I had to send my laptop for repair sometime back, surprisingly I did not miss it. Something unimaginable in this computer dependent world. I had not taken any backups of my work, yet all I had to do was use another computer in my office and I was back on the job without missing a beat. The reason for this was that for the last six months or so more than 95% of my work is happening on cool online applications from Google. So I am not dependent on having MY laptop (with everything stored in its hardware...)and am able to do things in ways a lot more efficiently and collaboratively than I was able to do earlier. And, all this costs me nothing. This was an amazing revelation to me and thought it worthwhile to share my experiences with you, so you could leverage on some of the best technologies, to power your business.

Google Docs: I am writing this article on google docs. (www.docs.google.com) This is a complete office suite, including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentations. Desktop equivalent would be word, excel, powerpoint. Now Google Docs, can do things that your desktop software cannot, for example, you and your colleagues can work on the same document at the same time and online. So collaboration on a document is a breeze. There is even version control to keep track of changes made. You can even assign how you want your colleagues to collaborate with you; just view the document, or make changes to it, or you could publish the document as a web page and share it with the public.

Google Docs uses folders to store work, but what is cool is that the same document can be filed in multiple folders. This makes searching for your work easy. Once my work is done I can send it to someone in multiple formats; word, pdf, open document format, and excel format for spreadsheet. So what's really interesting is since this application works online, and not on my desktop, I need not carry my laptop around with me. Whereever there is a computer with an internet connection becomes my desktop within a few moments.

Caveates:- Some formating issues are still there when saving google docs into other formats, you can import Excel sheets into Google Spreadsheets and vise versa, however if you are a power Excel user using Macros etc. there will be some problems, but for the most part, you can work with Google Docs with no worry at all and be a lot more productive. I do not have Microsoft Office on my computer. I do have Open Office, this I use in case I need a lot more power tools. You can actually open a Word document that you receive in a Gmail directly on Google Docs. Try it, Google docs is the way forward.

Gmail as your Email Client: A few years back, Outlook, that I had as my email client crashed, and I lost a lot of my work in this process. This was the first trigger to look for a solution which did not require me or my non-existent IT team on a regular basis. Gmail was the solution. Now my business email ID is This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it yet I send and receive all my mails from Gmail. Google supports POP, and sending and receiving emails using any of your email IDs, It just verifies if you are the actual owner of the email ID. So when I compose my email on Gmail I can select which email ID the mail should be sent from. My yahoo email ID, business email, or Gmail. All my mails I forward it automatically to my Gmail account, so I need to check email only in one place. Google has just launched an IMAP service for Gmail, which is going to make things even better. With IMAP you could synchronize email at different locations, like laptop, mobilephone and Gmail and all of them will have the same email. I have not yet tried this, but intend to, soon.

Another interesting feature  about Gmail, is that it uses threaded conversations, so all related email is together, it displays email from a particular contact in one place, and it uses labels (tags) to archive information. For instance you could Label, a mail Urgent, and Business. So later you can find all the labels marked urgnet, finish with the work, and remove this label, and use the label Business to later find this email. So you need not file your emails in only one directory, you could apply multiple labels.

One step better from a business perspective is Apps for domains from Google. Here you could have your business email hosted on Google. There is a free version and an enterprise version is also available. So essentially your business email is a Gmail account, plus with administration control, to create new emails, assign them to people etc. I use google apps for one of my businesses and am fairly convinced that there is no need for an email server as time goes on. Google Apps comes with a shared calendar, chat, common home page, making this really effective.

Google Notebook: This is really a very productive tool. Google Notebook, sits neatly on the right hand bottom of your browser. As you see something interesting you could clip it into your notebook, or write notes. Now what's is neat is that you can share notebooks with others. We use Google Notebook to plan and work on our Businessgyan Issues. So the notebook has space for say the next 6 cover themes. And as and when we get ideas we just keep jotting these down in the notebook, the notebook is shared by the content team so everyone can keep adding to it as and when they get ideas.

Caveat for all the above is that you do need a good internet connection. A typical DSL connection will do.

What Google is doing is shifting your computing from the desktop to the internet. Making collaboration easy and your work instantly portable.

The author is the Chief Catalyst of businessgyan. His area of interest include business strategy and innovation. For feedback and more information, e-mail: www.businessgyan.com/balaji.

Issue BG80 Nov07

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