OFFICE TOOLS PROFESSIONAL: PRACTICE MANAGEMENT RESOURCES – MATT HOLDSWORTH ON CLOUD COMPUTING
TRANSCRIPT
So here you have Office Tools Pro. You recognize this interface. There’s nochange in the user experience as far as anything you need to do differentlyregarding Office Tools Pro. Everything is here. I saved my presentation in the Office Tools Pro contact, and we have Microsoft Office loaded on.
So I’m going to get ready to do this presentation, and we are doing it fromthe cloud. So everything you’re seeing is being hosted out of a data centerin Washington as we go through this. So the speed, you’re really going toget a feel for what this looks like.
My saying with this cloud was good judgment comes from experience, andexperience comes from bad judgment. We, in the process of doing this, wentthrough two different hosting companies. The first one obviously I’m notgoing to stand up here and mention names, but I’m just saying, the firstone I learned every question that I should have known to ask before I movedto them.
So in this process, we basically worked on it for three months trying toget live on this network and untold lost hours of staff efficiency. In theprocess, I’m taking notes and pages of notes of things that I had expectedto work. Nevertheless it’s coming down to the wire, coming up to taxseason, and I’m in November and I still can’t print out of Lacerte. I can’tprint a tax return.
Obviously, that’s an untenable situation. We had developed a work-around,which we would have to back up the Lacerte client. Fortunately my oldnetwork was still running, and I would transfer the file to my old network,restore it on the old network, and then print from my local Lacerte. Soobviously that wasn’t going to work.
So we ended up switching, but before I get into all the details of thatprocess, I wanted to kind of back up. You hear everything cloud. What wasfunny was when I contacted the second company, they said, “You know, we’vebeen doing this for 12 years, and we’ve had very slow and kind ofincremental growth, and then suddenly someone starts calling this cloud andour phone is ringing off the hook.”
The service that we’re talking about here, hosted networks, has been aroundfor over a decade. All of a sudden everybody starts saying cloud ,and it’slike this big confusing thing. That means it’s just out there somewhere.It’s not on my network.