At OfficeDrop, we’ve noticed more and more visitors coming to our site who’ve searched for the word “cloud.” But since the cloud has so many meanings to so many people, we’d thought we’d explain how we see small businesses taking advantage of the power of cloud computing to get more out of their paper and digital documents. Our understanding of how businesses use the cloud is rapidly evolving as we grow!

Connecting Cloud Services

Connecting Cloud Services

More and more, we are seeing the benefits of the cloud in terms of connecting data to other services. Paper no longer has to be stuck in a silo’ed document management service, but can instead be accessed and shared with other software via a cloud filing cabinet. Data can be pushed from one place into another to take advantage of unique technologies – like Evernote’s amazing mobile clients or FreshBooks’ unique invoicing software. (OfficeDrop has recently released an API to allow other software developers to build off of our document scanning service and digital filing system/digital office.) Cloud content management makes this all possible.

Why Cloud Computing Is Great for Small Businesses

Cloud computing is great for small businesses for a number of reasons. As we mentioned in our blog post, “An Introduction to Cloud Computing for Small Business Owners:”

“Cloud computing is a platform for accessing and utilizing your businesses IT via the internet. This means nearly all of your IT resources – your servers, data storage, software/ programs – are hosted on the internet. It used to be that all of your computing would have to be done by your own servers, hardwired to your business. Now that the internet is around, your servers don’t have to be hardwired, and you don’t even need to have your own. Instead, you can rent server space from anywhere in the country from people like Amazon, who have already paid the overhead. Utilizing this system with SaaS, which does the same thing with software, one could theoretically run an entire business from various cyber cafés (if those still exist) without purchasing any of their own personal hardware or software at all.”

We Are Still Learning About the Cloud – From Our Customers!

OfficeDrop continues to learn more and more about how small business owners want to interact with the cloud (and their data!) When we first founded the company 3 years ago (wow, that’s a long time) we thought that web browsers would be the favorite way for users to access their data. But we were wrong. With the success of our downloadable apps, we’ve noticed something pretty amazing: Business owners like to use applications to visit the cloud, not browsers.

Beyond the Cloud Filing Cabinet and OfficeDrop’s Cloud App Strategy

As our cloud scanning software app, ScanDrop, continues to take off and since our iPad “paper to go” app was in the top 10 business ipad applications in itunes, we’ve realized that apps are a great way to interact with the cloud.

OfficeDrop Free App Downloads

And by “realized” we mean that our customers made it clear that they like apps!

Our CEO, Prasad, has been busy training some of our web developers in desktop programming, and our CTO, Vik, has dusted off his Objective-C skills for our Mac versions.

We will have a new way to interact with our cloud digital filing service from the desktop soon for Windows users. And Mac users will soon be able to scan to the cloud just like their PC friends.

We are also busy working on creating workflow specific desktop/cloud solutions for paper intensive industries, starting with accountants and bookkeepers. We just did the first demonstration of our new bookkeeping software, which was very well received, and hope to enroll beta users toward the end of the month. This software will connect the popular QuickBooks software with paper in a number of powerful ways: from the scanner, desktop and cloud. Let us know if you are interested in trying this service!

We are having a ton of fun here at OfficeDrop, helping business owners harness the power of cloud computing. Of course, we haven’t forgotten the importance of actually speaking with customers. Give us a call at 888-674-6493 if you ever want to chat about getting your paper and filing cabinets into the cloud!