Posted 11/05/09 at 07:53:51 PM by Ryan Whitwam

We all know Google has a lot of information about us. Now there’s a way to have all that data laid out before you in terrifying detail. Google Dashboard is the search giant’s new site aimed at increasing user control over personal information.

The Dashboard is available in your account settings page (or just go here), and kept behind an additional sign-in page. Once logged in, you’ll see all the Google services you use along with a summary of its use. There is currently support of more than 20 Google services including Gmail, Latitude, Google Voice, Google Docs, Gtalk, YouTube and Picasa.
 
Google offers quick access to the settings for each service if you’re not happy with the information being stored.  So, feel better?

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Posted 10/30/09 at 05:11:25 PM by Jason Barry

The benefits of Google Wave are yet to be seen by the mass public. Google released an internal developer sandbox earlier this year and eventually rolled out a consumer preview to 100k users in September. Now, Google has announced its next step in the rollout process: the federation sandbox.

Federated distribution models mean that companies can build and host their own Google Wave servers and integrate them with other servers. The features and promises from Google about Wave’s capabilities mean that corporate collaboration will take on a whole new meaning. This next step, allowing corporations to control their own servers, means that Wave will more likely be adopted into business use.

The federation sandbox is strictly experimental for the current time. They have released about 40k lines of code for inspection and the Wave Federation Protocol and Conversation model. They have also demoed a terminal based Wave client.

You can check out the Wave Federation technical information at the Wave Federation Protocol site.

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Posted 10/30/09 at 04:49:51 PM by Jason Barry

Los Angeles City Council approved a deal which will roll out Gmail and Google Apps to about 30,000 employees throughout the city.

"The City of Los Angeles, the second largest city in the nation, made a world-class decision today to support a state-of-the-art e-mail system," said Tony Cardenas an L.A. City Councilman. Most of the concerns regarding the switch surrounded privacy, stability, and cost.

Google and the city of Los Angeles cut a deal that if there was a “significant data breach” in which employee information was stolen or viewed Google would pay damage compensation. There should be obvious cost savings in moving away from onsite infrastructure as well as stability improvements moving the services into the cloud.

Have you, or your company made the switch? What are your thoughts on the Google Apps system?

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Posted 10/04/09 at 04:19:48 PM by Justin Kerr

Starting on October 5th IBM will begin selling a Web-based version of its popular Lotus Notes software suite, a move that puts it in direct competition with Google. The service which is currently being called “LotusLive iNotes” will include the traditional email, calendar, and contact management applications, but interestingly enough will not have any type of substitute for Google Docs.

IBM is apparently counting on the notion that most companies simply don’t want all of the applications that come with Google Apps, and would choose just the core communication applications if they had the choice. Just in case that alone isn’t enough to win over companies looking at cloud based options, they are also undercutting Google’s price per user by $14 a year, bringing the annual cost of a license down to a mere $36.

Google may have a two-year head start on IBM with over 1.75 million registered businesses, but researchers from Gartner claim this is only the tip of the iceberg. Apparently if current trends continue, almost 20 percent of companies will use some form of hosted email by 2012. It will be interesting to see if IBM’s sterling reputation with enterprises will be enough to beat out Google. Currently they don’t have any plans to offer free consumer level versions of the product, but that could certainly change over time.

Head on over to IBM's website to access the free 30 day trial.

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Posted 09/28/09 at 08:01:05 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Google says that it was high load on the internet giant’s Contacts server that caused the outages of last week. Users of Google Apps could not access their Google Contacts on September 24, from 10 AM to 11:30 AM EDT.  Gmail contacts were also unavailable from 10 AM to 1 PM EDT. This also affected Google Voice, as it relies on Google Contacts.

According to the Google Apps team, the solution was to temporarily stop all requests to the Google Contacts servers. A banner was shown in Gmail that informed users of alternate ways of accessing their contacts, but this likely did not lessen withdrawal symptoms for those affected.

On September 25, Google explained that the increased server load was caused by a rare convergence of events. First, an error in a network data center caused additional load on the Contacts server. Also, it just so happened that the server was experiencing higher than average usage that day. Finally, an update to the Gmail platform unintentionally increased load on the Contacts server even more. If they keep this up, their uptime might fall below 99%... the horror.

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Posted 09/18/09 at 09:07:12 AM by Paul Lilly

While most of the attention between Microsoft and Google focuses on the search engine scuffle (Bing vs Google), the two sides are also doing battle in the Cloud, where things are starting to heat up. That's because Microsoft on Thursday began opening the doors of its free web-based version of its Office Suite -- called Microsoft Office Web Applications -- to select Windows Live SkyDrive users.

Things will really get interesting when Microsoft officially launches its online version of Office in the first half of 2010, and until then, the software maker still has time to fine tune the experience, although it might not have much to do. Microsoft Office Web Applications already works on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, while support for Chrome is being developed. But the biggest boon might be the ability to switch between the desktop and web versions

Between now and launch, Microsoft says it will be adding beta testers 1000 users at a time

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Posted 07/08/09 at 03:34:31 PM by Pulkit Chandna

A lot of you must have given up all hope of seeing Gmail leave beta. But Google has finally abandoned its original plan of eternally keeping Gmail in beta and finally stripped Gmail of its beta tag. Google Apps has also left beta. Google has realized that large enterprises are not too keen to “run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase.”

“We've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase. So we've focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark,” Google said on its official blog.

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Posted 06/20/09 at 05:08:27 AM by Justin Kerr

Security and privacy advocates have been pushing online service providers to offer better protection for their customers, and to start offering secure HTTPS connections by default. HTTPS allows you to securely encrypt traffic to and from the server, and for example, protects us from having our usernames, and passwords sniffed out on public networks. Gmail offers users the ability to enable HTTPS as a default connection type (highly recommended), but for the average user, it probably never comes to mind. Email accounts have become a primary hub for password recovery, and many people don’t realize just how painful losing control of one can be until it happens first hand.

This could change in the near future as reported by Google software engineer Alma Whitten in a blog post that claims, we are “looking into whether it would make sense to turn on HTTPS as the default for all Gmail users”. Currently, they are conducting research into the performance impact of rolling this out across the board, but this is a promising step in the right direction. Google is also considering making secure connections the default for other services such as Docs and Calendar.

Secure connections used to be considered very processor intensive for servers, but like anything else, this has become less true as CPU speeds continue to climb. "Unless there are negative effects on the user experience or it's otherwise impractical, we intend to turn on HTTPS by default more broadly, hopefully for all Gmail users," the post says.

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