Recurring Meetings Get Sophisticated

/in

Being able to schedule recurring meetings is a convenience, but managing them can be problematic when changes are needed to one or more of the sessions.  Google Calendar has gained new capabilities to deal with this dilemma.

Here are the details.

  • In Calendar when modifying an event, when you change the time, title, description, location, or attendees of an individual meeting in a series, that meeting now remains part of the series.
  • If you change the title, description, location, or attendees of a series of events, these changes will be applied to all events in the series, including those that have overridden fields. However, Calendar will intelligently keep track of what fields you override, and not change those fields e.g. if you change the location of one particular event instance in the series, then later modify the location for the entire series and give it a new title, the one particular event will be updated with the new title but the location will remain at what you had overridden.
  • Changing the time or frequency of any series still resets all information in the series, even those that have been manually overridden.
  • If you make any changes to a series and apply to “All Following”, it will reset all information in all future meetings, and the future meetings will be become a new distinct series.  This will override any fields that you may have manually overridden.

These features make it easier to manage recurring meetings.

Microsoft BPOS Outages: Cloud vs. Hosted Server

/in

Last week, Microsoft experienced several outages of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).   As ZDNet noted, with so few users, nobody really noticed (as opposed to every Google performance  or service issue making headlines).

In our opinion, the outage tells a much more important story — the difference between a hosted server and a cloud-based solution.  MS BPOS runs as hosted servers on shared physical servers.  In effect, Microsoft is installing their servers on hardware the same way you would install them as virtual servers on shared hardware.  Microsoft is honest in that none of the services run in a replicated or redundant way.  With the exception of email, for which users should be able to send, receive and access 30 days history, if your virtual server or physical server has troubles, you are out of luck.

The implications are serious.  Without redundant services or data, any failure puts you, the customer, at risk for data loss.  Imagine a server failure that corrupts an underlying SharePoint database.  Access to documents, wiki’s, and other content can easily be lost.  As Microsoft offers no clear mechanism for backing up data, data you place in BPOS is likely at greater risk than keeping it on in-house systems.

Granted, Microsoft’s big customers (like Coca Cola) can negotiate for special services.  For the rest of the user community, at $120 per user per year, you would just be out of luck.

Here is a blog posting praising the virtues of BPOS and possible backup strategies.  Clearly, the author does not get it.  Why would you trust your data on a service, like Sharepoint, where after a disaster impacting your servers hosted by Microsoft, you are likely to wait 6 days to get data that is 7 days old from the point of failure?  That is effectively a 13 day gap in information.

Fundamentally, MS BPOS misses the mark.  Either Microsoft doesn’t understand the needs of businesses or they are unable of providing the level of service smart businesses require.

Managing Contacts: Eliminate Duplicates

/in

One of the biggest contact management challenges is removing duplicates.  In Google Apps, the process just got easier with the “Find Duplicates” button.  One click, and you can review and merge duplicate contacts.

Google Apps and Mobile Device Management

/in

To help enterprises better manage mobile devices like iPhones, Google recently added enterprise admin policies for iPhone, Nokia E Series, and Windows Mobile devices.  The capability lets you:

  • Remotely wipe all data from lost or stolen mobile devices
  • Lock idle devices after a period of inactivity
  • Require a device password on each phone
  • Set minimum lengths for more secure passwords
  • Require passwords to include letters, numbers and punctuation

Similar features are expected for Nexus One and Droid phones soon.

Click here to learn more.

Real-Time Collaboration: Presentations

/in

Need to create a presentation with other members of your team?  Presentations, one of the Google Docs applications, lets multiple users edit presentations at the same time.  When collaborating in real-time, you can now see on which slide others are working.  If working on the same slide, co-editor presence lets you see which element (text box, title, graphic, etc) the other editor is modifying.

Want a demo?  Want to learn more about collaborating?  Join us for one of our upcoming webinars.

Improved Email Formats for Document Sharing

/in

To help clarify communications when sharing documents, Google Apps now generates emails with color coding and new formats.  The messages are designed to give more visual clues to the recipient as to the type, number, and name of the documents.

Shared documents, spreadsheets, and presentations are defined by blue, green, and red coloring.

When sharing multiple documents, users new receive a clear list of document titles as links to open each document.

You can see snapshots of the new mail formats here.

Breaking News: Google Voice for Business is Coming!

/in

According to a report by eWeek in the UK, Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard has confirmed that a business version of Google Voice will be released in 2010.

Updated Google Directory Sync

/in

This week, Google released an update to the Directory Sync Tool.

The release includes synchronization of passwords for new and existing users.  With this update, organizations can avoid the added expense of single sign-on solutions.

This update is available only for Premier, Education, and Partner Editions.  Click here to learn more.

Google Groups: A Major Addition to Google Apps

/in

Google Apps Premier and Education Editions now include Google Groups.

With the addition of Google Groups, you can ..

  • Create an email distribution list to which users can subscribe, with several notification options to members
  • Facilitate threaded discussions
  • Provide a “public” mailbox for saving project-related emails

For more information, to discuss how this feature can help you migrate off MS Exchange, or a demo, please contact us.

Back to the drawing board?

/in

Google recently removed the ability to email a document into your Google Docs account.  The little-used feature is being re-vamped to increase functionality and expand the number of supported file types.