Before the summer of 2009 we started up a new company to bring Hosted SwyxWare to Norwegian resellers. We refer to this as Cloud Communication. Starting a company from scratch is a perfect way to be a little bold and try to do things differently. So, my quest as the CTO was to see just how ‘cloudy’ a company can be in the year of 2009…
There are of course some basic needs when running a company. We needed an office suite and a system to handle accounting and invoicing.
For the ‘office suite’ I jumped on the Google bandwagon, and signed up for Googles Apps for Domains. This gave us email, word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs free of charge and integrated with our own domain. At the moment the Apps for Domains are free of charge for up to 50 users. It is also secured using HTTPS. I must admit I was a bit skeptical initially about the feature set of the Google Apps suite. Even if 90% of the features most office suites are not used, Google Apps did lack even some of the basic features. The collaboration possibilities outweights most of them. Gone are the days when revisions of a document were emailed back and forth between collaborators. Google is making the collaboration more and more powerful. It is quite satisfying logging in to the account, and suddenly you have been given more and better features overnight.
Sharing a document can be done in many ways, even generating a URL so everybody can access the document. Editing can be restricted, a document can be shared for viewing only. There are tons of stuff on the Net describing the features of Google Apps, so I will not go into detail about how it all works.
The conclusion is clear. I do not have Microsoft Office or Open Office installed on my machines anymore. Google really provides what needed for a small company.
Accounting and invoicing are taken care of by a company named ‘24SevenOffice’. Completely web-based, but not as streamlined as the solutions from Google. While Google runs in virtually most web browsers, the accounting application runs in Internet Explorer only. Apart from that it provides us with everything we need to take care of the cash-flow as well.
Recently we started to use an online Ticket system to provide our resellers with the benefit of smooth handling of support requests. All emails sent to our support address automatically generates a ticket, with reference number and status updates. The user can reply by email or logging into the system with the browser. This system is now ‘integrated’ with our support phone number. Outside business hours or after timing out in the queue, the caller gets the option to generate a support ticket. This works by SwyxWare sending an email to the support email address with the number of the caller. It is possible to attach a voice message, this file is attached to the ticket for playback by the support personnel.
These are the three most important services for everyday use. I have found a lot of cloud based services and my computer has a lot less software installed than just a year ago.