Office solutions minus the pinch. Thinking outside the box.

I'm sure many folks out there are in businesses where they outsource for their IT needs for whatever reason. This can be all well and good instead of keeping some designated IT guys on salary. But what happens when people need silly things like software for a store bought PC and your off-site IT guy has all the disks? You going to pay the guy his 75.00 an hour and wait the upwards of a week it's going to take for him to get there? Raising another question... Why even pay for what you can get for free? Here's what I mean:



Say you are in a bind, are sick of the MS Office Trial, or just need some good office software.. Well instead of shelling out what could be $100 why not just download Open Office instead? It's almost exactly the same as MS Office with many cool features. One being you can even save your documents as file formats that MS Office recognizes. Best of all, it is completely FREE and LEGAL. Interested in checking it out? If so, here's the linkage.

What if you want to punch up some assets for something like a presentation? You really going to use that dinky little paint program that comes with the PC? What else is there you say? Well you could either pay big bucks for something like Adobe Photoshop, or you could go with something like this! G.I.M.P is a very good (and somewhat easy) program to use and nothing beats the price. Up until somewhat recently it was pretty much on par with things like Photoshop too. It'll do the job and then some when it comes to layered graphic editors that handle transparency. Short and simply, you'll be able to make your fancy pants pictures look all spiffy all free and legal.

Want to find a way to cut some corners? What if your company is like mine and needs to send pictures back and forth from lawyers, technicians, adjusters, offices, etc.. How much does that cost you in shipping if your pictures are so huge and numerous you need to mail disks everywhere? My solution for that was oddly enough Photobucket. It works very well, and you can just link people pictures instead of having to put them in 30 emails or sending out a dvd. Privacy isn't much of an issue either, you can password things. I'd give it a go, being free, what's to lose right?

My personal favorite... Ever have that moment where you are finally home.. unwinding.. and suddenly realized you don't have some kind of document you needed? Be it a call list.. Excel document.. Presentation you want to work on... Now what if the office is closed and you're on a deadline? No no it's not time to grab your ankles, cause you thought ahead right? GOOGLE actually offers a document sharing feature that can be kept exclusively private. Just create a Google account if you don't already have one, and click on the "more" link once you're all logged in to access the goods. What really makes this shine is you can couple this with Google "sites" and link these documents to a private site that only people you designate can see. You can even go so far as to set permissions to the linked documents individually. This pretty much means you can give employees website access but they can't get into things you don't allow them to see. What's even better is you ,or anyone else you designate, can edit these files once they are uploaded. You can easily collaborate with other employees anywhere. There is even a nifty chat window thrown in the document window for good measure! What makes this so damn awesome is it's all free free free!!!

Well it's about that time for me to do the jet.

Take care,
-HD Shock