I’ve always been one to appreciate the support of an IT department.  Notice, I didn’t say “a good IT department.”  I mean any IT department.  No matter how underfunded the department, I can pretty much guarantee that an IT department will do a better job of satisfying my information-access, communication and collaboration needs than I can do on my own.   They build, install, and support a variety of email, customer relationship management, accounting, and collaboration tools that make sure that I can do my job better.  Since striking out on my own, however, I am, from an applications perspective, pretty much on my own.

I’ve been a Google gmail user since their early days, and until we worked out some issues with our web-hosting service, that was my primary email system for the first few weeks.  I admit that some of my emails were found by clients in their spam filters, but it was quick and easy and enabled me to maintain my contact list without having to worry about Outlook. 

It wasn’t until launching the new company, that I became fully aware of all of the applications that are available on Google.  One of the first I discovered was Google Calendar, which not only enables me to share my calendar with my partner, but also enables me to view other public calendars and to create specific calendars that I can turn on or off at will, including one for each of my children, who happen to have different school schedules.

The second that I discovered was Google Docs, which my partner and I used to collaborate on the text for our website, and which I have subsequently used to collaborate on some marketing material edits with one of our first clients.  It was a lot easier than trying to email copies of Word documents back and forth and trying to keep versions straight.  Andy try to do it with three people collaborating on the same document.  As a matter of fact, I wish I had discovered it before leaving IDC.  There were times when as many as ten analysts reviewed and edited a document prior to submission to our publications department.  Try managing that in Microsoft Word!  OK, the program can be a little buggy, but in the end, the final formatting can be done in Word or Adobe, and everything prior that can be done using Google Docs.  I’m sure there’s a security officer concern out there somewhere, but for now I’m OK.

The next advancement for me was in leveraging a good reader.  Again, I went with Google and their reader, which enables me to see all of the recent posts from my favorite blogs and news feeds.  It helps keeps me current, when I don’t have 80 analysts supporting me.

The most recent discovery was the Google personalized homepage.  For me, it is a thing of beauty. I have everything I need to start, manage and organize my day, on my desktop when I turn on my computer and launch my browser.   And it is 100% portable, regardless of whether I am working on my laptop, which I slug between work and home, or any one of the three computers that are sitting around the house.

All this brings me to a most interesting discovery this week, which is a company called Serendipity, which offers a product called MyWorkLight.   Think of it as a secure RSS reader that would enable you to receive, not only your email, calendar, news feeds, your blog reader, and your joke for the day, to your personalized homepage, but also your credit card transactions as they are occuring, and your account balances in your investment accounts, as they are changing.  It’s the beautiful, highly personalized world of Google applications with secure content delivered to your desktop.  I’ll bet, if you were one of the hundreds of thousands of people who got their personal information stolen over the past year, you would love to have a monitor on what is happening to your credit cards and other account balances.

The possibilities for applying this software are almost endless – patient records, lab results, banking transactions, payroll information, internal financial reports, report cards from school, distribution of updates to internal policies.  My head is spinning.  Watch the space and watch this company.  I expect very good things to happen here.