GigaOM » Collaboration

Chromebooks: Google’s next uphill battle

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 20:05:48 +0000

Photo by Pinar Ozger, pinarozger.com

“Some businesses literally threw me out of the meeting five minutes in when they realized I asked them to move their emails outside of their firewall,” remembered Google’s Rajen Sheth at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference in San Francisco Thursday. Sheth is known as the father of Google Apps, and he told his audience Thursday that establishing these apps what a bit of an uphill battle.

Even Google’s executives initially didn’t believe in the idea, and it took months to finally get the approval for one single engineer. Seven years later, ~~Chrome~~ Google Apps have evolved into a huge success story with four million business customers.

However, Sheth already has his next battle picked: He is now Group Product Manager of Chrome for Business at Google, and in this role is trying to sell Chromebooks to enterprise customers. “I feel like it’s a déjà-vu,” he said when asking about the challenges around establishing the device in the enterprise world. Some people already get it, he said, others aren’t quite there yet.

Google officially introduced the Chromebook at its Google I/O conference in May, and is charging enterprises $28 per month and device. Sheth said that Google wants to do to the desktop with Chromebooks what it did with Apps for enterprise IT. The upside for webworkers and companies alike is that the individual device matters much less than before. “We want to get to a point where any device is your device,” he said, adding that he doesn’t even carry a computer anymore. “I know when I log into my Chromebook at home its the same as my Chromebook at work,” he explained.

So how can Google win this battle and repeat the success of Google Apps? Sheth said that the product is continuously getting better, and also implied that there could be products other than laptops and the workstations currently available. “We are building it as a generic operating system,” he said, explaining that it would be up to the CE partners to come up with compelling form factors.

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Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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So why did Cisco buy Versly?

Om Malik — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:24:05 +0000

Cisco Systems announced Monday that it was buying a little-known collaboration software company, Versly, for an undisclosed amount. Versly makes it easy to collaborate inside the Microsoft Office products, though it’s not clear who its customers are. The way I see it, this is more of a talent and knowledge acquisition vs a product/market focused acquisition.

Now, like Cisco, we have long been believers that broadband-based collaboration is a transformational idea for companies and individuals. The San Jose, Calif.-based routing giant made collaboration a big area of focus when it bought WebEx and a slew of other companies. However, its collaboration plans have fallen short of its target.

Many of Cisco’s competitors — for instance, Google and Salesforce — are pretty far along in their efforts, and Cisco needs to catch up. It seems Cisco is looking to jump-start its efforts, and for that, it needs a team with deep understanding of collaboration and software-as-a-service business model.

I would rate this acquisition a “B+” for Cisco. Versly seems to be a good start, thanks to a pretty good group of executives who will soon be joining Cisco. That said, I do think Cisco needs more than just this team.

Versly is roughly two years old and has received funding from the likes of 500 Startups and Accel Partners along with a group of angels. It was originally called TaskDock. It had been building Atlasssian Confluence add-ons for a while before focusing on this new market.

Have you tried or used Versly? If yes, please share your thoughts with us.

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The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

GoDropBox allows people to upload files to your Google Docs account

Simon Mackie — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:05:48 +0000

UPDATE: GoDropBox has been renamed GoFileDrop.

GoDropBox is a nifty third-party add-on for Google Apps that adds a public mailbox to your Google Docs account, enabling anyone with the appropriate link to upload files to your account. This is handy for web workers who would like to accept files that are too big to email and don’t want to have to use additional file transfer tools.

Once installed via the Google Apps Marketplace, you’ll be given a unique URL that you can then forward to other people, which allows them to upload files to your Google Docs account through their browser (they can only upload files and don’t have the ability to read or otherwise access your account). The upload page is fairly basic, as shown in the screenshot above. It is easy to use and supports drag and drop, allows batch file uploads and can show upload progress. Uploaded files appear immediately in your Google Docs account.

The installed version of GoDropBox is only a trial, offering up to 100 users on a domain just 50 MB of data allowance each. Additional data is priced at $5 for 2 GB per month, $9 for 5 GB per month, or $15 for 10 GB per month (subscriptions can be canceled at any time).

Note: Confusingly, despite the name, this has absolutely nothing to do with file-sync-and-sharing service Dropbox. Also, in order to use it, you’ll have to be a Google Apps user and an admin will have to install it on your domain.

(via Digital Inspiration)

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Microsoft takes on Google Apps, finally launches Office 365

Simon Mackie — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:06:13 +0000

At a press event in New York on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer officially launched Office 365, the Redmond software giant’s suite of online collaboration and office tools. It includes Office Web Apps and hosted versions of SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online. It also has a feature set that aims to take on Google Apps for Business. But with a product that costs more than Google’s offering and that’s coming much later to market, will Office 365 be a success?

Office 365 is not Microsoft’s first attempt at offering this kind of service; it has previously offered hosted Exchange and SharePoint services with BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services). But by including Office Web Apps in Office 365, the company now has a much more rounded product that enables users to do their work anywhere, on any device, and to easily collaborate with others.

Office 365 vs. Google Apps for Business

One of Office 365′s main advantages over Google Apps is the huge existing installed user base of Office products. Office is entrenched in the majority of businesses worldwide, and Office 365 offers an easy pathway for those users to migrate to cloud collaboration while using familiar tools. Office 365 also has a greater range of features than Google Apps, incorporating office productivity (Office and Office Web Apps), collaboration and intranet tools (SharePoint Online), email and calendars (Exchange Online) and instant messaging and web conferencing (Lync Online).

Unlike some previous Microsoft releases, Office 365 works cross-platform, so it can be accessed equally via Mac and PC and on mobile devices — although there are reports that mobile access from some devices is limited. Office Web Apps, in particular, is an impressive suite of products, and while they aren’t complete cloud-based replacements for the desktop Office apps — they don’t offer the full range of functionality that desktop apps do — Microsoft obviously invested a lot of effort in making the user experience very similar. The interface is familiar, and documents look identical in Office Web Apps and in the desktop applications. By enabling seamless round-trip working between Office Web Apps and Office desktop applications, Office 365 can also work when users are offline, something that can’t be said of Google Apps.

Of course, Google believes that its product is superior. On Monday, in a post titled “365 reasons to consider Google Apps” on the official Google Enterprise blog, Google Apps Product Manager Shan Sinha aimed a few barbs at Office 365, saying that it is designed for usage by individuals, not by teams; that its pricing is complex; and that Office 365 doesn’t have proven cloud reliability, while Google Apps has a record of 99.9 percent uptime. Some of Sinha’s points are debatable: Office 365 does enable co-editing and collaboration, for example, and Microsoft has plenty of experience in offering cloud-based services, even if Office 365 itself is new.

Easy migration to cloud productivity for existing Office users

With its higher price point, Office 365 might not tempt existing corporate users of Google Apps for Business away, particularly as migrating between the two services is unlikely to be straightforward. However, that’s probably not the market that Microsoft is aiming at. Rather, it wants to keep hold of the huge numbers of business customers with existing investments in the Office product line. For them, Office 365 is a well-designed product that offers an easy migration route to cloud-based office productivity at a reasonable price point with products that will feel very familiar to their users. I think that will make Office 365 a compelling proposition for many business customers, in particular smaller businesses that would like to offer their employees the ability to work and collaborate remotely using familiar Microsoft tools but don’t want to have to make an upfront investment in, and then maintain, their own SharePoint and Exchange servers.

Office 365 is available on a number of different plans, starting at around $6 per user per month for small businesses with less than 25 users; enterprise customers have access to plans including dedicated support. For comparison, Google Apps for Business costs around $4 per month.

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The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Google Apps to Drop Support for Older Browsers

Simon Mackie — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 10:22:54 +0000

In a blog post, Google has announced that it will soon discontinue support for older browsers in Google Apps. Beginning Aug. 1, Google Apps will only officially support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari, on a rolling basis. So after Aug. 1, Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3 will no longer be supported. Certain features may stop working in those browsers (and in previous versions), and eventually, Google Apps may stop working entirely. Each time a new browser version is released, Google will begin supporting that update, and then stop supporting the third-oldest version.

As Google’s Venkat Panchapakesan noted in his post, Google Apps takes advantage of the newer technologies supported by more recent browsers, such as HTML5, to power some of its advanced features, like drag-and-drop file uploads. Maintaining support for older browsers that don’t include these newer technologies, or only have partial implementation, means not being able to implement certain features, or having to invest considerable engineering efforts to produce workarounds in order to implement them. As more vendors come to rely on the capabilities and power offered by HTML5 and related technologies to produce web apps that can match the power and functionality offered by desktop applications, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more web apps going down this route.

It’s probably not a decision Google took lightly, as this change will affect a significant number of Google Apps users. Taking a look at WebWorkerDaily’s stats, for example, shows that a small percentage of users do continue to use the older browser versions affected. However, as Google will simply stop testing new features and bug fixes in unsupported browsers, it’s unlikely that affected users will see any serious degradation in functionality for some time.

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Build a Shared Knowledge Base from Your Inbox With GrexIt

Simon Mackie — Tue, 31 May 2011 21:03:13 +0000

One of the problems with conducting so much work communication via email is that a lot of useful conversation, information and knowledge ends up being locked away inside people’s inboxes, unavailable to the rest of the company. Even worse, if a person then leaves the company, that information may be lost forever. That’s the problem GrexIt is trying to solve with its new app, which is essentially a company-wide knowledge base for Google Apps that allows users to move specified discussions from their inboxes into a shared, searchable repository.

After a user has authorized GrexIt to access Google Apps, moving conversations into GrexIt is simply a matter of forwarding emails to the “add@grexit.com,” or if the user has the GrexIt browser extension installed (currently available for Chrome and Firefox, with Safari support on the way), hitting the “Add to GrexIt” button. Once conversations have been moved to GrexIt, they become available to everyone on the company domain. Users can also apply shared GrexIt labels (which work similarly to, but are separate from, Gmail labels) to conversations to make them easier to find later. Users with the browser extension can also search the repository from their Gmail sidebar.

GrexIt also has a couple of additional advanced features that make it a more useful enterprise tool. Firstly, admins can specify can specify “Fetch rules” that automatically pull certain emails into GrexIt. For example, a Fetch Rule could specify that all of the emails in a user’s inbox with the label “Invoices” are automatically moved into GrexIt (note that users are asked for their permission before any Fetch rules are applied). Admins can also set up “Access Rules” and restrict access to discussions with certain GrexIt labels to particular users, or groups of users.

Unfortunately, emails aren’t often written with the intention of being stored in a knowledge base for later recall, which may make the signal-to-noise ratio of the GrexIt repository pretty low, and specific information difficult to find. I can imagine that in a larger company the volume of material stored could potentially become difficult to manage. However, it’s still better than having no shared access to that information at all. While the signal-to-noise ratio in a GrexIt repository may be lower than on, say, a shared wiki, adding information to GrexIt is much easier than having to write out wiki content, so it’s more likely to be used by everyone in a company.

GrexIt is currently in private beta and free; you can request an invite at the website. When it’s released, it will be sold on the Google Apps Marketplace, likely for somewhere between $1 per user per month to $5 per user per month, according to co-founder Niraj Ranjan Rout. It currently only supports Google Apps, although Rout says that support for other email platforms is on the way. Note that the Firefox extension does not yet support Firefox 5 beta.

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The Case for Increased M&A in 2011: Actions and Outlooks

WriteThat.Name Keeps Your Gmail Contacts Up-to-Date

Simon Mackie — Wed, 11 May 2011 19:02:04 +0000

Keeping an email address book up-to-date is a fairly labor-intensive task, which is why we’ve seen the launch of a number of products that attempt to automate the process, such as Xobni, Plaxo’s Personal Assistant and Gist. An app joining this crowded market is Kwaga’s WriteThat.Name, which works with Gmail and Google Apps, automatically scanning incoming emails for the contact information that’s typically contained in email signatures, and then updating the contact database with that information.

Setting it up is straightforward: Authorize the app to work with your Gmail/Google Apps account, and elect to either have your contact details updated automatically or manually. WriteThat.Name will then scan incoming emails looking for contact information (note: it only works for emails received after the point of signing up, it doesn’t scan through your existing inbox). If you choose the manual option, you’ll get a daily email asking you to confirm contact updates before adding them to the address book, as shown in the screenshot above. You can click “Update” to accept the new details, or “Check” to compare the updated entry against the existing one, with the option to edit the entry after accepting the changes:

Choosing the manual option is probably the more sensible way to go until you feel comfortable that the app won’t make any serious errors, but it’s worth noting that WriteThat.Name says it will never delete any contact information, and also that Gmail has an option to restore your contacts database to any point in time up to a week previously, so any mix-ups could be easily corrected. The app works pretty well, judging by my limited testing, with no errors so far. It’s worth pointing out that contacts are only updated once per day (so you only get one daily email if you choose the manual option), and the app will only update existing contacts; it doesn’t create new ones. Of course, in order to work, WriteThat.Name needs full access to your incoming emails, which may be a concern. Kwaga has a comprehensive privacy policy and says it doesn’t store email contents.

WriteThat.Name costs $3 per month, or $20 per year, per Gmail/Google Apps account; the first month is free. That’s cheaper than Plaxo’s Personal Assistant tool, which costs around $7 per month, but then Kwaga’s app will only update the address book with information that’s contained in the emails your receive. Unlike many “social CRM”-type apps that we’ve covered, such as Gist and Plaxo Personal Assistant, WriteThat.Name doesn’t attempt to tie email addresses to data from publicly available data sources, like directories and social networks. WriteThat.Name is perhaps more similar to tools such as gwabbit and Copy2Contact, Windows apps that can automatically extract contact information from Outlook emails. Personally, I’m left wondering how useful WriteThat.Name’s approach will be compared to some of its social CRM competition; many of the people who email me nowadays have pretty sparse (or even non-existent) email signatures.

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How Amazon’s Cloud Failure Could Affect Consumer Behavior

SherpaTools Brings Advanced Permissions Delegation to Google Apps

Simon Mackie — Mon, 09 May 2011 09:01:47 +0000

Google Apps reseller Cloud Sherpas is announcing some updates to SherpaTools, a companion product for Google Apps that provides additional functionality for domain admins, such as user and contact management, and email policies. The new features are being announced ahead of the Google I/O developer event happening this week, and should make SherpaTools an attractive option for larger organizations looking to switch to Google Apps that need more robust functionality for their IT admins than is provided as standard.

The most significant change is an update to its delegation features, providing greater control over permissions. SherpaTools’ delegation feature allows admins to domain administrators to delegate certain administrative responsibilities to specific users, without having to grant overall admin rights. By introducing the idea of “constituents,” SherpaTools gives admins the ability to delegate specific users with rights to act for a group of users. For example, an admin could grant a specific user the ability to reset passwords for sales personnel only, and also grant the same privilege to different users, but for the Engineering department only. SherpaTools isn’t the only admin tool available for Google Apps that provides permissions delegation features — competitors include Promevo’s gPanel and LTech’s Power Panel — but it’s currently the only one that provides these constituent-based controls; they should prove particularly useful in reducing IT support overhead in larger enterprises.

Additionally, the product now supports the free version of Google Apps, and also features “Instant Seat Purchase,” which enables users to upgrade their account at any time. Generally, when a company purchases Google Apps through a reseller and wants to provision a new user but has already reached the number of licenses available on its account, an admin will need to call or email the reseller to get them to upgrade their account. With this feature, admins can provision users immediately and be billed though their Cloud Sherpas account.

Delegation and Instant Seat Purchase are only available in the premium edition of Sherpa Tools (the “Collaboration Pack”), which can be purchased as a standalone product for $4 per user per year, or $1 per user per year for non-profits. It’s free for customers who purchase Google Apps through Cloud Sherpas.

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Microsoft Tries to Get Collaborative in the Cloud With Office 365

Simon Mackie — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:31:10 +0000

Microsoft has launched the public beta of Office 365, an online suite of collaboration and office tools aimed at small businesses. It includes Office Web App, hosted versions of SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online, plus a new Office 365 Marketplace, which gives users a way to find partner apps and services.

With Office 365, Microsoft is taking aim squarely at Google’s cloud-based business productivity suite, Google Apps for Business. Both sets of tools appeal to the small business market, and offer similar “work anywhere” cloud functionality and an ecosystem of related tools through their marketplaces. Despite Google having had a considerable head start in this market and having a much larger ecosystem of partner apps in its marketplace, Microsoft has the advantage of a strong brand in Office, a comparatively powerful of set of online tools in Office Web Apps, and a huge installed userbase for its desktop apps. Businesses that have already invested heavily in Microsoft products for the desktop will likely find the familiarity of Office 365 appealing, particularly as it offers the functionality of Sharepoint and Exchange for a low monthly subscription fee without requiring any upfront investment in hardware, software licenses or staff.

Office 365 includes:

Office Web Apps. Online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
Sharepoint Online. Intranet and collaboration tools.
Exhange Online. Email and calendars.
Lync Online. Unified communications, including IM and web conferencing.

If you’d like to try it out, you can sign up for the beta at the Office 365 site for a 25-user account (for businesses with more than 25 users, Microsoft offers enterprise plans, including dedicated support). Note that Microsoft currently anticipates the average wait for a new account from sign-up as being approximately two to four weeks during the beta period. When the beta ends, which is likely to happen later this year, users will have 30 days to decide whether to migrate to paid subscription, which should start at $6 per user per month. For comparison, Google charges $50 per user per year for Google Apps for Business, or around $4 per month.

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The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Noteleaf: Quick Info on Meeting Participants, Delivered by SMS

Charles Hamilton — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 15:00:31 +0000

Envision this: You’re running late for a meeting, so you haven’t had time to look into the people you’ll be talking with. But a few minutes before the scheduled meeting time, you get an SMS on your phone containing a link to a mobile-optimized web page with photos of the participants, together with data from their LinkedIn profiles, their last few tweets, and links to your most recent emails with them.

That’s the idea behind Noteleaf. The service has just been in operation for a couple of months, having received funding from Y Combinator, but Noteleaf is already adding features. As of today, its SMS notifications will include some new data:

Participants’ last three tweets, plus links to their Twitter feeds. Twitter handles are retrieved from LinkedIn profiles, but the actual tweets are pulled directly from Twitter.
A list of connections you share with each participant.

Some of Noteleaf’s features will sound familiar to Gist users, which we’ve written about several times. But Noteleaf’s co-founder Jake Klamka assures me that the company isn’t interested in competing with Gist or Plaxo; rather, he and his colleagues want to maintain a service that’s extremely simple to use, and requires no special apps or changes of behavior. Indeed, it’s likely that once users sign up for the service, they’ll hardly ever need to visit Noteleaf’s website again.

The signup process is very simple indeed. Authenticate your Gmail or Google Apps account through OAuth, do the same with your LinkedIn account, and (optionally) provide your cellphone number for delivery of text messages, and that’s it. If you don’t have a U.S. or Canadian cellphone, Noteleaf will insert the information about meeting participants into your calendar’s notes.

At the moment, Noteleaf’s notifications only work for meetings scheduled through the web interface of Google Calendar or Google Apps Calendar (only the primary calendars are recognized). And it helps if you’ve had Gmail or Google Apps email exchanges with the participants before the meeting. But Noteleaf plans to expand the services with which it’s compatible.

Meanwhile, though, Noteleaf’s extreme simplicity should appeal to teams that coordinate meetings using Google Calendar. The service is currently free while it’s in beta; the developers are considering a freemium model in the future.

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Google Apps Gets Scheduled Rollout of New Features

Simon Mackie — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:00:23 +0000

To make its products more appealing to larger enterprise customers, Google is introducing a Scheduled Release option to Google Apps, which will add a delay to new feature releases that allows time for administrators to use a test domain to explore changes, educate support staff and communicate new info to their users.

One of the great things about web apps is that developers can deliver the latest updates to a product as soon as they’re ready. Unlike with traditional desktop software, users don’t have to wait for the next version of an app to get their hands on new features. However, these rapid release cycles can mean the product can change with little or no warning, which can be hard to manage in larger organizations, where complex systems or processes may be significantly affected by small, individual changes. Scheduled releases in Google Apps should allow organizations to plan for feature rollouts with more certainty.

Scheduled release will be used for all new features for Gmail, Contacts, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites in the future. With the new system, admins can choose between two options in the Google Apps control panel:

Rapid Release. Customers on the Rapid Release track have access to new features as soon as the features have completed testing and quality assurance,
Scheduled Release. Customers on the Scheduled Release track gain access to new features on a regular, weekly release schedule following the initial release of those features. New features will be released on the Scheduled Release track each Tuesday, with at least one week’s notice following the initial feature launch.

Customers who previously had “pre-release features” enabled in the Google Apps control panel will be placed on the Rapid Release track, and all others will be placed on the Scheduled Release track. Google expects many SMBs to choose the Rapid Release track, while the Scheduled Release option will appeal to its larger customers with more complex IT environments.

To support the new scheduled release process, Google has also launched a “What’s New?” portal, which will contain information about recent and upcoming releases, as well as training information.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik

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Google Apps Rolls Out More Spam-Fighting Tools

Charles Hamilton — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 22:00:44 +0000

Email spam is, of course, a continuing problem, even if the total amount has fallen recently. So Google has responded by adding some new tools to Google Apps.

Administrators of domains that use Google Apps can now enable a technology known as DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). This technology is intended to prevent “spoofing” of messages, the widely-used spam technique of sending emails with a bogus “from” address, or one that’s real, but not sent by that person. DKIM uses a pair of keys — one in the domain’s DNS records, and one in sent messages — supposed to prevent address spoofing.

This new option is added to SPF, another spam-fighting technology that Google Apps has supported for some time. And users of the paid Google Apps for Business suite can refine their spam filtering using Postini, which Google bought several years ago.

If these spam-fighting tools aren’t enough, Google has also announced that it’s now possible to entirely turn off the ability for some users to send or receive emails from outside one’s own domain. While this feature was originally intended for Google Apps for Education used in schools, it’s also available in the Business and Government editions.

I’m not sure how many businesses would find internal-only email addresses useful, since there are many other options for communicating privately within organizations. But internal email would have some similarities to the “not-really-email, only-receive-messages-from-your-friends” Facebook Messaging system.

How many spam messages are arriving in your inbox? What do you use to control spam?

Image by sxc.hu user kveselyte

Google Tests More Intrusive Ad Placement in Gmail Web Interface

Charles Hamilton — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 14:00:46 +0000

The independent Google Operating System blog is reporting that some Gmail users are now seeing ads below messages. Gmail has long displayed ads in its web interface, to the right of incoming messages. But some are complaining that the new placement makes it more likely that people will click on ads accidentally when they want to reply to a message.

I am not yet seeing the new ads in any of my Gmail or Google Apps accounts. Of course, one can avoid ads by using ad blocking browser extensions, or by signing up for the $50 per account per year Google Apps for Business service (previously called Google Apps Premier).

It could be that the new ad placement, if it becomes more widespread, is an attempt by Google to increase signups for their paid service, which, in addition to being ad-free, offers more features, including bigger mail storage, additional business apps, enhanced security and spam-fighting tools, as well as an uptime guarantee and priority support.

Would additional ads change your use of Gmail or Google Apps?

Image courtesy of Google Operating System

Quick Tip: Report Spam to Keep Your Gmail Inbox Cleaner

Charles Hamilton — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:00:11 +0000

Over 90 percent of all email messages are spam. Most email providers have filtering systems that do a pretty good job of catching spam messages. But every so often, there will be a surge of spam messages that get past the filters to pollute our inboxes. I’ve noticed more spam than usual lately, so here’s a tip that may help reduce future messages.

When you get a spam message, don’t open it, but don’t trash it right away. You should first report the message as spam to your provider. Here’s how Gmail and Google Apps users can report spam. Other mail systems have similar procedures.

If you’re using Gmail’s web interface, check the box to the left of the sender’s name, then click “Report spam.” The mobile web interface has a similar option.
If you check mail using IMAP and a mail client like Outlook or Apple Mail, you can report spam by moving messages to the folder called [Gmail]Spam.
If you use the Gmail app for Android, check the box to the left of the subject line, then click the Menu key and select Report Spam.

How do you keep the spam level down in your inbox?

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Add Interactive Features to Presentations With SlideRocket

Charles Hamilton — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:00:00 +0000

The web-based presentation application SlideRocket has enhanced its tools for interactivity and collaboration. Users can now incorporate interactive elements into their presentations, in addition to traditional graphics. For example, a presentation might include a plugin showing a real-time Twitter stream. In addition, one can include polls directly into presentations, as well as a commenting system, so that viewers can post questions directly on slides. One can also include audio narration.

Users within an organization can have access to shared folders and libraries that they can use to put together presentations that are customized to a specific audience while retaining the organization’s graphic look and content. So, for example, if a salesperson uses a particular slide containing statistics and that data changes, it can be updated in one place; all presentations using that slide will be updated accordingly. Similarly, if a company changes its logo or graphic design, presentations can be automatically changed to reflect the new look.

SlideRocket was one of the first services to be integrated with Google Apps; users can incorporate documents and spreadsheets directly into presentations. Existing presentations can be imported from PowerPoint and Google Presentation.

The interface for putting together presentations is surprisingly simple and intuitive. Without leaving SlideRocket, one can search for images through Flickr, or through its own library of stock images.

Presentations can be made public, embedded into web pages, or can be shared with specific colleagues or clients. SlideRocket offers detailed analytics that allow tracking of who looked at what. And yes, presentations can also be printed or turned into PDFs; of course, interactivity will be lost.

At present, SlideRocket presentations continue to be Flash-based. However, the developer is preparing an HTML5 version that will be available on platforms, like the iPad, that don’t support Flash.

You can see a sample presentation or a video. Pricing plans include a free “lite” version with limited features, a “pro” version for $24 per user per month, and an “enterprise” version that is priced per user. A 14-day trial is available. Google Apps admins can make the trial or full version available to their users through the Google Apps Marketplace.

Do you use SlideRocket? What do you think?

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Google Apps Take Two Steps Toward A More Secure Cloud

Simon Mackie — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 09:01:23 +0000

The option of a two-step verification process has been added to Google Apps, Google announced today. Once activated by an administrator, the new authentication process requires users to log in using their password and a verification code that’s sent to their phone via SMS or generated using an Android, BlackBerry or iPhone app.

Users have the option of indicating that they are using a computer that they trust, which means that they won’t be asked for the verification code in the future from that machine for 30 days.

Google believes that this two-step authentication process, which might seem familiar to users of certain online banking websites, should make Google Apps much more secure; even if a hacker steals a user’s password, they won’t be able to access the account.

The technology used to implement this system is based on open standards; Google hopes it will allow for integration with other vendors’ authentication technologies in the future. Google is also making the code for the mobile apps open-source so that its customers can customize them.

Administrators for Google Apps Premier, Education and Government Editions can activate two-step verification from the Admin Control Panel now; the mobile apps are available today. Standard Edition customers will be able to access it “in the months ahead.” Google is also planning on making the technology available for individual Google users.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?