It’s the second day of the poor weather conditions affecting the roads here in Wales, making travelling to work nigh on impossible. Thankfully, our staff are all equipped with internet access and email make working from home a viable option. With this is mind we thought we’d share some of the invaluable applications we tend to use. If you have any further suggestions feel free to leave a comment, we’d love to hear from you.

Dropbox
Dropbox
A cloud based file storage service which enables us to easily share and access files to team members and clients from a central resource. Another great benefit is that files are synchronised across multiple computers negating any confusion e.g. which file is the latest version.

Skype - Free internet phone calls
Skype
A software application that allows us to make video and voice calls over the internet, perfect for conference calls between clients and members of our team. Additionally, the app allows the ability to share files and send instant messages.

Harvest - Time tracking software
Harvest
Whether working at home due to the snow, from our office, or via our smartphones, Harvest provides us an easy way to track project time through its start and stop timers. Other features we use from the app are creating invoices, automatically pulling in project hours and expenses, exporting reports in CSV format and tasking which projects our team are to work upon.

Gmail
Gmail
A cloud based email service which we use to back-up our studio email accounts, thus giving us the ability to access all office emails wherever we are and on whatever device we have to hand.

YouSendIt - Send large files
YouSendIt
A secure app, which helps us send, receive and track large files sent to both clients and suppliers. You simply enter the recipients’ e-mail addresses, attach the file and send it; the recipients receive an e-mail notification with a URL that lets them download the file.

Spotify - Music
Spotify
Music tastes within the studio are eclectic to say the least so to cater for this problem we created a Spotify channel enabling each member of the team to add their own music to a playlist, which can be listened to within the studio or at home. However, as great an idea as this initially sounded it soon became evident that some of the tracks added were never going to have a universal appeal and multi-coloured headphones began sprouting themselves from every computer. Needless to say we’ve now ditched Spotify and now our solution is a first in, first to choose the internet radio station. However, should you have a team of like-minded musical souls then this may be an option to look at.