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With the advent of fast speed broadband internet, software programs that operate “in the cloud” and telecommunications that use your internet connection there’s no wonder the Remote Contractor market is growing.

In the cloud? What’s that you ask? Well it’s just like Hotmail or Facebook or your internet banking, secure services that you use on the Internet from anywhere in the world. It’s easy to access and you don’t need to bring your computer with you if you don’t want to. Even programs like MYOB are moving to the cloud with their online product called Live Accounts. It’s also an interesting time for these companies because new and nimble competitors have an opportunity to grab a market share. Companies like Xero (New Zealand company) and SaaSu (Australian company) are good examples and both companies have excellent products and free plans for micro businesses and consultants.

There are online customer databases like SalesForce which companies use to keep track of their customers and Skype that allow personal users to make calls to other Skype users for free. These services enable you to work from where ever you are and enable employers to validate that you have logged in and performed the desired work so opportunities are coming thick and fast for home workers.

Remote Contractors and Virtual Assistants (VA)

Remote worker, home based employment, remote workers and virtual assistants are some of the terms used to describe this type of work and some of the work available is paid hourly pay or payment for specific tasks. It’s an ideal situation for working mums who need to earn an income while caring for their babies and young children. We’re creating a service to help you find work as a remote contractor. Visit our Registration site and complete your details and we’ll let you know about opportunities as we come to them. If you are interested in receiving alerts about work from home opportunities register with our remote contractor service.

Our friends at virion – the business voip telco are working on a system where you can help any of your friends who own or work in a business that has 4 or more Telstra lines and want to find an alternative solution. The work involves getting a copy of their phone bill and performing a price comparison. Register your interest with our Remote Contractor service.

is your internet fast enough for a voip phone system

We’ve updated our telephone system to the latest in Cisco IP phones and want to share the information with you because we think it’s ground breaking. We use our Broadband Internet connection to make and receive all our calls and that throws out the window the old concept of paying Telstra almost $40 per month just to have a telephone number. I was only just explaining to a friend today how the VoIP phone system from virion works and I’ll try to explain it again in this blog post.

Your Broadband Internet connection delivers the voice to your phones and takes it away to the people you call so this link is critical in the quality of your voip phone system. The best way of testing the quality of your broadband internet connection to run a speed test and see how fast your upload speeds are. Yes, I did say upload speeds. Most people want fast download speeds to download videos, emails and attachments, but with a voip phone system you need to have a broadband connection with good upload speeds.

In this diagram the upload speed is 0.81Mb/s (810Kbps) and the best quality VoIP phone system requires 87.2Kbps, so,theoretically 10 people in your office could be having phone conversations with your VoIP phone system using your broadband internet. But what if someone is sending an email with a huge attachment? I’ll keep you up-to-date with our VoIP experience as we use it.

If you want to test a business grade VoIP phone system and VoIP service take advantage of virion’s Instant Trial.

The benefits of a PDF file are:

• most computers in the world will open it,
• it maintains the look and feel of anything you can view on the screen and
• it stops people from editing your files

Adobe Systems Incorporated are the owners of the PDF (Portable Document Format) standard and they have traditionally made money by making the viewer program available for free, but charging for the program which actually creates the PDF files. This is common with many other programs like Flash (for website animations) where you can download a player to view them, but you have to buy the software if you want to create them.

There are a number of applications available which allow you to easily convert any file you can print into a PDF. These files don’t necessarily have the full functionality that is available with the Adobe Acrobat “creator” software but many people don’t need these features.

The program we have found is CutePDF and the video attached to this post (click here or on the title if you are viewing this as an email) shows you how to download the program, install it and use it to convert files to PDF. Please feel free to send us some comments if you know of a better product or want to share your experiences.

The Cartooning College has provided cartooning courses for kids, adults and specialised markets who have used the courses to enable disadvantaged people express themselves creatively. They have created a new website built on the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) and Steve has produced some instructional videos about how to administer a WordPress site using the newly created website for the Cartooning College. Their website is www.cartooningcollege.com.au.

“I realised the power of cartoons back in 1992 when I had a british cartoonist called Johnjo draw a caricature of my face in my logo. It became an icon in Sydney’s Northern Beaches (with the aid of much newspaper advertising over the years)” confirms Steve.

The initial video of this course is included in this post so click on the title to go to our blog and watch the video to understand about creating and managing posts using WordPress. If you want to have your own WordPress website and learn the skills in a practical example take advantage of our 123ezy Webmasters course:.

EzyLearn offers the 123ezy website builder as part of a website hosting package and it makes it so simple to add (and change) words to the heading and description of each page within your website. Visit the 123ezy website for more information or take a look at a website that he been created using the SiteBuilder to see how it works.

Ross Miller is blind and has been for much of his life. He’s intelligent and dedicated and travels around Sydney and Australia helping people who are injured at work gain the skills they need to perform and find new jobs. It is an inspiration to work with Ross because despite his seeing disability he is pro-active in every aspect of helping find his clients work. His website is http://www.careerprofiles.com.au/.

The lady that we’d like to thank is Barbara Smith from Roving Trainer. Barbara worked at our first training centre that opened in Dee Why in the year 2000 and helped build a professionalreputation for a very small business at the time. Coming from a corporate training background, Barbara added a level of professionalism that all her students enjoyed and empathy that ensured her students learnt. Barbara is now training people in sunny Port Macquarie so please look her up if you need help in that area.

There are plenty of other people that we’d like to thank and you’ll hear about their story in the coming months. If you have had a success story using EzyLearn training courses or a someone who recommended us, please make a comment or send us an email.

The Training_Company exercise file used in our MYOB Bank Reconciliation course (#503) uses a datafile created in MYOB Accounting Plus v18 so it needs to be upgraded if you have downloaded the latest version. You can upgrade the file using the special program (found under the start menu) or by simply trying to open the file using the program.

This video takes you through the upgrade process. Click Here to see the elearning website, scroll to the bottom and you’ll see the topics covered in MYOB Bank Reconciliation 503. If you wish to enrol into the course you can enrol at the website mentioned above of visit our online ordering site for online courses by clicking here.

We’ve used Google’s new Internet Browser called Google Chrome (which is very fast compared to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer), to show you how to access this datafile and get it onto your computer. This data file was created using MYOB Accounting Plus version 18 so if you are using a more recent version of the software you’ll need to upgrade the datafile using the upgrade assistant.

My first thought was how interesting that a well reputed education institution stops having lectures altogether and I was a little disappointed that I wouldn’t have an opportunity to meet my fellow students and share stories and ask questions. After using the learning tools however I have come to the conclusion that the tools themselves are very useful and it re-affirmed our online training goals here at EzyLearn to become the number one source of online training in Australia for employment and productivity for small to medium businesses.

We have received help requests of how to get around our online learning websites so the video in this post is designed to give you a quick demonstration.

The production of the next MYOB course (MYOB Payroll) is underway and you’ll get a change to see these videos for free if you are a subscriber to this blog. This video is a small taste of the many more to come. Please feel free to comment or share this blog post with your friends. To visit the online MYOB course website, click here.