I thought I would take a moment to run through some of the online cloud tools we use at Webtechy. There has been quite a change in the way we work recently, moving from running all our services that we require in house (such as Small Business Server, Exchange, CRM, etc.) to using services that are run in the cloud. This means that we can focus on what we do best without the management of large numbers of servers, updates, and fixing issues when they go wrong. The downside is you have to provide some trust in the services you consume I guess.

The following diagram shows a depiction of some of the central cloud services that we make use of:



The arrows show the integations that exist between these tools.

The "i" icon also depicts which of these services are available using an iPhone application.

A quick run-through of the services are as follows:

Kashflow (www.kashflow.co.uk)
An online accounts software package that is easy to use and integrates with a number of other systems. This means our remote accountant can work on the accounts, and I can go in and see the latest as well. Previously we used QuickBooks, but this meant transferring files back and forth.

Capsule CRM (www.capsulecrm.com)
An online CRM application that allows us to keep track of the people and companies we do business with and track sales pipelines.

ZenDesk (www.zendesk.com)
Our online help desk (located at http://zendesk.webtechy.co.uk) allowing us to track and resolve support issues for our customers. Our customers can also login to see the latest with regards to their ticket.

Magento (www.magentocommerce.com)
the new kid on the block with regards to having an online e-commerce shop. Our online shop is currently in production and hosted with NuBlue! More news soon!

GoogleMail (mail.google.com)
We moved away from an Exchange based system to Google Mail in order to reduce costs and maintanence. Also provides integration with a number of other systems that we use.

Harvest (www.getharvest.com)
An online time and expense tracker that is user friendly and easy to use. The iPhone application also makes for quick entry of time and expenses when out and about.

Beanstalk SVN (www.beanstalkapp.com)
Online Subversion host with integration to Harvest, FogBugz and ZenDesk.

FogBugz (www.fogbugz.com)
Task, features, customer request tracker and project management tool for software development in a central hosted location.

GoToManage (previously Paglo) (www.paglo.com)
Automatically discovers and monitor our, and our customer key systems and provides notifications and reports of the systems in place.