Leave It In The Clouds

“In A Bind” is an interactive site that searches the web for the cheapest prices on your textbooks based on the information that you give it about your classes. Once you've picked everything you need, you can purchase or rent the books and we'll ship them right to your doorstep.

The Cloud

Cloud computing, also known as cloud storage, is an internet service that provides storage to computer users. The difference between this service and using a different type of storage like a hard drive is that all of the storage is floating on the internet and will never have a physical presence. It has many great aspects to it like allowing users access to their information from any computer and having large amounts of storage space. There are different types of cloud computing that serve different purposes. If you want to store pictures online, you can use services like Picasa or Flikr or YouTube for digital videos. There are also general online services that let you store whatever you want like Box.net or Windows Live. It's a really convenient way for businesses to give their clients access to their information from any computer with access to the internet. Let's say that a customer has a problem with a service or product that you're providing and you're not in the office at the time that you're contacted about the issue. With cloud computing, you can get a hold of your customer's information no matter where you are and fix the problem as quick as possible. So, how will "In a Bind" use cloud computing? Well.....

The Central Hub

"In A Bind" is a great idea as a company, but there is no guarantee that it will take off and soar as soon as we officially launch our website; which means that business is going to be running a little slow for a while. We won't have all the man power that we want at first which means that people are definitely going to have to double up on tasks; so any tools that can make things a lot easier and more organized for us will be great. This is where cloud computing comes in handy. When it comes to keeping track of our expenses and customers information, Google Docs is going to be our go-to tool. We'll be able to make spreadsheets with our customers' information in it so that no matter where we are, we have what we need. If one of our employees needs to contact a customer about an issue with their order, all they have to do is log on to our Google Docs account, look at our customer information spreadsheet, and get whatever they need. If there is a presentation that has to be made, we can create the entire online and save it to our Google Docs account. That way, we can get the presentation wherever it has to be without any hassle of having to save it to an outside source and if we ever need to refer back to it, we know exactly where it is.

 You've Got Mail

Our customers will be able to send email us about any concerns and issues that they may have. Whether it be about not receiving a textbook that they ordered or if there is a problem with a money transaction, once they send in an email letting us know what the issue is, we will make sure that we get back to them within 24 hours with the best solution. One great thing about this is that any employee of the company will have access to the email account which means that if one person doesn't know the right way to go about handling a situation, but someone else within the company does. The person with the most knowledge about the issue can be contacted about the problem, read the email for themselves (no matter where they are), and be able to respond to the customer with a resolution to their problem. For example, let's say that someone working for us (we'll call him Bob, the intern) receives an email from a customer about a transaction and Bob can't find any information about the transaction in our records. Bob can then call Susie in the finance department, even though she's out of the office, and Susie can look through our records in our Google Docs account, find the information that Bob is looking for, and send it to Bob. Bob can then take all the necessary steps to help our customer out with whatever they need, and everyone ends up happy.

The cloud will definitely be an essential part of our company. It will hold all of our customer information and company records in one convenient place. Thus, making is easier for people to find what they're looking for and help everything run a lot more smoothly.