Want to get up to speed quickly on cloud computing and the solutions we consider to be business ready?

We have provided your "reading list" below:

Related Blogs or Other Writings

As you already know, reading blog articles can be hit and miss. In some cases the writer does not have the domain expertise on the topic they are discussing, or today's topic is useless for you. In a well written blog you should be able to read the first four or five lines and decide whether to read any further. So while we recommend some of these blogs, you need to select the individual articles which you find helpful.

1. Of course the first resource we list is our own blog.
2. The End of Enterprise Software? This particular blog article discusses the future of Enterprise Software as a platform. We agree with this author, having selected Drupal and Force.com as our cloud development platforms.
3. The Cloud Computing Journal is a good place to get a variety of perspectives and updates on Cloud Computing. Some of it is very "techie" in nature, but you will find some good business oriented content from time to time.
4. IT Business Edge does not dedicate a specific section of their website to Cloud Computing, but we have uncovered good nuggets about the business impact of technologies in the Business Alignment and Management section of their website and their Mobile Technology section.
5. Simon Wardley writes a popular blog which covers many business issues in IT and writes extensively about the cloud.
6. Chirag Mehta's blog might be a bit technical for some of you, but he seems to put out some provocative ideas from time-to-time about what is coming next in cloud computing.
7. Cloudswitch is moving companies from their current technical environments into the cloud. This blog can be very technical, but patience will allow you to learn a lot from these guys.

Drupal - "Community Plumbing"

Drupal is an open source content management system. This website is developed exclusively using Drupal. It is our preferred tool for building an online presence for our clients. It provides a robust Social Publishing platform which allows business users to maintain ownership of managing and publishing their own content. Changing content on the fly no longer requires a programmer. Once an online presence using Drupal is correctly set up for one of our clients, they are in the driver's seat to add new pages, blogs, forums, users, or posts of any kind (in a multi-lingual environment if required). Drupal is designed as a robust database-driven platform which provides high performance, scalability and a high degree of customization. Thousands of developers globally contribute capabilities to Drupal and with our guidance you can exploit those contributions to develop a powerful online presence to interact with your clients or build exceptional collaboration capabilities behind your firewall.

Because Drupal is open source, we achieve higher levels of integration with other cloud based applications. This is particularly important in cases where we require seamless interaction between your CRM system and your online presence to provide high levels of interaction with your customers. Additionally, Drupal comes optimized out the box for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We will set you up for SEO and leave you with some simple rules to use when creating your content to ensure you continue showing up in the Google searches which are important to you. You will be pleased with the results you obtain.

When it comes to getting up to speed on Drupal, you can start with the community website for Drupal, but it might scare you off unless you are a developer. Here are some other places to check out:

1. Acquia - Acquia was started by the founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert. At Acquia, Dries appears to be commercializing Drupal by offering commercial services such as remote support, development, hosting, and immediate support for microsites. Acquia also provides some standardized toolkits with which to start a website development. The page for business owners on the Acquia site has some good content for you to review.
2. Our friends at Acquia have developed an excellent two-pager with the top ten reasons to use Drupal.
3. The Gilbane Group has published an excellent white paper on the Acquia site about social publishing. It explains the benefits of the Drupal CMS approach to social publishing and how corporations and non-profits can enrich collaboration with their communities (all stakeholders including employees, customers and partners) using Drupal.
4. Ubercart or Drupal Commerce in Drupal 7 - everyone seems to want to sell on the web. Ubercart is an open source e-commerce package that fully integrates your online store with Drupal. This allows our clients to build a community around a product, sell access to premium content, offer paid file downloads, and many other capabilities. 

Google

We use Google Apps for Business to run our business and are working with clients to migrate them to the Google platform. There are many sources you can check out, but here are a few of the tools we are implementing for clients:

1. Google Apps - We set up our corporate domain at Google and now we use all of the tools in the apps portfolio - gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Groups, Google Sites and Google Video. We are quite impressed with the integration of gmail / Google Calendar with mobile devices. Special interfaces are available for Google Android, Blackberries, iPhones and others to integrate directly into Google Apps.
2. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools help us to analyze the traffic on this website and our blog. Drupal provides capabilities to integrate and optimize the use of these important analytical tools.
3. We are experienced in using Google Adwords. For the right clients we believe this is an important tool, in combination with other social tools, in guiding traffic to your online presence.
4. Blogger is Google's blogging tool. While Drupal provides us with blogging functionality, we finder Blogger is followed by more readers and potential subscribers. By using Blogger, our blogs are followed more extensively, resulting in more eyeballs being guided back to this website.
5. Feedburner is Google's is a "web feed management tool. It provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based content publishers" [from Wikipedia]. It provides us with excellent analytics about who is reading your blogs.
6. Google Apps Marketplace is a place where you can acquire tools which are meant to integrate directly in Google Apps. We have experimented with a number of applications in the Marketplace (still searching for that perfect Project Management tool).
7. Mailbrowser is a free gmail Plug-in which provides capabilities you will never find in Microsoft Outlook (unless maybe you use an Outlook Plug-in). It indexes your entire gmail account and provides you with detailed contact information in a window, providing summary information about your conversations with this contact, trends in conversations, summary information from the contact's website, and complete management of all attachments related to the contact you are working with at a point in time. 

Customer Relationship Management

Once we have determined our customers' top challenges we select the best tools for the job. In general we are finding our application portfolio looks something like this:

1. Non-profits - CiviCRM. This tool allows our clients to enhance fund raising activities, track and email contacts, manage events with online registration, track activities for a large base of members or constituents, manage memberships, perform case management, and quickly create new online websites.
2. Service Companies - Worketc. If you are selling hours (time entry - volume batch entry or individual), requiring CRM capability, project management, online ticket management and robust email capability, this is likely the solution we will recommend for you.
3. Product and Service Sellers - We work with three CRM solutions in this area: Zoho, salesforce.com, and an in-house solution for companies with a heavy distribution element.