Office Productivity
xPert Office offers virtual collaboration tools
Published December 18th, 2008 by Jennifer LeClaire
It’s been said teamwork makes the dream work.
Indeed, collaboration is key in today’s workplace. But with distributed workforces and virtual offices, collaborating isn’t as easy as meeting in the conference room at 2 p.m. sharp with your Starbucks coffee. Or is it?
Virtual office technologies have improved by leaps and bounds over the last five years. Another spin on the virtual office is the “online workplace” made possible, of course, by the Internet.
But developing a virtual office isn’t as easy as signing up with a respected virtual office provider. That’s just where it begins. You also need to design processes around the way people communicate, use and share information and interact with each other to collaborate. Or, you could work with a company like Q2 Learning.
The xPert Office
Q2 Learning has a service known as xPert Office that may be the answer to ineffective collaboration efforts with your virtual employees. XPert Office promotes the concept of a virtual office with distributed teams working from anywhere and everywhere.
XPert Office is a collaboration platform that recognizes conversation is the core business process and understands that support for distributed teams is vital. The company describes it as the next step beyond e-mail combined with conference calls.
XPert Office promises to kill internal e-mail for good. That’s a bold promise, but the technology is in place to do it. XPert Office also encourages document sharing with a shared drive, the ability to flag and tag key discussions and get feedback and approvals.
Q2 Learning takes it a few steps further with xPert eCommunity, a next-generation collaboration platform that moves beyond supporting meetings to supporting deeper work and learning conversations. You can launch wiki-like tools for discussions and embed working documents into the conversation around them.
So while you are considering the pros and cons of a virtual office, consider the many tools available to help your plight for productivity, collaboration and cost savings.
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Messaging, Collaboration and the Virtual Office | aBetterOffice December 19th, 2008 at 7:03 am
[...] If you are running a virtual office, then keeping the lines of communication wide open is vital to your success. You can’t practically manage a virtual office and a distributed workforce without messaging and collaboration. [...]
Elizabeth Sanchez December 19th, 2008 at 7:42 am
I’m not familiar with Q2 Learning. It appears the company offers some valuable tools for virtual offices, but I am not sure how they compare to what else is out there on the market. There are more and more choices these days in terms of virtual office technologies. The technology looks promising, but I couldn’t discern a competitive differentiator between what it offers and what others offer, other than this firm does seem to take a more consultative approach.
Maggie Correta December 19th, 2008 at 8:02 am
I don’t know Q2 Learning either. But I did visit the site and it seems they have a strong expertise in collaboration. I wasn’t able to see their price points, but that could be a differentiator. There are much larger players in this space, and many small players emerging on the virtual collaboration front. But after poking around I bit I discovered this company has been around for a while. It used to be called Collaboration Architects. Q2 Learning seems to have gotten out of the collaboration gate early.
Rob Zeus December 31st, 2008 at 7:14 am
Collaboration is the name of the game in 2009, whether you work in a traditional office space, a distributed office or some other arrangement. But I would add one word to that — streamlined. Collaboration is key, then but streamlining collaboration is vital because companies need to focus on productivity. With so much talk about social networking, I wonder how much time employees waste updating their facebook accounts? Collaboration tools can also be a drain if people don’t know how to use them effectively. This Q2 Learning company does training, which is a smart move for companies looking to streamline their collaboration.