To digress slightly from my usual blogging subjects, I came across a very interesting model today, which attempts a grand conceptualization excercise. Rather grandly titled "The Grand Collaboration Convergence", it attempts to make sense of the chaotic mix of saas solutions marketed as "online collaboration" software.
click to enlarge
GMail now allows you to open the Word attachments in your mail (.doc, .docx) right from your browser, even if you don't have MS Word installed locally.
There is a "view" button beside your attachment which opens it in a browser.
A much wanted feature has been added to Google Apps, as Christopher Dawson reported yesterday. Google Apps now supports management of multiple domains from a centralized Google Apps administrative panel. At first viewing, this new development brings great relief to administrators, who have to manage separate domains within the same organization from separate consoles.
For example, it is not uncommon for a college to have Google Apps on separate domains for students, teachers and administrative staff. Or for a company to have separate domains for different divisions. Part of the reason is that the management wants separate groups to have access to dedicated email extensions, and separate information and Google Apps modules.
1. Introduction 2. Mail Client 3. Mobile Support 4. Access Options . 5. Calendars, Contacts, Tasks 6. Folders vs. Labels 7. Collaboration Features . 8. Exchange Alternatives 9. Conclusion
Google Apps may hold only a miniscule portion of the messaging market, with only around 1m odd users, but slowly and surely, one win at a time, it is spreading its reach.
In continuation of this trend, Google has bagged a contract with The Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The laboratory plans to move all of its 5,000 e-mail users to Google Apps by this summer. It has already migrated around half of those users from Sun Microsystem's email system.
One of the main arguments presented against Google Apps in the enterprise is a lack of the ability to implement policy controls and fine grained permissions to data. And to a certain extent, this holds true. For example, you cannot share contacts with specific groups, Google Apps Sync does not allow you shared group calendars within Outlook, there are no shared tasks and so on.
But in its continuing effort to make its suite more robust, and incorporate feedback, Google just introduced new sharing options within Google Docs. The new options are as follows:-
Memeo launched today what the media is describing as the Memeo's take on the "GDrive". GDrive is the much anticipated service everybody expected Google to launch on the lines of Microsoft's SkyDrive, an online service which allows you to store large amounts of data online.
Although Google never launched the GDrive, Memeo has called its new service the GDrive, a drive which integrates and fits into the local file structure of both Windows Explorer and the OS X finder. Formerly Memeo users could access Google Docs right on their desktop using Memeo's client, but now the GDrive lets them drag and drop upload files and folders to their Google Docs account. On the other hand, they can open and edit Google Docs files locally like any other file.
As Clint Boulton reported in eWeek earlier, Serena Software further elaborated on the reasons for which it left Google Apps for Microsoft, again. For those who don’t understand “again”, Serena had earlier migrated from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps back in 2008 because it offered a juicy saving of $750,000. The whole thing sounds like getting divorced and remarrying the same person.
Back then, Google packaged and advertised Serena’s migration to Google Apps as a major enterprise win. Serena seemed to be having a good time with Google Apps, but all was obviously not well as it suddenly decided to go back to Microsoft a few weeks earlier. It chose to opt for BPOS, Microsoft’s cloud solution including SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and LiveMeeting.
Today, Microsoft made Office Web Apps available for everybody to check out, use, collaborate or do whatever they want with it. This closely follows Microsoft's May 12 launch of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.
Users just need to access their live.com account, and will find options that allow them to start creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
As the software-as-a-service debate gathered momentum over the past couple of years, one of the main arguments presented against the numerous benefits of SaaS was security. In a world where systems around the world are subject to hack attacks daily, how could you trust a third party with your enterprise data, and share it over a public network as the internet? This still remains one of the major concerns of companies today.
Over the past few years mature SaaS companies have done a commendable job of winning trust for the SaaS model, and a lot of credit is due to Google as well. In a further step, Google today released a Google Apps security white paper documenting in detail all the security arrangements, procedures and protocols in place to secure the business data of its customers. To quote from the accompanying Google blog entry:-
Googleappsbuzz, as the name suggests, is designed for anyone who is interested in Google Apps, especially for businesses - users, potential users, experts or just lay geeks who can't get enough of Google Apps. This site will bring you up to the minute opinions, news, reviews, expert reviews, resources, articles, how-tos, videos on the subject.
The Google Bee (that's me) would love to get your feedback, or hear from you if you think your resource deserves to be included in the site. You can contact me at gb (at) googleappsbuzz (dot) com.
