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Virtually yours
In THE software and services industries, the need to organise teams, projects and tasks is one of the major issues facing the managers. With workplace environment changing rapidly, management is swiftly shifting towards interactive and converged communications through shared, web-based applications, which may be rather expensive.
But for the small- or medium-sized organisations that cannot afford costly commercial products like Microsoft Share Point Portal suite and Lotus, there is a brand new product — Zoho Virtual Office. The suite is free for up to ten users and is one of its kind as it provides all the features of a strong collaboration tool under one roof.
Installation
The idea behind Zoho VO is a web-based secure environment that caters to everyday office tasks. Installation is simple and though Zoho VO makes use of MySQL and web-server, the intricacies are completely transparent to the user. Make sure you install the product on a server machine, or on a relatively faster machine.
A root administrator is created just after the initial setup, and other office members can sign up after the installation is complete by visiting the home-page, which resides on the local server.
Sign in with the root admin username and password. The interface is the same as other normal users would enjoy, but since we are logged in with admin privileges, we have added administrative options.
Zoho VO is designed for simplicity, yet the interface is elegant, ensuring that you learn the basic operations quickly. On the left side, a panel bar appears with categories like Personal, Groups and Settings.
Personal is the all-in-one portal-type page displaying everything you can expect from a tool of this calibre. It has panels of email, tasks, events, notes, shared documents, favourites, group associations, announcements and reminders. In addition to these collapsible, drag and dropable panels, Calendar and Contacts appear in the left side under Personal. All of these items are quite self-explanatory and existing users may already be using these functions in other management tools.
By clicking on any of the panels that contain the preview of related information, the details pop up. For example, Email Link displays folder list, filters, search and settings. By selecting ‘Leave all mails on server’ under Mail Options tab >Server Settings, one can comfortably continue to use existing mail client and at the same time read mails through Zoho VO.
Proceed to Settings in the left side panel. Under the General icon, mail accounts, password, time zone and GUI can be configured.
The next icon is Admin. Here, standard operations like user and group policy management, LDAP and Active Directory settings, backup, authentication and customisation can be performed. The third icon in the panel is Groups. Just like Personal, this is a Group desktop. All the info pertaining to groups is present here.
Companies can map their departments to Zoho VO Groups, thus providing a platform where all members can view groups’ outstanding tasks, upcoming events, shared documents and announcements.
One of the main advantages of Zoho VO is its web-based architecture. This means that it is a lot easier to be in touch with office and colleagues from home or during travel — without any significant change or purchase of additional software. A common scenario is checking company email, which is configured over the internet while away from office. Since Zoho VO fetches the mail on its site, simply publishing the Zoho VO PC to the internet using public IP makes the office site available to its users at a remote location. This also enables chat sessions.
Also, the automated emails that include reminders and task completion means the team leaders do not have to visit the home-page to get follow-ups on their progress on assigned tasks. At any given point, the team leaders can create and email archived task reports as well.
Plus, if you have a query, just drop an email to Zoho VO support. The prompt and professional support staff takes care of complaints, suggestions and problems effectively, regardless of the company’s licensing mode.
When project schedules and task deadlines become more stringent and time to manage teams and personal info actually starts to hinder productivity, tools like Zoho VO can be utilised to collate all the data that matter in decision-making to get most out of a team.
Writer’s email: nizar.ali@ gmail.com
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