Remote control

Entrepreneur, Oct, 1998 by Heather Page

Like many entrepreneurs, Jeff Stello overflows with ideas about building businesses and making money. It's bringing those ideas to reality that, at times, can get a bit tricky. But that hasn't stopped the 40-year-old president and owner of IT Financial Inc., a financial management consulting company in Malvern, Pennsylvania, from trying.

Take the time his client, Healthy Pet Corp., a Trumbull, Connecticut, company that owns and manages animal hospitals, needed to draw up a business plan and operations manual for several hospitals it had acquired. The founders pulled together a management team of eight individuals, including Stello, from around the country to design, write and edit the documents. At first, the team used e-mail to send files and communicate ideas. But the project got messy when team members began experiencing problems opening different file formats and tracking multiple versions of the document.

The solution to Stello's dilemma? The HotOffice Virtual Office Service from HotOffice Technologies Inc., a subscription-based solution that lets users store information on a centrally located server they can access via their Web browsers. With HotOffice Virtual Office, Stello's team had one easily accessible place to store, retrieve and track the project's documents.

Virtual offices like these work much like Web sites: You rent a private work space, typically through an Internet service provider (ISP), that acts as a single location for team members to meet, post documents and share ideas in real time. Although Web-team collaborations don't work in every business situation, they've become increasingly common as entrepreneurs strive to build more flexibility into their companies. Driving this need is the burgeoning global economy, faster product development cycles, and the growing complexity of projects that often involve multiple industries.

"In today's business environment, most projects are very complex and usually require a wider set of competencies than one small company can bring to bear," explains George Metes, director of business consulting for Virtual Learning Systems Inc., a Manchester, New Hampshire, company that provides training and consulting on virtual teams and collaboration. "With the emergence of the Internet, you're able to reach out to the [people with the] competencies you need and bring them into a project just when you want them."

The real benefit of building virtual teams like these is the reduction in travel time and costs involved with working with individuals in far-flung locations. Moving most of the work online makes it possible to manage, discuss and work on tasks with people across the country - even around the world - with very little investment.

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK

When it comes to choosing the technology to build a virtual office, keep this rule in mind: the simpler, the better. You don't want team members struggling to learn how to use equipment or technology. Utilizing simple, inexpensive tools that most men are already familiar with, like email, bulletin boards and Web browsers, saves time.

Typically, applications like HotOffice fall the need because they act as the command center for a virtual team, allowing members to place objects such as documents, images and spreadsheets into a common location for review; post notes on a bulletin board for comment; retrieve files; and share ideas.

HotOffice's Document Center area, for instance, can be used by team members to create, update and collaborate on documents. When working with his team, Stello posted his business plan and operations manual in separate folders in the Document Center for review. Each hospital also had its own folder, so that relevant documents could be stored in the proper location as they were completed. The Document Center also has a search engine to help you quickly locate documents and other files in your HotOffice.

The Communications Center in HotOffice is where Stello's team did all its brainstorming and communicating. Here, you can send team members e-mail messages, share ideas on an electronic bulletin board and hold real-time meetings in the online conference room.

Hotoffice gave Stello's project the organizational structure it needed to get the job done. "[HotOffice] was a great solution because it gave us the tools we wanted without a significant investment in time or money," Stello says.

A free software trial of Hotoffice is available for downloading at www.hotoffice.com. You can subscribe to Hotoffice for $10 to $15 per user, per month, either through an ISP or HotOffice's Web site. In addition, HotOffice software is now offered on 3Com Corp.'s CD-ROM, "Connections," an Internet access starter kit and software bundle packaged with all U.S. Robotics modems.

A solution that's similar to HotOffice is Netopia Inc.'s Virtual Office 2.0. The difference here is an "in/out basket" where office owners can post files and visitors can drop off and pick up files. You can also set up private out baskets and passwords for certain visitors so sensitive information can be kept private.