Thanks to Ian Betteridge for his blog entry on BT's Insight blog about WhosOff
Its nice to know the word is getting out into the business community !

Read Ian's article here

With 9,258 votes so far WhosOff has grown to the #6 spot on CEO World Magazine poll for the Top Dates and Calendar Web Applications list. Cast your votes today at http://ceoworld.biz/ceo/2008/12/22/top-dates-calendar-web-applications-list/

The websites were evaluated by majority of votes based on ten main criteria:
- Content
- Authority
- Navigation
- Design
- Accessibility
- Innovation
- Business sense and growth expectations
- Degree of competition mix in their market
- Team
- Traffic type: blog, wiki, Services using tags, Mash up based on Google / Yahoo / Live.com maps, Feeds and social networking sites etc.

WhosOff.com, the Free online staff holiday/vacation planner, recently 'processed' its 250,000th leave request.

Since its launch, less than 2 years ago, thousands of businesses and organisations have taken the opportunity to use WhosOff.com to manage their staff holiday/vacation and out of office times. Based in the quiet city of Canterbury, England - a world away from Silicon Valley - WhosOff.com is attracting users from over 75 countries around the world – an impressive start for an online service aimed at business users.

WhosOff.com allows staff to request holiday/vacation whilst applying simple initial controls, for example, checking the number of days a staff member has remaining or staff clashes, and can pass the logged request on by email for final approval by an appointed approver.

Project manager, Philip Cross said “Many companies have difficulty tracking staff holiday and WhosOff.com delivers an answer to this enduring problem for free. We have spent the last couple of years gathering feedback from our users helping us to keep the service simple yet providing great functionality”. In development from Whosoff.com is a paid-for ‘Premium’ service which is due to be launched in November 2008 . The premium version will provide users with added features and tools including integration with some desktop applications.

Everyone's favourite report has been rewritten today to enable users with large staffing numbers to retrieve monthly views more quickly.

Try it for yourself, login to your account and click on the WhosOff Today? link.

Over the weekend WhosOff was the 'Red Hot Site of the Day' on Redorbit.com

RedOrbit.com, based in Texas,USA has become the premier internet destination for space, science, health, and technology enthusiasts around the globe.

A couple of reviews have been posted recently which I think really capture the essence of the Whosoff service.

Steve Anderson's 'Keep track of who's off' and John Reardon's 'Tracking Time off the easy way'

Thanks to both of them for taking the time to mention Whosoff on their blogs.

WhosOff currently manages the holiday and vacations of tens of thousands of users worldwide -across thousands of companies and organisations both large and small.

# Happy Birthday to us...#

On 1st July 2007 WhosOff celebrated its first year as the internet's first and only free to use Online staff holiday and vacation planner...

Back in July 2006 we really had no idea how popular a service like this could be and have been surprised at the take up, not only amongst SMEs but also departments of some 'very' large businesses around the world.

Our aim is to make WhosOff the first choice for business and other organisations to manage staff holiday and vacation.We aim to keep the site friendly, easy to use and give first class support.

After favourable reviews on sites such as Techcrunch.com, Webware.com, Killerstartups.com and recently downloadsquad.com we can see the word is spreading.We can now boast a considerable and continously growing user base !

Thanks for all those who came on board and who support the site.

Who's blogging WhosOff?

Hi my name is 2 - You've probably heard of me, but not so long ago I used to be just another single digit, the second best, just number two, you would n't even have looked at me twice, am I right?

In the old days everybody just knew about number 1, wanted to be number one, the first, the one and only, the 'numero uno' and for me and the rest of the guys..well, we never got a look in...

How things have changed! - now its my turn - everybody's talking about me ! Number 2 ...ok...I've got 'point zero' tagging along but wow! its great ! Number 3 is soooo jealous - anyway I expect his turn will come.

But for now, its me in the spot-light 2.0 , I'm the belle of the ball 2.0, in fact anything 2.0 is the biggest, bestest thing...ever...

Just add me after any noun, yes any noun, and it'll be appearing all over the web 2.0 in a jumping-jack-flash 2.0 second... how about Pizza 2.0 ? or Drawing Pin 2.0 ? or even Teapot 2.0 ?...Sounds great doesn't it ?

Is it just a 2.0 buzzword or am I really going to be on top of the World 2.0 ? How long will it last and is number 3 coming over hill 2.0 ?

Watch this space 2.0

Business, particularly SMEs, are being inundated with promises from the likes of Google and Microsoft, of online delivered web applications.The current buzz words being 'Web 2.0' and 'Saas' (Software as a Service) and 'On demand'.

There are, of course, the many spreadsheet,word processing, personal calendar,Networking offerings but what real advantage do these online services have over our traditional desktop applications and how many business are really buying into this type of on-demand software?

I'm sure people running day to day businesses would n't mind getting a handle on what this whole 'Web 2.0' really means and how it can help their business in particular.One answer lies, for a lot of SMEs, in having one of their daily problems solved by one of these web 2.0 offerings.

www.WhosOff.com is an online workplace leave management service that makes organising time off easy. It is simple to use and solves an enduring office problem that every SME has.."who's off ?" And what's more the service is Free!

WhosOff.com is also a story of modest entrepreneurship - proving that you do not need to be in Silicon Valley or backed by millions in venture captial to get a project off the ground.