Using Microsoft Office Groove 2007 and other collaborative technologies has enabled a virtual office services business to grow and expand. After working as a PA and administrator for 20 years, Anna Isaacs decided to use her experience to set up a virtual office services business. She duly launched Office Lifeline in January 2007 to offer clients her organisational and PA skills virtually - from her home office. "I had recognised for some time that there were lots of small companies and individuals

New 60-second business insider videos are great way to learn something very quickly! Many office-based tasks can be made significantly easier with new technology but generally we just carry one doing things in the same old way. But by learning a new process - or at the least basics of it - in just 60 (ish) seconds, you can make a very significant difference to how effectively you work. Videos include: Saving a PowerPoint file as a pdf Using templates in Office Using the colour category in Outlook

You don't need to spend hours on a train, plane or in a car to have vital meetings with suppliers, colleagues or customers. With Microsoft Office Live Meeting you can set up conference calls from your office so you don't lose valuable working time. As well as improving productivity you can also reduce your travel expenses and your carbon footprint. When we're all looking for ways to streamline costs technology can be a useful tool. Take a look at the new hosted web conferencing page on the Small

Time is pretty much the most precious commodity in most businesses and anything that can save you time has got to be worth a look. Email overload is often a principal culprit here - generally there are too many of them - and that's without the spam factor - and then it's too easy to get distracted throughout the working day. A New Zealand-based company has developed a potentially useful Outlook add-on called Ezidoesit, which turns emails into prioritised Ezidoesit tasks using a drag and drop, visual