Fifth Annual Small Business Summit 2010 - 16 March

November 10, 2007

Managing Your Internal Communications: Online Offices

For small businesses, there's a lot of options for their internal communications. One of the new entrants in the market is from Catalyst Office.

I took it for a quick spin and found it quite easy to use and feature rich.

Online offices have several things in common: they provide email, document sharing, shared calendar and other features to enable businesses to have a central place to communicate.

While Catalyst Office is simple to use it has some neat features and options that you'll like.

For example, I was sending an email message and clicked on the 'actions' tab in the window for composing an email message. I was given the option to NOT send the message before a certain date and time.

Catalyst Office's calendar function is feature rich, enabling you to invite attendees to a meeting including other options you would expect to find.

The version of Catalyst Office I used had "catalystoffice.com" as the domain instead of Smallbiztechnology.com. Google Apps enables users to have their own domain name, which is better for projecting a more professional image.

Catalyst Office has a lot of competition, including: HyperOffice, WebEx's WebOffice, Google, Zimbra and Zoho.

What separates many of these tools is the features they offer, the interface (some are quite slick and make you feel that you are using a desktop application) and how well they integrate with other tools.

There's some services that focus primarily on one solution, like email, but have a cross over into collaboration.

For example, I saw David Koretz, founder of BlueTie at Intuit's "Just Start" campaign stop in NYC and he said BlueTie's free service is exploding in growth and the featuretisements they offer are a big success.

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