Free Tools for Virtual Office
What are the tools for collaboration other than Exchange?
As a rule, the average organization has a question about the organization of interaction between employees when the number of employees exceeds 2. Typical tasks are to send mail, exchange contacts, set and control a task, schedule a meeting. I’ll try to cover this topic with the example of the thorny path of our small organization.
Post office.
Here Google hosted mail facilities are unrivaled. At least 50 accounts, a huge mailbox size, access via pop3, imap will be available for your domain name. The ability to access mail from mobile devices.
Tasks.
Unfortunately google hosted does not have the means to work with tasks, and does not seem to be eager to have it yet. On this fertile ground, seeds of web-based software have sprouted, among which the Remember the milk web service is the undisputed leader. Having obvious advantages and the ability to integrate into google calendar (like an external calendar), although rmilk is not as tightly integrated into google calendar as we would like, for example, assigning tasks to someone else requires mutual registration, and it's not so simple do as I would like. Mobile access to tasks is possible in web browsing mode, for this there is a version of rmilk optimized for display on mobile devices. In the paid version, it is possible to synchronize with attacks directly from a mobile device (Windows Mobile,
The calendar.
Google hosted includes an excellent calendar with the ability to connect both employee calendars and general calendars, for example, holidays in the country, enterprise event calendars. In general, the calendar is valid.
The blog.
Why do I need a corporate blog? Well, if your office is virtual, then I want to be at first in the know about everything. And what about everything, everything? We agree on a common blog, i.e. each employee writes interesting points there during the day, it will be like a “report on the work done in a day”, I hope you have not been distorted by these words;). The blogging process is very useful in terms of company development and self-motivation. In addition, this is a great opportunity for a painless transfer of affairs from an employee to an employee, so that the employee can, so to speak, delve into customer relationships and learn other intimate moments of the internal “kitchen”. Editors' Choice - blogger.com, aka blogspot.
Why? The initial choice fell on livejournal.com and its principles of community organization, however, the inability to close posts from prying eyes quickly overcame all the pros. A blogspot, as it turned out, is one-click-post, and the ability to distribute write permissions, the ability to post to a blog from emaila, the ability to receive new posts by email, the ability to rss subscribe. What you need considering the possibility of integration with google accounts, but, unfortunately, not with accounts from google hosted services.
Projects
How to collectively conduct projects in the usual sense of the word is not yet entirely clear. Zoho seems able. For our needs we use google sites, and in particular its feature with the creation of a page of the "custom list" type, in some cases it is archi-convenient.
And all together.
Zoho. There still needs to be clarified, paid-for free, its feature, but the fact that he is the undisputed leader in terms of the set of services - do not go to the grandmother.
But still, only one tool combines all the advantages of teamwork + access from mobile devices is the offtopic of today's article - Exchange 2007. It makes sense to look at its reincarnation in the product for small enterprises Small Bussiness Server 2008, where it is present in the Standard version.
Recently, big players have also entered the Ukrainian IT market - the Astelit operator offers a virtual office service with the ability to configure exchange hosted services for your domain, which means that they have Exchange on their side and Microsoft Outlook and mobile devices on your side, however all this is not something that would be free :)
At the time of writing, we are still continuing our search for Holy Grail as a free collaborative tool and will always be happy with your observations, feedback and suggestions.
PS it makes sense to get to know zimbra better (via strannik.blogspot.com)