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Outlook Inertia the Main Factor Holding Business From Google Apps
Meshach writes "There's an interesting article in PC World claiming that the major factor preventing businesses from transferring their communication interface from Outlook to Google Apps is employees' unwillingness to give up a tool that's so familiar. Basically, Google is underestimating how attached businesses and their workers are to Office and Outlook in particular. Quoting: 'Google has found out that, yes, many companies are happy to ditch Exchange for Gmail if it means saving money and eliminating the grief of maintaining Exchange in-house. However, and maybe to a degree unexpected by Google, it also discovered that many companies consider it a deal-breaker to lose the functionality that the Outlook-Exchange combo provides, thanks to the deep links that exist between this client-server tandem.'"
If the next version of Outlook is as different as the last issue of Word was from everything that went before, the advantage of familiarity will disappear.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Google appear to be actually focusing on emails replacement and to me it looks very promising: Wave combines email, instant messaging and collaboration. You can run it on googles servers or on your own. Its very promising. Google Wave http://wave.google.com/ Common irritations with email, - replying to one person, reply to the group, making sure everyones included - trying to coordinate on one document via email and contant back forth emails
I've had Windows 7 on my desktop for a while (currently RTC). I really don't notice too many differences between it and Vista except for some superficial UI changes. On the other hand, Vista was more or less a fine operating system. It's not Vista that was shit, it was the IT media that was shit (but everyone already knew that).
You get 25GB of storage with the corporate GMail account... I'm at the rather high level of email by volume (PPTs, Visio, random people sending me pointless Mega-Zips) but 2.5GB a year doesn't sound too high.
The reason you have, and I had, all of those PST files is that one PST file can't be over 2GB and the search engines seem to prefer multiple small files anyway. Switching it all into a 25GB GMail account stops that problem and stops the "oh look time to create a new PST file".
For those of us who actually search back through time in emails its a mega boon, especially as you don't get the occasional "Oh sorry, we've just realised that your PST file is trashed for no apparent reason.... and we trashed it about 2 years ago but this is the first time you've accessed it since then so all the backups are also trash."
25GB of Email storage, its a wonderful thing.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I'm using Darwin Calendar Server in my office: http://trac.calendarserver.org/ You can install it on a linux box and it's even in the Lenny and recent Ubuntu repositories if you don't want to deal with dependency hell. The only real "gotcha" is that you _must_ enable extended attributes in fstab -- without that, you'll pull your hair out wondering why it doesn't work. Sunbird will sync with it, although Sunbird always downloads all the data when it starts, so if your calendar is large (2-3 items per day spanning 2 years), it'll nail your calendar server's resources for about a full minute. After that, your server can get back to doing whatever else it does -- DCS uses very little resources while runnig. During this time when Sunbird is downloading everything in the calender, Sunbird is not responsive, so just let it sit for a minute or two after loading Sunbird. Sunbird will also completely fail to load the calendar beyond a certain size. This is BTW, the linux version of Sunbird. No idea if Windows version works better. With those exceptions, Sunbird works fine and Apple's iCal (if you have any Macs) works flawlessly of course. For remote access, just VPN into your office and sync.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
As far as I can tell, it is a document store with version control, a business user's version of source code control minus defect/feature tracking.
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Could someone explain briefly what Sharepoint really does?
It does a *lot* of things, all under the umbrella of web-based collaboration. Some examples:
- The document store (with optional versioning control) that you mentioned. This also includes the ability to add additional metadata to the files. For some special document types, you get a special type of library, like a picture gallery for images.
- Lists - sort of like a web version of how business users tend to use Excel, although almost everything in SharePoint is a list at some level, including the document libraries.
- A very powerful search engine that can index all of the content in SharePoint as well as other locations (file shares, Exchange public folders, other web sites). It has tons of Google-esque features like the ability to do "site:slashdot.org"-type syntax but e.g. instead of specifying a particular site, you can specify a particular metadata field to limit the search to. You can also heavily customize the back-end with lists of noise words, synonyms (e.g. specifying that if someone searches for "IBM", documents that contain "International Business Machines" should also be included), etc.
- The whole thing is sort of a MySpace/Facebook for corporations. IE your users can throw together web content without actually knowing HTML, and can e.g. create simple applications vaguely similar to how Excel can.
- From 2007 on, there are a number of specialized library types like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Note that the wiki support in particular is *very* limited compared to something like MediaWiki.
- If you buy Enterprise SharePoint CALs for your users, you can make use of some incredibly powerful features like the Business Data Catalogue, which is an interface to SQL/ODBC/OLEDB data, and makes database content available as lists within SharePoint. So if you have e.g. an HR database sitting in Oracle, you can bring it (or at least the non-private data) into SharePoint for your users to use as a canonical version of that information (IE anything they use it for is automatically updated when the database is). Combine this with the Excel Services backend (which lets users set up Excel formulas and macros for online instead of local processing), and they can now make very powerful business web apps.
It's a very, very complicated system and at least today it has a lot of limitations and bugs, but there's also a lot of interesting potential there. I'm not a huge fan of using it myself, but every actual business user I've worked with has loved it to the point that if we replaced all of our fileservers with SharePoint servers, I think they'd be overjoyed.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Note: I work for a large System Integrator company in my country and I have recently left a project which delivered a corporate intranet built on Sharepoint. The intranet has 3000 users, just so that you get a picture of what kind of systems I work on.
It does a *lot* of things, all under the umbrella of web-based collaboration. Some examples:
- The document store (with optional versioning control) that you mentioned. This also includes the ability to add additional metadata to the files. For some special document types, you get a special type of library, like a picture gallery for images.
Yet it is not a "proper" CMS. It fails spectacularly to provide a out-of-the-box solution for documents made of small sets of disparate files (ex.: a financial statement as .doc plus a pdf version and accompanying excel; in order to treat this set as a single identity you have to roll up your own custom implementation).
- Lists - sort of like a web version of how business users tend to use Excel, although almost everything in SharePoint is a list at some level, including the document libraries.
An interesting and flexible approach unless you want to build relationship among existing lists. Yes, you have "lookup" but it's fragile (good luck deploying a solution with lookup fields to different sites, for a start) and Sharepoint confines everything into non-communicating sites so if you need a list to centralize, say, a list of departments so that you can reuse it from other subsites... you have to write code for that.
- A very powerful search engine that can index all of the content in SharePoint as well as other locations (file shares, Exchange public folders, other web sites). It has tons of Google-esque features like the ability to do "site:slashdot.org"-type syntax but e.g. instead of specifying a particular site, you can specify a particular metadata field to limit the search to. You can also heavily customize the back-end with lists of noise words, synonyms (e.g. specifying that if someone searches for "IBM", documents that contain "International Business Machines" should also be included), etc.
Didn't play much with it so I can't comment. If it does what it says on the box, it's nice.
- The whole thing is sort of a MySpace/Facebook for corporations. IE your users can throw together web content without actually knowing HTML, and can e.g. create simple applications vaguely similar to how Excel can.
Forget about corporate homogeneous look&feel, or decent collaboration tools like forums, faq lists, or blogs, though. The stuff offered without resorting to third party solutions is pathetical.
- From 2007 on, there are a number of specialized library types like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Note that the wiki support in particular is *very* limited compared to something like MediaWiki.
We used forums, mostly. They are horrible and very feature-limited.
- If you buy Enterprise SharePoint CALs for your users, you can make use of some incredibly powerful features like the Business Data Catalogue, which is an interface to SQL/ODBC/OLEDB data, and makes database content available as lists within SharePoint. So if you have e.g. an HR database sitting in Oracle, you can bring it (or at least the non-private data) into SharePoint for your users to use as a canonical version of that information (IE anything they use it for is automatically updated when the database is). Combine this with the Excel Services backend (which lets users set up Excel formulas and macros for online instead of local processing), and they can now make very powerful business web apps.
And forget setting up any meaningful relationship among the data unless you wrote code yourself.
Also, Sharepoint/Exchange integration has so