If it weren’t for the customers …

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… the job would be easy.

Earlier this week, Ning (a service that creates networking-based private communities) announced that it was rapidly terminating its free services.  Making real the fears of many users of free services, Ning is hoping that keep its revenue stream in tact knowing that 80% of revenues come from 20% of its users that pay for services.

Ning’s mistake is not forcing users from a free model to a paid service.  Ning’s mistake is in how it communicated and is managing the change.  Rather than a migration to paid services, Ning’s free service users heard: “Pay or Leave! And, Ning will help you leave!”

If the 80/20 rule is true, maybe Ning will really be happy shrinking its customer base by 80% in order to keep 80% of its revenue.  How may of the paying customers are also in free communities and will leave because of the treatment?  I wonder.

When Google wanted to boost paid usage of Google Apps among SMBs, they cut off free services at 50 users and rapidly added new features to the paid versions.  For many businesses forced to go from free to paid, the carrot of better features and functions mitigated the pain of the stick.

It will be interesting to see if “We don’t want you” is a good business model for Ning.

Horizon Joins Google in Push to Bring Cloud Computing to SMBs

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Horizon Info Services is partnering with Google to offer webinars for small and mid-size businesses.  The webinars, scheduled at multiple times on May 6, 2010 and May 12, 2010, will focus on how businesses can save 30% or more on IT costs while improving productivity and reducing their ecological footprints.

More information and registration links are available by clicking here.

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?

In The Clouds While On The Ground

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I have been stuck in airports before, so I know the drill:  You can get more information online about weather delays and other problems than you can from the gate agent,  so relax and enjoy the drill.

Here at Orlando Sanford International, they have WiFi setup with a subscription service, but no way to create a new subscription.   It is a work in progress.  Good news, though, as Google and other Google services — including Google Apps — are allowed through the firewall for free.  No need to pay; No need to figure out how to pay.

No muss; no fuss, I am able to work.  Clean out the inbox, setup my tasks, and otherwise organize my thoughts as I travel home from vacation.  The flight delay, while disappointing, becomes an opportunity to reduce my “back to work” stress.

Opportunities abound with the right tools.

File Server or File Service?

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Most organizations store and share files by setting up one or more file servers.  They used to be referred to as “File and Print Servers”, but as most printers include direct network connectivity, spooling, and job management features, the need to have print spooling and drivers running on a server has nearly disappeared.

File servers seem to be heading in the same direction.

Disk space no longer needs a physical connection to a server with a full operating system. Disk drive control, security, access rights, and I/O management can be delivered directly by storage area networks (SANs), network attached storage (NAS), and cloud storage solutions.

What happens when storage is further abstracted?

Gladinet (http://www.gladinet.com) has a series of tools that lets you attaché multiple, independent cloud storage systems and accounts and presents them as top level folders on a mapped drive. OffiSync gives you access to Google Docs and Google Sites storage from toolbars/ribbons in the MS Office applications (avoiding mapped drives and windows explorer altogether). While Gladinet extends the model of OS-based storage management, OffiSync moves storage management directly into the application.

In its infancy, cloud storage services are giving us the opportunity to rethink the positioning and role of storage within operational architectures – in the cloud and in our data centers. File servers feel nearly obsolete as storage becomes a commodity and access control migrates from the operating system to the applications themselves.

Quick Tip: PDF files on Sites

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To make using Google Sites easier, PDF files attached to pages and file cabinets can now be previewed with the Google Docs viewer so no need to download the file.

Quick Tip: Translate Google Sites

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Not multi-lingual?  No worries when using Google Sites.

If you visit a site that’s not in your chosen language for Sites, there is now a ‘Translate’ link at the bottom right of the page which will translate the site for you using Google Translate.

Updates to Google Apps Directory Sync

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Recent updates to Google Apps Directory Sync include:

  • Compatibility with the new Groups (user-managed) service that will automatically detect groups that users create, and will not delete or overwrite them.
  • Delete limits: Delete limits now apply to users, groups and shared contacts. These limits stop any synchronization that deletes more than the specified percentage (or number) of users, groups or shared contacts.

These improvements make managing Google Apps accounts from your existing directory service just a bit easier.