Now there's something I never thought I'd see in my living room again. After five months of broadbandless misery involving MAC codes, BT line tags and almost wilfully incompetent "support" staff at my old ISP, who'd apparently outsourced their helplines to a box of monkeys in a ditch, I am now online at home again.

From next week I'll be working from home full-time again, and Skype will be vital to my livelihood. It'll be a relief to be free of an office management that won't let me download Skype, or Google Toolbar, or Irfanview, or pretty much anything useful, though I understand that such rules are pretty standard in the workplace nowadays. Far be it from me to suggest that the nation's business brains are suffering a fear of the new that blinds them to the benefits of the internet. It's inevitable that business practices will take time to catch up with technology.

But I do think it's a shame that some companies and employees are missing out on Skype's workplace benefits. Skype's Extras gallery features a small but savvily-formed pile of business applications that can really improve efficiency, boost communication and cut costs for the forward-thinking professional.

Skype Extras are little downloads that help you get more out of Skype – anything from 3D talking avatars to lie detectors. At the moment Extras are only for Windows users, but Mac compatibility is in the pipeline. Extras are submitted by Skype's developer partners, and those programs that work particularly well with Skype earn Skype Certification. So look out for the icon when you're browsing the extras, or when you're shopping for Skype gadgets:

The growing batch of business add-ons include Skip2PBX, a gateway that enables up to 99 concurrent Skype lines, and Skylook, with which you can record calls, get SMS alerts and more. The sole Skype Certified Business Extra is Convenos Meeting Center 3.3 (below), a subscription-based web conferencing tool that was one of the first programs to win certification. Users attend the conference through their browser, creating a virtual workplace where participants can securely meet, share and store documents. Coffee isn't included.