>Even though I know there are no guarantees against this, I would hate to waste a lot of time tuning in to technology that will shortly disappear. Any help or comments appreciated. :)

I have to echo the sentiments of several others on this subject. You might also want to visit Rick's website and look at who else is using his product. I think even the UT is powered by WC. It's a very straight forward system that comes with plenty of sample code that you can copy and paste into your own and make modifications. Rick must never sleep, because he's always great about answering questions, here, in the newsgroups, on betas, and on his own web site. His support and product are both excellent. The cost of the product is negligible considering what you get.

Now, in order to make this thing work from your office heres some of what you'll need. You need:
1. A static ip address - from internic which can be resolved by the DNS servers.
2. A pipeline to the internet (ISDN on the lowend, DSL, Roadrunner, T1, T2, etc. on the high end.) I recommend setting up an ISDN or cablemodem connection for development purposes.
3. An ISP who will host your ip address. Even though you might have an ISDN account through your local telco, you still have to pay the big bucks to an ISP for hosting your ip address. The telco connection is just to get to the internet, the ISP will register you with internic so that when someone enters a url such as

http://www.mydomain.com

it resolves that to be 204.121.122.3 or whatever the ip address might be.
4. I'm sure I'm leaving something out, but that should be enough info to give you a frame of reference. Of course, there are hardware issues too, like if you go ISDN, do you use an ISDN Modem or a router like one of the Ascend products. Anyway, have fun.