One of the most important tools in our office is our shared workspace.  We share calendars, action lists, documents, and more.  Staff also use the virtual office to keep track of their hours, updated shared information on current projects, access contact lists and more.

• An Intranet is vital to your business if you have multiple staff who occasionally work from different locations.
• An Intranet shared workspace can also be an invaluable tool for managing community events, not for profit groups and associations, and keeping community organizations, well . . . organized.

I want to introduce you to a new free hosted virtual office at Officezilla.com.

I had a super easy time setting up my own virtual office and upon signing up was given a real person’s name and phone number in case I run into trouble.  I can invite as many group members as I like and choose theme colours and even use my own images to decorate the virtual office space.

One of the things I really like about this intranet tool is it uses feeds very effectively.  Group members can set up a feed and monitor goings-on from a variety of feed-enabled devices like cell phones or even arrange for email updates when things are changed or added to the Group site.  (I suggest setting these feeds up in Feedburner if you really want it easy for members to get feeds by email).

Our shared office is a paid solution, and a very good one.  It’s the one thing my staff won’t let me trim from the budget!  At roughly $1000 annually, our hosted Intranet at WebExOne.com, is an investment that has significantly enhanced our ability to grow our capacity to manage multiple projects.

Would you like to more easily manage your tourism business?  Get all the members of the team on the same page?  Make it easy to track how your next festival or community event is coming along?

Try Officezilla …. the other members of your team will thank you for it!

Do you have a favourite virtual office solution?  Let me know about it by commenting below.

Google Sites at http://www.sites.google.com offers businesses the opportunity to create a shared Web presence to share Web pages, calendars, events, and almost any kind of document. Your free site can be public or private and members of the site can even create and share content.
For the past three or four years, we’ve use Webexone.com to keep an Inranet for our team at Northern Edge Algonquin. We use the site to share documents, calendar of events, share databases and documents and manage all kinds of internal communications. The thousand dollar annual cost of the service is easily made-up for in productivity of team members having instant access to all kinds of shared information. Now, with Google Sites, businesses can get a similar type of interactivity for free!

As with most google services, the service is neatly connected to things like google docs, spreadsheets, and google calendar.