Everybody likes free, right? Well, we as business people and owners are no different, especially in this time of belt tightening and efforts to accomplish more with fewer resources.
While we don’t typically think of Microsoft and ‘free’ in the same sentence, due to competitive pressures from the folks at Google and the open source software movement, the Windows giant has been forced to make changes in an effort to remain relevant in the dawning cloud-computing world.
Following is an overview of two Microsoft products that on their own are rather revolutionary, but combined should result in some powerful results for those who are ready to think outside their daily box.
The first item on deck is Microsoft Mesh. I won’t get into a lot of detail here since I have already written a post at InsideSmallBizCRM blog – check it out if you are interested – but I will say: Mesh is a cloud service from Microsoft that allows you to share files across the web. You simply create folders in your mesh, and specify the rules for sharing. A copy is created on your local machine and another on your Mesh desktop in the cloud. Depending upon your rules, new files or changes to existing files will automatically replicate through your mesh to other members. If a machine is offline at the time you update Mesh files, when it is next connected, it will be updated. You do nothing further.
The benefits? 1) Universal access to your critical files. 2) Version consistency since changes automatically replicate through the mesh. 3) Should you be without your personal machine or should it fail, your mesh desktop will have a copy. 4) Access via various web enabled phones is on the way.
Mesh is free and allows up to 5gb of file storage. (To make it even more interesting, Mesh allows you to remotely access your Windows based Mesh PCs – so even if something you need isn’t in a Mesh folder, you can get to it. Sweet!)
The next Microsoft tool that I want to talk about is not really free, but it does come bundled with several versions of Office, so there’s a good chance you own it already. My guess is this is one of the most under-utilized components of Microsoft Office: I am referring to OneNote.
Do you often find that you are juggling Adobe Acrobat, Word, and PowerPoint files, web pages, emails, online slide shows, even video, while researching for work? You need all of these disparate yet important information sources in one place, but there is no simple way to do so. Sure, your contact manager or CRM is great for people interactions, but it gets unwieldy when you start throwing browser bookmarks and various document formats into the mix.
If this sounds at all familiar, you owe it to yourself to discover OneNote. Beyond offering a central location to store and manage your important business intelligence no matter the format, it provides flexible organization of that data along with support for tagging and full text indexing for easy recall later. OneNote lets you share your ‘notebooks’ with other team members so they too can access and add to a project repository.
The basics of OneNote are quick to master, yet the possibilities are limited only by your imagination. If you already have OneNote installed on your PC, take 10 minutes to learn the fundamentals. You’ll earn that time back within two hours of using it.
So, take ubiquitous data access, team sharing, remote control, add a universal data repository, and you have the makings of a potent collaboration solution. All for (almost) free! Enjoy.
