Google Drive is down … I goofed off too long and was about to get some work started and now it's not there. Figures!—
Karen Groves (@grovesdesign) May 10, 2013

Google Drive seems to be down. Damn!—
Elise Descamps (@elidesc) May 10, 2013

Obligatory "Google Drive is Down" tweet.—
Steven Cary (@sjcary) May 10, 2013

Google acknowledged that issues were afoot by indicating a “service disruption on its Apps Status Dashboard.

Google Drive service disruption reported on Google’s App Status Dashboard

“We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive. We will provide more information shortly,” Google reported.

Google PR had no further information to share.

According to the dashboard, the last time Drive service was disrupted was on April 17, for around three hours. Gmail, Talk, Groups, Contacts and other Google products were also affected. The day before that, there had been “a misconfiguration of (the) user authentication system,” which prompted login requests to ping fewer servers than what is normal. The problem turned out to be a capacity issue, as opposed to a heavy influx of traffic.

Before the April 17 incident, there were “disruptions” to Google Drive on March 18, 19 and 21.

Despite Friday’s disruption, files did show up back on the main drive at around noon Pacific time, though, so the disruption did not last long.

Nevertheless, this sort of event doesn’t help Google’s efforts to bring enterprises on board with Google Apps. It might also hurt Google prospects at gaining customers on Google Compute Engine and the Google Cloud Platform, as more enterprises flock to and expand their use of Amazon Web Services and other public clouds.

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The new version of BoxCryptor is more explicitly aimed at teams. It includes new features such as the ability to share file access permissions without sharing private passwords, and to share files with entire teams with a single click. BoxCryptor 2 also does away with the original version’s mapping of files to folders, a system that meant every folder and project required the setting-up of a new BoxCryptor drive – now, there’s just one drive.

Another compliance-friendly new feature for businesses is the option to have a master key covering everything encrypted by employees, just in case someone leaves suddenly or goes rogue.

The update comes as BoxCryptor finds itself up against an increasing range of rivals such as Viivo and DigitalQuick. CipherCloud closed a $30 million investment round last December, and Symantec is also now in the Dropbox encryption game. In short, everyone’s clicked that consumer cloud services will be used in business, like it or not, and their consumer-grade security leaves a market opportunity for more serious users.

According to BoxCryptor CEO Andrea Wittek, the full version of BoxCryptor 2 will come out sometime this quarter. The technical preview, launched on Tuesday, can be downloaded for Windows and Android.

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I hit up the Podcast Gallery website earlier today and took it for a spin. In short: I’ll be using this for both my audio and video podcast needs going forward on all of my devices. It doesn’t hurt that I have a fair amount of storage available to me in both Dropbox and Google Drive of course. Here’s Podcast Gallery’s creator, Amit Agarwal, explaining how Podcast Gallery works:

About the only feature I see missing — and I’ve already pitched it to Agarwal — is the ability to subscribe to a show and have it automatically upload new episodes to my cloud storage.

Yes, podcast subscription is a primary feature in any podcatcher, but I still see value in Podcast Gallery. The ability to watch or hear a podcast through a browser on nearly any device is a big plus. I’ve already streamed several audio and video episodes on an iPhone 5. And the Google Drive integration is perfect for Chromebook users; you can even set the media files to be available offline so they sync to your Chrome OS device.

One potential holdup for some: to save favorite podcasts to your collection requires you to sign in via Facebook or Twitter. Some folks won’t use a service that is connected to a social network. Surprisingly, you can’t sign in with a Google account, which would actually make sense, given the Google Drive integration. Regardless, Podcast Gallery is a handy and refreshing take on podcatchers that smartly bridges mobile, desktop and the cloud.

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Probably the biggest news of  the week was a Federal Computer Week report that public cloud leader Amazon is building a private cloud for the CIA. Citing unnamed sources, the story put the worth of the contract at about $600 million for 10 years. What was unclear — since no one is speaking officially — is if this completely separate from Amazon’s existing Govcloud, although that appears to be the thinking.

As the exec of one cloud competitor put it — this shows that Amazon will, for the right price, get into the private cloud business.

CIA spokespeople would not comment; Amazon did not respond to request for comment. Asked last week at GigaOM’s Structure Data event about the report, CIA CIO Ira “Gus” Hunt said he could not comment now but “maybe someday.”

A bad week for cloud-based services

The week started off rough for many Google Drive users who reported ttheir service was down. As Engadget put it, if there’s ever a time you don’t want your shared documents to go inoperable it’s Monday morning. There were additional intermittent troubles with the cloud storage system for two days.

On Wednesday, it was LinkedIn’s turn to flake out. The professional social networking site was down for about 45 minutes over a two-hour period, according to InfoWorld.

Not to be an apologist for cloud services — God knows I was ticked off by the problems with Google Drive last week –but it helps to remember how many times on-premises applications go awry.

My last employer ran an email system from a huge vendor. And we had multiple multi-day outages every year. I’m sure the vendor (it’s in the great northwest and is now trying to forklift its users to cloud ) would probably blame the implementation, the on-site admin guys would beg to differ. Bottom line, however, was that the poor schmuck end-users couldn’t get their mail. Moral of the story? Technology can fall down no matter how it’s delivered.

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Now doo is coming out of beta on OS X today and, over the next few weeks, on Android, then iPhone, then iPad (a refreshed Windows 8 app will follow in the next couple of months). And, while the end result is similar to that in the beta, it’s quite a different beast under the hood.

Why? As CEO Frank Thelen told me, the future may be all about semantic tagging, but for now people still love their folders:

“The beta period was a very tough time for us. We learned that people are not willing to put their documents into a library like iTunes. We had to change the product in a way that people can keep their existing folder structures, and we’re just a smart overlay. Basically we had to change the whole architecture.”

So, while the beta version involved wholesale importation of documents, the new overlay approach involves just pointing doo to existing folders and letting it do its semantic thing, namely optical character recognition, smart auto-tagging of people, sources and places, and categorization — doo can recognize and classify 70 different types of document, from contracts to tickets. In the beta, if you opened a document it would open in doo; now it will open in the service it’s stored in, such as DropBox.

Essentially, doo has morphed from a well-organized document repository into a cross-service search engine for consumer and small-business cloud storage. That in no way diminishes what it does — it’s super-valuable to have a tool that can return useful data when asked to, for example, find all invoices stored in the last 30 days. Additionally, Thelen said, improvements to doo’s syncing capabilities mean it can always detect when a file is stored multiple times across different services, and always serve up the most recent iteration.

You can also scan documents straight into doo, or even photograph them in via smartphone. But, for now at least, the main value for most people will be in its management of existing documents across DropBox and so on. It’s like a smarter alternative to Found (which was in any case acquired by YouSendIt last month).

By the way, for those of you who want to run doo on a Windows 7 PC, you may have a wait in store for you. While it will come at some point, Thelen said, the doo team hasn’t even started working on it yet.

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Most small workgroups already have favorite consumer-oriented tools they use every day (hello Dropbox!), so it makes a lot of sense to make it drop-dead easy for them to keep using those tools instead of trying to lure them away.

Do morphs into Do More

The original Do app, viewed as a way for individuals to manage tasks, has evolved into a project tracking and management tool for workgroups. These new links to other collaboration products are a further push in that direction.

Do co-founder Amit Kulkarni claims more than 100,000 small companies use “Do” as their collaboration home base and hopes to capitalize on that.

“As they use this tool, they also use Dropbox or Google Drive [for file sharing], Harvest for time tracking and Wufoo forms for leads — we thought it would be cool if you’re using Do as your persistent browser tag for you to be able to see all that information from the other applications inside of Do,” Kulkarni said in an interview.

Do More makes it easy to attach a Dropbox file to a project, comment on that file and then, if necessary, share screenshots just by clicking on the Dropbox icon, Kulkarni said.

With Do More, users can now:

• talk to customers and prospects using Wufoo online forms
• use Contactually to create and manage email contact lists
• share pertinent files with Dropbox or Google Drive.
• use Do Chat for instant messaging and collaboration.
• automate time tracking with Harvest
• use Salesforce.com’s Desk.com for customer service

Collaboration battle gets intense

Do, and now Do More, come out of Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Manymoon and its social productivity application — then at the top of the Google Apps Marketplace charts — two years ago.

Easy collaboration continues to be a big selling point for vendors old and new — with IBM pushing Connections; Google touting Google Apps and Google Drive; and of course Microsoft beating the drum for Office plus Skydrive plus SharePoint. Consumer fan favorite Dropbox is adding more IT-friendly controls to attract more business customers. Younger, potentially more nimble startups like Asana are also in the mix, so the competition here will be fierce.

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On Tuesday, the company’s beefing up Dropbox for Teams with a more powerful console for both users and IT admins that will keep company documents in the company — if that is the mandate — and allow admins to better track user activity.

The new console lets admins:

• View member details like per-user storage usage, recent activity, web sessions, linked devices and third-party applications.
• View team activity — member log-ins and team invitations and generate downloadable reports
• Set sharing controls to keep shared folders and links within the company or allow team members to decide access level on a case-by-case basis

The power of Dropbox is that millions of consumers use it from their tablets and smartphones, and want to keep using it at work. Its flaw is that IT views it as a problem — large companies, including IBM, forbid its use (along with the use of other consumer IT that it deems insecure.)

“Over 2 million businesses have people inside them using Dropbox. It’s already pervasive, we just want to make it easier for IT to say yes to those people asking for Dropbox,” Sujay Jaswa, VP of business development for Dropbox said in an interview.

Business users are an important target for San Francisco-based Dropbox. While it claims 100 million users total, it does not say how many consumers pay for the service nor how many use Dropbox for Teams, which costs $795 per year for 5 users plus $125 for each additional user.

Dropbox is the most entrenched of these competitors and it’s doing some good things here to make itself more palatable to IT at least in smaller companies, said Terri McClure, senior analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group.

While Dropbox is the champ of consumer cloud storage, it faces off in that market against Apple iCloud, Microsoft SkyDrive and Google Drive.

Among business accounts, Google is getting traction with the Google Apps-Google Drive combo and Microsoft integrates SkyDrive storage with Office and Windows 8. Box, usually the company most associated with the Dropbox-of-the-Enterprise crowd, touts its support of all client devices, but targets larger companies than Dropbox for Teams, said McClure.

Still, it’s hard not to see all these rivals battling it out for the same paying business customers down the road.

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That should grease the skids for folks who find logging into yet another online account annoying and enable invited workgroup members to edit a document simultaneously if necessary.

According the SkyDrive blog:

“One piece of feedback we’ve consistently heard, especially from students, is that our current SkyDrive edit links can be frustrating for recipients when they find that they need to sign in or sign up for a Microsoft account just to make a quick edit to the document.”

Microsoft is putting a lot of weight behind Skydrive, integrating it with Windows 8 and Office (and Office 365.) Skydrive competes directly — and ferociously — with Google Drive — which also allows its users to edit documents without logging  in. Both of these entries also have to face off against Dropbox, the hugely popular consumer-based file storage and share service, as well as  Box and dozens of other smaller players.

Group leaders wanting to keep tighter control over who can collaborate can invite people into the document via email and check a “require the user to sign-in” box.

In a market this competitive, lowering barriers to entry is really important. Let’s face it, signing up for yet another online account can be a pain and many folks will just skip it if they can. So, this is a smart move for Microsoft. Oh, Microsoft also said that Skydrive is now home to 1 billion Office documents.

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Turns out there’s a service called CloudHQ that can help. It’s a pay service — with a limited, free trial — that synchronizes data between various cloud storage services. That means you can keep data in sync between Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, Basecamp, SugarSync, Box and Microsoft SkyDrive. Since Google Drive is already natively supported on Chromebook, CloudHQ is the missing link to pull in Dropbox data to a Chromebook.

The Pocketables blog pointed out the directions for this solution and I’m strongly considering it, save for one thing: CloudHQ costs a minimum of $49 a year.

I have to figure out if having direct Dropbox access in my Chrome OS File Manager is worth that cost. The other option is how I use Dropbox today: Access it on the web and download files as needed on to my Chromebook.

For those interested in using CloudHQ to add Dropbox — or any of the other supported cloud services — to a Chromebook, it’s a simple process. After setting up the CloudHQ account, just create a Dropbox folder on your Google Drive and sync that folder with your Dropbox account using CloudHQ.

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What helps extend Chrome OS is support for web extensions. Here are a few of the more useful ones I turn to on a regular basis. The best part: All of these work with the Chrome browser too, so you don’t need a Chromebook to use use then. While many extensions are simply shortcuts to web sites or apps, these have become my go-to extensions:

Clearly by Evernote (install). I’ve long used Evernote’s cloud service to store ideas, images and general information. It’s no surprise to me that the company recently picked up $85 million in funding for enterprise workers to do the same. With the Clearly extension, it’s easy to clip items from the web and have them available on every other device I own. But that’s not what I use it for. Instead, with one button tap, the web extension clears all the clutter from any web page and presents it in an easy-to-read format, much like the Reader function does in Apple’s Safari browser. Evernote Premium subscribers can even use Clearly to read web content aloud in one of 21 languages.

Pocket (install). This web-clipping service certainly overlaps with Evernote, but I simply like the presentation of web pages better, especially on my mobile devices. The former Read It Later service became Pocket and with its cross-platform support, I generally use it on my Chromebook to send pages to the cloud for later reading on my iPad mini or Galaxy Note 2 smartphone. It’s simple to use too: Just tap the extension button when viewing any web page and you’re done. Once the page is sent to your Pocket account, you can add tags for aiding in content organization.

Save to Google Drive (install). This one is relatively new, having just been added by Google recently. But boy is it useful for a Chromebook user; especially someone who recently joined the Chromebook team and got 100 GB of Google Drive storage included with their laptop purchase. This extension that adds a button to save web page links, documents and even media files appears in a right-click context menu, making it easy to save local storage space on your Chromebook.

Any.DO (install). I previously reviewed the Any.DO task management app and since it’s effective and works on all of my devices, I still use it. The Any.DO web extension brings my tasks to the Chromebook, allowing me to see what I need to be working on next. The extension syncs tasks and reminders to my other devices so I don’t have to manage tasks differently depending on what phone or tablet I happen to be using when away from the Chromebook.

Send using Gmail (install). Google has its own official extension that I was using to send links over email, but I replaced it with this instead for one simple reason: I wanted to save space on the Chromebook. Instead of having yet another web extension button, this handy bit of code adds an option to “Email this page address” without a button. To access it, just use a two-finger tap on your Chromebook trackpad when viewing a web page and you’ll see the option in a pop-up menu. Choose it, add your recipients and hit send. Note that this extension places occasional ads on your web pages, but you can disable them in the settings.

Awesome Screenshot: Capture and Annotate (install). The Chrome OS has built-in screen capture and image editing features but I find this extension to better fit my workflow. It also provides more options: You can capture a selected area of the screen, for example. And it’s simple to mark up an image or annotate it prior to saving. The only issue I have with this extension is that you manually have to right-click to save your captured image. There is a native option to save an image locally, but it doesn’t seem to work on the Chrome OS.

Of course, these extensions help me focus on what I use my Chromebook for: Mostly web browsing and blogging at work. (OK, I admit I have the Facebook extension installed too.) But the Chrome extension site likely has something for everyone these days. And although many people consider living in a browser too limiting an environment — for some it surely is — these extensions can help turn Chrome OS into more than just a browser.

Got any favorite extensions for Chromebooks or the Chrome browser? Drop them in the comments and I’ll take a look!

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