Tuesday, 30 June 2009

Little Fluffy Clouds

As our minds turn towards holidays, we might be considering how we could work remotely more effectively. A term that has been around for a while now is 'cloud computing' and Tailored Time has been exploring what this means, what is out there and the pros and cons of working this way for the entrepreneur/business owner.

According to the big dictionary in the sky ' Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet'. You may already be doing it... we all use remote mail servers, hosted webspace, google mail, hotmail, survey monkey, constant contacts, salesforce.com... we have embraced it and it means that it is easy to work with colleagues who are no longer sitting in your office. However, along with the highs that we experience on working this way, there are also some downsides to consider...

Some highs
  • you can access them anywhere you have internet access
  • you can share documents easily
  • it is often free (hooray!)

Some lows
  • If your connection is slow, working on your cloud will be slooooowww... very frustrating with things like salesforce.com if you are used to working on a CRM hosted on your machine
  • You are dependent on someone else for your technology and just like we have learnt to hate Microsoft, we could soon feel the same about the likes of Google....
  • With google applications and others that are free it is very tempting but beware... you can get hooked and though it may be free now, we are sure it won't be free for long...
Some apps that are tried and tested by us:
www.surveymonkey.com - surveys online
www.google.com - document sharing and lots of other functionality
www.salesforce.com - CRM system
www.freecrm.com - CRM system
www.officelive.com - document sharing and lots of other functionality
www.ymlp.com - newsletter software
www.constantcontact.com - newsletter software

We would love to know your thoughts, good applications to use and useful stuff like that so get commenting!

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