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.

Nothing in life is certain, except death, taxes, and the T3 Technology Conference being the the go-to spot for financial services technology.

David Drucker and Joel Bruckenstein are the brainchildren behind the T3 conference and will be taking their talents to Weston, FL for the 2011 event being held February 16-19. This is the sixth year that the duo has been running the conference and they are extremely excited to see what new innovations will be discussed during this year's show.

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.

Standing with a fist raised in the air, chanting "Bernard come back, Bernard come back", I felt as though I was in a positive mental attitude, MLM event, getting geared up for yet another year of break-neck sales.

But no, thank goodness…I was one of the 30,000 attendees at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event in San Francisco participating in a Marc Benioff marketing stunt to combat Microsoft Dynamics guerilla marketing tactics with their "I Didn't Get Forced" campaign.

This week I had a good discussion about technology for financial advisors with Bill Winterberg, one of the most technology forward minds in the Financial services market. Before joining the finance world, Bill was a software engineer for Hewlett Packard and this background in technology has allowed him to become a thought leader in the industry.

Bill currently writes technology columns for Morningstar Advisor, Advisors4Advisors.com as well as on his own blog called FP Pad. You can also find him doing his thing on Twitter from @BillWinterberg.

Part I: SaaS for Lawyers; Part II: SaaS for Financial Advisors; Part III: SaaS for Accountants

With SaaS technology, the PC can be made to serve as a global network. Today, in part 2 of a 3 part series, we will discuss how financial advisors and broker dealers can reduce hardware costs, decrease their carbon footprint, increase mobility and enable collaboration with clients while providing SEC and FINRA compliance through cloud computing and SaaS.

Tomorrow in New York, Microsoft is releasing its latest edition of Office 2010 Web Apps which, in my mind, will mark Microsoft's full acceptance of the SaaS software delivery model. Furthermore, Microsoft's development of web applications for the cash cow that is MS Office, officially shifts the standard from legacy software to SaaS.

In an interview with USA Today, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com said, "We're entering an entirely new paradigm." This new paradigm is one where businesses and consumers alike are no longer bound to physical locations or forced to use complex technology to manage networks and files but freed to move about freely in the clouds. About this paradigm shift, ECM chief executive Joe Tucci said, "We're now going through what I believe is pretty much going to be the biggest wave in the history of information technology.''

Post Authored by Leonard Johnson, VP Marketing, NetDocuments

Leonard Johnson and Marc Duncan attended T3 Conference in La Jolla, California this past week on February 17th to the 20th. We not only enjoyed beautiful, warm weather at the Hilton La Jolla Hotel adjacent to the world-class Torrey Pines Golf Course, but more importantly we enjoyed visiting with many of our customers and consultants of this prestigious financial investment advisory industry. Marc works closely with our customers and prospective customers in this industry and he stated, "it was like a family reunion." We have wonderful customers who are great to work with and we greatly appreciate their business.

NetDocuments was recently reviewed in the t3 newsletter which deals with technology for financial services professionals. It was written by David Drucker who, along with Joel Bruckenstein, administer the t3 conference and newsletter. Along with running t3, David Drucker is also a journalist, speaker, financial advisor, pit bull rescuer, biker, classic car nut, gadget geek, and bluesman.

In his recent article titled, "A Sampling of Client Portals," Drucker reviewed four different products that provide client portal functionality for financial advisors. The four products reviewed were Advisorsites, Family Office Network, NetDocuments and Make It A Good Day.