In a Google spreadsheet, you can do an online currency conversion that looks up the exchange rate in real time, making my life much easier.

For example to get EUR to GBP just type

=googlefinance((”CURRENCY:EURGBP”))

which will give you the rate ( you can then use that to convert existing cells to whatever currency you wish)

This makes it really easy to build an expense forecasting sheet like this that auto updates the exchange rate

The syntax is =NETWORKDAYS (start_date, end_date, [holidays])

example =NETWORKDAYS (14/09/2009, 10/11/2009, 18/09/2009) gives you 41 days. In my example I only used one holiday but you can of course include multiple days in there.

First the full article…

_

Ad 1…

_

Ad 2…

• Cloud computing is a reality here and now, and is being used by businesses to reduce cost and redeploy expertise in a strategic manner
• Even if your business is not considering how cloud computing can be used in order to create a competitive advantage, remember that your competitors will be.
• Cloud is not just about saving costs, it’s about freeing up resources in to align them better with business strategy

I have to say that it was one of the best events that I have attended. The delegate level was very high, the speakers were all excellent, and the WiFi worked perfectly throughout! Plus Google showed their commitment to the cloud by running all the demos live over the Internet and most of the presentations were run live over the web using Google docs.

The conference was opened by Google execs Nikesh Arora (President Global Sales and Business Development) and Adrian Joseph (Managing Director, Google Enterprise EMEA), with some personal anecdotes on their experiences as digital immigrants.

Next up was Nicholas Carr with his talk titled Era of the Cloud: The Big Switch. As expected, he talks about the historical move from self generated power to mass scale power grids, but the general theme is how disruptive some innovations and trends such as cloud computing can be. If these are embraced, IT can be aligned in order to deliver real value to the business rather than “producing electricity”.

Next up Dr Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon on “The Cloud Capability” talking about why customers are actually buying cloud computing services.

Now time for the first panel, “The Perfect Storm”. I really enjoyed the panels, form me they were one of the highlights of the whole day. The first one has a high level/visionary focus and the next 2 panels are more practical with some real customers. Guy Clapperton moderates this panel On stage:

• Werner Vogels – CTO & VP, Amazon.com
• Nicholas Carr – Author, the Big Switch
• Paul Daugherty – Chief Technology Architect, Accenture
• Dr. Carsten Sorensen – Senior Lecturer Information Systems, LSE

Then, the next panel titled “Risk and Reward” - some real customers talking very frankly about their experiences. In this session, the Jaguar Landrover deal is announced. On stage is:

• Marcello Cordioli – CIO, Permasteelisa
• Olivier Carre-Pierrat – Infrastructures & Telecoms Director, Euromaster
• Jeremy Vincent, CIO Jaguar Landrover
• Claudio Umana – CIO, Fracarro
• Jean-Francois Caenen – CTO, Cap Gemini France

Then it was time for the Google Engineering team. I really enjoyed this session. They even touched on some futures which is very unusual for Google. Nelson Mattos starts it off and then Matthew Glotzbach does a fantastic demo.

During lunch, I took a look at the demo pods. These were manned by the Google “doctors” in their white lab coats – very cool. I watched some demos of Google Wave, Google Apps, and Enterprise Workflow  for Google apps with Google partner Cordys. CapGemini and Nordic Edge were also there although I ran out of time so didn’t get to see their stuff.

After lunch and it was time for the customer panel “Collaboration in the Workplace” with:

• Paul Cheesbrough – CIO, Telegraph Media Group
• Francois Blanc – CIO, Valeo
• Todd Pierce – SVP & CIO, Genentech
• Andy Beale – CIO, Guardian Media Group

It starts off with Paul Cheesbrough, CIO of Telegraph Media Group showing the results of their research relating to the move to Google Apps… for example he showed a stat that staff now spend 36% more time communicating with co-workers which has had a positive effect on productivity. There are loads of interesting things in here, take a look.

Now time for the big man, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. Marc is an entertaining speaker, and despite the pretty salesy pitch, most people seemed to lap it up.  I really loved the demo double act of Tim Barker and Jager McConnell, who showed an amazing demo of “Service Cloud 2″ – my key takeaway was how a business can use Service Cloud in order to interact better with customers whether it’s by phone, twitter, facebook or old-school email. This could really create a competitive advantage since not many businesses really do CRM well.

Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, was up next. This video is essential viewing. His session is all about the importance of focusing on core, essential business. IT energy should be focused on improving the business, not on running commoditized services (such as email for example). Geoff says it best, watch him…

Last but not least… the “Fireside Chat” with Dave Girouard (President, Google Enterprise) and Alan Eustace (SVP Engineering and Research, Google). This was an awesome session. When you watch this you can see the difference in culture between Google and their competitors. Open, honest, straightforward, insightful…

Thanks to the Google team for a great event. If you want to follow the happenings of the day over twitter, it all happened on the #atmosphere hashtag And if you missed atmosphere, you might still be able to attend the “Innovation at Work” event happening in London later this month. No famous authors, just pure time with the Google folks looking at the latest stuff from the Google Enterprise team.

Although they do expect to make significant cost savings, what’s interesting is that this is not simply about cost reduction. The fact that Rentokil is a global business, means that cloud computing can provide them with many advantages that may be difficult to achieve with “on premise” software, such as:

- global data distribution: when you log on from the office in Bangkok your user experience is similar to when you are back home in London (as long as the Office has a decent Internet connection) – because your data is always “close to you”. With traditional “in house” IT this cna be pretty costly to achieve because you need to replicate your data globally. In the Rentokil case, Google does the heavy lifting for them at a much lower cost due to their economies of scale.

- continuous innovation: with in-house IT infrastructure, any new stuff needs to go through a lengthy testing and deployment process before being rolled out. This cost time and money, and takes too long. With cloud-based apps these can be tested by the provider and implemented when ready, for all their customers on a regular basis. Typically, cloud vendors add in new features and capabilities every few weeks. Think about this in relation to corporate IT systems – what version of MS Office are most large enterprises running – Office 2010? Office 2007? No – mostly Office 2003 which is now over 6 years old.

- “innovation economy” – what I mean by this, is an economy of scale whereby all Google’s customers can benefit quickly, from new capabilities introduced to the product. Unlike a traditional software vendor, Google can quickly get a view of what is working well, or not-so-well, with parts of their offering, because everything is running on their infrastructure. Once an update or new feature has been tested and released, it is instantly available to all customers globally. It’s not something that an IT team has to concern itself over, so their time is freed up to consider how their business can use these new features, rather than just implementing them. Most “cloud vendors” have these short release cycles: Salesforce.com (cloud CRM) and DimDim (web conferencing)  release new stuff every month, blueKiwi Software (social networking for enterprises) releases new features approx every 2 weeks!

Here is what Rentokil says are the key capabilities for them.

• Google integrated chat and video features to support training & improve productivity
• Powerful personal and shared calendars
• Consolidation and standardisation of a single mail system and address book
• Improved collaboration within and between divisions and functions
• Automatic email translation and real-time translation in Google Talk

The last one is very understated – automatic translation of chat is a huge thing for a global multi-national corporate. Now technicians in vietnam can chat with technicians in slovenia, both in their native tongue rather than a “corporate standard” such as English. Awesome stuff.

Anyway – it’s good to see these things becoming a reality TODAY for enterprise computing.

I.T. teams can no longer ignore that these things are happening – instead they must figure out how they should be using cloud computing in order to further the goals of their business.

The 2010 Lamborghini Reventón will be a limited production (15 cars) recession-busting €1.1m supercar…

It looks great,  and rather amusing is the spanish translation of Reventón

http://www.dataliberation.org/home

Including:

• How to escape from gmail,
• YouTube
• Google Docs

I wonder if MS will follow suit?

The ability to deflate and redeploy quickly would also make it pretty attractive for temporary power sourcing.

This would be an interesting alternative to normal wind turbines, provided that the implementation can be practical and economical.

Many IT teams feel threatened by cloud based services because they are not under their direct control. However, forward-thinking IT teams realise that the right strategy is to embrace the cloud, let someone else manage commodity services (such as email), enabling them to focus on tasks that provide a direct business benefit.

For example, email does not provide a competitive advantage, because everyone has email. It is a massively important and critical part of a business operation, but in essence it’s a commoditized service that should just always work, much like a utility such as electricity and water.

I like this story because Serena is firmly in the “forward thinking” camp – the technology that they migrated to and from is not really important – however the principle of using cloud based services for things like email is something that I think more businesses could benefit from.

Some interesting points from the presentation:

• Serena software wanted to increase each user’s mailbox from the current 150MB, mainly for the purpose of e-discovery which is very difficult with the current setup because everyone archives their mail to PST (personal folder) files. The process of finding emails stored in these PSTs in the event of a legal requirement to do so, would be very difficult. With Google each user gets 25GB of storage so there is no need for people to use PST files.
• The cost of increasing each user’s mailbox to even 1.5GB would have been pretty expensive. They say that they’ve saved $750K – calculating what they would have spent versus what they did spend.
• They used this migration as an opportunity to reduce the number of distribution lists from 600+ to 26!
• They went for a “big bang” approach – mainly due to calendaring. For example if you had half the company on Google and the other half on exchange you could have some sync issues with meeting requests etc. so it’s better to switch everyone at once.
• They did a few “practice migrations” with 4 pilot groups, testing their training documentation, user guides etc. They had it right by the time they did the 4th pilot group.
• They didn’t actually migrate the user’s mailboxes, but provided guidance for people in the event that they did want to do this themselves. This meant that the actual migration day work was only 6 hours work for 2 people.
• Lastly, for unified communications they used a solution called vmerge from Voice Mobility, which seems to offer good integration with google apps.