Office in the Clouds Checklist for Contractors

I get asked week­ly from con­trac­tors if their com­pa­nies should move to the clouds and ditch their phys­i­cal servers. I have a medi­um size paint­ing client in Wis­con­sin who is spend­ing $700 a month keep­ing his serv­er and com­put­ers active. If you only have 5 peo­ple in your office and are spend­ing $700 a month for online back­ups, remote access, file stor­age on a serv­er, what would you do? Prob­a­bly the same as this client. He is mov­ing his busi­ness to the clouds. I thought I’d cre­ate a sim­ple check­list for oth­er con­trac­tors to look over as they pon­der whether it would be a good move to have an office in the clouds. What is Cloud Computing? Just for clar­i­fi­ca­tion, the words ​“Cloud-based,” ​“Cloud com­put­ing,” or ​“Office in the clouds” sim­ply means a vir­tu­al office or pro­grams run­ning with­out soft­ware but host­ed online. Google Cal­en­dar and Gmail are cloud-based as you need to access the Inter­net to use them. If you have a sta­ble Inter­net con­nec­tion, cloud pro­grams are sta­ble, easy to use, and do not slow down your com­put­er. You can also access them from any com­put­er in the world. The Office in a Cloud Check List If you have a small ser­vice busi­ness with 1 to 10 employ­ees work­ing remote­ly or at an office, this is the check­list I’d use to get started: 

1. Access and Store Your Office Files: Egy­nte or Drop­box (My com­ments: These pro­grams offer: Online Back­up, File Shar­ing, Edit­ing: basi­cal­ly an online MS Exchange Serv­er for files. I per­son­al­ly use Drop­box and love it. )
2. Mobile Device: iPhone (don’t set­tle for a Droid or Black­ber­ry. The iPhone works great with Google Apps)
3. Cal­en­dar, Email & Doc­u­ment Edit­ing: Sign up for Google Apps Pre­mier: $50 a year per user / Works with Out­look if you don’t want to move away from using MS Outlook
4. Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM):Pipeline Deals CRM (My com­ments: Pipeline Deals works very well with Google Cal­en­dar and Con­tacts. I per­son­al­ly use 37 Sig­nals High­rise. There are pros and cons to each. So email me if you have a spe­cif­ic ques­tion about your CRM needs.)
5. A Copy of MS Office or Openof­fice: Although Google Doc­u­ments is good, MS Word and Excel are bet­ter. So I’d still keep a non-cloud MS Office installed on your com­put­ers. Open Office, by Sun Microsys­tems, is an alter­na­tive to MS Office. It is free and works just like Word, Excel and Pow­er­point. It just does­n’t have the cool graph­ics and look.
6. Finance: Quick­books Online
7. Print­er Shar­ing: There are a num­ber of cloud based print­er host­ing options, but I have not used them. The eas­i­est solu­tion I’ve found is to cre­ate a print­ing net­work at your office, prob­a­bly like you cur­rent­ly have set­up. If you have a Mac at your office, cre­at­ing a print­er-shared envi­ron­ment takes just min­utes: even if you have PCs mixed into the bunch. The PC machines just need to install a pro­gram called Bon­jour Print Ser­vices.

Option­al Items

1. Sched­ule Pro­gram (accept online appoint­ments): You​Can​Book​.me works the best with Google Calendar.
2. Mac Com­put­er: Macs run faster and require less fixing/​maintenance. You can install a pro­gram called Fusion3 that allows you to oper­ate Win­dows appli­ca­tions on a Mac. When switch­ing to the clouds, you’ll have less rea­sons to run Win­dows pro­grams. How­ev­er, MS Excel, is still much bet­ter on a PC. So if you are cre­at­ing com­pli­cat­ed spread­sheets or use Excel for esti­mat­ing, Win­dows is still a good thing to have on hand! The Macs are just an eas­i­er machine to oper­ate and are fun too! My favorites are the iMac and Mac­book Air.
3. Project Man­age­ment Soft­ware: 37 Sig­nals Base­camp (inex­pen­sive and easy to use for man­ag­ing projects. A more advanced option that works very well but cost more is called Blue­Fold­er. Blue­fold­er is more of a full ser­vice man­age­ment soft­ware. You can sched­ule appoint­ments, ser­vice calls, fol­low ups, assign tech­ni­cians etc. For most paint­ing and remod­el­ing busi­ness­es, this pro­gram might be too advanced.)

Cost for Cloud Computing The cost for cloud com­put­ing is very inex­pen­sive. For exam­ple, Google Apps for Busi­ness is Free. The paid ver­sion gives you a lit­tle more fea­tures at $50 per user/​per year. I have used the free ver­sion for over 2 years and will be switch­ing to the Pre­mier ver­sion this year. The cost to set­up Google Apps varies depend­ing on who you hire and the train­ing you receive. Some­times the set­up can be as lit­tle as $200 – 300 (with­out train­ing and file trans­fer­ring). Pipeline Deals CRM runs $15 per user/​per month. Egy­nte starts at around $25 a month for online stor­age, shar­ing and back­ups. Drop­box for Teams starts at around $65 a month. This is just a sam­pling of the cost. As you can see, it real­ly is a smart choice. You can spend more time being pro­duc­tive and less time fix­ing com­put­er prob­lems. Your Com­ments and Thoughts? Is your office in the clouds? If not, are you plan­ning to move soon? What pro­grams have you looked into and are you hap­py with your deci­sions? Please feel free to share your expe­ri­ence with Cloud com­put­ing and email me if you have a question.