Just a bit more rationale for choosing cloud services

I just composed this email to a client, and thought it would be a useful posting — good for a quick pasting into future proposals.

Benefits of online services

In brief, working online, or “in the cloud,” simply means using an application on the Internet using a web browser, as opposed to one that resides on your computer. 

I’ve looked for a really good video to explain “What is the cloud?” in simple terms. This one from salesforce.com  is good (ignore the loud-ish music and sales-y tone). And here’s one by Rackspace’s Lew Moorman. Both come from a business perpective, but it is easy to translate into a non-profit context. Also, here’s a blog post about nonprofits and “cloud computing.”

A quick sketch of recent history: Within the last four years, the internet has become a proliferate garden of services, with readymade options for collaboration and communication. The last two years, especially, have brought affordable and powerful features to organizations, saving tons of time and money while allowing workflows that simply weren’t possible before. Most obvious, as Google Apps users already know, working on the web allows any user to do their work from any computer or mobile device, anywhere in the world.

Prior to these innovations, organizations frequently turned to database developers to create proprietary, bespoke solutions. These were, of a nature, expensive, hard to manage and upgrade, and difficult to use offsite. Even worse, because they were created by an individual or a small agency, getting support for or adding new features to the software could be frustrating and costly, or downright impossible. 

Online software is typically designed more generally, to be used by people in many different industries. We shouldn’t assume this means it’s less powerful. In fact, because it has lots of users, it has give all those people a lot of reason to come back. (With conventional software, or custom database, the developer already has your money, and you’re only paying them once. The next time they actually have to impress you is when they have a new version out, and you’re going to pray it is better than the last version, while you fork over your dough once again.) So cloud applications are designed to be plain but potent. 

I suppose my favorite bonus of online software is that I don’t have to install or update anything on my computer, and I don’t have to wait for entirely new versions to get new features; they just show up!

Here are a couple of examples of cloud applications. I listed these because they were pertinent to a particular client, but also because I think they are good examples of cloud apps. Also, it’s worth mentioning again that Google Apps Marketplace is my go-to directory for such services. 

Insightly.com is a tool for Customer Relationship Management, or CRM. Other popular CRM apps are ACT! and Salesforce. They are targeted at salespeople, but helpful to anyone needing a shared database of contacts and projects. Insightly offers tagging of contacts, Google Docs, and email messages; linking contacts by relationship, organization, job titles, and miscellaneous associations; and project and task management. It also integrates with Google Apps to simplify user management (i.e. one place to add users and change passwords). There are other similar tools out there, but I’ve been satisfied with Insightly’s mojo. 

Oh, yes — Insghtly is FREE. 

Mailchimp.com is a flexible and friendly bulk mailing service. It has many features that I appreciate, but my favorites are: using a custom web page to build a newsletter, so it looks how you like it; demographic information on subscribers, based on public information available via social networks and the like; clever techniques for knowing who opened your email and when; and methods to prevent your newsletters from being tagged as spam. 

I also find Mailchimp’s pricing to be more reasonable than others’.

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog

June 28, 2011 | Filed Under Tech | Leave a Comment 

“Google Apps account infrastructure transition complete”

Google_apps

From: apps-noreply@google.com
Subject: Google Apps account infrastructure transition complete

Dear Google Apps administrator,

We recently transitioned your organization to the new infrastructure for Google Apps accounts, a change that makes over 60 additional Google applications like Google Places, Google Reader, Picasa Web Albums and AdWords accessible with Google Apps accounts.

What does this email mean?

First of all, if you’re a Google Apps user, and you received the message (continued below), you likely won’t notice anything different in your online experience. Google made “the Transition” [capital mine] for you automatically, and it should be totally transparent to you. They started this upgrade to Apps about a year ago, making it system-wide in the fall, and they’re finalizing it now.

The substance of the Transition is that you can now log into any of Google’s 60+ services — YouTube, Maps, Reader, Picasa, Latitude — with your Google Apps ID (e.g. you@yourdomain.com). Log into one service, and you’re connected to all of them. It unifies the experience, and your access to all the various cloud resources. It also makes sharing and collaborating between users within your organization (all-y’all@yourdomain.com) somewhat easier. 

In Maps and Latitude, when I go to share, my domain users didn’t pop up as they do in Calendar or Docs. So, while I’ll still have to type in specific email addresses to collaborate with, my users will have a space on Google in which to keep content related to my business, separate and apart from their own personal Gmail material.

In larger terms, it’s pretty cool that Google has put this amount of work toward maturing an increasingly popular service, given that many businesses are still using the free version. The recent upgrade is a broad stroke, and one that puts Apps waaay out in front of any other “cloud” service. Adding to its versatility is the Google Apps Marketplace, where you can find third-party services to add to your Apps suite, giving your users access with the same ID, and you a single place to manage user accounts for all your cloud apps.

Contrast this with Apple’s long and sordid history of cloud initiatives. I am, in fact, hopeful and optimistic about iTunes Match, and the photo-syncing facet of iCloud. Credit should certainly be handed to Apple for creating full-featured, if anemic, online subscription services long before “cloud” became tech parlance. But as the Ars Technica article relates, Apple never quite nailed performance or, in the case of MobileMe, botched the whole job and soured the world against their service. 

Even after they got their act together with MobileMe, they never took it to the next level of functionality or, God help us, speed. MobileMe never became a collaborative MobileUs. I don’t anticipate iCloud offering a whole lot more functionality than they’ve already announced. Apple sells to indiviuals not to businesses. Dropbox, for example, shouldn’t start packing up their toys to go home. Apple, of a nature, aren’t going to run a service as open and flexible as Dropbox.

Apple’s shiny new data center ain’t for nuthin’, however, and I want to hope that all that storage has to be for our personal media collections, going beyond music to movies and other video. It’s a fair bet that iCloud will beat the music clouds recently announced by Google and Amazon, unless the other guys make your media available on all mobile devices, including iOS. 

Vive la Transition!

Continue forwarded message:



To determine which of these additional applications your users should be able to access, click “Organizations & users”, then “Services” from your Control Panel. Your Control Panel can be accessed at https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomain.com

Note: This email confirms that your transition is complete! No further action is required on your part, and your users will see a notification about this change the first time they sign in after the update. To learn more about how this change may impact your users, visit our Help Center article.

If you have additional questions about this transition, we encourage you to explore our Help Center documentation for administrators and for end-users.

Sincerely, 
The Google Apps Team

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog

June 10, 2011 | Filed Under Tech | 1 Comment 

Solid State Drives – quick summary

So, here’s the scoop on SSD: The drives are much faster — speeding up everything from boot-up to opening apps and docs — much more stable and less fragile, and consume much less battery… and they’re much more expensive per gigabyte. In short, if you don’t need as much data living on your computer, a solid-state drive is awesome. If you need more space, 500GB in a conventional drive is the way to go. You can always upgrade later as the prices drop, and they will.

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog

June 9, 2011 | Filed Under Tech | Leave a Comment