How much is your “my documents” folder worth?

Personal computing definitely changed the way we all use technology, and a by-product of this revolution has been that we all keep our stuff locally on our computers. That’s the “personal” in PC, after all.

I know that many of you will remind me how you diligently store all of your documents on the corporate file server, and the system administrators will elaborate on scripts mapping users’ “my documents” back to network share or use an off-line/folder sync solution.

The reality is that many users (i.e. folks like consultants and sales reps that travel and are out of the office regularly) don’t ever get the important files on to the corporate servers. External drive manufactures picked up on this right away; they put “One-Touch” buttons on USB drives that allow you to do a “complete backup with the touch of a button”. In my world, that’s still too much to remember, and even once I remember to do it, it takes a long time and slows down the machine. I can’t remember the last time that I was ever able to recover a useful file from a USB drive.

Enter Mozy Enterprise. Last night, I needed a customer presentation that I’d left on my laptop back in the office. Since Mozy is service that runs in the background on your PC, it had already backed-up the file to EMC’s data center, and I was able to login to the website and retrieve it, even though my machine was off. I know that even if my laptop died or was stolen today, I would have all the important stuff that I need without any effort on my part.

Mozy Enterprise is a perfect fit for business that need an easy and managed solution to keep remote offices and road warriors protected. It comes with full-featured web-based console that let’s IT departments specify backup policies, configuration settings, and recover files, all using SSL and AES encryption. All this costs about the same as a new pair of tennis shoes. How valuable are your documents?

If you are interested in learning more, setting up a demo, or just getting starting with a trial deployment, contact Eran at 404-665-3132 or email sales@cloudsherpas.com.

Searching in Google Chrome

One of the coolest features of Google’s new browser (aside from the wickedly fast javascript engine called V-8) is the Omni box. What makes it useful is that you can search for anything and everything from one place.

Are you a little in the dark about where the Omni box is? Well, its better know as the address bar. Yes, in the same place that you would normally type “www.mysite.com”, is where you can also just type in text as if you where on the Google search page. Too easy.

Not content to leave things well enough alone, Google added the ability to customize the engines that are processing your searches; this means that if you have other places that you frequently search, like wikipedia or even Google Docs, you can easily add these engines to the default list. Here’s how:

Right Click in the address bar and select Edit Search Engines and on the next window select Add. You need to give your custom search engine a name and keyword. On the URL box, paste in one of the URLs listed below. Now when you search, these results will be included in the list. How simple was that? Feel free to post a comment

Wikipedia – URL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s

Google Images – URL:
http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&hl=en&q=%s&btnG=Search+Images

Google Maps – URL:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&q=%s

Digg.com – URL:
http://digg.com/search?s=%s

Cloud Sherpas guide migrations to the cloud

September 12, 2008, by Allan Maurer

ATLANTA—Cloud computing providers such as Google, EMC and others rely on a channel partner to educate, train, migrate and support firms using their products. Cloud Sherpas, a startup founded in July and one of 15 in the Atlanta CapVenture program this year, plans to be that guide to cloud computing.

Founder and CEO Michael Cohn tells TechJournal South the company is self-funded now and seeks a $500,000 angel round to establish itself as a cloud systems integrator.

“We’re building a service practice and a support organization to help companies move to the cloud,” he says. On the Google side, for instance, the company plans to help large organizations migrate from Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes to Google Apps for Enterprise.

The idea is to give firms migrating to the cloud environment “a local throat to choke,” says Cohn.

“Companies with 100 to 2,000 seats is our sweet spot,” he says.

Cohn says the initial stage of the business looks like a consulting organization, but its goal is to build a platform that enables secure integration.

The advantages of cloud computing are obvious, Cohn notes. “It’s a much lower cost (than licensing software outright). It enables a company to reduce capital expense and move the cost to operational expense by paying for IT as a service. Cloud computing takes the concepts of Software as a Service and utility computing and puts them under one umbrella.”

Cloud Sherpas will have a charge back on vendor per seat fees and will charge a recurring support fee, which Cohn says will be “nominal.”

“If you compare the cost of total ownership to ours, it’s a savings of from 50 to 70 percent while getting higher levels of service,” he says.

“Cloud computing is future proofed. In the traditional model of installed software, you have to update and patch it. In cloud computing, as improvements are made, you get them on the fly. That’s the benefit of multi-tenant architecture.”

Cloud Sherpas currently has a staff of four counting Cohn. “We expect to grow to half a dozen by the end of the year and to 12 by July of next year,” he says.

His partners include Eran Gil, VP of Business Development; David Hoff, VP of Technology, and Neal Miller, CFO.

All have years of experience.

Cohn says CapVenture coaching has been “very valuable.”

“We’re partners with Pete Privateer of Reflex Security (as a coach in the CapVenture program). It’s fantastic that they partner entrepreneurs with seasoned veterans,” he says. “It’s a great benefit to be able to bounce your ideas, your business plan, and your issues off of people who have been there before.

“The access is remarkable for someone who does not necessarily have a deep network in Atlanta. Just getting accepted to CapVenture opened a lot of doors for us. We hope to close a couple of new partnerships in a couple of weeks that are a direct result of being part of the program.

The CapVenture program runs from August 19, 2008 through October 7, 2008 and will conclude with an investor event to be held at the ATDC on October 7, 2008. It is sponsored by the Advanced Technology Development Center and the Technology Association of Georgia.

This year’s coaches include some of Atlanta’s most highly respected entrepreneurs and executives including: Jamie Bardin, James Davis, Mike Eckert, Kelly Gay, Scott Geller, Dave Gould, Doug Hadaway, Sanjoy Malik, Sanjay Parekh, and Peter Privateer.

On the Web: www.cloudsherpas.com; www.atdc.org/capventure/; www.tagonline.org

Google Apps newest member?

Welcome, Google Video.

With all the excitement around the release of my new favorite browser, Chrome, Google also managed to expand the growing suite of Apps last week to include Video. The primary use cases are still developing, however, product training seems to be an obvious fit.

What you get

With Google Apps, Premier Edition, you now get Google Video included at no additional cost. Each clip can be up to 300MB in size, and you get 3 GB of video storage per user account. Administrators have a variety of controls over the service, such as being able to edit or remove clips, generate usage reports and create tag taxonomies. Here are some suggestions to get you started:

1. Share rich video information – Video sharing makes important communications like internal trainings and corporate announcements more personal, engaging and effective.
2. Keep videos secure and private – Employees can securely share videos with select coworkers or everyone at the company without making confidential information public.
3. No large files or complex infrastructure – Google securely hosts and streams your videos, so employees don’t need to share videos over email, or burden IT for a video solution.
4. Everyone at your company can contribute – Employees can share videos instantly. Viewing and annotating doesn’t require any special software, just a standard browser.

Google releases ‘Chrome’ browser

 

Web 2.0, refined.

As it turns out, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and even Mozilla’s Firefox were never built to be traditional application platforms.  They have provided a useful way to surf links and store bookmarks, but that’s about it.  Think about the last great or even signifiant innovation to come from either; tabbed browsing?  plugin support?

Well, once again, Google re-wrote the book today.  They’ve released an open source browser that brings incredible business value to the cloud.  Here’s what they have to say about their newest project, the Google Chrome Browser.  Why not try it right now -> http://www.google.com/chrome  

At Google, we spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And like all of you, in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends – all using a browser. People are spending an increasing amount of time online, and they’re doing things never imagined when the web first appeared about 15 years ago.

Since we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if you started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

So today we’re releasing the beta version of a new open source browser: Google Chrome.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff – the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better . By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

This is just the beginning – Google Chrome is far from done. We’ve released this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We’re hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and we’ll continue to make it even faster and more robust.

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others – and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.

But enough from us. The best test of Google Chrome is to try it yourself.