Salesforce helped pioneer the concept of putting confidential organizational data in a "public cloud" system.  Other key vendors offering public cloud data services include Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3 services. "Cloud" has come to mean  many things to many people as far as putting internal office functions up on the Internet. The word “public” is important to understand. This means that all data--every corporate and nonprofit user--sits in one enormous database. This is in fact a reassurance, not a drawback.  

Back in September, Peter Campbell kicked off a discussion about project management in the idealware.org blog. I wanted to pick up the thread by focusing in on Basecamp. Among project management-related tools, Basecamp has the buzz. It is quite common when we start a new project, that someone from the team involved will have used it and know their way around it.  

Moving our office this summer, we ended up having a gap between moving out and moving in. I got many questions about what we did with all our servers while bridging the gap. Fact is, though we use many such things, most of it is out there in the “cloud.”