Work From Anywhere, Including Your Office

We've all heard a little too much about "the cloud" in recent years. But here's why the cloud is revolutionizing the way we work and increasing productivity at offices across the world.

Making the move

Although early adopters of the cloud, and frequently consulting with our clients to help them better leverage cloud technologies, last year we transitioned our legacy document library from the server in our office (on-premise) to Google Drive (the cloud), and we've never looked back. The server, lovingly named Lucille, was old and slow and would periodically corrupt perfectly good files for no good reason. When looking into an upgrade solution, Google products stuck out for a few reasons:

• We were already using other Google Business solutions, such as Gmail and Google Calendar.
• Google is continually innovating and releasing new versions and products.
• Docs, Sheets and Slides fully replace Microsoft Office for most of the team, saving money on software.
• Google's suite of programs offer fantastic collaboration tools to make working together easy, even at a distance.
• Google Drive can store Google files and all sorts of other file types. And, it now has easy-to-use version control.

Moving to the cloud quickly became the obvious choice. We all have laptops so we can work where we need to – our desks, a coffee shop, a client's office, a co-worker's desk, a meeting room, Florida or even London – so why wasn't our document storage just as flexible?

Collaboration at a distance

Thus far, the biggest benefit of transitioning our documents to Google Drive is the ability to collaborate with each other. Documents can easily be shared internally, allowing several team members to contribute to a project document at one time, each providing their unique input without overwriting each other. This is helpful on everything from research documents to meeting notes. And Google Drive collaboration works seamlessly whether we're sitting next to each other or sitting across the world.

In fact, Google's collaboration tools are so great, I had a Hangout call with several Integrity and client team members. I was here in St. Louis at our offices, and everyone else was scattered across the world - Pittsburgh, Paris and Tokyo to be specific. The most difficult aspect of the call was deciding whether the greeting should be "Good Morning" or "Good Night".

Work from anywhere

The portability of my work life is a huge perk. I'm writing this blog from my favorite coffee shop while I drink a latte. Moving our resources, documentation and deliverables into the cloud wasn't what made this possible, but it certainly made it easier! On Google Drive, and other cloud storage solutions, documents are readily available on a variety of devices at any time of day.

Storage for everything

I've yet to find a document that can't be stored in Google Drive. It gladly accepts Word Docs, Photoshop Files, Images and even HTML files. If you're using Google's programs, including Docs, Sheets and Slides, you can create, update and edit documents directly in Drive. You can then download your files as PDFs, Microsoft Office formatted files and more.

Ultimately, the flexibility of cloud storage provides companies with time and money savings. If your team is looking for a more flexible solution to document storage, check out options in the cloud.