Articles about Google Apps

Steve Ballmer's departure from Microsoft will be a series of epitaphs written over the coming months. Many arm-chair pundits and analysts will scrutinize his 13-year tenure as chief executive, and you can expect him to be the scapegoat for all things wrong with Microsoft. Most assuredly, Ballmer could have done many things better, but he also contended with forces out of his control: government oversight for anti-competitive practices conducted under predecessor Bill Gates' leadership; maturing PC software market; and rise of the Internet as the new computing hub, among others.

For all Microsoft's CEO might have done wrong, he was right about something dismissed by many -- and I among them: Google. Ballmer started treating the search and information company as a competitive threat about a decade ago. Google as Microsoft competitor seemed simply nuts in 2003. How could search threaten Windows, particularly when anyone could type a new web address to change providers? Ballmer was obsessed, chasing every Google maneuver, often to a fault. Execution could have been better, but his perception was right.

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For those in the States, the mad dash to compliance is unquestionably on. After years of taking a "wait and see" approach to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations surrounding medical office technology, healthcare providers (and related covered entities) are scrambling to get their systems and procedures in order. Big Brother has officially set a September 23, 2013 deadline for most new rules that put into place heightened protocols for how patient information (PI) is shared as well as how notifications about breaches need to be handled, among other things.

Naturally, a lot of my consulting clients in the healthcare industry are reaching out for professional help on how to get their IT systems in line as these deadlines approach. One of the biggest facets of the new HIPAA laws, which affects companies like mine that provide hands-on IT consulting, is that for the first time ever we are being considered "covered entities" in the same boat as the healthcare outlets themselves.

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As if moving to shiny new headquarters in Austin, Texas, wasn’t enough to keep the firm busy, Spanning Cloud Apps has just added a raft of features to Spanning Backup for Google Apps, its enterprise-class data protection solution.

The Spanning Backup Summer ’13 Release adds functions designed to help large organizations protect, manage and repair their Google Apps data, handle large user bases, and comply with complex regulatory and policy requirements.

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Migrating data between two Google accounts is not the easiest of tasks -- there's no simple switch that one can flip. Folks have to use various tools provided by the search giant to move a Google+ profile with circles, backup important emails and Drive content or transfer the Voice number and data. Based on my experience, it takes quite a bit of time too.

This makes it especially problematic for business users who wish to seamlessly migrate data from a standard Google account to Google Apps. Backupify wants to address this issue with the latest update for its Migrator tool, released today, which now introduces support for Google to Google Apps (and vice-versa) migrations.

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The war for the hearts and minds of potential cloud email users at organizations worldwide is far from over. Both Microsoft and Google are winning small field skirmishes for their respective corners over the past few years. Most recently, Microsoft won huge contracts with the State of Texas and the City of Chicago moving to Office 365's vision for the cloud. Conversely, Google Apps chalked up big converts in the form of CBC Radio Canada and the US National Archives.

UK business technology website Computing.co.uk has published the results of a survey it ran across 160 IT decision makers from organizations of all shapes and sizes. While the survey sheds light on numerous opinions surrounding the major cloud email platforms, its most shocking finding is that a whopping 37 percent of organizations moving to the cloud for email are opting for Office 365 over all the major players. Other cloud vendors included in the survey results were Google Apps, Apple iWork, and QuickOffice.

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Like many Gmail users, I greeted the news of the introduction of tabs to the interface with a degree of anticipation -- now it was just a matter of waiting for the feature to roll out so I could try it for myself. Earlier today I was randomly signed out of my Gmail account, and after signing back in and checking the settings menus, I could see that tabs were now available to me. Excitement was short-lived, however; it quickly became apparent that this new feature is a disaster.

On the face of it, there's a lot to be said in favor of adding tabs to one's inbox. The idea is that emails that match certain criteria are automatically sorted so your inbox is easier to manage. I have an enormous number of filters configured that sort and label messages but the prospect of having a series of tabs to access certain types of mail was definitely appealing.

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Last week at Google's annual I/O conference in San Francisco the web giant launched a new feature called quick actions for Gmail which recognizes certain types of messages and lets you take immediate action on them directly from the inbox -- RSVP to an invitation, or quickly see flight info for example.

Third-party developers are able to add their own actions, and OrangeScape announces it is doing exactly that with its self-service workflow builder, KiSSFLOW.

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Over five million businesses currently use Google Apps -- a number that is growing all the time -- and while getting to grips with the cloud-based productivity suite is fairly easy, there will always be some staff members who struggle.

Toronto-based Synergyse, a startup comprised of former Google employees, hopes to make it easy for everyone to get the most out of Google’s suite by providing training directly inside each application.

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Many American schools may be gaga for iPads, but elsewhere Google Apps and Chromebooks' affordability are winning educators. Today, the search and information giant reveals that Malaysia will roll out Apps to "10 million students, teachers and parents", Felix Lin, director of product management, explains. "As part of this initiative they are also deploying Chromebooks to primary and secondary schools nationwide".

In the Malaysian Ministry of Education report, I don't see this number but reference to 10,000 schools and separate ones identifying "2.9 million students enrolled in primary school" and "2.3 million students enrolled in lower and upper secondary school". The current, official student tally from the Ministry's website is 5.23 million students. Including teachers and parents likely explains the larger number.

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Backupify is introducing an enhanced set of backup and recovery features designed to support its core offering for enterprise-level organizations on Google Apps. The "Spring Release for Google Apps" includes tools built to offer more efficient ways for administrators and end-users to manage their backups within larger organizations.

The update, which builds on the Winter Release launched last December, adds the following advanced data recovery and admin controls:

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We all know software vendors have vested interests that sway some of the decisions they make. When I heard that Microsoft was the real driving force behind a sly K-12 school privacy bill making the rounds in Massachusetts, I immediately smelled something rotten. While the public purpose behind the bill aims squarely at protecting student privacy, it's not hard to connect the dots back to Redmond, Wash.

Even though it's easy to see why Microsoft would prop up such a bill (to ease Google Apps' rise in the K-12 educational market), I question the long-term business sense of such dirty grandstanding. Microsoft's Office 365 for Education is already free for students and staff of any qualifying school district (just like Google Apps), and the suite is pretty darn good competition for Google on technical and functional merit alone. So what's the sense in playing dirty just to sign on a few more seats here or there based on misinformation?

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If you surveyed the different directions K-12 school districts take in the United States, you'd find nothing less than a hodgepodge of technologies. The mess that was known as "Novell Hell" universally bows down to a diverse array of technologies including Active Directory, campus-wide Wi-Fi, iPads, Chromebooks, and a little bit of everything else in between. While it's reassuring that most districts I'm in discussions with are moving to cloud-based Google Apps or Office 365 for their email, the end-user device side of things is murkier.

I'm not going to call myself an expert in K-12 technology and policy, but seeing that I spent the last four years supporting and training users' technology needs at my former high school district, I've got good experience understanding the issues affecting teachers and students alike. After attending educational tech conferences year after year, the common consensus stands: everyone in education knows where they want to be, but the paths some of them take to get there are muddled with too much idealism and not enough realism.

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When Google first introduced the world to Gmail back in 2004, its 1GB of free storage space for messages seemed unbelievably generous. How times change. Since then of course, it’s upped the figure to 10GB, but for a lot of people that’s nowhere near enough. Businesses get a much more substantial 25GB through Google Apps, but even that can be restrictive -- especially if you have to send, receive and store a lot of large attachments.

Cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery firm Backupify can’t do anything about the lack of space for consumers, but it is offering a new free solution for firms. FreeSpace actively monitors the amount of space available in Google Apps Gmail accounts and makes it easy to free up as much space as you need, whenever you need it.

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The competition in the Google Apps backup market is steadily ramping up, with more than a few contenders jumping in lately to have a piece of this newfound need. Just two months ago, I wrote about my (mostly) positive thoughts regarding Apps backup provider Backupify. But in order to do the competition justice, I decided to give the other popular alternative Spanning a run for the money.

Your choices don't stop at Spanning and Backupify, in case you're wondering. Google stepped into the backup arena with its first party Vault solution earlier last year, which takes the crown for being the  most integrated option (for apparent reasons.) Some of the junior vendors in this space also include CloudAlly and SysCloudSoft. These two latter providers try to edge out Spanning and Backupify with better pricing, but they are not yet as established so it is tough to judge them on cost comparison alone.

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While the cloud generally provides for better reliability than on-premise systems, having a solid backup plan is still a universal necessity. Cloud solutions like Google Apps and Office 365 have nearly eliminated the notion of data loss due to technological failure. The systems and processes in place that govern the storage of your important data with players like Google and Microsoft are rock solid. We can fault providers for service downtime any day of the week; but you'll be hard pressed to read about cases where they actually lost your data.

The biggest issue with data loss on cloud platforms lies within the acute problem of human error. We aren't perfect and will likely always be dealing with data loss stemming from incorrect clicks, mistaken deletion, and other similar circumstances. For this very reason, even with its inherent safety nets, the cloud needs a fallback of its own.

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