Blog: June 2010

Living in the Cloud, Part I

A few years ago, I introduced the readers of this column to cloud-based computer services like Salesforce.com, Google Apps and others. These services take something that you typically do with an application on your computer – e.g. word processing with Microsoft Word – and transform it into a service that you can use with any web browser connected to the internet.

In some cases, these services are more or less equivalent to their desktop counterpart and, in many cases, they go beyond them. Salesforce.com, for instance, has grown far beyond what is available in desktop customer relationship management applications like ACT! In other cases, the cloud software is a much simpler version of its shrink-wrapped competitors. While Google Docs will handle your short documents and basic spreadsheets with ease, you probably don’t want to build your 500-page textbook with it. (more…)

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