Cloud Sherpas Protects, Preserves Enterprise Data with Enhanced Google Apps Admin Product

3,000 IT Pros (Serving 300,000 Workers) Now Using SherpaTools Application as Google Apps Presence Grows in Enterprise Market

ATLANTA, GA – May 11, 2010 – Cloud Sherpas, a leading Google Apps Solution Provider, today announced an upcoming premium feature set of its SherpaTools application for Google Apps admins. One of the “Original 50” apps in the Google Apps Marketplace, SherpaTools extends the IT management capabilities within Google Apps. While in beta, SherpaTools has remained free for all Google Apps domains. The company will continue to offer a free version of the product, and will soon introduce a paid version as well. However, companies that buy their Google Apps licenses directly from Cloud Sherpas will continue to receive the premium features at no cost.

The new, premium features in SherpaTools help enterprises protect and preserve end user data. Google Apps admins can now delegate access to fellow IT staff, such as help desk workers, without providing the company’s master username and password credentials. Using a dedicated pin number, a help desk worker can reset an end user’s password, for example, but he or she would not have access to a broader spectrum of employee data. The Access Control List feature is a significant addition to SherpaTools. Particularly for larger companies, limiting access to employee data is a critical security measure.

An equally valuable new, premium feature in SherpaTools involves the ability to quickly and easily preserve the data assets of terminated employees. In general with Google Apps, all of an employee’s data assets (spreadsheets, presentations, emails, etc.) are deleted once he or she is removed from the system. Admins get around the issue by suspending rather than deleting a user from the system. The admin then goes into the employee’s account and manually removes/archives/reassigns the data files they want to keep. This is time-consuming and highly discretionary process, leaving companies exposed to the loss of potentially valuable data. With SherpaTools, IT admins can automatically delegate all of a terminated employee’s files to his or her manager or another user in the system. This saves time and helps to ensure that important data is not lost.

Since launching in March, approximately 2,100 businesses have signed up to use SherpaTools. These companies serve nearly 300,000 workers. Among the 2,100 businesses, over 250 have at least 100 workers; 50 have over 1,000 workers; three have more than 10,000 employees; and two have upwards of 30,000 employees. Many of these are global deployments.

“SherpaTools success is consistent with the rise of Google Apps in the enterprise,” said Michael Cohn, founder and VP of Marketing and Product Management at Cloud Sherpas. “Large, global businesses realize the significant cost and performance benefits associated with Google Apps. Likewise, they want more IT admin functionality. That’s where SherpaTools comes in. We’re 100% focused on making life easier for Google Apps admins. We think SherpaTools is a great fit for the largest companies and busiest IT pros.”

Google Apps brings simple, powerful communication and collaboration tools to organizations, but sophisticated IT departments need more management functionality than Google offers “out of the box.” SherpaTools addresses this need by providing Google Apps administrators with more flexibility in the way they manage end-user profiles and settings, shared contacts and groups.

Using SherpaTools is easy. Google Apps administrators can easily add SherpaTools to their domain through the Google Apps Marketplace (http://bit.ly/SherpaTools). Since SherpaTools relies on Google Apps as the OpenID identity provider, users don’t need to create an account or remember a new password – they simply log in with their existing Google Apps credentials.

SherpaTools is the only cloud-based application to extend Google Apps’ IT management capabilities. The application works with Premier, Education and Partner editions of Google Apps. For companies licensing Google Apps from Google rather than Cloud Sherpas, there is a fee to use SherpaTools’ Premium edition. The cost is based on the size of the organization.

About Cloud Sherpas
Cloud Sherpas (www.cloudsherpas.com) is a cloud computing systems integrator and application developer. As a Google Apps Authorized Reseller and leading Google Enterprise partner, we have migrated hundreds of thousands of users from legacy, on- premise messaging systems to Google Apps and Google App Engine, helping organizations adopt cloud computing to innovate and dramatically reduce their IT expenses. SherpaTools for Google Apps (www.sherpatools.com) enhances the functionality and ease-of-use of Google Apps for both administrators and end-users and is available in the Google Apps Marketplace (http://bit.ly/SherpaTools).

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Google Sites Bulk File Uploader – now shipping!

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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Cloud Sherpas Boosts Google Apps System Integration with Google App Engine Development Practice

Leverages Google’s Cloud to Enable Deep Enterprise Integrations

Atlanta, Georgia — April 8, 2009 — Cloud Sherpas, a leading Google Apps™ systems integrator, announced today the formation of a Google App Engine™ development practice dedicated to extending the utility of Google Apps in enterprise deployments. The team will leverage Google App Engine and eventually the new Java™ language support to enable deep integrations and build innovative products for the Google Apps ecosystem.

“The drive to reduce cost has created a groundswell of demand for Google Apps among large institutions and enterprise customers,” says Michael Cohn, CEO of Cloud Sherpas. “With Java language support, Google App Engine offers an open, scalable platform for organizations to integrate Google Apps with other applications, build custom workflow applications, and migrate legacy workloads to the cloud.”

Google App Engine is built on Google’s computing infrastructure and is optimized to run Web applications. Unlike other infrastructure services, applications deployed on App Engine more reliably autoscale to meet spikes in demand without the need to buy excess capacity. And since customers are only billed for actual usage, App Engine is an ideal pay-as-you-go platform that further drives cost down.

“Cloud Sherpas has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to execute in Google Apps deployments, said Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead. “We’re excited to have them at Campfire One and expect to see their dedicated team develop unique Google Apps extensions and stand-alone products.”

At Google’s Campfire One event tonight, Google announced an early look at App Engine’s Java language support. “Google has responded to developer feedback,” said David Hoff, VP of Technology at Cloud Sherpas. “The new set of App Engine features, including scheduled tasks, more secure access to firewalled data, and of course, an early look at support for Java programming language, allows enterprise customers to extend Google Apps like never before to meet the unique challenges of their business.”

Cloud Sherpas also published a white paper today entitled “Extending Google Apps with Java for App Engine.” The white paper offers a high-level overview of the Google App Engine stack and describes an approach for integrating custom applications with Google Apps. Please visit www.cloudsherpas.com/whitepapers/gae.html to download the white paper. You can also meet the Cloud Sherpas team at the upcoming Google I/O conference on May 27-28.

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 App Engine, Secure Data Connector, Google Enterprise Partner, Google Apps and Google Apps Authorized Reseller are trademarks of Google Inc. Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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Google chat now does video!

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.

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.

Are Enterprises Ready for Cloud Computing?

The Darwinian Theory of the Corporate Datacenter (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud)

By: Barry Lynn
Aug. 15, 2008 09:00 AM

There have been multiple white papers and articles written by analysts – Is Cloud Computing Ready for the Enterprise? The question is asked so many times now – Is Cloud Computing ready for the enterprise? So, I have to ask – Is the enterprise ready for Cloud Computing?

I’ll start this discourse with a few PC and sincere comments (the two are not mutually exclusive unless one is running for political office).

First, I love Corporate CIOs and IT managers (not in a romantic way, of course, but with great admiration).

Second, they have the most difficult jobs in the corporate universe. They are the brains and the central nervous systems of large enterprises. They are also the most taken for granted of all executives. They represent cost centers who get no credit for their corporations’ profits, while keeping the corporation alive. If they achieve 99.99% availability of their services, an iota of kudos is given for that 99.99%, but a mountain of wrath is doled out for the other 0.01%.

Finally, I spent 27 of my 37 year career in information technology as an enterprise IT manager and Fortune 500 CIO. You guys and gals are my comrades.

So, why do I feel the need to put my comrades on a pedestal? Well, it started with some comments I made at a Wall Street conference and variations of it that I made to members of the technical press and analyst community. I used the following analogy.

If you woke up in the morning and read in the Wall Street Journal that an eCommerce company like Overstock.com had stopped using the USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. to deliver their goods and, instead, leased airport hubs all over the world, bought a fleet of jets and bought thousands of trucks and started delivering the stuff themselves, you’d think they were out of their minds. So, why is is not equally insane for financial services companies, health care institutions, manufacturing companies, bio-tech companies, pharmaceutical giants, etc. to be spending a billion dollars or much more each year on information technology infrastructure?

Well, that analogy has prompted several to accuse me of thinking that corporations are insane and corporate IT managers and CIOs are stupid. I assure you that it not the case.

Then what do I do? I really put my foot in my mouth. I title this treatise “Are Enterprises Ready for Cloud Computing?”, as if to arrogantly proclaim that we are ready but enterprises are not.

But there is expiation for that as well (and I am not running for office, so this is a thought embellishment rather than flip flop).

Intellectually, of course you are ready. Of course you have the experience and skill to adopt Cloud Computing. And most of you have the resources. Most significantly, you have always risen to the occasion when disruptive technologies have been thrust upon you.

But, practically speaking, whether you, I or anyone thinks that the future holds a world where all enterprises will get computing on demand and only pay for what they consume, we know that this will not happen over night. I do see a world, though, in six or seven years, where this will be very much the norm and corporations owning datacenters will be the exception to the rule.

So, here’s where the Darwinian Theory of the Corporate Datacenter comes to play.

I have said many times that Cloud Computing is the most disruptive technology that has come along in a very long time. Respected technology analysts say it will be bigger than e-Business and it’s potentially a quarter of a trillion dollar market (that’s almost enough to fund a fraction of a war!). So, people ask me – Do you think Cloud Computing is a revolution or an evolution?

My answer is a resounding “Both”.

I believe that all evolutionary change starts with revolutionary change. In Darwin’s Origin of the Species evolutionary changes start with a mutation. Those mutations are the revolutions that result in evolution. In most cases the mutation comes about as a mechanism to heighten the chance of survival – you know, to make the species more fit. Subsequent to those revolutions, the evolutionary process gradually occurs as the most fit survive and the mutation becomes the norm – the standard.

Cloud computing is the mutation – the revolution. Enterprise IT and Corporate CIOs/IT Managers will jump on the opportunity to evolve as they always have when revolutionary technology mutations have occurred.

So, here’s an example of a scenario of how the evolution will happen.

During the next couple of years two things will occur.

First, enterprises know that the hardest things to plan for with regard to capacity, performance, etc., are on line applications offered on the web. They really have no control over who may log on, how many may log on, when they may log on, what they may do once they log on, etc. So, the natural evolutionary step to mitigate this is to run those applications on massively scalable infrastructure that scales up and down dynamically as needed, using resources on demand, always there when needed and only paying for what is consumed. These infrastructures are what we are now calling Clouds.

At the same time, the mission critical data and systems of records that are the enterprise life blood residing in their datacenters need to be isolated from these on line applicatons exposed to every internet user. This will be accomplished through the use of secure virtual gateways in the Cloud, connecting, in a loosely coupled manner, rather than a fully integrated manner, to the enterprise datacenters, their databases and systems of record.

These gateways will take many forms. They may be SOA gateways using XML and virtual XML firewalls, virtual messaging systems such as MQ, virtual EAI appliances or customized appliances encapsulating organizations’ proprietary techniques for reliably and securely communicating among systems (and anything new that comes along to supplement or replace these things).

Second, infrastructure/architecture agnostic Cloud platforms (what we at 3tera call Cloud Computing Without Compromise) will be installed in enterprise datacenters. There will be two factors that will drive this.

(1) As more and more apps are offered on line, those same apps will often be used internally by the enterprise employees. Why incur the cost of having separate experiences for employees and customers who are accessing the same information and functionality. Also, when connecting the on line apps in the Cloud to the datacenter and SORs, having them on similar platforms will make it seamless and efficient. ‘

(2) A Cloud infrastructure done right, behind the corporate firewall, enables the enterprise to run their datacenters as metered utilities. It enables them to more efficiently use their hardware resources by provisioning what is needed for each application on demand and releasing those resources when no longer needed for other applications to use. It enables them to more efficiently use intellectual capital by shifting IT administrators from managing machines to managing applications. And, most importantly, it greatly decreases time to market because the lengthy provisioning, configuring, etc., of hardware and infrastructure resources is, pardon the pun, virtually eliminated. So albeit humongously significant, forget all the talk about cost reduction and avoidance. Cloud Computing in the enterprise has the potential to greatly increase revenue and beat the heck out of competitors implementing like products using traditional datacenter deployment methods.

OK – so what’s the next step in the evolution?

At the same time that enterprises are growing comfy with apps in Clouds and realizing the upside of dynamic provisioning and scaling, they will be developing new applications and replacing/changing existing ones. They will start building the new apps in Clouds and as they change existing apps, will consider migrating them to the Cloud in the process. This will afford them the advantages of much faster times to market, the ability to run applications on demand in multiple datacenters (globally if appropriate) creating their first truly complete disaster recovery abilities and concentrate on their core businesses which may be financial services, health care, manufacturing, etc., but certainly is not datacenter operations (they will leave that to the companies whose core business IS datacenter operations).

Now the final step (well, as my limited vision can see it – of course there will be much more beyond this):

Enterprises will find themselves with datacenters that only contain data. Finally, a datacenter will be what its name implies. All of their functionality – all the non-data tiers of their services, will be in Clouds connected to the datacenters’ data. At that point, evolution will have to start behaving like the datacenter is an appendage. Over time, the corporate data will move to the Cloud just as many smaller businesses without datacenters are using storage services in Clouds today. The corporate datacenter will be a vestige, and eventually evolution will cause it to disappear.

Discussion of this step always raises questions of privacy and security. I maintain that when corporate data is in the Cloud it will actually be more protected than it is in the enterprise datacenter. But I’ll save that for a separate, devoted future posting.

In short, the corporate datacenter is not a stupid useless entity. There have been no alternatives. My hat is off to the brave men and women who devote their careers to thanklessly operating them. They are profound necessities. But neccesity truly is the mother of invention, and the corporate datacenter, with all of its overhead, has bred Cloud Computing.

So, as I started this with a PC comment, I feel like ending it with one. As I composed this, I did realize that there are many people out there that discount Darwinian evolution in favor of Creationism. I assure you that I have the utmost respect for all beliefs, no matter how different from my own. And my references to evolution here, obviously have to do with the evolution of technology, not of the human race. Furthermore, I am very happy to depict the corporate datacenter as the eventual dinosaur with a saddle on it’s back being ridden by a member of the Cloud Computing species.