Cloud file servers
Cloud is a strange word to describe a whole host of technologies that have only one thing in common, they are hosted on the internet, rather than locally.
For the small businesses I serve, there are two areas worth their weight in gold:
- Hosted scheduling/email
- Hosted file storage and sharing
Think of the role an Exchange server plays in a larger company. You have a central place to manage email for all your employees, plus collaborate on schedules and tasks. For a number of years there have been companies hosting exchange servers in the cloud, so you don’t have to have a local one. These solutions are much more cost effective for all but the largest organizations, as Exchange servers are great when they work, and a nightmare to deal with if they are not properly managed by experts and experience a failure. These services run from about $6 per mailbox per month on the low-end, with offshore support and long hold times, to around $12.50 per month for very well managed, secure email with responsive, domestic support.
More recently, Google Apps Premier has come along at the bargain basement price of $50 per user per year. Offering similar capabilities, with the addition of up to 25GB per user, built-in sharing of Google Apps documents, and 1GB of general storage space per user, it’s a great value, and backed by a huge company. We use it internally, and have deployed it for a number of our customers.
However, if you want to share any kind of files, with server like control of who gets to see what, and whether they can change it or just view/download it, then you need a different kind of service. There are lots of players in this space, each with a different set of capabilities, but here are three to watch:
- Dropbox.com, this is designed primarily for personal file storage and sharing, you can use it to share with others, but it lacks sophistication in the area of setting up groups of people with different rights and privileges. A one person business can use it, but even most small businesses are going to find it limiting.
- Box.net, this is the 800lb gorilla of this type of service. It’s full featured, sophisticated, hooks into other services like salesforce.com, and offers an API to allow developers to build custom apps that integrate with it. It’s also a little more expensive, when compared to other players in the space. As an IT vendor, I also have some reservations about Box.net’s requirement that it contract directly with all my customers, if I decide it’s the best solution for them.
- Egnyte.com, we are strongly considering a reseller agreement with this company. Here’s why, it offers file storage, sharing, flexible group permissions, is reasonably priced, and also includes a huge amount of storage for remote backups. Like Box.net, it may be a little more complex than many small business people would wish, if they were planning to manage it themselves. We plan to integrate it with our other services, as a low-cost and flexible alternative to installing an in-house file server.
CAVEAT
What none of these services do is offer the ability to run client server applications. So you can’t move your QuickBooks or ACT databases onto them, and expect to be able to use the applications. Such applications move so much data between the PCs and the server that most internet connections will lock solid rather than run them. There’s another way to put such applications into the Cloud using server and workstation virtualization, but that’s a topic for another post.
Droid revisited
My Droid has passed from the shiny new toy stage into the workaday tool category, and it’s holding up pretty well. I found a couple of new tools that have made it considerably easier to live with:
- K9 mail, odd name, great replacement for the standard Android mail client. You can get more items on the page, better control over each mail item, and it’s a lot easier to clean out trash with the batch ops feature. Free from the marketplace.
- Dolphin Browser. While the standard Android browser is pretty good, Dolphin has two features that are addictive: it offers a tabbed interface, something I’ve loved since Firefox was first launched; it allows the pinch and spread zooming capabilities first seen on the iPod and iPhone 0 much easier (and cooler) than the +/- of the standard browser. It also offers custom gestures for opening new tabs, going back and forward, very helpful and a little like using Graffiti, for the old Treo/Palm users among you.
Not much more to report at this time, except that I no longer have iPhone envy. If Verizon introduced the iPhone tomorrow, I would pass, not enough advantage to consider switching.
Droid’s December 11th Update
Verizon/Google did fix a few things with the December 11th update. First, whe I turned on the phone early last Friday, it just ran the update. Didn’t take long, rebooted and there it was. Here are some of the highlights from an end-user viewpoint:
- Bigger time display
- Clearer action buttons for answering/rejecting calls. It would still be better if you could just push them rather than having to swipe them, but an improvement nonetheless.
- Visual VM now has a speaker button – still doesn’t recognize a bluetooth headset, but a step in the right direction.
- Easier to pick a contact and navigate to it. Fewer clicks and it seems to be more lenient about how precisely you press the location on the map to activate navigation. Still don’t understand why it won’t just go there right from the contact.
The voice dial thing still isn’t fixed, but the voice search seems to be finding the contacts better. Email still comes in at random unless you power cycle the phone.
Verizon, when’s the next update, and what will it fix?
A month with the Droid
Just over a month ago, the Motorola Droid arrived with much fanfare from Verizon. Billed as an iPhone killer, it was overdone. I decided to be an early adopter, and, overall, I’m not disappointed.
What’s good:
- The Droid has a great touch screen, large, crisp graphics and responsive to touch.
- It has a physical keyboard when used in landscape mode, more on that later.
- It’s a good phone, decent reception, bluetooth works OK, speaker is decent.
- There are plenty of apps. The app store doesn’t compete with the iPhone, but there’s a good selection and it’s getting better
- It has wifi, and it’s easy to set up.
- Gmail integration is good.
- Great browser, great search, with decent voice search- try “nearest Panera” – great stuff.
- Built-in Navigation, with auto resume after a call
What’s not:
- No voice dial – Oh there’s an app, but in a couple of dozen tries it never once picked the right contact.
- Screen shuts off during calls, and requires you touch awkwardly placed power button to get back on, then open the lock again – stupid and annoying.
- No contact sync, except via GMail, Exchange, or Google Apps Premier. So if you have your own domain, and don’t want to spring for Exchange, you are out of luck. I know Google wants to push Premier Apps and its Exchange capability, but really, this is stone age or really exploitative, depending on your viewpoint. (Oh, I forgot, you can stick your contacts on an SD card too and import them – sneakernet anyone?)
- How the Navigation works – You pick a contact, select the icon to map it, and it brings up a map, then you click the highlighted point on the map, then tell it to go there. How about a voice command of “drive”, then “Alex Burns home”?- that would be nice? I think Tiger Woods got a Droid and was trying to set a destination when he hit the fire hydrant! To add insult to injury, the cloverleaf near my house went in 3 years ago, but it’s still not on Google Maps.
- Visual voice mail doesn’t integrate with bluetooth – and there’s no button to activate the speakerphone in the App – Wake up Google!
- Email sync doesn’t work, I sometimes wait hours to get emails on my phone – even my Treo 600 got that right five plus years ago.
- The slide out keyboard sucks, and the on-screen keyboard doesn’t come close to the one on the iPhone. You can use them, but you’ll be pulling out your netbook a lot more to send email if you have a Droid.
It may sound as if I hate the Droid, I don’t, but I sure hope Google/Verizon’s December 11th system update fixes a lot of the above. It seems as if the Droid/Android 2.0 operating system were rushed to market. It reminds me not of Windows Vista, but early XP. A good operating system rushed out because Millenium was awful. In Droid’s case, rushed out so as not to let AT&T/Apple have another holiday season without a competitor from Verizon.
Ultimately, Google and Verizon will fix this, it’s just too important to both of them. How can Google sell phones with Navigation if the maps are out of date? Who will tolerate non-functional voice dial when hands-free is the law in most states? I just wish they’d waited another couple of months and got more of the kinks worked out. As for Motorola, nice try, it’s a good piece of hardware overall, but we need to be able to wake the screen up at the end of the call with a finger swipe – period. And fix that keyboard in V2.0, or drop it and improve the on-screen version.
Tips from the trenches:
- What to do about email – if you power the phone off and on again it will then sync your email. Nuts, yes, effective also.
- Contacts, CompanionLink has a product that syncs from Outlook to Gmail, and let’s Google’s own sync complete the loop with the phone. Works well – $40, only drawback is you have to start the sync manually from the PC each time – no push or scheduled sync. Also first sync can take hours if you have a few thousand contacts.
- Favorites – stick a shortcut on one of your homescreens for each person you call regularly – closest thing to speed dial and a stopgap until voice dial works. Google, we need more homescreens and a menu item to pick them with.
- Simple Weather – tried them all, Android weather doesn’t refresh, this one works well
- Swift, great Twitter app
- Flashlight, when you’re fumbling for car key, or trying to find a screw you’ve dropped inside a computer case!
- Advanced Task Killer free version – when the phone starts slowing down, great way to get it moving again
- Silent mode on/off – Curvefish, also WiFi on/off from same vendor – great widgets to control things you need to do often.
- Google Sky – really cool app.
What to do about Windows 7
First a disclaimer, we work on Windows PCs and sell them, so do lots of other people, but be aware of it as you read this article, we’re biased because we use the same software as 90% of the population!
Windows 7 is the best operating system I’ve ever seen coming out of Microsoft. The beta version was much better than the initial release of Windows Vista, heck it was better than Windows Vista AFTER the first service pack. The release candidate was almost flawless, and the version released on Thursday to the general public is superb.
If you’ve been holding onto a Windows XP machine for several years because you refused to buy Vista (perhaps even based on our recommendation) your wait is over. Windows 7 runs well on the latest hardware, a 3 year old PC, and even a 5 year old PC. It runs better than XP on anything with a multi-core processor, and it’s no slouch on a single core machine, as long as it has 1GB of RAM. It will run in 512MB of RAM, even though Microsoft says it doesn’t, but it does bog down a little.
As to compatibility, it runs everything Vista runs, and a few things Vista never did, such as older versions of QuickBooks (pre-2007 versions). If you find something it won’t run, download XP mode, and it most likely will. XP mode is a virtual machine implementation of Windows XP, and it’s available on Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate versions. It works really well, and I have yet to find an XP vintage application that it won’t run. IT even runs Taipei, a Windows 95 vintage game that I admit I’m addicted to!
So go out with full confidence and get a Windows 7 PC, and say goodbye to Vista! A sad chapter in Microsoft history closes as a new better one opens. And for heavens sake, give that pre-2005 vintage XP PC a decent burial, and buy a new Windows 7 PC, there’s only so much the government can do to stimulate the economy – now its your turn!