Cloud Sherpas was featured today on the Google Apps developer blog! We shared our experience building SherpaTools for Google Apps on the Google platform and detailed our use of Google Apps APIs, Google App Engine, Google Web Toolkit, and other Google technologies. Check it out — read “Building Applications on top of Google Apps.” Hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed putting together the technical details.

Plugin for Microsoft Office expands collaboration with Google Apps suite

OffiSync is a powerful tool that directly connects Microsoft Office to Google Apps, letting you save your files to Google’s cloud and collaborate with colleagues directly from your desktop application. Today OffiSync announced a premium version of their software, enabling users to save their Office documents to both Google Docs and Google Sites. You can read more about OffiSync on this page, or check out the coverage on TechCrunch.

As an OffiSync partner, Cloud Sherpas can help your organization rapidly deploy OffiSync. This is a great opportunity for organizations using Google Apps to eliminate the boundaries between Google Apps and Microsoft Office. Take some time to experiment with a free trial, or contact us for more information on enterprise licensing.

Download Leaving Lotus event materials

Thank you to everyone who came out for Leaving Lotus last week. Your interest and participation at the event is a clear indication to us of the growing demand for alternative solutions in the enterprise. We’d also like to thank Google for hosting us and Binary Tree and Ferris Research for their substantial contributions.

Members of the audience represented organizations with 250 to 5000+ users, and businesses drove in from all over the Southeast. We had some great conversations with CIOs and IT leaders about why they’re seeking alternatives to Lotus Notes/Domino and how they could take the first steps in considering a migration to Google Apps.

If you’re thinking about Leaving Lotus, Cloud Sherpas would be glad to help you evaluate, deploy and support Google Apps for your business. Give us a call, we’re here to help.

Download the event materials

In response to your feedback and comments

All,

Thank you for your feedback to our last post. We are thrilled that through the use of blogs and twitter, we can engage the community in a nearly real-time conversation. What I find odd, however, is the fact that a leader of another large company can call for the “eradication” of Lotus Notes to his partner community, but it was David Hoff’s “Top 10 Reasons I Left Lotus Notes for Google Apps” that sparked the ire of the Lotus Notes faithful. We clearly hit a nerve here and wanted to take an opportunity to respond to some of the feedback.

First of all, let me say that Cloud Sherpas is made up of several former Lotus Notes Professionals. In my previous role with a large Fortune 100 company, I was responsible for the implementation, support, and day-to-day management of a 30K Lotus Notes and Domino user base. I actually helped that company migrate to the cloud right before I joined Cloud Sherpas. In any case, I too was once very proud of the Lotus brand going back to version 3.0c. However, I write to you now on this side of the divide because I have seen, acknowledged, and experienced what the cloud and Google Apps can provide for each of your organizations.

The time has now come for all of us to be thought leaders for our respective organizations. Are we really so unconditionally committed to maintaining the status quo and defending our on-premise messaging infrastructures? Knowing what you know now, if 10 years ago, you or your organization had the option of either pursuing the cloud or advancing the brand of your on-premise infrastructure, wouldn’t at least some part of you be extremely tempted to forgo your moral obligations and chase innovation?

For many years, the Lotus community has adeptly provided reliable, robust ways to deliver messaging and collaboration to users across multiple platforms. In the early days, Lotus was quick to develop Lotus Notes support for OS/2, which provided a true multitasking platform. With the acquisition from IBM, Lotus began pioneering support for the 64 bit platform on the AS400 and its associated stability, long before the Intel platform even dreamed of addressing memory beyond the 32 bit limit. When it became clear that Linux was ready for the data center, again, IBM and Lotus embraced the platform and released full support for the domino server.

Recently, IBM Lotus has even dared to dip a toe in the SaaS water. In January, IBM announced that Bluehouse is now “LotusLive”. We applaud this endorsement of the cloud model. However, this service still lacks the basic ability to provide browser-supported email (iNotes). At this point, it seems IBM is just attempting to host versions of its on-premise software in IBM data centers. This lack of a multi-tenant architecture and scale is clearly reflected in the pricing and feature set.

Aside from the fact that a browser offering is still not available, businesses cannot even purchase the product unless they commit to 1,000 seats. Furthermore, the purchase price is a massive $162/user (yes, this includes the software license for the client). This is more than 3x the cost of the entire Google Apps Suite, and users are subject to a host of limitations, not the least of which is a 1 GB mail file (versus Google’s 25 GB). We are citing these figures from the LotusLive signup page at https://www.lotuslive.com/pricing/notes.

Regardless of what side you are on, we can all acknowledge that, from time-to-time, disruptive changes occur in the IT industry. These advances leapfrog incremental evolution by approaching the challenge in a fundamentally different way. We see many of these characteristics in Google Apps. By the intensity of the reaction that we’ve generated, we can see that change is difficult. In this light, we want to elaborate on the benefits that our customers have experienced by switching to Google Apps. We have addressed the feedback with an analysis of five key points:

1. Rapidly Changing Technology. There were numerous responses from consultants that Notes/Domino 8.5 is a great product with many wonderful features. Although my experience ended with 8.0, I assume that you tell the truth. However, most Notes/Domino organizations are not on the latest version and probably can’t tell you if or when they are going to upgrade. I’m sure the folks at IBM can tell you exactly how many organizations are fully deployed on version 8.5, but in today’s economy, how many companies can afford to allocate time, money and effort to upgrade on-premise infrastructure instead of using those resources to focus on their core business? In the move to Notes/Domino 8.5, server upgrades are a very small component of the process. To take full advantage of the latest release, desktops, clients, templates and applications must be upgraded too, which can be quite daunting in terms of hardware requirements and time. (One of our enterprise customers with over 15,000 users would need to upgrade 38% of their laptops just to use the 8.5 client.) Whether you spend 20 minutes, 20 hours, or 20 days upgrading your Lotus Notes and Domino infrastructure, should this ever be the chief priority for your business? The truth of the matter is that in today’s economy, using and/or transitioning to the latest and greatest in IT is not an option for organizations focused on sustaining, building, and growing their business.

2. Notes and Domino Applications. Lotus Notes and Domino is a wonderful rapid application platform. Things such as field level security and offline capabilities are merely a few of the many positive features that provide a “Swiss army knife” of tools at a developer’s immediate disposal. If you are driving business-facing and transactional applications that help your organization succeed, by all means, keep it going. However, the best (and most cost-effective) solution to a problem is oftentimes not the most complex or versatile option, but rather, the one that most directly and efficiently meets your needs. To continue the metaphor, a pair of scissors can better solve certain problems for which a fold-out “Swiss army knife” would prove too costly, too convoluted, and too cumbersome.

With such a useful and fast development tool, many organizations find themselves left with a myriad of Lotus Notes applications that, while a good idea in the beginning, lack the careful life cycle approach to application development and data management. Over time, the initial value of the application wanes, and the enterprise is forced to dedicate ongoing resources and money to non-core business needs. For example, traditionally crucial Notes applications often mature into more complex CRM and/or ERP applications.

3. End Users. In today’s world in which messaging has extended to web clients and mobile devices, we believe that Google’s approach to mail is more convenient and appropriate for end users. Over the years, IBM has continued to extend support to a wider range of browsers; however, cross-platform support is a necessity, not a luxury. As the lines of collaboration blur inside and outside the organizations, IT departments have increasing difficulty mandating client software. Yet, with over 100+ million users on GMail, Google has built a platform that is designed from the ground-up to be intuitive, fast and self-supported. Deployment of all users on this single platform provides an unprecedented level of feedback for the evolution and refinement of Apps on a daily basis.

More often than not, many of the advanced features that fat clients provide are not utilized by end users. In comparison, Google has built a client that addresses key end user pain points like mail box size limits, message labeling, and a powerful search functionality, all powered by an almost infinitely scalable, cloud-based infrastructure that requires zero administrative management or maintenance.

4. Innovation. At some point, even Lotus gurus have to wonder, is Lotus Notes and Domino driving innovation, or is it more engrossed in features and functions? With Google, we see many companies take their first step into cloud computing by moving on-premise messaging spam and antivirus filtering to Google Message Security (formerly Postini). On the surface, the case is simple; an overwhelming majority of Internet inbound mail traffic is spam, so why consume precious internal bandwidth receiving these messages if they’re only going to get deleted? If you dig a little deeper, you see first-hand the innovation provided by having an intensely focused, multi-tenant filtering and archiving solution. Whereas on-premise solutions can only “see” what’s happening locally, collect patterns, and download definitions, a cloud-based solution has access to all this information with an enormous sampling of Internet activity in real-time. Google is constantly adding dynamic features and functions to the Google Apps suite. In the last year, Google has added real-time voice and video chat to instant messaging, released Google Video (aka YouTube for your internal organization), and developed full Java support for Google App Engine.

5. Cost. Running a data center is a costly proposition. As employees and customers demand systems that are designed to yield zero downtime, additional resources must be allocated to provide redundancy, failover, and recovery capabilities. The cost of providing IT services can be greatly reduced with an economy of scale. Did you know that Google is actually the world’s fourth-largest server manufacturer? (Not for resale, but for their own use.) Building on such a massive scale proves once again that Google has approached the problem differently. As another example, Google uses a custom-built operating system stack that bootstraps itself at runtime. This allows Google to release and deploy an update across hundreds of thousands of servers in less than 24 hours. The scale of this design is one of many ways that Google’s economies of scale greatly cuts costs for Google, which in turn, results in significantly lower costs for customers. To refer back to the first of these five topics, instead of spending additional funds on IT, a business should reduce costs and overhead associated with building, operating, maintaining, and upgrading IT infrastructures.

Enhancing your messaging and collaborative infrastructures can be the perfect, first step onto the cloud. Google is redefining this space for you each and every day. And for the most part, unless you’re talking to Google, other players in the industry are not going to help you migrate an organization of less than 1000 users. Why would they keep such a good thing from smaller to mid-sized companies? The answer most likely goes back to how much revenue providers (in this case, Lotus Notes) need to generate from software licenses that you purchase for your current on-premise deployment in order to profitably offset their own costs.

From time-to-time, disruptive changes occur in the IT industry. These advances leapfrog incremental evolution by approaching the challenge in a fundamentally different way. We see many of these characteristics in Google Apps. Do you?

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

If you can’t make it to Atlanta, 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 you can participate.

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.

Google Apps and OffiSync deliver Microsoft’s future today

As the arms race between Google and Microsoft escalates, a heated competition between Google Docs and the impending Microsoft Office 2010 has set some high expectations for the product’s release.  The actual competition, however, has essentially consisted of Microsoft’s frantically racing to catch up with a product, Google Docs, that has facilitated an unprecedented degree of real-time collaboration and multi-location accessibility.  In other words, while Microsoft will take another year to catch up, Docs users have already benefited from these features for 2 years now.

Also, let us not assume that Google Docs will remain unchanged until the release of Office 2010.  The most obvious problem with these Docs vs. Office debates is that they pit an unreleased, future version of Office against a version of Docs that is up-and-running today.  Who ends up on top by the actual release is anyone’s guess, but while some columnists and critics list the current deficiencies of Docs, if the past is any indication of the future, Office may have an entirely new list of things to imitate by 2010.

In any case, the showdown will happen when it happens.  While we wait, though, end-users and enterprises are benefiting from the document-sharing paradigm in Google Docs today.  For those of you who have already migrated to Google Apps, but find that for whatever reason, your company needs to use Microsoft Office for certain functions, a sync between Office and Docs seems like the perfect, yet unattainable, solution.  However, this is exactly what we are offering you:

Cloud Sherpas has proudly forged a partnership with OffiSync.  What this means for you Office 2003 or 2007 users is that you can sync your Office files with Google Docs.  Not only are you storing your data on Google’s cloud, but you can also take advantage of the Google Docs sharing paradigm within the Microsoft Office environment today.  This demo has some really cool details:

Like what you see?  Contact us to experience this unique sync between Google Docs and Microsoft Office.

Intranets, team collaboration sites and document archives powered by Google

While Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs capture much of the Google Apps spotlight, it seems only appropriate to shed light on Google Sites — another key component of the enterprise suite.  An exploration of the discussions on Twitter reveals a community abuzz with the innovation and functionality of Google Sites.

Google Sites is an enterprise wiki that all Google Apps users can benefit from.  It’s easy to use, quick to deploy, and nicely integrated with the rest of the Apps suite.  Companies that adopt Google Sites cut additional expense from their IT budget while increasing their employee’s productivity, further leveraging their investment in Google Apps.

1.  Company intranets. Traditional intranets provide enormous value to organizations, but fall short in terms of collaboration and ease of use. With only a handful of authorized editors, a traditional intranet doesn’t allow a general user to contribute content, making it a challenge to keep content fresh and important resources up-to-date.  Google Sites is inherently collaborative and simple to use, and with its robust permission schema, offers a platform to build an intranet for your users managed by your users.

2.  Team/project sites. Forget about complex SharePoint sites or cludgy Lotus QuickPlaces — there is a better way for teams to share information and stay connected.  Cloud Sherpas makes heavy use of Google Sites in every client engagement, creating a central resource for both internal and external team members to share files, keep meeting notes, and track progress. And with native hooks into other Google Apps modules, sharing calendars and other team resources is a snap.

3.  Archives. Much like your company intranet, the value of your archives depends heavily on how easy it is to recall files from its depths.  For traditional file shares and document repositories, this is achieved by mandating a rigid hierarchy, which as we all know, is very difficult to maintain over time.  As one might expect, an archive supported by Google would naturally come with Google-powered search.  The many of you familiar with Gmail should realize how much a difference it would make to be able to search through thousands of files in your archives with the ease that Google search exhibits in Gmail, especially if you forget the exact file name or location.

To get more out of your Google Apps deployments, Cloud Sherpas is developing a suite of Google Apps productivity tools.  The first product in our suite is the Google Sites Bulk File Uploader. Go ahead and try it!  Because I think we can agree that no one should be charged with the cruel and unusual punishment of manually clicking, finding, and uploading hundreds or thousands of files, the Google Sites Bulk File Uploader allows you to easily transfer an unlimited number of files and folders to Google Sites with just a few clicks.

You can download an evaluation version and see how easy it is to move files to Google Sites.

TechCFO, a financial services consulting firm, used the Google Sites Bulk File Uploader to migrate a large document repository from Microsoft Exchange Public Folders (an archive system without a search function!) to Google Sites.  Once the documents arrived in Google, they were indexed and immediately searchable.  The Bulk File Uploader helped facilitate what otherwise would have been an arduous task and turned an unused file share into an indispensable resource for their growing organization. Read the case study here.

So this was our effort to convince you that Google Sites is worth a first date, and that we have the tools to help you get more out of your deployments.  Stay tuned, because this Friday we’ll be announcing an upgrade to our Bulk File Uploader that will give you additional flexibility and control over the file transfer to Google Sites.  It’s a simple concept, but the payoffs are great.

Want more proof that you’ll love the Uploader?  Take a screenshot of you using the free evaluation version and twitpic it to us.  Starting… now, if you’re one of the first five, we’ll give you or your company an Express license for free!  So save yourself the normal cost of $295, and move 100 files or folders to Google Sites for free!

Oh, I suppose this requires you to follow us on Twitter.

Google Apps Sync for Outlook offers choice; Need for Exchange significantly diminished.

On Sunday, PC World claimed that IT decision-makers were still reluctant to leave Microsoft, and writers for BusinessWeek.com scoffed Monday that Google Apps is still not a threat to Redmond, but a stunning announcement from Google on Tuesday has propelled Google Enterprise past what was arguably the most common excuse for Microsoft shops not to use it.

In an unprecedented resolution between SaaS advantages and legacy product familiarity, Google Enterprise has developed the Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook. Now, IT departments reluctant to abandon the familiarity of Outlook can offer users a choice — they can either continue to use Outlook or adopt Gmail, while Google Apps, behind-the-scenes, eliminates the Exchange server and floats the former infrastructure into the cloud. The impressive end result boasts two considerable advantages:

1. High capital expenses associated with purchasing Microsoft server licenses and hardware disappear, as do the operating costs of maintaining this legacy, on-premise infrastructure.

2. End-users determined to stay on Outlook now have that option, although Google is confident that the majority of employees, especially those already familiar with Gmail, will choose Google Apps over the Outlook interface once they experience what Google Apps has to offer.

For an employee like Sherry Arp, though, this option to remain on Outlook is invaluable. Sherry Arp, an Avago Technologies employee that transitioned to this Outlook-Google Apps system, describes the process as “seamless” and adds in this interview that, “It was just like Outlook. I didn’t have to learn anything new.”

For Bob Rudy, vice president and CIO of Avago, Google Apps Sync for Outlook “eliminates the last hurdle or mindset for letting go of [Microsoft] Exchange or the Exchange mentality.” In the clip below, he firmly advocates the product, stating that it saves the company $1.6 million a year.

Dave Girouard, President of Google Enterprise, also mentioned on Tuesday’s announcement that Google has more than 1.75 million businesses and 15 million users already benefiting from its expertise in cloud computing. The plug-in for Microsoft Outlook has eliminated what was perhaps the largest remaining deterrent to the switch from expensive Microsoft Enterprise Agreements (EAs) to Google Apps, and the impending growth now seems virtually limitless.

Google’s own explanation of the product:

If you’re still reading, what are you waiting for? Capitalize on this breakthrough. As a authorized reseller and leading Google Enterprise deployment partner, our job as Cloud Sherpas is to help your organization seamlessly make this transition.

Let’s talk about the switch. We’re ready when you are.

From the Google Apps blog, May 19, 2009
As a website grows, organizing its content becomes ever more important. Google Sites has always allowed you to group pages in a hierarchy, but this wasn’t very apparent when finding your way around. We’ve been working on navigation, and today we’ve released a new feature that lets you set up a tree structure in your sidebar, to help show the structure of the site at a glance.

To set this up, click the “Edit Sidebar” link below the sidebar (or choose “Manage Site” from the “More Actions” menu), then edit the navigation widget. The configuration panel now lets you indent and “outdent” items to set up a hierarchy. The navigation widget can also be set up to highlight the current page, to help viewers see where they are, via a new “Navigation Current Page” color setting in the site’s “Colors and Fonts” configuration.

By grouping sub-pages in categories you can give viewers a more detailed view of your site while keeping the overall framework simple. By default only the top-level items will be expanded, as shown in the example above. A user can of course expand and collapse any items s/he wants, and those changes will be remembered across all the pages in the site.

We have many more improvements to site navigation in development; look for them in the coming months.

But that’s not the only user-interface change. We’ve also changed the toolbar to more closely resemble Google Docs, in our continuing efforts to make our applications have a more uniform look and feel. Additionally, we switched the site settings area to use vertical navigation, to make room for some upcoming features like AdSense integration. We’ve also started to add some collaborator tools to the site management area.

Less visibly, we made some major changes to our rendering infrastructure to improve performance and in preparation for new upcoming themes. This is meant to remain compatible with the layout customizations site owners have made, but it might have minor impacts on how your site looks. See this help article for details. As part of these changes, we grouped related Colors and Fonts settings to make them easier to understand. We also added a “from theme” option to each variable which makes it easy to revert to the original theme value. And we now allow the gadgets in the canvas to be styled separately from the gadgets in the sidebar.

Finally, we heard from you that it was often confusing to have your site content appear in one language, while other areas of the site appear in the user’s language. To improve this we now offer a site language configuration in general settings (“Other stuff”) which allows this to be uniform.

Posted by Jens Alfke, Software Engineer

Desktop utility automates the creation of large document repositories on Google Sites

Atlanta, Georgia — May 19, 2009 — Cloud Sherpas, leading Google Apps enterprise deployment partner, announced today the general availability of the Google Sites Bulk File Uploader — a desktop application that automates the upload of large document repositories to Google Sites, saving you the time from an otherwise manual process.

The Google Sites Bulk File Uploader preserves the folder hierarchies in your existing file system by creating Google Sites file cabinet pages for each nested folder. Once uploaded to Google Sites, your organization can take advantage of a fully-indexed, searchable document repository powered by Google search.

The Google Sites Bulk File Uploader recently helped TechCFO, a growing financial services firm, migrate 700+ files and folders from Microsoft Exchange Public Folders to Google Sites. Once in Google Sites, the files were indexed by Google, making years of collective intellectual property instantly available to TechCFO via Google Search. “The Google Sites Bulk File Uploader enabled our firm to rapidly deploy a Google Sites intranet with fast, secure access to the firm’s collective intellectual capital,” said Neal Miller, partner at TechCFO.

To learn more about how TechCFO’s is using Google Sites and the Google Sites Bulk File Uploader, read the case study here or watch this recorded webinar.

To download a FREE evaluation version of the Google Sites Bulk File Uploader, visit our website at: http://www.cloudsherpas.com/solutions/google-sites-bulk-file-uploader/.

About Cloud Sherpas
Cloud Sherpas (www.cloudsherpas.com) is a cloud computing systems integrator and application developer. As a leading Google Enterprise partner, Cloud Sherpas helps organizations leverage Google Apps and Google App Engine to dramatically reduce IT expenses. The company delivers deployment, change management, support and development services to commercial, enterprise and educational institutions seeking to adopt cloud computing.

Cloud Sherpas is a Google Apps Authorized Reseller and enterprise deployment partner. The company also supports cloud computing solutions from EMC/Decho, TriCipher and other best-in-breed vendors.

Google, Google Apps, Google Sites and Google Apps Authorized Reseller are trademarks of Google Inc.

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