Virtual office: the place remote teams lost
A map generated for the size of your team, desks, meeting rooms, reception and floors. Your character walks through it, sits at their own desk and talks to whoever is nearby. No invite, no link, no booked call.
When the team went remote, what disappeared was not the room: it was the ability to talk to someone without scheduling it. Every conversation started requiring a calendar invite, a link and the question "got five minutes?", and what used to cost ten seconds in the hallway now costs half an hour of two people's calendars.
Workspacefy's virtual office puts that layer back. It is not an office metaphor on a login screen: it is a navigable map, with your character inside it, where being near someone is enough to start talking.
And it does not live off in a separate product. It sits in the same workspace as tasks, calendar, email, notes and dashboards, so going from a conversation to the task it produced is one click, not a migration between tools.
A map, not a list of avatars
Reception, desks, meeting rooms and floors. The office is generated for your team's size and still makes sense as it grows.
Everyone gets their own desk
Claim a desk and sit at it. Whoever arrives sees where you are, whether you are nearby and whether now is a good time.
Proximity chat
You talk to whoever is around you, like in a hallway. Walking over is the invite, there is no invite to send.
Rooms you can book and lock
Book the meeting room, lock the door when the subject calls for it, and knock before entering someone else's.
Presence you can see, instead of a green dot
The green dot in a chat app answers the wrong question. It tells you someone opened the app, not whether they are available, in the middle of something, or sitting with exactly the people you need.
On the map, presence is position. You can see who is at their own desk, who is behind a closed door and who is wandering around. That is the information that decides whether you go now or later, and it is precisely what no contact list can convey.
Short conversations get to be short again
Remote teams do not talk less for lack of interest. They talk less because the cost of starting a conversation went up: find a free slot, send a link, wait for everyone to join. Faced with that, the thirty-second question becomes an async message, and the async message becomes a two-day thread.
With proximity chat, the cost drops back to near zero: you walk over and talk. Rooms still exist for what needs a room, bookable and lockable, but they stop being the only way to have a conversation.
An office inside the workspace, not beside it
Most virtual office tools only solve presence. The work stays somewhere else: tasks in a tracker, the document in a wiki, email in an email client. Teams working that way spend the day rebuilding context across tabs.
Here the office is one more module of the same workspace. The conversation that happened at a desk becomes a task with an owner and a due date, the decision becomes a versioned note, and what you agreed with the client becomes an email, without switching products or copying context between them.
- Tasks with Kanban, a built-in timer, WIP limits per column and swimlanes per team.
- Calendar and interactive Gantt, with recurring events for your rituals.
- Notes and wiki with comments, version history and a recoverable trash.
- Real-time chat, a whiteboard with live cursors and video meetings with screen sharing.
Hybrid: people at home stop being extras
In a hybrid setup the imbalance shows up fast. Whoever is in the physical office takes part in the hallway conversations; whoever is at home gets the summary, when it arrives at all.
A virtual office with a personal desk and proximity chat gives the remote half the same informal channel the in-office half already has. That is the difference between being in the meeting and being in the company.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this a business address or a virtual office address service?
- No. Here "virtual office" means software: an online workplace with a map, desks and rooms where your team meets. We do not provide a commercial address, mail handling, physical rooms by the hour or any company domiciliation service. If that is what you need, a coworking space solves it; this product does not.
- How does proximity chat work?
- Your character walks around the map, and the conversation happens with whoever is near you. Walking over replaces the invite: there is no link to send and no slot to book. For anything that needs a closed conversation, meeting rooms can be booked and locked.
- Is the map fixed or does it fit my team?
- The office is generated for your team's size, with a reception, a desk area and meeting rooms, and it grows into more floors as the team grows. Each person claims their own desk inside it.
- Do we have to replace the tools we already use?
- Not all at once. The virtual office is a module of the workspace, and Gmail and Outlook keep working inside it through integrated email, along with two-way integrations with Google Drive and GitHub. Many teams start with the office and move tasks and documentation over later, at whatever pace works.
- Which plans include the virtual office?
- Real-time features, video, the collaborative whiteboard and the office, start on the Pro plan. The permanently free plan covers tasks, calendar, notes, forms and one workspace, with no credit card and no trial countdown.
- Does it work for teams across time zones?
- The office solves the synchronous part: it helps where working hours overlap. For the rest, what holds a distributed team together is the asynchronous record, versioned notes and wiki, task comments, decision history, and that lives in the same workspace, waiting for the other time zone to wake up.
Keep reading
- Remote work without six tabs open for one questionPresence, conversation, execution and record in one environment. That is what separates a distributed team that works from one that spends the day catching up.
- A Gather alternative for teams who want the office and the work in one placeGather solves presence. If your team also needs tasks, a schedule, email and documentation, the question stops being which virtual office is better and becomes how many tools you want to keep.
- Team management when nobody sits in the same roomVisible workload, rituals that take real room on the calendar, and all the context in the same place the work happens.
- Collaboration tools that do not require five open tabsA whiteboard with live cursors, chat with mentions, video meetings with screen sharing and a versioned wiki, all in the same environment as the tasks.
Open your team's office
Five minutes to set up the workspace and claim the first desk. No credit card.
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