OffiSync 2.0 Preview

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OffiSync 2.0 offers greatly expanded collaboration features for MS Office users connected to Google Apps.

Join us for a discussion of the OffiSync Reseller Program and a demonstration of many of the new features.

Support for native MS Office files in Google Docs:

  • Open native MS Office files in Google Docs
  • Save MS Office files in native formats to Google Docs (Google Apps Premier and Education Edition Only)

Expanded Collaboration Features:

  • Auto-discovery of Google Sites in use
  • Create new Google Sites and folders from within MS Office applications
  • Dashboard showing other documents related to the context of your work

Co-Authoring Beta For Word and Excel files stored in Google Docs and Sites:

  • Multiple users can edit files simultaneously
  • Updated view of each others’ work with each save or auto save

MS Office Compatibility

  • Full Compatibility with Office 2003 and 2007 Editions
  • Beta support for MS Office 2010 Beta
  • Full support for Office 2010 will be available after Microsoft officially releases Office 2010

Space is Limited; Click here for webinar times and registration!

Do Governments Get Google?

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Friday was the deadline for municipalities to submit entries for Google’s Fiber Network Project.  Working with several municipalities on their applications, it seems that the local governments were going to gain from universal Gbps access to homes and businesses.  As I see it, they were missing the mark.

Whether or not you think Google wants or will enter the local fiber market as a business, I think we can all agree that a better understanding the impact of Gbps access will help Google identify other market and service opportunities.

I expect municipalities that focused on how their community could assist Google is tracking the impact would be the likely winners.  For the local towns we helped, a few of our suggestions included:

  • Surveying commuters and tracking changes in telecommuting patterns
  • Intra- and inter-district online learning pilot programs, to leverage teaching resources and lower costs
  • Medical information projects with local doctor’s practices, providers, and software vendors (my town is home to one the larger vendors of medical practice management software for small practices)
  • Business development programs … does Gbps access attract businesses?

None of the towns we spoke with initially thought of helping gather and track information about the impact of the fiber network.  Additionally, none of the towns had a business relationship with Google beyond use of public search.  Many of these towns are now looking at Google Apps Education Edition as a starting point for the latter.

I’ll post updates if/when we learn how the town we helped are doing.

We Need a New Term

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What do you call an image of a file server that runs in an environment in which it exists across multiple processors, pools of memory, and disk that in now way correlate to any specific pieces of hardware?

We cannot call it cloud computing, as this term means just about anything to just about anyone these days.  While the denotation of virtual server is correct, the connation is server image hosted on a physical server, exclusively or as one of several virtual servers sharing resources.  Granted, the “virtual server” may be hosted on multiple servers for redundancy, but any given instance of the server image only exists and runs on one host at any point in time.  The same seems to hold true for the meaning of cluster.

So, what do we call a server – an operating system that uses processors, memory, network access, disk, et cetera abstracted from a pool of resources?