Company laptop and the software needed

I'm a strong supporter of open-source, freeware and SaaS (Software as a Service). We have recently switched half of our company's computers into MacBook Pro. Here are a list of software that we installed (or not installed, if we are using SaaS) for common office tasks on all MacBook Pro. Most of them work on Windows as well since we were previously living in that world.

Photo credit: Toni Cuenca

Text document, Spreadsheet: OpenOffice (Free)
Presentation: Keynote (USD19.99). We previously used OpenOffice for presentation.
E-mail, Calendar, Address Book: Google Apps (Free for 10 users)
Anti-Virus: None, however we do run as Standard User instead of Admin on our MacBook. We previously used Avast on our Windows computers.

I am a strong advocate for Google Mail (part of Google Apps) as I have used Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird and some webmail solutions, but nothing come close to Google Mail, in the sense of uptime and functionality (multi tagging is one of the most amazing features).

Ever since I switched over to Google Mail couple years ago, I no longer need to download e-mails and attachments for five to ten minutes every morning. I no longer need to constantly back-up my e-mails, and I no longer need to delete some indexing files in Thunderbird or Outlook just to get the e-mails working again. And of course, I no longer needed to duplicate an e-mail just to fit them into two separate folders. And not to mention, a search that really works!

Google Calendar is my first exposure to shared calendar couple years back and now I couldn't understand how I could have lived so long without it. We also use it to reserve meeting room (by creating a calendar that automatically accept invitation if it is not busy for every meeting room and have corresponding calendar invited if meeting room is needed).

Google Contact is the centralized repository of all my contacts. Before iOS/Android era, I was a strong supporter of Sony Ericsson and I sync'ed all my contacts from my phone to my laptop using software provided together with the phone. I took the pain couple years back to manually transfer all the contacts into Google Contact and now I sync my Blackberry, iPhone, iPad and MacBook Pro address book to Google Contact using Exchange. Any update in any device will update the rest automatically over internet via 3G/Edge/WiFi. The reason for sync'ing MacBook Pro address book is mainly for offline purpose and for other apps that work with address book.

Comments

Is AsiaWorks a scam?

First of all, let me disclose that I have attended the training, I did my AsiaWorks Basic training back in 2012, then Advanced and Leadership Program (LP) in 2014. All these three trainings were conducted under Asiaworks Training Sdn Bhd in Malaysia. The reason I'm writing about this is because when I did a Google search on "AsiaWorks review", almost all results point to negative reviews. Best yet, some of these reviews are from hearsay of the writer's friends, family members, colleagues, etc. I will bring you through my journey based on my first-person experience. Photo is for illustration purpose only, not a real photo of the training. Photo credit: Luis Quintero Cult and Secrecy Imagine someone told you Bruce Willis is dead before you even watched the movie "Sixth Sense" (sorry to those who have not watched "Sixth Sense"). This is the main reason why they want to keep the content of the course so secretive. The course is designe

Malaysian woman searching for her son separated at birth

If you are a Malaysian male (of Chinese/Malay ethnicity) and were born on October 28, 1977 (plus minus a week), please read on. You may have been told by your parents that you were adopted at birth, or you may doubt that you were adopted, or you may even have started looking for your birth parents with no avail. Photo credit: Luciana Ferraz I have just got to know that a friend's mom has a son who she has given away at birth. She was then a 19-year-old young lady and she wasn't sure what to do with the unexpected pregnancy. She insisted on not aborting the baby and followed her mom's advice to give the baby away when the baby was delivered in a clinic in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. She didn't get to see the baby at all and the only information she had was that the couple who adopted the baby are Malaysians (of Chinese ethnicity) in their 40's back then. Her mom has passed on now and she has limited information on where to look for her son. She is a gra

Outsource vs. in-house

In my digital marketing company, we outsource a lot of the tasks in the office. The following considerations are weighed before we decide outsourcing or hiring: Is this role a core competency of our business? If the answer is yes, we will hire if we have enough jobs to keep him/her busy. If we don't have enough jobs yet, we will outsource until we can get enough jobs to hire one full-time. Photo credit: rawpixel.com Is there a career path and environment for this role to grow in our company? We would like all our team members to grow professionally and personally. We may have enough jobs for a particular role to be more cost effective hiring in-house, but if we know that we can't provide the right environment for this person to grow, we will outsource the jobs. We outsource our accounting, payroll, systems administration and office boy (despatch) jobs. There is pretty much no career path for an accountant, a systems administrator and an office boy in our c

Entrepreneurship, technology and life

Search This Blog