Discover 2 Cloud tools that will rock your Biz!

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The Cloud…it’s everywhere!  You can’t walk down the street, check your twitter feed or shop (at Amazon) without hearing about the Cloud!  The Cloud of course is cloud based computing…basically it’s the ability to do stuff online without knowing the physical location of where all that computing magic is happening.

Cloud capabilities can include services (Google Apps is probably the most well known), data storage (I previously told you about Dropbox) and Entertainment (Netflix anyone?).  The Cloud is getting bigger every day and it’s opening up a bunch of amazing opportunities.

Check out these 2 really cool, cloud powered applications that will really rock your business productivity!

Free and Simple Online Meetings

First up is Join.me – a clear cut, simple screen sharing tool.  Here’s a description from their site:

So what is join.me exactly? It’s an impromptu online meeting space that happens wherever, whenever. It’s getting a second or third pair of eyes on your presentation from across the hall or across the continent. It’s instant screen sharing with anyone or everyone to get stuff done, quickly.

It supports up to 250 people at once, allows you to take control of a remote computer (think tech support) and doesn’t require a big download and application to stay on your desktop.  All that and it’s free and easy to use!

Even cooler – you can also use Join.me on your mobile device, letting you check out a new slide, document or whatever while you’re not at your desk!

File Sharing, backup and more

The other cool tool to check out is Egnyte.com.  Egnyte is an online file server, online storage, an FTP site (File Transfer Protocol), a file sharing tool and an online backup solution.  And it’s all in the cloud (no hardware needed) and it’s built for business!

I learned about Egnyte from a client of mine who needs to share lots of files with lots of different clients in a very secure and specific way.  A year ago, she would have needed to buy an expensive server and get it set up and maintained by a professional.  She was expecting to pay several thousand dollars to solve this problem

Instead she’s paying less than $50 /month and she gets a complete and fast backup solution as well!  It’s convenient, it’s fast, you can access all of your stuff (and all of your clients can access their stuff) from anywhere, all of your employees can be working from the most up to date document, you have built in version control and you don’t have to worry about a hardware crash losing stuff that can’t be replaced!

If you’re not sure how you’d set up Egnyte (it can be pretty tricky), you can contact my friend Mike Hill at MicroNetKC – he’s a local reseller and has helped other folks get it configured.

It’s pretty amazing what’s possible these days!

What cool cloud stuff have you seen lately?  Share your thoughts in the comments below – I’d love to hear them.

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

1 thought on “Discover 2 Cloud tools that will rock your Biz!”

  1. little guy says:

    good stuff Shawn… thanks for sharing.

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