Google Apps

The City of Los Angeles has had it with GroupWise, and will replace it with Google Apps. It's a big win for la GOOG, especially as it beat Microsoft to the deal. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers count how many angels can dance on a cloud.
(GOOG) (MSFT) Not to mention iPhone costumes...

IBM/Lotus wants you to reconsider "Going Google". It's now offering a SaaS/cloud hosted email service, with similar functionality to Google Apps' Gmail -- but undercutting Google's price. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers wonder if it'll be more reliable than Gmail. Not to mention Tetris as you've never seen it before...
(IBM) (GOOG) (MSFT)

As polished as Microsoft's Office Web Apps may be, in one very significant way, it's far inferior to Google Apps, and will give Google plenty of time to catch up to Microsoft. Once again, Microsoft can't seem to get synchronization and sharing right.

The Active Sync 'end round' that Google used to get calendar and contact sync to work on the iPhone is now being used to get push Gmail. Here's how:

Gmail, Google's email service, was down for an hour or two yesterday, causing widespread wailing and gnashing of teeth. Not just the free version, but also the Google Apps email service was affected. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers discover why it happened, as they check their SLAs.

By Richi Jennings. Your humble blogwatcher has selected these bloggy morsels for your enjoyment. Not to mention more from the 8 Bit Pwny Club...

Google is firing up a Google Apps campaign to try to convince small and medium businesses in four metropolitan areas (New York, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago) to "go Google". They've set up a special site called "Apps At Work" for the campaign.

The hidden costs of cloud computing. There is always lots of buzz around Google Apps availability and the tradeoffs versus Microsoft Office. TwinStrata throws out an interesting analysis, built from real infrastructure metrics.

Microsoft today let loose a new beta version of its flagship enterprise messaging software now called Exchange 2010. As Eric Lai reported for Computerworld, this is a big update and it looks to address some of the competition from Google.

A new Google Gadget adds business intelligence to the popular online messaging and collaboration tools.

There's been lots of speculation that Google might launch its own Linux-based desktop operating based on its Android. Now, Google CEO in hinting that that's exactly what Google might be doing.

As Google innovates Apps at break neck speed, it needs to take on some of the non-core Office functionality. One such capability that Google doesn't yet have is clip art and drawing capabilities that exist in Microsoft Office. 'Yet', of course, being the key word.

It isn't all laziness, I swear! There is some value in viewing others' communications about IT outages. With that, today's post is just a paste of my email to my employees regarding Tuesday's Gmail outage (with some good news thrown in to temper the tempers). Feel free to cut and paste it to your employees if you need to relay the same message and you are as lazy as me:

Last week's Google Sync update that now allows iPhones and Windows Mobile phones to able to sync with Google Apps is a fantastic feature. It worked flawlessly for my GMail account. But for some reason it didn't work for my Google Apps Premiere account. Why?The answer, I just discovered today is..

Google updated spreadsheets this weekend with some new features across the board. You mobile phone spreadsheet warriors now have a new tool at your fingertips.

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As always, Google is adding important updates to our Google Apps. Today's in particular are pretty cool and a big help in productivity..