I recently had the pleasure of meeting a business centre pioneer in Vancouver who is successfully operating a virtual office business centre. Walter Moa is the President of Suite 400 Business Centre in Downtown Vancouver. He started the virtual office component of his business centre two years ago when he recognized the growth in the number of home-based businesses and small businesses that had staff teleworking.
Moa's gone all out in the implementation of his virtual office business centre by incorporating the latest technologies to most effectively service his clients. He has also been astute enough to know that the technology he was working with is somewhat leading edge so he also has permanent technology support staff.
The technology in use is certainly impressive. Moa's clients utilize Centrex phone lines from the local telephone utility which allows Moa to offer a complete line of services from telephone answering by his centralized support staff, instant call transfer, bounce back to the corporate receptionist and alpha numeric paging. His remote clients have all of the same telephone capabilities in their home offices as they do when they choose to come to the business centre.
The telephone solutions used by Suite 400 are not uncommon with many of the business centres in North America. Moa has, however, taken his services several steps further. He has established a local area network (LAN) in the business centre to accommodate his "traditional" clients and appropriate dial-in services to allow all the remote users to access the same LAN. This allows virtual office clients to send e-mail to the centralized support staff, utilize high-end printing equipment at the business centre, and use the LAN as a back-up mechanism for the home-based operation.
Moa has standardized on Microsoft solutions including Windows '95, Windows NT, Exchange, and Office along with other key products such as Maximizer, Netscape and Pointcast. What I liked about Moa's approach was that his business centre is truly an extension of his virtual clients' operations. He can also offers to help clients with hardware and software support. Essentially, Moa's support staff become an extension of the virtual office - the "corporate services" of your virtual business.
The virtual office workers are all attached to the central business centre with ISDN BRI lines which provides the level of response that is critical to remote workers. The business centre has multiple high speed links to connect their operation to the outside world - the cost of which is shared over a broader number of users.
Suite 400 Business Centre provides a broad range of packages for virtual office workers from simple telephone answering to the full-service electronic connectivity. In addition, they offer traditional office space, meeting rooms and standard business services that you would expect to find in any business centre. The virtual office workers are, of course, able to come into the traditional office to utilize these services, as required.
I was very impressed with Walter Moa's implementation of the virtual business centre. I think that he has built a model which will effectively service a wide range of clients in the coming years. I was especially impressed with his commitment to the virtual office concepts and his plans to continue to "push the envelope."
CONTACT:
Walter Moa
phone: (604) 257-3610
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