Archive for month: March, 2009

The US has a CIO for the first time. In appointing Vivek Kundra the federal government’s first CIO, President Obama acknowledges the role information services can play in effective management and service delivery.

Vivek Kundra, the former CTO of Washington D.C., is best known for moving the District onto Google Apps. In addition to big savings on email, Google Apps provided a platform for inter-department collaboration and more transparency for the public. Every District employee is reachable by email and agencies and program use Google Sites to publish and share information.

That the first US CIO has a preference for Software as a Service solutions is a hopeful sign. While he has no direct control over agency CIO’s, if the White House is pushing for SaaS, we can and will see adoption and cost savings.

Smaller companies, like drop.io, are coming out with innovative, feature rich offerings to strong reviews.

While these solutions compete with specific collaboration functions, they do not yet offer an integrated communications and collaboration solution.

In a major shift, Microsoft has changed its mind and backtracked from its decision to allow VARs to bill directly for SaaS solutions. Here is the story.

When you create a form, associated with a spreadsheet, you can now elect to share results — a summary of responses — with your collaborators, or with everybody that fills in the form.

Learn more here.

Google has added data validation (lenient or strict) to Google Spreadsheets. You can now:

• Validate numbers, dates, and text.
• Prevent users from entering text that doesn’t match your criteria, or show them a comment on the cell when the data doesn’t match the validation rule.
• Add text to the cells you add validation to, to help your collaborators enter the right type of data.

Learn more here.