Docusign, the cloud-based electronic signature platform that has processed more than a half billion pages of legally-binding documents, just released a free version of its eSignature solution in which people can receive five “sends” (documents sent and signed) per month, with no credit card required. DocuSign also now offers its 8 million users integration with social networks, allowing them to sign in with Facebook, LinkedIn, Paypal, and Salesforce. READ MORE
If news of Dropbox‘s latest funding round is true, the cloud storage service has achieved the same overall valuation as Twitter. According to TechCrunch, DropBox is raising between $200 million and $300 million in its latest round of funding, which would place the company’s valuation in the $5 billion to $10 billion range. READ MORE
On Sunday for four hours Dropbox accidentally dropped the need for password authentication so anyone could log into anyone else’s Dropbox account with any password and an email address. Following up on this event, LifeHacker’s Melanie Pinola tells how to add an extra layer of security to your Dropbox account. READ MORE
Now that AT&T has capped bandwidth use to 150 GB for DSL customers, home office workers might want to know, “What can be done to limit bandwidth use?” GigaOM‘s Dave Greenbaum offers good advice. READ MORE
Three things set an Internet company above the rest: photo sharing, immediate and unexpected sense of value and familiar usability features writes tech investor Alex Taussig, a principal at Highland Capital Partners. He suggests that Facebook wouldn’t be Facebook without photo sharing, which he calls “the most ego-expressive form of media,” and mentions other sites and apps cropping up that play into that, such as Instagram, Picplz, Pixable, Path, and Color. READ MORE
If you are not using Dropbox, you should be. The file backup and sharing service hit a major milestone of 25 millions users who are uploading 200 million files per day since January 2010. What’s interesting about this tech company is that it’s managed to make this milestone without a dime spent on advertising. READ MORE
I work in one town but our main office is in another town. I had to figure out how to make sure our employees can use the software we use. Here is what I do to make it all work. We manage about 3,000 clients and have three offices 45 miles from each other, along with a number of our employees who work from home one or more days a week. We don’t have server farms or a bona fide IT department. Other than a fast internet connection, a Netgear gigabit router and a Cisco switch, we use the cloud and other free tools to manage our systems because we live on a budget. I am a sales person, first and foremost. If I’m not selling, we’re not making money. I don’t have time to spend on the road outside of client meetings and sales presentations. The question has always been, how can I get software and minor hardware issues handled without having to drive an hour just to fix a very simple problem? We started off by using a Web-based management system called AMS360 (www.ams360.com). Any associate can work with a client from their office or while the agency principal is lounging by the pool in Fort Myers Beach. This has completely changed the way we do business. We got rid of the file cabinets and now have all documents, client notes, and expenses for future client contacts in one place. In the millisecond world we live in, clients believe that quotes and changes need to be handled within the minute, not the hour. Because of this access, I am able to complete tasks from the client’s office and provide them with a confirmation email before ever leaving the meeting. As a management team we can review associate interactions with clients by reviewing activities created for each client in the management system. This allows us to change our methods or identify potential problems with the sales structure before it turns into a problem. Tech support is another major issue. Over the years, I have had to deal with fixing simple issues over the phone, explaining something to an associate who doesn’t even know where to find the Windows control panel or how to set the properties on their multi-screen workstation. One of my new favorite applications for doing tech support is called LogMeIn.com. I first install the LogMeIn client on every one of our remote machines. Then I can easily make any software change without leaving the office. If the computer boots up and has Internet access, I can control it. I use the free version that allows me to see all computers, monitor computer use, and just about anything else except play sounds or transfer files. I have even used my laptop to show a presentation on a workstation connected to a projector within the same conference room. Transferring files between our offices was always a big question mark. It’s now a breeze. I found a free Web app called Dropbox. This is a form of online storage, but the idea is you can share files and folders with anyone who has a Dropbox account (such as our own employees). I simply install an app on my PC, then drag and drop files into folders within my Dropbox account for others to access. I have created folders to share with the office staff and other colleagues. Each folder is shared only with a defined group or individual. I even placed the article I am writing now in my Dropbox for later review and retrieval. It replaces having to email a file — one that was probably too large for the 5MB email limit on the mail server and also does not give my colleagues access to the original source file. Another area of irritation for us has to do with managing virus protection on remote computers. We use a product called Sunbelt Vipre (www.vipreantivirus.com). We can update virus definitions automatically or make changes to our remotely defined groups, such as sales staff, customer support workstations, laptops, and other groups I have created. It allows me to filter websites for content by keyword and monitor use without using an onsite firewall, which means less PC maintenance for me. One of the best parts of Vipre is the ability to generate custom reports about everything from individual computer use to spyware or virus threats. Our fourth area is the life blood of office communications: email. For that, we use a combination of Microsoft Outlook and Gmail.com. We do not have an Microsoft Exchange Server within our organization, so we use Gmail to control the flow of email to our smart phones. Setting up our Charter hosted email to forward a copy of every email to our individual Gmail accounts saved us thousands of dollars since we would have spent that on an Microsoft Exchange server. Basically, I send a copy to my laptop and one to my Gmail account. This syncs seamlessly with my BlackBerry Bold 9650. Outgoing email looks and feels like I am sitting at my desk when, in reality, I am probably powering through lunch and trying to catch up on the morning’s email. I manage the email with the BlackBerry’s option to delete e-mail on the mailbox and on my phone. Ok, you are probably asking: why do that? Isn’t it better to save e-mails on the server? After a few months of deleting emails accidently from the phone and the mailbox, I found that I wanted copies to remain in Outlook on my laptop so I could add them to the management system with client notes and the files that just don’t work on a phone. So I didn’t want to keep e-mails on the server; I wanted to force myself to keep them. Let’s face it: software vendors go out of their way to integrate with Outlook. It’s true that I have to delete something twice, but Outlook routes email to folders easily to save them. Time is money and I am not making money unless I am selling something. I don’t have the time to spend on the road when I can do most of my tech support from my own office. It just makes sense to utilize all the tools available to manage information and systems remotely.
Abaca Technology Corp., which launched in 2005, offers physical and virtual anti-spam appliances. The company uses Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service to host the software that works with its appliances. Without EC2, it would have been much harder — and much more expensive — to launch Abaca, according to Bill Kasje, vice president of Business Development. “As a small company, we were able to get our servers up and running quickly,” he says. “We didn’t have to invest in a big infrastructure environment, or have backup power and redundancy, all the things our customers expect from us because email is a mission-critical application.” Though Abaca does deploy in-house servers, it would need at least four more, in a cluster configuration, if it were hosting its software in-house, he says. This way, Abaca’s IT team could focus on the company’s core competency: filtering spam. For many small companies, the smorgasbord of newly available off-site or “cloud” computing offerings means they can reduce the number of servers they purchase and maintain in-house. In fact, according to James Staten, principal analyst as Forrester Research, they may no longer need servers at all. “There are now options available over the Internet that didn’t exist before,” he explains. For instance, companies used to use servers for file sharing, but there are many Internet-based options such as Microsoft Windows Live, Dropbox, and so on, that provide the same options over the Web. “Backups can be done over the Web too,” Staten adds, “and it looks almost exactly the same as when you back up to a server. A lot of people have print servers, but that’s not really necessary any more either, with today’s network-based printers, or wireless-enabled printers with built-in print servers.” In fact, Staten believes, many small companies no longer need any in-house servers at all. Better without servers Why reduce or eliminate servers? “The number one advantage is it gets you out of the IT business,” Staten says. “You don’t have to worry about high availability.” [A high availability configuration ensures continued function by connecting two or more servers in a cluster so that one can “fail over” to the other in case of a problem.] You no longer need to worry about off-site backups, emergency power supplies, or how your company would preserver its data in a widespread disaster like a hurricane, since all these protections are now provided by an off-site by a service provider, and defined in your contract. You can also get by with fewer IT staff, Kasje says. “We would have to have IT staff monitoring systems around the clock. All we have to deal with are the software issues, so that’s much easier. There is a whole class of problems we don’t have to address.” Not having servers on site means much lower upfront costs, though it also means ongoing costs to pay for a service or server space. “You’re trading capital expense for operating expense that you can adjust up or down, depending on your needs,” Staten says. And while the day-to-day costs may be similar, or perhaps lower for owned equipment amortized over several years, off-site servers can provide lower cost if you take risk into account. “There are so many more things to account for,” he says. Three off-site options For companies that want to cut their server count and turn to Web-hosted options instead, there are three different basic options to choose from: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) In this approach, an application is provided by a SaaS provider and runs on its servers. Your employees (or customers) use the Internet to log into the software. Well-known examples include Salesforce and Google Documents. Hosted servers In this approach, you contract for server space — or even an entire (real or virtual) server at your provider. In many ways, you can treat this off-site server as if it were a regular server, loading applications and data onto it as you see fit. However, the hosting provider maintains the server, usually providing backups, security protections and such. Rackspace and Hostway are two examples of this approach. Raw cloud space “Cloud” is a relatively new term that is often used to describe any Web-hosted offering. Strictly speaking, it simply refers to the architecture by which software and/or data reside in a network or “cloud” of servers connected by the Internet, rather than on a single machine. You can lease raw space in the cloud, for instance, from Amazon’s EC2 service. In this setup, you are still responsible for managing your own server space. If your provider had an outage, in the case of SaaS, the application would be up and running as before once the outage was over. In a hosted server setting, the provider would restore data on the servers, providing the configuration you had before the outage. In a cloud computing outage, once the outage was over, your IT staff would need to reconfigure and reload your online server with the applications and data that were there before. You would be responsible for ensuring backups, and also the security of your data. Because of these added tasks, Staten doesn’t recommend pure cloud computing for small companies unless they also have solid in-house IT expertise. On the other hand, he says, “If you’re really tech savvy, these are great new options to avoid ever having a server within your walls.” Whichever option you choose, Abaca’s Kasje recommends giving off-site computing a try. “You can step into this very easily,” he says. “And you should be able to figure out very quickly whether it’s something that can benefit your business.”
