We did an install at a customer last week of a very large Google Search Appliance cluster. The GB-8008 is the big fish in the pond of enterprise search appliances. Stacking in at 12 servers, plus switching and power, these beasts come with their own rack units.
Front:
Back:
Google Docs now works offline! This means that you no longer have to export to another word processor before you get on that airplane.
Now there’s a better solution. With Google Docs offline (powered by Google Gears), I can take my little piece of the cloud with me wherever I go. Once enabled, I have a local version of my document list and editors, along with my documents.
This is great news for all of our customers, as we can now address one of the major roadblocks IT managers had with deploying Google Apps into the enterprise. Ready to take the plunge and put your business on Google Apps?
From Google: “With Google Sites, people can quickly gather a variety of
information in one place – including videos, calendars,
presentations, attachments, and text — and easily share it for
viewing or editing with a small group, their entire organization, or
the world.”
It looks great, and is exactly what our customers have been looking for to improve collaboration without making investments in license-driven technology like Sharepoint.
You can select themes and quickly deploy Wiki’s and collaboration pages for your users, customers, partners, etc. We have an internal Wiki that we need to VPN in to gain access to - with Google Sites we can give our employees and partners access to this information without having to worry about maintaining servers or security details.
We’ll be experimenting with Google Sites and keep you up to date on what can be done with it.
For more commentary and information, here are some good articles from industry sources:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/27/it-took-16-months-but-google-relaunches-jotspot/
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206900666
We were honored to participate in MarketAmerica’s leadership conference last week. MarketAmerica announced our partnership with them in the development of a Google Search Appliance-based platform.
Our friend Marc Ashley was kind enough to introduce us to a capacity crowd of 24,000+ excited MarketAmerica associates.
If you need help making sense of search for your business, please contact us.
From TechCrunch:
“Microsoft has offered 19.00 Norwegian Kroner ($3.56) per share. The offer represents a 42 percent premium to the closing share price for Fast as at January 4 and values FAST at 6.6 billion NOK ($1.2 billion U.S).”
This could heat things up in the space. Microsoft is already giving away a “free” (if you own Windows) Enterprise search product, and there is the MOSS search capability within SharePoint. Acquiring FAST could make things interesting for Endeca, Google, and the rest of them.
But what are they really buying? We’ve seen FAST come up in competitive bids in our Google Search Appliance work, but the customers are typically migrating away from it.
This is fantastic news for all of us Blackberry addicts out there. I was actually missing meetings for a while after I moved from Exchange to Google Apps because of the lack of sync functionality.
This is a huge feature everyone had been requesting; I had been beating the drum on this for months but I am sure hundreds of more partners had been as well. The ability to sync between a hosted solution like Google Calendar and your device, over the air (OTR), can not be understated. We’ve seen this come up time and time again from our customers as a sticking point either before they move to Apps, or after they’ve made the switch.
Even better, this sync works with both regular Google Calendar, and Google Apps!
Read more on the Google Mobile blog:
http://googlemobile.blogspot
Get the sync tool here: http://www.google.com/intl/en
Slashdot had an interesting feature today on Sky’s Botched Google Migration In the UK. There seems to be much consternation out there about this rather large (1 million user) migration. While LTech was not involved in any way on this project, we have been working with our customers on similar migration projects.
The Hermes Project mentions that:
Customers have to go into the Gmail interface and enable POP3 themselves - could they not have done this as a batch job and maintained it via the provisioning interface for new customers?
This would be ideal. Google is aware of this problem, and I know that there has been some buzz on the API group over at Google. Until this is available, having your previous email servers available for a reasonable amount of time (which Sky has done) will give your customers enough time to make the necessary changes and still be able to communicate effectively.
Customers are being left on their own to re-configure their e-mail clients - could a client software tool not have been provided?
There are so many email clients out there, on so many platforms, that it might be difficult to ensure that client migration could be completed without a tremendous amount of follow-on support. Google has provided some nice APIs for provisioning and migration, but the burden of building client-based (ie Outlook, Thunderbird, Entourage) migration tools is much larger than dealing with a single vendor API.
To help deal with these types of client-setup issues, LTech offers a support package for Google Apps migrations. This is designed to assist both end-users and administrators. In leiu of a dedicated support team like LTech on your project, a well-written set of self-service instructions will give the majority of your users everything they need to make the switch, with your own support folks handling the one-off cases. Again, giving your users enough time to make the switch is key.
There is a neat little open-source tool from the folks at Google that allows you to use Google Docs as a service, uploading and downloading documents from the command line.
From Google:
GDataCopier is an API for Python programmers to:
GDataCopier provides a command line tool called ‘gdoc-cp’ that allows
system administrators to automate bi-directional copy of document
between the local machine or Google document servers.
Read more here: http://code.google.com/p