Ok, it is easier for the first day at least.  I’ll let you know when I hit day 30 or 60… I wil say that there is nothing better to help you succeed at something than forcing yourself to do it…

Today I ran exclusively on Zoho applications (except for my corporate email).  I know that this is not really new, but in a way I feel that it was.  In the past I always had Microsoft Office 2007 installed on my tablet pc.  It was an easy fall back, really easy.  Let me explain.  Three times today, I needed to open an existing document, spreadsheet, and presentation… in the past, I would unconsciously just double-click the file I needed and poof, the associated application would open.  However, without having Office installed, I needed to think twice, and react in a new way. 

First thing this morning, I needed to revise the quantity of a parts order.  I had the data in a Excel spreadsheet.  Oops… No Excel on this tablet anymore… for a second I actually had to pause to think of what I needed to do about this.  Then, I opened Zoho Sheet, and simply clicked the "import button" and browsed right to my file.  It kind of felt like opening Excel, and then clicking "file open." In about 15 seconds poof the file opened, and I was able to update the quantities, with all of the formulas importing correctly and recaltulating the totals instantly.  Pretty cool.  As a side benefit, I now had/have that particular spreadsheet available via my iPhone.  This came in handy later in the day when a collegue of mind needed information from that same sheet.  I was able to bring it up when we were away from our PC’s…

My second, opportunity to interact with Zoho in a completely "Office-like" situation was when I needed to fill out a point of contact document for a video conference call I have with Pearl Harbor this Friday.  I saved the attachment from email, and then "imported" it into Zoho Writer.  After providing a bit of information, I was ready to send the file back to my contacts at Pearl. This time, instead of going through the "normal" process of saving a document and then "attaching" it to an email, I simply clicked "Share" and "Email Out" in Zoho Writer.  I entered a few email addresses, and off the edited document went as the body of the email right from my zoho mail account.  Nice.

Finally, later in the day, I reviewed an old PowerPoint presentation for some information that I need for a presentation I will be doing for my Board of Education.  This time there was no uncomfortableness in what I needed to do.  I launched Zoho Show from the desktop links I created earlier in the day, and imported my presentation, in about a minute, I was moving through the information with ease… All in all it was a really easy day living in the cloud.

The air is nice up here, anyone want to join me?

Well it is a new day, and we have “Sprung Forward” (Day Light Savings Time, US) so I am continuing my adventures in the cloud… I almost feel like I am renewing a new year’s resolution.  Interesting feeling…

Im my press forward to continue my adventures, I recently needed to do a clean install of my OS as, even against Microsoft’s own recommendation, I upgraded my Tablet’s Vista Ultimate install to Windows 7.  While the Upgrade went very smoothly, I had a some software that just did not want to play well in the Win7 environment… Also, it just reinforced why I never recommend a upgrading an OS, ALWAYS do a clean install!  Interestingly, one of Microsoft’s own packages (Live One Care – AV-Firewall-Anti-Spam) in not compatible with Win7 and it let me know that all the time.

So last week, I migrated all of my data to my 16GB Corsair USB Drive, and performed a clean install of Windows 7.  Ok, well I actually did the install twice. The first time, I upgraded to the 32bit version and it only took about 15 minutes total (now that was pretty cool).  However, I have a 64bit Intel Core2Duo processor, and I wanted to try out a 64bit OS, so I went through the OS install again with the Windows 7 64bit installer this time.  It took about 25 minutes for the 64bit install (again not to shabby).

Now, up into the “Clouds.”  I am really working hard NOT to install Microsoft Office 2007 at this point.  As I know that this will force me to truely use an online office suite.  My choice (not any big guess for this choice for those of you who know me) for an online office suite is Zoho.com.  While there are a number of reasons or this choice, Number 174 is blogging right from Zoho Writer, and Zoho’s use of Google Gears for “offline” editing and document creation, and Number 190 Zoho’s support for the iPhone which gives me access to almost ALL of Zoho’s application suite right on my iPhone! That said, to simplify my life a bit, I am using Outlook 2007 because it is allowing me to leverage Apple’s Mobile Me application to join my corporate email / calendar to my iPhone. I tried hard to use Zoho’s business suite (with mail and calender), but I found that I need my phone to “ping” me when I have an upcoming appointment… if it doesn’t, I sometimes don’t get where I need to be :0( I have put the word out to Zoho that I would really appreciate it if they could develop a true iPhone application that would sync with the iPhone mail / calendar / contacts… for now, I check my Zoho Business account regularly, but not enought to keep me from missing meetings.

Tomorrow will be a real test for me I think.   am going to be converting my current inventory database into Zoho DB and Creator so that I can begin running reports against the data to start planning for my technology bid and summer moves and technology repurposing. With the clean install of Windows 7 and Zoho Business Suite, so far I can say, the air is fine up here “in the cloud” want to come up and join me?

Photo Attribution: People, Clouds, and Triumph by cuellar

Microsoft announces that Office will be “taken to the web” in the next release of the Office Suite.  Make no mistake, there will always be an office “rich-client” for the desktop, however, there will also be a thin web-based client that will be browser independent as well.  Check this out though… as you watch the video, Microsoft has FINALLY brought real collaboration into the Office Suite.  A shared document, spreadsheet, PowerPoint, or OneNote Notebook will be able to be worked on simultaneously by multiple users, AND it will be able to have realt-ime updates and messaging for collaboration.  Pretty cool.  Now does this impact GDocs, Zoho, and the other cloud suites?  I’d say yes, but we will have to see over time how the service holds up. If you’d ask me to predict: pretty well.