I’ve decided to get certified! Microsoft Office certified that is. I have worked with the Microsoft Office suite of programs throughout my working life (most of my 20 years in the workforce and prior to becoming a Virtual Assistant and starting Net Secretary) and continue to work with these packages daily in business. I am an expert in the packages of Word, Outlook and Excel and train others in their use. I’m pretty good at Powerpoint and Access too, although the latter I have not used for a few years (and it is true what they say - you lose it if you don’t use it). So I have decided to turn this personal expertise into recognisable qualifications in these packages and I will therefore be sitting the MOS exams over the next 12 months for each of the packages in the Microsoft Office suite. I am currently in the process of taking trial assessments to see if I am ready to sit the real exams. (I’m confident I will be in Word at least)

These certifications are helpful for one’s business in that they are an internationally recognised standard for expert status in the world’s most popular office productivity software. It’s all well and good to say "Yes I’m an expert in Word" but until you actually have that certificate, it can be difficult to substantiate that claim. Certification adds credibility and authenticity to one’s claims of expert status in these areas and I think it is something that is going to be great for Net Secretary and good for clients in the long run also.

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I have recently been researching online collaboration tools for Net Secretary. There are quite a few out there from very simple to very sophisticated with a broad range of services. The prices for these tools vary from free to jaw droppingly expensive. Online collaboration tools are great for Virtual Assistant businesses, especially when collaborating and sharing with your team (as Net Secretary does). They are also a great way to help risk proof your business, as contact details, current projects etc can all be uploaded to the collaboration tool for everyone to access. Therefore if I am away, on holidays or sick, my team can action items in my absence.

One tool which I am trialling is Airset.  This collaboration tool is currently free and so far it looks like it has everything I need. I can log messages to my team there, upload files and documents we are working on, add contact details of clients, and other features which I haven’t yet fully explored. All of these features are for the eyes of my team only and are in a secure environment that is password protected and encrypted.

I’m not at the stage where I need a portal for clients to login also but this may be something I look at down the track. For now, I think Airset will work well for Net Secretary’s team and enable us to be that little bit more efficient.

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I pride myself on being a technology savvy Virtual Assistant and a bit of a ‘tech head’. I’m pretty good at nutting out most problems with my PC software and helping others with their software issues. However, there is one problem with my Microsoft Outlook 2007 that has got me stumped and has been occurring since I bought my new Dell laptop last year. It freezes at will, shut downs, restarts, comes up with an annoying "The document template is not valid" whenever I try to open an email or an appointment. I also do not have an address book - I cannot link the file to my Contacts to get this happening. I have done some research and I realise it is a compatibility issue when upgrading from 2003 to 2007 or transferring 2003 files to 2007 (which I have done). The ‘fixes’ they suggest have not worked.

So I duly called Dell to see what they could do and to my surprise, I was told I only had the hardware warranty, not the software warranty. So $82 later, I now have the 12 month software warranty helpdesk support. This was something I omitted to look at when I purchased my new PC, perhaps arrogantly thinking I could handle any issues myself. It is a timely reminder that small business should have a software support plan in place, whether it be your partner who is an IT expert, a reliable accessible friend or family member who is expert in IT issues or a paid for helpdesk service, of which there are many around.

Dell were extremely helpful when I previously had issues with my PC not connecting to the Internet and dropping out. They fixed it remotely from Malaysia or wherever they are and because I purchased my system from them, they have all my details on file and I feel confident they can provide me with the support I require (hopefully infrequently!). Virtual Helpdesk Assistants helping a Virtual Assistant!

Now I just have to get around to calling them back to get this darn Outlook problem fixed …

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Hi everyone

I just had to repost this from an email Kathie Thomas sent to the Virtual Assistants Forum a couple of weeks ago. How many of these can you relate to hearing before?

• The Marathon Message: The extremely long voicemail that never ends.
• The Death March: Leaving a phone number at the end of a long voicemail. If you missed it, you then have to listen to the entire message again just to get the phone number.
• The Screaming Eagle: The voicemail left in a noisy bar or as a fire truck is passing by.
• The Drunken Dispatch: The drunk dial voicemail.
• Voicemail Interruptus: As the person is leaving the voicemail, they stop in the middle to have a conversation with someone else or answer another call before they return to finish the message.
• The Misguided Message: A person or telemarketer leaves a message for you that was actually intended for someone else.
• Voicemail Incognito: The anonymous voicemail.
• One Way Wonder: When the person thinks they are speaking to you when they are actually talking to your voicemail.
• The Pocket Dialer: The person that accidentally calls you because the phone is in their pocket or bag and isn’t locked, leading to an endless soundtrack of them walking down the street, driving or having a conversation with someone else.
• And, worst of all, the person who rattles off their telephone number at lightening speed, causing you to have to repeatedly go back over the entire message to try and decipher the digits.

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Okay I confess.  I’m a technology geek. A technophile. A computer nerd. A gadget freak. And I love it! If there’s a new technology to be had, a new piece of software, I’m out there researching it, testing it, telling my clients about it, boring my friends with it and generally getting unnaturally excited about it. My latest piece of technology (that should be arriving any day!) is a Nokia N95 in the very hard to get and extremely classy Sand colour (a pale goldy bronze). Because of course, technology has to be attractive* as well (*not really, but it makes it more enjoyable to use!). This little beast of a “mobile phone” is actually far more than just a phone. It is a PDA, GPS navigator (you can download maps from Nokia), MP3 player, video recorder and player, email sender/checker, and modem. It doesn’t come cheap but I did find a bargain online (email me if you want to know where!) Finally a device that will allow me to be truly mobile and not miss any important emails or get lost finding a client’s premises.

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It never ceases to amaze me the wonders of modern technology and none more so when I receive a query from a prospect in another country. One of the reasons I love what I do so much is that it breaks down borders across the world to in fact make this business borderless in many respects - a global business thanks to the Internet. We can all learn so much from one another just on a local scale but when it encompasses those who live in a different time zone, culture and climate, the learnings become that much more interesting. The main benefit of being an Australian VA is that I can offer my US and UK clients an “overnight” service - as they wake and check their inboxes, I have worked “overnight” (my day) to deliver their job. A definite win-win for all concerned and one that still gets me (perhaps pathetically!) excited when I complete a job for an international client.

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I was excited to receive my new laptop computer last week and even more excited when the transfer of my documents and files from my old computer was successful. I must admit I was nervous about using Vista for the first time but it appears so far that my anxiety was largely unfounded. I have found Vista to be beautiful to work with and really not that confusing. It takes a little bit to get used to things but it is not a wholesale change for Windows software as I had feared. In terms of networking my old PC and this one together, I confess to feeling very nervous and anxious that it would not work, that I would stuff it up or it would be a a pain in the behind to configure everything. However, I was pleasantly surprised when it took only 10 minutes to install the router and software and my laptop found the network instantly. First time lucky maybe? I’m waiting for something to go wrong but I am pleased to say that I am rapt with the smooth sailing with this new piece of technology thus far.

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