HyperOffice: An Online Workplace for Businesses on the Go Complex Intranets and Client Portals Made Simple Jamie Bsales
The workplace isn't what it used to be. Between work-related travel, telecommuting, contract workers and consultants — not to mention clients and suppliers — a business owner is rarely likely to find everyone associated with a project in a single location at the same time. So how does one manage projects and keep all parties in sync and connected when the only commonly accessible application is a Web browser? Via the Internet, of course.
HyperOffice.com has combined a suite of communication and collaboration tools into a slick portal that is both easy to use and highly customizable. Need a central repository for documents that your employees and clients can share? It's here. Want a way to centralize contacts among a group of field salespeople? You can. Looking for a master calendar to help manage employees' time and coordinate meetings? HyperOffice has it, along with shared to-do lists, links, reminders, forms and more. And each of these public components has a private counterpart, so each employee has personal folders, to-do lists – and so on – that only they can see.
One-Stop Shopping
Unlike other Web solutions that focus on one piece of the puzzle (say, document management or group calendaring), HyperOffice has packaged it all together — which means just one login for users and one monthly bill for you. And with plans starting at $17.99 a month, it's cheaper than buying a server dedicated to the tasks and deploying Microsoft Exchange. Not to mention easier.
That's what attracted Carroll Ross, president of Collaborative Solutions, LLC, to HyperOffice. This McLean, Virginia-based consulting and outsourcing firm helps clients identify and implement large-scale IT projects, from rolling out ERP and CRM applications to guiding major organizational-transformation programs. The three-year-old firm has 32 employees, most of who are on location at customer sites at any given time.
"I wanted to establish a consistent Internet portal to connect my employees," recalls Ross. "Something more comprehensive than just Web-based e-mail."
Ross and his crew certainly had the expertise to set up and manage a custom remote collaboration/communication system using Microsoft Exchange servers on the back end and a Sharepoint Portal Server. "But for a business our size, that kind of investment didn't make sense," he says. Ross thought about building his own custom portal, but then he read about HyperOffice and realized they had already built it for him. "It was a perfect solution for us, because HyperOffice had all the pieces we were looking for," he says.
Complex Feature Set Made Simple
Working with HyperOffice is simple. After you sign up for a plan, you can pick your unique login URL (typically yourbusinessname.hyperoffice.com) and password. At least one person needs to be designated as the administrator in order to add users, set permissions, change default settings (if needed) and so on. But don't be put off by that moniker — no previous IT or Web-coding experience is necessary. HyperOffice has done all the heavy lifting for you, and straightforward dialogs walk you through the steps.
You can leave your portal's home page as is, but most businesses will want to customize it a bit (with your company logo, welcome statement or what have you), especially if clients and customers will be given access. And thanks to the customizable nature, different types of visitors to your portal can have different views. So, for example, your employees might have access to all online modules (documents, tasks, calendar and so on), but a particular customer might only be able to see and access the folder where her project documents reside.
That's one of the features Collaborative Solutions likes best about HyperOffice. Ross needed a portal that clients and consultants could use on a per-project basis. "This way, we can let customers see project schedules, documentation, and tasks," says Ross, "without giving them access to our company portal and its e-mail and what not."
