives detailed messages about the upcoming board meeting on her IR-capable pager and organizes the messages by squirting them into the IR-capable personal information manager (PIM) application on her laptop.
In a hotel room, she uses the laptop to add the latest schedule information to an electronic slide presentation. In the hotel business service center she uses the IR-capable presentation graphics software to squirt the slide images to an IR-capable laser printer, producing handouts for the meeting.
At the board meeting, she displays the electronic slides to an audience by squirting them one at a time from the laptop to a high-speed IR-capable large screen video projector (some slides have digital video and audio clips that demonstrate the physical processes underlying the schedule dependencies she is presenting).