Office finally comes to the Cloud

After conceding much ground to their competitors, especially Google with its cloud-based docs suite, Microsoft is finally coming to the party. It seems that the Office suite software will be available online later this year, which is about a thousand years in cloud development time. As is the new norm, a stripped down version will be available for free, and a fully featured priced model also offered. Whether that will be enough to staunch the bleeding of users to Open Office, Google Docs and other services such as Zoho remains to be seen.

Some Tasks with Gmail, Madam?

If you spend a lot of your working life managing emails, then a task manager that lives inside Gmail is going to sound attractive. Taskforce have come up with a very functional and minimalist task manager that is right at home within the uber email service. Users can run multiple lists for different users, link emails to tasks, add comments, deadlines and reorder tasks easily. Installation is extremely simple. Taskforce is free at the moment, but will eventually morph into one of the many excellent cloud-based services that (shock, horror) charge a little for their wares.

Museum of Me Me Me

You choose: this site embodies/showcases all that is good about social media, all that is creepy and intrusive. Intel logs in to your Facebook account, siphons up your name and all of your images and some of your friends' images as well, then displays them in a virtual museum, accompanied by soft, uplifting music. The whole exercise is technically impressive and emotionally manipulative. You are supposed to feel moved as the faces of friends and family float past and memories are triggered and massaged. In privacy terms, this site performs a useful service: reminding you how much of your personal life you have fed into a commercial service, and how much that service knows about you and your preferences. 

Google Docs, aka GDrive

In a small but significant move, Google Docs now allows users to upload folder structures as well as files. Recently they opened Docs to uploads of any kind of file. This helps Docs move a bit closer to the fabled GDrive. Still not as functional as DropBox with its efficient and seamless file synching, but an increasingly viable place to store and work with personal or business files. Google seems to be putting a lot of resources into its cloud products, so watch out for ever more fully featured iterations of Docs, Gmail and their music storage service.

Take DropBox to the Next Level

If you are a cloud power user and you have hit the 100Gb DropBox storage ceiling, then you might be looking elsewhere (such as Rackspace) for online storage/synching options. But wait — DropBox will allow you to break right through that ceiling! Unfortunately, their 350Gb Teams option seems to be oriented more towards small/medium sized businesses than individual users. At $795 per year (5 user license), $2.20 per Gb seems quite steep. Rackspace clocks in at around $1.80 per Gb per year, and their rates are calculated on the amount actually stored, not on the maximum storage amount. That said, DropBox still has the best and simplest synching and interface (and has just passed 100,000,000 users).

Online File Conversions

Sometimes a client might give you a file saved in an exotic format. You don't have the program required to open it, nor are you inclined to install it for this one instance. Now you don't have to — Zamzar allows you to upload your file and save it as something openable. In my case, I tested the service by uploading a Microsoft Publisher file and saving it as a Word Doc. Seconds later, the converted file was in my inbox. The basic service is currently free, with a paid service allowing online file storage and faster processing. The name of the service derives from the protagonist of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

Cloud Storage Systems

Thinking about storing some of your files online? Perhaps you want to access certain files while travelling, or share photographs with family or colleagues, or just have an online backup. Here's a short list of online storage providers (all of them have a free account)

• Dropbox
• Rackspace (consumer solution also branded as Jungle Disk)
• Amazon Cloud Drive
• ADrive
• SugarSync

Other options include Google's Picasa albums and their Google Docs service. Microsoft also have a fairly generous offering. The constant reduction in the price of storage (Moore's Law, anyone?) has made possible this impressive expansion in low cost online file storage.

Shortcuts / Tips for Gmail users

If you have abandoned your old, archaic email package for the cloud-based goodness that is gmail, you may benefit from learning gmail's shortcuts and efficiency enhancing options. Google has provided a page of resources for business users, but they apply equally to any user.

Offices in the Future

We've posted before about shared office spaces. Workers who traffic in information -- particularly those in the programming and design world -- sometimes use office spaces in an itinerant fashion. They occasionally need a workstation, so rent a space for a few hours, then move on. Some programmers set up shop in cafés or in a park on a sunny day. The point being that in a wireless/mobile world, location doesn't matter as much as it once did. So why have an office at all? Why even have your own computer -- or at least a desktop PC? Perhaps the future will be a world littered with access points and increasingly capable mobile devices, with all data and most apps in the cloud. You log in to your work space, access your data storage, interact with co-workers remotely and so on. For some people that world is pretty much here. The rationale for dingy office cubicles finally starts to evaporate. Once corporates sniff the potential savings, the logic may become unassailable.