Key Virtual Office Trends

December 23, 2009

The office is where most workers spend the majority of their time. Increasingly, though, the “virtual cubicle” or “virtual desktop” has become more important, as workers spend more time glued to the computer screen and do most of their work in software applications. A worker might be sitting in a cubicle in Boston, MA, but is really doing most of the work with a team based in India with the help of an online collaboration platform and an online conferencing tool. For that person, the physical office is probably less important than the set up and tools in the “virtual office” that they share with the remote team.

So what are the new trends in realizing the “virtual desktop” of the future?

One basic direction is to hone in on the most commonly used software application and turn it into a Swiss-army-knife-type of toolkit that supports all of the office worker’s needs. One of the best ones out there is Xobni. Xobni lives in Microsoft Outlook and enhances its functionality in many ways: it adds a killer full text search capability, it helps organize email messages into conversations at 10 times Outlook’s speed, it helps with scheduling and appointments, and it brings in social network profiles of email correspondents. In short, it is what a “virtual” Rolodex should be.

While Xobni is an Outlook plug-in that depends on the computer and Outlook being run, CentralDesktop represents a more pure “virtual office” approach. Everything is hosted online and is accessible with just a web browser and an Internet connection. The platform is organized around “workspaces”, which are like project-specific working rooms where team members meet, exchange documents, work on online documents and engage in discussion. Nevertheless, with the newly added WebDav integration, CentralDesktop now allows users to replicate the online documents with offline versions that sit on their desktop or internal networks. This is similar to Microsoft’s own office application strategy: Offline software with an online extension.

Google is also pushing into this field by slowly but steadily weaving its set of disparate online applications together: Gmail (which has finally graduated from Beta status), Google Calendar (the best alternative to Outlook calendar), Google Docs, Google Voice, all of which are powered by Google’s computing and hosting power. We are clearly seeing the formation of the “Google World” that encompasses all of the critical functions of a physical office, but is virtual and hosted in the cloud. The hope is that with a fully hosted platform, resources and costs can be saved from reduced information systems support need. Moreover, with the advent of Google Wave, we should see soon many new ways of tying these applications and data streams together and maybe a new paradigm in collaboration platforms.

Lastly, I want to mention a very interesting company that really re-invents the ideas of “time tracking” as applied to the virtual office. RescueTime is a desktop application that quietly tracks the amount of time the user spends in each application or website. Through tagging and a scoring process, it then categorizes the amount of time spent overall and helps identify time wasted or time spent efficiently.

 

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.