Hello, Crown Clients and Friends!
Do you feel like your software is helping you stay productive as you switch between your workstation and mobile device? Are there some missing features that stop you from being productive with just your mobile device? This week’s blog post is devoted to Crown Computers CEO Sean Goss’ top five cloud and productivity apps; these apps can help you work with your documents and files across all of your devices, and keep your productivity and security up while on the go.
OneDrive
OneDrive is the cloud storage product inside of Microsoft’s Office 365, and is (with the Business Standard edition of Office 365) fully integrated with your Office apps and subscription. This makes it a no-brainer for backup storage if your company already uses Office. It’s the backbone for all of your documents and collaborations, and the list of its features is very extensive. Most importantly, you can access your OneDrive files on any device that you have your Office apps on, and the files can be automatically synced every time they’re edited. Since it’s integrated with Teams, files and folders that you store in OneDrive can be instantly shared with members of your organization.
If you don’t already have a subscription to Office 365 then individual and family plans are affordable, especially considering the fact that one terabyte of cloud storage would cost more than an Office subscription, if you were to get it from Google Drive or Dropbox. That size may or may not be enough to backup all of your home media or photo library, but it would certainly come in handy for all of your other personal documents and files.
OneNote
If you find yourself feeling a little disorganized, Microsoft’s OneNote can help you keep all of your ideas together, and is flexible enough to let you be creative with how that information is stored. OneNote can deal with more unruly data than you would typically put into a Word Document; if you need to make a reference to another note, you can just link to it in the note; if you need to make a reference to a photo, you can simply drag a copy of a .jpeg into the note.
As a part of the Office 365 suite, you can share OneNote files with colleagues and family members, which will automatically update whenever they’re edited. There are tons of really helpful features in OneNote, and one that can be really useful in specific circumstances is its OCR (optical character recognition), which lets you take a picture of text, and then treat it as text.
SnagIt
Snagit Is a powerful tool for screen capture and desktop recording for Windows and macOS, with an emphasis on sharing. It integrates with other apps like Office, Gmail, or Slack, and gives you a wide range of tools to share content with. For instance, if you need to quickly explain a process to a colleague, you can use the Screen Recorder to show them, instead of spending an hour typing up a method. You can also take any short recordings and turn them into a GIF, making it a small file suitable for being sent and opened as a text message. Another cool feature is creating video from images: with this feature, you can talk and draw over a slideshow, like giving a short presentation on anything you may need to.
Grammarly
If you want your communications to be well written and clear across your apps and devices, Grammarly is the service for you. It’s like the grammar check in MS Word that you’re almost certainly familiar with, but with a lot more powerful features. With the premium version, you can even have Grammarly assess the tone of your writing or grade your level of formality. If you need concise, clear writing for your text messages or other mobile apps, Grammarly can replace the keyboard on your Android or iPhone, so you can have your writing shine in any form of communication.
LastPass
In a previous post, we talked about the importance of password managers and using multiple, strong passwords for all of your logins. LastPass is a fully featured password manager with a few tiers to choose from. Some of the important features are data breach protection (which lets you know if any of your accounts have been compromised), and multifactor authentication (which we talked about here). LastPass is more than just a password manager, though, and has elements of what is called a “digital wallet,” which is like an encrypted vault for important information, like credit cards or other sensitive information.
The Family Plan also adds secure sharing, which helps you securely share login information (like for a Netflix account, for instance) with members of your family. Best of all, if your organization uses LastPass, it includes a Family Plan for all of your employees as well.
-Written by Derek Jeppsen on Behalf of Sean Goss and Crown Computers Team