Why a virtual office? It saves you money!

Are you a manager or owner of a company? Do you feel you need your employees present so you can keep an eye on them? Well, hopefully the answer is no. But if the answer is yes, I have something interesting bits of information you may find useful...and they may save you lots of money.

In most business situations, an employee is only needed in the office for very important things; for example your IT tech person or the receptionist. One of the constants in business is that employees are the biggest expense to a company. Not only do you pay for their training, salary or wages, and benefits, but there are a ton of other costs as well.

Let's start with the cost of space for a cube, office furniture, printing supplies, printer maintenance, liability insurance if someone gets injured at work, and the list goes on. With technology today, more companies are finding they don't even need employees in the office for meetings anymore. Virtual meetings save time and money. With document collaboration tools, especially free ones such as OfficeLive and Google Docs, employees don't even have the need to store important files on their main computer. And if you give your employees a certain budget for supplies at home, you eliminate excess at the office, as well as reducing the need for various insurances and office space.

You can even go a step farther and have a mainly virtual company and office. This is a rather lengthy topic, but here is the short of it. First, the only people that ever need to be in the office are employees that will need to interact with incoming customers and any personnel needed to keep daily operations running, such as servers and the tech environment. Second, have a bunch of "Hotel" cubes or areas in which an employee can come in with a laptop, plug in and do their work if they are needed in the office. Most meetings and sales calls can be held virtually. Third, use a document management system that you can manage and track everything. A good example is SharePoint. Fourth, give laptops to your employees and give them the ability to VPN into work. For security and liability reasons, you can lock down a laptop much better than someone's personal home computer. Lastly, go green. Give your employees a low supply budget. Why? Because why on earth would they possibly need to print anything out when everything can be collaborated online.

I will be doing a series of blog posts on various software that is extremely helpful in achieving the virtual company. I will also be going into some more details on how it saves companies lots of money. Enjoy!

Does my business need Vista?

To be quite honest, no. I like to compare Vista to Windows Millenium Edition; an OS released because an OS "HAD" to be released. Although Microsoft really put some amazing features into Vista for personal, business, and mobile users, it has more problems than I would ever bother writing. Not only that, but how do you determine what version of Vista you need if you have no choice and are buying a new computer?

One solution if you are computer savvy or have an IT department is to just make an image of your old Windows XP machine, assuming your last system had XP, and then wipe the current computer's hard drive and place on the image. A fairly easy process too. Also, most companies when buying new systems are not aware that they can usually save money by ordering in bulk and requesting no operating system to be installed. The reason for this is because most companies now have a standard image that goes on every computing system.

Yes, I know you want to know the answer to the obvious question: What if my company has decided to go to Vista? Well, hopefully they will hold off and wait for Windows 7 instead. As of now, it appears to be the new Windows XP...which means features and stability. If your company is going ahead with Vista anyway, here are some tips:

1. Does your business need extremely advanced security?
2. Does your business have lots of mobile users who use their laptops between work and home (mobile commuting or just traveling work force)?
3. Does your company not want to spend a lot of extra money on computer recovery software and tools?

If you answered yes to most or all of these questions, then make sure your business is spending the extra dollars to get Windows Vista Ultimate. However, for most companies, Vista Business will handle all of your computing needs. Hope this helps. As always, feel free to contact me with questions.

Collaboration at your fingertips

In business today, being able to collaborate documents across a company or even the world has become much easier. However, to save a company resources, such as time and money, businesses need to collaborate quickly and easily. Therefore, a company needs to find a collaboration tool. Of course, there are many tools out there, some ranging from free to very pricey. They all have the pros and cons, but I wanted to mention two that really stand out for the everyday company, ranging from large to small.

Google Docs

Well, as most people know, Google has a great web-based office suite. The tool is called Google Docs. It allows you to collaborate with spreadsheets and word processing documents. While one user is updating a document, another can be updating as well. Or, while one person is going over a document a group of people can follow along, since there is a built-in chat feature with the document sharing. GDocs also has a "PowerPoint" presentation equivalent, form creator, drawing tool, and now file storage for any document type. For a free online tool such as this, it doesn't get much better. Or does it? I had said no before, but most of Google's latest enhancements has it playing with the big boys now. If you are savvy with HTML, CSS, and the like, you can do everything that you would in Office in Google Docs. Did I mention this is free? Although, if your organization wants to benefit from a SharePoint-esq feel, there is a paid service, which is very afforable to all size organizations.

OfficeLive (Now SkyDrive)

What if you still want free but need to use Microsoft Office? Well, don't worry, since most companies fall into this boat. Microsoft actually offers a document management and collaboration solution for free! And now, you can edit/create Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents directly on the web, thanks to the power of Microsoft's 2010 products. Wonderful! A person doesn't even need a Windows Live / Hotmail account to view the documents. However, if they want to edit or work with the documents, they will need an account, which is free as well. OfficeLive, now SkyDrive, acts like a document repository in which you have collaboration abilities. You can have multiple people working in the same document at the same time. You can then edit documents offline or in a full version of Office.

Conclusion

If you had to pick between these two only, it would be a tough call, but still the same end result. If you are on a budget and can't afford Microsoft Office for every person's computer but need something that has a good chunk of the features, then I would use Google Docs. All you need for that is a computer with an Internet connection...or even a Smart Phone. But, if you really need to use Microsoft Office, then I recommend trying out SkyDrive. It has a slight learning curve, but is very dynamic and useful, as well as easy to integrate into your current work environment thanks to Live.