"Everything we do, we do differently than we did 18 months ago. We've reengineered the entire firm to change the client experience," said John Ohmer, CEO of YellowBrickRoad Financial Advisors. "It's made portfolio reporting and financial advising completely different than anything we've ever experienced."

What John and his team did was to go boldly to a place where they had not gone before...that place is called the cloud.

Investment banking is complex enough, anyone alive in 2008 can attest to that. Now couple that with the difficulty of sharing information in a secure and compliant way across offices and firewalls. That's the situation THiNKGREEN! Global Advisors was looking at before it made its move to the cloud.

"We used to have our own server but that was pretty dicey. It was usually reliable until it wasn't. If that went down, everything went to a standstill...Now we know that all of our documents are always available and safe in NetDocuments. Our whole idea was to be entirely in the cloud to eliminate wasted resources which bodes well with our green tech push." - Asmaa Parker, banking associate.

The integration between Nuance PDF Converter Enterprise 7.1 and NetDocuments has just been revamped and I'm here to tell you about it.

Nuance PDF Converter Enterprise 7.1 lets legal firms convert, edit, share, and create PDF files, including the ability to redact, bates stamp, and quickly combine documents of any type with simple drag-and-drop into a single PDF. The NetDocuments connector provides an out-of-the box configuration to display a NetDocuments Save toolbar option. This allows a user to intuitively save a PDF file directly into NetDocuments, then select the desired matter-centric location to store the document. The connector is included in PDF Converter Enterprise 7.1, and works for all NetDocuments users without any additional installation of software or fee.

Thousands of lawyers, accountants, financial advisors and more use NetDocuments everyday to securely manage and share their content from the cloud. Salesforce CRM users are another fast growing constituency among NetDocuments users.

In fact, NetDocuments is the most popular all-time document management system among Salesforce users.

Since 2006, when NetDocuments first released its AppExchange integration, the rich customizable platform of Salesforce and NetDocuments has allowed the applications to be tightly integrated for all types of customers, including enterprise-level organizations such as Extra Space® Storage, as well as hundreds of financial service advisory, consulting and legal firms.

Extra Space Storage's business revolves around earth-based self storage units, but that doesn't keep it from using the cloud to make its business go.

With 2,200 employees spread out at self-storage locations around the country it uses NetDocuments to manage and share all of its documents within Salesforce.com in a simple and user-friendly way.

It adds over 5,000 documents a week that are instantly made available to the corporate office in Salt Lake City as well as the majority of employees that are working in their local communities.

NetDocuments has long been integrated with Salesforce.com and thousands of our joint users have leveraged this tight integration to manage all of their client data from one secure place in the cloud.

This video tells the story of Reggie, a small business owner, who sees the light when he sends he sends his documents to the cloud and manages them in Salesforce.

Let us know how you are using cloud. Find us on Twitter at @NetDocuments or drop us a line in the comments section.

Sure, most of us enjoy holding hands with the people we love, e.g., our significant others, children or grandchildren. But do we really like holding our IT person's hand? Or, for that matter, do IT staff really like holding the hands of those in their organization? My guess: umm, not so much. So, cue the NetDocuments New User Interface…

<See more screenshots at http://www.netdocuments.com/start/2011/>

Remember recess in elementary? That's right, a hundred kids running at full speed in different directions, headed for unknown destinations, totally oblivious of who would be there and why? Exciting, yes. Fun, yes. Total mayhem, you bet. The Cloud Computing industry is growing at a break-neck pace, recess is out, and it's time to make some sense of the chaos.

Collaboration is a broad and well trodden topic; in fact, it was Salesforce.com's theme at their event of the year, titled "Collabor8". But just because Salesforce.com can throw around phrases like "collaborative software", or taking a "collaborative approach" in their business vernacular, it doesn't make it any easier to grasp in a real sense, nor to implement in a real-life, competitive and fast-paced environment, especially if your business has nothing to do with Salesforce.com.