Witness the birth of both the VA (Virtual Assistant) and the term Virtual Office Services. It is still predominately the domain of women, with a large proportion of mums preferring this approach to working in an office. By equipping themselves at home with a fast internet connection, telephone, PC and printer they can easily provide a basic secretarial service: telephone work, diary management, typing and more. And, they have flexibility in how and when they work.

But who are these people who ask you to trust them with your business admin?

The Virtual Assistant

VAs are a special breed. It’s difficult enough just setting up on your own without also putting yourself in the firing line with demanding clients. So it’s not surprising that many give up. But those that stick with it are usually professional, resilient, resourceful and capable people who know their job inside out.

However, being a VA brings with it an array of challenges:

• The Boss is now a “client” … who can be just as demanding
• Their IT equipment is now their responsibility to manage and maintain
• They have to cope working alone and with flexibility comes the need for self-discipline

Most VAs are good communicators and have experience of handling demanding clients, but the conflicting priorities can be a headache and managing client expectations has to be a core skill.

The technology is another matter though. The VA needs IT support to keep the operation going. This is often provided on an ad hoc basis by a partner or a friend, which can leave them vulnerable It’s worth checking out their situation first, so you don’t find yourself stranded. If you need your VA to use your technology – ranging from Microsoft Exchange and Groove to iCAL and other online calendar or file sharing tools – then they’ll need to be IT-savvy enough to cope or have access to more professional support.

Working alone has its own set of issues. VAs will usually take steps to break their isolation and have moral support close at hand, but being the only person in the business can again leave them vulnerable to workload peaks and illness … not forgetting, everyone needs a holiday some time too.

My advice to someone looking at using a VA is to ask them about these issues and satisfy yourself that the trade-off in risks Vs benefits is acceptable to your business.

Virtual Office Services

This tends to describe the wider array of services provided by a business that’s more than just a individual VA, perhaps a business that’s grown with a few VAs or an organisation that has secretarial and admin staff providing chargeable VA services to clients. Typically, they will have better office facilities – this can be a physical office or a virtual office setup – and you can expect their IT systems to be superior to that of a VA. This enables them to deliver more sophisticated services just as if they were “within your organisation” but with all of the flexibility and cost benefits of a VA.

The types of IT you might expect to find them using includes:

• A website through which they take instructions, track work and manage clients
• A web office for document management, calendar sharing and time recording
• Collaboration tools such as instant messaging and tele/video/web conferencing
• VOIP telephony system for call handling and virtual internal extensions for VAs

Not many people like being forced to use someone else’s IT systems if they can help it. Most website applications will force a new way of working on clients that’s alien and burdensome, so look for someone who can also accommodate some of your more important working practices.

If you create large documents or use digital voice dictation, emailing large files will be impossible and you’ll need to use a file transfer service, a WebOffice or another collaboration tool. This is common so understanding the options for file transfer is important from the start.

The range of services that the Virtual Office Services provider can offer will be far greater than a VA largely because of their technology. You should also find that their IT knowledge and even their IT support people can be extremely useful in helping you to learn how to get the best from your own IT systems and may even help you to solve IT problems too.

Apart from making refreshment and welcoming guests, virtual office services can cover pretty well most of your office admin and secretarial activity. These can include:

• Virtual PA
• Virtual Receptionist
• Mail Handling & Scanning
• Digital Typing Services
• Transcription Services
• Database Management
• Marketing Admin Support
• Sourcing and Purchasing
• Book Keeping Services
• General Office Admin.

In fact, providing they have the right technology, the range of services is only limited by the skills of individual VAs. Surprisingly, virtual office services can extend into the most unexpected areas, such as tele-marketing, language translation and even property management as you will see from the following client examples.

Property Development

This property services business manages new build shopping centres and housing developments. The owner is frequently traveling and running site meetings, so he uses his VA mainly for typing services. He has a Digital Pocket Memo for dictating letters, minutes and reports, and also uses it to record live meetings. The voice files are downloaded to his laptop and then sent via email to his VA who emails the finished Microsoft Word documents the next working day.

Medico-Legal Professionals

A clinical psychiatrist specialising in childcare cases has a heavy case load which means she is constantly interviewing clients and preparing reports for solicitors and local authorities. She uses her own digital recorder to dictate multiple reports simultaneously and her VA uses templates to compile individual reports. Her VA also handles client calls and uses her preferred methods of working to track enquiries via a spreadsheet and book appointments online via iCAL.

Management Consultancy

This niche consultancy is an established virtual organisation, with everyone being home based to keep overheads low. It was therefore natural for the MD and other Director to look for a virtual PA to handle their calls and prepare reports. Reports are often large files with complex graphics and they rely on their VA to compile these and resolve technical issues in Word, Excel and Adobe. Initially, they used their VA’s WebOffice for file transfer before realising that it was ideal solution for their virtual organisation – now their VA uses the company’s own WebOffice.

Property Management

A successful property developer whose busy life was limiting the number of deals he could manage turned to a VA for help. The VA deals with a lot of personal and routine office admin, as well as handling telephone calls, which releases time enough to double his deal rate. He soon realised that his VA was capable of more. She now manages a small property portfolio of 10 flats for less than the cost of a property management company, which involves managing lettings, deposits, rents, VAT reporting and making decisions on day-to-day management issues with tenants and tradesmen.

This is a very important and often overlooked tool, which all users should use periodically to make sure there are no errors in their file system and to correct those errors that do appear.

Windows will run chkdsk, but only when errors in the file system have reached the point where Windows itself notices that there is a problem. In fact, problems usually have been present and propagating in the file system for awhile before Windows notices them. These problems are often responsible for subtle performance issues or strange malfunctions of your software. In fact, it has been our experience at Just So Software that the vast majority of support requests regarding our Property Management Software package are resolved by having the user run chkdsk.

You should run chkdsk whenever there is an anomaly – whenever your software does something unexpected, whenever you experience a “blue screen of death”, prior to installing any package, after installing any package, after a power failure, both before and after an upgrade, and – if none of those things applies – once a week anyway. Most of the time, chkdsk will report no errors. But sometimes it will, and the times it does report and fix an error more than make up for the effort you took on the times that it did not find an error.

File system errors are a fact of life that comes about because of the huge complexity of these computers, and the very high density of storage on hard drives. It is not a problem that is exclusive to Windows file systems, but Windows is one of the worst about automatically checking and cleaning the file system, which is why you have to do it.

So, here is how you run chkdsk:

1. Go to Start->Run.

2. In the Run requester, type “Cmd” (without the quotes).

3. A command line window will open. In that window, type “chkdsk c:” (without the quotes).

4. The system will run chkdsk. Read the output carefully.

5. If chkdsk did not give any error messages you are done. If it finds errors it will tell you it is fixing them, but it really is not. Don’t believe it.

6. If chkdsk reported any errors at all, then type in “chkdsk c: /f” (without the quotes).

7. chkdsk will tell you that it cannot run and ask if a disk check should be scheduled for the next time the system restarts. You tell it yes.

8. Reboot.

There is a bug in the Windows XP version of chkdsk. Chkdsk may report an error that “security descriptors have changed” then will give an error message of “CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the master file table (MFT) bitmap”. If you receive these two error messages together, this is normal system behavior that merely reflects that the system is running while chkdsk is running. In this case, ignore it. If the “free space marked as allocated” error appears WITHOUT the security descriptor error, then you should treat this as a valid error and run chkdsk to repair the file system. This bug in chkdsk is NOT present in Windows 2000; any reported errors there should be considered valid.

Periodically running chkdsk is the single most important thing you can do to ensure that your data stays safe and your computer continues to run without issue. Do not fail to do this!

When you first started your business chances are you learned pretty quickly which things you were good at and which things you needed help with. This learning process is a part of most small business owners’ experience, and it is important for every business owner to recognize his or her strengths and weaknesses. Focusing on the things you do well, and hiring others to take on those other tasks, is the mark of a good entrepreneur. Rather than trying to do everything the smart business owner focuses on his or her core strengths and looks for talented individuals who can take on the more mundane tasks of running the business.

The same strategy can be used when it comes to IT and computer support services. As the business owner you could spend your day running around the office fixing computer problems. Or you could focus on growing your business and making it better. Which option sounds more appealing and more profitable to you? By using a quality IT support services provider you can let others handle those routine software and hardware problems.

Good computer support services can help your workers be more productive, and that increased productivity can boost the profits of your company. These days everyone is trying to do more with less, and the companies who are able to achieve that goal stand to thrive and grow their market share. Hiring an outside specialty firm to handle your computer hardware and software support issues can help you keep your business lean without sacrificing the reliability and productivity you need to survive in today’s tough economy.

If you doubt that proper IT support services can boost your company’s profits and help the firm grow, just consider the alternatives to such support. You could continue to rely on any tech savvy employees you may have on staff, but if they leave the company they will take their knowledge with them. In addition there may be complex problems that they are simply not equipped or trained to handle. And when that does happen your business could be down for days as you search for the resources you need to repair the network and get the PCs back online.

Alternatively you could hire your own in-house staff of IT professionals to oversee your network and help your workers with hardware and software problems. This approach can be a waste of money and resources, since those workers may not have enough work to keep them busy. When you consider that IT workers are generally quite highly paid, you can see how this strategy could eat into your firm’s profits. IT workers are serious professionals, and they expect to be paid well for what they do. While this may be fair to them, it can place an undue burden on your small business. By hiring a quality technology firm to provide you with the computer support you need your company can avoid these unnecessary expenses while still getting the support and protection it needs.

The most daunting task for many small business owners is managing their computers and keeping them at bay from technical errors. Poor IT management can affect any size of business. Without proper technical resources, even the best selection of small businesses has a high risk of failure. Before you do anything else for your business, take the essential steps to manage your IT department and you have a far better chance that your business will be a profitable one.

Amongst the best options available to Small Businesses to take care of their computers are online tech support resources that have turned to be highly useful to troubleshoot all kind of PC problems; whether simple or complex. Technicians working with these computer support companies first diagnose all infected PCs through the online PC repair session followed by troubleshooting all.

Another benefit of availing Small Business Support services from any tech support company is cost efficiency. Starting out with simple issues such as those of installation of any software programs to critical like fixing blue screen of death error, you can the tasks done at lowest prices.

Online PC repair is the simplest, cheapest yet the most self sufficient service for small businesses to resolve any kind of software defaults. Offering the user to control actions taken on their system, tech support avoids all possible chances of any security breach.

The ongoing fierce competition has led numerous tech support resources to launch service packages including a complete array of services for different purposes. For ex: You can ask for a Small Business Support pack to cater your individual needs for your computer support requirements. You may also ask for customized solutions as available with most computer or tech support companies. Small businesses are finding tech support sessions useful as they serve as affordable alternatives over hiring full time computer technicians to handle their daily technical needs. They offer support to meet the criteria of your business. Whether it’s a sudden server crash or virus outbreak, you can be assured to get your PC blues solved onsite within no time. By working with a company that offers a combination of computer technician services and Online PC Repair, small businesses can receive the IT support they need without the heavy price tag associated with it.

I have been working on a lot of computers lately and one of the things that I notice the most is that there are programs still on the computer that are no longer needed.

Some of the new computers have a lot of demo software on there for the customer to try. If they like it, they have an option to buy it. If they do not like it, or even tried it, the computer still has to store the program and all of the related files.

In addition, many times parents will buy education software for their kids. The kids are now 9-10 years old, but the software that was bought for the 3-4 year old still remains on the computer.

Another example is AOL. Some people have started off using AOL, then they decided to go to cable modem, DSL, FIOS and the no longer use AOL. Even though they do not use it the software and all of the files remain on the computer.

Everything mentioned above slows down the computer, especially leaving AOL on it. AOL is a massive program and it puts software pieces everywhere including a program called the registry.

The registry is a program that keeps track of everything on the computer. If you no longer use an application and you do not uninstall it the Registry has to go through all of the data to get to where it needs to go.

So, the first step in getting rid of the applications that you no longer need is to go to the Start menu and look at all of the programs and files under the All Programs menu option. Just look at the different folders and applications to see what you no longer use, or even heard of.

The next step is to click on the Start menu and click on the Control Panel icon. When the Control panel opens click on the Add/Remove programs option. In XP and Vista, Add/Remove programs is either in the first row (icon vies), or on the left column (word view).

When the Add/Remove window opens you will see all of the applications that are installed. If you have a lot of applications on your computer it can take 30 seconds or more to populate all of them on the screen.

Click on the application that you want to remove and select Remove (XP), or Uninstall (Vista). Follow the prompts and the program will uninstall. Some applications ask you to restart your computer after it is uninstalled. You can do this each time, or just wait until you uninstall all of the applications. Once you are done, go to the Start menu and select Restart and the computer will restart.

The next and final step is to delete the folders associated with the programs. Add/remove mainly work with the applications, not the extra files it installs. Click on the My computer icon and then select the drive C icon. Next look for Program Files folder and double click on that to open it. The next thing to do is to look at the folder names and delete the folders of the applications that you uninstalled. The folder names are usually the same as the application that you removed.

After you are done I would click on the Start menu , then click on Accessories folder, and then the System Tools folder and select Disk Defragmenter and let it run by clicking on the defragment program. What this application does is gets rid of the extra spaces on your hard drive. The extra spaces were left there from the applications that you removed. After it is complete, which usually takes an hour, the hard drive will work less and find what it is looking for faster. The end result is a faster computer.

Please visit my blog site below and leave comments or suggestions there. Please let others know about this article. My goal is to inform the computer user so that we can all prevent these viruses from spreading.