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| Run A Virtual Office |
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Business & Finance July 1999 • Vol.5 Issue 7 |
Run A Virtual Office Use The Web To Host Virtual Meetings, Set Up A Newsletter & More | ||
 In the past, setting up a business office meant renting a physical office, signing up for utilities, buying office furniture, and hiring a secretary. The process was both time-consuming and expensive. If you were concerned about impressing your customers, then you had to spend even more money and be careful regarding the location and appearance of your office. The Internet has changed all of that. You can now assemble a full suite of tools and services on the Internet into an impressive "virtual" office. Even better is the fact that many of the components are free, and the ones that are not free are fairly inexpensive. While the resulting virtual office may not have mahogany paneling, a solid oak desk, and marble floors, it will surely impress your customers, suppliers, employees, and co-workers.
 HotOffice. HotOffice (http://www.hotoffice.com) is one of your best options for running a private, virtual office. (All that is missing is that fancy paneling.) Only people with the necessary permissions can access your office and its files online. This makes it more useful for interacting with co-workers than customers. For a small operation, for example, you could even compare it to a private intranet without the hardware and capital requirements. HotOffice basically gives you the means of connecting a small group of people online. The process for posting documents to the office is fairly simple. For example, you can easily post Microsoft Office documents from within Office. For other types of files, you will use Windows Explorer to post to your office. Once the documents are in your HotOffice account, anyone with the necessary permissions, which you set up, can view them (or download them) online from any browser. Posting and retrieving documents, however, requires the HotOffice software. HotOffice also does even more. For example, each HotOffice account includes E-mail that supports attachments, which most browser-based E-mail programs do not typically support. (You view the attachments in Hypertext Markup Language [HTML].) HotOffice also includes a chat room and a bulletin board. HotOffice includes a 30-day free trial. Signing up for the service is as easy as going to its Web site, clicking the Free Trial link on the home page, and filling out three screens of information. The information relates to your name, company name, E-mail address, and the like. You do not have to provide any intrusive information. As soon as you complete the information, the site will configure your HotOffice account so it is ready to use. Once you have an account, you simply log onto the service with any Java-enabled browser and provide your account name and password to use the system. (Java is a programming language used on the Web.) Other than the browser, no special software is required to log on and use your HotOffice account. Publishing from Microsoft Office to your HotOffice account, however, does require special software. You can either download this software from the HotOffice Web site, or HotOffice will mail you a free CD. You must install the software on each computer you plan on using to post Microsoft Office documents from Microsoft Office. Running the installation program modifies the Microsoft Office templates in such a manner that with one click you can publish Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files to your HotOffice account. Of course, if the computer you are using does not have this software installed, then you can still post files using Explorer. HotOffice costs $12.95 per user per month, and you can quickly add or remove users as needed. You get 20 megabytes (MB) of online storage per user, and more is available inexpensively. By the time you read this, the next version of HotOffice should be available. It is scheduled to include a group calendar and contract manager, Web store creation tools, Web site building tools, and more. You can also set up a virtual office for a similar price at Netopia (http://www.netopia.com). Virtual Meetings. While HotOffice is designed much like a private office, there are many other components for a public office available on the Web. One such tool is a virtual meeting room, which allows co-workers and customers to interact with one another from their own computers. In addition to the fee-based version in HotOffice, WebEx.com (http://www.webex.com) offers a virtual meeting room for free. The first time you log onto the service you must set up an account and download a browser plug-in. After that, you simply click to start a meeting. This generates a meeting number. Anyone wanting to join you in the meeting must have that number so your meetings stay private and include only invited guests. The WebEx.com software allows you to share documents, presentations, and even Web sites with all the meeting attendees. The best thing about WebEx.com, besides that fact that it is a free service, is you can sit down at any Internet-connected machine, download the plug-in, and get into a meeting in just a few seconds. This makes it wonderful for those spur-of-the-moment meetings and brainstorming sessions. E-mail. Most likely, you already have at least one E-mail account—the one that came with your Internet account. There can be good business reasons, however, for having multiple E-mail accounts. First, your existing E-mail address will disappear if you change Internet service providers (ISPs). Second, when all your personal and business correspondence comes into one account it can be hard to keep them separate. Third, if you post to discussion groups and give out this E-mail address, you will then have to wade through a lot of spam (junk E-mail messages) to get to your business correspondence. Fortunately, the solution is easy and free. Most search engines and Web directories, such as Excite (http://www.excite.com) and Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) either offer free E-mail accounts or links to free accounts from other sites. Most of these E-mail services are browser-based. The plus side of these accounts is they allow you to pick up your mail from any Internet-connected computer while traveling. On the negative side, they usually prevent you from sending and receiving attachments, and they make it harder to archive your messages locally. A few free E-mail providers, such as Friendly Email (http://www.londonoffice.com), offer free POP3 (non-browser) accounts that work with attachments and E-mail programs such as Eudora. A good solution is to use several E-mail accounts. Use one POP3 account, from either your service provider or a service such as Friendly Email, for your business communications. This will allow you to send and receive attachments and save files locally. Use a second E-mail account for personal correspondence where you do not need attachments. Use a third E-mail account for posting messages online. Then, when the inevitable rush of spam overwhelms this account, you can simply abandon it and start a new one for posting. (NOTE: Just make sure you keep track of all your accounts and passwords.) Keeping In Touch. Keeping in touch with a few remote co-workers and/or customers is fairly easy with E-mail. As the number of customers or co-workers grows, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep everyone in the loop using E-mail. Electronic newsletters (sometimes also called discussion groups or listservers) are one solution to this common problem. With an electronic newsletter, someone wishing to send a message to everyone simply sends an E-mail message to the newsletter. The newsletter server then automatically forwards that message to everyone who has signed up to receive the newsletter. Anyone receiving the message can reply to it, and the server will relay that person's message to everyone on the list. The newsletter will only accept postings from members, which helps reduce spam and off-topic postings.
One advantage of Topica is it is the only service that lets you import a long list of E-mail addresses from a file to add to your newsletter. This can save you much time over entering the addresses of newsletter recipients one at a time, especially if you are accessing the service over a modem. One important decision you must make is whether to make the newsletter moderated or unmoderated. With a moderated newsletter, nothing goes out to the group until you approve it. This allows you to kill spam, remove flames, and generally keep the discussion on-track. Approving every message in a busy newsletter, however, takes time and the newsletter is not working anytime the moderator is on vacation or otherwise unavailable. Topica sends each message to the moderator. You send it back via E-mail to a special address to approve it or you simply delete it to kill the message. The process is much easier if you set up a special E-mail account just for this purpose. You can then have multiple moderators, which Topica does not support, by sharing this E-mail password with your co-moderators. With an unmoderated newsletter, anyone approved to join the group can post anything they like. Of course, inappropriate postings are much less likely to happen in a private newsletter targeted at co-workers or clients than in a publicly accessible newsletter. You can also create free electronic newsletters at eGroups (http://www.egroups.com) and ONElist (http://www.onelist.com). ONElist and eGroups allow you to remove the advertising they place at the bottom of all the E-mail messages coming from your newsletter for $4.95 per month—a good investment for business users. ONElist limits your newsletter to 250 subscribers, while Topica limits you to 500. Topica gives you the most tools to manage your newsletter, but eGroups is also a good service. You will want to keep your business lists private, and both of these services allow that. Online Calendars. One of the most difficult things for co-workers in different locations to accomplish is coordinating their schedules. Web-based, online calendars make schedule coordination a snap. In addition, many online calendars make it fairly easy to share all or parts of your schedule with the outside world. Typical of these services is AnyDay.com at http://www.anyday.com. AnyDay.com is a free service for which you must provide only a minimum amount of personal information to start your account. You then can access and maintain your calendar using your browser with no additional software. You can even create multiple calendars (say, social and professional). Once you finish creating your calendars, you enter your events into them one at a time. You can enter either single events or recurring events, such as a weekly staff meeting. You can also enter important birthdays and anniversaries. AnyDay.com also lets you selectively merge items between your personal calendars as well as the event calendars it provides. Once you are satisfied with your calendar, you can publish a month's worth of it on the AnyDay.com Web site. Once you publish your calendar, your friends, family members, and co-workers can view it online. You can even have AnyDay.com send out E-mail messages to anyone you select to let them know you have published a new calendar. AnyDay.com includes features that make it even more useful. Because it is Web-based, you can view and update your schedule from any Internet-accessible computer. It includes a to-do list and contact manager. These too are Web-based, making them especially handy when you are on the road. This service can also send you E-mail reminders. Finally, if you create calendars for all of your staff under the same account, your staff can easily merge information from your calendar into their calendars. While not available as this issue went to press, AnyDay.com will soon allow you to download your calendars into personal information managers (PIM) and personal digital assistants (PDA). There are also plans to improve the printing of calendars and to expand the interactivity between your personal calendars and the specialty calendars provided by AnyDay.com. In addition to AnyDay.com, you can find online calendars at Appoint.net (http://www.appoint.net), Jump! (http://www.jump.com), and When.com (http://www.when.com). The Pros Of Going Virtual. By pulling together the various Web-based components that make sense for your specific business, you can put together an incredibly powerful and impressive virtual office at little or no expense. While these tools can make you look like a big company, they require surprisingly little maintenance on your part.  by Ronny Richardson
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