Move to the Cloud with a little help from Google, Box, Zoho & Flickr
I just discovered google mail/Gmail (google email for apps to be specific). I only started looking because my old hosting provider was bouncing my mails and was not helpful in fixing the problem so I figured there are plenty of providers and I would just vote with my feet. In looking for a new provider I noticed google apps email (which lets you send mail from your own domain). You cant send from your own domain with regular google mail which is a shame (yes you are allowed to "fake" the from address but when you do this the receiver sees "xxxx@googlemail.com on behalf of ......." which I think looks naf) So I set up everything on google and had outlook connecting via IMAP and all was good. After a very short while I ditched outlook and just used the google mail web site wich is well designed, easy to use and above all very responsive. I still use IMAP on my phone because with such a small screen its easier to use the built in mail client than the google mail web site. A 7GB limit on my mail is extreemly generous but I hope never to get anywhere near that. And all that for FREE.Having been converted to google mail I had a look at some of the other stuff they offered and was impressed.
Google Calendar
The perfect compliment to google mail, google calendar can even send invites to outlook users which turns up in thier outlook calendar and vice versa, well impressed!
Google Docs
Fantastic, all my docs stored on google so I can get to them from anywhere and on any platform. Not quite as good as it sounds, you can only "upload" aka "convert" a few document types (.doc, .xls, .ppt, .pdf + open office equivalents) and they are of limited size, still, should be sufficient for most stuff. Its a fairly basic word processor/spreadsheet compared to MS office but let face it most of us dont use a fraction of the power of those apps anyway (especialy when your talking about "personal" documents). I would think much better of this if they gave you eg 1or 2GB and allowed you to upload anything you liked (even if you could only edit the .doc and .xls stuff), remember they give you 7GB of mail so this does not seem an unreasonable request.
Google Apps Vs Google Accounts
Unfortunately you cannot send from your own domain with a google account, only with a google "apps" account (dont see why they cant fix that). It is further unfortunate that google "apps" accounts have a very limited number of "apps" to use (mail, cal, start page, sites, docs) so if you want access to stuff like notebook, bookmarks or any of the other non "apps" stuff you have to have a normal google account aswell which seems a bit of a pain and I cannot see why they would want to limit the usefulness of an "apps" account.
Storage
So I got my "docs" up on google but what about all the other "files" that you cant quite (and more importantly google don't) call "docs"? There are plenty of free file storeage services arround, go pick one based on your needs, web based access/editing would probably be top of the list. but getting all your files on line gives you a great advantage of being able to access everything from anywhere.
Box.net do free accounts and you can access your files via a browser (and even edit a few types) thanks to Zoho.
Photo & Video
Google have Picassa web albums and give you 1GB of photo storage for free. If you need more space you can buy it. I dont think they currently support video.
Flickr, I would probably call the no1 (and defacto) online photo site offers free (but in my opinion very limited, 200 pics or something) accounts, however, for an EXTREEMLY REASONABLE $25 (aprox £12 - £15) per year you get UNLIMITED photo storage. they also support video of upto 150MB and 90sec in length.
Music
So far I have not found any place to put all my music files for free. Humyo (which is also resold under various other brands) give you 25G of "Multimedia" storage and 5GB for "other" files all for free but even this generous allowance is way to small for my music so for the time being at least my music remains offline. Not that big a deal as I have 4GB on my phone to carry arround my current faves.
Instant Messageing
I use Microsoft Messenger but whichever variation you use the same thing aplies. Normaly you sign in and send/receive messages via some kind of app installed localy on your machine (there are even some apps which let you sign into multiple networks at the same time). This means your tied to the PC this stuff is installed on. There are several places that let you sign in to these networks from a web site, meebo.com being one I found recently. So, thats another application moved off to the net meaning I can access it from anywhere.
Conclusion
So with all this, I only had to fork out money on flickr and I have moved my entire day to day computing requirements onto the net/into the cloud. I can do all my email, use IM, access and edit my docs and access and share all my photos all from any web browser running on any platform. Whilst I still need my main PC at home to edit my photos/videos etc before uploading them the vast bulk of stuff I want to do I can do from anywhere. Result.
I've long thought that all this sort of stuff sounded like a good idea but I just needed a reason to do it, I was not overly troubled by being tethered to my home desktop pc. It was my wife complaining she was not able go go up to the second floor of the house (where my home PC lives) to use the PC and still keep track of what the kids are doing on the ground floor that gave me the push. I had an old laptop which I thought I would give to her but thats a machine I use for random test builds and experiments etc etc so it wasn't necesarily going to be the same each time she used it and I did not want to put her data on it because I would have to move the data each time I messed arround with it. I could have let her use remote desktop to the machine upstairs but that would mean it would have to have windows on it (which normaly it would but no garantee) and she would have to go up and turn the thing on. Its then that I thought it would be great if I could get everything she wanted to use into a browser, that way she could use any PC or OS as long as it had a browser and a network connection.
Going through the pain of uploading/converting word docs to google docs is not to bad if you have fairly simple docs and the results are not bad, a few tweaks here and there are reuqired. I was so impressed with this new way of working I moved all my own stuff to, the only problem I had was that my files were not all googleisable (is that a word?) so I needed some other place for those visio diagrams, zip files etc, enter box.net (I might move all my google docs over there as well at some point to avoid the situation of having some files at google and some at box. Documents at box are editable in the same way as they are on google via zoho).
Remember!!
Moving to the cloud is all well and good but do you realy trust these guys 100% and in fact CAN you ever trust anyone 100%. Stuff can happen that they cannot predict (or for business reasons let on about even if they do know its comming). The past few weeks have seen very major companies collapsing and the US gov bailing some of them out to the tune of nearly 2 trillion USD. Even the big boys can go out of business overnight! Where am I going with this?? If you didn't figure it yet, BACKUP !!!!!. Yes these boys have Raid, High availability, Disaster Recovery and a bunch of other stuff, things can and do go wrong and in the scheme of things your particular data does not matter to them. It probably does to you though.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
posted by Ben at
15:46
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