Introduction
I want to write about something that a lot of us are spending increasing amounts of time doing, and that's 'working in the cloud'.
As a partner in a small business, I want to make our business cost effective, easier to run and more flexible, in many ways Cloud based applications offer us ease, cost savings, and flexibility of working that is unrivaled by existing PC based apps.
For us, the most fundamental thing that Cloud apps offer is the ability to work anywhere - from the office, at home, from a client location, from a shoot. This has introduced a freedom that we've not seen before and that can enhance or ruin your quality of life depending upon the way you approach it!
I've broken the tools that we use into two categories - office style tools that help us with day to day running of the business, and Sales and Marketing. Here's what we use:
Office, Admin and Business Operations
- Google Apps - mail / docs / video / sites / calendar / contacts / chat
- Snaptic
- Google Maps
- Remember The Milk
- DropSend
- Delicious
Sales and Marketing
I'm going to cover off this article in three posts, one focusing on each of the two groups above, and one about what we plan to manage using Cloud based apps in the future.
So to start, here's a look at our Office Admin and Business Operations in more detail:
Google Apps is the biggest piece of the jigsaw. We store the bulk of the documents used to run our company using this technology which of course means we can access them from anywhere. We used to do this using remote access to our server, but that wasn't nearly as reliable or fast. The partners in the company keep in touch with Google Mail, Contacts, Calendar and Chat.
I used to be the biggest fan of Microsoft Outlook and used it for around 10 years, but I also used to regularly copy my outlook data which was stored locally onto a memory stick and bring it home with me so I could use Outlook from home, which was a complete pain. Forgetting it would necessitate a journey into the office. I also couldn't access the data on my phone or on other computers such as my Mac. We looked at running Exchange Server, both hosting it ourselves, and also as a managed service which we would pay monthly for. Hosting it ourselves necessitated buying a server, the software and maintaining it which had an initial outlay of thousands, followed by time and money spent on maintenance. As a managed service, Exchange server costs around £30 / month / user. Google Apps is £30 / year / user, so the decision to go with Google was pretty easy.
There are a couple of things that Google Apps doesn't replace Outlook for and these are To Do Lists and Notes. Actually, Apps does have To Do Lists, but it doesn't offer the flexibility that we'd like, this is where Remember The Milk and Snaptic come in.
Remember The Milk (replaced To Do Lists in Outlook)
RTM is a brilliant app that allows you to keep multiple To Do Lists. It also allows you to associate notes with a to do list item and to send tasks to other people. I keep lists on a project by project basis as well as lists with the following titles 'work', 'personal', 'household' and 'sales and marketing'.
RTM appear to have spent a lot of time looking at ways to make their app as efficient as possible for the user, so for example, by prefixing a task with 'tom' it will automatically be given a due date of whatever day tomorrow is, 'mon' would schedule the task to be due on Monday, etc.
Notes can be assigned a priority by using one of three colours and the system is flexible enough to allow a variety of different views on tasks, for example being able to view all tasks that are due today across multiple task lists or just tasks due in a single list.
This is one of five tabs that is always open on my browser when I'm working (the others being Google Mail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts and Snaptic).
Snaptic (replaced notes in Outlook)
I've only recently started using Snaptic, possibly because they haven't been around for so long. They appear to be one of the new kids on the block when it comes to note taking apps, and for my requirements, they're the best.
I tested Snaptic up against Evernote (I'd also experimented with Zoho office). I know alot of people swear by Evernote, but for my purposes - specifically to make notes which are primarily text based ideas and record them quickly, Snaptic is a winner. It appears to be much faster than Evernote (admittedly, it has less functionality, like scanning graphics for text, but I don't need this anyway).
Snaptic allows you to easily and quickly add tags to notes and it is with tags that you organise your notes. The client for Snaptic on Android, which is my phone platform is called 3banana. Like the web based part of the system, it's super fast. Unlike Evernote on Android, it stores your notes locally and syncs with the web, rather than always accessing your notes directly from the web. This means it's faster and also still works when you don't have phone reception - on the tube for example.
DropSend (replaced FTP server)
We use DropSend to send large files to clients. We have an Pro account which costs $19 per month and allows us to send unlimited files. If you work in media and need to send large files to clients, you're definitely going to want this app or something similar. There are loads of other apps out there that do what DropSend does, YouSendIt being one of it's main competitors.
We used to use an FTP server installed on our office server, but we were forever having problems with clients not being able to connect, or not knowing how to connect and needing their hands holding through the process. I don't think it was a problem with our implementation, just a problem with FTP in general. I'm really glad to see FTP server replaced by web based systems!
DropSend is good, but it also has a few issues. I like the fact that for the price you get loads of Cloud based storage - 25GB. This is fantastically useful as both backup for projects and a handy archive of assets that can be quickly re-sent to a client.
Here's what I don't like:
There is a maximum default duration of links being active set to 14 days. If you want the link to be active for longer, and we invariably do, you need to set it manually for every file that you send. When you set it manually, you can set it up to 365 days.
For as long as I've been using the Adobe Air based app, there has been an issue whereby occasionally, upon completion of upload of a file, the app reports back a 'send error'. Whilst the app is supposed to have 'send resume', the only way to get around this error is to re-upload the entire file. I use two windows based PCs and I've had this problem on both machines, so it doesn't seem to be installation specific.
When you minimise the PC based app to the task bar (Windows 7), you cannot expand the app again by clicking on the task bar, as you should be able to. Instead, the only way to get the app back is to click on it in the system tray. I keep expecting them to fix this problem with every software update, but it's still there.
Despite all this, we're still using DropSend and it works very well most of the time.
Here is a tip if you use DropSend in a company environment, with Google Mail: set your DropSend e-mail address to a distribution list that will reach everyone within the company and then set up a rule within Google Mail that will remove messages from DropSend from the inbox and place them in their own folder. This way, everyone can use the same DropSend account and everyone will receive notification that a file has been picked up, without the notifications clogging up your in-box.
Google Maps (replaced Microsoft Autoroute)
Invaluable tool for planning how to get somewhere, researching locations, parking, etc. It syncs very well with most phones and particularly well with Android phones.
Delicious (replaced bookmarks in various browsers)
I got so bored of trying to manage multiple bookmarks in multiple browsers on multiple computers, that I installed Delicious, and never looked back. These days there are a number of different tools available for synchronising links, including through tools specific to Explorer, Chrome and Firefox, but Delicious is OS and broswer agnostic and does exactly what I need it to do. I highly recommend it.
Summary
Whilst this isn't an in depth review of the services I've listed here, or a recommendation of the best apps and services for all circumstances, it is a description of what we're successfully using within our company to operate our business in the Cloud.
In part 2 I'll explain how we used cloud based tools to win promote our company and win business.
I'm fascinated to know what tools other people are using - let me know how you do it.
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