What do you need to build your Virtual Office?

Howdy! Just want to share how I manage my virtual office doing my I.T. Consultant and Web Developer jobs. I am! I am working from home most of the time and setting up a virtual office is a must.

Choosing the right tools for your virtual office is really a crucial tasks. I must admit it was not easy but with proper tuning and selection of tools, you will arrive to your desired virtual office. It won’t be that expensive, most of the tools are free actually.

What exactly do you need?

Since you will mostly interact with clients online, you need to setup your communication tools. Common communication methods used are email, IMs, voice chats and conferencing. If you have corporate email account, you can set it up with MS Outlook or Thunderbird.

For IMs and voice conferences, you can use Skype, GTalk, or Yahoo! Messenger. All are free for download and is easy to setup. Please get your headset and microphones ready anytime; accessible when needed.

For your suite tool, you can try the online office suites like Google Docs and Zoho; try also to use Google Apps for you to have an small enterprise appeal. Both suite offers a lot of features like project management tools, scheduling, email solutions, backup, etc.

Well, with the right internet connection speed, you will find these tools easy to work with; with nothing much to spend but download it for free. There are more tools online fore free, just explore. Enjoy!