With the internet becoming an ever greater part of our lives, there are more and more possibilities. One of those interesting possibilities is to make yourself, and your office, location independent. As an entrepreneur, there is no greater feat than location independency. It makes your life so much easier and much more fun!
Location Independency
With the term ‘location independency’ I mean the fact that you can work from ‘anywhere’ in the world. Basically, it doesn’t matter whether you’re enjoying a cappuccino in Italy or you are sitting in an office in New York. Either way, you can do your job.
To translate this to an office, let me first say that I view an office as a place where my employees can work. We prefer an office because it is a place to go to every day, to do our job. However, I want to make sure that my employees can do their work from home, or better yet, from a nice cafe if they want to. That is what location independence is all about: working from where ever you are.
Internet
We recently moved our office and it amazed me how easy it was. We picked up our laptops, some small stuff like a printer and some ordners and we were basically good to go.
When we arrived in the new office, all we had to do was enable the new wireless internet connection on our laptops, and we could continue to work. We moved in about 2 hours. Okay, we moved one door down, but still, 2 hours is pretty fast.
All we need for our employees is for them to have internet access, and their laptop.
Our Setup
The setup we use is pretty simple. We use only hosted applications for our main business applications. This allows us to access them through a web-browser from anywhere that we have an internet connection. In our case, this is our customer portal, project management system and CRM (Customer Relation Management) system.
Our e-mail is hosted through Hosted Exchange, which means we can connect our laptops, home computers and mobile phones to it easily to get any mail or calendar updates we get.
We use a file server which is also hosted, and connect through a VPN (Virtual Private Network). Then we can easily access the files as if they were stored locally.
All our mobile phones have internet access, with a flat fee subscription service. The mobile phones can be connected to the laptop and function as a modem. This means that we can go online anywhere that our mobile phone has internet access.
My Location Independency Gadgets
It has happened on many occasions that I was sitting at a road side cafe, waiting to go to a next meeting, that I had to get some work done. Simply connecting my mobile pho
Fri, Jun 4, 2010
Entrepreneurship