The software I spend most days working on is called "Groove Virtual Office". But what exactly is a virtual office, and why on earth would you want one?

Here's a new webcast exploring the practicalities of working in really distributed organizations. Includes intro from Jeff Zbar ("The Chief Home Officer"); a Groove demo; and commentary from two Groove customers. "While outsourcing work to freelancers lowered our company's operational costs, it raised the costs of coordinating client work", says one of the Groove users interviewed... and there's plenty here to show exactly how Groove lowers those coordination costs.

Case study #2 is a translation company called iTranslate, with their nominal base in Paris. Here's some of their intro:

The French government makes it extremely difficult for companies to let employees go, so if after expanding we later needed to downsize, we could have faced punitive charges... but our competitors had much more freedom to hire and fire. This was a severe handicap for a small company like ours. We decided to set up a virtual office because we needed a solution that would allow us to grow the business without taking on permanent staff and incurring more fixed costs. We needed to tap into an international group of skilled contractors -- we like to call them our e-partners -- who could work together over the Internet...

Case study #1 is Atlanta-based marketing agency MediaThink ("Feed Your Head: Sign up for our industry leading newsletter the Brain Snack. It's free and it will make you smart". They have an RSS feed too):

Going virtual, initially, really wasn't an easy model to deal with, and we ran into a number of problems that we really didn't anticipate. Mostly, the problems we were having were associated with process and moving information around efficiently. Like a lot of other businesses we relied heavily -- almost solely -- on email, to share Word documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations... But then we had a ton of email and a ton of attachments, and that just caused more problems. So we had people working on the wrong version of a document, people needing a file that they had lost because they'd mis-filed it somewhere... - literally hundreds of emails every day, and it was crushing the business, it was grinding us to a halt.