SAAS and other online free services - How to save your data remotely and access from anywhere?
The new model of software application development cannot ignore the methodology of SAAS that is beneficial for both the customers and companies. In SAAS method, you only pay for what you use, unlike buying the whole suite of applications in which you rarely use options other than a few. If you get MS Office as a SAAS app, you can pay for the Excel or Word and only for the time you use.
Coming to the main point of this blog post, “How to save your data remotely and access from anywhere?” I remember the time around 10 years back when I bought my first PC. The Internet was available only for the elite community at a premium and that too dialup. We have to literally pray for the connection to get successful and pray more for not getting disconnected in between. With a little over 8 kbps max speed, you can browse a lot of static sites and check your mails. Hotmail was the free service that give you 2 MB which was more than enough, and who was out there to spam you?
Things have changed with Google entering the email arena with unlimited storage space. By that time broadband came down to households. Now you have thousands of MP3, hundreds of movies and hopefully very little useful data on your hard disk.
But if one day, your hard disk breaks down or your OS gets corrupted. All the data and customizations you made are lost!!! No. you have a 500 GB backup hard drive and you keep a backup of everything you do in that. You can simply restore everything from the backup. Good idea, but you always have to sync the data, keep the versions and also carry it everywhere you go.
The other way is to store everything, at least your documents, to the web and access from anywhere, anytime, but with an internet connection.
The applications / services noted below can be accessed with Mozilla, which is available on Windows, Linux and Mac.
Create, edit and save your documents using Google Docs. It has a word processor, spread sheet and presentation support. We can also share these documents with friends and track the changes. Also, export them to different formats like pdf, ods, doc etc.
If you are a frequent traveler and don’t get access to net while traveling, you can enable Google Gears support to Google Docs so that the documents are available offline and are synced when we get online.
For using Google Docs you need a Google account.
a. Adobe Acrobat
2. X-Marks – bookmark sharing (http://www.xmarks.com/)
x-marks provides synchronization facility for your bookmarks automatically. For using x-marks you just need to install the plug-in for FireFox and create and x-marks account. Now you can access your bookmarks from any machine and synchronize it. You also can view the bookmarks online at x-marks site. The add-on is available for IE and Safari too.
x-Drive was one of the popular online free storage service provider, but have been closed recently after being acquired by AOL. There are more players out there, one is Adobe Acrobat. By creating an account on Adobe, you can get a multitude of features like word processor, free storage, desktop sharing, and file sharing using the Adobe Acrobat AIR application that gets automatically installed along with Adobe Acrobat 9.
4. Calendar
Online calendars are a best place to track your appointments. Google Calendar offers facilities like sending SMS reminder, sending email reminders, XML import and sharing calendar with friends. If you are using Thunderbird with Lightning (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/) plug-in, you can add the Google calendar to your Thunderbird. But you should be online while using this feature. For MS Outlook, Google is providing a free synchronization application (http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=98563) that will synchronize the GCal data to Outlook. Additionally, if you own a Nokia Mobile, you can synchronize the data with all these services using PC Suite.
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