Tony Safoian Speaks on Cloud Computing at Google's I/O Conference
SADA President and CEO, Tony Safoian, joined a crowd of developers and IT professionals estimated in San Fransisco late last month to attend Google's annual developer conference, Google I/O. This conference provides developers and professionals from all over the world a forum to share their experiences, and announce new products or developments in the world of Internet technology.
The paradigm in IT, both in the way it functions within organizations and how companies like SADA Systems deliver services as 'solution providers', is changing. Google understands that, and through innovation in products like Google Apps (a part of a solution set offered by Google Enterprise) is helping drive this change. Organizations like SADA Systems are in turn, helping bring these solutions to market by providing services focused on implementation into organizations of various types and sizes.
You can see Tony's presentation at I/O in the video located here.
An article in the San Fernando Business Journal, published Tuesday (June 24th), ranked Los Angeles sixth in the nation for jobs in the technology industry. The study, published by the AeA (American Electronics Association) revealed that within the LA region there were 172,000 employees within the electronics and technology industry. The combined payroll for all employees comes to $14.3 billion. The actual numbers may be a little different as the most recent statistics are from 2006.
Areas ahead of Los Angeles include some you might expect. Cities that lead Los Angeles in the number of tech jobs include the New York Metro Area, Washington D.C., San Jose/Silicon Valley, Boston, and Dallas-Fort Worth.
The study, "Cybercities 2008" is available on the AeA website. You can view the report by clicking here.
The last official day to purchase a new computer from Dell with Windows XP loaded was Wednesday, June 18th. Even so, the company is still making it possible to get a computer with Windows XP loaded, but customers will be expected to purchase a Vista license. the business and personal computing markets remain largely lukewarm in their reception of Windows Vista, Microsoft's much maligned upgrade to Windows. Nonetheless, the tides are changing, and Microsoft annoucned that it will cease retail sales of Windows XP as of June 30th. OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) will still be able pre-load computers with Windows XP. Support for Windows XP OEMs will continue through 2010.
Dell's offer allows them to take advantage of 'downgrade rights' built into Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Ultimate licenses. Essentially, this allows the party purchasing the computer to choose an installation of Windows XP Pro instead of the Vista OS, with the option of returning to Vista at a later date. Customers who take advantage of this offer will receive their computers with Windows XP pre-installed, but bundled with a Vista installation disc.
There's more. In order to take advantage of the downgrade option Dell's customers must first upgrade to one of the eligible versions of Vista (business or ultimate). In addition, this option comes free of charge only on Dell's 630 and 720 H2C desktops, and the M1730 laptop. There are extra fees to downgrade the Latitude, Optiplex, Precision, and Vostro lines. Finally, Dell's best-selling brand, the Inspiron, does not offer a pre-installed downgrade to XP. Customers purchasing these computers will have to manage the downgrade to XP themselves.
What does this mean for you? Essentially, Microsoft is phasing out Windows XP in favor of Windows Vista. The older operating system will be supported for a while yet (until 2014), but the time to make the switch is coming. Given the high hardware and software demands of Vista, it may be best to wait until you're ready to buy that new computer before making the switch.
POP3 Configuration tool for Outlook: Free, Open, Customizable
What if you're helping move dozens, hundreds, or thousands of users to Google Apps, and you find that many people wish to continue to use Outlook or Outlook Express and download their mail, as opposed to just using their web browser? Simply distribute a version of the tool with your custom settings, and have your users help themselves! This tool can potentially save dozens of hours of manual labor in time it would otherwise requires to plan, coordinate, and manually add the new settings for all Outlook users in your organization or group of users.
About the tool POP Configuration tool is a free and open Windows executable which will configure Microsoft Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2002 and earlier versions of Outlook to use Google Apps via POP3/SMTP. The only information a user of the tool needs to provide is the email address and name to be displayed in the From: field.
Usage: Tool executable can be downloaded from SADA's Website
Make sure the email client you are configuring (Outlook Express or Outlook) is closed.
Download and save the file.
Double-click on the file to execute it.
Enter your email address (the portion before @ symbol).
Enter your full name.
Hit Next. Hit Finish.
Your email client is now configured to be used with Google Apps POP3/SMTP.
Customization: The source code can be downloaded from SADA's Website
A number of UI elements in the tool can be customized, such as logo, text fields, and icon. If you'd like to modify the logo, it must be 157 pixels wide, 57 pixels high, and less than 15 kilobytes in size.
Customize the file sada_customization.txt
Create configuration file by running the following command: ./make_config.pl sada_customization.txt NEWDIR English
Modify gmailconfig.nsi by replacing pop.YOURDOMAIN.com with pop.gmail.com and smtp.YOURDOMAIN.com with smtp.gmail.com
Compile gmailconfig.nsi using NSIS -Download and install NSIS from http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Download -Run NSIS -Click on compile NSI script -Click on Load Script. This will compile the script and create tool executable
You're done. Distribute the executable to your users
SADA uses Google Sites for project management in cases where a lot of content and status elements need to be managed, and a large number of people need to be kept in the loop.
One of the nice features of Apps is the basic notification rules you can set (and encourage others to set), so that all updates to the project Site are automatically send to subscribers. This saves steps in having to update the Site AND THEN tell people about the progress you've made. This way, you just do it once, in one place, and everybody who needs to know gets notified.
How do you set this? It's painfully easy. Check out the instructions below:
Google Apps Email List Management Tool, now available
SADA has released a customizable, email list management tool available for hosted and on-premise implementations for those organizations who want a more streamlined method for managing email distribution lists in Google Apps.
Review the Presentation below for a basic use-case overview.
Four Trends that Fuel the Web Application Movement
In a recent article for CIO, Rishi Chandra, product manager of Google Enterprise, spoke on the adoption of web-based applications. Speaking for the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, yesterday, Chandra indicated that four key trends will be responsible for the trend of rapid adoption of web-based applications by consumers and businesses alike. Chandra feels the following four trends are key to the success of computing in the cloud:
Consumer Innovation Setting the Pace
Rise of the Power Collaborator
New Economics of Scale for IT
Barriers to Adoption Are Falling
Basically, all of these trends indicate that focus has switched from trying to capture the business and enterprise market, to trying to capture the consumer market. As Chandra put it, "People can go from Google search to Yahoo search in one click." It is due in part to this that enterprise technology companies must provide the consumer with the best possible value. As a result, innovations in technology are now driven by end-user demand. Prior to the ubiquity of the Internet new technologies were driven by innovations in the workplace, and users were forced to learn new applications that were sometimes difficult to master. It was a case of experts writing for experts. This model has since turned 180 degrees, and applications are being developed to be easy to use in order to capture the broadest possible cross-section of the consumer marketplace.
For a number of years computer manufacturers have been wrestling with the size of the laptop. Specifically, they've been trying to make notebook computers as small as possible and energize the 'ultra-portable' market. Entries into this division have ranged wildly in price and quality, and the major hurdle for manufacturers and consumers alike was sticker price. Up until recently consumers paid big bucks for tiny computers. With the introduction of the Intel Atom, a miniaturized processor, one of the major hurdles in bringing affordable micro-notebooks to the market has been cleared. Another major roadblock has been storage. Drives small enough to fit the dramatically reduced form factor of a 'sub-notebook' have only recently started to drop in price, paving the way for manufacturers to begin the introduction of smaller and smaller notebooks.
With the Eee PC Asus is now leading the pack in the marketing of small notebooks. These computers have been dubbed 'netbooks' as their primary focus is on wireless connection to the Internet, web browsing, and email.
One interesting outgrowth of this new trend in Internet-centric computers is the adoption of Linux as a viable, even preferable, alternative to Windows. To date Asus has sold over one million units, and has projected that over five million will sell before the end of the year. For Linux this is a huge increase in user adoption. Given the success of Linux on these machines it's easy to speculate that users of Windows might start to question why they need the more expensive OS from Microsoft. That said, Asus is now releasing a version of the Eee PC that uses Windows XP, and HP is marketing their own netbook with Windows Vista.
Clearly a demand has been created for ultra-portable computers with advanced wi-fi capability. So, what could this mean for desktop applications? It could mean that client-side software comes under attack by software in the cloud, or hosted applications. The nature of the netbooks makes them an ideal platform for writing, storing, and sharing all of your documents online with services such as Google Apps or Zoho Office.
Obviously, these are not ideal systems for high-end graphics work or gaming. More typical high-end notebooks and desktops will still be used for those purposes. The low cost and small size of these computers make them ideal for students who need a computer for taking notes during class. Writers and Business professionals who are rarely in the office or at home might also appreciate the low cost and flexibility of a netbook.
