A big barrier to creativity and innovation is a lack of the software and computing tools necessary to carry your vision through. Cloud computing eliminates many of those obstacles by providing quick and cost-efficient access to sophisticated technology you can use to create blogs, graphics, and presentation materials for promoting and expanding your business.
Consider how you can unleash your creativity with Windows® 7 Professional plus Windows Photo Gallery, a cloud-based photo management, tagging, and editing tool. Windows Photo Gallery allows you to organize your photos, polish your shots, and stitch your photos together into beautiful panoramas.
Let's say you snapped some photos of your staff at the office holiday party and wanted to share that with clients to create a more personal relationship. If a perfect photo was marred by one worker blinking, you could use the photo fuse feature in Windows Photo Gallery to give the squinting worker a wide smile from an alternative shot. That is just one simple example of how Windows 7 Professional, combined with easy-to-access and easy-to-use cloud tools, give small-business owners powerful communications abilities.
The cloud liberates you so you can access any resources you need from anywhere you are. For example, Windows 7 Professional also works together with Microsoft Office Web Apps, a free online cloud companion to Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Microsoft Office Web Apps lets you go to the cloud to view, edit, and share Office files—even if you're at a computer that doesn't have Microsoft Office installed. As long as you have an Internet connection, you always have the tools you need to tackle any project.
This is especially true with the recent announcement of Microsoft Office 365, which next year replaces Business Online Productivity Suite (BPOS), Office Live Small Business, and Live@edu, enabling companies to bring together Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Lync, and Microsoft Office in an always-up-to-date, 24/7, cloud service offering.
"Half of our business comes from small and mid-size organizations, and cloud computing makes a lot of sense for them," says Kirsten Barrera, director of eMarketing for InfinIT Consulting. "Many are dealing with explosive growth and have outgrown their IT infrastructures. They don't have resources to keep up with the latest technology and aren't sure how to manage it. Especially in this economy, they're controlling costs."
The cloud—which stresses mobility and anywhere access—works in concert with Windows 7 Professional's mobility features that provide extra security, power conservation, and the ability to connect easily to networks and printers. "Windows 7 also gives us the speed and functionality of a large company, without the overhead," says John Henshall, Senior Transport Analyst at Elan Public Transport, an independent consultancy "We can remain small, while responding even faster to our customers. That gives us competitive advantage over other bigger, slower firms."
The same could be said about the cloud as a whole. You can gain access to any tools you need to unleash your creativity however you want, whenever you want, wherever you want.
