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!

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.

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.

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