Articles about Cloud

Microsoft on Monday rolled out the stable release of Windows Intune 2.0, the latest version of the company's new browser-based remote PC management suite that has been in beta for the last three months.

This version of Windows Intune enhances the UI from the first version and adds a handful of user-requested features, most notably the improved ability to deploy software to remote PCs from a cloud storage account.

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We asked, and you surprised us with your answers. Many of you don't think much of iCloud. But perhaps you got off to a bad start because of the glitchy launch. First impressions are so important in any new relationship.

Yesterday, Apple flipped the switch on iCloud in conjunction with a rash of supporting software updates, including iOS 5. Getting those updates was no easy matter, as Ed Oswald reported yesterday and many of you also shared. iCloud is Apple's new connected synchronization service, which replaces iTunes as major sync hub and offers a rash of new capabilities. But to really get it, many of you have to persevere through more updates than I've seen necessary from Apple in years. The service also isn't working quite right for many of you, in a cascade of glitches that reminds of the catastrophic launch of MobileMe three years ago.

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Early this afternoon, Apple flipped the switch making iCloud and its next-version mobile operating system broadly available. To use one you'll need the other, and for Mac owners that also means OS X 10.7.2. If you didn't get iTunes 10.5 yesterday, you'll need it, too.

In many respects, the big news from Apple this week isn't iPhone 4S, no matter how long the buying lines might be come Friday, but iCloud and iOS 5. As I contended earlier today: "iCloud is Apple's killer app". iCloud is a synchronization service that pushes email, contacts and calendars -- like predecessor MobileMe -- and offers online data storage. But there's much more, such as synchronization of applications or digital content like music and movies purchased from the App Store across devices. It's unsurprising that Apple would take a sync-across devices approach. After all, the company generates most of its revenue from selling hardware, not offering cloud services.

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In March 2008, I wrote at Microsoft Watch: "Synchronization is today's killer application. It's either kill or be killed. If Microsoft doesn't strike the deadly blow first, Google will". Google got sync right first, but sometimes latecomers are the talk of the party, as Apple is today with the release of iCloud.

I'm not sure how many people get what iCloud is -- and more importantly what it is not. The service isn't an online storage space like DropBox. iCloud is fundamentally a synchronization service -- more importantly a push sync service. It's the feature many iOS device users will find they can't do without, and it's every company's dream product: Something that locks users into a broader platform, as Microsoft did with file formats and Office during the 1980s and 1990s.

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Today, Apple releases iCloud and iOS 5, two days before iPhone 4S launches in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom and United States. The new operating system is a significant upgrade that can be installed on iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. iOS 5 works in tandem with iCloud, which is Apple's Internet-enabled synchronization service; it replaces iTunes as the company's major sync hub.

We're crowdsoucing our initial reviews, and I ask for your first take ahead of anything that we might do. If you've got something to say about either iCloud or iOS 5 -- or both -- we'd like to get it right away. If you've tested either or both before their release, we request your full or mini-review even sooner.

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CTIA Enterprise & Applications kicked off today in San Diego with a brief tribute to Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who died last week. CTIA President Steve Largent praised Apple's move into the smartphone market, also calling it "disruptive".

Dan Hesse, Sprint CEO, then took the stage -- the first of three chief executives. He checked off wireless industry accomplishments, such as the year's many natural disasters or the Arab Spring that toppled governments across Northern Africa and the Middle East. "We make a difference in the lives of nearly every person on earth", he asserted.

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Comodo has launched its online backup solution -- releasing a new dedicated desktop client, Comodo Online Storage, as well as updating its desktop backup tool, Comodo Backup, to version 4.0.6.

Comodo Backup 4.0.6, which had been split into separate free and paid-for versions during its beta testing phase, has been released as a single, free tool in the same manner as its predecessor, version 3 was, which will please those who had championed it as one of the best free backup tools available for Windows.

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As the Friendly Giant used to say: "Look up, look waaaaay up!" Today Apple officially launched iCloud, its provocative synchronization service, during the "Let's talk about iPhone" event. The new service is available to all supported devices running iOS 5 or Mac OS X. Apple also launched iOS 5 today.

Today's launch event is a crucial coming-out party for Tim Cook as new CEO. He replaced Steve Jobs in August. Jobs is legendary for the so-called "reality-distortion field", a seemingly hypnotic effect where Apple's cofounder makes almost any new product announcement magical. Jobs is a master of selling aspiration, of making people, well some, believe that Apple's new this or that will make their lives better. Cook has presented before, but never with so much expectation -- or anticipation -- around him.

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LaCie’s online backup service Wuala has been updated to build 368, codenamed Hirslanden. The biggest change of note is the removal of storage trading, which previously allowed users to give up free space on their hard drive in return for free online storage.

This news, which has angered many Wuala users, appears to be caused by a switch from UDP to TCP networking, a move Wuala claims will make the service more stable, but which makes trading storage impossible for security reasons. Anticipating a backlash, LaCie has announced that any earned storage through trading will remain free for 12 months, at which point it promises a “generous rebate” for those who wish to keep this storage.

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>Watch out Tumblrs and WordPress bloggers, Adobe just announced that it has acquired font-subscription service TypeKit. Is it the end of cheap web fonts?

TypeKit founder and CEO Jeffrey Veen is "thrilled. There honestly is no better place for us to continue building our platform. But perhaps even more significantly, this represents a huge step forward in bringing fonts to the web".

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Whoa, think enterprises are rushing to the cloud? Think again. It's still early days and slow going. Seventy percent have used software-as-a-service projects for less than three years, says Gartner. That's less time than consumer cloud services like Facebook and Twitter have been around or even Apple's iPhone. One-third of organizations have migration plans in place -- from on-premise to SaaS solutions. Among those enterprises already in the cloud in some way, 95 percent plan to maintain SaaS investments or increase them.

Gartner surveyed 525 organizations from nine countries -- in June and July. That may seem like old data but at the pace enterprises make IT changes, it's current; the survey might as well have been taken yesterday. :) Organizations adopting SaaS cite two major reasons: ease/speed of deployments and lower costs. Global economic crisis is a major factor driving SaaS adoption. Perhaps it's no coincidence that the US stock market collapsed three years ago last week, and the majority of enterprises started deploying SaaS solutions since.

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The new math that analysts use to make predictions is sometimes amazing to comprehend. Gartner predicts that so-called cloud email and collaboration services (CECS) have reached a "tipping point" based on projected 10 percent enterprise adoption by 2014. So it's not even 10 percent yet, but, hey, that's okay, enterprises are rushing to the cloud. Or are they?

I'm a big proponent of cloud computing, and have predicted the big push to cloud-connected devices for years. But even I have to gape in wonder at the concept of 10 percent in three years being a "tipping point".

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There are plenty of free online storage providers around, but most provide only one or two gigabytes of space in their basic accounts: not much, by modern standards.

Minus stands out, though, by offering a whole 10GB, free of charge. The service supports files up to 2GB in size; these can be private, shared individually through links, or entirely open to public view; and there are no transfer limits, very useful if you’ve large files you’d like to distribute and you’re worried about potential bandwidth costs. And these are just some of the plus points of the Minus service.

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Today, Microsoft dropped the other ball during the second big BUILD developer conference keynote. The company is releasing Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview and Windows Server 8 Developer Preview. The software will be available for MSDN subscribers.

Yesterday, Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows & Windows Live division, formally unveiled Windows 8, which is available in a developer preview you can download now. Today, Jason Zander, vice president for the Visual Studio team, connected the dots to developing apps supporting Azure services also connected to Windows Phone 7.5. He created the Windows 8 Metro-style game pictured above.

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That's the takeaway from Gartner, which has released a forecast for Social CRM. While the market is expected to generate $1 billion in revenue next year, there are more than 100 vendors competing, the majority of which are unprofitable or take in less than $1 million. The market is growing, but it's too small for the number of participants. Social CRM accounts for just 5 percent of the total client-relationship management market.

The problem is customer adoption. "Until recently, many companies have treated social CRM as a series of experiments and tactical purchases", Adam Sarner, Gartner research director, says in a statement. "Few have a social CRM strategy or established metrics to measure its effect on hard business results. Different departments, employees and managers implement different types of applications for different purposes.

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