Resources

Services and Providers

These are a selection of the services and providers we often recommend to our clients. Baffling isn't it? Don't worry, we'll help you make business sense of it!

  • Google Docs - share documents, spreadsheets etc in realtime, very powerful software, free or £33/year for premium version
  • Feng Office - so good we've signed a partnership agreement with them! Started out as an open source version Google Doc, and while not as complete as Google on the document side, it is fantastically powerful for collaboration on documents and integration with contacts and email - can also be used as a CRM and project management system.
  • Zoho Office - very, very comprehensive integrated office suite with CRM andother common business applications, it is however expensive as you have to pay for each module you use
  • Microsoft Office 365 - Microsoft's answer to Google Docs, also very comprehensive and similarly priced
  • Funambol - Open source push email and contact sync solution
  • Upvise - a comprehensive suite of applications for the web and mobile devices with offline access on practically all smartphones (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Nokia). It can also be used as a framework for implementing custom applications, which is very appealing for businesses with that need. Main drawback is a lack of integration of contacts with other services such as email
  • Toodledo - very powerful and excellent value (from free to US$25/user/year) to do list application, which can also be used as a notebook and project management/collaboration tool. Good offline access for iPhone and Android. Nuvola are big fans of this.
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) - Simple data storage buckets (S3) or complete servers which can be switched on and off, and scaled, 'elastically'. The latter is fantastic if you manage your own servers, although for the less technically inclined who need a webserver (for example), we recommend our hosting partner, Dudobi.
  • Dropbox - a cloud file storage solution that lets you keep files on multiple computers in sync, access your files in a web browser or from a mobile and share them with others. 
  • Ubuntu One - a similar service to Dropbox, from the people behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system (although it also works on Windows and Mac). Consumer-oriented as it includes a music store, but also good for business.
  • Accounts Portal - A web-based accounts system which people who hate accounts software enjoy using! Does not synchronise with other data sources though, but it does let you take invoice payments by Paypal/Google Checkout
  • Xero - a competitor to Accounts Portal, we have not used this but it has been recommended several times
  • Salesforce.com - the grandaddy of web-based software, has a multitude of add-ons available but can prove expensive
  • SugarCRM - a competitor to Salesforce, SugarCRM provides a free and open source 'community edition' with limited functionality, but we'd probably recommend using their online version as it has more features unless you have some spare space on a webserver and the knowledge to set it up yourselves.
  • Tomboy Notes - a rather nice and little known open source desktop note-taking application that automatically links your notes together by title, originally by/for Linux geeks but now has very easy to use Windows and Mac versions that can sync your notes between computers via a web server (we can provide this) or Ubuntu One. Mobile support is rather lacking however and is limited to a read only Android app.

Articles

Some articles of interest

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