TechBays

To an independent contractor or small and medium businesses, Officezilla offers a virtual office at zero cost. What you get with Officezilla are the following features:

1. Calendar
2. Chat Rooms
3. Contacts
4. Content Library
5. Directory
6. Files
7. Forums
8. Knowledge Base
9. Email
10. Phone
11. Private Messages
12. Project Manager
13. Resources
14. To Do List
15. ShortCuts

Officezilla manages your data centrally. You login to Officezilla.com and, depending on the features activated by your admin, you view a homepage that you can personalize.

Officezilla complements your existing web applications experience. It doesn’t have a free email account but supports POP and IMAP such as Gmail.

What is unique with Officezilla is the centralized way of organizing your group’s documents, which can be handled depending on the type under Content Library, Files, or Knowledge Base sections. Check the Files section below. It’s easy to create folders and subfolders; and Officezilla indexes these folders. In the example below, I created folders Accounting, Human Resources, and Logistics. I also created subfolders Controlling, Financial Accounting, and Treasury.

The Resources section allow you to create links like bookmarks.

The key feature of Officezilla is Project Manager. This feature allows you to create multiple projects, tasks, messages on tasks, status updates, responsible users. It’s simple and easy to use. But it doesn’t have change or revision stamps. This is an area that Officezilla should improve on, and take a cue from Google Docs’ revision facility.

Still the basic project or task management functions are ready for production use. Below is a screenshot of the task view.

Other features are simple but office handy, like To Do List, Phone messages (aka While You Were Out), and account features that allow you to change the Home template.

With Officezilla, Google Docs, Google GrandCentral number, and online instant messaging, you now have an online office.