Skip to main content

Home/ Open Web/ Group items tagged Integrated-Cloud

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Gary Edwards

Two Microsofts: Mulling an alternate reality | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/n-alternate-reality-7000016916

Microsoft microsoft-monopoly Judge-Thomas-Penfield-Jackson

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Judge Jackson had it right. And the Court of Appeals? Not so much
  • Judge Jackson is an American hero and news of his passing thumped me hard. His ruling against Microsoft and the subsequent overturn of that ruling resulted, IMHO, in two extraordinary directions that changed the world. Sure the what-if game is interesting, but the reality itself is stunning enough. Of course, Judge Jackson sought to break the monopoly. The US Court of Appeals overturn resulted in the monopoly remaining intact, but the Internet remaining free and open. Judge Jackson's breakup plan had a good shot at achieving both a breakup of the monopoly and, a free and open Internet. I admit though that at the time I did not favor the Judge's plan. And i actually did submit a proposal based on Microsoft having to both support the WiNE project, and, provide a complete port to WiNE to any software provider requesting a port. I wanted to break the monopolist's hold on the Windows Productivity Environment and the hundreds of millions of investment dollars and time that had been spent on application development forever trapped on that platform. For me, it was the productivity platform that had to be broken.
  • I assume the good Judge thought that separating the Windows OS from Microsoft Office / Applications would force the OS to open up the secret API's even as the OS continued to evolve. Maybe. But a full disclosure of the API's coupled with the community service "port to WiNE" requirement might have sped up the process. Incredibly, the "Undocumented Windows Secrets" industry continues to thrive, and the legendary Andrew Schulman's number is still at the top of Silicon Valley legal profession speed dials. http://goo.gl/0UGe8 Oh well. The Court of Appeals stopped the breakup, leaving the Windows Productivity Platform intact. Microsoft continues to own the "client" in "Client/Server" computing. Although Microsoft was temporarily stopped from leveraging their desktop monopoly to an iron fisted control and dominance of the Internet, I think what were watching today with the Cloud is Judge Jackson's worst nightmare. And mine too. A great transition is now underway, as businesses and enterprises begin the move from legacy client/server business systems and processes to a newly emerging Cloud Productivity Platform. In this great transition, Microsoft holds an inside straight. They have all the aces because they own the legacy desktop productivity platform, and can control the transition to the Cloud. No doubt this transition is going to happen. And it will severely disrupt and change Microsoft's profit formula. But if the Redmond reprobate can provide a "value added" transition of legacy business systems and processes, and direct these new systems to the Microsoft Cloud, the profits will be immense.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Judge Jackson sought to break the ability of Microsoft to "leverage" their existing monopoly into the Internet and his plan was overturned and replaced by one based on judicial oversight. Microsoft got a slap on the wrist from the Court of Appeals, but were wailed on with lawsuits from the hundreds of parties injured by their rampant criminality. Some put the price of that criminality as high as $14 Billion in settlements. Plus, the shareholders forced Chairman Bill to resign. At the end of the day though, Chairman Bill was right. Keeping the monopoly intact was worth whatever penalty Microsoft was forced to pay. He knew that even the judicial over-site would end one day. Which it did. And now his company is ready to go for it all by leveraging and controlling the great productivity transition. No business wants to be hostage to a cold heart'd monopolist. But there is huge difference between a non-disruptive and cost effective, process-by-process value-added transition to a Cloud Productivity Platform, and, the very disruptive and costly "rip-out-and-replace" transition offered by Google, ZOHO, Box, SalesForce and other Cloud Productivity contenders. Microsoft, and only Microsoft, can offer the value-added transition path. If they get the Cloud even halfway right, they will own business productivity far into the future. Rest in Peace Judge Jackson. Your efforts were heroic and will be remembered as such. ~ge~
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Jun 13
     
    Comments on the latest SVN article mulling the effects of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's anti trust ruling and proposed break up of Microsoft. comment: "Chinese Wall" Ummm, there was a Chinese Wall between Microsoft Os and the MS Applciations layer. At least that's what Chairman Bill promised developers at a 1990 OS/2-Windows Conference I attended. It was a developers luncheon, hosted by Microsoft, with Chairman Bill speaking to about 40 developers with applications designed to run on the then soon to be released Windows 3.0. In his remarks, the Chairman described his vision of commoditizing the personal computer market through an open hardware-reference platform on the one side of the Windows OS, and provisioning an open application developers layer on the other using open and totally transparent API's. Of course the question came up concerning the obvious advantage Microsoft applications would have. Chairman Bill answered the question by describing the Chinese Wall that existed between Microsoft's OS and Apps develop departments. He promised that OS API's would be developed privately and separate from the Apps department, and publicly disclosed to ALL developers at the same time. Oh yeah. There was lots of anti IBM - evil empire stuff too :) Of course we now know this was a line of crap. Microsoft Apps was discovered to have been using undocumented and secret Window API's. http://goo.gl/0UGe8. Microsoft Apps had a distinct advantage over the competition, and eventually the entire Windows Productivity Platform became dependent on the MSOffice core. The company I worked for back then, Pyramid Data, had the first Contact Management application for Windows; PowerLeads. Every Friday night we would release bug fixes and improvements using Wildcat BBS. By Monday morning we would be slammed with calls from users complaining that they had downloaded the Friday night patch, and now some other application would not load or function properly. Eventually we tracked th
Gary Edwards

Death of The Document - CIO Central - CIO Network - Forbes - 0 views

blogs.forbes.com/...death-of-the-document

forbes visual-documents visually-immersive static-documents compound-documents

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Apr 11
     
    Well, not quite.  More IBM happy talk about interoperability and easy document interchange.  While i agree with the static versus interactive - collaborative document perspective, it's far more complicated. Today we have a world of "native"  docs and "visual" docs.   Native docs are bound to their authoring productivity environment, and are stubbornly NOT interchangeable.  Even for ODF and OOXML formats. Visual documents are spun from natives, and they are highly interchangeable, but interactively limited.  They lack the direct interaction of native authoring environments.  The Visual document phenomenon starts with PDF and the virtual print driver.  Any authoring application(s) in a productivity environment can print a PDF using the magic of the virtual print driver.   In 2008, when ISO stamped PDF with "accessibility tags", a new, highly interactive version of PDF was offically recognized.  We know this as "Tagged PDF".  And it has led the sweeping revolution of wide implementation of the paperless transaction process. The Visual Document phenomenon doesn't stop there.  The highly mobile WebKit revolution ushered in by the 2008 iPhone phenomenon led to wide acceptance of highly interactive and collaborative, but richly visual versions of SVG and HTML5-CSS3-JSON-JavaScript documents. Today we have SVG-HTML+ type visually immersive documents spun out of Server side publication presses such as FlipBoard, Cognito cComics, QWiki, Needle, Sports Illustrated, Push Pop Press, and TreeSaver to name but a few.   Clearly the visually immersive category of documents is exploding, but not for business - productivity documents.  Adobe has proposed a "CSS Regions" standard for richly immersive layout that might change that.  But mostly i think the problem for business documents, reports and forms is that they are "compound documents" bound to desktop productivity environments and workgroups. The great transition from desktop/workgroup productivity environme
Gary Edwards

LIVE: Google Apps Event | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD - 0 views

digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/...live-google-apps-event

ge google-apps google-enterprise Cloud-Computing replace_or_re-purpose

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Jun 09
     
    Digital Daily is carrying John Paczkowski's point-by-point twitter stream of the Google Apps Event. Fascinating stuff. Especially Dave Girouard's comments comparing Google Apps to MSOffice. One highlight of the event seems to be the announcement of a Google OutLook integration app. Sounds like something similar to what Zimbra did a few years ago prior to the $350 million acquisition by Yahoo! Zimbra perfected an integration into desktop Outlook comparable to the Exchange - Outlook channel. If Google Apps Sync for Outlook integration is a s good as the event demo, they would still have to crack into MSOffice to compete with the MSOffice-SharePoint-MOSS integration channel. Some interesting comments from Google Enterprise customers, Genentech, Morgans Hotel Group, and Avago ....... At an event in San Francisco, Google is expected to discuss the future of its productivity suite and some enhancements that may begin to close the gap with Microsoft (MSFT) Office, something the company desperately needs to do if it wants to make deeper inroads in the enterprise area. As Girouard himself admitted last week, Apps still has a ways to go. "Gmail is really the best email application in the world for consumers or business users, and we can prove that very well," he said. "Calendar is also very good, and probably almost at the level of Gmail. But the word processing, spreadsheets and other products are much less mature. They're a couple of years old at the most, and we still have a lot of work to do."
Gary Edwards

Stoneware, Inc. WebNetwork of Integrated Applications - 0 views

www.stone-ware.com/...applications.html

cloud-computing cloud-productivity stoneware

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Dec 10
     
    Good review of Stoneware's private / public cloud computing system.
Paul Merrell

Testosterone Pit - Home - The Other Reason Why IBM Throws A Billion At Linux ... - 0 views

www.testosteronepit.com/...billion-at-linux-with-nsa.html

surveillance state NSA Linux Linux-backdoor Solaris FreeBSD Darwin

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • IBM announced today that it would throw another billion at Linux, the open-source operating system, to run its Power System servers. The first time it had thrown a billion at Linux was in 2001, when Linux was a crazy, untested, even ludicrous proposition for the corporate world. So the moolah back then didn’t go to Linux itself, which was free, but to related technologies across hardware, software, and service, including things like sales and advertising – and into IBM’s partnership with Red Hat which was developing its enterprise operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “It helped start a flurry of innovation that has never slowed,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. IBM claims that the investment would “help clients capitalize on big data and cloud computing with modern systems built to handle the new wave of applications coming to the data center in the post-PC era.” Some of the moolah will be plowed into the Power Systems Linux Center in Montpellier, France, which opened today. IBM’s first Power Systems Linux Center opened in Beijing in May. IBM may be trying to make hay of the ongoing revelations that have shown that the NSA and other intelligence organizations in the US and elsewhere have roped in American tech companies of all stripes with huge contracts to perfect a seamless spy network. They even include physical aspects of surveillance, such as license plate scanners and cameras, which are everywhere [read.... Surveillance Society: If You Drive, You Get Tracked].
  • Then another boon for IBM. Experts at the German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (BIS) determined that Windows 8 is dangerous for data security. It allows Microsoft to control the computer remotely through a “special surveillance chip,” the wonderfully named Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and a backdoor in the software – with keys likely accessible to the NSA and possibly other third parties, such as the Chinese. Risks: “Loss of control over the operating system and the hardware” [read.... LEAKED: German Government Warns Key Entities Not To Use Windows 8 – Links The NSA.
  • It would be an enormous competitive advantage for an IBM salesperson to walk into a government or corporate IT department and sell Big Data servers that don’t run on Windows, but on Linux. With the Windows 8 debacle now in public view, IBM salespeople don’t even have to mention it. In the hope of stemming the pernicious revenue decline their employer has been suffering from, they can politely and professionally hype the security benefits of IBM’s systems and mention in passing the comforting fact that some of it would be developed in the Power Systems Linux Centers in Montpellier and Beijing. Alas, Linux too is tarnished. The backdoors are there, though the code can be inspected, unlike Windows code. And then there is Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), which was integrated into the Linux kernel in 2003. It provides a mechanism for supporting “access control” (a backdoor) and “security policies.” Who developed SELinux? Um, the NSA – which helpfully discloses some details on its own website (emphasis mine): The results of several previous research projects in this area have yielded a strong, flexible mandatory access control architecture called Flask. A reference implementation of this architecture was first integrated into a security-enhanced Linux® prototype system in order to demonstrate the value of flexible mandatory access controls and how such controls could be added to an operating system. The architecture has been subsequently mainstreamed into Linux and ported to several other systems, including the Solaris™ operating system, the FreeBSD® operating system, and the Darwin kernel, spawning a wide range of related work.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Among a slew of American companies who contributed to the NSA’s “mainstreaming” efforts: Red Hat. And IBM? Like just about all of our American tech heroes, it looks at the NSA and other agencies in the Intelligence Community as “the Customer” with deep pockets, ever increasing budgets, and a thirst for technology and data. Which brings us back to Windows 8 and TPM. A decade ago, a group was established to develop and promote Trusted Computing that governs how operating systems and the “special surveillance chip” TPM work together. And it too has been cooperating with the NSA. The founding members of this Trusted Computing Group, as it’s called facetiously: AMD, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, and Wave Systems. Oh, I almost forgot ... and IBM. And so IBM might not escape, despite its protestations and slick sales presentations, the suspicion by foreign companies and governments alike that its Linux servers too have been compromised – like the cloud products of other American tech companies. And now, they’re going to pay a steep price for their cooperation with the NSA. Read...  NSA Pricked The “Cloud” Bubble For US Tech Companies
Paul Merrell

The Cover Pages: Alfresco Enterprise Edition v3.3 for Composite Content Applications - 0 views

xml.coverpages.org/AlfrescoV33-CMIS.html

Alfresco CMIS cloud computing integration interoperability Lotus Outlook Google Docs Drupal

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 May 10 - Cached
  • While CMIS, cloud computing and market commoditization have left some vendors struggling to determine the future of enterprise content management (ECM), Alfresco Software today unveiled Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.3 as the platform for composite content applications that will redefine the way organizations approach ECM. As the first commercially-supported CMIS implementation offering integrations around IBM/Lotus social software, Microsoft Outlook, Google Docs and Drupal, Alfresco Enterprise 3.3 becomes the first content services platform to deliver the features, flexibility and affordability required across the enterprise.
  • Quick and simple development environment to support new business applications Flexible deployment options enabling content applications to be deployed on-premise, in the cloud or on the Web Interoperability between business applications through open source and open standards The ability to link data, content, business process and context
  • Build future-proof content applications through CMIS — With the first and most complete supported implementation of the CMIS standard, Alfresco now enables companies to build new content-based applications while offering the security of the most open, flexible and future-proof content services platform. Repurpose content for multiple delivery channels — Advanced content formatting and transformation services allow organizations to easily repurpose content for delivery through multiple channels (web, smart phone, iPad, print, etc). Improve project management with content collaboration — New datalist function can be used to track project related issues, to-dos, actions and tasks, supplementing existing commenting, social tagging, discussions and project sites. Deploy content through replication services — Companies can replicate and deploy content, and associated information, between content platforms. Using powerful replication services, users can develop and then deploy content outside the firewall, to web servers and into the cloud. Develop new frameworks through Spring Surf — Building on SpringSource, the leader in Java application infrastructure used to create java applications, Spring Surf provides a scriptable framework for developing new content rich applications.
Gary Edwards

gDocs Scanning Software - 0 views

www.gdocscan.com/index.html

gDocScan OCR_Scan MPS Google-OCR

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Apr 11
     
    Cloud Document Management: gDocScan lets you scan, index, OCR and search your paper documents as well as index and search your emails, Word and Excel documents. Integrated with many MPS systems like Kyocera and Kodak. Use gDocScan cloud document management to implement a paperless office. Using hosted document management reduces the costs of handling, storing and retrieving your documents. Document scanning software lets you scan with multiple scanners, at different locations. Document search from any location, over the Internet. gDocScan also lets you add index fields to emails, Word, and Excel documents, and store them in Google Docs. Automatic document backup. Share selected documents with partners, clients and vendors. gDocScan is designed for Windows 7|Vista|XP|2008|2003 platforms, including 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows.
Gary Edwards

Sencha Announces Cloud Environment for Mobile Web HTML5 Developers - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...ha-announces-cloud-environ.php

Sencha.io mobile-apps mobile-framework

shared by Gary Edwards on 31 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 31 Oct 11
     
    Sencha.io is designed to give Web app developers the ability to synchronize and manage data in the cloud without having to write an excessive amount of code. For messaging, data management, login and deployment, Sencha claims that a few lines of Javascript will allow mobile Web developers to easily integrate these functions to apps built with HTML5.
Gary Edwards

Jolicloud Enables Google Docs Editing in File Manager - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...ing-in-file-manager-010688.php

sync-share-store-collaboration JoliCloud Google-Chrome-OS

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Mar 11
     
    Very cool stuff.  Keep in mind that JoliCloud is Linux, based on Google Chrome OS.  I wonder how much of this is built into Chrome OS, or was done by JoliCloud? Jolicloud (news, site) has recently launched version 1.2, introducing several features and renaming the locally-installed cloud operating system into Joli OS. Among its latest additions was Dropbox integration into the file manager. In an update, Jolicloud has also announced better Google Docs integration for easier management, previewing and editing of online documents.
Gary Edwards

Is the Apps Marketplace just playing catchup to Microsoft? | Googling Google | ZDNet.com - 0 views

blogs.zdnet.com/Google

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Take the basic communication, calendaring, and documentation enabled for free by Apps Standard Edition, add a few slick applications from the Marketplace and the sky was the limit. Or at least the clouds were.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 10
       
      Google Apps have all the basic elements of a productivity environment, but lack the internal application messaging, data connectivity and exchange that made the Windows desktop productivity platform so powerful.   gAPPS are great.  They even have copy/paste! But they lack the basics needed for simple "merge" of client and contact data into a wordprocessor letter/report/form/research paper. Things like DDE, OLE, ODBC, MAPI, COM, and DCOM have to be reinvented for the Open Web.   gAPPS is a good place to start.  But the focus has got to shift to Wave technologies like OT, XMPP and JSON.  Then there are the lower level innovations such as Web Sockets, Native Client, HTML5, and the Cairo-Skia graphics layer (thanks Florian).
  • Whether you (or your business) choose a Microsoft-centered solution that now has well-implemented cloud integration and tightly coupled productivity and collaboration software (think Office Live Web Apps, Office 2010, and Sharepoint 2010) or you build a business around the web-based collaboration inherent in Google Apps and extend its core functions with cool and useful applications, you win.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 10
       
      Not true!!! The Microsoft Cloud is based on proprietary technologies, with the Silverlight-OOXML runtime/plug-in at the core of a WPF-.NET driven "Business Productivity Platform. The Google Cloud is based on the Open Web, and not the "Open Web" that's tied up in corporate "standards" consortia like the W3C, OASIS and Ecma. One of the reasons i really like WebKit is that they push HTML5 technologies to the edge, submitting new enhancements back into the knuckle dragging W3C HTML5 workgroups as "proposals".  They don't however wait for the entangled corporate politics of the W3C to "approve and include" these proposals.  Google and Apple submit and go live simultaneously.   This of course negates the heavy influence platform rivals like Microsoft have over the activities of corporate standards orgs.  Which has to be done if WebKit-HTML5-JavaScript-XMPP-OT-Web Sockets-Native Client family of technologies is ever to challenge the interactive and graphical richness of proprietary Microsoft technologies (Silverlight, OOXML, DrawingML, C#). The important hedge here is that Google is Open Sourcing their enhancements and innovations.  Without that Open Sourcing, i think there would be reasons to fear any platform player pushing beyond the corporate standards consortia approval process.  For me, OSS balances out the incredible influence of Google, and the ownership they have over core Open Web productivity application components. Which is to say; i don't want to find myself tomorrow in the same position with a Google Open Web Productivity Platform, that i found myself in with the 1994 Windows desktop productivity environment - where Microsoft owned every opportunity, and could take the marketshare of any Windows developed application with simple announcements that they to will enter that application category.  (ex. the entire independent contact/project management category was wiped out by mere announcement of MS Outlook).
Paul Merrell

Microsoft Helping to Store Police Video From Taser Body Cameras | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...-video-from-taser-body-cameras

surveillance state police body-cameras Taser Microsoft cloud-services Azure

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Microsoft has joined forces with Taser to combine the Azure cloud platform with law enforcement management tools.
  • Taser’s Axon body camera data management software on Evidence.com will run on Azure and Windows 10 devices to integrate evidence collection, analysis, and archival features as set forth by the Federal Bureau of Investigation Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Security Policy. As per the partnership, Taser will utilize Azure’s machine learning and computing technologies to store police data on Microsoft’s government cloud. In addition, redaction capabilities of Taser will be improved which will assist police departments that are subject to bulk data requests. Currently, Taser is operating on Amazon Web Services; however this deal may entice police departments to upgrade their technology, which in turn would drive up sales of Windows 10. This partnership comes after Taser was given a lucrative deal with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) last year, who ordered 7,000 body cameras equipped with 800 Axom body cameras for their officers in response to the recent deaths of several African Americans at the hands of police.
  • In order to ensure Taser maintains a monopoly on police body cameras, the corporation acquired contracts with police departments all across the nation for the purchase of body cameras through dubious ties to certain chiefs of police. The corporation announced in 2014 that “orders for body cameras [has] soared to $24.6 million from October to December” which represents a 5-fold increase in profits from 2013. Currently, Taser is in 13 cities with negotiations for new contracts being discussed in 28 more. Taser, according to records and interviews, allegedly has “financial ties to police chiefs whose departments have bought the recording devices.” In fact, Taser has been shown to provide airfare and luxury hotels for chiefs of police when traveling for speaking engagements in Australia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE); and hired them as consultants – among other perks and deals. Since 2013, Taser has been contractually bound with “consulting agreements with two such chiefs’ weeks after they retired” as well as is allegedly “in talks with a third who also backed the purchase of its products.”
Gary Edwards

Ray Ozzie's startup has mobility, communications at core - Computerworld - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...obility_communications_at_core

Ray-Ozzie Cocomo Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Mar 12
     
    Interesting, but lightweight interview with Ray Ozzie.  Look at the productivity comment in particular.  He also mentions "social productivity" as being an aspect of "communications".  My guess is that his new startup, Cocomo, will gear up towards a Cloud Productivity Platform where this new capability of integrated web communications is woven deep into collaborative productivity applications.  With enough juice to blow the legacy Windows - MSOffice Productivity environment out of the water.  We shall see. excerpt: When he joined Microsoft he thought it had a "tremendous history," he said, with great technology assets and people. But it was a company struggling to adjust to changes in the PC and server markets, he said. "I tried my best to communicate with various groups what their purpose in life was," he said. For instance, he tried to convince the Office group that it should focus on selling productivity, as opposed to selling PC-based productivity products, and the Xbox group that it should sell entertainment, not boxes or discs.
Gary Edwards

Office suites in the cloud: Microsoft Office Web Apps versus Google Docs and Zoho | App... - 0 views

www.infoworld.com/...ersus-google-docs-and-zoho-726

Office-suites Cloud-Computing MSOffice-Web-Apps google-docs ZOHO

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Oct 09
     
    Neil McAllister provides an in-depth no-holds-barred comparison of Google, Zoho and Micorsoft Web Office Productivity Apps.  It's not pretty, but spot on honest.  Some of the short comings are that Neil overly focuses on document fidelity, but is comparatively light on the productivity environment/platform problems of embedded business logic.  These document aspects are represented by internal application and platform specific components such as OLE, scripting, macros, formulas, security settings, data bindings, media/graphics, applications specific settings, workflow logic, and other ecosystem entanglements so common to MSOffice compound "in-process" business documents.   Sadly, Neil also misses the larger issue that Microsoft is moving the legacy MSOffice Productivity Environment to a MS-Web center.   excerpt:  A spreadsheet in your browser? A word processor on the Web? These days, SaaS (software as a service) is all the rage, and the success of Web-based upstarts like Salesforce.com has sent vendors searching for ever more categories of software to bring online. If you believe Google, virtually all software will be Web-based soon -- and as if to prove it, Google now offers a complete suite of office productivity applications that run in your browser. Google isn't the only one. A number of competitors are readying Web-based office suites of their own -- most prominently Zoho, but even Microsoft is getting in on the act. In addition to the typical features of desktop productivity suites, each offering promises greater integration with the Web, including collaboration and publishing features not available with traditional apps.
Gary Edwards

ShareFile Integrates Cloud File Share With Desktop Folders - PCWorld Business Center - 0 views

www.pcworld.com/...hare_with_desktop_folders.html

Sync-Share-Store DropBox

shared by Gary Edwards on 31 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 31 Mar 11
     
    Making cloud-based file transfer service easier.  Improved FTP alternative for small and medium sized business. A ShareFile user's customers can access files on a company-branded Web portal, one of the business-friendly features that helps set the service apart from the likes of Dropbox, according to Steve Chiles, chief marketing officer at ShareFile. Users can also allow their customers to log in to the service and upload files from their own website. ShareFile comes with reporting features that allow users to see who has uploaded and downloaded files, and when they were transferred. The addition of Sync will help automate the process of uploading files, instead of having to do a lot of the upload work manually. The feature allows for both one-way and two-way synchronization of files.  The user just has to drag and drop the file they want to synchronize into a designated folder. A folder can also be configured to send content to many recipients.
Gary Edwards

Busy Docs - Document Management for Google Docs and Local Network - 0 views

busydocs.com

busydocs

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Feb 11
     
    Another DropBox integrated into Google Docs.  The list keeps growing.  Box.net just got $48 M fifth round funding.  Google Cloud Connect has been released.  BusyDocs isn't worried though.  They have spent quite a bit of time identifying the many shortcomings of Google Docs.   Good job.
Gary Edwards

IntalioCloud takes on Salesforce.com » VentureBeat - 0 views

venturebeat.com/...iocloud-takes-on-salesforcecom

venture-capital plutext wiki-word jason salesforce.com intalio

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 May 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 May 09
     
    IntalioCloud takes on Salesforce.com with public-private cloud design. Note that business applications developed for use in Salesforce's platform have to use the company's proprietary programming language, while IntalioCloud is open to many languages such as JavaScript and Ruby. Third, Intalio says it provides 25 gigabytes of data storage per account, much more than Salesforce. $42 Mill in VC The nexxus here is that both salseforce.com and Intalio need to provide integration into the MSOffice productivity environment to compete with Microsoft Azure.
Gary Edwards

The future of enterprise data in a radically open and Web-based world | Hinchcliffe - 0 views

blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe

woa openweb opendata enterprise soa dion-hinchcliffe semantic-web

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Aug 09
     
    Dion Hinchcliffe has posted a lengthy discussion on the future of Open Data and the Open Web.  He identifies three Open Web methods for accessing and working with Open Data; WOA, API's and Linked Data.  These methods are discussed in the context of SOA and the re-engineering of enterprise business systems.  Great stuff.  Dion also provides an excellent chart describing his vision of how these things fit together. Excerpt: "Open data holds up the promise of instant connectivity between arbitrary numbers of ad hoc partners while at the same time reducing integration costs, improving transparency, harnessing external innovation, and even (perhaps especially) creating entirely new and significant business models. I sometimes refer to these as "open supply chains", and the term is highly descriptive when it comes to the potential for open data models to make cloud computing safe and interoperable, help journalists to do their jobs better, or create multi-million dollar new lines of business, such as Amazon's well-known Web Services division."
Paul Merrell

Join Opera's journey to reinvent the Web - 1 views

www.opera.com/...23

Opera Opera Unite content sharing

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Nov 09 - No Cached
  • Opera today released Opera 10.10 with Opera Unite, a powerful technology for personal content sharing directly between all your devices. Opera Unite is available as a standard feature in Opera 10.10, available free from www.opera.com.To mark this release, Opera is inviting the world to join our journey to reinvent the Web. By wrapping both a Web browser and a Web server into one package, Opera Unite challenges the conventional, semi-private methods of sharing the content that really matters to people everywhere."We promised Opera Unite would reinvent the Web," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. "What we are really doing is reinventing how we as consumers interact with the Web. By giving our devices the ability to serve content, we become equal citizens on the Web. In an age where we have ceded control of our personal data to third-parties, Opera Unite gives us the freedom to choose how we will share the data that belongs to us."
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Nov 09
     
    Playing with the software now. Unite is a cloud integration, with a directory on your system identified as a directory to be shared with the cloud storage. Haven't really got into it yet, but I see options to keep the data in the folder private, to share it with those who know the password, and to publish the directory to the world. There are roughly 25 Unite applications not discussed in the press release here. http://unite.opera.com/applications/ My first thought was that Google will have to respond in kind, while Microsoft --- which doesn't get the power of "free" --- will respond but with a less generous offering.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Nov 09
     
    Opps. I was wrong. There is no online storage. It is as stated in the press release, an integration of a server with the Opera browser. The shared content is served by the local machine. Which means that the local machine must be running in order for others to access the shared content. But according to the Unite FAQ, this also means that there are only practical limits on the amount of content shared, e.g., hard disk capacity and bandwidth. Why bother with setting up a LAN or VPN if you can share files over the internet using Opera? And how will Google and Microsoft respond?
Gary Edwards

Google Is Prepping A Sneak Attack On Microsoft Office - ReadWrite - 0 views

readwrite.com/...eak-attack-on-microsoft-office

document-wars Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 May 13 - No Cached
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 17 May 13
       
      Pretty good quote describing the reach of "Visual Productivity".  Still, the quote lacks the power of embedded data (ODBC) streams and application obects (OLE) so important to the compound document model that sits at the center of all productivity environments and business system automation efforts.
  • In a supporting comment, Zborowski pointed out that Google doesn't support the Open Document Format, suggesting that Microsoft is more open than Google.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 17 May 13
       
      Now this is funny!!!
  • Productivity software is built to help people communicate. It's more than just the words in a document or presentation; it's about the tone, style and format you use to convey an overall message. People often entrust important information in these documents -- from board presentations to financial analyses to book reports. You should be able to trust that what you intend to communicate is what is being seen.
Paul Merrell

From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users' Online Identities - 0 views

theintercept.com/...ck-web-users-online-identities

surveillance state GCHQ Black-Hole

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • HERE WAS A SIMPLE AIM at the heart of the top-secret program: Record the website browsing habits of “every visible user on the Internet.” Before long, billions of digital records about ordinary people’s online activities were being stored every day. Among them were details cataloging visits to porn, social media and news websites, search engines, chat forums, and blogs. The mass surveillance operation — code-named KARMA POLICE — was launched by British spies about seven years ago without any public debate or scrutiny. It was just one part of a giant global Internet spying apparatus built by the United Kingdom’s electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The revelations about the scope of the British agency’s surveillance are contained in documents obtained by The Intercept from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Previous reports based on the leaked files have exposed how GCHQ taps into Internet cables to monitor communications on a vast scale, but many details about what happens to the data after it has been vacuumed up have remained unclear.
  • Amid a renewed push from the U.K. government for more surveillance powers, more than two dozen documents being disclosed today by The Intercept reveal for the first time several major strands of GCHQ’s existing electronic eavesdropping capabilities.
  • The surveillance is underpinned by an opaque legal regime that has authorized GCHQ to sift through huge archives of metadata about the private phone calls, emails and Internet browsing logs of Brits, Americans, and any other citizens — all without a court order or judicial warrant
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • A huge volume of the Internet data GCHQ collects flows directly into a massive repository named Black Hole, which is at the core of the agency’s online spying operations, storing raw logs of intercepted material before it has been subject to analysis. Black Hole contains data collected by GCHQ as part of bulk “unselected” surveillance, meaning it is not focused on particular “selected” targets and instead includes troves of data indiscriminately swept up about ordinary people’s online activities. Between August 2007 and March 2009, GCHQ documents say that Black Hole was used to store more than 1.1 trillion “events” — a term the agency uses to refer to metadata records — with about 10 billion new entries added every day. As of March 2009, the largest slice of data Black Hole held — 41 percent — was about people’s Internet browsing histories. The rest included a combination of email and instant messenger records, details about search engine queries, information about social media activity, logs related to hacking operations, and data on people’s use of tools to browse the Internet anonymously.
  • Throughout this period, as smartphone sales started to boom, the frequency of people’s Internet use was steadily increasing. In tandem, British spies were working frantically to bolster their spying capabilities, with plans afoot to expand the size of Black Hole and other repositories to handle an avalanche of new data. By 2010, according to the documents, GCHQ was logging 30 billion metadata records per day. By 2012, collection had increased to 50 billion per day, and work was underway to double capacity to 100 billion. The agency was developing “unprecedented” techniques to perform what it called “population-scale” data mining, monitoring all communications across entire countries in an effort to detect patterns or behaviors deemed suspicious. It was creating what it said would be, by 2013, “the world’s biggest” surveillance engine “to run cyber operations and to access better, more valued data for customers to make a real world difference.”
  • A document from the GCHQ target analysis center (GTAC) shows the Black Hole repository’s structure.
  • The data is searched by GCHQ analysts in a hunt for behavior online that could be connected to terrorism or other criminal activity. But it has also served a broader and more controversial purpose — helping the agency hack into European companies’ computer networks. In the lead up to its secret mission targeting Netherlands-based Gemalto, the largest SIM card manufacturer in the world, GCHQ used MUTANT BROTH in an effort to identify the company’s employees so it could hack into their computers. The system helped the agency analyze intercepted Facebook cookies it believed were associated with Gemalto staff located at offices in France and Poland. GCHQ later successfully infiltrated Gemalto’s internal networks, stealing encryption keys produced by the company that protect the privacy of cell phone communications.
  • Similarly, MUTANT BROTH proved integral to GCHQ’s hack of Belgian telecommunications provider Belgacom. The agency entered IP addresses associated with Belgacom into MUTANT BROTH to uncover information about the company’s employees. Cookies associated with the IPs revealed the Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn accounts of three Belgacom engineers, whose computers were then targeted by the agency and infected with malware. The hacking operation resulted in GCHQ gaining deep access into the most sensitive parts of Belgacom’s internal systems, granting British spies the ability to intercept communications passing through the company’s networks.
  • In March, a U.K. parliamentary committee published the findings of an 18-month review of GCHQ’s operations and called for an overhaul of the laws that regulate the spying. The committee raised concerns about the agency gathering what it described as “bulk personal datasets” being held about “a wide range of people.” However, it censored the section of the report describing what these “datasets” contained, despite acknowledging that they “may be highly intrusive.” The Snowden documents shine light on some of the core GCHQ bulk data-gathering programs that the committee was likely referring to — pulling back the veil of secrecy that has shielded some of the agency’s most controversial surveillance operations from public scrutiny. KARMA POLICE and MUTANT BROTH are among the key bulk collection systems. But they do not operate in isolation — and the scope of GCHQ’s spying extends far beyond them.
  • The agency operates a bewildering array of other eavesdropping systems, each serving its own specific purpose and designated a unique code name, such as: SOCIAL ANTHROPOID, which is used to analyze metadata on emails, instant messenger chats, social media connections and conversations, plus “telephony” metadata about phone calls, cell phone locations, text and multimedia messages; MEMORY HOLE, which logs queries entered into search engines and associates each search with an IP address; MARBLED GECKO, which sifts through details about searches people have entered into Google Maps and Google Earth; and INFINITE MONKEYS, which analyzes data about the usage of online bulletin boards and forums. GCHQ has other programs that it uses to analyze the content of intercepted communications, such as the full written body of emails and the audio of phone calls. One of the most important content collection capabilities is TEMPORA, which mines vast amounts of emails, instant messages, voice calls and other communications and makes them accessible through a Google-style search tool named XKEYSCORE.
  • As of September 2012, TEMPORA was collecting “more than 40 billion pieces of content a day” and it was being used to spy on people across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, according to a top-secret memo outlining the scope of the program. The existence of TEMPORA was first revealed by The Guardian in June 2013. To analyze all of the communications it intercepts and to build a profile of the individuals it is monitoring, GCHQ uses a variety of different tools that can pull together all of the relevant information and make it accessible through a single interface. SAMUEL PEPYS is one such tool, built by the British spies to analyze both the content and metadata of emails, browsing sessions, and instant messages as they are being intercepted in real time. One screenshot of SAMUEL PEPYS in action shows the agency using it to monitor an individual in Sweden who visited a page about GCHQ on the U.S.-based anti-secrecy website Cryptome.
  • Partly due to the U.K.’s geographic location — situated between the United States and the western edge of continental Europe — a large amount of the world’s Internet traffic passes through its territory across international data cables. In 2010, GCHQ noted that what amounted to “25 percent of all Internet traffic” was transiting the U.K. through some 1,600 different cables. The agency said that it could “survey the majority of the 1,600” and “select the most valuable to switch into our processing systems.”
  • According to Joss Wright, a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, tapping into the cables allows GCHQ to monitor a large portion of foreign communications. But the cables also transport masses of wholly domestic British emails and online chats, because when anyone in the U.K. sends an email or visits a website, their computer will routinely send and receive data from servers that are located overseas. “I could send a message from my computer here [in England] to my wife’s computer in the next room and on its way it could go through the U.S., France, and other countries,” Wright says. “That’s just the way the Internet is designed.” In other words, Wright adds, that means “a lot” of British data and communications transit across international cables daily, and are liable to be swept into GCHQ’s databases.
  • A map from a classified GCHQ presentation about intercepting communications from undersea cables. GCHQ is authorized to conduct dragnet surveillance of the international data cables through so-called external warrants that are signed off by a government minister. The external warrants permit the agency to monitor communications in foreign countries as well as British citizens’ international calls and emails — for example, a call from Islamabad to London. They prohibit GCHQ from reading or listening to the content of “internal” U.K. to U.K. emails and phone calls, which are supposed to be filtered out from GCHQ’s systems if they are inadvertently intercepted unless additional authorization is granted to scrutinize them. However, the same rules do not apply to metadata. A little-known loophole in the law allows GCHQ to use external warrants to collect and analyze bulk metadata about the emails, phone calls, and Internet browsing activities of British people, citizens of closely allied countries, and others, regardless of whether the data is derived from domestic U.K. to U.K. communications and browsing sessions or otherwise. In March, the existence of this loophole was quietly acknowledged by the U.K. parliamentary committee’s surveillance review, which stated in a section of its report that “special protection and additional safeguards” did not apply to metadata swept up using external warrants and that domestic British metadata could therefore be lawfully “returned as a result of searches” conducted by GCHQ.
  • Perhaps unsurprisingly, GCHQ appears to have readily exploited this obscure legal technicality. Secret policy guidance papers issued to the agency’s analysts instruct them that they can sift through huge troves of indiscriminately collected metadata records to spy on anyone regardless of their nationality. The guidance makes clear that there is no exemption or extra privacy protection for British people or citizens from countries that are members of the Five Eyes, a surveillance alliance that the U.K. is part of alongside the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “If you are searching a purely Events only database such as MUTANT BROTH, the issue of location does not occur,” states one internal GCHQ policy document, which is marked with a “last modified” date of July 2012. The document adds that analysts are free to search the databases for British metadata “without further authorization” by inputing a U.K. “selector,” meaning a unique identifier such as a person’s email or IP address, username, or phone number. Authorization is “not needed for individuals in the U.K.,” another GCHQ document explains, because metadata has been judged “less intrusive than communications content.” All the spies are required to do to mine the metadata troves is write a short “justification” or “reason” for each search they conduct and then click a button on their computer screen.
  • Intelligence GCHQ collects on British persons of interest is shared with domestic security agency MI5, which usually takes the lead on spying operations within the U.K. MI5 conducts its own extensive domestic surveillance as part of a program called DIGINT (digital intelligence).
  • GCHQ’s documents suggest that it typically retains metadata for periods of between 30 days to six months. It stores the content of communications for a shorter period of time, varying between three to 30 days. The retention periods can be extended if deemed necessary for “cyber defense.” One secret policy paper dated from January 2010 lists the wide range of information the agency classes as metadata — including location data that could be used to track your movements, your email, instant messenger, and social networking “buddy lists,” logs showing who you have communicated with by phone or email, the passwords you use to access “communications services” (such as an email account), and information about websites you have viewed.
  • Records showing the full website addresses you have visited — for instance, www.gchq.gov.uk/what_we_do — are treated as content. But the first part of an address you have visited — for instance, www.gchq.gov.uk — is treated as metadata. In isolation, a single metadata record of a phone call, email, or website visit may not reveal much about a person’s private life, according to Ethan Zuckerman, director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Civic Media. But if accumulated and analyzed over a period of weeks or months, these details would be “extremely personal,” he told The Intercept, because they could reveal a person’s movements, habits, religious beliefs, political views, relationships, and even sexual preferences. For Zuckerman, who has studied the social and political ramifications of surveillance, the most concerning aspect of large-scale government data collection is that it can be “corrosive towards democracy” — leading to a chilling effect on freedom of expression and communication. “Once we know there’s a reasonable chance that we are being watched in one fashion or another it’s hard for that not to have a ‘panopticon effect,’” he said, “where we think and behave differently based on the assumption that people may be watching and paying attention to what we are doing.”
  • When compared to surveillance rules in place in the U.S., GCHQ notes in one document that the U.K. has “a light oversight regime.” The more lax British spying regulations are reflected in secret internal rules that highlight greater restrictions on how NSA databases can be accessed. The NSA’s troves can be searched for data on British citizens, one document states, but they cannot be mined for information about Americans or other citizens from countries in the Five Eyes alliance. No such constraints are placed on GCHQ’s own databases, which can be sifted for records on the phone calls, emails, and Internet usage of Brits, Americans, and citizens from any other country. The scope of GCHQ’s surveillance powers explain in part why Snowden told The Guardian in June 2013 that U.K. surveillance is “worse than the U.S.” In an interview with Der Spiegel in July 2013, Snowden added that British Internet cables were “radioactive” and joked: “Even the Queen’s selfies to the pool boy get logged.”
  • In recent years, the biggest barrier to GCHQ’s mass collection of data does not appear to have come in the form of legal or policy restrictions. Rather, it is the increased use of encryption technology that protects the privacy of communications that has posed the biggest potential hindrance to the agency’s activities. “The spread of encryption … threatens our ability to do effective target discovery/development,” says a top-secret report co-authored by an official from the British agency and an NSA employee in 2011. “Pertinent metadata events will be locked within the encrypted channels and difficult, if not impossible, to prise out,” the report says, adding that the agencies were working on a plan that would “(hopefully) allow our Internet Exploitation strategy to prevail.”
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 47 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page