Online applications to make you more productive this holiday season!

As the holiday winter break fast approaches, you are no doubt curious about how to improve your productivity at work with what time you have left. Never fear - Josh’s list of online apps is here with free features to delight and amaze.

These days the number of great free web applications is truly amazing.

I want to share with you some free tools that will let you store files, backup your computer, send huge files to people, and give you secure remote access to your computer.

No doubt you have a gmail.com account - no longer is it restricted to be used for email.

Now that Google has increased the available space from 2gbs to 5gbs (enough for a DVD) it is big enough that you can use it as a hard drive to store files.

The easiest way to do this is to use the Firefox (www.firefox.com) web browser, and install an addon called gspace - available from http://www.getgspace.com/. This will give you a web interface to upload and download files to your free gmail space. It’s free, and works on Macs and Windows.

This is good for big project files you want to take home (and can’t find your usb key) - but not a good way for daily backup. To handle daily backup of your key files - which should be less than 2GBs - there is mozy.com - to sign up click here - https://mozy.com/?ref=9HAZY1 to get an extra 256MBs of backup space. Mozy installs itself on your computer and lets you select a private key to encrypt your data and which files to back up. That’s it. Of course when disaster strikes and you need to restore you have several ways to do it. It’s free and works on Macs and Windows.

We have looked at storing big files in gmail, backing up your computer, now let’s look at emailing big files. These days file sizes are getting bigger, and we still need to share them with other people. However, network administratos frown on sending large attachments through email, as it slows down everyones email, and uses up valuable email server disk space. So what can you do?

Use www.sendthisfile.com! Another free service, it allows you to upload files of any size, as an email attachment in their system. You then specify the subject, body, and the recipients and the servce then sends the emails with a link to download the files. Fast free and painless. Because it’s web based it is completely cross platform, running on Macs and Windows.

Finally - have you heard about www.logmein.com? The free remote access solution to your computer? Have you ever needed a way to get to your computer at home from work? or to your work computer from home? Need something that punches through even the toughest of firewalls? (I know a dubious feature - but logmein.com is very secure.) Then you need to check out www.logmein.com. Note - even though you sign up for the free version, they still sign you up for the paid version. To correct this be sure to update your subscription preference to free and you will be able to keep using the product for years to come.

Hopefully - this list of free web goodness will put a smile on your face, and some cheer in your heart, just in time for the season of giving!