Since moving from Dublin to Detroit at the beginning of this year, good communication across time zones and continents remains a major stumbling block to my software development and research efforts.
There are anything from 8 million to 11 million part-time or full-time telecommuters in the US. The obvious benefits of lower costs, less travel and less pollution have to be weighed against a real need for good software to help employees communicate and managers control a multi-country software project. Groupware products such as Lotus Notes and now Lotus' Webserver Domino, have always looked like a good way of creating a central document and email repository. But, for most small businesses without a large IT department, the administrative overhead is often simply too high.
While doing some work with Esearch (www.esearch.ie), the Irish email directory, we decided to try an alternative approach - a virtual office where you pay a third party to store your information securely on a server permanently connected to the Internet. Our aim was to co-ordinate our efforts in the US and Ireland.
HotOffice, who recently secured some equity investment from Intel, was our first port of call. HotOffice costs around $10 per month per person. For that, each individual gets 10MB of space, a separate email account and a HotOffice login for accessing extra online utilities.
Having installed the HotOffice client software, MS Office 97 documents and spreadsheets can be easily uploaded for group collaboration by simply clicking the HotOffice logo which has been neatly added to the toolbar. There are also additional tools: an email client, Java chat, a message board and a Microsoft NetMeeting server. Credit checks and business reports are also available via third-party links at a reduced cost. The Java client software ensures that all Office 97 document uploads between your PC and the HotOffice server are securely encrypted.
However, the overall package was not very satisfactory: the email user interface was cumbersome, NetMeeting calls can't be used by more than two people at the same time and uploading the software onto the server could be accomplished just as easily using FTP. Worse still, HotOffice could do with a lot more bandwidth as their servers are just too slow. Additionally, HotOffice is tightly integrated with Microsoft technology and so is only really useful if you currently use Microsoft Office.
HotOffice does have excellent support and may work for you if you're a small business with a group of 2 to 25 largely Internetilliterate teleworkers who need to be able to collaborate using simple tools. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial at www.hotoffice.com. Be aware that HotOffice insist that the initial point of contact with your company needs to be someone in the US or Canada.
HotOffice's biggest competition comes from Netopia, a similar product which has now hooked up with GeoCities, one of the better places for free Webpages on the Net. In my view, both of these products suffer from a fundamental problem. They don't offer a lot more than existing email tools such as IRC (Internet Relay Chat), FTP and IMAP have to offer. IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is a new(ish) email protocol allowing access to email from a variety of locations.
If you do have the resources, then there are better solutions. A number of shrinkw-rapped Web-based groupware products known as TeamWare is emerging as the new workflow software or as an Intranet solution for IT departments new to the Web, even as a possible revenue stream for ISPs trying to find new ways to make more money as competition forces their dial-up prices ever lower.
Lotus's Instant TeamRoom, Involv, eRoom and Facilitate.com are just some of the more interesting players in this arena. The kind of functionality on offer is drag-and-drop remote file manipulation, file versioning, voting, polling and application development to name but a few.
There are real possibilities for virtual offices, especially for the small business with a mobile work force who can gain access to groupware and Intranet solutions by renting the functionality at a much lower cost. Keeping endless emails of every discussion and comment in multiple employees' email boxes just isn't practical anymore, if it ever really was.
Like the automotive manufacturers, many of the large software companies such as Microsoft, ICL and Sun have moved some development to India, Russia and other parts of the third world. With TeamWare products and, to a lesser extent, the likes of HotOffice and Netopia, smaller organisations can begin to take advantage of the global market in software development.
Despite the present drawbacks, the real office of the future may be a virtual one somewhere on the Internet.
Godfrey Nolan is at godfrey@riis.com. See also www.riis.com