Nov-04-2009Open University talks clouds with MS and Google
(topic overview)
CONTENTS:- Microsoft lowered the price of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which includes online versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications and Office Live Meeting, from $15 per month per seat to $10 per month per seat. (More...)
- Balz Wyss, Microsoft's Asia-Pacific senior director of unified communications and SaaS (software-as-a-service), told ZDNet Asia in a follow-up call that enterprises can also choose to subscribe to individual products within the suite. (More...)
- The price of individual hosted servers has also reduced, bringing Microsoft's superior solution much closer in price to Google's competing Google Apps service. (More...)
- Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's Business Division, said in a conference call Tuesday the software giant will be making the hosted suite available to 15 additional countries. (More...)
- With the business case approved it then moved to address security issues around the cloud. (More...)
- To encourage businesses to embrace the cloud on its terms, Microsoft is claiming that its Online Services will be updated with new capabilities every 90 days. (More...)
- The end product is owned by you, ready for use as an image or PDF to be incorporated into presentations or interactive applications and sites. (More...)
- Google Adds New Social Media Features to Friend Connect Google has enhanced Friend Connect by adding new social media features that Web publishers can integrated into their sites. (More...)
- "People are in e-mail all the time, so efforts to offer solutions that sit outside of an inbox tend not to have tremendous success," McLeish said. (More...)
- While the market for cloud hosted email, file storage and associated services is far from mature, it appears Microsoft is committed to positioning themselves as the market leader and 'default choice' as the market grows. (More...)
- Telecom in New Zealand is a close partner of Google rival Microsoft on several fronts. (More...)
- Austin also points to Google's recent move to provide a "government cloud" to attract U.S. federal government business as evidence of a slight shift in mindset. (More...)
- Current estimates indicate it could be some years before even 5% of business email is hosted in the cloud. (More...)
- Monday marked the launch of BPOS trials in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania and Taiwan. (More...)
SOURCESFIND OUT MORE ON THIS SUBJECTMicrosoft lowered the price of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which includes online versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications and Office Live Meeting, from $15 per month per seat to $10 per month per seat. For its Exchange Online e-mail offering alone, Microsoft cut the price from $10 per user per month to $5 per user per month. Microsoft also increased its standard e-mail storage per user from 5 GB to 25 GB -- the same amount that Google provides for Google Apps subscriptions.
[1] SMBs are using Google Apps as a replacement for Microsoft Office, but large enterprises aren't. While enterprises buying GAPE may be paying for e-mail, a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation package, what they're really using is the e-mail portion." Microsoft also cut the list price on its entire Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) suite, saying it would drop from $15 per user per month to $10.
[2] Microsoft appears less interested in SMB customers, who use the entire Google Apps suite (often in the free version). Microsoft also cut the list price on its Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) suite, from $15 per user per month to $10, with a five-seat minimum purchase.
[3] Microsoft has cut in half its per user per month list price for Exchange Online services and cut by 33 percent the price of its Business Productivity Online Services suite of online productivity applications. The drop from US$10 per user per month to $5 for
Exchange Online is significant because it brings Microsoft much closer to the price Google charges for its Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) suite that is anchored by Gmail.
[2] Hosted Exchange Online is now $60 per user per year, compared to $50 per user per year for Google Apps Premium. (Google also offers a free version.) Microsoft says that it now has over a million paying users for its BPOS solutions, which are now offered in 36 countries. 70 percent of those customers are coming from competing solutions—such as IBM Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise—Microsoft says, so these users represent new customers for the software giant. Microsoft also downplayed the significance of Google's claim that over 20 million people are using its Google Apps solutions. The vast majority of those users are using the free version of the service, Microsoft says, pointing to a Reuters report showing that Google had added its free education users to dramatically increase the numbers. Microsoft also has millions of users taking advantage of the free Live@Edu service, but it does not include them in its BPOS numbers.
[4] Reuters report that number includes
millions of college students using a free version of Google Apps, which lists for $50 a year (about $4 per month) per user. Capossela said Microsoft also has millions of users for its free Live@Edu service, but said the company doesn't include them in its BPOS subscriber totals. "I have a really hard time understanding their numbers," he said. "You simply don't know what their paying user numbers are. Analysts predict that they are pretty small. It's hard for us to really know." Asked what he thought of Google's high-profile win of the City of Los Angeles for a 5-year, $7.25 million deal to use Google Apps, he said, "I feel like we are winning lots and lots of deals. We can't spend too much time worrying about what they are doing.
[5] Although Google beat out a Microsoft proposal for the business, whether users will start using other Google apps -- word processing, spreadsheets and so on -- instead of Microsoft Office standbys remains unclear. If they do, Google will win another victory for both its apps and its cloud computing model. A provision in the contract could win L.A. significant monetary concessions if references from this deal win Google Apps more business elsewhere in the state. The city may receive a series of discounts of up to $1,200,000 for its Google subscription costs if California governmental entities, such as the city's proprietary departments or the county of Los Angeles, 'piggy-back' onto the city's contract. Some see this as an untenable conflict of interest, as it is highly unlikely that a city IT worker will discuss problems with the deployment if the city's budget will be adversely affected.
[6] In a groundbreaking move, the big, busy city of Los Angeles, California has agreed to use Google Apps Google's cloud-computing alternative to Microsoft Office and other programs for all its city offices and officials. The $7.2 million contract means the city will undergo a complete overhaul of its city administration software, the slow and crash-prone GroupWise (Novell Inc.). The contract was signed after various companies submitted their bids, and one of Google's main rivals in the project, software giant Microsoft, was also in the game. LA's decision to go with Google and cloud-computing is seen as a major blow for Microsoft, who largely depends on the success of their operating systems and (offline) office software.
[7] The post continues by saying that in the face of a massive budget deficit, Google's honey-coated promises of cost-savings were enticing. It claims the proposed system under consideration will cost taxpayers an additional $1.5m in the first year in the process of migrating and training for Google Apps. It goes on to fluff its own Novell GroupWise software by saying over 1,200 U.S. agencies use the product including 47 of the 50 U.S. states. "The City of Los Angeles should have opted for this proven product to ensure the security of its data and to save taxpayer money. They have taken a risk with no reward.
[8] U.S. and Latin American customers will be served from from data centers in Texas, Virginia, Washington, and a newly built one in Chicago. These announcements come one week after the city council of Los Angeles voted to replace an aging Novell GroupWise email system with Google Apps, beating out Microsoft Exchange Online.
[9] Microsoft's "on premises" version of the Exchange email system remains the dominant way organizations handle email. This requires them to purchase Microsoft programs and run them in house on company equipment. IBM has stepped up marketing of its Lotus Symphony
hosted services, and has even
accused Microsoft of exaggerating the glowing metrics it has been using to tout its new online offerings. Google recently struck a blow by convincing the City of Los Angeles to dump its in-house Microsoft Exchange system for Google Apps.
[10] Microsoft's price cuts come at a time of increasing competition in the market for hosted software. Among other developments, Google Apps recently scored a high-profile victory by persuading the city of Los Angeles to switch to its email service. Competition didn't play a role in the pricing decisions announced today, said Ron Markezich, the Microsoft Online corporate vice president, in an interview this afternoon.
[11] Rather than confuse people with a promotional price, we'd rather just go in with a list price that's very clear and competitive." Asked about the city of Los Angeles' decision to shift to Google Apps for email, Markezich acknowledged that Microsoft Online partners originally competed for the business, but he noted that the city contract ultimately focused on email, and the city has made it clear that it's not planning to switch away from traditional Microsoft Office programs from employee computers.
[11] Last week, the city of Los Angeles voted to go ahead with a deal to shift many employees to Google Apps from Microsoft Office. In an interview, Microsoft Vice President Chris Capossela said the move has less to do with competitive pressure than that "it's the price that customers are really excited to buy our suite at."
[12] Although Microsoft Office will still be used by Los Angeles, the city plans to reduce the number of licenses it has and move many non-power users to the simpler Google Apps alternatives.
[13] "If we want to move to Google Apps, we would have to uninstall from every PC to force users to learn Google Apps, not great for productivity." He added that DSC employees in general seem to be more concerned with presentation rather than content of a document. "Google Apps do not provide such rich formatting capabilities. This mindset would have to change or be changed for Google Apps to take off," Wong said. The company also has "nagging worries over security and
confidentiality ", he noted. In response to these concerns, Ramanathan told ZDNet Asia in a follow-up e-mail that the "true power of Google Apps is the ability to collaborate online and share documents in real-time, from any PC or Web-enabled mobile phone". "While client-based productivity software has many more rich formatting capabilities than cloud-based productivity software today, the gap is closing," he said. "Meanwhile, cloud-based productivity software can provide additional functionality that client-based software does not currently have, such as translation of documents into 42 languages." Users who like Microsoft Outlook, he added, can try an application called Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, which allows Outlook users to connect to Google Apps for business e-mail, contacts and calendar. These people can also use Gmail's Web interface to access information when they are not on their work computer, he said.
[14] Wong believes, too, that the cloud computing model will eventually prevail. Although DSC is not focusing on the platform yet, he does not discount the possibility of migrating to the Web. "As more applications move to the cloud, our entire desktop experience will reside in the cloud and tightly," he said. While DSC is biding its time with Google Apps, another local company recently made the switch. In an e-mail interview with ZDNet Asia, NRG Engineering's CTO Gilles Depardieu said the company made the decision to migrate after its previous server--running Microsoft Exchange--crashed following an attack by hackers from Russia and China. The company's CEO was also looking to reduce associated IT costs from having to consult Exchange platform specialists whom NGR did not have internally, and who were "expensive and busy" to engage when needed, Depardieu said, adding that this also created "lots of invoices" that had to be exchanged between the finance and IT departments. The company evaluated other options, such as running managed/hosted Exchange servers with local service providers, but found the price "too high", he said.
[14] The City Council last week preliminarily
chose Google Apps for the $7.2 million contract, marking a victory for Google over enterprise-giant Microsoft and a continuing shift toward conducting business in the cloud. In cloud computing, services such as e-mail are hosted and managed via the Web, and files are stored not on local computer servers but at a provider's data centers, such as Google's.
[15] Microsoft Price Cut Goes After Google Apps The drop from $10-a-month to $5 for Exchange Online lowers the annual cost to $60-per-user. That compares $50-per-user-per-year for the paid version of Google Apps. How Many People Have Really 'Gone Google'? Only Google knows and they aren't being very specific, as suits their purpose. Exchange Surcharge Could Hinder Droid With Businesses If Verizon wants to win over business iPhone users, it needs to rethink its data plan.
[3] In a move aimed at heading off those who might "Go Google," Microsoft has cut the prices of its
Exchange Online service by half and its Business Productivity Online Services suite by a third. These drops, in the per-user, per-month list pricing, appear intended to help Microsoft compete with Google Apps Premier Edition, the paid version of its online apps suite.
[3] While Exchange has traditionally been an on-premises application for businesses of all sizes, Microsoft may be hoping that the lowered cost for the online version will attract businesses to the Business Productivity Online Suite, which would allow it to stave off a challenge from Google Apps and Gmail.
[16] Microsoft cut the cost of the Business Productivity Online Suite ' which includes the Web-based versions of Exchange and SharePoint as well as Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting ' for business customers by about a third, dropping the per-user price from $15 to $10 per month.
[16] Microsoft is reducing the price of its
Business Productivity Online Suite, the cloud-based enterprise communications platform, and expanding the service into 15 more countries. Since its launch about a year ago, the BPOS has grown to about 1 million users and saw significant growth during a discounted promotion, said Eron Kelly, senior director of the Microsoft Online Services team. As such, the software company decided to essentially make the discount permanent, dropping the BPOS subscription price from $15 to $10 per user per month. "For us, it's a pretty exciting time," Kelly said in an interview Monday.
[15] SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--Microsoft Corp., (MSFT) in a move highlighting the growing competition to offer customers so-called "cloud" office applications, has cut the price of its Exchange Online email services. The company is now charging $10 per user per month for the service, where Microsoft hosts email services on behalf of its clients. It previously charged $15 per user per month.
[17] Microsoft is cutting the cost of its hosted cloud business productivity bundle. This includes Exchange Online, which falls from $10 per user, per month, to $5.
[18] The firm said that the hosted Business Productivity Online Suite and Exchange Online, Office SharePoint Online and Office Communications Online will be reduced to just $10 (£6) per user per month, for a minimum five-seat subscription.
[19] Today Microsoft have announced dramatic reductions in the price of their hosted editions of Exchange Server, SharePoint and Office Communications Server. Microsoft's reductions in the cost of BPOS (Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite) which consists of Exchange Server, SharePoint and Office Communications Server are by 33%, and they are reducing the price for hosted Exchange Server by 50%.
[20] SINGAPORE--The country next week will be the first country in the Asia-Pacific region to get Microsoft's hosted Exchange, Sharepoint and Office Communications Server products, known collectively as its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).
[21] Microsoft said today that it's cutting the price of SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and other programs in its Business Productivity Online Suite -- versions of its server programs that it hosts for customers for monthly subscription fees, as an alternative to traditional versions run from customers' own servers. The company also said it signed up hundreds of new customers for the offering, including high-profile names such as McDonald's and Lions Gate Entertainment.
[11] Microsoft cuts the prices of its Business Productivity Suite and offers new features for its Dynamics CRM Online at no extra cost, as it seeks to block cloud-based competition from Google, Oracle and other companies. Although Microsoft has traditionally offered many business and consumer applications as on-premises software, it has been making aggressive moves into the cloud in order to match the moves of many of its longtime rivals.
[16] Computerworld - Microsoft Corp. is slashing the price of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) by a third as it debuts the service in 15 new countries. A Microsoft executive also touted BPOS' momentum, while questioning figures trumpeted by Google for its
rival Google Apps suite.
[5] Microsoft's online, subscription-based versions of Office apps are in development and aren't due out until the first half of 2010. CIOs choosing BPOS or Exchange Online over Google Apps and others typically cite three key factors: seamless integration with on-premises instances of Exchange or SharePoint; familiarity with the Microsoft platform; and an easy exit strategy if they decide they don't like cloud computing. "I don't think it's any secret that it's a big change to take your company to Google; it's a different environment," said Tony DeGregorio, VP and Global CIO at Tyco Control Flow, a manufacturer that will have 12,000 employees on Microsoft Exchange Online by December. Tyco is replacing a combination of on-premises Exchange and Notes platforms that it's adopted due to various acquisitions in recent years.
[9] Microsoft BPOS has been generally available for just several months, and competes with Google Apps, Zoho Mail, Yahoo Zimbra, and the newest entrant, IBM Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging. Although Microsoft has disclosed the names of several large companies that are implementing BPOS or Exchange Online -- including its largest, GlaxoSmithKline, with 110,000 seats -- it has released 11 more names, including Aon Corp., Aviva PLC, McDonald's Corp., and Tyco Flow Control. Aon, which is transitioning all 36,000 employees to Exchange Online, is the largest customer win disclosed this week. Microsoft also announced that BPOS and Exchange Online are now available in Singapore, and will be available in India later this year.
[9] Markezich's response is that Microsoft offers a scaled-down version of Exchange Online, designed for employees who aren't frequent PC users, for $24 a year, and a scaled-down version of BPOS for $36 a year. What's more, "we're not seeing any inclination that Zoho or Google or Zimbra or any other of those offering fake Office capabilities can replace Microsoft Office," he said.
[9] Cho claimed the total cost of ownership for an on-premise e-mail offering like Microsoft Exchange at $300 per user, per year compared to a Google Apps total cost of ownership at $90 per year. What's more, he said Google has on average 10 minutes of downtime per month vs. 2.5 to 3.5 hours for a premise-based e-mail system.
[1] BPOS, which includes Web-hosted versions of Microsoft's Exchange e-mail, SharePoint collaboration, and other Office communication-related apps, now costs $10 per user per month, down from $15 per user per month.
[5] Microsoft is also decreasing the monthly price of the service—which includes hosted access to Exchange, SharePoint, and Office Communications Server—from $15 to $10 per user.
[4] BPOS includes Exchange Online with Hosted Filtering, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online and Microsoft Office Live Meeting. There are also slimmed down online versions of Exchange and SharePoint for "deskless" workers, or those who use the services infrequently. "I think the price decrease is a combination of Microsoft tuning its infrastructure and continued competition in the space," said Creese.
[2] Part of Microsoft Online Services, the suite includes the online versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications and Live Meeting. The BPOS is targeted at businesses that want their employees to have access to Microsoft's familiar e-mail and collaboration tools from anywhere. Microsoft announced late Monday that companies such as McDonald's Corp., Lions Gate Entertainment and Swedish Red Cross have joined early adopters like Coca-Cola, Eddie Bauer and Energizer in using the suite.
[15] Microsoft also announced that McDonalds, Coca Cola and Lion's Gate, among others, have signed up for the online version of Exchange and SharePoint. Chris Capossela, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's business division, says the online versions of Exchange and SharePoint have won a million paying business users since those services were launched one year ago. Microsoft is also making the online versions of Exchange and SharePoint available free to 2,000 U.S. universities, he says. This is the software giant's latest counter moves against IBM and Google in the battle over corporations and small businesses to business applications delivered over the Internet.
[10] My experience however is that there is a lacking in functionality, performance and ease of use of Google's offerings compared with the newest offerings from Microsoft. This is not a surprise as the web is a fairly young platform for applications and many apps have yet to well translated to the web. A key that Microsoft holds is a large user base - and users are very familar with their products as most have been using Microsoft Outlook and associated products for years. Naturally many are not keen to move from powerful PC based applications to dulled down web based products which don't have the look and feel they're used to. They will do this as they recognise productivity benefits of current versions of Exchange/Outlook, Microsoft Office, OCS, etc when compared to competiting applications.
[20] Microsoft also expanded the hosted storage limit to 25 GB per user, from the prior 10 GB. One year
after its official launch, BPOS is being used by 1 million paid customers, Microsoft announced on Monday. Chris Capossela, senior vice-president of the information worker product management group at Microsoft, told Computerworld on Monday that 70% of those users "are coming from IBM Lotus Notes or Novell GroupWise." "That is a wonderful figure, because it means we are getting new business, not just migrating existing business to the cloud," he said. Google has been also been bragging about its success at winning new business.
[5] Some recent large deployments of Google Apps Premier, which costs US$50 per user per year, include 20,000 users at Motorola, 35,000 users at Rentokil Initial and 7,000 users at Konica Minolta. Google will announce its latest Apps enterprise win --
MeadWestVaco Corp., a global packaging company based in Virginia that has signed up for 17,000 users. Currently, Google Apps is in use at more than 2 million businesses by more than 20 million end users, although the company doesn't break out how many of those deployments are of Premier, the paid version of the suite.
[22] Are Microsoft's cost cuts enough? Google Apps, by comparison, which includes apps for documents, spreadsheets and presentations, in addition to email, costs only $50 per user per year.
[9] Asked about the threat
from Google Apps, Elop said: "A number of Google's claims aren't holding up." The Microsoft executive referred to Google Apps customers such as the Washington D.C. government and Motorola's mobile unit, which he said have since sidelined their Google Apps projects because they could not move users away from the "primary use of Microsoft's ". Their cloud projects based on Google Apps have not provided cost reductions but incremental costs, he said.
[21] The campaign focuses mainly on Google Apps, the company's Web-hosted suite of collaboration and communication applications, whose "cloud" software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture Google maintains is a superior alternative to managing on-premises software. In Canada, Google highlighted customers such as Delta Hotels in Toronto and Sotheby's Real Estate in Vancouver, both of which, the search giant claims, no longer have to deal with the hassles of managing e-mail servers or rolling out software updates. The company is intent on convincing businesses of all sizes, but in particular large enterprises, that Google Apps is less costly, easier to implement and maintain, and makes possible better workplace collaboration than on-premise options such as those sold by
Microsoft Corp. and
IBM Corp.'s Lotus division. "The idea behind 'Going Google' is that companies switch to Google Apps and it's a real transformational change," said Tom Oliveri, Google's enterprise marketing director.
[22] The company hopes marketing Google Apps will further promote
enterprise moves to cloud computing. At least one organization is doubtful Google Apps' feature set can match their current office productivity software staples. User inertia, learning curve Local company Digital Scanning Corporation (DSC) is among those that will not be switching to Google Apps just yet.
[14] L.A. mediated security risks by placing a clause in the contract that requires Google to compensate the city in the event that the Google system is breached and city data exposed or stolen. That is something that every major SaaS contract should include, if you ask me. This is not the free Gmail everyone knows. This is an enterprise version of their cloud-delivered software that comes without the ads, and with technical support. While it could be too early to tell if L.A. will be successful using Google as their e-mail and office automation solution of choice, this is a huge test case for cloud computing, specifically SaaS. While salesforce.com has had some great success around deployment of their SaaS-based CRM solution, corporate and government office automation applications have still been the domain of Microsoft and still are by a very larger margin.
[23] In what could be construed as a major victory for proponents of cloud-based IT systems,
Google won a contract in October from the City of Los Angeles to provide about 30,000 municipal employees with e-mail. The Los Angeles City Council voted 12-0 on Oct. 27 to use Gmail instead of Microsoft's Office Outlook, with Google promising to compensate the city in the event of a data breach.
[16] Los Angeles City Council has approved a $7.2 million deal to use Google's applications for its 30,000 personnel. The council voted unanimously to replace several of their current IT systems with Google Apps and GMail instead of competing offers over a dozen other IT suppliers.
[24] Last week, the Los Angeles City Council approved a $7.25 million five-year deal to adopt Gmail and other Google Apps.
[2] The city is actually paying out $.7.2 million as part of a deal with Computer Sciences Corp. to help employees migrate to the Google services. It's apparently more than the cost of maintaining its old email system. Novell, which was bidding to take of city email services, is mad: "With the City facing a massive budget deficit, the speculated budget benefits of switching to this untested application are enticing, but as a recent independent Los Angeles City Administrative Officer report has stated, the proposed system under consideration will actually cost taxpayers an additional $1.5 million in the first year.
[25] Just last week, the Los Angeles city government approved a deal to run Google's e-mail and Internet application services under a $7.25 million contract.
[1] We're not sure what
noted irony expert Alanis Morissette would say about this, but it turns out that Microsoft is kind of, sort of paying for part of the city of Los Angeles'
switch to Google's e-mail platform. Apparently, Microsoft paid the state of California $70 million back in 2006 after the state alleged that Redmond -- get this -- overcharged for its software.
[26] As for Google's recent high-profile win in Los Angeles, Microsoft points out that Google had to make special concessions to the city around extra security and external servers, and even had to build a special version of the service called GovCloud. Microsoft already offers these kinds of capabilities via BPOS to customers with over 5,000 users.
[4] Google recently snagged a deal to
provide online apps to 30,000 workers at Los Angeles City Council, a former Microsoft customer, and has launched a
major marketing campaign.
[19] Last week, the city of Los Angeles voted to go ahead with a deal to shift many employees to Google Apps from Microsoft Office.
[27] The biggest danger here for Microsoft is that if Google Apps proves itself a viable workplace solution for an organization the size of the city of Los Angeles, it pretty much lays to rest the argument that cloud-based computing solution like Google Apps can't replace the ubiquitous Microsoft infrastructure.
[13] Last week's announcement that the city of Los Angeles was moving to Google Apps was quite a blow to Microsoft.
[13] The price may have been hard for Los Angeles to swallow, since Google's bid with Google Apps was only about $4 per user per month. It's likely that the pricing of these bids is somewhat anomalous.
[13] Google Apps -- which includes Gmail, Postini hosted e-mail security and archiving, Google Docs and Google Sites aimed at creating intranets -- is $50 per year, per user.
[1] Tan Bee Loon, a representative from Google Enterprise Southeast Asia, said that Google customers would also benefit from continuous innovation as Google would still keep developing the products being used. "There are so many benefits, like real-time translation when opening email through Gmail," he said. Tan highlighted the ability of Google Apps in collaborative working both between applications and between different users, enhanced emailing systems, and system security. Putranto explained: "Google Apps enable company's employees to work on a single project simultaneously from their own laptops.
[28] "My feeling is that no one has really gotten it right," Chandra said. "It's one of the things we're looking at to see if there's a real opportunity there to improve how users communicate with each other and find information about other users." While it's unclear whether Google Apps will even get an enterprise social-networking layer, Chandra offers some hints of what it could look like if it's ever built. "Search has to be a critical aspect of it," he said. The user experience would likely be woven into Gmail, so that end-users don't have to go to a separate application to tune in to co-workers' status updates and other notifications, he said. A big benefit that enterprise social-networking layers can add to collaboration suites is a directory where employees create profiles stating their areas of expertise, McLeish said. "That can be a very useful thing, especially for an organization with thousands of employees when you?re trying to navigate and find the right resource" for a task or a project, she said. Chandra points out that Apps users often create these profiles using the suite's Sites application, which lets them build Web pages and sites whose content can then be searched. Google has a consumer service called Google Profiles that seems close in functionality to these workplace "expertise badges," but Chandra declined to say whether Google plans to adapt it for Apps.
[29] Google Apps brings simple, powerful communication and collaboration tools to organizations. With Google Apps, customers can choose solutions such as Gmail''', Google Talk''' instant messaging, Google Calendar''', Google Docs''', Google Sites''' web application, and Google Video''' for business to work together more effectively.
[30] All the Google App solutions are hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software to download, install or maintain. As an authorized reseller of Google Apps Suite, eBusinessware received training, support and deployment services from Google, as well as access to APIs for integrating Google Apps into their customers' business operations. eBusinessware assists in the integration and support for clients who use Google Apps.
[30] Niall Sclater, the OU's director of learning innovation, told GC News that the university will shortly be taking a decision about whether to deploy Google Apps or Microsoft Live@edu. He said that not only will the OU be able to outsource email services for its 229,000 students, as well as its staff, taking away the maintenance burden from the university, but it will also be able to use the large document storage facilities offered by cloud computing systems.
[31] The deal was widely viewed as a significant win for Google over Microsoft and a vote of confidence for cloud computing. Microsoft's price cuts also come as Google is in the midst of a major channel offensive to recruit partners for its Google Apps productivity suite.
[1] The price cuts come amid a sharp increase in customers looking to move to Google Apps to lower hefty software licensing fees for standard desktop productivity suite software.
[1] Critics not satisfied The provisions for accountability don't satisfy critics, who say the move is full of unknowns. "Who's going to pay for the Internet use for 30,000 people to use Google Video?" asked Kevin McDonald, executive vice president at Huntington Beach Calif. -based Alvaka Networks and IT consultant who closely followed these negotiations but is not involved in the deal. Questions about extra bandwidth and the limited capabilities of some Google services make this an enormous risk, according to McDonald. Even if security concerns are addressed there are many more factors that should go into making a decision like this, he said. McDonald also said that he thinks the productivity claims Google made to win the deal are dubious at best. "Google justified its pitch by saying that the use of Google Apps will save a ton of money based on productivity gains, when everyone knows that when you put in something new, you never know if it will integrate well or not with existing technology," McDonald said.
[6] L.A., evidently, has $1.5 million of that money left over and will give it to Google for the city's Google Apps deployment. If nothing else, this is a funny circumstance -- and kind of a painful one for Microsoft, given that Google won the e-mail bid in large part by touting the lower costs of its service in comparison to Microsoft's more traditional offering.
[26] The city hopes to cover the additional $1 million in costs from installation and migration by CSC with a $1.5 million payment from a
2006 class action lawsuit against Microsoft. Google's image as a new, hip application provider is in its favor.
[6] The city will use $1.5 million of that Microsoft money to pay most of the $1.9 million cost of the Google contract's first year.
[13] That
city deal to take on Google's free email services as a cost-cutting measure will actually cost the taxpayers $1.5 million more next year than if City Hall would have stayed with its old email system.
[25] The $7.25m deal will transfer all of the city's 30,000 employees to Google Apps over the coming year. Google hopes that LA making a successful switch will entice smaller cities to outsource its email system to servers in the cloud. It argues a web-hosted platform will save IT costs of running their own servers.
[8] Interesting. I never really knew anything about this. What kind of idiot needs to be "trained" to use Gmail? Oh yea, these are government workers. It will cost money to train them, but over time I think switching to Google Apps is going to save the city a ton of money. I don't think training should be that hard, most if not all the City employees have commercial email accounts with one of the majors like Yahoo, MSN, or GMail if they can use those then they can use Google Apps.
[25] Students and other young PC users are already adept at Google apps. Although critics have their doubts about the capabilities and costs of this implementation, no one questions why Google pitched the deal: Google aims to demonstrate that Google Apps, often viewed as lightweight and being in perpetual beta, is ready for the enterprise. "This is a great reference account for Google -- a great move -- especially the very public nature of it," said Matt Cain, email and collaboration analyst for Gartner. Crawford confirmed that the project is getting an awful lot of attention, who said he's been contacted by 29 different agencies from five states that want to observe the migration, which will begin after the contract is approved and signed by the mayor.
[6] Ouch. That is not a cloud with a silver lining for Microsoft. One of the most interesting aspects of this win for Google is that the city appeared to have lingering concerns about the security and privacy of data in the cloud. Google addressed those worries by promising to develop a "Gov Cloud" that segregates the documents and data of government organizations from other Google Apps users.
[13] Crawford is overseeing the planning and migration of the city's roughly 30,000 email users and archived data. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a well-tested model, he said, and that knowledge, combined with Google's promise to provide security and economic safeguards for its government cloud, convinced him that the move was wise. Google's plan to protect government data Google vowed to fence off portions of its massive data operations specifically for governmental use because of the much more stringent security and transparency requirements that government data requires. Google will segregate data centers for both the city and its police department as two separate units. "If Google breaks confidentiality we can go after them for unlimited damages," Crawford said.
[6] By switching to cloud-based services, businesses can save money by reducing IT expenses. Skeptics of cloud computing wonder whether businesses and governments should fully entrust their systems to the companies, such as Google or Microsoft, that manage data centers. Solutions such as Microsoft's BPOS have seen significant growth in the past year, Kelly said. Microsoft Online Services tries to set itself apart from Google by stressing its focus on enterprise solutions. "We're not a one-size-fits-all provider in this space, which I think is important," he said.
[15] "We're pretty excited about the price and not so much focused on free services or the price Google or others might charge," Capossela said. In addition to the price drop, Microsoft is also touting several new customers and announced its plan to bring the year-old Microsoft Online services to more than a dozen new countries. The company is announcing its commercial launch in Singapore, as well as trials in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Poland, Romania, and Taiwan. Microsoft also expects to have commercial availability in India later this year.
[12] Customers seeking to take advantage of the flexibility and Total Cost of Ownership cutback that the move from on-premise solutions to hosted services provides, will be able to profit from lower prices for Exchange Server in the Cloud and additional Microsoft Online Services. According to Microsoft, customers will be able to get refunds in case they paid higher prices for its Cloud offerings so far.
[32] The drop from $10-a-month to $5 for Exchange Online lowers the annual cost to $60-per-user. That compares to Google's $50-per-user-per-year list price for a suite that is anchored by Google Mail, but includes other applications as well. Microsoft also increased the size of its Exchange online mailboxes from 5GB to 25GB.
[3] Microsoft's huge pricing restructure is expected to have a big impact on the competition - especially Google who's hosted Email is now only fractionally cheaper than hosted Exchange (though it does include hosted apps also). Competitive cloud based email and applications vendors have been pushing hard to get organisations to adopt their hosted email/office products - especially Google who are rumoured to be giving away their products in order to 'win' reference customers.
[20] The BPO Standard Suite is now ''6.69 per user per month for a minimum of five users. It was ''10 previously. Microsoft offers products such as Exchange and SharePoint online for a monthly subscription rather than the customer having to buy full licences.
[33] In an attempt to pull customers away from Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM On Demand, Microsoft is also offering Dynamics CRM Online free for six months. Other elements present in Dynamics CRM Online include simple contact management, which provides a unified view of customer information; a new homepage dashboard with real-time views of key metrics; and a new price of $44 per user per month. "This is the way we think about this: The pricing for on-premises products has come down and become more affordable, and we think that on-demand CRM can go through a similar shift in the equation," Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, said in an interview with eWEEK. "We can drive that in the marketplace and give them a CRM at a low price and put a compelling offer out there.
[16] Apart from the price cuts, e-mail inboxes will also be upgraded from 5GB to 25GB per user, Elop said. He noted that the boost to price-points and services were the result of enhancements made to the company's cloud infrastructure. This expansion has provided increasing economies of scale, allowing Microsoft to offer the service enhancements, he said, adding that the announcements were "not a competitive response to Google".
[21] The software giant also criticized Google's competing entry, casting doubt on that company's claims about the number of users it has gained. "Global organizations such as McDonald's, Rexel Group, and Tyco are choosing Microsoft Online Services for the rich capabilities, flexibility, and value they deliver," Stephen Elop from Microsoft business division said.
[4] The business productivity bundle of Sharepoint Online and Office Communications Online falls from $15 to $10. In public the company is insisting this has nothing to do with competition from Google and other rivals. One its VPs was less bashful about bashing the competition. Chris Capossela told Computerworld that he doubted Google's claims for paying users. He said: "I have a really hard time understanding their numbers. You simply don't know what their paying user numbers are. Analysts predict that they are pretty small. It's hard for us to really know."
[18] The
Business Productivity Online Suite will come with a price tag of just $10 per user per month.
[32] The price for Exchange Online as a standalone service will drop to $5 per user per month, from the previous $10 rate.
[11] Following the price cuts, Exchange Online will be made available for just $5 per user per month, down from $10.
[32] 
Balz Wyss, Microsoft's Asia-Pacific senior director of unified communications and SaaS (software-as-a-service), told ZDNet Asia in a follow-up call that enterprises can also choose to subscribe to individual products within the suite. The slim, browser-only version of hosted Exchange e-mail would cost US$2 per seat, per month, and Sharepoint at US$3 per seat, per month, he said.
[21] Microsoft is cutting the cost of its hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Office Communications Server, and rolling the services out to 15 new countries this week.
[19] Microsoft has announced it is cutting by a third, the subscription prices for the hosted versions of Exchange, Sharepoint, and Office Communications Server.
[12] The price of individual hosted servers has also reduced, bringing Microsoft's superior solution much closer in price to Google's competing Google Apps service. [4] I feel good about how much progress we've made in a short period of time." To securely serve LA's 30,000 employees, Google is building a special version of its Google Apps service to be called GovCloud. It will offer extra security and be hosted on separate Google servers so that the city's data is not co-mingled with data from other companies.
[5] You're on top of the world one day, then tossed into the heap the next when the new big thing arrives. That Sunset Boulevard moment came for Novell last week after the LA City Council unanimously voted to replace its existing Novell communications systems with the apparently fresh, fab, and boffo cloud-based Google Apps. LA is the country's second-largest burg and the first major U.S. city to entirely entrust its data to an off-site host. The decision ended an almost year-long battle between Google and other software vendors such as Microsoft over the contract.
[8] RSS newsfeed
here and get news stories as they break. AAPT has deployed Google Apps to provide internal video and intranet capabilities for its 1300 staff. In a blog post on Google's site, AAPT COO, David Yuile, said while the company's decision to use Google Maps and Google Earth to help it visualise and plan its operations and communications with customers, the decision to adopt Google for its internal video and intranet collaboration was a harder decision. "The decision to 'go Google' for our internal IT infrastructure was a tougher decision at a philosophical level than a technical one, because it fundamentally concerned a new way of working within enterprises, but it's a decision we haven't regretted," he wrote.
[34] Google Mail is the next step. "The decision to 'go Google' for our internal IT infrastructure was a tougher decision at a philosophical level than a technical one, because it fundamentally concerned a new way of working within enterprises, but it's a decision we haven't regretted," Yuile said. Yuile said he had been concerned about the amount of control the company would retain with the Apps. "The breakthrough for us was in realising that both worlds can exist and people will use the methods that best suit them," he said.
[35] The company does not, however, disclose actual user numbers, saying only that
"20 million" users from "2 million" companies use Google Apps. How many of these are paid users? Google won't say. My guess--and it's just that--is less than 1 million.
Google would be more credible if it revealed real paid user numbers.
[3] How many people really use Google Apps and how many of them are paying customers? That's a question Google has never quite answered, having touted a
"20 million users" and "2 million companies" figure that is almost meaningless. The company has recently taken its "
Gone Google" offline advertising campaign worldwide, giving it reason to pump up its user figures as much as possible.
[36] The City of LA paid 7.2 million to use Google Apps, not Gmail. It isn't free, they are paying their reseller and Google to use the service and support it.
[25] When the Los Angeles city council voted to turn the city's email infrastructure over to Google Apps Premier Edition, Google won a much-needed reference account, Novell lost a big customer for its on-premise service Groupwise, and the city council faced a lot of questions.
[6] This must be a joke: A Novell corporate blog item that chastises the City of Los Angeles for
recently selecting Google Apps to replace Novell's GroupWise e-mail and calendaring software.
[37] The Los Angeles City Council voted 12 to 0 last week to
outsource its e-mail system to Google. The largest city in the country will make the cloud a home for its enterprise e-mail with a $7.2-million contract that will move all 30,000 city employees to Google. This might be the most significant win to-date for SaaS, a win that could drive others to cloud computing.
[23] Microsoft is new to the cloud computing game; Google has something to prove and the buzz of a truly cloud-born offering. Microsoft has to walk the fine line of protecting their profit margins; they couldn't bid fire-sale prices for the Los Angeles contract because it would give their other customers a reason to negotiate for much lower rates as well.
[13] If Google & Microsoft keep slugging it out for cloud-based business, that's good for all of us consumers. As to what the MS VP said about not knowing Google's paying user numbers. does it really matter? Also, I would think that MS would still had to have done something custom if they won the Los Angeles cloud-based services. With laws the way they are, I just don't see any vendor's off-the-shelf offerings covering all governments' requirements.
[4] The Business Productivity Online Suite was one of the Microsoft options that the Los Angeles city government considered while searching for a new e-mail and collaboration system, Kelly said.
[15] We'll continue to bring new innovations and deliver the software and services businesses need to succeed." Microsoft says that it improves its cloud-based offerings, marketed under the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) umbrella, every 90 days. This quarter's updates include increasing the email storage capacity for standard users to 25 GB and new administrative scripting capabilities.
[4] Come November 7, the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) will be offered in no less than 15 additional countries and regions.
[32] Microsoft also expanded the reach of Business Productivity Online Suite, introducing commercial availability in 36 countries and regions including Singapore.
[16] Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's Business Division, said in a conference call Tuesday the software giant will be making the hosted suite available to 15 additional countries. These include Singapore on Nov. 9, followed by trials in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan and "eventually" India, he said. Officially
released in April this year across other regions including the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, BPOS will also see its prices
cut by a third, from US$15 to US$10 per seat per month, Elop said.
[21] A year ago, IBM launched Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging. Microsoft's Ron Markezich, corporate vice president for Microsoft Online, said the price reduction was a reflection of the popularity and maturation of BPOS, which he says now has more than 1 million paying customers. "Since we came to market with general availability we have seen a large increase in scale of the service which allows us to drive efficiencies," he said.
[2] By the end of 2009, BPOS will be available in exactly 36 markets worldwide. BPOS commercial availability in Singapore will debut this week, while Indian customers will be able to access Microsoft Online Services by the end of this year. Customers in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, and Taiwan will be able to start BPOS trials later this week.
[32] GovCloud will also be certified under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). Microsoft is
seeking the ISO 27001 security certification for its data centers. It has "nothing to announce yet" regarding FISMA credentialing, Capossela said. Reassuring customers worried by the
T-Mobile Sidekick data outage that occurred on Microsoft's data centers, Capossela said Microsoft is "taking this very seriously and trying to learn from it." He also said recent executive departures in Microsoft's online services group,
including chief Debra Chrapaty, are not a big deal. "A couple of people internally have taken over her duties. We have a fantastically deep talent bench," he said. Microsoft is officially starting this week to offer service in Singapore, while starting to trial service in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Poland, Romania and Taiwan. It also plans to offer the service commercially to India by the year's end.
[5] Of course, Google isn't alone in the SaaS market for collaboration and communication software, where Zoho and Yahoo's Zimbra also compete. IBM and Microsoft are busy re-tooling their on-premise software to work on the cloud as well. Google, like other SaaS vendors, also faces skepticism over the security, privacy and reliability of Web-hosted applications, which reside, along with their data, at external data centers beyond the control of an enterprise's IT managers.
[22] We will continue to bring new innovations and deliver the software and services businesses need to succeed." Microsoft is facing stiff competition from Google in the hosted applications marketplace, and these latest moves will seen as an attempt to win back some ground.
[19] "If the competition weren't there, given Microsoft's financial fine tuning over the past year, I'm sure the company would be pocketing the increased profit." Major vendors such as IBM, Cisco, Novell, and Google are hot to build online service businesses around e-mail and other collaboration software.
[2] Ron Markezich, corporate VP of Microsoft Online, says the price drop is not in response to what happened in Los Angeles. "We've achieved a level of scale we didn't have a year ago, and have made a number of software investments that allow us to drive down costs and have more efficiencies," he said.
[9] Several council members were concerned about whether the city would actually see any cost savings and questioned if Google is actually capable of securely storing sensitive law enforcement data. "It's unclear if this is cutting edge, or the edge of a cliff we're about to step off," the
Los Angeles Times quoted Councilman Paul Koretz as saying.
[8] Nice try Novel, stop whining and work on making something that can compete with Google Apps on merit. How does it make sense to look at the 1 yr cost? The GM of Los Angeles's IT is quoted as saying that longer term, this switch will save the city somewhere between $8 million and $30 million. Novell? NOVELL? Whatever. they bitched about Active Directory, too.
[25] Google (GOOG) just landed a nice 5-year, $7.25 million dollar contract from Los Angeles to overhaul its 30,000 users''' email with Google Gmail and Apps.
[38] Last week, Microsoft lost the battle for 30,000 e-mail accounts at the City of Los Angeles to Google.
[3] As part of a 2006 settlement between Microsoft and the state of California alleging overcharges for software, the city of Los Angeles received several million dollars.
[13] What'''s funny though is how LA is paying for Google'''s software. It turns out LA will use $1.5 million from a settlement in a 2006 class action lawsuit against Microsoft (MSFT) to help pay the bills.
[38] Rentokil plans to use Google to consolidate 40 e-mail systems, including open source products and Microsoft Exchange, into a single e-mail system.
[33] Microsoft is one of the leaders in converting voice mails to email text - it was doing that as part of Exchange Server before anyone even knew about Google Voice. By 2014, spoken words ''' in the form of voice mails, short annotations (with services such as
Jott.com ), and audio clips ''' will be seamlessly converted to text, and become available for in search databases at Google et al. (Even if the idea of having your private voice mails available as text in a web search is surely open to debate.) Services such as
Yahoo Fire Eagle paved the way for greater location awareness, and Mozilla Firefox has built-in features for sharing your GPS coordinates.
Google Latitude is another great example of how you can let friends know you are on the bus, automatically.
[39] Microsoft said last month that it had finalized the product. Traditionally, Microsoft has developed products first as a server and only later, if at all, customized them to run in hosted form. Exchange 2010, though, was designed first as an online service and then crafted into a product that businesses can run on their own servers. This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.com.
[12] Organisations signing up for BPOS and Exchange Hosting from Microsoft in the U.S. will be delivered Exchange Server 2010 going forward. It is understood however that customers in other countries such as New Zealand may have to wait up to 9 months before they can access the hosted edition of Exchange Server 2010.
[20] Exchange 2010 is expected to ship in
next week and Markezich said once the server is commercially available that BPOS would offer that platform to customers. He said new customers signing up after today would all be using 2010. Existing customers could cut over when they wanted. Microsoft said BPOS will be commercially available today in Singapore with commercial availability in India available later this year.
[2] Cho pointed to the dramatic cost savings customers gain by adopting Google Docs rather than an on-premise offering like Microsoft Exchange.
[1] "For many companies, GAPE vs. Exchange Online is a valid comparison -- and Microsoft just got a lot closer to Google's pricing," said Guy Creese, an analyst with the Burton Group.
[2] Timing of the big price cut by Microsoft is not being seen as mere coincidence. Google has been promoting Google Apps, using an offline campaign theme of "Gone Google," that spotlights companies who have adopted its online apps.
[3] Google Apps, a collection of online applications and utilities, is expanding in the Indonesia market as growing numbers of companies have opted for its premium services since their introduction late last year.
[28] "Computing as a utility is going to happen, it is just a matter of when," said Mont Phelps, CEO of NWN, a solution provider based in Waltham, Mass. At the recent CRN Fast Growth conference, Stephen Cho, director, Google Apps Channels, compared companies running private infrastructure standard applications to those that were more than 100 years ago generating their own power before the onset of electric utilities.
[1] NGR conducted a pilot test before deciding to move to Google Apps, Depardieu said, noting that companies looking to make the switch should prepare for user resistance to change. He added that changes to local configuration on each PC can also be upsetting for some users. "The CEO has to be on the CTO's side from the start the CTO would have a lot to do to convince other executives," he said. "Users will complain about how slow the migration from their old local data to cloud data is, might take days, as uploading is always slower than downloading."
[14] Prior to that win, the search giant had
boasted that Google Apps has 10 million users, including 1 million business customers. (Many Google Apps are available to consumers free of charge.) Capossela contends Google's marketing hype should be taken with a grain of salt: "It's always hard to tell what exactly Google is counting," says Capossela.
[10] Ramanathan said Google sees "huge opportunity" in enterprises and has "thousands of" Google Apps business users in Singapore and Southeast Asia, ranging from small and midsize businesses (SMBs), to large enterprises and
educational institutions.
[14] The "Gone Google" campaign is aimed at IT and business executives who influence IT purchasing decisions, and is designed to sell them on the benefits of using products like Google Apps and the Search Appliance enterprise search device.
[22] Gmail's voice and video chats are now limited to one-to-one communications, but Google wants to broaden that capability to more than two participants and make it more robust all around for Apps. "This is the first step in a much broader set of features we hope to roll out over the next six to 12 months around video chat capabilities," said Rishi Chandra, a Google Apps product manager. "It's a great opportunity for us to push that space along."
[29] Google Apps users can expect to see significant improvements in the suite's voice- and video-chat capabilities, as the company builds on Gmail's current features in that area.
[29] Google Apps, which includes Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and Sites, costs a little more than $4 a month."
[25] In what seems like bizarre math, Google competitor Novell points out that the cost of training employees and migrating the city's thousands of workers to gmail will cost an additonal $1.5 mil.
[25] LA will save money by getting rid of unneeded servers, support staff, and IT staff. The spam filters will improve, saving employee time by not needing them to weed through as much junk mail. It's not "free e-mail", it's $50/per person per year for business customers, with better uptime and better support. This entire article is absurd and uninformed. I wonder what it would have cost to just maintain their current system; hardware, licensing, etc. Add that up compared to the 1.5 million gives us what? Not to mention the long term savings.
[25] Google charges $50 per user per year for GAPE, which also includes other productivity applications.
[2] The data will not only be on different servers, but actually in physically separate data centers. Microsoft bid on the contract, but its bid was
pricey at about $15 per user per month.
[13] Microsoft is cutting the subscription costs for its on-demand application portfolio by 30% to less than ''7 per user per month.
[33] Sharing Onno's views, Putranto said: "With only US$50 per user, you can do exactly the same as you can do with proprietary software that may cost up to $300."
[28] Because Novell was the product upper administration used, it was the system selected for all staff. This choice was made ignoring the fact that the system it was replacing supported more users with fewer servers, fewer technical staff, and over all less cost per user. This decision also ignored glaring discrepancies in quality and reliability between the two options.
[25] For instance, Indonesia's networking infrastructure is not as robust as Singapore's, but the addressable volumes of "deskless" workers can increase Indonesia's lower ARPUs (average revenues per user) to equal that of Singapore's, said Wyss. The reliability of available networking infrastructure was also a consideration in deciding which countries to debut its product, he said, adding that speed is not crucial--a basic broadband connection would suffice for apps to run well.
[21] Putranto, however, refused to disclose whether there was any noted company among the 10 current users of Google web applications. "One of our latest customers is coal mining firm PT Energi Kaltim Persada," he told The Jakarta Post. Putranto said he was optimistic Google products would gain a significant market share in Indonesia.
[28] Users could keep Windows XP, switch to Macs, or a use a humble machine with a lightweight Linux distribution and retain the same office applications. The LA contract offers Google a chance to demonstrate their ability to cope with large scale data handling, storage, and security.
[24] Despite appearances, Google will sometimes negotiate additional security features for large enterprise customers using Google Apps Premium Edition (GAPE). "We hear tales from clients about little things they'll do," said Austin. "In some places, they're essentially limiting all mail read traffic to specified addresses only so you have a higher level of security." Other customers have managed to negotiate data storage rules so that information is not taken offshore, he said. "That's not a standard offering, but our indicators say that they're doing it.
[40] PointStar, a Google Apps reseller, added in an e-mail interview: "Google has dedicated teams of engineers to constantly monitor and maintain data security as well as data center protection procedures that conform to the SAS 70 standard."
[14] In an e-mail interview with ZDNet Asia, DSC CTO Wong Ee Sing said the organization currently has no plans to push for a company-wide migration to Google Apps, though the IT department had tried out the suite and found it adequate for day-to-day use.
[14] Gmail and Google Apps are already in use by about 38,000 employees in government agencies in Washington, a fact that has encouraged Google to develop a dedicated Government Cloud for deployment in 2010.
[16] Perhaps someone inside can shed some general light on that because what that system was like is a very big factor. Were they using some'sendmail' based text email with custom apps? In that case it would be a HUGE transition to the web-based, label/conversation threaded GMail interface. If they used a fat client like Outlook then it is indeed possible to IMAP and hide a great deal of the transition. They also state that they won't be implementing it before June, which yields a very nice lead time for employees to get online and get a personal GMail account just to get used to the concept. I think the related apps (i.e. did they use Sharepoint vs Google Docs vs some Novel/Red Hat / Lotus) will be the biggest challenge.
[25] The move to services like Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Windows Live and so on is, of course, a cultural change as much as anything else. It changes the way companies pay for IT, manage it, hire around it and so on. It's not surprising that for many it will be an emotional decision that brings in feared change processes. The problem is that, in areas such as email and CRM, that change now seems inevitable and those that put off today are merely delaying the inevitable.
[41] In August Portsmouth University opened a Google Apps service to nearly 30,000 students and reported that within a month it had about 4,300 active users, including people from China, Nepal and Nigeria.
[31] I am going to out on a limb and suggest that Google has fewer than 1 million paid Google Apps users, a number which I'd consider to be a smashing success.
[36] AAPT has decided to use Google Apps for its 1300 staff after deliberations it called more philosophical than technical. The telco has implemented phase one of its planned adoption of the applications, setting up Google Video and Google Sites, according to an entry on
the Google Australia blog written by AAPT COO David Yuile.
[35] The company charges $50-per-user-per-year for a corporate Google Apps subscription.
[36] Does Google offer a content "export" or "download" from there Google Apps services? I would definitely see some businesses not liking the idea of not having full access to their data if they ever wanted to remove it and move to another system.
[24] '''With the Google Apps Reseller program, we can offer companies the Google Apps Premier Edition, a broad set of powerful APIs that enable us to implement unique solutions that are tailored to the individual needs of our clients" said Ed Hoofnagle, CEO.
[30] The cost for training is probably higher than normal because the reseller (Computer Sciences Corp.) is training to gain more revenue as I'm assuming the margins for reselling Google Apps is fairly low.
[25] There are significant costs to migrating, training and securing
Google Apps."
[37] Let's take the training for the other google apps out of it for a sec. Let's just assume they are all using Outlook or similar to manage their mail. GMail supports IMAP (and POP) So once IT imports everything over, it's simply a matter of changing the connecting server in Outlook, and everyone is back where they were before.
[25] Google's approach to building the user base for Gmail and Google Docs has been to promote the software to individual users while largely neglecting the more complex needs of business users. As such, the services allow relatively few options in the area of defining security controls, with a clear emphasis on open access rather than meeting business or regulatory needs.
[40] Google's email service, Gmail, for example, only provides real-time translation for premium users.
[28] Then when it comes to comparing against hosted services, there's often a level of inventiveness that comes in. A CIO recently told me that Google had suffered huge outages for its Apps service that knocked users off mail for several days, for example. Yet, given the viral nature of social networks, it is nigh on impossible for this to have been true and the 'fact' to go unreported (or at least un-Tweeted). The interesting thing is that I don't think these people are being consciously economical with the truth; they are just very afraid of losing control of a chunk of infrastructure and jumping at factoids to suit dearly-held tenets. This is understandable: as well as losing a fiefdom, they might well be having to say goodbye to friends and colleagues as part of a decision to outsource what has quickly become a commodity service.
[41] The Open University is in negotiations with Microsoft and Google about cloud computing services for students and staff.
[31] The deal is a massive boost for Google as it attempts to compete with Microsoft, IBM and HP in the business arena. Perhaps it's the first sign that cloud computing is being considered as a serious proposition by major corporations. Google's ambition is to lure companies away from their dependency on Microsoft Office.
[24] Enterprise adoption of cloud computing was the focus of Google Atmosphere, an event for CIOs held in London on Oct. 22. The presentations and panels featured some of the leading cloud computing technologies and industry watchers, along with several presentations from Google about its cloud products and roadmap.
[42] "The cloud is no longer an 'if' but a 'when' and the when is actually now," said Matthew Glotzbach, Google's product manager for enterprise apps.
[42] With the business case approved it then moved to address security issues around the cloud. "We had to convince our security guys that we were all still safe, and then we started to tackle the old'single sign on' chestnut, believing firmly that we need to embrace ease-of-use as a core principle for this and many other things," he wrote. "It was a really interesting experience, as along with Google we were really educating our security guys on the robustness and security of the cloud, a new area for them." In the testing phase that followed, AAPT encountered a number of security issues such as firewall and monitoring configuration due to the increase in video traffic, Yuile wrote. The company also determined that a company-wide announcement and restatement of the internal internet usage policy would suffice for its launch needs. Yuile said that following the launch of the new capability feedback and comments from staff suggested that the "whole 'engagement' thing" was working. "Personally, I'm sucked in hook, line and sinker with video updates, which are proving a much simpler and quicker way to spread the word (or am I just really saying it saves me writing it down?!)" he wrote.
[34] "Google is looking to capture the next 2 billion users and it has to have a very consumer-oriented strategy," Gartner analyst David Mitchell Smith said at a presentation at Gartner Symposium in Cannes last week. "Part of what they're doing here in general is trying to be the champion of the individual as opposed to the establishment. It is a critical part of what Google is doing and it's part of the pattern of them providing value to the user and not worrying about the impact on the enterprise. Whatever you think of that as a business development strategy, it's not very helpful when you're trying to maintain and enhance existing IT security policies.
[40] Enterprises often reject Gmail and Google Docs because they can't control crucial security aspects such as where data is stored or how email is used, but despite appearances Google is open to a little quiet negotiation.
[40] Avaya Unified Communications Can Reduce Cell Phone Expenses - Avaya defines Unified Communications as orchestrated communication and collaboration across locations, time, and medium to accelerate business results. It is achieved through the convergence of real-time, near-real-time, and non-real-time business communication applications including: calling, conferencing, messaging, contacts, calendaring, collaboration, and rich presence with voice, video, text, and visual elements. Users can access these capabilities using multiple modalities including voice, data, and speech access, through telephones, PCs, and mobile devices. These communications services are increasingly designed to be embedded into structured and unstructured business processes. This takes Unified Communications to the next level in terms of IP voice and video telephony; audio, web and video conferencing; unified messaging of voicemail, email, and fax; instant messaging and more.
[22] Ryan Harris, 26, of San Diego, sold software and hardware designed to fool Charter Communications and other Internet service providers into believing the gear belonged to paying customers, the prosecutors allege. Harris and his employees also offered technical support in publicly available chat forums at tcniso.net, the Web site belonging to their modem-hacking business.
[27] Today's announcement was made by Microsoft business division president Stephen Elop, who named a number of new customers including McDonald's. "Global organisations, such as McDonald's, Rexel Group and Tyco, are choosing Microsoft Online Services for the rich capabilities, flexibility and value they deliver," he said.
[19] The company mentioned the following customers: Aon Corporation, Aviva PLC, Barry-Wehmiller, Hofstra University, Lions Gate Entertainment, McDonald's Corporation, Rexel Group, Swedish Red Cross, SkyTeam Alliance, Tyco Flow Control, University System of Ohio, Westcon Group Inc. "Global organizations such as McDonald's, Rexel Group and Tyco are choosing Microsoft Online Services for the rich capabilities, flexibility and value they deliver," said Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft Business Division.
[32] To encourage businesses to embrace the cloud on its terms, Microsoft is claiming that its Online Services will be updated with new capabilities every 90 days. Those updates include an increase in mailbox storage space to 25GB for users of the standard service.
[16] Microsoft said that its online services are regularly updated, and that the latest versions include increased mailbox storage of 25GB, and new administration scripting tools.
[19] Google has won its highest-profile customer in its battle with Microsoft to provide e-mail and other Internet services to businesses.
[43] With the potential success of L.A. with Google, which will be well publicized, other large organizations will surely follow. At that point Microsoft could have some trouble on their hands as existing Microsoft users migrate away from Office on the client.
[23] Just as Google has been eroding Microsoft's hold on the home PC user, providing a free and well received alternative to Microsoft Office, larger government and commercial organizations have been resistant.
[23] "You simply don't know what Google's paying user numbers are," Microsoft Senior Vice President Chris Capossela said. "Analysts predict that they are pretty small. It's hard for us to really know."
[4] Who will actually lead the market in years to come is not clear. I would suggest those predicting troubles for Microsoft should look at the last decade or so where they have competed agressively with various Linux and Open Source vendors. They seem to have seen solid profits and steady market share in that period. I am certain they will be even more aggressive as they face off against Google and other providers in the Cloud arena over the next decade.
[20] LA's move is seen as a big win for Google and cloud-computing. With LA's initiative, this setup may soon be adopted by other cities and municipalities in the U.S. and the rest of the world. As for Microsoft and other companies while there will always be a portion of the population that prefers working off the cloud, this should wave a big red flag.
[7] The move comes as Microsoft faces continued pressure from rivals, including Google.
[12] McDonald also said the deal shouldn't have taken place during a fiscal crisis, and that the immediate timing adds an unnecessary one-time cost of more than $1 million. Since the costs of running Google are the same as running GroupWise, the move easily could have been delayed, he noted.
[6] The contract with the company responsible for implementation, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), is projected to cost almost $1.5 million more than the five-year cost of maintaining and upgrading GroupWise. L.A. can repurpose decommissioned GroupWise servers for other computing loads, he said.
[6] "It costs $15 per user/month, and includes Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications, and Live Meeting.
[25] When considering the cost of supporting your own Exchange and e-mails servers, including hardware, software, and people, the cloud option is much less expensive.
[23] Of course, there are other issues with moving to the cloud: privacy, reliability, dependency on a 3rd party, etc. Not everything is about cost. It's nothing more than a commercial vendor, using their best fuzzy numbers, to whine about why the choice, favoring them, wasn't made and how it was bad/wrong/short-sighted. It's mainly an attempt to save face in a vain hope that none of their other dissatisfied customers will follow suit and do the same thing. Gmail has to recoup costs and this is a bit like saying well u have to buy the cd from us but ur only paying for the cd and the labour not the software.
[25] The software maker plans to cut the monthly per-user cost of licensing all three products from $15 to $10, while the cost of licensing individual products is also dropping by as much as 50%.
[27] The price for the suite will drop to $10 per user each month, from the previous $15 subscription rate.
[11] Discounts refer to pricing for commercial customers - I am still investigating whether there is any additional discount being offered to not-for-profit organisations. At they same time they are increasing the size of hosted mailboxes to 25gb per user.
[20] Among the new customers are McDonalds, Aon, Lions Gate Entertainment, and Rexel Group. They join existing customers, such as Blockbuster, Coca-Cola and Autodesk as those paying Microsoft to run hosted versions of its products.
[12] The SaaS apps already are available in more than 15 countries, and Microsoft has trials underway in more than a dozen additional countries. European customers will be served their SaaS apps from a new data center in Dublin and another in Amsterdam.
[9] Asian customers will be served from Microsoft's Singapore data center and a newly built one in Hong Kong.
[9] The end product is owned by you, ready for use as an image or PDF to be incorporated into presentations or interactive applications and sites. How do successful startups like SynapticMash survive in today'''s economy? Innovation gives them a leg-up; as does help from programs like Microsoft BizSpark.
BizSpark is a program for software startups that provides development tools and technologies to build applications and server licenses to host them.
[11] The bid was largely based on cloud-hosted versions of Microsoft's existing products, primarily Exchange and SharePoint. This should have been a reassuring thing as far as compatibility is concerned.
[13] Microsoft formally launched Microsoft Online at a San Francisco event a year ago. Next week, Microsoft will also formally launch Exchange 2010 at its TechEd Berlin developer event.
[12] "And we have made a number of software investments including Exchange 2010 that allow us to drive additional efficiencies." He said Microsoft is passing on the benefits of those efficiencies and would continue to do so as a hallmark of BPOS.
[2] Aiming for SMEs Wyss said Microsoft hopes the online suite will help reach the small and midsize business (SMB) market more effectively. He said the delays in rolling out BPOS to other countries in the region was a result of pending approval from regulators in the respective countries. While Microsoft has focused on markets with broadband penetration, there are emerging economies that could potentially yield returns equivalent to that of developed markets, he said.
[21] Companies there will be able to try the BPOS for free until Microsoft flips the switch on subscriptions. The platform is expected to switch from trial to subscription later this year in India, Microsoft said. The company gives businesses a few months to try out the service before starting to charge them.
[15] Markezich said the move lets the company eliminate promotional pricing that had been in place since last year, creating a simpler pricing structure. He said, the addition of new customers has helped the company make its services run more efficiently, based on economies of scale and investments in software improvements.
[11] IT services firm PDMS will carry out the work related to the platform, which is scheduled to go live in mid-2010 under a software development framework aimed at speeding up delivery times. It is expected that the new system will provide real-time data on lost property so that items can be returned to customers more efficiently.
[27] Google Adds New Social Media Features to Friend Connect Google has enhanced Friend Connect by adding new social media features that Web publishers can integrated into their sites. PayPal Introduces Open API to Put Payments Into Apps PayPal used its inaugural PayPal X Innovate 2009 conference in San Francisco to officially announce the PayPal X program to release APIs allowing developers to integrate PayPal seamlessly into third-party applications.
[36] Apps, a Web-hosted communication and collaboration suite for workplaces, is used by more than 20 million people in more than 2 million organizations. In planning these enhancements, Google has decided not to add a separate application to the suite, Chandra said.
[29] Sure, there may be 20 million Google Apps accounts that represent 2 million companies.
[36] SINGAPORE--In a bid to expand its international marketing efforts around Google Apps, the search giant last week launched a global initiative it calls "Gone Google".
[14] The experience of launching a voice or video chat session should flow seamlessly from within Gmail and mesh organically with the other Apps components. "It should be embedded in the core experience across the application set," he said. Google isn't disclosing further details about its plans.
[29] Google is promoting its online apps as though many people are really using them and paying to do so.
[36] Ebusinessware Inc is an end-to-end New Paradigm solution provider for Web 2.0, Social Media, Mobile Platform and Cloud Computing as well as the new Google Wave solution.
[30] If Google has an outages, that must mean all cloud computing solutions are naturally evil.
[23] Gerry Chng, partner at Ernst & Young, said organizations looking to adopt cloud computing should first consider some key issues before making the commitment. As public cloud computing utilizes the Internet, if they are using public clouds, organizations should consider whether their existing infrastructure can handle the demands to access applications and data over the Internet. Companies need to review their business continuity plans for provisions in the event of unavailability of applications or data in the cloud. They need to relook internal policies and regulatory requirements on data protection before deciding how much data, and in which form data should be hosted in the cloud.
[14] Chng also noted that availability and confidentiality posed risks to information security when companies move to the cloud. "As the applications or data are provisioned from the cloud, organizations become highly dependent on the
availability of the cloud service provider and Internet connection," he said. "While an organization can plan for bandwidth, one cannot always prepare for unexpected events such as an
earthquake disrupting optical fiber submarine links to the Internet."
[14] "The City of Los Angeles should have opted for this proven product to ensure the security of its data and to save taxpayer money. They have taken a risk with no reward.
[37] As a valued customer, Novell will continue to offer our world-class support to the City of Los Angeles during the transition."
[8] "People are in e-mail all the time, so efforts to offer solutions that sit outside of an inbox tend not to have tremendous success," McLeish said. A significant spike in the use of multi-person video conferences on an ad hoc basis by thousands of end-users could have implications for the IT department, which may have to monitor network traffic and possibly provision more bandwidth, she said. One area that Google hasn't yet decided how to approach, if at all, is the popular trend among collaboration vendors of adding enterprise social-networking features to their software, adapting Twitter- and Facebook-like capabilities to a workplace setting.
[29] Acceptance and training required should not be an issue. What's significant about this contract is that everyone was waiting for someone big to go first, and that someone was the City of L.A. Of course, there are other state and local governments, such as Washington D.C., who use Google as their e-mail system, but L.A. marks the largest thus far.
[23] "The City Council was presented with clear evidence that Google posed a very significant risk to the security of the City and citizen data, much of it highly confidential.
[8] "Like the LA Police department and others, we continue to doubt the economics and security of the City's decision to move to a Google system.
[37] The $7.2 billion contract is seen as a signal test for Google's ability to build a promised "government cloud" that meets rigorous security and reliability concerns.
[6] The $7.2 million contract would have given Microsoft legitimacy in the "cloud computing" arena.
[13] Microsoft to Open Cloud Computing Center in Taiwan Microsoft and Taiwan's economics ministry plan to open a cloud computing center together in Taiwan.
[36] I am waiting for a cloud computing alternative to photoshop and then I will be installing Ubuntu and waving goodbye and good ridance to Microsoft.
[24] Our cloud computing offerings aim to lower IT cost and complexity and also reduce security risk.
[30] Not sure if I get that logic, but we
clearly saw it with the T-Mobile fiasco, and the cloud computing spin that comes out of each Gmail outage in the last year.
[23] While the market for cloud hosted email, file storage and associated services is far from mature, it appears Microsoft is committed to positioning themselves as the market leader and 'default choice' as the market grows. [20] Microsoft today announced an update to its cloud-based email and productivity services, as well as a much needed 33 percent price reduction.
[4] While it is entirely possible that Novell products can, for the right price, be highly reliable there has been no demonstration of added benefit in our case and the switch has been disruptive and costly. Novells statement makes light the significant hidden cost in lost productivity from switching to and maintaining their products. I have sat in meetings with Novell representatives, and the kinds of egregious lack of support and functionality they consider to be acceptable are quite frankly insulting.
[25] You can argue forever and while keeping an expensive status quo, you have to leap sometime. This argument from Novell is bogus. It is fairly easy to look at a number like 1.5 Million and assume that it is money down the drain, but I can tell you from personal experience the level of productivity organizations benefit from between these two products is significant. I find it interesting that the article neglects to mention how many employees this cost covers. For a municipality the size of LA this is probably not a large IT cost on the grand scheme of things.
[25] Read a compelling case study by EMA, Inc. to learn how Dell uses BMC CONTROL-M to cut cost and increase productivity with workload automation.
[37] Firms can use hosted web applications for communication, productivity, and collaboration.
[28] Beefing up video and voice communications within Gmail is a good decision because e-mail remains the most-used enterprise application by information workers, said Sheri McLeish, a Forrester Research analyst. In a recent Forrester survey of 2,001 information workers in the U.S., 87 percent said they use e-mail, and among those, almost all use it at least once every day.
[29] Deepak Ramanathan, the company's Asia-Pacific head of enterprise marketing, said in an e-mail interview that Google is focusing on digital screens for the campaign to keep the advertisements "fresh and up-to-date", and has placed advertisements in 17 digital billboards across the Singapore Changi Airport's three terminals.
[14] Over the past year, Google's enterprise team has doubled in size to about 1,000 employees and the company is actively recruiting to continue beefing up the staff, Google spokesman Andrew Kovacs said.
[22] Telecom in New Zealand is a close partner of Google rival Microsoft on several fronts. [34] In related news, Microsoft announced new updates on Nov. 3 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.
[16] One of the better developments out of Microsoft. They really need to make this service rock solid, deploy the rest of Office online, and ramp up their service.
[15] Microsoft needs to erase that from people's collective memories by offering an incomparable experience with Office online.
[15] Microsoft said allowable mailbox sizes would go from 5GB to 25GB, a move that ups Microsoft's stake in the so-called "bottomless" inbox war with other online providers.
[2] Austin also points to Google's recent move to provide a "government cloud" to attract U.S. federal government business as evidence of a slight shift in mindset. [40] Putranto said that all applications hosted by Google were available free to users, but with less features.
[28] Feature-for-feature, MS Office beats Google Docs by a wide margin. Critics argue that Office users only utilize 10% those features, but that 10% differs from person to person. Many users develop their IT skills on MS Office.
[24] I think you'll find 9 out of 10 users won't even know what Google is anyways, and will probably be just sending straight e-mails. IT departments will just hope they can figure it out with some sort of short tutorial.
[25] Cisco and IBM/Lotus are also competitors in the hosted e-mail market, currently dominated by Google. David Coursey tweets as
@techinciter and can be
contacted via his Web site.
[3] Obviously, Google uses the b-word differently than the rest of us). David Coursey tweets as
@techinciter and can be
contacted via his Web site.
[36] "Until today, more than 10 local companies have used Google premium web applications," said Putranto Yuwono, director of EB Connection, the local partner of Google recently. "Another 10 companies have been expressing their interest to use these products," he added.
[28] The emergence of cloud storage providers such as Amazon,
Rackspace Cloud, and
Mozy Pro have shown we want to store data in the cloud. Storage-as-a-service is still in an infant state because it's still not possible to use any web app to access that storage. By 2014, cloud storage will lose its proprietary and closed nature; standards will emerge that allow you to store data on your provider of choice, then access it from any web site ''' including Flickr, YouTube, and even Spotify. web storage also means a lessened role for the OS in not having to manage as much local storage.
[39] Here are five ways in which web apps will change over the next five years. We're seeing this already with sites such as
Twitterfeed (which uses Yahoo and others for authorisation), and
Traxo.com (which makes good use of
Facebook Connect ) to share data between sites.
[39] In the next five years, apps will become even more adept at sharing data, mostly thanks to
OAuth (a way to authorise access between sites) and
OpenID (a login service).
[39] In the next five years, geo-location services will greatly improve: every web app will know your current location.
[39] Web Apps is considered one of the open source software providers with big prospects to replace more expensive propriety applications.
[28] All signs point to a coming revolution in web applications ''' sites will no longer be static islands unto themselves or behave like Microsoft WordPad in the cloud. Several emerging technologies such as OAuth, OpenID, HTML 5, and a web OS will initiate an age of robust web applications.
[39] Companies looking to leverage a piece of the Microsoft Cloud would be able to do so at a cheaper price as of November 2nd, the Redmond giant explained.
[32] In today's technology roundup: Microsoft chops hosted software price, London Transport gets lost property system, file-sharers are big spenders too, and hacker charged in cloning scheme.
[27] Don't be so quick to think that Microsoft makes kneejerk reactions and is lowering price in desperation. That statement might make you feel good but there's another explanation from your college economics class: maximize the product of price times quantity, e.g., a slightly lower price might be more than offset by an increase in quantity sold.
[15] How many companies lower prices on their products because the products are just too darn popular? That's what we're supposed to believe? Microsoft doesn't want to make too much money? Yeah, right. This smacks of desperation.
[15] Besides cutting the price of the BPOS suite, Microsoft is cutting the price for most individual components.
[5] Microsoft also announced that BPOS users' e-mail inbox sizes will grow from 5 gigabytes to 25 gigs. Kelly said his team rolls out updates to BPOS every 90 days.
[15] Microsoft's corporate vice president, Allison Watson, told ZDNet Asia in a previous interview
Asia was expected to embrace BPOS faster than the United States, noting that Asian users were more accustomed to a "digitally-connected environment".
[21] Microsoft was a little shy in applauding some new companies, out of what it says to be hundreds of customers, that adopted BPOS over the past few months.
[32] All BPOS customers will be moving to the new Exchange 2010 platform as well.
[4] Within the next week it is expected Microsoft will make Exchange Server 2010 available for download.
[20] If I want to leave (Exchange Online) I can pick that up and move it to my own Exchange environment. It's not a proprietary type of environment."
[9] Instead it claimed that it was enjoying economies of scale now that it has so many users. The firm claims to have over a million paying customers of its various online offerings and that excludes Live Meeting,
Mary Jo Foley reports.
[18] I'm confused as to why people are speaking as if gmail requires "training" in order to use. It has 146 million users, last I checked. It's also SIMPLER than regular email: it doesn't have lots of folders, you can search really well, and follow-up messages are grouped (as "conversations") so that you don't need to look for them. Just because it's different doesn't mean it is going to terrify the end users. This "change=confusion" equation is silly.
[25] According to Yuile, most of the benefits would come from Gmail and storage. The first phase of the roll-out didn't touch either of these. "We resolved that Phase 1 was'strategic' (a euphemism for 'gut feel') and would significantly contribute to a more engaged (and hence productive) workforce," he said. There was a trial on 20 users, where Yuile nutted out a few problems such as firewall and monitoring configuration. He decided that there would just be a basic landing page since most people would be familiar with the apps, so that no real training was needed. Although Yuile admitted he himself had some teething problems.
[35] There is no need to push software updates to the clients, no servers to back-up, and no data center space to lease. Most employees of the City of L.A. will already know the Gmail interface, perhaps having their own private accounts already.
[23] With pre-built data integration, data cleansing, and a central repository for cost information, Financial Planning & Analysis (FPA) software helps you significantly reduce the effort involved in transforming cost and budget data into easy-to-understand cost information.
[41] Independent financial data showed that the new system will actually cost more, not less."
[8] New features, which are free to users, include increased data support and customizable views.
[16] Wong cited "user inertia and learning curve" as some of the company's concerns. "None of our users are interested in re-learning a new application, especially when the one they are currently using works just fine," he explained.
[14] Most services require a minimum of five seats with services starting at $2 a month for occasional users.
[18] "There is negotiation with regard to special features." While Gartner argues that security and functionality concerns mean that Google is unlikely to replace on-premises services in any of these areas in the near future, it does recommend running pilots to assess their usefulness in specific areas.
[40] Gurgaon, Haryana, November 2, 2009 /
India PRwire / -- eBusinessware Inc has become an authorized reseller of the Google Apps''' suite of communication and collaboration tools.
[30] Current estimates indicate it could be some years before even 5% of business email is hosted in the cloud. [20] Creese says the cost reduction in notable for corporate users who typically focus on GAPE as an email replacement.
[2] Even the licensing costs are more than just the applications - you have to have licensing to access the servers upon which the applications reside, thus effectively doubling your licensing count. With Novell, you don't have silly server-based licensing, unless you use the Linux crapola they are forcing.
[25] If the mandate is everyone must use gmail'''s web interface, then yes, there is going to be a big cost for re-training.
[25] Cost Reduction Webcast: Buy, Lease, or Cloud Compute? Run your office like a well oiled machine - without wiping out your bank account.
[36] The wave of migration from propriety software to open-source applications is now gaining momentum because open source provides cost efficiencies and helps avoid legal charges for piracy.
[28] Monday marked the launch of BPOS trials in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania and Taiwan. Microsoft did not disclose dates for general availability of the service in those areas but said trials can run from 2-6 months.
[2] CYA - Cover Your Apps Cover your customers' apps and earn an additional 20% instantly when selling ARCserve' Backup, XOsoft' and ERwin' products wi.
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Ebusinessware Inc Joins Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program31.
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