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Category virtual offices:

A virtual office is a computer simulation of a physical office. As much as possible, it needs to replace all the functions that are found in physical work area, where people communicate, work together, keep lists, and store things. In my vision of a true virtual office, I would type my username and password into a login screen and be sucked head first into my computer. I would spend the rest of the day working with virtual replicas of my colleagues.

That not being possible, there are other interesting options for a “distributed workforce”—a group of workers in which each person is in a different physical location, often in a different city. When our company searched for a virtual publishing office, my favorite by far was a configurable, three-dimensional, animated workspace called Qwaq. Although it sounds like a duck, the service is one of the most serious attempts to create a useful, Second Life world for business users. I highly recommend Qwaq to anyone who can find a use for it.

Once you sign up, you can start setting up individual offices, conference rooms, and auditoriums. You can connect the rooms with doors, and suddenly you have a fully functioning office floor. Each worker is assigned an avatar (an image that represents the worker), which can walk around a room, change rooms, or even wander out into a park. On the walls are screens where you can project Word or Excel files, for example, so not only can you mingle with your colleagues’ avatars but you can look at the same documents with them and get serious work done.

When we signed up for a trial, our avatars were like the ones in the picture, but in the current Qwaq demo video the avatars look like people. The first thing I did was set up an office with a desk. I added a few furnishings. I put a Word document on a screen. Then I called a colleague and invited her to try it with me. After she signed in, I looked around the office and didn’t see her. I called her again. “Where are you?” “In a field,” she said. So I left the office and walked into the park.

As I remember, it was perfect weather, and the field, scattered with trees, stretched out forever. I felt discouraged at first, but in the distance I saw a small pink color. Pressing hard on the forward arrow key, I began to jog toward the pink spot, just to the left of a tree. As I approached, I saw it was, in fact, another avatar, the avatar of my colleague. I found her. And then, as we headed back to the office to create plants, configure our bodies, even jump into the sky so we could look down onto the office, I almost forgot that what we really wanted was a place to store files, share calendars, and hold video conferences, an office that provided the mundane but practical needs of our business.

It began so innocently. I remember thinking, we’ll look on the Internet, check out the reviews, and choose a virtual office. I knew very little about the subject, but really, how complicated could it be?

Enough that I nearly drove one of my colleagues insane. After months of research, talking with people, free trials, and moments of fatigue and near surrender, we realized the perfect virtual office—one that worked without glitches, was easy to set up and organized for our type of work, and had all the features we needed now and for the feature—was found nowhere in the products we tried, remaining instead a mere vision, a feeble hope, on some hazy horizon of the future.

Like finding the perfect cell phone or car, the perfect virtual office existed only in the promotional materials of the products.

There was another complication, too, a form of near torture. New products seemed to appear weekly, and the ones we tried were later updated and improved.

So at Thomas Riggs & Company our quest dimmed from religious fervor to the practicalities of business. And although we never found our sought after paradise, we did learn an important truth: when looking for a virtual office, as important as finding a good product is understanding your present and future business needs. All virtual offices come with a distinct set of features, and the better you understand what your business is going to do with the office, the more likely you will make a good choice.

What we also found, and what you might experience as well, is that the virtual office that most grabs you and sets off your imagination might not be appropriate for your work.

In my next post I’ll talk about the most interesting virtual office we tried. To the despair of those around me, I found myself talking endlessly about the product. So fascinating, so cutting edge, so utterly useless for our work.

At Thomas Riggs & Company we operate in a virtual office on the Internet. But years ago in Chicago, where I worked for Encyclopaedia Britannica, I used to take the El to the office. I read or gazed at buildings, watching people through their windows as they ate breakfast or put on a shirt. At work I saw actual people. A colleague and I would enjoy threatening each other with our typewriters, and we mused about a special Elvis edition of the encyclopaedia.

But that would be the beginning and end of my career as a physical worker. In 1992 I moved west and became a freelancer. One of my first clients was Oxford University Press. Someone there told me about a new service, AOL, where you could send electronic messages. I was curious, but for work I still mailed floppy disks and talked with people on the phone, their voice suggesting a face, a hair color, whether they wore glasses or had a nose ring.

A few years later, after I started a business of workers dispersed across the country, I still liked talking on the phone, but e-mail soon became simpler. I attached files to messages. I stopped hearing voices much or seeing handwriting. In my e-mails I found myself using exclamation points more, hoping to send a simple signal: I know you’re a human being, and I appreciate you.

But what was I really doing? Working alone in my home, receiving and sending electronic messages, finding it increasingly difficult to create imaginary faces for my correspondents. I had gained freedom but fractured something work had long provided humanity: the regularity of human contact, the joy of shared experiences, and the useless chatter that in the end made us happier and more efficient.

Not that I wanted to work in a physical office again. What I wished instead was a way to increase human contact in our work, in our business, with the hope of improving our lives and our efficiency as well. So I looked around and found that technology, which had created systems of isolated workers, had recently invented the virtual office. I learned we could share a workspace on the Internet. With webcams we could see and talk with each other. We could work on the same text as if we were sitting next to each other. Though still not sharing a physical space, we could begin to take the first steps toward restoring something important for me, and for many others, in work: sharing life with other people.

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