Okay, so with web hosting, and email and control of your domain and control of your telephone, you have a lot of the basic technologies, the baseline services in place that you'll start building on top of, and a lot of this advice about picking cloud services, you'll have to tweak to the specifics of the kind of business that you're in. It's a little bit analytical. At times, it's a little bit geeky and technical, I will try to make sure there's a picture to clarify on each of those technical or abstract pieces. But this advice could save you a lot of headaches. You make good choices, with cloud based systems, they grow with you, you make choices that don't quite work out and unwinding them cost Far, far more, far more than you'll ever say. We're living through that right now.

So here goes, here's you with your happy computer and you've got a business need and you've got to look for a service. To meet that need might be invoicing might be sharing of files might be, I don't know what, obviously, my bias and what this course is all about is trying to do anything for your business, especially anything is going to go beyond your individual use in the cloud, not as desktop software. So here's the scorecard. I'm going to walk you through for picking cloud systems. My assumption here is you've got options. All I'll use invoicing as an example, I'm pretty sure there are multiple invoicing cloud based invoicing systems out there in the world.

You're looking at them, they may be similar in price. How do you pick what criteria do you use? This is about those criteria. First thing of course, business fit right if the features and functions of the platform don't suit your business or are biased towards the different kinds of bit Kinda business, lower score for those guys, let's say this, let's say we were doing this on a one to five scale. You might say in terms of business fit. Service a gives service a gets a three, service B gets a three, I'm not going to make this easy.

As MC gets a three, they're all they're all pretty good. None of them are quite exact. It takes time to make an evaluation like that. It's worth the time. I don't just adopt it and say I'm done with it. If it's something you'd be living with for a long time, in particular, one of the things that you want to evaluate in your usually usually get a period, typically 30 days, although I've seen a couple recently that are 21 days.

So they're aiming for revenue when you forget, is it easy to use, and is it well designed? That's not trivial, and it's not incidental. If something's ugly, or if something's confusing, you'll like it less. You'll use it less It'll be less valuable for your business. That doesn't mean that pretty equals easy to use. Really good design.

Thank you, Steve Jobs manages to be both and it used to be beautiful and functional and just write and you kind of go click, man, I love this thing. This is so easy to do what I need to do with it, get that feeling. You give them a good score on design and ease of use. So maybe you like these guys a lot. Maybe you don't like these guys so much and this is kind of ugly and they need to grow up before you're going to use them. Not very technical, right?

Is it a fit for your business? Is it easy to use? Is it is it pleasant? On most services, at least at the signup point. Have t o 's Terms of Service. That's that legal boilerplate that you don't read before you click the OK button with your credit card for system for your business.

It is worth reading those as pain Is that is because you want to see if the company's policies present any conflicts for your business, making this up to make the point. But if they say, we can't deal with stuff from overseas, and you've got customers overseas, that's not a fit. You'll occasionally run into weasel words that essentially say we own your data. If you run into that in terms of service, close your browser and go on to the next one. I can't think of a justification for that. That makes sense.

There are companies that have tried stuff like that. Don't go there, right? It's your data. And it's like gold in the long run. So it is worth checking the policies for services and saying how do these guys compare with one another? companies are learning that they've got to be pretty open about that.

Now let's talk a little bit slightly geekier. Say you've used something for a month or two months or six months or a year. You've got maybe customer records and I don't know business data of some sort in there. And you decide for whatever reason that you need that data, you may want to move to another system, you may want to do some analysis, you may need to use it to populate something else. If a platform that you're considering doesn't make it pretty clear that it's easy to get stuff out of there, that's a real knock against them. That's, that's both a policy and a set of functions.

To take a really hard look at before you take the plunge of committing to a particular system for your business on data becomes its own lock in. Right? If you've used an invoicing system for two or three or four years and you've got customer records that go back a long ways, and stuff that you don't remember anymore, and it's all in there. You're very likely to keep using that. Yes, in theory, you could migrate it, almost everyone will output what's called a CSV comma separated values, CSV txt file. Good, you need to be able to do that that's not the same thing as picking it all up and starting over or organization, that format of that data in one system is rarely going to be an exact match for another.

I know the lady who runs a booming booming business, I think she's passed the million dollar mark. She's still using a very old customer and sales management system. I believe it's act a CT, there's no way she can migrate often. She's molded it around her business, she's molded her business around it. As far as I know, there's not a cloud alternative to that. So she's doing all sorts of backflips with PCs and local area networks to keep running the version she uses bummer for her.

But she didn't really doesn't have a choice. She'd always come to a grinding halt to migrate to something else. I've seen failures like that in the corporate world over and over and over again. One of the reasons that COBOL programmers can still get employed is that a system becomes a black box. So exporting data is something you do want to look at. And you actually do want to if you can remember to do this, I don't always you do want to keep up with if you can, right?

If you can go get a monthly or six month or even annual dump of everything that's in each of your cloud based systems. It's a great fallback. I'd seen the position of betting the farm on a cloud based system, have those guys go out of business? And then you're sitting there saying, What do I do? And as I said, if they don't allow you to export, run screaming from the room. The richer the data export, the more likely it is to be useful.

But there's an asterisk there. It's complicated. If a service says we've got an XML export, great, that's more complex structure for data than a flat comma separated value file. You may not know what to do with an XML file, I wouldn't know what to do with an XML file. Okay, so I put a guy here with a piece Because it sort of tends to be the starting point in the world. But one thing that makes a real difference in business is mobile access.

And I don't just mean you can log in through a web browser to get to system x. I mean, do they have a mobile client, if someone has a mobile client points for them, if it's if it's native, and it's really good, and it feels slick, really good points for them. If they don't have a mobile client, and they're not talking about getting a mobile client, I'd knock them I'd I consider downgrading for that. The web access that's designed for the big screen doesn't necessarily work on the little screen. And you may look like you could get away with it, but you really would want to do work on it. So I'm gonna give these guys a warning if that's their solution. There are web apps for mobile web interfaces to systems for mobile, that kind of mitigate some of that clunky They're not quite the same thing as what's called a native app code that's actually written for an iOS, iPhone or iPad code that's written for an Android code.

There's written for a Blackberry. So best score of the bunch would be someone with a really solid and mature native app. In an ideal world, almost everything you do on the desktop, you can do on the mobile, but it's right for the fingers and touch interface of the mobile, it's less typing intensive. The buttons are the right size and stuff like that. So they've got a mobile app. Great.

They've got a mobile web interface. Okay. They don't have a mobile story. I'd at least contact him if you really like a lot of other things about the system and say, What are your plans for mobile and see what they say? Okay, now we got to get a little bit on the geeky side API. API stands for application programming interface.

Let me see if I can make sense of that for you sort of normal people terms. When you're using an app, when you're using a system of some sort, even through a web interface, there's, there's an IQ. Looking at that screen, there's a human being who can make sense of what's on that screen. The interface on the screens isn't all functional. It's not all fields and buttons. There are labels and shapes and layouts and arrangement that you can make sense of, in order to figure out what to do to make that system work.

That's not the same level of intelligence that's going to be there. If another system wants to talk to that system in really broad generic terms. That's what an API an application programming interface is. When someone designed service a they said, You know what, we need to build this. So another surface another piece of software. can actually do something, do some sort of stuff to talk to our service, maybe you know, only maybe in and out.

If a service you're considering has an API. That's a huge bonus. If they don't have an API, and they don't have any plans for an API, that's a huge, I'm not so sure. The reason is, as you start getting more cloud systems and more data in those, you will find business efficiencies in letting them on enabling them to move things back and forth or coordinate between each other. If they don't have an API, an application programming interface. It can't do that, right.

And you could sit someone down at a chair and say, take something out of here, put it in there, you could use that human interface as sort of a poor man's API, but it will work at midnight, you'll be paying it salary, and it's not the same, just not the same thing. So an API presents or apps Have an API is actually quite a big deal in this evaluation, I'd really knock someone that didn't have it. And I really, really look hard for, for systems that do have it. One way you can measure how good it is, by the way, without getting really technical, you start looking for who is in other services, who actually uses the API for the guys you're considering. You look at service a, if they have a list of other systems that have some form of integration with them, you got something going on, the longer that list is, the better.

Vice versa. If you've got an established cloud system in your business, and you go look on their list of integrations, and you say, Oh, they talked to service a, but not B and C, points for service a. Were longtime, happy heavy duty users of freshbooks for invoicing and I go look and see freshbooks you integrates with something that I'm considering why freshbooks is core to my business is something I'm going to add to it talks to freshbooks. All the better. I'll cover some additional goodies in a separate lesson that helped with that integration story. But what I want to alert you to here is that it's useful to look at that.

And the presence or absence of an API is a good indicator of longer term business value. Frankly, it's the mature approach, right? It's the mature approach to building a system, because you're acknowledging that machines talking to machines are how things will start to work eventually. done right? You can get a level of integration and automation that a lot of big corporations tear their hair out trying to get, and you're paying for another credit card by the month. How cool is that?

Last term here platform. It's a little it's a little hard to identify. But you know when you see it kind of like I don't know what you're Half platform is a concept from the technical world that says, we built something strong enough that other guys are building on top of it. An easy example the iPhone, when second go around with the iPhone not first go around, when Apple opened up the iPhone and said, Okay, we'll let you guys out in the world write software for iOS for the iPhone operating system. They really declared it a platform at that point. And to growth to I forget what it is 1,000,000,002 billion app sales validates that.

That's one of the things it's made. Its you've made it useful, is sort of a we and everybody out there is smarter than us. Just one or two of us are just one company aspect to being a platform. They are the sign of something being a platform in this cloud based world. Specifically describe this kind of roughly, and I'm going to use an example Get you some samples to work with. I'm a I'm a happy user of Dropbox and Evernote, for example.

One of the ways that I would say diagnostic, I know that Dropbox is a platform is that there's there's a Dropbox. There's not only a Dropbox client for my iPad, Dropbox client, right, so Dropbox wrote that app. But other apps, other companies apps on the iPad, other companies apps on the Mac, can also talk to Dropbox. So there's Dropbox code or permissions, at least in some of those other apps. Same thing with Evernote, which I also use quite heavily. This is the app that I use to read news has a one click button it says stick this in Evernote.

So Evernote has gone out looking for developers and Actively courted them and said right stuff for our platform. If the cloud based system you're looking at has a developer story, that's a really positive note. The big dog in cloud software, of course, is Salesforce, they have a huge, huge, huge developer story. So it's a, it's a good example of a very mature cloud based platform. So platform. Last one, because people are always concerned about this security.

Let me get one bugbear out of the way about cloud based systems insecurity. It's very common for small to medium business owners to say, Well, I don't want my data out on the net. If your computer on your desk, a computer in your pocket is plugged in, and on the net, it's on the net. your desktop computer is no more no less secure because it happens to be yours in your office than a machine sitting in Amazon's data center or Microsoft's as your data center. So you've got to, you got to rethink that notion pretty heavily. My, my belief is that cloud systems are probably more secure than the systems on my desktop or on my, on my colleagues, desktops, why?

I'm not a security guy. I don't say they're paying attention to that all the time. I don't have anyone running reports, I don't want to pay for that. I want to pay for a little slice of time from the security expert at freshbooks, the security expert at Dropbox. They do have a bigger target on their chest. Because they've got hundreds and thousands of users and lots and lots of data.

I grant you that they have better security guys playing defense on your behalf. The one thing that you can look forward to make a decision and the reason include security in the scorecard is how strong is the security on system a versus system B on Google recently introduced something called two factor authentication is that that's a really good diagnostic I, if freshbooks said we're going to two factor authentication, I'd say, giddy up, I'm really happy with you guys I'm already happy with. But what's two factor authentication, it's you got to know, two separate things, it's actually slightly different. You got to you got to know one thing and have one thing. So in the case of Google's two factor authentication, I need to have my password. And I need to have the mobile that I told him as mine.

So when assigning with a password, they send me a code. That's the second factor, I can set it up. So to do that, every time I'm really trusted devices like my desktop computer. But if I sign in to Google on some other computer, temporarily, I have to have the password. And I have to put in the code that they're going to send to my mobile. So I'd say trust the security Look into it a little bit two factor authentication, big thumbs up on any stories about data leakage, find out how they address them.

Really good companies are surprisingly transparent about saying, here's the problem. Here's what we did about the problem. We're not going to give you the keys to the kingdom, but we're going to tell you that we addressed it. And the last one, which is really hard to put a score on, but you can get a feel for it is what's the culture of the company? I will, I will take two or three services that I'm looking at, and come up with a problem and ask him for help ask them for support on it. If they're responsive, cordial cheerful, that's a big plus for them.

If they can't get around to it can't be bothered, not necessarily My favorite thing that there may be other strengths that override it. But support is one of the best indicators of company culture that I know of. I'll give one last shout out to fresh books. One of the many reasons that I've stuck with him for multiple years now is their support guys are fantastic. I think they make everybody in the company start with two months in tech support helping customers, which is a great company policy. When you got a problem, they help you, and you will end up with problems.

And you will want help. So take a look at that forgiving company. Here's one last little test when you sign up for service a if that's your winner, if you follow the previous lesson, you're not going to sign up with your email address. What are you going to do? You're going to create an email alias called service a. That PDQ calm that's the email name that service a will know about and send stuff to.

And when it gets to your server there at PDQ land, your servers, your web service, it'll say oh, that's actually our buddy Fred. And PDQ calm That way you can switch it around, manage it separately, make it go into a folder, whatever. So don't sign up for all of these with your own personal email, especially in the evaluation period, because eventually you'll just start getting spam. This is a way of ducking that I'll send up, I'll create an alias for a service evaluated. If I decide not to take the service, I turn that off, and I nuke that email alias. And any chance of that email alias leaking and getting out into the world of spam.

Just went bye bye doesn't exist anymore. So that's the scorecard. I'll make a digital copy of it available might even add support now that I think about it, but look hard at the cloud services that you're going to run your business on. Take the time to research them a little bit easy to get shiny toy syndrome, but for long term use, they need to tie together with the other things that you're using. They need to be easy for you to use your employees to use. They need to be in your pocket with a really good mobile client.

And, etc, etc. Think about that stuff hard before you hit the signup button. Even if it's only 30 bucks a month that you're paying. Hopefully you're getting a lot more value out of it than that. That's it. See ya.