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From an Fight For the Future mailing: "Here's the deal: yesterday the Senate delayed its expected vote on CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act that would let companies share your private information--like emails and medical records--with the government. "The delay is good news; but it's a delay, not a victory. "We just bought some precious extra time to fight CISA, but we need to use it to go big like we did with SOPA or this bill will still pass. Even if we stop it in September, they'll try again after that. "The truth is that right now, things are looking pretty grim. Democrats and Republicans have been holding closed-door meetings to work out a deal to pass CISA quickly when they return from recess. "Right before the expected Senate vote on CISA, the Obama Administration endorsed the bill, which means if Congress passes it, the White House will definitely sign it.  "We've stalled and delayed CISA and bills like it nearly half a dozen times, but this month could be our last chance to stop it for good." See also http://tumblr.fightforthefuture.org/post/125953876003/senate-fails-to-advance-cisa-before-recess-amid (;) http://www.cbsnews.com/news/activists-send-the-senate-6-million-faxes-to-oppose-cyber-bill/ (;) http://www.npr.org/2015/08/04/429386027/privacy-advocates-to-senate-cyber-security-bill (.)

Too little, too late? IBM enters the SaaS cloud market with an email-calendaring offering. But where's the IBM SaaS cloud ecosystem? 

Talk about a game changer: Excerpt:  An epic battle is brewing out West with much more than a lucrative technology contract at stake: Microsoft Office or Google's cloud? As the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday, Microsoft and Google are bidding for a $7.25 million contract to replace the city of Los Angeles' outdated email system. Los Angeles put out a call for bids in 2008. "Google Apps got the nod because city administrators believed it would be cheaper and less labor-intensive," writes LA Times reporter David Sarno. We all knew this day of reckoning was coming. For Microsoft, the fight to hold on to its Office base is on. Google Apps, the Web-based office suite that includes the viral Gmail, promises less overhead and potentially big savings to fiscally strapped cities, corporations and college campuses. In addition to dispatching teams of lobbyists, both Steve Ballmer and Eric Schmidt have offered to put in appearances at city hall, if city officials think it will help, according to a city councilman quoted in the article.

Good review with some important pointers that all software developers should pay attention to.  iPAD apps are essentially WiFi Web Apps at some level.  Once again the NoteCase Pro - Google Docs issue of HTML-CSS Stylesheets vs. in-line custom formatting comes up.  Again. excerpt: InfoWorld.com investigated the available programs and put together a recommended business apps suite that should be the standard install on corporate iPads. I was surprised to find that none of the iPad productivity suites is ideal, though one comes close. (I've added U.S. iTunes links for each app covered.) Related Content View more related content Get Daily News by Email Of course, beyond the productivity apps that nearly everyone uses, iPadders have further needs, so I've also put together a collection of additional business apps that you might make available to employees or point them to for more specialized work.

This ruling could have a major impact on uptake of data storage in the cloud. It's not a done deal until the Supreme Court rules, of course. But the susceptibility of data stored in the cloud to warrantless searches by the government has been a major disincentive for cloud usage.

File Transfer is Not What It Used to BE.  FTP, email attachments, FTP appliances, DropBox

In taking this next step Box are closing some acquisition doors in electing to attempt to become a core piece of enterprise infrastructure rather than be swallowed up into someone else's larger offering. It's a brave and interesting move that will see them attempting to penetrate on-premise document and project management opportunities that are currently dominated by entrenched vendors, notably Sharepoint. Box's collaboration and work flow tools are currently adequate but unremarkable, and while the user interfaces are well done and unintimidating, they are now attempting to enter the areas of business steeped in document versioning and email inefficiencies that have been so lucrative to Microsoft, who can't be blamed for not cannibalizing their licensing golden geese of Office, Sharepoint and Exchange yet, and probably made 48 million as you read this sentence. Addressing the inefficiencies of these old ways of working are at the core of the modern collaborative enterprise, and it is primarily focusing on business purpose and performance from participants that ultimately unlocks the greater efficiencies possible with 2.0 technologies. The challenge for Box will be to avoid becoming a larger document and content graveyard while providing greater business agility, and this requires some cultural shifts in their offerings to target customers.

I've always liked the term OpenStack.  I also am up to my ears in Cloud-computing and Cloud Document management.  So it's only natural to type in the URL CloudStack.com and see what pops.   Here's what i found; a Texas USA operation specializing in P2P Jabber sync-share-store alternative to DropBox.  Very cool. "Dead-Simple Sharing.  No uploading. No emailing. No FTP." "We build p2web-based apps that help people share their photos, videos, and documents the simple way."

Wave has finally taken over gDOCS.  Entirely.  Are you paying attention Florian and Jason?  This is it.  Your ship has come in.  The final key for Google will be that of being able to work with native OOXML documents, in a Wave, without breaking them.  Round-trip of in-process compound business productivity documents is the last part of the puzzle Google needs to crack the mighty Microsoft monopoly. excerpt: "When we launched the new Google Docs last April, one of the big changes was moving comments to the sidebar and letting people reply to comments. Today, we're updating comments in Google Docs to facilitate rapid and seamless discussions and integrate with email in an intuitive way. Since there are a number of significant" improvements, this update is only available for newly created documents for now.

Tagged PDF, Scanning software that connects devices directly to the OfficeDrop Cloud, Sharing of folders and documents, attaching forms to documents, Intuit add-on, eMail addresses for folders, and, an automated mail system for sending out bills and payments.  Awesome!  Way beyond DropBox, but same idea ported over to Tagged PDF forms.

Jorno is the folding Bluetooth keyboard that fits in your pocket and allows you to type with ease anytime, anywhere. Write email in a cafe. Take notes in a meeting. Blog wherever you are.

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?

For those who care about Web accessibility, here is an opportunity to provide feedback on some accessibility tools for one of the most widely-used web services. The message deserves wide distribution. The contact email address is on the linked page.  The linked tool set should also be of interest to those doing mashups or embedding YouTube videos in web pages. Hi all, I'm the co-developer a YouTube third-party tool called EmbedPlus. It enhances the standard YouTube player with many features that aren't inherently supported. We've been getting lots of feedback regarding the accessibility benefits of some of these features like movable zoom, slow motion, and even third-party annotations. As the tool continues to grow in popularity, the importance of its accessibility rises. I decided to do some research and found the WAI Interest group to be a major proponent of accessibility on the web. If anyone has time to take a look at EmbedPlus and share feedback that could help improve the tool, please do. Here's the link: http://www.embedplus.com/ Thank you in advance, Tay

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.

Conrado gets a very good review! Excerpt: Feng Office packs most of the features you should require for most project management duties. In addition to basics like calendars, contacts and email, it also provides milestone and task management, and a built-in time-tracking function. All of the above are well-implemented, although some users may actually find the similar interface design of all the functions more confusing than helpful, since it's often not clear which function you're using at any given time without looking at what tab is highlighted. I like the uniformity, though, since it gives each feature a sense of connectedness to the others and adds to the feeling that Feng Office is a holistic solution. Notes, Links and Documents features also bring much to Feng Office's overall value proposition, and each is well-executed. You can even create new Word docs and PowerPoint HTML documents and presentations directly from within Feng Office using its own built-in editors, both of which retain UI elements from Microsoft's own suite. That means less time switching from browser to standalone apps, which adds up to better productivity.

Knock me over with a feather. Now comes news that Cisco wants to challenge Microsoft Office and Google Apps. Paul Smalera of Business Insider questions the wisdom of this initiative, insisting that Cisco must know it can't beat either MSOffice or Google Apps. Maybe Cisco is fishing for help? Where is that wave-maker application Jason and Florian are said to be working on? :) Excerpt: Cisco VP Doug Dennerline told reporters, the company is "thinking about" adding document drafting and sharing to WebEx, which already features instant messaging, online meeting and email services.