Scheduling is often a problem in any office. Salespeople on the road need to schedule meetings with senior management who are busy in meetings, or need to book a boardroom from their hotel room.

However, Regina-based SaskTel and the Toronto-based Sun-Netscape Alliance claim to have solved such administrative head-aches with QuantumLinx Office, a suite of online office productivity applications.

The product is essentially an ASP-based intranet, and potential users need only go to the QuantumLinx Web site (www.qlo.com) to set up an administrator account.

Other users can then be added to the virtual intranet, each of them able to connect and check office e-mail, use the centralized scheduling software and participate in online forums. The service costs $14.95 per user per month.

One of the small business owners taking advantage of this service is Paul Martin, president of Regina, Sask.-based Paul Martin Communications. His four-person enterprise has been using a QuantumLinx Office account to co-ordinate their virtual office for the past six months. "We're not huge. We're barely even small," he says. "But we're virtual, and that's the whole point."

He finds the service easy to use — something he values highly. "It was very easy to configure. I did it myself," he says. "I can even act as the administrator, which is pretty amazing from my perspective because I'm not very skilled at that stuff."

He also finds the price attractive because it allows his business to exist without a physical presence. "The other option is an office — rent some office space and centralize everyone and then you're still into a network inside your office anyway," he says. "Anything that's less than the cost of real estate makes sense. We can be as remote as we want."

The product is aimed at small to medium-sized businesses that want the flexibility of a VPN, but don't have the resources for one. "The most important thing is it gives us the foundation for an intranet," says Martin.

"With us being virtual, we've got people in different locations all working from remote offices. We have to communicate, so (this service) links us all together and enables us to do scheduling and all that sort of jazz, which is quite good. It's pretty tough to do a network that has remote sites and still be cost effective. Being able to use this system, and having it Web-based, is ideal for us."

The site has a direct link where customers can download Star Office.

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