Apple to Apples

Great infographics by MBAOnline.com Enjoy!

Why companies choose Microsoft BPOS / Office 365 over Google Apps

Today, Computerworld published a good article by Shane O’Neill titled “Why We Chose Exchange Online, Not Google Apps”

The author of the article, based on customer testimonials, explains why Winston-Salem selected Microsoft hosted Outlook over Google Apps. While I have touched on this point many times over, for every business owner, it always comes down to three key criteria:

1. How familiar are my employees with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office applications vs. Gmail and Google Apps?
2. How much money have we already invested in Microsoft licenses, i.e. Microsoft Office, SharePoint, etc?
3. Extent of required end-user training we will have to provide to ensure that the solution is quickly adopted by all employees

As you can see, the selection process can be fairly simple and at times, majority of decision makers will favor a technology that their users are already familiar with, without looking at  feature and functionality, or even price tag.

It is important to remember, that choosing your cloud provider will have long-term effects on your business, and if your competitors selected a more agile, feature-reach collaboration platform, they may beat you at your own game. Hence, the selection process must include a much more detailed review and analysis of all pros and cons prior to making a commitment to a particular technology or vendor.

Until next time,

Steve Driz

Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is here!

Several hours ago, Google started sending emails to Google Apps users introducing Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office. The email provides an overview of the Cloud Connect concept and includes direct download link for the Cloud Connect plugin.

Below is a brief overview of the Cloud Connect.

The installation took approximately 1.5 minutes, and having launched Microsoft Word we have noticed Google Connect toolbar right under the standard office toolbar in Office 2007.

Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office toolbar

Prior to using the plugin, you will have to authorize Google Cloud Connect by logging in to your Google Apps account and setting up synchronization options that can be changed later. Provided that you have selected automatic document synchronization that would take place every time your Word document is saved (always remember to enable auto-save option in Word so that you don’t loose important documents), Cloud Connect takes care of the rest and instantly provides you with a unique web link for sharing your documents with others. Don’t worry, while your document is saved to Google’s cloud instantly, it is not automatically shared with the world. A “Share” button on the far right, when clicked, will take you to what looks like standard Google Docs Sharing settings. In a matter of seconds you can start sharing a Word document, PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheet with people you select. You can also specify if a person can edit a document, or just view it online.

Google Cloud Connect sharing settings

When synchronized, the file will be stored in Google’ cloud and can be viewed online as if it was a native Google Docs document.

Viewing Google Cloud Connect document online

In my view, this can be a huge win for Google specifically winning customers that hesitate  switching from Microsoft Office to Google Apps as many people prefer to use something with familiar interface. It would be interesting to see what happens to Cloud Connect popularity and to overall user loyalty to Google Apps after Microsoft’s launches Office 365 which is currently in Beta. Microsoft Office 365 incorporates online document collaboration features for standard Microsoft Office documents by design and includes feature limited online versions of popular Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Unfortunately, Google Cloud Connect is currently not available for Mac due to the “lack of support for open APIs on Microsoft Office for Mac”. At this time, Google did not disclose any plans to make it available for users of Microsoft Office for Mac in the near future.

Google Cloud Connect is available as a free download from Google’s website at http://tools.google.com/dlpage/cloudconnect

Google also made available enteprise deployment resiurces including an MSI file. It can be located on Google Apps Administrator Help center at http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1186214

For additional information, please visit the official Google Enteprise Blog at http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/02/teach-your-old-docs-new-tricks-with.html

As always, I look forward to receiving your comments.

Until next time,

Steve E. Driz

Getting Google Apps to 99.99%

On January 14th, Google posted Service Level Agreement (SLA) related data as it applies to Google Apps for both business and individual customers.

In 2010, Gmail was available 99.984% of the time, which translates into approximately 7 minutes of downtime per month, and basically represents accumulation of small delays throughout the year.

Google Apps Downtime 2010

Compatible data for Microsoft BPOS for 2010 shows 113 incidents, 74 unplanned outages and 33 days with planned downtime.

Considering the above data, Google Apps seems more reliable compared to Microsoft BPOS. In several blog posts, Microsoft reiterated that guaranteed uptime is one of the key priorities for BPOS and its future successor – Office365 that is currently in Beta.

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Seasons Greetings and Happy New Year!

Friends,

It has been another successful year for us. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, our dear customers and readers and wish you all good health, love, happiness and prosperity in 2011!

Steve E. Driz
President & Chief Architect
The Driz Group

How to choose a third-party Disaster Recovery provider

Recently, this topic was discussed with one of my colleagues on LinkedIn, and I’ve decided to blog it as a part of “how to” series. I hope that it would help businesses of all sizes make an informed decision when selecting Disaster Recovery provider.

I would like to start with stating while this “how to” may cover both DR and BCP, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are different by definition, and would not recommend blending the two together when evaluating 3^rd-party vendors in that space. Both have to be looked at and planed for separately based upon organization risk tolerance and scope.

For example, a complete or partial structural damage to the head-office may constitute a disaster in the event and majority of business related activities as well as back-office systems reside within the same building. In that case, you will need to repatriate your core systems as well as core recovery team to another location where you can continue selling products or services while supporting your customers.

On the other hand, if an application server fails, and you cannot be down for more than 10 minutes due substantial loss of revenue, you will most likely follow business continuity protocols to ensure that services are restored by using a redundant system hosted either on premises or in a third-party facility. However, this by no means would grant declaration of a disaster.

When choosing a 3^rd-party provider, you must ensure that your organization receives priority in the event and you are forced to declare a disaster. For example, many DR vendors offer their services on a first come first serve basis, and while history has shown that larger providers will have the capacity when needed, this point must be taken into consideration and properly incorporated within the master services agreement. To reiterate, following tragic events of 9/11 in NYC, a good friend of mine served as a CIO of a large national health provider in New York City. His organization was forced to declare a disaster along with other companies affected by it. Fortunately, they had a tested DR plan and a reliable provider who had the facilities and the equipment available despite the fact that it had to provide services to many other customers simultaneously.

When selecting a third-party DR provider, you must ensure that you primary DR site is not;

• located in close proximity to any manufacturing facilities that use large quantities of harmful chemicals
• located in a high-crime area
• located in close proximity of rail-road
• located within close proximity to any strategic government buildings

and is;

• receiving priority diesel supply if running on power generators, i.e. some larger telco data centers will have priority as they are considered an “essential” service by the City

As far as facilities go, you must ensure that the facility is equipped as follows:

• sufficient rack space, power, voice and data
• sufficient storage
• fully equipped office space for the core recovery team
• sleeping quarters for employees that may need to work multiple shifts
• kitchen, bathrooms etc.
• sufficient parking space

As always, I welcome your comments.

Until next time,

Steve E. Driz

Microsoft launches Office 365 as an aggressive approach to cloud applications

Based on Microsoft’s official press release, the company has launched a new cloud platform Microsoft Office 365. The new brand includes all features of Microsoft BPOS, i.e. Exchange Online, SharePoint Online,  as well as ever green Office desktop application such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint a.k.a. Office Web Apps, now available as a part of Office 365. In addition, it includes Microsoft Lync – Communications Server in the cloud.

By introducing a fully integrated suite of products in the cloud, Microsoft is set to raise the bar on the existing cloud offerings including those offered by the competition. It would be interesting to see if Google has something up their sleeve.

Read full press release

Official Microsoft Office 365 website

Business and Marketing Benefits of New Re-designed Twitter

Today I came across a great article by Chris Crum analyzing new, re-designed Twitter interface and explaining why new interface may attract new users to Twitter, and what are the benefits of using Twitter for business.

While Twitter has been around for a while, many businesses and individual still did not adopt it for variety of reasons including limited resources, questionable return on investment (ROI) , etc., and while Twitter does not solve all business problems for all industries, it has an immense potential, and if you are not using it because you don’t have enough time, make the time as soon as you can because you might miss the boat.

Read full story

Until next time,

Steve E. Driz

Microsoft Apologizes for BPOS Outages

As a conclusion following a series of Microsoft BPOS outages over the past several weeks, on September 8th, Microsoft issued a statement on Microsoft Online Services Team Blog apologizing for recent outages that affected customers that use Microsoft hosted services such as Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. By issuing a timely apology to its customers, Microsoft shows that they are serious about making BPOS a success while understanding that service reliability is key for any business that hosted services providers.

My name is Morgan Cole, and I lead a team at Microsoft whose mission is to make sure that BPOS customers have a great experience with our services. We aspire to deliver quality services, and in the last couple of weeks, we have fallen short of this aspiration. During this time, we experienced two network access issues in North America, and just yesterday, two brief periods of service degradation also affecting users served from North America. These incidents were unique to BPOS and not related to other Microsoft services.

I wanted to write here to apologize to you, our customers, for any inconvenience these issues may have caused. We know how important these services are to the daily operation of your business, and we take our responsibility as your partner and service provider very seriously.

I also want to provide a bit more detail about the recent issues.

Specific to the August 23 event: our proactive efforts to upgrade to next generation network infrastructure caused unforeseen problems that affected access to some services. Operations and Engineering quickly identified a design issue in the upgrade that caused unexpected impact, but the issue resulted in a 2-hour period of intermittent access for BPOS organizations served from North America.

The August 23 event was remediated, but the solution did not resolve another underlying issue which created subsequent problems on September 3rd and 7th. BPOS customers experienced brief periods of service degradation, primarily affecting the sign-in service and administrative portals. The impact during the afternoon of September 7th had more widespread customer impact, although the duration was relatively short. We performed emergency maintenance to isolate suspect traffic, which has proven successful in stabilizing the service. We continue to monitor the network and all services to ensure stable operations. Needless to say we, like you, find the events unacceptable and have 24/7 efforts underway to ensure we do not have a repeat of these events.

We appreciate the serious responsibility we have as a service provider to you, and we know that any issue with the service is a disruption to your business – and that’s not acceptable. I can assure you that we are investing the time and resources required to ensure we are living up to your – and our own – expectations for a quality service experience every day.

As always, if you are experiencing any service issues, we encourage customers to contact us. Our customer support is available 24 hours a day by telephone or via Service Requests submitted from the Microsoft Online Services Administration Center.

More Microsoft BPOS Access Issues as Users Report Additional Outages

Thanks to yet another report by ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley, we keep learning about new occurrences of Microsoft BPOS outages following reports. According to the source, majority of Microsoft hosted services outages affect Exchange Online, Microsoft’s hosted Exchange service.

By not addressing these issues swiftly, Microsoft is playing a dangerous game toying with consumer confidence yet again. One would think that an organization of this size such as Microsoft would have sufficient and effective business continuity measures in place to ensure that a service they promote is accessible at the very least. Don’t get me wrong, I do understand that things happen and that systems generally need to be maintained, but I refuse to understand outages when we talk about mission critical systems or services such as corporate email.

As a side-note, I don’t see or hear Google bash Microsoft for incurring downtime that to me shows which organization is more “mature” in terms of its ethical values.

Read full story