Google sticks it to Microsoft with DocVerse purchase

by Ron Miller on Wednesday 10 March 2010

Last week Google purchased DocVerse, a tool that lets multiple users share and edit Microsoft Office documents online. The purchase gives Google a way to bring Office users under the Google Docs umbrella. Google recently made it possible to upload any type of document into Google Docs. DocVerse provides a way to make the Microsoft Office ones (of which there are likely to be many) editable within the Google Docs framework.

As they reported in their blog post announcing the purchase, they understand there are many businesses still committed to using Office documents:

“But we recognize that many people are still accustomed to desktop software. So as we continue to improve Google Docs and Google Sites as rich collaboration tools, we’re also making it easier for people to transition to the cloud, and interoperate with desktop applications like Microsoft Office.”

And even while Microsoft is making a bigger and bigger play to the cloud (as I wrote recently on DaniWeb in “Microsoft Supposedly Commits to the Cloud“), Google has found a way to undermine that play by making Microsoft’s documents work in its environment. It’s a brilliant move, and one which should help companies committed to using Office (at least for now) to begin to transition to Google Docs if that’s what they plan to do.

You can learn more about how DocVerse works in this video:

DocVerse from Amir Khella on Vimeo.

For more information:
- see the Google Blog post announcing the deal

Related Articles:
Memeo aims to connect the Docs
Google to begin opening up Google Wave for testing
Can Microsoft dominate web-based applications?
My Predictions for 2010



U.S. Air Force Manages Aircraft Site Using Powerful Storage Virtualization Platform

by admin on Tuesday 9 March 2010

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U.S. Air Force Manages Aircraft Site Using Powerful Storage Virtualization Platform

Objective:
Meet business demands more flexibly; manage data more simply and efficiently; and mitigate the risk of lost data with a storage area network (SAN) that pools, shares and centrally manages storage resources.

Approach:
Virtualize SAN-attached storage, which is available with the new HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP)

Business technology improvements:
• Reduced time that servers must be offline to install tests from one hour to 10 seconds
• Decreased storage reconfiguration time when a server is down from one week to half a day
• Reduced system administration time by approximately two-thirds
• Increased overall storage capacity by factor of at least two
• Optimized capacity utilization through Snapshots, thin provision and optimized data paths

Complete the form below to access this White Paper from HP:

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Securing the Physical, Virtual, Cloud Continuum

by admin on Thursday 25 February 2010

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Securing the Physical, Virtual, Cloud Continuum

The data center is undergoing a radical shift, from virtualization towards internal cloud environments where workloads dynamically move, start and stop driven by real-time performance needs. At the same time, IT practitioners are interested in exploring external cloud computing options—but security and compliance concerns are squelching adoption. A key concern is trust. Moving to a cloud provider shifts the burden of trust onto the provider–something that few providers are able to handle today. To overcome this concern, responsibility for security and compliance needs to stay with the customer. This requires an overhaul of security practices – the same practices we’ve been using for 15 years. We need new security and compliance controls that span the physical, virtual, cloud continuum (not everything will be virtual so security must continue to protect physical assets). We also need security controls that are location-aware and dynamically enforce policy regardless of workload location. This requires an adaptive perimeter defense and restoration of depth for defense in depth.

Complete the form below to access this White Paper from Trend Micro:

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Cloud computing competition heats up

by Mike Dolan on Monday 22 February 2010

As business computing gets more advanced and cloud computing moves beyond email, competitors are flooding in to challenge incumbents. GigaOm takes a look at some of these and sizes up the market. Article



Google Buzz Is New Black – Solving A Problem That Google Wave Could Not

by Chirag Mehta on Tuesday 9 February 2010

Today Google announced Google Buzz. Watch the video:

The chart below shows the spectacular adoption failure of Google Wave as a standalone product. This was predicted by a lot of people including myself. As Anil Dash puts it Google Wave does not help solve a “weekend-sized problem”.

Besides the obvious complex technical challenges there are three distinct adoption barriers with Google Wave and Google Buzz has capability to overcome those:
Inseparable container, content, and collaboration: Changing people’s behavior is much more difficult than inventing or innovating a killer technology. Most of the people still prefer to keep the collaboration persisted separately from the content or not persisted at all. Single task systems such as email, Wiki, and instant messaging are very effective because they do one and only thing really well without any confusion. Google Wave is a strong container on which Google or others can build collaboration capability but not giving an option to users to keep the content separate from the collaboration leads to confusion and becomes an adoption barrier. 
Google Buzz certainly seems to solve this problem by piggybacking on existing system that people are already familiar with – email. Google Buzz is an opt-in system where the users can extend and enrich their experience against using a completely different tool. 
Missing clear value proposition: Google Wave is clearly a swiss knife with the open APIs for the developers to create killer applications. So far the applications that leverages Google Wave components are niche and solve very specific expert system problems. This dilutes the overall value proposition of a standalone tool. 
Google Buzz is designed to solve a problem in a well-defined “social” category. People are already using other social tools and Google Buzz needs to highlight the value proposition by integrating the social experience in a tool that has very clear value proposition unlike Google Wave which tried to re-create the value proposition. Google Buzz assists users automatically by finding and showing pictures, videos, status updates etc. and does not expect users to go through a lengthy set up process.
Lack of a killer native mobile application: This is an obvious one. Google Wave does work on iPhone and on some other phones but it is not native and the experience is clunky at best. When you develop a new tool how about actually leveraging a mobile platform rather than simple porting it. A phone gives you a lot more beyond a simple operating system to run your application on. 
Google recognized this and Google Buzz is going to be mobile-enabled from day one that leverages location-awareness amongst other things. I hope that the mobile experience is not same as the web experience and actually makes people want to use it on the phone.
You could argue that why Google Buzz is going to be different since Google did have a chocolate box variety tools before Google Buzz – Latitude, Profile, Gmail, Wave and so on. I believe that it is all about the right experience that matches the consumers’ needs in their preferred environment and not a piece of technology that solves a standalone problem. If done right Google Buzz does have potential to give Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Gowalla run for money.

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