Free Cloud Apps That Small Businesses Should Be Using

If you want to save time, money, and energy while building up your small business to its ultimate potential, you should absolutely consider using cloud applications. The following are some free user-friendly and effective programs to get you started in exploring the wonderful, cost-effective world of “cloud”.

Freshbooks

Freshbooks’ tagline is “painless billing” — and with their user count currently at over 2 million (and write-ups in Tech Crunch, USA Today, and the New York Times) they must be right. Use Freshbooks to manage invoicing/expenses and time sheets for up to 3 clients, as well as send and receive an unlimited number of invoices for free. Unfortunately there isn’t really any competing service that offers more for free — and a Freshbooks upgrade starts at $19.95 for 25 clients.

Google Docs

Google Docs is an entirely free service, and an immensely popular part of Google’s growing cloud arsenal. It’s ideal for sharing, editing, and commenting on documents (and has html and chat capability, as well.) It also features revision tracking and a drawing utility — and with every subsequent improvement/upgrade, Docs is starting to rival Microsoft Word in capability.

Skype

Skype, the immensely popular online phone service, is a smart choice for small businesses that are burdened by phone fees. Skype is free when calling/contacting other Skype users (yes, even across the world), and the call quality, not to mention, is excellent. You can even conduct conference calls with three or four users for free (with video capability included). Calling to landline telephones does cost money, but the fee is minimal — much less than wallet-busting international fees for traditional cell phone service, for sure.

PicNik

Newsflash: Not everyone has the latest edition of Photoshop installed on his/her hard drive — and that’s quite an expensive proposal, at any rate. Picnik is a free tool that allows you to share, edit, crop, resize, and rotate photos entirely online (it works on Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms.) Additional features include a variety of creative fonts and effects, shapes, and frames. If you want the fancy version, though, you’ll have to upgrade to the premium version for $24.95 a year.

Windows Live Skydrive

That lone storage bin in your company copy room filling up pretty fast? Look no further than Windows Live! Skydrive, a password-protected file sharing and storage service that allows you to upload up to 25 GB of documents for free (and individual files limited to 50 GB). It can also host photos using Windows Live Photos (pictures are categorized into albums with this service).

Zoho

A Google Docs competitor, Zoho is free for a group of three users or less; additional users bump up the cost to $50 (per user, per year). The India-based company has over 3 million users currently, and does almost everything: word processing, mail merging, spreadsheets, presentations. It has small storage capability, and provides support for custom domain names and shared contacts/calendars. Most importantly, it supports a number of document formats and can create PDF files as well.

Doodle

If your employees and management have a hard time coordinating meetings and phone conferences due to heavily mismatched schedules, Doodle might just be the perfect solution. It’s a polling app: If you’re trying to schedule a meeting, then you delimit a series of possible times and dates that are then sent out to others. Recipients respond to the poll (which is colored-coded according to whether they can or cannot attend a specific meeting) and voila! instant scheduling success. You’ll never run around harassing co-workers for their schedules again.

Additional Resources: Check out Adobe.com where you can find customer management software along with many other products to help your business grow.