For the last 10+ years, I’ve spent countless nights and weekends keeping Lotus Notes/Domino running at organizations of all sizes. In the process, I’ve gathered more certifications than can fit on a business card (CLS, CLP, PCLP…), but at the end of the day, ensuring that email is working 24/7 takes too much time and effort. For that reason, I’ve left Lotus for Google Apps with no regrets.

Here’s my Top 10 List of why I made the switch:

1. No more emails with the red “X” replacing the actual image.
2. No more weekends spent upgrading Lotus Notes servers.
3. No more waiting for the AdminP guy/gal to do his/her work.
4. Way too many fixes on Lotus Fix List databases.
5. Killnotes.exe should be more of an attitude than a program.
6. I never made the switch to Java, and neither did Lotus.
7. I never was and never will be a fan of Quincy.
8. A smart upgrade isn’t as smart as a no upgrade.
9. Google’s 25GB inbox opens in less than 5 seconds.
10. Google’s email search function actually works.

Have you already made the switch? Are you thinking about it? Do you have a better Top 10? Share your feedback in the comments section below!

We also invite you to join us on Thursday, Aug 13 at the Google Atlanta office for Leaving Lotus — Making the Switch from Lotus Notes/Domino to Google Apps.

If you can’t make it to Atlanta, no problem! We’ll be broadcasting the Q&A portion of the event over a conference line and taking your questions live over twitter. Click here for more info on how to participate.

The pace of Google’s innovation can sometimes makes your head spin.  In a little over a day, they released a major upgrade to Gtalk (instant messaging) to over 35+ million users.  I don’t think I’d even call it an upgrade -  the difference between a chat program and full audio/video conference application doesn’t really fit my definition of an “upgrade”.  For those that haven’t started using it already, see the details below.  The audio and video performance is very good.

About voice and video chat

Voice and video in Gmail only works with the newer version of Gmail in supported browsers: FF 2.0+, IE 6.0+, Safari 3.0+, and Google Chrome.

Since sometimes reading “lol” doesn’t deliver the same punch as actually hearing your friend laugh at your jokes, you can now use voice and video capabilities in your Gmail chat. From within Gmail, you can have an actual conversation with someone (seriously, out loud), or even chat face to face over video.

Here’s what you’ll need to get started:

• Download the Gmail voice and video chat plug-in, quit all open browser windows, and install the plug-in.
• Sign in to Gmail.
• In the Chat section of your Gmail, select the contact you want to call. If they have a camera icon next to their name, you can make a voice or video call to them; just click Video & more

If your friend doesn’t have a camera next to their name in your chat list, you can invite them to download the Gmail voice and video chat plug-in from the Video & more menu in a chat window. Even if your friend doesn’t have a video camera, you can still make a voice call or a 1-way video call.

As someone who has spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours helping large enterprises transition to the latest and greatest collaboration and messaging tools, I’m constantly impressed with the way the Google builds and implements products.  But enough about infrastructure; it’s not nearly as cool as the end results.  See the screen shots below.

Screen Shot of Google Talk Video

For a relatively small outage that Google had a few months ago, they sure did get a lot of press.  As Google responded, “Over 1 million business customers” have come to expect 100% up-time and flawless service from Google, so I guess it should not have been a surprise that blogosphere lit up during this interruption.  It certainly set the stage to for a great discussion around up-time and reliability.  

Let’s take a deeper look at the reality of what Google provides; the chart below from the Radicati Group documents average downtime as experienced by business for several enterprise messaging systems on a monthly basis.  It’s clear that the traditional on-premise approach is at least an order of magnitude less reliable than Gmail.   

Email Up-time Comparison

I am not one to be swayed by reports & averages, and real world experience trumps any marketing hype or consultants research, in my opinion.  In this light, we setup our own enterprise monitoring solution that tracks Google on a regular basis.  

The charts below are from monitoring our own internal Google Apps Gmail over the last few months. Keep in mind, this is actual production data, not just a simple “ping” of gmail.com.  These results are based on successful log-in actions via an automated script, performed every minute from no less than 12 internationally dispersed servers that intelligently check for full Gmail availability.  

Google Apps Gmail Downtime for Cloud Sherpas

If you look at things in even more detail, you can see that not only is Google delivering on the SLA, they provide a great user experience.  See the response time graph below; this is the amount of time that it takes for the login process to occur.  Google is providing sub-second response time over this entire same period.  How long does it take you to login to your current on-premise mail system?

Google Apps Gmail Response Time

Customers are sometimes apprehensive about moving to Cloud Computing, and they often express this hesitation as being “concerned about security” or “worried about data privacy”.  Oddly enough, if you ask, most of them will also to tell you how great online banking is and how they couldn’t live without it.

They might also mention how many laptops have been stolen or lost in the last year.  Let’s face facts; people who want your data would rather steal the laptop of a Product Manager or Sales Director to have all of the contacts, emails, and documents locally than spend all the time and effort to hack firewalls, crack passwords and then cover their tracks.  Does your company have encrypted PSTs or My Documents folders on laptops?

Now let’s contrast this situation with Cloud based email at Google.  If my laptop is stolen, the thief gets nothing.  There’s no data stored locally on my machine.  Google even takes things a few steps further to ensure security and privacy.  

At the bottom of every Google Mail page, you will notice a button called “Activity”.  If you click on it, it displays not only the address of all the recent connections to your mail but also the method (imap, browser, etc…).  Even more, with Google Apps, you can automatically enforce SSL encryption at the domain level.   

Google Activity Details

Need more security?  How about the fact that Google Apps includes Postini Message Security and Discovery at no additional cost.  This includes spam control, anti-virus protection, and message filtering.  Need still more?  With Google’s support for Single-Sign-On, we can implement multi-factor authentication which means that even if a password is compromised, additional private information is required to access the account.  

In reality, Cloud computing provides better security in a quicker and efficient way.  If you too have “security concerns”, we would love to talk with about how to improve your controls, while reducing costs.  To set up a demo or just get started with a trial deployment, contact Eran at 404-665-3132 or email sales@cloudsherpas.com.

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.

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

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.

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.