How to create a virtual office

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How to create a virtual office

Posted by Justin Long ⋅ March 1, 2008 ⋅

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This month, we will outline some of the newly available, free (or cheap) technological tools that make it easier to equip an office. One caveat: Nearly all of these require Internet access at some point. The tools listed below are the ones we use in our own office. There are other competitors out there, and we are not endorsing these in particular—just highlighting them to show how for little or no cost you can have some very powerful office management tools.
Google Documents provides a free word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software. Google is rolling out off-line access to files, so you can use them if you are temporarily without Internet access. The advantages of Google Docs: they are free, and files can be easily shared for joint editing by multiple people.

Google Reader (reader.google.com…) is one of the best blog readers available, and now it has new abilities to share entries you’ve found interesting along with your notes. This is effectively a free blogging tool. (There’s also a free tool for commenting on regular web pages that don’t have RSS feeds).

Gmail provides a free, high powered web-based email account; mail can also be downloaded from Gmail into your favorite POP client (i.e. Outlook or Thunderbird).

Google Calendar is a free, powerful calendaring application. We maintain multiple calendars: for work, for home appointments, and for project itineraries.

Amazon S3 (aws.amazon.com…) and Jungle Disk (www.jungledisk.com…) combine to give you extremely cheap, infinitely scalable hard disk space. S3 is access to remote storage on Amazon’s massive server network; you pay $0.15 or less per gigabyte of storage per month. (30 gigabytes = $4.50 or so per month.) These files are fault tolerant and backed up; Amazon guarantees their availability at 99.9%. Jungle Disk makes the Amazon S3 file service map to a local hard drive, so you can just drag-and-copy files over. This is a great offline backup service. It is available with encrypted connections if you require.

Highrise is a wonderful contact management (or donor management) tool. It gives you an email address you can forward emails to, and it will automatically pick up all the contact information available in the email. Basic editions are free. Multiple users can be given access to a single Highrise account. (See www.highrisehq.com…).

Grouphub is a great project management tool as well, from the makers of Highrise. Multiple users can access the same account, which provides for milestones, to-dos, questions, notes, calendaring, etc.

PHPBB3 is a free, open source bulletin board service which can be downloaded and installed on a website for use as a threaded message board. There are services that will give you free or semi-free space to set up a PHPBB without having to have your own server or domain.

Strategicnetwork.org… (which we manage) or Google Groups are both great tools for establishing email groups for distribution of news or communications. Both are free.

If you’re hunting for bibliographic information on a book, just click over to the World Catalog (www.worldcat.org…). It features virtually every book in print with a quick reference link to the appropriate citation format (e.g. APA, etc).

If you want to send out email newsletters and track respondents, you can use Constant Contact—but Campaignmonitor.com… gives you basically the same features and is much cheaper.

Q10 (www.baara.com…) is a free bare-bones editor for those of you who (like me) find yourself distracted by the siren call of the Internet. It consumes your entire screen with a simple black page and minimalist features. (No boldface, italic, underscore, etc.) I’ve found it useful for writing papers and articles.

If you have Outlook, you may find the free tool Xobni (now in public beta) to be of immense help. It will index your Outlook message store and provide lightning fast access to contacts and past emails, and show you who knows whom. It only works in Outlook right now.

Download Accelerator Plus (www.speedbit.com…) is a widely used download manager that helps use multiple connections to speed the download of larger files. When you’re downloading huge PDFs or Powerpoints from someone’s website, this is a must.

YouSendIt (www.yousendit.com…) is a great tool for sending files that are too big to send as attachments. It uploads the file to the YouSendIt server and then sends a link to the file to your contact. They can download it at their leisure with a normal web browser, and the file gets deleted afterward. This is also good etiquette so that you don’t send someone a huge multi-megabyte file that they’re not expecting, particularly when they pay for their connection by the megabyte.

If you have a great tool to mention, send us a note via email to editor@momentum-mag.org….