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another excellent tutorial from InfoWorld.

Make LucidChart your online whiteboard and bring your team together to brainstorm. Capture the ideas in an impressive mind map with LucidChart's online collaboration software.  Replacement for Visio.  Import existing Visio charts. visual diagramming.

Wow!  This reads like a premature press release, but if true it's breakthru technology.  I wonder though why Ericom is targeting education?  Seems this innovation would be of immediate importance to enterprise and SMB businesses struggling with the great transition from desktop/workgroup productivity systems to Web Productivity Platforms. excerpt: Ericom has released AccessNow, a pure HTML5 remote desktop (RDP) client that runs within a Web browser without the need to install anything on the client device. AccessNow provides accelerated remote access to applications and desktops running on Windows Terminal Services, remote desktop services (RDS), and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), including applications, remote desktops, VMware View desktops, virtual desktops running on Microsoft Hyper-V, and other hypervisors. AccessNow works on any device with an HTML5-capable browser, such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, and others, without the use of browser plugins, Java, Flash, ActiveX, Silverlight, or other underlying technology. Internet Explorer is also supported, although it does require the Chrome Frame plugin. AccessNow uses only the standard Web technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This approach helps IT administrators maintain centralized control of school resources. It also enables students and staff to use any Internet-enabled device, including smartphones, tablets, and Chromebooks, to do their work anywhere and anytime.

Good review of Cloud sync-share-store providers.  Not sure what this hs to do with Apple's iCloud though?  Other than to point out that there are other solutions available.  Like Dropbox, SugarSync and Box.net.

Excellent summary and historical discussion about Microsoft and why they can't seem to compete.  Lot's of anti trust and monopolist swtuff - including file formats and interop lock ins (end points).  Microsoft's problems started with the World Wide Web and continue with mobile devices connected to cloud services.

Good interview but i'm looking for ways to short Box.net.  I left lots of sticky notes and highlights on this page - all of which are under the Visual Document list since i didn't have a Cloud Productivity list going.  I spend quite a bit of time studying Box.net, DropBox and a ton of other early Cloud sync-share-store operations while doing research for the Sursen SurDocs product.  Also MS-Live/Office/SkyDrive and Google Docs Collaboration.  No one has a good bead on a Cloud Productivity Platform yet.  But Microsoft and Google clearly know what the game is.  They even have a plan on how to get there.  Box.net, on the other hand is totally clueless.  What are these investors thinking?

Google throws in the towel on desktop search, just as Microsoft somehow reached into my WinXP Pro (which never runs with automatic updates turned on) and killed the file search functionality, replaced by a message that file search is no longer supported in Explorer 6, with an invitation to upgrade MSIE or use Bing. As though I would ever let MSIE outside my firewall! 

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.

excerpt:  Social Business 4.0 (SBS), is Jive's latest version of its enterprise collaboration technology. In this new release, Jive includes deep integration with Microsoft Office, a mobile application for the iPhone and Blackberry plus the ability to bridge from internal to external communities. Jive is offering the ability to create or save documents in Microsoft Office with automatic upload to the Jive platform. Documents are rendered for the browser for users to view and make comments.Users may also collaborate on documents such as Power Point presentations. This co-authoring feature is similar to what you can do in Google Docs.

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."

MindTouch was by far and away the hottest property at the 2009 Web 2.0 Conference. And for good reason. They have figured out how to tap into the productivity value of enterprise collaborative networks. Most their underlying stuff is based on REST based data objects and services, but they also allow for proprietary data bindings. The key to MindTouch seemd to be the easy to fall into and use collaborative interface: imagine a workgroup project centered around a Web page filled with data objects, graphics and content, with each object also having a collabortaive conversation attached to it. Sounds complicated, but that's where the magic of MindTouch kicks in. It's simple. One the things that most impressed me was an interactive graph placed on one of the wiki project pages. The graph was being fed data from a local excel spreadsheet, and could be interacted with in real time. It was simple to change from a pie chart to a bar graph and so on. It was also possible to interact with the data itself and create what-if scenario's. Great stuff. With considerable persistence though, i was able to discover from Aaron that this interactivity and graphical richness was due to a Silverlight plug-in! From the article: "..... Rather than focusing on socialization, one to one interactions and individual enrichment, businesses must be concerned with creating an information fabric within their organizations. This information fabric is a federation of content from the multiplicity of data and application silos utilized on a daily basis; such as, ERP, CRM, file servers, email, databases, web-services infrastructures, etc. When you make this information fabric easy to edit between groups of individuals in a dynamic, secure, governed and real-time manner, it creates a Collaborative Network." "This is very different from social networks or social software, which is focused entirely on enabling conversations. Collaborative Networks are focused on groups accessing and organiz

Amazing must read!  BackBlaze offers unlimited cloud storage/backup for $5 per month.  Now they are releasing the "storage" aspect of their service as an open source design.  The discussion introducing the design is simple to read and follow - which in itself is an achievement.   They held back on open sourcing the BackBlaze Cloud software system, which is understandable.  But they do disclose a Debian Linux OS running Tomcat over Apache Server 5.4 with JFS and HTTPS access.  This is exciting stuff.  I hope the CAR MLS-Cloud guys take notice.  Intro: At Backblaze, we provide unlimited storage to our customers for only $5 per month, so we had to figure out how to store hundreds of petabytes of customer data in a reliable, scalable way-and keep our costs low. After looking at several overpriced commercial solutions, we decided to build our own custom Backblaze Storage Pods: 67 terabyte 4U servers for $7,867. In this post, we'll share how to make one of these storage pods, and you're welcome to use this design. Our hope is that by sharing, others can benefit and, ultimately, refine this concept and send improvements back to us. Evolving and lowering costs is critical to our continuing success at Backblaze.

Excellent discussion that covers the full spectrum of Open Source Software - Community licenses.