Group items tagged

GigaOM Simon Mackie posts his top 20 Google Search Tips.  

MailBrowser is incredible!  Watchout DropBox, this takes the whole sync and collaboration on attached documents to a new level. Also: gCalendar ext gMail Checker Plus MailBrowser ext GleeBox Google Quick Scroll (shows search results on page) IE Tab for Chrome (renders IE specific Web Pages in Chrome) Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer (no waiting for Adobe or PowerPoint Reader) Forecastfox Weather Fastest Chrome: research aid for wikipedia and google search Apture Highlights:   better research than Fastest Chrome

SMEStorage provides provide a cloud storage gateway in which file meta-data is synchronised, but all files continue to reside on the original storage platform. In this way SMEStorage can offer value added services and clients to existing cloud storage providers, whilst also providing a single cloud file system which enables files from many different cloud storage providers to be managed in one cloud file tree. SMEStorage provide services to individual users, and also to corporate users via its Organisation 'FileServer in the Cloud' platform offering, which combines file sharing, user management and collaboration features.

Adoption of cloud computing is on the rise. Recent IDC (News - Alert) research shows that worldwide spending on cloud services will grow almost threefold, reaching $44.2 billion by 2013.With this increased interest and adoption, businesses across the world are embracing IBM's public cloud services for easy-to-use collaboration tools to connect with colleagues, partners and suppliers quickly.

PALO ALTO, Calif - Box.net unveiled a redesign of its cloud-based content management (CMS) and collaboration system at a press event here today at company headquarters. The new interface, features and partnership announcements with NetSuite, Samsung and VMware are all part of the company's strategy to win over more enterprise customers. "This is an all new version of Box, remade for the enterprise, enabling a new set of workflows and features," Box CEO Aaron Levie said in opening remarks. Storage in the free version of Box has been upgraded to five gigabytes (up from one) and is unlimited for enterprise users of the paid version. Box has also increased the viewing area for content by 30 percent, added real-time updates of content including new comments, edits or deletions of a document. Updates are also ranked and collated to present the user with the most important information. Another improvement is a simplified administrative console designed to improve readability and organization. Overall, Box said it has developed a much more scalable framework for its user interface that makes it easier to roll out new features.

Increasing adoption has created a US$1.1 billion Cloud Computing market in Asia Pacific 'With a 90% share of the market, SaaS is the dominant segment of the Cloud market in the Asia Pacific region. The APAC SaaS market expected to grow at a CAGR of 39% for the 2010-2014 period,' says Nitin. He continues, 'Cloud Computing is to be an important driver of growth as Singapore establishes itself as one of the Cloud hubs in Asia Pacific. The Singapore Cloud Computing market is set witness strong growth powered by CRM, Collaboration and HRM applications.'

Cloud Computing White Papers   The Open Group Cloud Work Group exists to create a common understanding among buyers and suppliers of how enterprises of all sizes and scales of operation can include Cloud Computing technology in a safe and secure way in their architectures to realize its significant cost, scalability, and agility benefits. It includes some of the industry's leading cloud providers and end-user organizations, collaborating on standard models and frameworks aimed at eliminating vendor lock-in for enterprises looking to benefit from Cloud products and services. The White Papers on this website form the current output of the Work Group. They are also available in PDF form from The Open Group bookstore for download and printing. Further papers will be added as the Work Group progresses. The initial focus of the Work Group is on business drivers for Cloud Computing, and this is reflected in the first items to appear: The Business Scenario Workshop Report White Paper: Building Return on Investment from Cloud Computing White Paper: Strengthening your Business Case for Using Cloud White Paper: Cloud Buyers' Decision Tree White Paper: Cloud Buyers' Requirements Questionnaire Further White Papers will address other key Work Group topics, including Architecture, Infrastructure, and Security.

Collection of reviews for Cloud based project management systems

The company halted its work on Wave, but aspects of its radical approach to communication have been reincarnated for business collaboration. When Google Wave launched in 2009, the company suggested the program was a "new category" of communication because it combined the virtues of e-mail, instant messaging, and methods for sharing pictures, links, and other documents. Among its other features, Wave went a step beyond IM by letting people see what their message partners were writing as they typed it. That meant that the people on the receiving end of your messages would see characters appear onscreen even before you had finished formulating a sentence. It was a radical approach. I tried Wave myself and found it very distracting to watch people type, delete, retype, and misspell their thoughts. People I had persuaded to try it with me never signed in again, unsure as to how it was useful. We weren't alone in our confusion: last year, Google announced it would stop developing Wave. And yet, Google Wave lives on-in business software.

A Complete Document Management System packaged as a server appliance.  Still needs wiki-WORD sync-share-collaborate.  Still needs portable "native client" docx viewer/editor with fixed/flow/flock options. Good solution for SMB:  instead of trusting business documents to a Cloud provider, they can purchase the Treeno DMS-Cloud appliance and do it themselves. Treeno Document Vault 2.0 - document management appliance. The new Treeno Document Vault is designed specifically for the small to medium sized business. It is a completely self-contained plug-and-play document management server appliance. Treeno's EDM solutions include document, imaging, email and document workflow management. Treeno Software's mission is to provide their customers with operational workflow efficiencies and measureable return on investment (ROI) through the fast installation and implementation of their fully secure, highly reliable, and easy-to-use, web-based Enterprise Document Management (EDM) Solution. For more information on Treeno Software, please visit www.treenosoftware.com

Not sure what to make of this news.  XP continues to rule the desktop, Office 2003-2007 the productivity sweet spot.  I have used and researched Office 2010 and emphatically insist that it is a honey-trap for SharePoint and Live.com cloud-computing.  The MS-Cloud becomes THE default hard drive for Office 2010, with social networking-Facebook like contagion based on shared documents, crap collaboration and in-your-face insistent Live.com/Hotmail eMail.  Everytime i wanted to do something in Office 2010, there were 20 road blocks and hurdles MS put in the path forcing their Facebook-virus on my associates and myself.  Incredibly anti-productive.  Yet it's the only cloud-productivity solution capable of easing the difficult transition from desktop to cloud productivity environments.  Office 2010 does this by integrating into legacy desktop productivity  systems just enough that users will not realize until it's too late that a mine filed of hurdles and gotchas lies ahead. excerpt: Businesses are now deploying Office 2010 five times faster than they deployed Office 2007. Office 2010 is also the fastest-selling version of Office in history. "Nearly 50 million people worldwide use Office Web Apps to view, edit, and share their documents from anywhere with a browser and an Internet connection," added Numoto. Microsoft previously revealed in October that the company had sold six million copies of Office 2010. The company didn't reveal any additional sales figures on Wednesday but reaffirmed that the software is selling well. Office is currently used by more than 750 million users worldwide according to Microsoft.

I wonder about those numbers. 6 million copies of Office 2010 sold; total of 750 million users of all versions. That makes 0.8 per cent of Office users who had upgraded between June and October of 2010? Five times faster than Office 2007 would make Office 2007 sales in the same period of its release cycle 0.16 per cent of the 750 million, assuming the number of users had remained constant. I suspect there are some apples and oranges in that wood pile, to mix a metaphor. E.g., retail sales that exclude sales to OEMs?

Excellent review of Windows 8, including some prescient thinking about what it means to have HTML+ Web Apps running natively on the Win8 OS platform.  The author/reviewer Sebastion Anthony suggest why this breakthrough is a problem for Google, Apple and Mozilla.  I'm wondering though; is this a problem for the Open Web future?  Or is this a positive step towards an Open Web communications and collaborative computation platform that  is used by all and owned by none?   After nearly thirty years of a love-hate-hate more than ever relationship with Microsoft, for sure Win8 and native HTML+ is something to carefully watch.

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.

Review of SharePoint-Office 2010 integration.  MSOffice access and integration with SharePoint "content" has been improved and expanded.  Templates, forms and reports have been moved to the SharePoint center.  Or should i say "the many possible SharePoint centers".   There is also an interesting integration of the tagging system, with smart-tags becoming Bing enriched.  Good-bye Google.  Good-bye RDF - RDFa. excerpt:  Many enterprises buy into Microsoft's integrated vision of collaboration because they assume their products work well together. While in the case of SharePoint and Office this is technically true (more so with the 2007 versions), many of these integrations are either not used by or not visible to the average Office user. However, integrations introduced in SharePoint and Office 2010 may change this perception because they are exposed in menus and dialogs used by nearly every Office user. Perhaps supporting SharePoint Online and having SharePoint provide the basis of Office Live Workspaces is encouraging the SharePoint and Office planners to take a more user-centric perspective. In any case, here are some of the new integrations between SharePoint and Office 2010 that you should look for.

Ouch! Phil lands on Cisco like a ton of bricks. He hears them Talk the talk but doubts Cisco can walk the walk. This is a very detailed analysis and indictment. Sounds to me that Cisco will sooner rather than later be out there shopping for Collaborative Web systems. Excerpt: Color me skeptical, but I feel the detail behind yesterday and today's Cisco Live event hasn't matched the aspirations set out in executive keynotes. I like the vision set out by CEO John Chambers of providing a technology infrastructure that (as Oliver Marks puts it) does a better job of connecting people. I'm highly supportive when CTO Padmasree Warrior looks ahead to a future fabric of 'intercloud' interoperability standards - ending lock-in by individual cloud providers - and talks about 'federation' between cloud and on-premise. But when I look at the map of where Cisco claims to play in the cloud, I'm struck by how feeble its tenure is at each level, from the underlying foundation all the way up to both Paas and SaaS, where WebEx is its undernourished poster child, as I'll discuss below.

Another great review for Conrado. Summary: OpenGoo is an open source web/Cloud office where all resources and aspects of contact and project management are linked. This includes eMail, calendar, task, schedules, time lines, notes, documents, workgroups and data. Great stuff. OpenGoo and hosted sister Feng Office are the first Web Office systems to challenge the entire Microsoft Office productivity environment. Very polished, great performance. Excellent use of URI's to replace Win32-OLE functionality. Lacks direct collaboration of Zoho and gDOCS. Could easily make up for that and more with the incorporation of Wave computing (Google). I'm wondering when Conrado will take on the vertical market categories; like Real Estate - Finance? I also think OpenGoo and Feng Office have reached the point where governments would be interested. Instead of replacing existing MSOffice desktops, migrate the project/contact management stuff to OpenGoo, and shut down the upgrade treadmill. Get into the Cloud. I suspect also that Conrado is looking carefully at Wave Computing, and the chellenge of incorporating Wave into OpenGoo.

"Horizon Info Services is committed to offering industry-leading technology services to small businesses at affordable prices." This is an interesting approach. Horizon is a reseller of customized and enhanced Google services. They provide enterprises and SMB's with gMail hosting, on-line backup services, security, and customized Google Apps. They are also ready to dive into Google Wave, as the ultimate interface for aggregating Web based communications, messaging, conversations and collaborative documents.

.... "I recently described how Google's Wave, a collaboration tool based on the new HTML 5 standard, demonstrated the potential for Web applications to unglue Microsoft's hold on customers. My post quoted Gary Edwards, the former president of the Open Document Foundation, a first-hand witness to the failed attempt by Massachusetts to dump Microsoft and as experienced a hand at Microsoft-tilting as anyone I know......"

With Documents To Go for the Google Android platform you get read, write, create and sync support for Word and Excel 2007 (OpenXML formatted) documents, support for receiving and sending attachments through Gmail and other applications (including the free RoadSync Exchange beta client, open password protected files, and view Word documents with track changes so you can see what others have done to your document. ZDNet reviewer Mathew Miller also recommends that people check out the details of the DataViz Intact Technology to see how documents will be handled to maintain file formatting and structure throughout the process of editing. There are two YouTube Video demonstations of "Documents to Go" running on an Android. ........ No collaborative editing with MSOffice desktops, but this is outstanding stuff.

Google programmers open source two components of the Google Wave messaging and collaboration prototype. One includes the Operational Transform, which forms the complex center of the Wave model. Google Wave is an example of the Pushbutton Web, where real-time communications rule the roost. Google July 24 said it released to open source the OT (Operational Transform) code, the framework that enables multiple people to edit a single document in real time across a wide-area network, as well as a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol. The Google Wave Federation Protocol is an open extension to the XMPP core protocol, geared to allow near real-time communication of wave updates between two wave servers.