I’ve deployed Windows in every version since 3.0, and I looked at those early Windows through a greyscale monitor on a 286. I’ve used Microsoft Office in every version up to 2010 and hooked an old Neanderthal smartphone up to a hosted Exchange server and tapped my way through my emails with my little stylus.  I’ve installed and configured Windows server back-ends from Windows NT up to 2008r2. I’ve worked in IT rooms that were so full of loud server iron, that it was like being in the engine room of a submarine. I’ve installed or worked on every version of Exchange from version 5.0 up to 2007. I spent thousands of dollars of my own money on Microsoft manuals and certification exams in order to stay up to speed on developments.

And then it all began to change, and for me, it began with Exchange. Exchange 2007 was the last version I deployed, and the last version my own email account was connected to. I’ve been a Google Apps user for two years now, and I’ve also helped transit some of our clients over to Google Apps also.  My personal transition away from a Microsoft-centric working experience started with email, and has continued on through the rest of what I do. I feel like I’m boarding the Google boat and there are just a few bags left on the MS dock.

Google Apps has been offering full-featured email and collaboration services for a while now. An Exchange server can be replaced in a cost-effective fashion, providing shared calendars, spam filtering, message archiving, chat services, access anywhere from a web browser, and almost no mailbox size limits– starting at $50 per mailbox per year. And while you can certainly use Outlook, Apple Mail and iCal to connect to Google, you can use nothing but your web browser if you want and have full functionality. About the only major feature of Exchange not replicated in Google Apps is Public Folders. But then again, Microsoft isn’t providing for that either going forward.

Replacing email servers is one thing, but replacing those desktop applications is another story altogether. Microsoft has held a monopoly on workstation software and business productivity applications for years. The fact is, Windows and Office work well enough for the majority of users out there. They’re easy to use and familiar. A real challenger has to offer a better way of doing something the average user is already doing. And Cloud computing’s Software As A Service  is finally maturing to that point.

Speaking as a heavy Microsoft user, I’ve personally been anchored to Windows and Office, primarily by Visio and Project.  Microsoft Word is still critical for final document drafts and printing, since the offerings on Google Apps just aren’t there yet in terms of refinement and features. But it’s just a matter of time. The recent addition of Smartsheet to our toolkit has now removed our reliance on Microsoft Project except for our very largest initiatives. And we are eagerly awaiting the evolution of Google Drawings to allow us to build the type of schematics we’re creating with Visio.

Microsoft of course has its own Cloud offering, Office 365, and naturally it’s tied into licensing of their existing products. They have a tiered licensing model that’s much more complex than Google’s. But it’s also a much deeper system than Google Apps.  It goes without saying that Google has no legacy revenue streams to drag into the 21st century. Even so, any company can make a migration decision based on what functionality works best for them, but it’s nice to be able to start fresh at a very aggressive price-point.

For further comparison, since Google Apps is platform agnostic, Mac users don’t draw the short straw yet again when it comes to software and collaboration with their Windows brethren. For remote users in a company that’s migrated to Google Apps, all they need is an Internet connection and a web browser, and they will have exactly the same experience as they have sitting in their office. While the individual feature-set of Google Apps isn’t as elegant or robust as Microsoft Office or Office 365, Google Apps is radically simpler in that you get full access to it’s features with just a web browser. This makes it a serious competitor for today’s geographically diverse, small to mid size business.

Regarding remote workers, smartphones deserve a mention. I used a Blackberry for years, but opted for a Droid recently. You probably knew this was coming, but Google Apps on the Droid takes only minutes to configure, and works smoothly. Google Apps functionality includes: Gmail, Calendar and Contact sync, Push support, Google Docs,  Enterprise Admin controls, and 2-way verification for extra security. This feature set is available for almost all platforms, including Windows:  http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/mobile.html

By contrast, Office 365 applications for iPhone and Android are not coming anytime soon. Mobile access is limited unless you’re using Windows Phone, which let’s be honest, almost nobody is.

Handheld prevalence as per end-of-year 2010:

Android #1 – 33.3 milllion

Symbian #2 – 31 million

Apple #3 – 16.2 million

RIM #4 – 14.6 – million

MS #5 – 3.1 million

Source: http://on.mash.to/rG6bfd

As I write this, I have my email, shared documents, and a Project Plan open on my Windows workstation and on my Linux laptop. I use these applications every single day. My documents appear and function identically across these two computers. My email appears and functions identically. The Gannt chart appears and functions identically. On my Droid phone I have read and write access to my calendar, documents, and email. With the exception of Visio and Word, I can be anywhere with an Internet connection, on a borrowed computer running OSX, Linux or Windows and be fully functional. The last of my bags on the dock contain Word and Visio. I can’t leave them behind just yet, but I’m waiting. I want to get going.

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What will 2011 bring? We obviously won’t know for sure until this time next year, but Control Group’s best and brightest couldn’t wait that long. So…they came together to offer their thoughts on topics ranging from Google, Apple, Amazon, Java and 3D movies in the coming year. Their responses follow.

Happy New Year! We only have 12 months left to see if they’re right…

Craig Hillelson, Field Engineer Manager

- Google Apps will continue to be adopted by lots of small businesses.
- Mistrust of Google will grow proportionally.
- Microsoft will become increasingly irrelevant in terms of the general tech zeitgeist.
- Western governments will attempt to crack down on leaks but without much success.
- Iran will be the victim of a leak of information similar to what the US experienced but on a much smaller scale.
- Every movie will be in 3D and no one will care.
- JJ Abrams will remake “Blade Runner.” Nerds will be delighted or crestfallen.
- Putting microchips in kids will spark a ridiculous parenting debate on every talk show in America.

Charlie Miller, Senior Consultant, Media & Entertainment

- Consumer Tech: The Mac App Store will usher in a tidal wave of new desktop Mac apps and developers, following in the footsteps of the flourishing mobile app marketplace. Developers for Mac software will have a new option rather than “shareware” or “freeware,” and the 99-cent or $4.99 app economy will be unleashed. Bring on the Mac fart apps and Twitter clients!!

- Business Tech: Video reaches a tipping point as a standard content type from non-media companies. Sure, video is seemingly everywhere on the web already, but much of this content is from media companies, networks, and studios. I predict we’ll see huge growth of video delivery from within other verticals, such as financial, healthcare, and maybe even medical. We’re seeing this already, with small media groups being set up inside these types of companies, but as iPads, Galaxy TABs, and Microsoft Slates (maybe…) become ubiquitous, the market and monetization possibilities for delivering video content to these devices will boom.

Deb Au-Yeung, Senior Consultant, Products

- Maintaining Your Image: As more and more publicly available information is being aggregated into profiles on the Internet (Facebook profiles, tweets, URLs, personal websites), there will be a rise of privacy services to help manage your virtual public image and protect your privacy.

- Relying More on Friends: You’ll also see a rise in applications that utilize your personal network to make recommendations and provide support.  Whether it’s opinions on a potential purchases, recommendations on restaurants, what doctor to go to, or even micro-decisions like whether you should go to the gym today, we’re going to reach out to our networks to help us make better, more informed decisions both large and small.

- Saving Money on the Spot: With the ubiquity of smart-phones and improvements on pinpointing your exact geographic location, you’ll also see a rise in push notifications in the form of on-the-spot discounts.  As you’re passing Starbucks, you might receive an alert that you’re eligible for a free drink or maybe you’ll receive a discount on an item you favorited online, because a large number of users also favorited the same item.

Toby Joe Boudreaux, CTO

- Apple and Google will continue to move UX away from the desktop metaphor.
- Someone will finally nail Android UX with an open, elegant UI toolkit.
- Amazon will begin (re)selling mobile connectivity as a service, a la AWS.
- By EOY, consumer culture will stop thinking in terms of “mobile” and “apps” and stop seeing the huge cracks that currently exist in ubiquitous computing. Maybe just with a couple of brands. Apple will lead the way with the Mac App Store and iOS marketing integration, but because of the same, won’t be seen as totally seamless. It’ll be a small player.
- The hype curve on game mechanics will dip into the “played out” valley until some new player releases something more nuanced than badges and purple cows.
- Javascript will continue to become the most important language in modern application development, and functional programming will continue to catch on. Huge year for Scala (and Lift), Node.js, embedded JS, and stateless multicore/multithread/concurrent programming in general.
- DevOps will continue to be one of the fastest growing job market for product teams and businesses.
- The war over Java will not be settled, and people will start pulling away. The excitement over Scala and JRuby will keep the OSS evangelists raising hell, and eventually Oracle will cave.

Dan Meltz, Consultant

- Cars now have cameras that can recognize parking spots that are big enough. I think they will either add image recognition/OCR capabilities so that cars will be able to tell if a spot is legal. Adding QR codes to the signs is a possibility, but I don’t think that municipalities would be willing to lay out cash for a system that reduces their income.

Colin O’Donnell, Partner

- The world will not come to an end.
- The return of the IPO: Facebook’s IPO will fend off the pop of the latest tech bubble at least for 2011.
- People will realize that tablets are amazing single-purpose devices and not the Swiss Army device many hope them to be — this will usher in more things into the mainstream Internet of things.
- We’ll see the face of tech investment change to match the hyper development lifecycles of products.
- We’ll see the mellowing of gamification and the adoption of more recommendation algorithm services.
- Leaving our awkward digital childhood, we will start to realize deeper uses of social media beyond self promotion and product marketing.

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I am really busy these days, but a bunch of things have just been in the news that I need to comment on.

I’m working on the infrastructure for a new phase of QA testing that we are doing on a product. The infrastructure consists of a variety of physical computers, about fifty in all. Managing and maintaining them is more time consuming than the cloud-based computers I work with. The increased amount of attention and time that physical computers take is why I wonder about these things that I’ve read.

First, New York City has entered a “money-saving partnership” with Microsoft, signing up for some massive licensing. Fortunately this includes some cloud-based infrastructure, but it’s unfortunate that the city did not compare the Microsoft solution with something like Google Apps, or with open-source solutions like Libre Office. Since we are paying the taxes that are being used to pay for these services, shouldn’t we be getting the best deal? So, NYC, please call me when you’re ready to talk about your infrastructure.

Have you ever been shivering from the cold in a data center while waiting on hold for the URL to a service pack because everyone’s email is down? I have, and I never want to do it again. I’m sure no one in the city wants to do it either. Why not let Google freak out about keeping your systems up all of the time so you can do some things that really matter. That’s what the cities of Los Angeles and Washington DC do (along with a lot of other people).

Microsoft is also in the news for something else too: Ray Ozzie, their chief software architect, is stepping down. Ozzie seems like a sharp guy and was behind a lot of good things at Microsoft (yes, this is one of the few times you will hear me complimenting Microsoft). He’s asking his colleagues to “close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a post-PC world might actually look like, if it were to ever truly occur.’’ Guess what dude — we are in a post-PC world already.

Can I say that  more people are interacting with technology that’s in the cloud via their cellphones than through their PCs? Probably not, but I will tell you that what’s going on in the cloud and mobile space is a lot more interesting than the PC space. Will PCs even be relevant in a few years? We’ll see. Also interesting to note is that these articles indicate that no one will take Ozzie’s place as chief software architect. That makes me wonder about who’s driving the bus there. This probably doesn’t mean MS is going to just dry up and disappear, but will they ever be innovators again?

Well, enough pondering for now, I have to get back to punching power buttons and checking for failed hard drives — things that you never have to do in the cloud.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi50KlsCBio]

First off, Buzz has some serious potential. Google gained an incredible amount of ground on Facebook and Twitter with this launch, and I do sense a shark-jumping moment for Facebook. Once the Google App ecosystem takes off, and social games and e-commerce get integrated, there will be a huge erosion in Facebook market share.  People want one thing, one place to go, and Gmail is already mandatory.

1. Lets start off easy here: Mobile. Google, you own the platform, how hard would it be to launch with an Android app? In the time it took to do the marketing piece on the mobile site, Google could have developed a full-fledged app. Instead I have an “above ground only” slow-loading mobile web page. HTML5 isn’t quite here yet – and Android 1.6 is not supported.
2. Two way integration! Getting Tweets in Buzz is great, but I still have to go out to Twitter or TweetDeck to post. If I had the option to choose which networks my updates appeared on from within Buzz (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc), I would never have to leave Gmail… except for…
3. Where is Facebook? They have a strong API and a straightforward authentication service. Connect to Facebook and never make me go there again. Aggregate and publish (see above).
4. Buzz for Biz. I know it’s coming for Google Apps, but get it going already! How about full integration with LinkedIn – a CRM app would be a really interesting mash-up, as well as bringing all my connections into my address book. No more stale email addresses or phone numbers.
5. OK, I saved crazy for last. Google Profile. I am the strongest believer in an open information society – if everyone knows everything about everyone, then we are all equal. I understand that’s a little overboard, but why should I hide my information when it will only make the web more relevant to me, and get us to our ultimate destination quicker.  But with Buzz, your Google Profile went from obscurity to super relevant. So, quick inventory: Google has information about my friends, my browsing/search history (not to mention DNS info), my purchase history, my communications, the news I’m reading, and my documents. Now they want to know my age, sex, where I grew up? Are you crazy? Google is holding ALL the cards now. They keep repeating “don’t be evil” but you know what they say about absolute power… (did I mention my location?)

If history is any indicator of the future, Google will evolve and add features and services. They have done so consistently since inception, and people will choose convenience above all else, including quality and privacy. And I guess I’m one of them. See you on Buzz.

And if you disagree, see you in the comments!

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Were getting ready for an event with Google and Mozy that we have dubbed “CloudSourcing”, taking a note from Gartner and tweaking it a little.

Tom Mills from Google and Sean Finnegan from Mozy will be giving an in-depth review of their offerings and how they fit into an agile, post-recession office technology strategy.

I’ll be giving a brief overview of how I think we arrived at this point in IT and what it means for creative, innovative firms that are trying to do more with less.

In an effort to get my thoughts together and get some feedback, I’m using this blog post as a draft for the event.

Let me start off by giving a brief overview of our services, and then a little history about the evolution of our offerings:

We provide a number of technical services for our clients in the areas of infrastructure, application development, and industry-focused workflow consulting. As this is New York, we work with a number of creative firms; media, architecture, publishing, and design companies, as well as some key clients in the financial sector. We strive for long-term relationships with our clients, many of whom we’ve worked with for close to a decade. We have installed and managed hundreds of servers, network devices and application suites, but more recently we’ve been focusing on helping our clients select, migrate to, integrate, and manage Cloud-based services.

Since the 1990s and the introduction of pervasive bandwidth, we’ve gone through a number of permutations of the remote server/client model, and much has been written about the benefits and the irony of the shift back to the mainframe/thin client structure of the 1960s. Now everyone is talking about the future of ‘The Cloud‘; a vast array of computing resources, abstracted and presented as a single source to the consumer.

At the turn of the century, we found most small to mid-sized businesses with a pure Local Area Network (LAN), typically comprised of in-house mail – most likely Exchange – and a few other local services: file, print, etc.  A lot of these firms had an internal IT staff or a dedicated consultant to manage their servers, tape backup, networks, and desktops. Only a few were pushing the envelope by leveraging Application Service Providers (ASPs) to deliver back office services.

The risks with this situation were obvious. These systems mostly depended on a single Internet connection, a single building, and a single individual, prone to career changes and untimely vacations.  Remote access to these in-house services was expensive to do right and applications rarely worked as well remotely as they did in the office.

Over the next five years, we saw a gradual shift towards ‘Hosted Applications’. This typically came in the form of a service provider taking a LAN-based solution like Exchange or SharePoint out of the office and putting it in a data center. In conjunction with this change, we saw the IT services industry begin to shift its focus from in-house IT, or consultants, to managed services – companies providing regular systems management remotely.

There were some benefits to this offering: critical applications were not dependent on intermittent Internet connections or over-heated server rooms. Flaky consultants were traded for predictable management services and cost became as regular as the electric bill.

But there were still problems. We had the same old model of doing things, only it was moved out of the business’s office and into the provider’s.  Services that were built for an onsite installation and LAN speeds were shifted to a remote location – not always producing the best results. Access to applications designed for the LAN was sometimes unacceptable because of bandwidth and latency. In a similarly narrow view of the problem, Managed Service companies focused on monitoring systems and patching software, maintaining the status quo, without looking at the big picture, or driving the business forward.

Now the next generation of IT services is coming along and delivering on the promise of on-demand, scalable solutions. These services are web-native, built for the Cloud and multi-tenant environments.

As services like Google Apps and Mozy were built for the web – not re-purposed LAN applications – they deliver exceptional performance and remain very flexible. Control Group has designed our support and project services in a similar way. Our services are built to function efficiently remotely – scaling up when our clients need it, and going away when they don’t – and also to be flexible and innovative, driving business forward rather than maintaining the status quo.

Using the cloud paradigm, we act as a single source of technology for our clients. We help them run more efficient, profitable businesses by weaving an ever growing selection of web-based services, traditional IT, and industry expertise together, to provide an flexible, competitive business platform.

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Many of our clients use a combination of communication tools to keep in touch — whether Outlook/Exchange, Apple Mail.app, Entourage, or Google Apps. Combining these tools can create some technical challenges, as technologies from different manufacturers don’t always play nicely together. Today I wanted to share a workaround that I use in my personal calendaring setup: using Google Calendars with Apple’s iCal. This necessitates figuring out how to get Google Calendar ‘delegate calendars’ to sync with iPhone/iPod Touch via iTunes.

Google Calendar is a great tool for managing appointments, accessible from anywhere (check out Colin’s thoughts on Google Apps). It is also very versatile as it offers the ability to import iCal .ics files and MS Outlook CSV calendar snapshots. A delegate calendar is an additional calendar you can add to your existing Google Calendar account. At the present time, it is not possible to sync/view delegate calendars when syncing an iPhone/iPod Touch from iTunes. They will not show up there as it looks like this feature is not supported/implemented at the present time. There is a simple workaround which will allow users to sync delegate calendars from within iTunes. The following steps will guide you through the process:

STEP 1: disable your delegate calendars from iCal

1. Open iCal, then select ‘Preferences’ from the iCal dropdown menu
2. Select your Google CalDAV account and open the ‘Delegation’ tab at the top of the window
3. Uncheck each checkbox corresponding to each delegate calendar; they will disappear from the main calendar view where they were currently shown as delegates

Disable your delegate calendars from iCal

STEP 2: create the necessary account(s) for each delegate calendar

A typical Google Account URL has the following form: https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/USERNAME@gmail.com/user

This should be already present on your existing CalDAV account (the one you expunged the delegates from). Replace ‘USERNAME’ with your Google Account username, then copy and paste the line above into a temporary text document for now.

1. Open your browser and log in into your Google Account, then follow the Calendar link
2. Select ‘Settings’ on the ‘My calendars’ box on the left column of the page
3. Select the delegate calendar you want to keep in sync from the main page’s frame
4. At the bottom of the next page (the with the selected calendar’s details), copy the Calendar ID value (shown as clear text) which can be found in the ‘Calendar Address’ section; the Calendar ID has the following sample structure: qwertyuiopasdfghjkl1234567@group.calendar.google.com
5. Go back to the previous temporary text document where you saved your Google Account URL, paste the Calendar ID value you copied in the previous step and replace the ‘USERNAME@gmail.com’ part as follows (replace the Calendar ID with your correct value):https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/qwertyuiopasdfghjkl1234567@group.calendar.google.com/user
6. Then copy the whole resulting string
7. Go to iCal, select Preferences once again and add a new CalDAV account: please make sure you expand the ‘Server Option’ dropdown and paste the aforementioned string into the ‘Account URL’ field.

Create the necessary account(s) for each delegate calendar

You will need to create a brand new iCal account for each delegate you have set up on Google Calendar. When done, your iCal software will display each delegate(s) as separate calendars, and each one of them will be shown into iTunes and will be available for synchronization in the Device’s Info tab.

Each delegate(s) as separate calendars

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Last week, I shared some thoughts on my ongoing trial of Google Apps in place of Outlook and Exchange. I wrote about some of the killer features in that post… however, where Google Apps succeeds in its simplicity, it can fail in terms of flexibility. There are some things here that could mean game over for a lot of people:

Conversation view — how about an option to turn it off?

Conversation view, conversation view, conversation view!

It’s terrible. I have finally gotten used to it, and I still think it’s terrible. If only there were an option to shut it off. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a feature that groups email of a thread together. But it isn’t perfect and it can be pretty awkward. Emails tend to get jumbled up, and sometimes mixed into the wrong thread. Someone high up at Google must have came up with this one because it is one of the most complained about features and still they wont give you a way to shut it off.

Mobile device integration is really weak.

Being a Blackberry Enterprise user, the move to IMAP is a big downgrade. Sent mail is important! Email in under 2 seconds is hard to give up; with IMAP, be prepared for a full minute, unless you manically hit refresh. Google offers their mobile mail client, but it leaves a lot to be desired, it gives you labels (aka folders) and sent mail, but it’s clumsy and lacks basic things like original email text in the body of replies and copy/paste, to name two biggies.

Google plans to release Blackberry Enterprise Server integration this summer, but my hopes aren’t too high. Since one of my goals is to live in the cloud, having a BES server at our office doesn’t fit into that fantasy. Plus, calendar sync is one-way, and email sync is “under 1 minute,” but — I have to say it again — BES and Exchange give me email in under 2 seconds!

Return on Investment

I am willing to overlook these inconveniences, and many others because the ROI from an administrative/business owner perspective is really that good. Take Instant Messaging as an example. If you wanted to implement a company-wide IM platform with Microsoft, prepare to drop $5-$7k on hardware, another $3k+ on software, and about the same on installation. Then add in maintenance, training, and once (if) it gets adopted and people can’t live without it, get ready to plan on backup, archiving and a data recovery plan. We are talking at least $20k to do it right.

With Google Apps, you want company-wide IM? Check a box. You want all IM messages saved and searchable? Click another box. Cost? $0. You want video and voice chat too? Done. Gone are the days of patching servers, mailbox limits, backups running during the day, defragging information stores, Google Apps’ greatest strength is in the fact that it’s not there. It’s everything a cloud application should be.

“In Google I Trust”

One of the biggest drivers in my support of the Google platform is my trust in Google to quietly innovate and release new features and updates. I trust they will get mobile device synchronization right soon. Maybe Microsoft will cave and license them the rest of Active Sync. But  I still have mixed feelings about Google Apps. Life in the cloud is the future — if I was starting a new business, there’s no doubt I would go with Google Apps.  Coming from a Company with 10 years of Exchange process and history, it’s a harder decision. But I still might choose the new pain over the old.

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We are six weeks into a Google Apps pilot. Four have dropped out, there are six of us left. It’s been tough, but Stockholm Syndrome is setting in and I think I am starting to love Google Apps.

Google Apps for Business has been getting a lot of press recently — both positive and less-than-positive — so I wanted to share some thoughts on my experiences testing the platform as a replacement for the traditional Outlook/Exchange ecosystem. It’s been six weeks using Google Apps with a small group of guinea pigs here at CG. And after 10 years architecting, deploying, backing up, patching, defragging, archiving, replicating, maintaining, recovering* and yes, using Microsoft Exchange, I was definitely ready for a change and I was pretty eager to find out how the hype and marketecture lived up to a real world test.

After digging deep into Google Apps for my everyday communications, I found both some really cool features and some stinging gotchas for the average user. I also wanted to share some insight from the perspective of the administrator and the business owner. Here are a few quick thoughts on the positives…

Strongest points:

• Having one console for 90% of what I do, from any computer, Mac or PC is a relief. It’s fast, and simple. I have had enough ‘mandatory coffee breaks’ – waiting 20 minutes to have Outlook open up because it’s reindexing my local mail database.
• The document collaboration, particularly spreadsheets is really nice. It’s definitely not something to produce finished quality work, and rich change tracking that you might use for editing a contract is out, but in terms of getting an idea out there quickly, sharing it and collaborating with your team, I have not found anything simpler, faster, or easier. And I really like the paradigm of individuals maintaining ownership of documents and allowing others to edit them. File servers need to go the way of the newspaper.
• Google-powered search of my email is a no-brainer killer feature. Add Google Chat to the Google Mail window, and you’ve got an email client that’s hard to beat (though I do have one major complaint with Google Mail…. I’ll share more in a follow-up post).

Next week, I’ll share more thoughts on Google Apps, focusing on some of its weaknesses. Update: read Part 2 here.

*eseutil /R — ’nuff said

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