Huddle's Blog

On Cloud 9… 9 Cloud apps we wouldn’t be without

Posted on 03. Dec, 2010 by Alastair in Huddle, Tips

Recent studies indicate that by 2020 around 80 percent of the UK workforce will work flexibly – i.e. will be working more flexible hours and / or will spend some time either working from home or otherwise outside of the conventional office environment. As employers embrace more flexible working practices, enabling employees to work effectively outside of the traditional office environment will doubtlessly become increasingly important.

We think that cloud applications are frankly awesome in that regard. Martini coined the slogan ‘any time, any place, any where’ way back in the 1970s and that’s what cloud applications are really all about.

We’re really not sure what we’d do now without the ability to work on whatever we want, wherever we might be – access documents, schedule meetings, collaborate on projects, assign tasks, see how projects are progressing etc. As such we wanted to share our top 9 cloud applications:

1. Salesforce

CRM is more than a buzz word. Salesforce allows you to manage your sales process more effectively and record all details of customer contact. As such, you can quickly and easily see where you are in terms of closing that deal.

 2. Rapportive

If you use Gmail, Rapportive is a must have plug-in. Whenever you open an email from someone, a Rapportive window appears to the right of your screen. The Rapportive window contains details of your contact’s latest twitter activity, links to all of their social media profiles and you can add your own notes on each of your contacts.

Plus you can also use a range of apps inside Rapportive. For example, if you run your email campaigns via MailChimp, you can see which campaigns your contact has received and which they have opened and/or clicked through to.

3. Google Calendar

An awesome freebie from Google; this calendar allows you to easily schedule team meetings, plus you can create reminders and even access an offline version.

4. Toggl

If you bill by the hour, or just need to keep track of how many man hours are being spent, Toggl is a great way of recording time spent on particular projects and tasks. There are free and paid versions available.

5. Spotify

Ok, so this is a music app – but just like some people need music to workout to, we need music to work to.

Spotify allows you to access a huge library of music (over 10 million tracks) from your computer or phone. No need to ever buy or download music again. Plus you can share music, and collaborate on playlists.

6. Remember the Milk

That dreaded to do list needs some serious organising. Remember the milk allows you to access your to do list from anywhere, prioritise tasks, share tasks, set reminders… You can also quickly and easily see which tasks are due and when. Oh and it’s free.

7. Evernote

Many people describe Evernote as their second brain. Essentially, it enables you to quickly and easily capture ‘stuff’ – be that a web page, a picture, a business card – plus it organises it and makes it searchable automatically. Great for both business and personal use. Slightly scared of their future plans to install chips in peoples’ brains, mind!

8. Dropbox

Dropbox offers a place to store you files and access them anywhere. Simply download Dropbox, put your files in your Dropbox folder on one computer and they’ll automatically appear on any of your other computers that have Dropbox installed. Plus, you can save files of any type to your Dropbox and they’ll automatically sync from one platform to the next – e.g. so if you’ve a Mac and a PC the product can move between operating systems.

It also offers an awesome safety net in that all of your files are also accessible via the Dropbox website. Plus, they keep a change history so if you’ve accidentally deleted a file, you can undelete it.

9.  Huddle

Well, we couldn’t leave ourselves off of the list!

So, which cloud applications would you struggle without? Do let us know via the comments.

Tags: cloud, collaboration software, flexible working, online file storage, online project management, remote working, Tips