I'm using two consumer cloud services, one enterprise cloud service, and two conventional software packages to get you this column. Am I insane, or is this just how everyone works?

1. Google Drive Shows 'Bring Your Own
Cloud' Has Arrived
Yesterday I interviewed Chris Yeh, VP of platform for Box, about the big
news that Google has entered the cloud storage market with Google Drive. I
took notes on my iPad using the Penultimate handwriting app, and when I
was done, I backed the file up to Dropbox, another cloud storage rival.
To let my far-flung colleagues know I was writing this column, I posted a
message to our Google Groups message board, an online app which lets
staff writers and our dedicated freelancers see what everyone's working on.

2. Did I mention that we're a Microsoft collaboration software shop? So when
I wanted to know if my colleagues David Carr or Eric Zeman had filed their
articles yet (they're much faster than I am), I IM'd another editor using
Microsoft Messenger, and he sent me their stories using Microsoft
Entourage email (I'm on a Mac). I wrote this column in Word. To post to
InformationWeek.com, I pasted the text into a Web-based content
management system, TeamSite.
Are we insane? To get these 700 words to you, I used two consumer cloud
services, one enterprise cloud service, and two on-premises enterprise
software packages.
If we're crazy, by all means tell me. But I don't think we are, at least not
about our software. I think if you went and talked with groups of office
workers at your company, you'd hear similar stories of people piecing
together enterprise and consumer software, both cloud and on premises, to
get their jobs done.

3. Let's be clear--I'm not complaining. I felt incredibly efficient using all of
these tools, like I had what I needed at every turn. This is just the world of
work today, a world that's fast moving from "bring your own device" to
"bring your own cloud.“
BYOC pressure will force IT to deal with cloud storage, whether it's
Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Box, or some
other variation. All these services let people save files of different types
online, and they can be accessed from different devices and shared with
other people. All of them offer some level of free storage, with additional
storage and in some cases administrative controls for IT to use in a business
environment for a price.
Yeh, the Box exec, thinks one of the make-or-break factors for business
adoption of cloud storage will be which services build healthy developer
communities and close ties with other software makers.

4. Remember that backup I did of my notes to Dropbox? I used Dropbox
mostly because the Penultimate app has an integration with Dropbox. Box
has similar links with a note-taking app PaperPort Notes (I haven't tried that
one).
Yeh previously worked at Yahoo building developer communities around
Yahoo products. And he points to Microsoft SharePoint as a model for
enterprise software success based on a huge developer community, which
has added a wealth of features around the SharePoint collaboration
platform.
Yeh says the Box team isn't fretting Google's market entry -- it's
"validation" of the market, he says. He characterizes Drive as more of an
extension of Google Apps and concedes that companies highly focused on
Google productivity apps will find Drive appealing.

5. But it's more likely employees want to share files built using a huge range
of apps, and Box is positioning itself as the neutral player that knows how
to give business IT what it needs. Yeh notes that the mobile app market has
led to massive fragmentation--people using QuickOffice to work in Office
documents, PDF Expert to mark up PDFs, and so on. "In a fragmented
world, it's really helpful for us to take a platform-agnostic approach," he
says.
Of the cloud storage vendors, Box may be the most devoted to the business
IT market, but all the players will offer some enterprise controls. IT
organizations have a lot of experience sifting through features and finding
an option that works for the company. The key thing for IT to remember is
that employees aren't going to wait for that process before they start pouring
files into cloud storage. BYOC has begun, whether IT's involved or not.

6. How important have online collaborations become? The team at Orra
Health that online collaborations have just facilitated faster access of
information and place-agnostic availability of the same. However, the
success of these systems rests on the compatibility of these solutions with
native softwares and the different features like free storage, pricing, user
access etc.