Free funds for Virtual Office

What are the tools for teamwork other than Exchange?

As a rule, for an average organization, the question of organizing interaction between employees arises when the number of employees exceeds 2. Typical tasks are to send mail, exchange contacts, set and monitor a task, schedule a meeting. I will try to highlight this topic on the example of the thorny path of our small organization.
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Post office.

Here, Google hosted mail is out of competition. At least 50 accounts will be available for your domain name, a huge mailbox size, access via pop3, imap. The ability to access mail from mobile devices.

Tasks.

Unfortunately google hosted does not have the means to work with tasks, and it seems that it does not yet strive to have. The grains of web-based software software have sprouted on this fertile soil, among which the absolute leader is the web service Remember the milk. With undoubted advantages and the ability to integrate into the google calendar (as an external calendar), though rmilk is not as tightly integrated into the google calendar as you would like, for example, the procedure of assigning tasks to someone else requires mutual registration, and it is not that easy 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 the motives directly from a mobile device (Windows Mobile, Blackburry) using a client program on a mobile device.

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, company event calendars. In general, the calendar is valid.

Blog.

Why do you need a corporate blog? Well, if your office is virtual, then you want to be at first aware of everything. And how to be aware of everything? We agree on a common blog, i.e. every employee writes there interesting moments during the day, it will be like a “progress report for the day”, I hope you are not jarred by these words;). The blogging procedure is very useful in terms of company development and self-motivation. In addition, it is a great opportunity for a painless transfer of cases from an employee to an employee, so that an employee could, so to speak, penetrate into relationships with clients and learn other intimate moments of the inner “kitchen”. Editor's choice - blogger.com, aka blogspot.
Why? The initial choice fell on livejournal.com and its principles of the organization of the community, however, the inability to close posts from prying eyes quickly blocked all advantages. And blogspot, as it turned out, is a one-click-post, and the ability to distribute write rights, the ability to post to a blog from emaila, the ability to receive new posts by email, the possibility of rss subscriptions. What you need is given 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 entirely clear. Zoho seems to be able to. For our needs, we use google sites, and in particular its feature with the creation of a “custom list” type of page, in some cases archiudobno.
And all together.

Zoho Here you still need to clarify, the payment is free of charge, its fichastost, but the fact that the set of services he is the undisputed leader - do not go to the grandmother.
But still, only one tool combines all the benefits of teamwork + access from mobile devices — this is offtopic of today's article - Exchange 2007. It makes sense to look at its reincarnation in the Small Bussiness Server 2008 small business product, where it is present in the Standard variant.
Recently, large 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 Exchange is on their side, and Microsoft Outlook and mobile devices are on your side, however All this is not something that would be free :)
At the time of this writing, we are still continuing our search for the Holy Grail as a free tool for teamwork, and we will always welcome your observations, feedback and suggestions.

PS It makes sense to get acquainted with zimbra (via strannik.blogspot.com)