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AfterOffice.com after serious business
and still have fun
Extract from Jaring Internet Magazine (June
2000) |
NG Po Jen is a picture of someone
having fun. But don't let his self-depreciating
manner, boyish charms and soft-spoken candour
fool you. Ng runs a promising local Web startup,
Afteroffice.com Sdn Bhd (www.afteroffice.com)
which provides a Internet-based application
service - a virtual office - called after
its namesake and currently has more than 400
companies as its clients. Its list of clientele
are currently from Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore,
Australia, the United Kingdom and included
the likes of Adidas Malaysia (adidas.com.my),
Stein Morgan International (steinmorgan.com)
and even Parti Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia (www.gerakan.org.my).
Two main factors have helped drawn customers
to AfterOffice.com like bees to honey.
The first is due to AfterOffice.com virtual
office's homegrown suite of comprehensive
features with site hosting, email, calendar,
document center, virtual rolodex, Secure Socket
Layer (SSL) encryption for file transfer and
file storage, virtual bookmark storage, chat
and to-do-list.
In a walk-through demonstration, Ng highlighted
AfterOffice.com's Instant Message (IM) feature
where users can send IMs to online team members
and colleagues. "Our research and development
team anticipated the need for IM last year.
Hence, we are one of the earliest virtual
office service provider to have introduced
the IM feature late last year," said
Ng.
"A user can retrieve or
manage this list of bookmarks from AfterOffice.com
as long as there's an Internet connection,"
said Ng. Also in the development pipeline
are new features such as database implementation
for online inventory control, administration
workflow and Wireless Application Protocol
(WAP) access to the site. Other features such
as trade matching services are still on the
drawing board, according to Ng. "This
is an engine that matches our community members'
buy-and-sell profiles and will mark our first
step towards facilitating trade on the Internet,"
he said. It's going to take a two-prong approach
- and a lot of work- to develop AfterOffice.com's
new features and expand its market share in
the region - a task which Ng relishes and
adds, " It's going to be fun."
The second is price. AfterOffice.com virtual
office currently serves two flavours. One
is a free advertisement-supported version,
with 25MB of virtual storage space per company,
calendar sharing option to five users, meeting
room discussion topics restricted to three,
site bookmark limited to 100 entries and Windows
notepad entries to 50 files.
The other is a paid version, at US$180 per
annum and 50MB virtual storage space for a
basic five-user license. Additional users
cost US$18 per additional user per year. The
calendar sharing option and meeting room discussion
topic increases to 25 while both the site
bookmarks and Windows notepad entries is unlimited.
Extract from Jaring Internet Magazine (June
2000)
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