In many cases this takes some getting used to by end users. Earlier this week I experienced this during a roll out of Google Apps by a Dutch company with several international offices. Merely a week after the training sessions intended to train the trainers, they can already see that the layout of a calendar entry not only looks differently than during the sessions, but it has been made a lot more intuitive.

A second new feature, the Priority Inbox, that will become available to everyone, will most definitely be much appreciated by their “power” email users. Priority Inbox prioritizes your mail based on your previous read and answering behavior.

During the sessions I learned that some of them receive 200-300 mails daily. I can assume that every new technological enhancement that allows them to deal more efficiently with their mail avalanche will really be savored by them.

Now compare this to traditional, but often used, office applications that typically see improvements every three years…

Microsoft and Google offer schools interesting solutions. But as a school where and how do you start?

Do schools really have to use their limited budgets to purchase servers, licenses, spam protection, backups, etc, … the usual traditional IT-equipment? If you ask us, no they don’t need to.

Both Microsoft with Live@Edu and Google with Google Apps for Education offer schools and universities email, calendar and collaboration software for their students at very interesting conditions. Actually free or almost free.

In the United States and closer to home in the UK and the The Netherlands, more and more universities and schools go for Google Apps for Education. New announcements rapidly follow each other.

But as a school where do you start? Although some schools have their internal IT department their collaborators expect support and guidance during a migration. And let us not forgot the teachers or faculty members. Also for them changing course materials to use the new technological possibilities that the Google collaboration platform offers is a serious attention point. A train-the-trainer program for them is a necessity.

Anticipating on demand by Flemish and Dutch schools and universities, Romneya has made sure that they at least have  one thing less to worry about: finding qualified Google Apps-trainers.

Being the first in Europe, Romney has a Google Apps for Education-certified trainer onboard. This qualification is given by Google Inc. after successfully completing several exams that prove superior knowledge of and competence in Google Apps for Education.

Do you have plans for Google Apps in your school or university? Talk to us.

By definition real estate brokers are ‘mobile workers’. Only, in the past they were restricted to providing information to clients in their offices because of the client/server applications they used. With Google Apps Premier Edition and a specialized CRM application such as Maximmo now any real estate agent can work from any location  —the office, an open house or at the customer’s home— as long as he has (mobile) internet access.

A client does not like the property he is visiting? No problem, immediately an alternative property can be found in the CRM and a visit planned in the calendar. Immediately all co-workers can see the appointment in the shared calendars.

After ImmoVisie, Immo Clevers, Dewaele | vastgoed en advies, Immo Acasa has now “Gone Google”.

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.

Last Friday I received a call from a very anxious customer. One of his employees had received an important email message, read it and had deleted it from her mailfile. Because of the legal aspects related to this message, the customer wondered how he could restore it from the mail archives.

Just to be clear, his company had subscribed to the Google Message Discovery services and all messages and attachments are being centrally archived, supervised by one or more administrators, for a 10 year period.

Google Message Discovery, how to retrieve mail from archive from Romneya on Vimeo.

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?

Since a couple of days one of our potential customers started testing Google Apps. It seemed a good idea to us to send the project manager a ‘tip of the day’ email on the subject of Google Apps for a week and keep the conversation going. Just, how do you get started?

In the ‘traditional’ way I would write a small script and run that script via a scheduled cron job on some server somewhere. Unfortunately that is rather difficult as Romneya is a ‘server-less‘ company. All the applications that we use are SaaS based.

By the way, why not make this a small application with an entry form and a small database to ensure that other project managers or testers can also receive a daily tip? Neat idea, but how do you set it up without having to deal with the underlying technology and infrastructure? Right, use the Swiss army knife in Google Apps: Google Apps Script!

As a first step in the direction of a simple, but working, solution let us use a Google Form. Any Romneya employee can use it to enter the name, first name and email address of the person that he/she wants the daily tip to receive.

In our case the Google Spreadsheet has two sheets: a user overview and a second sheet with a column with the daily tips content. In the user overview we also keep track of which tip has already been sent to whom.

In the spreadsheet we can use the embedded script editor to code in Javascript. The documentation describes what you can do with Script. Of course it is (fairly) easy to send to or retrieve information from other applications that are part of the Google Apps offering; Google Sites, Google Docs and Google Calendar.

Perhaps it is not the most elegant code, but 63 lines of Javascript ensure that every person in the list receives a customized email with five consecutive tips.

Triggers allows to define when the script should be executed: on opening the spreadsheet, on saving, on form input or according to a schedule. In our case we only need to define five triggers, Monday till Friday, to have everyone on the list receive the information.

And then the really good news: total time spent… less than ONE hour.

Of course this utility is not scalable for a list with five thousand users. Of course it would probably be better, nicer, more feature-rich if done in a ‘real’ application development environment.
But is not that the essence of a Swiss army knife? To be an excellent tool do get things done FAST?

So, have you used Google Apps Script? What did you do with it?

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?

If you opt for Microsoft Exchange Online, going to the cloud will be hardly noticed by end users. The only thing they will notice is the extra ’sign-on’ application that downloads the settings for the Microsoft hosted Exchange servers. Whether the Exchange server is located in the cellar, their data center or Microsoft’s will remain unnoticed by them.

Little prevents you from taking a Big Bang approach.

Migrating to Google Apps is more manifest. Especially if you chose not to soften the (change) pains by using Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook and went for browser-only.

We often get asked to do a pilot. But to what purpose? To learn if users can deal with change without any kind of guidance or training? To see if functionalities such as sending emails or planning meetings in a calendar works (sic)? Or to know how to rollback to the old situation without too much work?

In many cases a pilot is seen as a ‘trial’ without any real commitment to a rollout. It is sort of trying to become half pregnant.

In our opinion a far better approach is to use the budget intended for the pilot to get guidance for the transition to the cloud. To have the time and means for what Mike Riversdale calls ‘serious handholding‘  and deal with the change in the organization. With expert support.

And here is the magical word again: change. Preparing for the upcoming change is key.

If the organization does not buy into the reasons for changes in the business context, i.e. being able to communicate and collaborate in a faster and more efficient way, than a pilot  is destined to go bad.

Because cloud computing is all about continuous change. Whatever functionality that today might not be available, is possibly released tomorrow.

I like to use the metaphor of going on a long trip. We agree that we want to see a certain country or continent. But we also agree that during the course of our travels we will have to face unexpected events. But with our goal in mind and with the necessary motivation and creativity, we will reach our destination.

With this philosophy in mind there is not much that prevents you from rolling out Google Apps with a Big Bang.

Or do have another opinion?

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?

As Google Enterprise Partner and Google Apps Reseller we have multiple projects running simultaneously. Most of these projects include tasks that need to be handled by customer employees. In the meantime we know from experience  that the somewhat more sophisticated tools –i.e. Microsoft Project, Manymoon, Basecamp– are simply a bridge too far for them. Usually the learning curve is too big.

That is why we use something that everybody understands: a Google Spreadsheet as a task list with color coding for the status of the individual tasks. Green is ‘Done’, red is an ‘Issue’, grey is ‘In Progress’, white means ‘To Do’.
For many users this is a first time they use Google Apps and we present them an online and shared version of something they really know well and understand: a spreadsheet.

However,  a huge disadvantage of this form of ultra-lightweight project management is that a lot of relevant information is kept in different places. Meeting minutes in Google Docs, opinions and feedback in Google Mail, tweets in Twitter, …

Is there really something that lay people can easily understand and is a combination of a traditional tasks list AND unifies the communications about the tasks?
We feel there is: Google Wave.

Trying to explain what Google Wave does, is next to impossible. It is a combination of mail, wiki, gadgets, etc. In a rather slogan like way some call it ‘email re-invented’.

Perhaps it is easier to show a real-life example of how Google Wave can be an answer to our project management problem: a simple way to manage tasks and communication about the tasks.

The coming weeks we will start a number of new projects where we will use Google Wave combined with Unawave.

Unawave, Google Wave extensie voor projectmanagement

Not only does this Google Wave extension allow you to assign tasks to different co-workers, obtain a real time status overview via a dashboard, but it also allows you to use all the Google Wave features to manage all communications in one or more Waves.

Want to know more on how to use Google Wave for lightweight project management? Get in touch and we can organize a webinar session on the topic. If you are Dutch speaker, join our webinar on the subject.

I am sure this will be interesting reading. Oh, and another thing that I really need to look into is undoubtably how to use Youtube for marketing.

Just to wet my appetite, I made this silly video with one of Youtube’s tools.

How do you use Youtube for your business?

The approach to preventing data loss has in my opinion two aspects: a purely technical and an end-user aspect.

True to their nerdy background you wouldn’t expect anything less from Google than that their technical approach would be close to perfection. In this article on the Google Enterprise blog they explain what measures are taken to prevent data loss due to technical hickups.  Great reading if you want to learn all there is to know on the subject of RPO (Recovery Point Objective), RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and ’synchronous replication’.

What this article boils down to is that, simply put, all data is stored multiple times and in multiple data centers in real time. As a matter of fact, they also compare the cost of alternative solutions for you. The most important fact is that if anything happens to your Google Apps domain, they can switch you over to another data center without any data loss.

But what if the ‘dummy user’ does something wrong?

I guess we’ve all been there. You delete a document only to discover a few weeks later that you really need it. Or the administrator removes a user and at the same time all the user’s Google Docs documents are deleted.

How can you prevent this?

Removed Doc documents are stored for a given period in your trash can. To prevent inadvertent deletions of i.e. template documents, you can assign an admin account as document owner. If you are not the owner of a document deleting it only removes the link to it. Only the document owner can physically and permanently remove a document in Google Apps.

But what about calendars and sites?

Also here a ‘dummy user’ can become a major risk. Except by exporting your calendar manually –but who does that, right– you only need to delete your calendar inadvertently to lose all appointments and meeting data.

Fortunately a few small companies are now providing a solution.

Backupify and SpanningSync offer monthly plans that allow the Google Apps admin to schedule daily backups of all Google Apps data onto Amazon’s S3 infrastructure. Of course you could try to do something similar with scripts to transfer your data to S3 or, soon, Google Storage for Developers but does that make sense?

Or can we expect Google to announce a new service in Google Apps: Google Backup?

The Google Apps Premier Edition comes standard with Google Message Security. If your Google Apps administrator has activated the service and he/she has changed the delivery address for mail, the MX records, from Google to Postini then your organization is protected from viruses and spam.

Apparently during the activation of the Postini service only one system administrator account is configured. The first Google Apps admin automatically becomes the (only) administrator for Postini. Also Postini creates for your Google Apps domain two so-called ‘ORGS’: one profile is intended for Account Administrators, the other for Users. These ORGS define the settings that apply to their users.

Postini ORGS

As a first step we need to ‘Move’ a user into the Account Administrator ORG. If you want this user to use the standard profile for Administrators you will have to ‘reset’ the user. He/she then inherits the settings of the ‘template’ pdefault profile.

Postini Move user

Postini Move user to Account Administrator ORG

Next, we need to grant the additional rights to the user via ‘Authorizations’ under de Account Administrators ORG.

Postini Authorize User

But be careful! All changes to the user rights are done in real time!

Add Authorized User Profile

Do not change stuff while thinking that it is possible to revert to the initial settings. It is NOT possible. There are simply no buttons on the form. So to be safe, take a screenshot or cut and paste the settings in a Google Docs before making any changes.

Overzicht Postini admin rechten

That is it. Your user is from now on a Postini admin and can change settings of Postini.
You want to check? Login with the Google Apps-user name and password on http://login.postini.com and now you can choose between System Administration or Message Center.

Having trouble doing this? As Google Enterprise Partner we can undoubtably help you.

Google Apps Premier Edition,