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Aspasia Cloud Informational Series – No.16 Why Google Docs?
A CORE DIFFERENTIATOR with Aspasia Cloud is its total integration with the increasingly popular and widely used suite of Internet based applications called ‘Google Apps’. In this edition we consider the way in which one part of that suite, Google Docs, can facilitate easier and improved communications with customers and prospects alike. For those who are unfamiliar with Google Docs, it is basically an Internet or ‘Cloud’ based repository where users can create, store and share anything from conventional documents such as letters, details sheets, spreadsheets and presentations to virtually any type of other file such as audio, video or anything currently up to a limit of 1Gb for each file. All such items uploaded to Google Docs can be organised into collections (or folders) and access to a collection or any individual item contained therein can be controlled and shared amongst any contacts or groups as desired. Indeed many readers will be very familiar with Google Docs whilst browsing the web for products or services where suppliers often store product information ranging from user manuals to things like maps, plans and comments about local planning applications. All these items can typically be viewed online or downloaded as desired with very generous storage limits which can always be extended extremely cheaply.
Anytime, Anywhere... Apart from the very easy to use and extremely
powerful sharing facilities of Google Docs, one of the real benefits is the ability to access (and often edit) any document anywhere at anytime and from virtually any device such as a desktop computer, a tablet computer or a smartphone where Google provide an appropriate “app” for most commonly used devices. And it is here that the real benefit can be appreciated by agents who in many cases are away from the office environment for a significant proportion of their day. An agent might be talking to a prospect, customer or supplier on the telephone and wish to share a document immediately with that person in the form of an emailed link. However, the vast majority of conventional documents in use by agents contain information that is invariably stored within their own
software solution and takes the form of items such as letters, detail sheets and inventories and Google Docs, being Internet based, does not currently have the facility to automatically merge external data as we are used to doing with desktop products like Microsoft Word. So this merging of data is automatically done within Aspasia Cloud before the resultant document is electronically forwarded to Google Docs. In fact, a copy is kept within Aspasia Cloud’s Oracle database as well as on Google Docs and the combination of the two means that agents have unparalleled methods to communicate information with their contacts. All this means that we can do things like assign a collection within Google Docs to a property and call it, say, ‘25 Acacia Avenue’ and this folder can hold sub folders or any items related to that property whatsoever. Again, the whole collection or individual items within it can be made instantly available to anyone you wish to whilst maintaining a paperless system and its associated savings. If the recipient wishes to have a printed copy they can generate it themselves or they can download it and use it in any way they wish. Not only is this a significant advance in terms of the service an agency can provide to their customer but it also represents a large saving in staff time and consumable costs. And of course if there is a need to do things in the old conventional way this can also be easily accomplished and it is likely that agents will wish to accommodate individual customers and prospects in this respect according to their personal preferences. More relevant to internal agency use, Google Docs also has the most sophisticated but easy to
Aspasia Cloud is the first fully integrated cloud technology software solution for agents involved with residential sales, lettings and property management. This informational series has been designed to explain how the software differs from other solutions and what that means for agents who use it.
For further information and to read previous articles in the series, please go to
www.aspasia.net.
PROPERTYdrum AUGUST 2011 35
use mechanism for collaborative document creation whereby several users can work on a single shared document online in real time or at their own convenience where an automatic revision history is kept for easy review. This facility has a multitude of uses where, perhaps, an agent wants to collaborate with their legal advisor on the drawing up of a new tenancy agreement or developing a contract with a supplier where the old method of emailing revised copies to each other is no longer necessary. Indeed the whole concept of email attachments can be largely confined to history as we now have much smarter and easy to use collaborative opportunities.
SPreAdSheetS And mAPS Google Docs also includes the facility to create
spreadsheets and presentations which, being online, can be embedded within web sites or used individually as desired. An often overlooked aspect of Google Docs is a very clever online drawing tool where quite sophisticated maps and plans can be produced to perhaps supplement property information and be placed into the collections referred to above as desired. All this means that the agent who really wants
to stand out from the competition now has a new very effective marketing tool in their armoury – the ability to display a significantly enhanced set of property sales and marketing collateral. And for existing customers, particularly within lettings, the opportunities to increase the level of service by making information more readily available are now almost limitless. Whatever aspect of the integration of Aspasia
Cloud and Google Docs may appeal to any particular agent the key benefit is the opportunity to streamline the business, differentiate the agency from the competition in the marketplace and ultimately to achieve greater success than might otherwise have been the case. Google Docs is just one element of Google Apps and hopefully these articles have begun to explain why the whole integration of Google’s ‘cloud’ based services are so crucial to helping us create in Aspasia Cloud a product so different to other conventional residential property solutions.
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