Posts Tagged ‘google docs for real estate’

So, we’ve committed, we’ve moved the ‘office files’ to the google cloud. The ‘office’ is now wherever we are.

Yesterday, we picked up a new laptop for the office. There was nothing to migrate, no files to move, or back-ups have to be done. We just logged into our cloud account and there it is. Where we left it.

A few years ago there was lots of talk about hot desk-ing, working in an open plan office environment, everyone brings their own laptop, and works somewhere on a large communal table. Cloud storing takes this one step further, in that the ‘your-ness’ of your laptop is no longer important.

…the ‘your-ness’ of your laptop is no longer important.

The other great thing about cloud storing is that as you set permissions for accessing it at the ‘door’, sharing your stuff becomes effortless. OK, so nothing really new there, in an office you can already network a folder, or a even a file, but whenever we did this within the Microsoft Office environment it was very clunky. We could share an individual file in the office, but only one of us could have it open at a time. The other person would close it, and then we could open it and take a look. But, although the files were always locally stored on our computers, there were many times when our computers weren’t in the same office.

With cloud files being assigned as shared with defined users, we can work on the same files simultaneously, see who’s editing what, and no one has to be remotely a). near the office, or b). on our own laptop.

In addition to the sharing through collaboration during the files creation, the cloud also makes it easier to share the final product. We’ve been working on a slide presentation for a meeting, we’ve been able to collaborate on the creation of the file, and then having delivered the presentation we can effortlessly share a link to the presentation online. With programs such as Power Point, sharing the behemoth was almost impossible due the file size limitations in email. Let google do the heavy lifting, and simply share a link to your work, not the whole thing.

Oh, and one more thing. The laptop we bought was an Apple, as our files are created in the cloud’s software, we didnt have to load any programs either…