HyperOffice has been a big fan of Skype for many years, along with over 450 million other users who are using Skype. As of this summer Skype is delivering more international calls than any other telecom company in the world. With so many users on Skype – and its’ popularity amongst our customers, we recently changed the default IM and VOIP tool inside HyperOffice to Skype. Now clients can improve their collaboration experience inside  HyperOffice. i.e. if you are sharing documents in HyperOffice, and want to chat in real time you can click on IM (at the top right of the HyperOffice interface) and open a Skype session.  Unlike collaboration tools with private chat environments they’ve built themselves – with HyperOffice & Skype chances are the person you’re working with is on Skype too. Or lets say you’re working with shared contacts in HyperOffice, you can click on the small Skype icon next to the name to initiate a call (even free international calls if they’re Skype users) or chat with the stored contact. You can check out these two features in the video.

HyperOffice has had a lot of success using Skype internally – so when we heard Skype for Business was holding a contest, we entered, and we won first place! You can check Skype’s blog to see how HyperOffice improve sales with the help of Skype here.

I expect Skype will only get better (faster) now that Skype has broken away from eBay, and improve its’ application in the collaboration world further as more project teams and small business jump on board their well packaged Skype for Businesses offerings.

Thank you Skype for the award!

Last night the Virtual Assistance Chamber of Commerce sponsored a webinar event for their members titled Leveraging Collabortive Virtual Office Technology for Virtual Assistants and Solopreneurs, where they invited HyperOffice to present our collaboration software suite. This was the second event we have done together, in response to the tremendous amount of interest we have from the Virtual Assistant community. Seems like the downturn in the economy is leading to greater demand for Virtual Assistants – since small businesses are laying off full-time staff, yet still have to keep up with the demands of trying to grow their business.

One of the common themes during the webinar was business productivity online suites  like HyperOffice help Virtual Assistants save time in trying to service their customers, allowing them to take on more clients in the same amount of time. One time saving trick  Danielle Keister, VACOC Founder and Virtual Assistant expert, shared with the group was creating a virtual drive which can be shared with between Virtual Assistants and their clients.

Danielle demonstrated how  HyperDrive can be setup in a couple minutes to create a central document repository where documents can be stored securely while giving access to clients to view and upload files and documents. As compared to other tools on the market, HyperDrive allows you to store multiple versions of a shared document without the clutter of sifting through multiple files with built in document version controls right from your windows explorer (also available on Mac). HyperOffice welcomes the Virtual Assistant community to try HyperOffice and take advantage of our deep domain expertise on setting up your virtual office to streamline your business using HyperOffice.