Cloud Based Services With Free Trial Offers

Many businesses are looking to the clouds as an opportunity to save capital investment and ongoing operating and maintenance costs. This is a hot field, with vendors scrambling to get in and establish themselves in the space. But how do you know what services are right for your needs?

It’s especially important for small businesses with limited resources to be sure they are getting the most for their IT and telephone dollars. One way to be sure is to try before you buy. With that in mind, we’ve complied a selection of cloud based services that offer a free trial period before you make a commitment.

Atlantic.Net offers a free trial of cloud hosting as an alternative to virtual private servers. Their platform is designed to let you build, test and deploy Windows or Linux servers in the cloud in a matter of seconds. You can run whatever software you need and pay by the hour for only the resources that you use. Atlantic.Net is committed to 100% uptime on their SAS 70 certified hosting solution.

BrowserMob offers a free trial of website load testing in the cloud. It’s important to know what your ecommerce or other web properties can handle before you miss an important sales opportunity because your site crashed from too much traffic. Run concurrent tests with real browsers, not simply HTTP requests. This service scales up to 5,000 concurrent browsers and 500,000 users with over 6,000 Mbps maximum data throughput to to handle the largest sites. Responsive expert testing advice helps you get results quickly.

Do spend a lot of time and money sending documents out for signature? RightSignature offers a 5 document free trial of their cloud-based document signature service. Rather than faxing or overnight mailing paper documents and waiting for them to be signed and returned, signers go online and create legally valid electronic signatures. You simply create your documents using standard office tools and then upload them to RightSignature. Then send out an email message with a link to your online document. The system creates a document signature certificate with signer information, audit long and unique ID number. Archiving is online, too, so you never have to hunt for a document again.

The rest of your paper documents also belong in the cloud. Shoeboxed offers a free trial of their document scanning and storage service in the cloud. This is perfect for anyone in business who deals with expense report receipts, business cards and other day to day documents that pile up on the desk. You can scan and file it yourself or Shoeboxed will do it for a very reasonable price. You just drop your papers in a secure mailer and soon they’ll show up on a secure online database. More than mere scanning, the actual information on the page is loaded into the database where you can export it to Excel, Salesforce, Outlook or other program of your choice.

Customer service is important for any company. Assistly offer a free trial of their customer service cloud solution. You get a month to see if it isn’t far better than your current methods of finding and responding to customer queries. This system includes social networks like Facebook and Twitter, as well as traditional email and toll free number contacts. As an integrated solution, everything you need is right there at the operator’s station in one easy to use tool.

Other services, from online meetings to toll free telephone, also offer free trial periods. Watch for free trial opportunities any time you shop online for business services. These are a great way to become confident that you are getting the right service at the right price.

As Travel Becomes Costlier, Online Meetings Look Better

In these economically challenged times, the cost of travel hasn’t improved one bit. In fact, it’s just getting more expensive and often less convenient to travel across the country for team coordination, client presentations and other face to face activities. Some of this is critical to the business, but is all of it? Couldn’t you do a better job if you could collaborate more often without the time and expense of business travel?

Many companies have found online meetings to be both a money saver and productivity improver. It works especially well if you can just call a meeting anytime you feel the need to get together, without having to worry about the cost involved. You can do that with GoToMeeting. You pay one low monthly fee. You have as many meetings as you like, anytime you like. No need to coordinate with a service provider. This is a service that makes calling meetings about as simple as sending out emails.

How easy is GoToMeeting? You can set up instant meetings with a single click. You also have the option to have one-time scheduled meetings or recurring meetings. It’s just like setting up a weekly review in the conference room except that the participants can be anywhere, even traveling. Those participants can join your meeting from a Mac, PC, iPad or iPhone. The cost to them is nothing. Even the apps for their devices are free.

All someone has to do to participate is click on the meeting link you provide them via email, instant message, or even over the phone. You’ll need to give them a meeting ID verbally if you invite them by phone. Each attendee chooses whether to pick up the audio portion of the meeting by phone or by using the microphone and speakers built into their computer. Use your own toll free service or purchase integrated audio conferencing from Citrix Online Audio.

What can you do in your online meeting? It’s both an audio and visual experience. The audio conferencing allows everyone to talk and listen. While you are presenting, you can mute the participant's mics to prevent background noise. You can also record your meeting sessions for future review and reuse.

The visual portion uses your computer screen. You can chose to share your entire desktop or a specific application. There are drawing tools, multiple monitor support and the ability to transfer keyboard and mouse control and instantly change presenters. You can have a chat feature enabled for discussion while someone is presenting.

After the meeting is over, you can post it to a website or third-party video host to share with others. Review the attendance report and schedule future meetings.

The basic GoToMeeting service lets you hold as many meetings as you want with up to 15 attendees each. Need more than that? Consider GoToWebinar that also includes GoToMeeting and supports from 100 to 1,000 users, depending on the plan you buy.

Are you intrigued by GoToMeeting as a way to have more meetings for less cost, but not sure if it will do everything you have in mind? No problem. Try GoToMeeting FREE for 30 days before you buy. Chances are, you’ll consider this the best business deal you get all year.

Going Green Office Tips

Happy Earth Day!

While we celebrate the environment today, any day is a good day to reduce waste and improve energy efficiency. It's not just the right thing to do, it's good for business. Let's start by finding some simple changes to make. We'll check the results and move on from there.

My own small office was almost insufferably hot during the summer and quite toasty even in Northern Illinois winters. Checking around, I could feel that a couple of computers, monitor, TV set, printers and overhead & desk lights were pumping out the BTUs like little space heaters.

The first change was to replace the 4 incandescent mini-flood lights overhead with equivalent CFLs or Compact Fluorescent Lights. These have come a long way in a few years. They only cost a few dollars now, are available in a wide variety of styles at the big box hardware stores, come in light temperatures that mimic incandescent, use dramatically less power, and are barely warm to the touch. The 4 dimmable Neptun R20 reflector bulbs I'm currently using consume 16 watts each versus 50 watts each for incandescent. That's 64 watts total versus 200 at full brightness. It's also 24 watts in heat versus 160 watts lost as heat per specs on the package. That change alone makes a huge difference in the heat you feel beating down on your head from above.

The two desk lamps are OTT-LITE fluorescents with full spectrum bulbs that make reading documents and working on the computer easy. As with the overhead reflectors, you can barely feel any heat when you put your hand near the bulb. You can feel incandescents, and worse yet halogens, from feet away.

Another change I made was to replace my tube TV with a similar size flat screen model. I could feel heat pouring out of the bookcase that held the old TV. Not any more.

My new color laser printer, a Brother HL-4070CDW, has an Energy Star sticker. That means it complies with energy standards for that type of equipment. Mostly, it sits quietly and uses little energy on standby. I intend to buy Energy Star rated equipment from now on. More and more manufacturers are complying, so it's getting easier to find. Computers and monitors are big users of power. I switched from a 17" tube monitor that was a noticeable heat generator to a 19" ViewSonic flat screen that is barely warm to the touch.

Want to know the best way to cut back on both heat and electricity? Turn things off when you aren't using them. That even means switching off the lights when you leave the room. It may seem trivial, but over the course of a month or year you can save many kilowatt hours by getting into this simple habit. Also set your monitor to go dark after 10 or 20 minutes and let your PC put itself to sleep if you don't use it for 15 to 30 minutes. It will wake up quickly enough when you need it again. If you find this too annoying to your work flow, just set the times longer. It will still make a difference when you go out for lunch or are in meetings for hours on end.

A handy tool that shows you instant results is the P3 International P4400 Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor. They're available at hardware stores and online for about $25. You plug in the device you want to measure and plug the meter into the wall socket. It shows you the number of watts being consumed. If you let it run for a day, you'll get the number of KWH used per day. At 10 cents or more per KWH, the total cost of running electronic equipment is significant. Even the phantom power consumed by equipment on standby adds up when everything on the circuit is considered. Consider using a surge protected power strip with a mechanical switch to completely turn off equipment that is only infrequently used.

Can you really see the difference? You bet you can. We replaced almost every incandescent light in the house with a similarly lumen rated CFL. The change paid for itself in a matter of a few months. I was shocked by how much of a difference it made.

On the waste side, I've switched to Office Depot 100% recycled EnviroCopy paper. This product has also come a long way. It's just as bright and solid as the non-recycled paper and doesn't cost that much more by the carton. But the best way to solve the trash problem is just don't use so much. I've pretty much canceled my paper trade magazines in favor of online electronic delivery. It not only saves the wasteful cycle of printing, mailing and hauling to the street for recycling, but it's actually easier to scan for the stories you are interested in.

Another tool that is gaining favor for both cost reduction and "greener" business practice is the online meeting, versus travel for in-person get togethers. You can still do that occasionally for relationship building. For day to day needs a tool such as GoToMeeting can save a small fortune when collaborating on projects.

I know that these measures just scratch the surface, but its easy to start by taking simple steps immediately. You'll be surprised by how much of a difference you'll actually notice.