5 Cloud Computing Tools Making the Workplace More Efficient
Dropbox is the service that introduced cloud computing to the masses, and although it faces stiff competition from Google Drive, Box.net and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, it’s still achieved near ubiquity. With Dropbox, you can store and back up your files in the cloud, and shared folders and free transfers to other Dropbox users mean it’s a quick and easy way to share large files that might not fit as an e-mail attachment.
Like many of the tools on this list, it also blurs the line between work and play - need to work on that new business presentation over the weekend? No problem - don’t save it to a flash stick, save it to your Dropbox and work on it from home. When you’re back in the office on Monday morning, your version will automatically update itself. Better still, there’s no chance of you losing your data - if your file is corrupted or you saved over your slides, you can revert to a previous version.
Evernote is the go-to service for note-taking on the go, allowing you to store everything from web pages and photographs to voice memos and plain text. 50 million people are already using the service which synchronises your notes between your Macs, PCs, iPhones, Androids and Blackberries.
Smart businessmen can use Evernote to store and search through their thoughts, whether they’re on the go, in a meeting or sitting at their desk. It can be used to create and store to-do lists, to scan and digitise physical notes such as receipts and letters, or simply to leave yourself reminders that might get overlooked in a traditional notebook.
Salesforce’s Chatter system leverages the power of the cloud to create a powerful collaboration tool that businesses of all sizes can use to streamline processes and to document sign-off approval. Through its secure user interface, companies have the ability to empower users to speak one-to-one via an instant messenger, to build groups of likeminded individuals within the company and to share files with each other, whether on the move through the mobile app or at a desktop computer through the web interface.
Now, that might not sound like much, but imagine the following scenario. The MD, the accountant and the head of sales all need to access a confidential document containing revenue projections for the next quarter. With Chatter, you can store the data in the cloud and make it available to only these users. Alternatively, imagine a sales rep that’s out of the office with a hot new lead - with Chatter, they can access the most recently updated quotes and demoes on their iPad, and then request digital approval from their manager to give the customer a 10% discount. Like most cloud-based technologies, the possibilities are virtually limitless.
I know what you’re thinking - Chrome is a browser, not a cloud application. While that may be true, the ability to use the cloud to synchronise bookmarks across devices and to create multiple users can make things run a lot more smoothly. If you stumble across an article on your mobile that you’re not quite ready to read, just bookmark it and it’ll appear in your browser next time you boot up your computer.
The user accounts are a particular stroke of genius - why not create two different users for at home and at work? If you stumble across, say, a whitepaper or an article in the evening, just switch accounts and bookmark it, then check it out in the morning. It works in reverse, too - now that you can easily bookmark something to your home account from work, there’s no excuse for you to read that article on Game of Thrones when you’re supposed to be working on a proposal.
While Apple’s iCloud won’t make you more efficient per se, it can save a lot of time in certain circumstances. Imagine that you’ve just upgraded to an iPhone 5 and you need to copy your data over. Instead of slowly backing up your data to your machine and then transferring it on to your new device, download it from the cloud.
In the case of loss or theft, an iCloud account is even more important. Apple’s ‘Find My iPhone’, which relies on the iCloud to function, will allow you to track your missing mobile and wipe the data from it before anyone cracks your passcode (you’re using one of those, right?). Even if you never manage to reclaim it, you can just restore your data from the cloud when your replacement eventually arrives.
Sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Cloud computing is taking us one step closer to that dream of us all becoming magicians.