September 2011 Featured Application - SpringAhead 
We recently moved offices in San Francisco and our movers pulled up to our new building with everything from the old one except our filing cabinets. They hadn't forgotten them. We simply didn't need them. Our paperless initiative had made them obsolete, and we were now in our tidy, uncluttered new space, and we had a few companies to thank for it.
I work for SpringAhead, a cloud service provider, so we have all bought into the idea of going paperless and leveraging emerging cloud technologies. During the assessment phase for how to make our day-to-day lives easier, we chose an online document management service (SmartVault) an online bill payment service (Bill.com) and a CRM (SalesForce.com). They all met our core criteria of power, ease of use, and long-term corporate viability. They got us started straight away.
Our first goal was to make it easier to keep track of our key agreements. Our sales team collaborates on deals and SalesForce's attachment features allowed us to track all of the documentation – from quotation to contract. SmartVault made management of the remainder of our corporate documents a snap through its categorizing and storage folder/directory structure.
Next, we wanted to trim the amount of time we spent sending out documentation. The biggest savings opportunity for us at this point was bill payment. Bill.com reduced the time we spend each month by at least half. Our team is also much happier not having to stuff envelopes.
The efficiencies we've found have made us hungry for more. We're inspecting every extra movement in our operation and are working through how we can make them better. Two of the bottlenecks we're working are document scanning and email. These processes don't scale well and our email boxes, despite our best efforts, continue to be more congested than we'd like. What we're looking for is a better way to collect documents from our team and distribute them to the systems we use.
Fortunately, cloud computing solutions are collaborating with one another more and more every day. For example, SalesForce.com created their AppExchange to allow developers to offer solutions that complement their core offering and hundreds of companies now participate. The document management providers we see in the market are following suit, and we see the potential for a new wave of productivity gains on the near horizon. The key is for developers to continue engaging their customers as participants.
Our company has always focused on building the systems that we would want to use. Along the way we have partnered with many companies that share that core value, as well as a spirit of collaboration. We continue to work with our software vendors and partners to find ways to make handling the day-to-day grind a little easier and a little more enjoyable. As we see the work being done by the cloud community, we remain amazed by the rapid progress and the transformational benefits it offers. If I were a gambler, I'd be long on cloud and short on filing cabinets.
