News of a possible H1N1 virus, or “Swine Flu,” pandemic is causing many commercial firms and government agencies to examine their Continuity of Operations (COOP) plans so business can soldier on during the crisis. The threat of an H1N1 outbreak is even prompting the United States Centers for Disease Control to recommend that small businesses have telework and business continuity plans in place.
This could place even organizations with well developed telecommuting programs in a challenging position, because a major virus outbreak may mean that their remote worker needs exceed their current capacity.
On the flip side, there are organizations that are far from telecommuting-friendly, which face even more challenges because they aren’t set up for remote working. In order to keep their business running in such a crisis they are going to need to buy or build an infrastructure to meet a new model of working.
At WebWorkerDaily, we get a chance to review some of the best office productivity, social media, online collaboration, project management, and Web 2.0 tools that in a worst case scenario — like a pandemic outbreak — can help an organization maintain some semblance of operations and communications, even though its employees and contractors are working from home during the crisis.
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While the Microsoft OneNote 2010 Technical Preview and the latest Evernote features typically garner attention, it’s important to not count
Zoho out of the race just yet. Zoho Notebook is a good online note taking application, which recently got some new enhancements. Zoho excels in a strong user experience and feature set that is getting ever closer to rivaling traditional desktop office productivity applications. This post is going to take a look at the latest round of improvements that recently hit the app.
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Zoho has released a major update to Zoho Projects, its online project management system that allows you to share projects with your team via the web. Zoho Projects 2.0 could be a tempting service for small- to medium-sized organizations that cannot afford Microsoft Project, the “gold standard” for project management in the enterprise. Zoho Projects requires no special software, just a browser and an Internet connection.
Several plans are available, including a free account that enables you to manage one project. That free account has unlimited users, which is a great way to get your feet wet. Create an account, invite all your team members, and give Zoho Projects a test drive before splashing out on one of the beefier plans. The good news is that you can now also import Microsoft Project files, which means you don’t have to recreate everything from scratch for an active project. Read the rest of this entry »
As web workers, we are often asked to help friends and relatives fix computer problems. For me, the majority of these problems seem to be related to email. It’s ironic, as email is now less popular than social networks.
So why is email such a hassle?
- It’s more than 30 years old. Email has come a long way, but its underlying protocols haven’t changed much since the 1970s.
- It’s really three different systems. Sending (SMTP) and receiving (POP or IMAP) are totally separate functions, and are often handled on different servers. That’s why I often hear comments like “I can receive, but I can’t send” from clients.
- It’s being used for a lot of things it was never designed to do, like send images and attachments, highly formatted messages, signatures and calendar entries.
- It’s been overrun by spam, and even well-designed spam filters aren’t perfect, and cause unwanted side effects, like messages that get misidentified as spam, or just go away.
- Email software is too complex. These programs that were originally built for offline use; that is, they were set up so that users could read and write messages without being connected to the internet. Sending and receiving would happen in batches. That made sense when internet connections were slow, expensive and charged by the minute. Now that most people have always-on connections like cable or DSL, that process is less necessary. Desktop email client software is a pain to set up and use; as someone who helps many people with email, Outlook is the bane of my existence.
- Many of us connect to the Internet in more than one place — at work, at home, and on cell phones. It can be very frustrating to realize that we’ve left the message we needed to reply to at the office.
- Many of us have more than one email address. I try to keep my work and personal email separate, plus I have a series of email addresses that I use when registering on websites that might try to send spam. And I have several email addresses that were given to me, such as the ones that are automatically created when signing up for instant-messaging services like Yahoo, AIM and Windows Live/MSN.
What can be done to overcome these problems? Here are some tips that might help you and your clients and friends be more productive. Read the rest of this entry »
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Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions vary, but for the most part they help businesses manage sales leads, accounts, campaigns, forecasts and activities. Most CRM packages tend to be too heavyweight for the sole proprietor, however. They cost a bundle and contain features that most web workers don’t need. Zoho has a relatively simple CRM solution that’s free for up to three users. Although it takes some figuring out, it’s a good option to consider for web workers.
Zoho CRM comes with all the basic CRM functions you’d expect: You can manage campaigns and leads, view reports and dashboards and manage inventory.
Getting Started
It’s best to start at CRM.zoho.com, even if you have an existing Zoho account. At first glance, the application looks overwhelming, especially if it’s the first CRM package you’ve used. Zoho has a useful Getting Started video that gives you a quick overview of the application and makes it feel less threatening.
Everything you need to access appears in the tabs at the top of the screen and the links below them. You can customize most of the reports and dashboards as well as the settings for every tab. Read the rest of this entry »
There is very little reason to depend on a hard drive-based application for your word processing needs these days. Google Docs provides everything most users will ever need; you already have it if you have a Gmail account, and it works offline, thanks to Google Gears. Another solution, Zoho Writer, which also works offline thanks to Gears, just got a major interface overhaul in its 2.0 incarnation, and now is more poised than ever to provide a complete alternative to Office and other similar programs.
The problem with Zoho, until now, has been one of constant improvement. That may not seem like a problem at all, but when that improvement involves adding more and more features, but keeping the interface the same, it can get a little unruly. The new redesign tries to make sure Zoho doesn’t overwhelm you visually, which in turn makes it easier to work with.
The old Zoho Writer menu
While some liked the old UI, I found it too cluttered, because I normally like to edit in full screen, and like as little chrome as possible in my browsers. The changes to the top menu give you a bit more room, but more importantly, they group and hide a lot of commands so you aren’t left feeling crowded. The new “MenuTab” feature groups similar commands under general headings. You can access these commands either by clicking the tab, which changes the button set available on your toolbar (much like Microsoft’s “Ribbon” UI for Office) or by clicking the little arrow next to them, which opens a drop-down menu without changing your toolbar.
The new Zoho Writer 2.0 "MenuTab" interface
It makes sense, and it suits multiple tastes. You’ll be comfortable if you’re used to working with Office, or if you’re used to working with drop-down menus like you’ll find in a lot of web apps. Zoho plans to use MenuTab in all of its other applications in the future, too, so even if you don’t like it, plan on getting used to it!
I won’t go into detail about Zoho Writer, since we’ve covered it before. It’s not new, but I still love Zoho’s tabbed management of open documents. I much prefer it to Google’s opening of new browser tabs for each document, although that makes much more sense when you take into account Google Chrome’s handling of each tab as a separate process. And I still miss Google’s full-screen edit mode too much to make a permanent switch.
Still, if you’re a Zoho user, or if you tried it out before but didn’t like it because of the interface, Zoho Writer 2.0 gives you ample reason to take it out for a second spin.
Do you use Zoho Writer? What do you think of the new UI?
Back in October, I had the pleasure of attending O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Expo Europe, at the Berliner Congress Centre in the heart of East Berlin. One of the more interesting conversations I had was with Jeffrey Walker and Laura Khalil of Atlassian, creators of the Confluence enterprise wiki software.
In describing the company and product’s history, Walker and Khalil indicated a corporate culture that was very much based around the notion of web working. While this isn’t completely unheard of for a large corporate, web working is a style that’s more closely associated with freelancers, startups and smaller organisations.
Khalil pointed me to a post on the company’s blog that discusses some of the cultural and technological adjustments the organisation has made as it needed to manage offices in Sydney and San Francisco:
- Internal communication is oriented around the Confluence wiki product: bringing together product management, HR, marketing, business metrics, template emails and PR.
- Task and project management, such as customer requests and bug reports, are tracked and managed using the company’s own JIRA product.
- Email is discouraged as a collaboration tool, being displaced by Confluence and JIRA, but still employed for 1-to-1 and “broadcast” communication.
- Lightweight tools such as Flickr and, notably, Delicious bring other collaboration and knowledge-sharing capabilities.
Interestingly, the company’s internal and external blog authors number around 160: an extraordinarily high figure for a 200-person company, with 80 percent of its staff publishing and sharing their work.
Also at the Web 2.0 Expo, I ran into Rodrigo Vaca, Zoho’s director of marketing, responsible for leading efforts to promote the popular web-based office suite.
Like Atlassian, Zoho’s solution to geographically distributed staff in many different timezones is to employ its own products and services as a component of the company’s culture. More so perhaps, with a thousand staff in offices from India and the U.S. to Japan and China, the web-based foundation of the company is critical. Vaca related how even the company’s COO works from home in order to minimize time wasted in physically commuting.
What both Atlassian and Zoho’s utilization of web working indicate is that it’s a working pattern that’s very much suited to large, mainstream, multinational organization – something we discussed a while back in Telecommuting Trends and our coverage of the emergence of Smart Work Centres.
Read more about Atlassian’s web worker culture and tools in An Insiders Look: Part 1 of 2 on how we (Atlassian) collaborate.
News of a possible H1N1 virus, or “Swine Flu,” pandemic is causing many commercial firms and government agencies to examine their Continuity of Operations (COOP) plans so business can soldier on during the crisis. The threat of an H1N1 outbreak is even prompting the United States Centers for Disease Control to recommend that small businesses have telework and business continuity plans in place.
The 
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
