Cloud Sherpas is eager to announce the next major release of OffiSync! A longtime Cloud Sherpas partner, OffiSync 2.0 boasts a one-of-a-kind Microsoft Office to Google Apps extension tool that enhances Office with the cloud collaboration capacities of Google Apps. We proudly affirm that this is a must-have for all organizations on Google Apps that still use Office for various or specific purposes. If you’ve already heard about OffiSync and/or you’re looking to download, the newest version was released this afternoon and is available for download here.

The most significant upgrade from the previous version of OffiSync is the new, real-time co-authoring feature. Every time a collaborator saves his document in Word, you can see the change in your Word document in real time as well.

Other new/improved features include:

• Support for any file type: OffiSync now supports Docs’ ability to store files of any type. What this means for Office users is that you can chose to store your Office documents in their native format without “converting” them to Google Docs format. This is ideal for preserving some of the advanced formatting that Docs doesn’t support.
• Improved Google Sites Support: OffiSync automatically detects all the Google Sites you have access to and lets you edit those files. You can even create new Google Sites from within Office.
• OffiSync Task Pane: A sidebar panel for Office that shows collaborators, recent documents, documents starred in Google Docs, recently shared documents and more.
• Improved Integrated Search: The new version includes improved integrated Google Search/Google Image Search functionality, available from the toolbar.

For those of you seeking a more detailed explanation for how OffiSync actually works, their demo video is really helpful, and we’ve made it available here. Below, we’ve highlighted some of the key functionality points for you.

As before, OffiSync users will see in their Microsoft Word, Excel, or Powerpoint toolbars an additional tab for OffiSync. From this toolbar within Office, you can browse your Google Docs and even your Google Sites. And much like in Gmail, within your OffiSync browser, you have an integrated search bar that filters through your files stored in the Google cloud, and you can then open them within Office.

Conversely, OffiSync’s integrated “Save As” button allows you to save files from Office into Google Apps. Users can even create a folder for Google Docs from their OffiSync toolbar in Office. Furthermore, from Office you can then add collaborators who will be able to access the file via Google Apps.

Lastly, when you save a new file in Office with the intent of putting it in Google Apps, you can specify whether or not you want to preserve Office’s formatting instead of allowing Google Apps to convert it into a Google Doc, Spreadsheet, etc. So now there is no fear of losing formatting or more complex functions, such as Macros or Iterations, when you upload any file into Google Apps.

This release of OffiSync is especially timely considering the significant updates that Google has made to Docs. This feature is especially timely now, considering Google’s new updates to Docs that, among other improvements, include higher fidelity document imports and increased speed and responsiveness.

With OffiSync 2.0, users can experience a seamless increase in collaboration and productivity between Microsoft Office and Google Apps. It truly integrates two environments into one, and you can see for yourself by downloading the new, free version today!

PBS recently aired a special segment on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer on cloud computing. It’s a great segment that highlights the basics of the cloud and why businesses are considering it. Take a look:

Click here to catch the full interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

What IT Revolutionaries Are Throwing Overboard

As we as Americans prepare to celebrate and commemorate our freedom, let us call to mind that which makes us free. Let us also call to mind that to which we still remain chained, as some of you may feel towards, say, your IT systems.

If you are reading this, chances are you already know about the substantial cost savings cloud computing and Google Apps provides as you spend significantly less on servers, IT management, and exceedingly complex licensing schemas. It turns out, though, that companies like Microsoft and IBM are starting to acknowledge those cost savings (and other cloud computing advantages) as well, and that believe it or not, these legacy companies seem for once to be on the defensive.

Although one could probably think of various reasons why Microsoft execs may be losing sleep, simply put, their greatest fear is most likely this: Microsoft’s cash cow products, at a seemingly unstoppable rate, are becoming eclipsed by the competition. (We’ll save IBM for a later post, just FYI.)

The onslaught from forerunners of the SaaS movement such as Google, as well as from countless start-up companies also hoping to capitalize on the cloud’s frontier, is forcing even the once-unyielding Microsoft to conform and compromise. One of the most inconvenient problems for Microsoft, though, is that in the time it took them to decide that a change was needed, an entire industry had already committed to embodying that change. Thus, many of the “new” features for the Office 2010 Suite are actually going to be emulations of Google Apps. For example, one of the key improvements for Office 2010 is to facilitate more group collaboration by allowing online-user messaging and simultaneous editing of documents. Sound familiar?

In this modern-day revolution, the once-invincible Microsoft is clearly on its heels. Not only can we show you how Google Apps is superior to Microsoft; Microsoft is showing you how Google Apps is superior to Microsoft. In the spirit of Independence Day, as we cherish our family, our friends, our food, and our freedom, we at Cloud Sherpas hope that by this time next year, we will be celebrating together your freedom from high-priced Enterprise Agreements and the hassle associated with on-premise infrastructure.

Have a safe and happy holiday weekend! Happy Independence Day!

Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry® Enterprise Server will allow users to access Gmail, Google Calendar and Contacts using built-in BlackBerry® applications. Google Apps Connector installs on BlackBerry® Enterprise Server, connecting it to the Google Apps servers and synchronizes email, calendar and contacts for BlackBerry® users. This functionality will be generally available in July 2009.

Download the Google Apps BES Datasheet

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.