Working collaboratively with bright people can change the way you work and innovate. But how do you do that when your partners, employees and contract staff work in a virtual office?

To name a few solutions:

1.Consolidate email addresses. Track multiple addresses, emails. Display customer’s picture.
2.Create sales receipts and invoices.
3.Track customer discounts, tax rates, and shipping charges.
4.Organize processed orders by customer names, invoice number, or date.
5.Link invoices and sales activity to each contact.
6.View maps to your customer’s locations with a web viewer.
7.Create groups of recipients based on status...

A New York-based architectural firm with offices worldwide uses a FileMaker database solution to print PDFs for clients and to connect to the website using Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), a standard software interface that makes databases independent of programming languages, database systems, and operating systems.

“The database is used to track all of our project information (from credits to location), our archive (ranging from architectural models, watercolors, drawings, and photos to magazines and books) and our contact system,” says David van der Leer, Steven Holl Architects. “The database is the backbone of our new website.” When greater bandwidth becomes available, they expect that their offices in Beijing will come online too. Read about how businesses in many industries collaborate.

Walter Murch, a film editor, uses FileMaker to keep the technical components of a film in one place. “What you're presented with in film is simply a mountain of stuff that comes at you very, very fast,” says Murch who worked on “Jarhead” with Sean Cullen.
“All these different people need to be able to communicate," says Sean, "and the thing about FileMaker Pro is that it's also collaborative. It helps you keep everything together as you get different people with different needs — you simply add them in, bring them into the fold, and they're all working together."

What do you think about that??