I hear ya on the office politics!!! I am lucky in that, as a specialist, I can pretty much chart my own course. They think I work magic!!
Distance collaboration is hot now as travel budgets for us, but even moreso for others, have been slashed. We are a Regional office, so we have 5 States and 65 Tribes to serve. It mostly involves webinar and video streaming technologies but as you can guess, there is a whole art in designing these sessions as well as all the peripheral work that surrounds them pre- and post-. The nice thing is figuring out how to spend less and actually do a better job of reaching people, especially in more remote areas. Smaller communities never had big travel budgets anyway, so if we can serve them better it'll be a big plus. It's all in the implementation. Plus we don't want to bore people to death, so matching up content and audience us correctly is critical.
So what do you and your hubby do? I know you had mentioned something on this before. You work in HR??