Are you wondering what the whole cloud this is about and trying to figure out how it can help your specialty contracting operation? Chances are you’re already in the cloud. There is a spectrum of definitions for the cloud but I prefer the broadest: When your data is stored or processed at a big data center instead of on your own computers, you’re in the cloud. The cloud has really been around longer than people have been referring to it as such. Your first Yahoo Mail or Hotmail account was essentially a cloud-based product.

Google and Microsoft dominate the market for delivering packaged cloud-based products to organizations of all size. The core of their offerings include email, contacts, shared calendars, and shared files including photos. Both have additional features that can be activated.

Microsoft’s product is called Office 365. We began using its predecessor, Office Live,  in 2007 and switched to Google Apps for Business in 2012. Google later changed the name of its product to Google Apps for Work to demonstrate it is as well suited for governments, universities and other non-profits.

At Rainier Asphalt & Concrete we require computer users to save almost everything in the cloud. On a practical level, our less-tech-savvy employees see little difference in the way they work. There’s a folder called Google Drive they can access in Windows Explorer just like any other Windows folder. Anything saved their is replicated in the cloud. Moreover, it’s easy to setup sharing so that files saved by estimators are automatically available to project managers.

Rainier Asphalt & Concrete has experienced one hard-drive failure since we began using Google Apps for Work. Getting our office manager productive again took only a few hours. Nothing was lost. We simply bought a new computer, installed software the user needs and downloaded Google Drive. All her files had been backed up real time and were available again.

Using Google Apps for Work it is possible to plug in additional tools developed by third parties. Shared Contacts for Gmail is one tool we’ve grown to appreciate. We use the unlimited version, which costs approximately $200 per year. The tool allows us to compile contact lists and share them throughout our organization. This might seem like no great feat and something that could have been maintained in an Excel spreadsheet decades ago. But the advantage of storing the contacts as we do is that they cascade through the Google ecosystem and can be found using Google’s powerful search capabilities.

Sharing calendars is also invaluable. Our project managers create calendars to manage and schedule jobs and our office staff can usually use the calendars to job cost incoming vendor bills to the appropriate jobs when purchase order numbers are absent. The shared calendars help free up project managers from clerical tasks. They also help with timesheet review, because we can quickly see when and where our crews were deployed and cross-reference the deployments against timesheet entries.

Since its first product release, Google has enhanced Google Apps to save time for users. As an example, email attachments can be saved directly to Google Drive or documents saved in Google Drive can be emailed to someone else. This functionality is available across devices: it can be performed in a web browser or on an Android phone.

All in all, we’ve found Google Apps for Work to be easy to implement and support and affordable for our organization. It’s become a transparent tool. We focus more on the work it helps us accomplish than supporting and troubleshooting the tool itself. For contractors, an affordable, reliable, time-saving tool is always a blessing.