Businesses Go from Ground to Cloud in 30 Days

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Nationally recognized cloud solutions provider Horizon Info Services announced a new program for helping small and mid-size business move into cloud computing with less risk and at lower costs. Horizon’s FasTrack Services provide rapid deployment of Google Apps for Business for companies with up to 250 employees, giving companies quick access to the integrated suite of email, calendar, and collaboration tools. Depending on each customer’s needs, Horizon helps customers through setup, migration, and user education, completing deployments in 1 to 5 weeks.

“For businesses with IT staff looking to move to the cloud, we offer the expertise needed for a quick, successful migration,” stated Allen Falcon, CEO of Horizon. “We nearly eliminate the learning curve, transferring knowledge and minimizing risk.”

FasTrack services provide customers with a project kick-off meeting and a customized, best-practice project plan, technical guidance and assistance throughout the project, status calls and updates, and template user communications. Core FasTrack Services are fixed-price, offering savings over most per-user and full service options.

“We also offer a many value add services and technologies,” notes Falcon. “These solutions facilitate data migrations, improve integration between Google Apps and existing technologies, and, most importantly, enhance the end users’ experience using Google Apps”

Businesses can learn more about Horizon’s FasTrack Services at a dedicated web site, http://fastrack.horizoninfoservices.com. Companies that complete the 12 minute assessment will receive a free analysis of their potential migration to Google Apps.

Horizon Info Services Expands Nationally

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Mid-South Office Expands Sales Network

WESTBOROUGH, MA – January 12, 2011 – Horizon Info Services, LLC (“Horizon”) announced today the official opening of the company’s first remote office.  Located near Austin, Texas, Horizon’s Mid-South office expands Horizon’s ability to reach and support small and mid-size businesses nationally.  Carol Gwynn-Adams, a former Google Enterprise Account Executive, will manage the new office.

“Horizon currently services small and mid-size businesses in nearly every state, including Alaska and Hawaii, and in more than half a dozen other countries from England to Australia,” notes Allen Falcon, CEO of Horizon.  “Expansion of our sales team with regional offices is a natural progression and complements our existing sales partner program.”

Initially, the Mid-South office is focusing on sales of Google Apps for Business and Google Postini Services.  The office will start offering other services, including web security and online backup services, later this quarter.

Google Postini Service Update: 6:20 PM ET

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For our customers, mail flow for Google Postini Services has been “normal” since about 3:25 this afternoon. A short while ago, the Message Center and System Administration consoles came back online.


The Postini service will continue to add deferred messages to the stream of messages being process and delivered in real-time. While we have no official word about how long it will take to forward all of the deferred messages, we expect the process will take several hours.

We will continue to monitor the process and post updates as appropriate.

We certainly understand the frustration and pain that accompanies email service disruptions. We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Share with Groups!

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In a recent enhancement to sharing in Google Apps, you can now share documents for viewing or editing by Group. This feature makes sharing with project teams, customer teams, or large numbers of individuals faster and easier.

Group sharing is works with:

  • Docs (documents, spreadsheets, and presentations)
  • Sites
  • Video

To learn how, Click Here.

To learn more about how to improvide sharing and collaboration, Click Here.

Google Postini Service Update: 3:00PM ET

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Google Postini Services continue to experience mail flow problems. Mail flow rates continue to swing between Normal and Critical this afternoon.


Horizon’s customers site on Postini’s “System 7”, which is now operating out of secondary data centers. This shift should improve mail flow as the systems forward deferred messages.

A status update posted at 2:40 PM ET indicates significant progress in improving mail processing.
Note: During this time, messages may be deferred or queued, but no messages will be lost, deleted or bounced. Mail processing may also be directed to the secondary data center at times.

Given the nature of the incident, we expect mail flow performance will continue to fluctuate until the issue is fully resolved and the backlog of email is delivered.

We will continue to post updates as they become available.


Google Postini Service Update

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12:45 PM ET

Some users are still experiencing intermittent delays in email delivery through Google Postini Services. Currently, mail flow is at near normal levels. Emails will still be delayed as the service forwards queued and deferred messages.
Given the “fast/slow” nature of this event, we expect that mail flow rates may continue to fluctuate this afternoon. We will post another update as information comes in.

Manage Email Retention With or Without an Archive

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With 25GB of inbox space for each user, managing space is rarely an issue. Company policies related to records retention, however, often create a need to enforce retention policies on email messages.

In Google Apps Premier Edition, you can not set a retention period for email. Once set, Gmail will automatically permanently delete all email messages older than the retention period.

If you want or need to limit user retention of emails, but need to retain corporate access to messages for legal or compliance reasons, we can add Google Message Discovery to your Google Apps service.

Google Message Discovery is an email archive/recovery/e-discovery service that offers secure, audited archives of all messages sent or delivered for up to 10 years. Message Discovery also works with most any in-house email system.

Click Here to learn more about Google Message Discovery or to view a product data sheet (PDF format).

Google Calendars: Group Invites

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Google Calendars now let you invite groups.

To invite a group to your event:

  • Simply enter the group name under ‘Guests’ in your Google Calendar invitation.

Google Calendars: Help Your Social Networking Efforts

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One of the basic tenants of social networking is to be mindful of your contacts’ birthdays and special events. Google Calendar can help. You can now add a special calendar that shows your contacts’ birthdays and events.

To add the birthday and event calendar in Google Calendar:

  • From the Settings page, select ‘Browse interesting calendars’ (at the bottom)
  • Click on “More”
  • You can then preview or subscribe to the ‘Contacts’ birthdays and events’ calendar.

Industry Update: Microsoft’s Sidekick/Danger Failure was NOT a Cloud Failure

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Over the weekend, Microsoft and T-Mobile acknowledged that the server failure earlier in the week would likely result in the total loss of user data.


While some in the “tech media and blog-o-sphere” tout this as a failure of the cloud computing model, the reality is somewhat different.

Read my post at Internet Evolution and learn more why not all hosted services are cloud-based and why it is important to know the difference.

— Allen