On-line Tools for Startups

I am an small business owner. We are virtual team and use many on-line tools. These are ones that we actually pay for and use everyday:

• Calendar: WebEx, Central Desktop
• Contacts: WebEx, Central Desktop
• Design: Lucky Oliver for photos
• Logo Design: Logo Company, Logoworks
• Managing Money: Quickbooks
• Wiki, On-line Docs & Spreadsheets: Central Desktop
• Project Management: Central Desktop
• To Do List: Central Desktop
• Website: WordPress, Website Grader
• Web Meetings: Central Desktop, Slide Live, WebEx, Free Conference
• Email Campaigns: iContact, Constant Contact
• On-line Surveys: iContact, Survey Monkey
• On-line Event Registration: 123Signup
• Presentations: Powerpoint

I am looking for a good backup service and email.

Update Dec-11-2007 Rahul Pathak (http://www.rp0229.com/blog/) commented

Hi there,

Thanks for posting this – it’s awesome. I used Google Apps for Your Domain at Judy’s Book for email/calendaring/etc and I’m using it again for my new startup.

Looks like you’re fairly committed to Central Desktop, but perhaps Google Apps is worth it just for gmail.

Cheers,

Rahul

Rahul: we use GMail but found the Google Apps more languid than Central Desktop. It also lacks some key features compared to Central Desktop, in particular a real wiki style linking environment and an easy ability to clone a workspace. We use a lot of workspaces (for example for all of our clients, for workshop attendees, and for partners). This gets a lot of content and communication out of the inbox and into the wiki/workspace. Because we are typically working against a deadline in the workspace, the contention management features (which many other tools ignore) make it easy to avoid losing work or having to manually reconcile overlapping edits.

We are always interested in looking at new technology and open to upgrading, but we looked at a number of alternatives before consolidating onto Central Desktop for our workspaces. The two things we really need right now is a workspace that allows us to create content that is useful as a presentation (e.g. can output PowerPoint), can be used to create a document or workbook, and is also separate pages in a workspace. We find we need to present, hand out, and edit/update (typically in a collaborative fashion with clients/attendees) the same content. In edit/update mode it’s more useful to have the content burst into many pages, but we are then faced with turning it into a single document or slide deck.