Setup Your Office

There are many affordable ways to setup an office for your Startup. I was hoping that this page could be a place for startups to leave some of those tips.

A Space

You and potential coworkers need a place to work. Your bedroom is a great start until you have coworkers. Your parents basement is usually the next step up. But what happens when that's no longer sufficient?

You have a couple options:

Incubator-type Spaces

This includes space such as the space offered by the Accelerator Center.

Advantages:

• They set up all the IT stuff for you including phones, networking, Internet connection
• Great, professional shared spaces, lunch rooms, conference rooms
• Access to industry advice from advisers, passing-by investors, and peer entrepreneurs.
• Coolness Factor

Disadvantages:

• Cost -- these spaces are expensive
• Shortage of options and availability

More info:

• See: Accelerator Center
• There are other spaces in S. Ontario. e.g. Indoor Playground∞

Add Other Options Here

Office IT

Optimal IT and Office Technology should be easy to use, professional, scalable, and simple to maintain. Oh yeah, and it should be cheap -- preferably free.

Here are some of the tools local Waterloo startups use for IT technology.

Internet Connectivity

Questions to ask: How fast of a connection do you need? Do you need a fixed IP? Will you be hosting sites on this?

Some options to look at:

• Primus/Magma -- offers the cheapest fixed IP that I can find. Great customer service. DSL (not the fastest thing in the world).
• Atria Networks∞
• Execulink∞
• Rogers or Sympatico Business (business access may be faster because of the absence of bandwidth shaping)
• Everyone that I know that uses TekSavvy says it's the bestest ever TekSavvy∞

Email

You and your co-workers need email addresses. They may want to be able to access these accounts remotely from the web. Email should be secure, have junk-mail filtering, etc.

But you probably can't afford an Outlook Exchange server yet, can you? (Although you could use a hosted Exchange server.)

I recommend Zimbra∞ -- it is amazing, allows for calendaring and shared calendars, easy to setup and maintain, etc.

Another option is to use GoogleApps∞

Phones

You may be interested in setting up VoIP phones in your office. That way you can have multiple extensions, emailed voice mail messages, etc.

I recommend using a system based on Asterisk.

TrixBox∞ is a good opensource package that wraps a Web user interface around Asterisk. A great option. There is a new similar product also built on Asterisk [@TODO: remember what it is]

For actual phones, I recommend the Linksys SPA941 or SPA942 -- these are the great for value, reliability, quality, and functionality.

You should consider using Power over Ethernet (PoE) to power your phones -- then you don't need to plug them in separately to a power-jack and if your power goes down (but your network stays up with UPS still powering your network switch) your phones won't get cut off.

[@TODO: describe setup in detail with costs, links, and newtwork diagram]

Router

You may want a professional router for your office. This gives more predictable network access (read: no unplugging the router to get things working), better security, and (perhaps most usefully) the ability to VPN into your network from home. Cisco has nice, expensive routers but you might be able to use a cheaper one and then set up VPN using a separate linux box

[@TODO this document is a work in progress]