The Inimitable Have Tex Blog

For years I’ve cursed Outlook and used it anyway. I’ve struggled with customers’ enormous PST files, crashes, and “Why can’t you just fix it?” requests. Finally I have an answer: “We’ll move you to Google Apps and use iGoogle to replace Outlook”.

Is it really that simple, well no, not really, but it is an attractive alternative for lots of people struggling with Outlook. My page has 4 columns, with gadgets for Mail, Calendar, Google Docs, reserving the 4th column for news feeds.

I use Chrome to display it, and set it as my home page. Chrome gives me the greatest amount of real estate “above the fold”, i.e. visible on my laptop without scrolling down.

Try it, you may never go back to Outlook.

In the year since we started deploying cloud services to our customers a lot has changed. Here are some of the highlights:

- Mobile Access. When we started most access to cloud services was from a PC or notebook. Now access is frequently from a tablet or smartphone, so we’ve been spending a lot of time looking at viewers and editing tools that work on those platforms. iFiles for the iPad and iPhone is a great tool. If you need to edit, then QuickOffice works well.

- Data Security. So many sites have been hacked that people are much more concerned about security. We insist on secure access only, and deploy two factor security for those of our customers who wish it on Google Apps.

- Backup. We’ve focused on cloud backup, with local copies. Encryption in transit and at rest are important too. Egnyte is a great partner in this respect delivering all of that, plus mobile file access.

- Touch once, see everywhere. People won’t put up with doing things twice or more. A combination of IMAP and CalDAV let people manage mail and calendars once and be done. Send it from your phone and it’s in your Outlook sent folder. Set an appointment on your iPad browser, and it’s on your Android phone moments later.

- Cloud files, need to edit on your iPad and access later from your PC, that’s OK. Just need a little creativity to set up and it works fine.

- Business Apps. There are so many to choose from. Simple invoicing, accounting, CRM, industry vertical apps, you name them, they are out there. We often help our customers pick the apps that are right for them, then wean them off having us do all the setup!

So if you’re at the beach this summer and a little bored, check out some cloud apps from your iPad. I know I will, I burn easily so any excuse to stay out of the sun!

A lot of companies are spending a small fortune to get unified communications, which, put simply, is where both voice and email end up in your email inbox. In addition to acting as a Skype competitor for making calls, Google Voice can replace your voicemail with a combination of text message alerts to your mobile phone, and MP3 attachments on emails.

The text message alerts attempt to turn the spoken word into text through voice recognition. The success of this varies wildly based on the speaker, often with hilarious results. The same text also appears in the email you receive, along with a link to download an MP3 file. The MP3 is a recording of the incoming call that would otherwise have gone to voice mail. Any media player with play them back (Windows Media Player, iTunes for example).

You can set up Google Voice on multiple lines, so that all your voice mail hits your inbox. That way you only have one place to look for your voice mail, and you can keep it for as long as you like.

It also solved another problem for me, the lousy, extra fee Visual Voice Mail app from Verizon on my Android phone. The dumb thing wouldn’t recognize bluetooth. It also required you to switch to speakerphone for each message, if you wanted that option.

Google Voice is a huge improvement, and the text sometimes informs, often entertains, and like all Google products, will probably improve over time.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.