A few months ago I posted an entry about cloud computing. Since then there have been lots of start ups and lots of new services provided by some of the old players, like Microsoft and Google, the latter needed no mention here but what’s done is done, needless to say for small businesses and even larger organizations these services allow you conduct business in ways you never have before.

While I have been keeping tabs as best I could on the progress of various cloud services, and believe me at this point there are way too many for just one person to keep track of, I also took the time to test a few of them to determine whether they may have a place in KCCS and/or can be recommend to our customers for use. Now before I continue this post I should probably admit a few things,

1. I am still not drinking the Cool Aid
2. I still love traditional desktop/ server applications

Recently I made a big push to move our most common used applications to a cloud version or a cloud alternative. For example things like CRM, Support Ticketing, Invoicing and even Project management, as a result we are about 90% cloud based. But being the none trusting type there is also a traditional application on our servers that serve the same purpose and before you point out the fact that it just doubles the workload I will say this, most of the services we use also integrate in some way with our desktop applications like Office, meaning that changes made using either the cloud of the desktop application will reflect on the other.

To give you a general insight to what I am referring to I will give a break down of what service we use and how we use them.

 First and foremost, we live on Google Apps. This is the bases for things like email, calendaring, document management, and other tasks such as chat, and collaboration tools like Wave and a relatively close Sharepoint like service, Google Sites. The Google Apps suite adds the perfect touch to creating and presenting a professional image, if you have your own web domain ( go get one if you don’t have one!) Google will add your domain to your emails, meaning no one has to know that you are really only using  Gmail on steroids. Looks exactly the same too. check it out.

There are tons of other applications that our employees have access to. In fact the only thing that we don’t use cloud services for is accounting, this is purely a choice made for our own security and that of our customers, we could have used Quickbooks online but opted to use the native application instead, however the cloud based invoice platform which is hosted by ZOHO is connected to Quickbooks via a plug-in.

I could go on about this topic but instead I decided to make a small table showing you the options available  all of which we use in house and recommend to our customers. Keep in mind however I still keep local copies of almost everything to edit with native applications if and when I need to.

I will spend a few follow on posts going into more detail on each application. More to come.