Archive for category: Blog

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).

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.

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.