Use a Web Office to Link a Far-Flung Staff

Not everyone who works together is in the same office. Sometimes you and your colleagues are miles apart. This is especially true in entertainment, multimedia and other industries where co-workers frequently collaborate on an ad hoc basis.

I have some experience in this regard. A few years ago I worked for a small company that produced a television program. We taped the show in Los Angeles, but the staff was scattered across California. One of my jobs as managing editor was to book guests for the show. Every day or two I would e-mail or fax the guest schedule to the producers, the talent and the technical staff.

If I were doing the show today, I would use a site on the World Wide Web to share such information. It’s pretty easy to post text files to an Internet site, which can be protected so that only authorized people can get in.

Posting files to a Web site is fine for one-way information, but sometimes you want everyone in the group to be able to update the file. One option is to get FileMaker Pro 4.0 ($199) for Windows or Macintosh. This database program from FileMaker (formerly Claris) makes it possible to share a database over a local area network (LAN) or via the Internet. With FileMaker running on a server that’s connected to the Internet, it’s possible for any member of the team to not only look up information in the database, but make changes or additions, depending on the permission level given them.

Let’s say you’re in the business of running bus tours and your employees work on different computers in one office, in remote locations or from their home offices. You have a certain number of seats to fill and once the bus is full, you can’t sell any more. Rather than having your salespeople call a central dispatcher to find out if there’s room on the bus, each person can query or add to the same database regardless of where he or she is.

The nice thing about FileMaker is that you can use it over a local area network (which enables computers in an office to share disk drives, printers, modems and other resources) or over the Internet. Either way, everyone can read and write to the database, depending on what privileges they’ve been granted.

FileMaker can also be used to create Web pages, which makes it easy to share information with your customers, partners and staff. There is even a way to create an interactive Web page that will let people add to or edit your database via the Web, assuming you want them to. That way, customers can book their own seats on the bus without having to call your office.

There are two ways to use FileMaker for collaboration. If you have a LAN or a permanent connection to the Internet, you can host the database on one of your own machines. Otherwise you can arrange for an Internet service provider to host your database.

Another option is to rent a virtual office on the Web. Several companies, including Lotus (https://www.lotus.com/home.nsf /welcome/teamroom), HotOffice Technologies (https://www.hotoffice .com/), Instinctive Technology (https://www.instinctive.com/) and Changepoint, offer virtual spaces where employees can meet and collaborate from anywhere in the world.

HotOffice, for example, allows you to use any machine on the Internet to store, retrieve and share documents. You can “meet” colleagues in a private online conference room, post messages on an electronic bulletin board, collaborate on Microsoft Office documents and access a presentation from a client’s office.

Once you set up a HotOffice account, each member of your work group can download special software that lets him or her transfer files between that person’s computer and “HotOffice” via the Internet to share with co-workers. HotOffice also has a way to take phone messages, post reminders for employees or trigger a live “NetMeeting,” in which you can chat with colleagues by typing at the keyboard or by talking, if each person’s PC has a microphone and audio system. The company positions this as free long-distance calling but, frankly, it’s not as clear or reliable as a regular phone.

You can use the service free for 30 days. After that you pay $19 a month for one user, $39 for three users, $69 for six users, $99 for 10 and $199 for 25 users. Additional users are $10 per month. The company gets 10 megabytes of storage for each user.

Changepoint offers the Involv intranet service (https://www.involv.com/), which can be rented for $12.95 a month per user. (An intranet is a proprietary network within a company or work group.) The service is designed for people who need to quickly set up a work group for employees or for people who are collaborating on projects.

ERoom (www.eroom.com) offers the cleanest interface of all the virtual office sites I looked at. The “desktop” that you see when you’re online is similar to what you see when using Windows 95. ERoom, in a sense, turns the Internet into a giant network disk drive. By putting all your information on a single screen, it makes it easy to share and exchange files among remote co-workers. The service costs $25 per month per user.

For more information on virtual office rental sites, visit https://www.larrysworld.com