Computing in the clouds?

The past few years at work we had been dabbling in cloud computing to help our team collaborate and brainstorm faster. This past year we undertook an enormous project of replacing six different versions of an application that was built on 40 year-old code and replaced them with one brand new application.

The interesting thing about this project was that we had to maintain a constant stream of communication with our "customers"(internal customers) and our vendors who operate in an entirely different state. We decided to utilize GoogleDocs as our leading tool to house our project issues lists. You see, our customers would test the application along side of the old application and report any issues on the GoogleDocs spreadsheet. We would then review the issues along with our vendors from Tulsa and make notes and comments in real-time.

Stuff like this is what I believe the future is going to look like for business. Taking a deeper look at what our team used Cloud Computing for: We had the ability to have multiple users updating the same spreadsheet at the same exact time. Yeah, thats right....no more "this document is read only" or "this document is already in use". We were able to have chat sessions via the chat bar that GoogleDocs provides. The coolest thing that some of the higher-ups liked was the option to view any changes that anyone made and revert back to another version of the document. These online documents can be exported into your favorite Excel, Word, etc format to be used offline if need be.

GoogleDocs isnt the only company doing this. ZoHo is another sweet company that offers a ton of Cloud Computing tools. Just think of the possibilities that your team would have if you utilized a cloud service. The best thing about these cloud services is that most of them are free!

Check out a video that Scoble posted interviewing Dave Nielson(co-founder of CloudCamp):

http://scobleizer.com/2009/06/29/teaching-unconferences-to-newbies-cloud-camp-style/

Thanks for stopping by!