Posted by Philippe Creytens at 14:04 on September 2, 2010
It is fair to say that probably the biggest advantage of using cloud applications in a browser is the fact that changes and new features become immediately available without software updates. With a minimal effort a cloud service provider can roll out new features and/or improvements of existing features to to thousands or millions of users.
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 13:09 on August 30, 2010
The upcoming start of the new school year offers new challenges to school administrations in our rapid changing new world: better and more open communication to parents, budgetary restrictions, students that grow up with Facebook and expect location-independent access to their information. And software vendors that have started battle against each other because they understand that the students of today will be the end users of tomorrow.
Microsoft and Google offer schools interesting solutions. But as a school where and how do you start?
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 13:25 on August 23, 2010
Real estate agents really understand the advantages of Google Apps Premier Edition. It guarantees them access on the go to their email and calendar without any headaches. Besides that, they no longer have to make backups, update software or mess with calendars.
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 21:45 on August 10, 2010
Google Message Discovery is an archiving service for mail that allows you to quickly search them. Your organization get unlimited storage of all mail and attachments for a retention period of 1 to 10 years.
A case from last week made me decide to –for the first time– make a short screencast on how to restore mail from the Google/Postini archives.
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 13:17 on August 9, 2010
The Swiss army knife is popular because of its different uses: it shears, uncorks bottles, slices and does a lot more. Google Apps also has its own Swiss army knife: Google Apps Script.
Simply great for your endless list of little things you want to automate fast without much effort.
Need an example? How about sending a ‘Google Apps tip of the day’ to pilot Apps users for a week?
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 23:06 on August 3, 2010
I recently had a discussion about the best approach for going to the cloud. Is the best approach doing a pilot or a Big Bang?
I keep repeating myself over and over: people don’t like change. Even if it turns out to be a positive experience over time.
Michael Sampson, Sharepoint specialist, summarizes this as follows: what is the biggest complaint about collaborative solutions? No one uses them!
Does doing a pilot prevent this, or not?
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 11:26 on July 22, 2010
In essence project management is all about making sure that different tasks are being done by different co-workers within time and budget. This sounds pretty simple, but every organization has problems delivering projects in a successful way. Barely one third of all projects are deemed to be a success.
Methodologies such as PMBOK and PRINCE2 are intended to keep projects under better control, but with a huge overhead in paper work and structured meeting moments. For today’s rapidly changing (business) world, a more ‘agile’ approach is often more appropriate.
Google Wave is being announced with the motto ‘Get stuff done with groups of people’. But does it?
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 13:26 on July 20, 2010
Summer time is a great time to read up on things. I have started reading ‘User Adaption Strategies‘ by Michael Sampson. Great intro for the book: “What is is the #1 complaint about new collaboration technology? No one uses them!”.
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 15:47 on July 15, 2010
During presentations Google people keep referring to their disaster recovery measures. They keep saying that backups are no longer needed. But is that so? Hello Google, never heard of the ‘dummy user’?
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 12:59 on July 14, 2010
Do you use Postini combined with Google Apps Premier Edition and are you dying to know how to have more then one sysadmin in Postini?
Easy, if you know how.
