If you run a startup company or you work as a contractor, you are not good at many things. Actually, you are great at one particular thing. In my case this is creating an intelligent development environment for electrical engineers. This means neither me nor my co-founder are good (or want to be good) at dealing with paperwork, setting up mail servers, cleaning the office, shopping for office supplies doing dishes and so on and so forth.
An important decision we made early on is to move as much IT as possible out of our company. We are computer scientists and we love working with computers, but we hate maintaining servers. We started out by buying a big fat server, and have regretted it ever since.
SaaS is great for startups and contractors. You don't have to worry about buying hardware, getting broken hardware fixed or installing software upgrades. It all just works. Google Calendar has improved since I started using it, but I never had to upgrade. If a Google computer breaks down, I don't even notice because a zillion computers are ready to take over its job. If something bad happens with the service, a thousand Google engineers are getting paged to fix it. That is a thousand more than I want to afford for software maintenance.
From day one, our e-mail was hosted by Google. No, we never used a GMail address for our business. Google lets you link your domain to its services, including e-mail, calendar, Google docs and more. We have written entire project proposals using Google Docs. Docs is not as good as your average word processor, but it allows to work on a document together, at the same time!
You don't want to spend time keeping your own laptop or desktop computer up and running. Our desktops run Fedora Linux, who's modern versions are pretty self-maintaining. Linux on laptops is and remains problematic (especially finding compatible drivers for audio, video and network), so we have Macs. Macs work out of the box, period. I get headaches when people ask me to fix their Windows PC, and for good reason. Even for IT guys, a Mac just saves you a lot of trouble.
To wrap it up, here are two nice hosted tools. We use Dropbox for file sharing, even with partners outside the company. Crashplan for off-site backup. (You need backups, hard drives will eventually crash!)
Bottom line: get a maintenance-free computer, outsource all you can to SaaS providers and spend your time at building your business.
Next post will be about outsourcing non-IT tasks.
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