The Virtual Office May Get a Boost with Google Drive

By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor

The concept of the traditional office is changing. What once consisted of a single, physical location to manage all employees is morphing into a geographically dispersed workforce operating in coffee shops, basement offices and even hotel rooms while on the road. This change to the virtual office relies in part on Phone.com (News - Alert).

Google is also jumping into the mix, offering Drive, according to this Phone.com blog. This storage unit allows the mobile worker to store anything they need on the go; accessing it from anywhere they have a browser and a high-speed connection. Anything put into the folder in Google (News - Alert) Drive is available with the simple use of the Drive application in the cloud. This release is the latest innovation to support the virtual office.

This Drive for the virtual office allows professionals to leave the office, but still continue what they are working on at home. Users simply drop the files into the Google Drive folder so they can access the files from their home computer. According to Google, more than 30 different file formats are supported in the app with expandable memory.

Making use of any applications in the cloud to enable the virtual office can save your organization money, while also providing additional access to information, networks, applications and more. If you need to leverage the virtual office, the cloud makes this possible. For Phone.com, the cloud makes it possible to offer customers a low-cost approach to communications.

A recent Phone.com blog stressed the role the cloud plays in the virtual office, especially as users leverage a phone system not running on a single computer or server in-house, but instead in the cloud and accessed through a browser. An IT technician is never needed to fix the phone system or conduct a diagnostic test. Removing this element of operation ensures organizations can easily use launch a virtual office and work from anywhere.

The biggest attraction for the cloud is the cost savings, especially if it means your organization does not have to purchase a PBX (News - Alert) server that may be outdated in just a few short years. Phone.com allows the enterprise to operate effectively as a virtual office for less than $95 per month. At the same time, users can gain access to Google Drive to optimize the use of information regardless of location.

If you need the virtual office to gain that competitive advantage, will you check out the benefits of Phone.com or Google Drive? For those who already leverage the virtual office, the big question is how Drive differs from Google Docs?

Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli