I am a strong believer in the benefits of making your company operate as virtually as possible.  Done right, it can make your firm  more cost effective and efficient.

A well designed virtual operation is also far more resilient against interruptions caused by unexpected events such as the H1N1 outbreak and the recent Icelandic volcano eruption.

However, managing a virtual workforce effectively is no trivial undertaking.  This Entrepreneur.com article outlines some  strategies for getting the best out of your remote personnel.  Key recommendations include setting clear expectations, establishing objective performance measures and using technology to keep up with virtual employees.

We have just formally launched our first stand-alone web application – DocuBuzz – an on-demand document management solution specifically designed for small businesses and distributed teams.

The concept for DocuBuzz evolved from our experience in developing custom document & records management solutions for a variety of clients.  In the course of these projects, we realized that the core document management requirements are quite similar across most small businesses.  We also realized that most off-the-shelf solutions were simply not suitable for small businesses – being too expensive, too complex, or both.

DocuBuzz is our attempt to offer an alternative – a simple and affordable document management solution that leverages the benefits of the web-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.  The current version of DocuBuzz aims to cover the essential document management needs of most small businesses.

Core features include:

• An intuitive multi-user interface
• Collaborative Notes & Tags
• Full text search with search filters
• Document versioning
• Built-in document viewer
• In-situ link & file sharing with variable shared-link lifetimes
• Flexible folder sharing permissions

Head on over to www.docubuzz.com and activate your fully-functional free trial account to check out DocuBuzz for yourself.  We are extremely eager to hear what you think about it.

The global economic outlook is looking increasingly bleak; but local business costs seem to be defying gravity – rentals, utilities and transporatation costs all still appear to be heading north.  Now is the time to seriously consider running your company partially, or even fully, online.

BusinessWeek’s enligtening special report (To Expand Your Busieness, Go Home) examines how some small businesses have successfully cut expenses and boosted productivity by moving their operations online.

The increasing adoption emerging Web and Communications technologies in the business arena has lead to new ways for groups to work together. Working with virtual or remote teams is no longer a novelty. For many small businesses, working through such virtual arrangements may be the only way to survive in this era of increasing costs.

However, simply adopting the latest web tools and communications gear is not enough to ensure the success of your virtual team. Managing virtual and remote teams requires skills sets that are very different from that required for managing in traditional office environments.

One key challenge is building up trust within your virtual team. Synchronizing the internets of the various individuals with that of the team can prove especially difficult when team-members can’t physically interact with each other regularly.

Check out Chris Bowler’s recent post on the Anywired blog for some general tips on cultivating trust and communication within virtual teams.

Most businesses are failing to take advantage of the potential benefits offered by the rapid growth of the social networking phenomenon. This according to a recent Gartner study which claims that businesses that harness the social web appropriately can “increase savings, productivity and profits”.

The gut reaction of most businesses is to block their employees’ access to social sites as such activity is perceived to be frivolous time-wasting. However, some smart firms are starting to realize that incorporating the social networks into their work-flows can actually dramatically increase their employees reach and productivity.

One such example is the use of social networks in the recruitment space. Many organizations have discovered that social networking sites are proving more cost-effective and efficient at recruiting the right talent than even specialized recruitment consultants. Indeed, even the high-end recruitment firms themselves are already using the social web as a key resource for tracking down the right candidates.

Another interesting development is in the way employees within an organization are communicating amongst themselves. Many teams have discovered that the messaging capabilities embedded in most social networking sites are far more effective at enabling collaboration and team-work than such traditional tools as email.

Bottom line – don’t dismiss the social networking phenomenon as a passing fad or distraction. It’s here to stay and can actually be turned into a powerful productivity tool if incorporated properly into your workflow.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch is reporting that New South Wales Department of Education in Australia has accepted a bid to switch over the email accounts of 1.5 million students over from Microsoft Exchange to Gmail (via Google Apps).

NSW DoE was unahppy because their 2004 MS Exchange installation cost 33million and took 3 years. It’s unclear why the system took so long to setup. The Gmail roll-out will increase current email storage allocated for each student from 35MB to 6GB.

The move represents a big win for Google – which is breaking into Microsoft’s mail and office collaboration market, at every scale. Last year Macquarie University elected to shift the email accounts of its 68,000 students and recent graduates onto Gmail. This new instillation will create what’s being reported as the single largest private deployment of Gmail. On the other end of the scale small and medium business are also increasingly switching away from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, to SaaS services like Google Apps, and Yahoo’s Zimbra.

A BusinessWeek article reports that LinkedIn successfully raised $53 million in additional funding from VCs. This effectively values the professional networking site at more than $1-billion.

LinkedIn is one of the few social sites that has figured out how to profit consistently from user-generated content. It is expected to generate $100-million in revenue this year and its user base is still growing aggressively. Compared to the other social sites, its average user is also older and richer.

LinkedIn expects to use the extra cash to develop new communication and collaboration tools for its members and to fund expansion into new markets in Europe and China. While its current membership base is heavily US-skewed, the site does already have a significant global footprint. Singapore-based members are estimated to number well over 50,000 – making LinkedIn a useful networking and research tool for smart local businesses.

In 2005, BusinessWeek ran a cover story predicting that the emerging phenomenon of blogging would have a significant impact businesses on communications. Three years on, the story “Blogs Will Change Your Business” remains one of the magazine’s most read articles online.

However, while blogs certainly have become an important medium, it is just one of the do-it yourself “communication multipliers” to have emerged on the internet since the article was published. Social networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn are have burst onto the scene as have a myriad of smaller social connectors and collaboration tools.

BusinessWeek thus felt compelled to update their story and review some of the Social Web developments they did not foresee in their original article. Beyond Blogs is well worth a read for an overview on how these emerging social media tools are having a very real impact on business processes today.

We Are Smarter Than Me
How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business
Barry Libert & Jon Spector
Wharton School Publishing, 2007

This book is a product of what it preaches – authors Libert & Spector apparently compiled their text with the help of thousands of contributors who chipped in with case studies, examples and the like. The authors dub this process “crowdsourcing” – the act of tapping on the resources of numerous external contributors.

The authors aim to explain how you can successfully leverage the potential of crowdsourcing in your own business.

The Economist website has an interesting commentary on the most recent broadband penetration ranking from the OECD (The Broadband Myth). This ranking grades the OECD countries according to various metrics for internet connectivity. Singapore regularly ranks near the top in the equivalent global broadband penetration table.

However, it is actually rather difficult to show that fast broadband connectivity is actually useful in any practical sense. In fact, the US – the most innovative country as measured by the number of internet start-ups – actually does poorly in the broadband ranking.

As the Economist report points out, the full potential of broadband is in the innovative new applications that is makes possible. In particular, broadband enhances the “participatory culture” on the internet, thus enabling new and innovative forms of productive collaboration. Unfortunately, this potential is far from being fully exploited in most fields.

The good news? This simply means that the ever improving broadband connectivity is creating promising new opportunities for imaginative enterprise. The party, apparently, has yet to begin.