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Since I am working at home I needed to find the office tools, from the word processor to the telephone, but luckily I am not really bound by any corporate policies, so I can pick whatever works best for me – both in usability and price – without any problem.

First of all, documents and spreadsheets are really a must for every office job now, so I first had to tackle this. As I work on more than one computer – a desktop PC, an MSI laptop and an Acer netbook – I needed a solution that allows me to reach the same documents from each PC – not to mention from other people’s pc’s if needed. For this reason I checked out two online office solutions, Google and Zoho. Of course, you can’t have internet all the time, so I have OpenOffice installed too – mainly for the price, MS Office is way better, but way more expensive too – for that case.

For the online solution I have picked Zoho, mainly because Zoho Business offers much more than google, including a desktop where you can add any web application you want to, and have a starting point when you work.

The whole suite is completely free, except for a few applications (like the CRM, Project and Invoice) where it is free up until an amount of data, then it switches into paying mode. But not too expensive even then.

For timetracking purposes I use timeXchange right now – Zoho Project has a timesheet, timetrack feature that you should use if you use Zoho Project – but I still did not decide if I go with timeXchange or Easy Time Tracking – the latter is an offline desktop application.

To follow my projects, contacts, companies, tasks and such I use Norada’s Jobblogs solution, which is also free except for more advanced group and e-mail features.

For the presentations I am experimenting with Prezi, the new “you must see this one” web app – not sold on it yet, but it looks interesting.

And then of course Skype for the telephone – a separate phone number for work, voicemail, and free call to landlines all over the world for 10EUR is too good an offer.

So this is it so far. If you have some other ideas, or a pet website, or any other comment, please let me know. I like to try new things.

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I don’t know, I’ve never been the fan of the put everything in the browser and “fly me to the clouds” movement, for several reasons. First, in my opinion the web browser is called browser and not “advanced data manipulation and browsing and knitting interface” for a reason.

The second is that well, if you put everything in the cloud, what do you do when it starts to rain? Dare Obasanjo certainly has a point that a 99.9% uptime means almost 9 hours of downtime a year. Some posts are not really using the same math as I do, they calculate with a worse service level, and that completely undermines the complaint (99% uptime means almost 88 hours of downtime a year, so 6 hours is not that bad). And if you are here, go and read Om Malik’s opinion, he has a long post on the topic.

So, Amazon is promising almost 9 hours of downtime. If that 9 hours happen to arrive on a quiet Sunday – or over several quiet Sundays – then it’s no problem really.

But what do you do if that 9 hours drive accross the last day of a critical project phase?
I like the idea of cloud computing, and I don’t want to say that you should not use Amazon S3, or Zoho or GoogleDoc, or whatever service you are using. I just would like to know what will happen to your service when the cloud gets dark?

On LinkedIn there was a question on why people want technical documentation in PDF, on paper, in Word, when all information can be put on internal wikis, blogs, etc. Most of the answers pointed to the neccessity to reach the things offline.

And not only when the server goes down. Interesting thing I read on JibberJobber, LinkedIn for example does not have a backup of your profile. If it disappears for whatever reason, you are toast. Have to start from scratch. That’s a good reason to save all your contacts, and your profile on your PC regularly – i.e. whenever there is a change.

Internet access is not 100% around the world, and the internet does not have 100% uptime. Bits go down regularly. I bet there are a couple intranets down even right now. Also there are 3 things in life that are certain: death, taxes and data loss.

I don’t talk against cloud computing – who am I to talk against it anyway -, I just want to point out that when you go near the clouds, you better have an umbrella, just in case.