PublicityShip and the Online Office

April has been one of our busiest months ever. And its also been the first full month of our new office arrangements.

In March, we started out on a new way of working. Our business is online, and we don’t need a shopfront. But working in an office is such a common way of working? Well we’ve decided to do things a bit differently.

We each have our own home-office now, and don’t have a central office. We meet around 3 times a week – our local cafe has wireless, as well as excellent coffee (and hot chocolate for Kate). We use Skype to talk or IM during the day, and email. We are starting out with Basecamp to run projects. Can’t say its all running as smoothly as it could yet, but it works pretty well.

Blue Beach - Small
Jane’s Broome Office

Last week Jane based herself in Broome for the week. Connectivity wasn’t that easy from Broome, but its clear that with a good network connection, its viable.

I’ve talked about this approach with a number of friends and business colleagues. Other than the potential for lack of social interaction, everyone thinks it sounds great.

There are a lot of names for various office working arrangements – remote office, flexible office, virtual office. In most cases there is an assumption that the main business has a base. What if our base is mainly an online base? Is there a name for this type of arrangement? And what do you think are the best online services to use for this type of office arrangement?