I recently asked my husband what his cloud strategy was … he looked at me like I was trying to sell him insurance and remarked that I paid enough for cloud storage, he thought I had the strategy.

I guess we’re both in trouble.

StrategyClouds

As a consumer I do pay for a great many clouds: Flickr, Dropbox, iCloud, iTunes Match, and Amazon Prime. I use a few more such as Google Drive and Office 365. I keep paying waiting for clarity on which product is best for my specific use cases, but I have not experienced much clarity yet.

Photo Strategy

I use my iPhone for most of my daily photographs of my children. These photos are backed up two ways. One way is the iCloud which is set up to happen without any trigger short my annual fee. Second is a work flow I constructed to share photographs of my children without out inudating my Facebook stream. I already shared my current workflow on my post “Hey, it’s Your Hard Drive, can We Talk?” but in the way of an overview, here is my LucidChart of the workflow:

You can see that I utilize: iCloud passively, Dropbox, IFThisThenThat.com, Tumblr, Flickr, and Posthaven.

Music Strategy

Are you kidding me? My strategy is to keep paying iMatch so I don’t regret losing the music from my 2006/7 iPod. Slightly related, I don’t listen to that music I am paying to keep. I am feeling increasingly worse about this lack-of-strategy.

Pandora. That is the extent of my music listening. But it seems not so much of a strategy.

Now feel free to share your strategy maybe?

Document Strategy

GoogleDrive or Office365

I have used Microsoft Office since the mid-late 90s (“in the 19s” as my oldest says). Old, right? I have used Google since 2009. Even though Microsoft introduced me to word-processing-think, I don’t have to use Microsoft Word to do that anymore.

For formatting I still work in the mindset of a Microsoft world, think: tables, styles, or publishing layouts. But I really could do everything through GoogleDrive happily.

Recently my district added Office 365 for everybody (really, we know Microsoft probably made it irresistibly cheap). The pitch to us was that Career Technology courses might find this a more appealing format. They may, but for me is is too many steps to ‘share’ a proprietary platform.

While some might enjoy the familiarity of Office, when I contrast their collaboration functions to Google Drive I feel like we are in this scene of Mean Girls:

When I consider older Microsoft sharing mechanisms (such as SharePoint) I find the idea of managed work groups and versioning cumbersome when I could manage who I share a document with myself and not rely on mechanisms to share. End users determining the members of their group is more agile and more democratic. I prefer to select who I invite to the document – and not have to create structures of approving/managing changes to the document. I would rather get the right people in the document and then work out issues with people than try to artificially manage them through a program and it’s settings.

While I am sure Office 365 overcomes many of the old Microsoft encumbrances, I feel pretty comfortable with GoogleDrive. The one caveat I have is the revision history lasts 100 changes or 30 days; I’ve never run up against that, but it does give my old-fashioned mind pause. But if I start a document tomorrow, it would still probably be in GoogleDrive.

 

As I grow in my understanding of cloud subscriptions and free services I hope that I am able to refine my Cloud Strategy.

Won’t you please share your cloud considerations?