Tips and tools to help you working remotely

SaaS, besides helping your business to be more productive, can facilitate you or your staff working remotely. We have already explained the advantages of SaaS for a business, but there is another, indirect, benefit: SaaS allows you to collaborate remotely with colleagues, providing you with tools to share projects, files and documents with all the stakeholders. For example, if you are a bookkeeper, some food for thought. Have you ever thought about how you could make your life easier by working remotely and collaborating with your clients? More on this in a future post ;-).

In a recent article, Gina Trapani - founding Editor at Lifehacker.com - provides some advice and best practices to “Master the Art of Working Remotely”. One of those best practices concerns the use of web tools to cooperate remotely. You can find free online (or cheap) software that can help you to manage projects, to work on office documents, to share knowledge and have conversations with coworkers or clients.
The most famous project management web based tool is Basecamp; if you just need to share task lists or calendars, many modern webapps for individuals offer some level of sharing or collaboration abilities (Google Calendar, Evernote, Remember the Milk, for example).
To collaborate on documents like spreadsheets or slideshows you can use Google Docs or Zoho.
To share knowledge, you can build your wiki on sites like Editme.com, PBworks or others (here at LedgersOnline, for example, we use Socialtext).

If you want to work from home or to allow your staff to work remotely, then, you might want to check out some other tips from Gina Trapani:

• To improve email skills
• To be "present" via instant messenger, like Meebo, Google Talk, or Skype or web based group chat like Campfire
• To regularly touch base in a human way by setting up regular voice or video chat meeting and check-ins