Live Enterprise

Zoho Sites: website as a public interface to your IT environment

For a long time Zoho hasn't delighted us with cool new services. And there were doubts that it ever will. After all, Zoho has already more than 30 SaaS services and it need to support and develop them. And the creation of each new service seems less and less justified. But this time, Zoho has done everything right. The app for creating business websites Zoho Sites - is really useful addition to Zoho's suite. Because (ideally) business site should be integrated with the company's IT environment, especially with email, CRM, recruitment system and collaboration tools. And Zoho - is the very suite that can provide such an integrated solution. There is also Google with its Google Apps and Google Sites. But at the moment Zoho Sites beats Google Sites in all respects. ***

OpenStack launches. CloudStack departs. Amazon adapts SAP. Azure rebrands

Here is the news digest from the leading cloud platforms. First of all, the open-source platform OpenStack (aka Linux for the clouds) which had been developed for two years by the alliance of IT giants (Rackspace, NASA, Citrix, Intel, AMD, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM ...) - finally comes to production. Since May 1, it was adapted by RackSpace for its service Rackspace Cloud Files and last week HP launched the public beta of its HP Cloud platform, based on OpenStack. However, a week before the launch the trouble (common for open-source projects) occurred with OpenStack. Citrix, which has been one of the first participants in OpenStack, suddenly decided to grant its own cloud platform - CloudStack - to Apache Software Foundation. Thus, CloudStack not flowed into OpenStack but became a rival project. Citrix explained this decision by the slow OpenStack development and unwillingness of other parties to integrate with Amazon Web Services APIs. ***

QuickOffice now can sync your files. Even with desktop

The developers of the most popular mobile office suite QuickOffice have created a new product QuickOffice Connect, which allows not only edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on your smartphone and tablet, but also sync these files between user devices (or between co-workers). However, QuickOffice is not going to compete with Dropbox, Box, SkyDrive, SugarSync and Google Drive. On the contrary, it allows you to synchronize files and folders with any of these cloud services but doesn't provide its own online storage. QuickOffice Connect works not only on mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android) but also on the desktop (PC, Mac). But it also is not going to compete with Microsoft Office, editing documents on the desktop is supposed be done in Microsoft's programs. ***

Don't use SharePoint while walking!

For Microsoft health and safety of the users - is the highest priority. And to prevent people from falling and being injured while working with SharePoint on the go, Microsoft just doesn't release mobile clients for SharePoint (except one for Windows Phone, which is used by very few users). But there are people for whom money means more than user security. Harmon.ie (the company known for its Outlook plug-in, which allows to collaborate on files stored in SharePoint) has released a mobile application for iPhone/iPad that works as a mobile SharePoint app. Now mobile users with smartphones and tablets can collaboratively edit documents stored in SharePoint, comment them, track the history of changes and versions, agree the documents. It's so easy and convenient that people do this even while walking and because of this already 2675 were injured due to falls and other accidents. The sufferers have already created a web site protesting against the new mobile app - www.DontSharepointWhileWalking.com ***

Yahoo! Small Business allows to monitor Social Web

Long time ago the Internet giant Yahoo! tried its hands in business-oriented projects. Remember, they even bought the collaboration star Zimbra. But then Yahoo! partnered with Microsoft and decided not to compete with the partner. And then Zimbra was sold to VMWare. But one business-oriented service still remains in the Yahoo! portfolio - Yahoo! Small Business, which allows small companies and entrepreneurs to easily create a website, email account and online store. During the recent years Yahoo! changed its executives, priorities and strategies and many services were closed. However, this service has survived for one simple reason - it's really demanded by customers and brings profit to the company. Moreover Yahoo! still finds resources for the further development of this service. Recently Yahoo! Small Business added a free marketing dashboard that allows to monitor Facebook, Twitter and other social networks (for online reputation management), analyze website metrics, submit your site to small business directories, conduct email campaigns. For example, the dashboard enables social media monitoring and provides recommendations on new listing opportunities, including on Yelp, Yahoo and others. ***

LinkedIn acquired Youtube for presentations - SlideShare

LinkedIn, the professional social network #1, is doing fine. During two last quarters LinkedIn manages to double its incomes - already up to $188 million/quarter. And the company is already valued at $10 billion. That's why LinkedIn can afford to buy the new users in bulk - for example, by purchasing online service SlideShare for $119 million. SlideShare works like Youtube - only not for video - but for presentations. And its target audience - are mostly business users (like in LinkedIn). You can upload to SlideShare your PowerPoint presentation and publish it anywhere in the embeddable web-viewer (like yuotube video). Besides SlideShare - is itself an additional marketing channel with a large audience, so by publishing a presentation on it, you can get new customers and partners. Will LinkedIn somehow integrate SlideShare into its network - is not clear yet, but at least they have already embedded LinkedIn presentation on the SlideShare homepage. ***

Samsung is the new Mobile King. Nokia and Apple - are behind

The Mobile market is very hot. Just to say that Apple has become the most valuable company in the world thanks to mobile devices. But at the same time the biggest IT giants are fighting for this market day and night and it's no time to relax. 5 years ago there were two Kings: Nokia was the largest producer of mobile handsets and Blackberry - ruled the smartphone market. But both companies started to rest on the laurels instead of continuing innovations. Then came Apple, which quickly dropped Blackberry from the throne and began to entice cell phone users from Nokia. Apple's rising was really fantastic, but this company has also come to the point when innovations gave way to the patent trolling to protect the positions from competitors. And now it's the time for hard-working Koreans - Samsung - the company that defending from Apple attacks, continued to innovate and now has become the largest mobile vendor in the world. ***

Blackberry's survival plan: Enterprise, HTML5 and messaging

As you know, Blackberry is in trouble. Sales are going down, users are switching to Android and iOS. Three months ago RIM hired the new executive to save the company - Thorsten Heins and yesterday at BlackBerry World 2012 conference he presented his plan of survival, which proposes to focus on those things, that Blackberry is doing well and on the target audience, that appreciates these things. Who is the target audience for Blackberry? Two weeks ago Thorsten Heines said quite specifically - business users. But yesterday he remembered of political correctness (because business users - are people too) and formulated a little differently - "people, striving to succeed". Unlike Android and iOS, focused on (time-consuing) games, Blackberry will be focused on those activities, that helps to achieve success. ***

Top 10 phones/tablets for the Enterprise

Good Technology, the provider of enterprise secure mobility solutions, has published its statistics on the number of activations of mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) in the companies using Good solutions. Top 10 most popular mobile devices in Q1 2012 you can see in the picture. It should be noted that most Good Technology clients - a large U.S. companies from the Fortune list (and, hence, for small business in Moscow this rating - is not very relevant). In addition, Blackberry and Windows Phone devices are not included in the rating, because Good Technology didn't support them. And may be you want to know in what order these devices are listed in the rating? Here is it: ***

Google launched Google Drive

After (just) six years after the first rumors appeared Google has launched the legendary file storage service Google Drive. And the first question is: why they created Google Drive as a separate service, when Google Docs is de-facto Google's online storage that can store any files? There is a couple of reasons. First, such file storage and sharing services (Dropbox and clones) is a very hot topic either in consumer or enterprise space. And the attention that Google can attract with the new app in this space is not a bad thing for the search giant. Second, Google Drive will serve as a file system not only for Google Docs, but also for other Google's services that operate files (GMail, Google +, Google Sites, Picasa ...). ***