Little fluffy clouds

I have talked about the Cloud and my moves towards it in my studies through Net11, and to date, I actually have made some major moves towards the Cloud.

What's in my Cloud so far?
All my email is now through Gmail, I utilise both Delicious and Diigo for bookmarking and referencing (although not exclusively yet). I have also set up a Pro Flickr account to move all our photos online for sharing (and another means of backup). You can see from this, I have made a reasonable effort to move towards the Cloud. Now though I'm ready to make my next big step: moving to Google Docs.

What's my next step then?
This is actually something that I have been mulling over now for a few months now. The thought has sat patiently at the back of my mind, occasionally whispering a few words here or there, pushing me towards this point. So now after much discussion with my wife, we have decided to move our writing needs to Google Docs. The plan is to do it slowly, weening our house of each component of Microsoft's Office suite, one at a time (kind of like a 12 step program for Wordaholics).

First I plan to upload key documents to get a feel of what I am doing. I will then start creating new documents solely in Google Docs. From there I will start to move spreadsheets online, and possibly PDF's (although that is more for backup purposes). The plan is to have everything online and Microsoft Office off my machine by the end of my current Study Period for uni.

But why do it?
My wife thinks I'm crazy, I tried out Google Docs nearly a year ago, at that time I came to the conclusion that I still needed Word on my machine. Now though I'm not so sure. I don't use most of the advanced features of Word and after using the latest 2007 version on my work machine, I like Word even less.

Now through school for this study period, I am required to keep an ongoing Portfolio in electronic format. So what better time than now to commit myself to researching and experimenting with something new. All ready I am discovering some features which I missed last time around such as linking into your blog account and making posts from Google Docs.

Ok then, lets get under way. This should be fun.

Some helpful hints for moving into the cloud

1. If you haven't all ready grab yourself a Google Docs (or similar) account.
2. Move some of your documents online to get a feel of the service.
3. For Mac users check out GDocs Uploader for drag and drop uploading to Google Docs.
4. Install Google Gears for offline work on you documents.