Google Mail 101 for Outlook Users

GMail — the catchy name for Google’s Web Mail — is designed to be easy to use, and highly functional. If you use Microsoft’s Outlook, you should take a look at GMail. GMail has many strengths, including tight integration with Google Calendar, simple synchronization across all your devices, it’s accessible from anywhere, you get great collaboration features and tools, and lots more… Here’s a quick run-through to give you a taste for GMail.

Google Calendars 101

Imagine being able to get to your calendar using any web browser on the planet — even using your smart phone! There’s a big advantage right there, with lots of leverage! So… what’s the user interface for Google Calendar like? This video intro shows you how easy it all is, in two short minutes. And this doesn’t even touch upon using calendars to collaborate with other folks in your team, that’s another big win!

Better collaboration

When you have a document you’re working on, and you want some input from other interested folks, cloud computing can save your bacon! If you’re wondering how you can better collaborate with your family, with your coworkers, with your clientele, with your vendors — take a look at this example and see how cloud computing makes many things possible and most things easier.

Four ways to protect your stuff using Cloud Tactics

You have many options for protecting your documents from corruption, including spare hard drives, burning DVDs for storage in your safety deposit box, redundant computer systems, and more. Storage is cheap these days, so why not handle your own backups?

Imagine having to allocate the resources to manage a team of professionals who do nothing but implement and track backups, clones, file-copies, encryption, security, and more, all day long, wrestling with hardware and infrastructure issues that would make your teeth curl. Yikes!

Here’s the good news: those professionals are already out there in the cloud, and they’ve already got the infrastructure and support staff in place, to boot. The best part is they’re offering their services to you for free or cheap, and only a couple of clicks away. All you have to do is leverage their expertise.

Here are four big players offering cloud tactics that can help you back up your stuff with minimal or no investment on your part.

Who Benefits from the Cloud?

Large organizations often have the resources to handle their own server farm with its own climate control, hardware configurations and networking issues. For the rest of us who work in small teams — family teams, business teams, religious teams, friends — there are Cloud services: that’s where professionals handle all the infrastructure nightmares, and you can piggyback on their expertise, letting them handle the headaches. There’s a good chance folks just like you — neighbors, allies, competitors — are already taking advantage of Cloud services. If you’re wondering how your competitors and allies are benefitting from the Cloud, here are some examples.