mind this - by Lars Plougmann

Google rolls out unified paid-for storage

People who are running out of storage on Gmail can now pay Google for additional capacity. Annual fees range from $20 for 6 Gb to $500 for 250 Gb, offered as a selection of four capacity choices. Currently, Gmail offers 2.8 Gb storage with every free account and 10 Gb storage with every paid-for business account.

When you buy extra gigabytes the capacity applies to both Gmail and Picasa photo albums. Later on we should expect to see Google Docs & Spreadsheets included in the same storage scheme. As integration between Google's services gets better (e.g. opening a Gmail attachment in Google Docs), offering unified storage capacity across all services makes a lot of sense.

The market leader in storage, Amazon's S3, offers a more flexible service where you are only charged for storage actually used (at $0.15 per Gb per month) with no requirement to decide on capacity or plans up front. Amazon also charges for traffic although the cost is only significant when massive amounts of data is transfered.

I had previously (wrongly) predicted that consumer email would offer unlimited free storage. Google's move suggests that email is no longer seen as the competitive frontier it once was; instead the applications arena is where competition is rife. It also means that the company protects itself from the hassle of policing fair use agreements while getting a (probably insignificant) revenue stream out of their previously free services. Most importantly, for users of Google's services it means that the risk of running out of space has just become a lot less likely and so a potential barrier to adoption has been minimised.

Tags: Google email Gmail storage capacity Amazon S3 Googlemail Google Apps

BusinessWeek tells CEOs about wikis

In 2004 when I introduced a hosted wiki as an experiment to the knowledge department of a law firm, adoption was almost instant. I primed it with a top level structure reflecting the things that mattered to our team: People, Projects and Ideas. Within a week, two projects had decided that this was the best tool to use for project management and communication, somebody started compiling a list of useful technologies and vendors, others started sharing ideas and links to articles. Most took the opportunity to provide a richer profile of themselves than the intranet allowed. The wiki clearly filled a vacuum, somewhere between email and the document management system. Yet, a few were not interested and didn't participate.

In short, a typical wiki adoption story. But the typical story may be about to change.

Many wikis started as an experiment by a small team, then spread virally. Now, CXOs and the business press have started to notice the power of simple tools like wikis. The success of Wikipedia explains part of the fascination (imagine having your own corporate equivalent) and a number of case studies are becoming well known.

BusinessWeek just published a series of articles on wikis as part of their CEO guide to technology (main article). Last month, InformationWeek reported on Enterprise 2.0, explaining that it is about "a new architecture defined by easier, faster, and contextual organization of and access to information, expertise, and business contacts--whether co-workers, partners, or customers." Their survey found that while a third were using the new tools, most technology professionals remained wary.

As the scales tip, collaboration centric initiatives are graduating from skunkworks to management sponsored projects engaging those communities eager to participate. This increases the likelihood of broad internal adoption of powerful, enabling technologies like wikis.

Tags: wiki law firm collaboration

The collaboration frontier: Spreadsheets

Being in the Bay Area last week allowed me to participate in the November Wiki Wednesday at the Palo Alto offices of Socialtext. The company has had a busy week rolling out a new version of the Socialtext wiki, reacting to Google's acquisition of JotSpot (another wiki company), releasing a wiki integration for Microsoft SharePoint (named SocialPoint) and following Dan Bricklin's work with WikiCalc.

Ross Mayfield showed screenshots of the recent version of WikiCalc, suggesting a focus on layout that almost goes against the wiki thinking that only the content matters in the creation process and that formatting can be introduced later. However, I think the new formatting tools are likely to help break down barriers to enterprise adoption.

In a number of enterprise environments (including my recent work with the finance department of a FTSE100 company) I have witnessed how reports from ERP systems are rarely used directly. Everything is downloaded to spreadsheet format where text and numbers are adjusted or re-arranged and the formatting touched up. The process typically involves multiple contributors and applies to internal management reports as well as reports to clients. The reality is that today's businesses are run by spreadsheets, supported by ERP tools.

This suggests a real enterprise market for spreadsheets with collaboration built in. (Perhaps a market for improved ERP tools as well.) Spreadsheets that do not require manual version control and change tracking, distribution by email or manual consolidation of changes. WikiCalc is headed in the right direction.

Tags: Google wiki wikiwed WikiCalc SharePoint SocialPoint JotSpot spreadsheets ERP

Growing choice in the low cost office suite market

Google is taking baby steps towards offering a suite of "office" applications. Last night, Google's collaborative word processing tool, Writely, warned users of a planned outage; this morning my Writely documents appeared in the same list as my Google spreadsheets under the new docs.google.com domain.

For small firms, the competition in the office application market is good news. The new players give us advantages not associated with the dominant office suite: collaboration, choice and savings. (For bigger firms it is good news as well and they should start experimenting with the capabilities but switching costs will prevent them from taking advantage of the offerings at this moment.)

First, the collaboration aspect. The new tools support the people part of the process, the fact that documents are rarely written, from start to finish, by a single person. In the past, big firms would email iterations of documents marked "draft" to their clients, today, smart firms invite their clients to participate in the drafting process. Simultaneous access is becoming the norm to eliminate the version and logistics nightmare of file sharing, reducing time to deliver and to increase acceptance.

The choice aspect means that as more players launch viable contenders, we get to choose the right tool for the job. Already there is Zoho, ThinkFree and Google Docs & Spreadsheets (awful name, and Google will have to change it as they add new formats, but they seem keen to avoid the Office label) and others.

As for savings, the good news is that many of these services are free. For now at least. I suspect some will adopt a "freemium" model where users pay for advanced features or extra storage.

Or we will see offline versions of the same software that you can buy and install locally. Most of the action today is in online services where an always-on connection is required and the software is confined to what the browser is capable of. Give me stand-alone versions of the software packages capable of synchronising with my library of online, collaboration-enabled documents and it is a combination I would happily pay for. That would beat my current free combination of locally installed NeoOffice (Mac only) with manual upload/download interfaced to an online collaborative service.

[If you don't collaborate with others then the online offerings are yet not a match for the slick, feature rich environments we are used to on the desktop - as this writer for Techworld finds out. (Thanks to Michael Sampson for discovering this article.)]

Tags: Google Writely Zoho ThinkFree collaboration office apps office 2.0 small firms small business

Towards building a business case for effective meetings and scheduling

Upon hearing a comment that scheduling a meeting at Boeing took 20 hours of effort, Michael Sampson, who used to write the Shared Spaces blog about collaboration, built a model to understand what dynamics were at work and what factors would push the time required to schedule a meeting to 20 hours.

Build a similar model or get the spreadsheet model from Michael if you need to build a business case for shared calendaring in your organisation. What do your numbers look like? What would be the reduction in effort if your organisation had the right tools at its disposal?

Of course, the meetings themselves consume people's time, and not always in a productive way. To read how a team at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, an investment bank, shifted the focus of their weekly 90 minute teleconference from updating other team members to discussing ideas and solutions, look at use case one in the Socialtext case study of DrKW.

Tags: meetings effective meetings scheduling calendar Michael Sampson wiki

Google Apps for small firms

A few days ago Google launched a new product called Google Apps for Your Domain (unofficially named Gafyd for short). It is a collection of existing Google products (Gmail, Gtalk, Calender and Page Creator) that you can tie to an existing internet domain. It is aimed at smaller organisations looking for a common solution to email, shared calendars and a bit more. Gafyd is free in the beta period but you have to apply for the service.

I set up Google Apps for Your Domain this weekend for Zonoma, the consulting firm through which I offer my services. As I was already using all the services included with Gafyd I wasn't expecting huge changes from signing up but two benefits stand out:

• Previously, I used url forwarding to send visitors who wanted to go to www.zonoma.com on to my googlepages.com website. Using Gafyd, the website now lives at zonoma.com which looks more professional and will make navigation more logical when the site grows bigger than one page.
• Gafyd offers up to 25 user accounts on the zonoma.com domain. This allows me to lend Zonoma email addresses to team members when Zonoma starts delivering projects bigger than my own resource (we wouldn't necessarily have to use this approach every time but it is good to have the option if circumstances call for it). My email address stays Lars@Zonoma.com as I previously used email forwarding.

Setting up Google Apps for Your Domain requires you to confirm ownership of your internet domain. Setting up email and web pages requires some fiddling with the domain record held by your internet registrar but Gafyd gives clear instructions on how to accomplish this. After I had made all the changes it took about two hours for Gafyd to verify the changes and activate email and web pages. A simple administrator's dashboard informs of service status and provides access to settings and user admin.

I can think of several firms where Google Apps for Your Domain would have been an appropriate and simple solution to internal and external communications. The calendar alone would be a useful component of a collaborative infrastructure. I can imagine that the service would be useful for virtual teams too, working together in the way envisaged by Tom Malone in The Future of Work.

For subsequent versions of Gafyd, Google say they will add Personalized Start Page to the service although I can see a stronger case for Writely and Google's collaborative spreadsheets. A premium service is promised for later in 2006. A feature I would vote for would be custom domain addresses (such as mail.zonoma.com) to make it easier to work from sites where webmail is blocked.

If you are a small business or organisation and you don't already share a good email / calendar / IM solution, go apply for Google Apps for Your Domain.

Tags: Google Google Google Apps Google Apps for Your Domain Gafyd collaboration small business calendar

To buy or not to buy... the MS Office suite

From the moment I saw Excel the first time, I was smitten. It was a great improvement over Lotus 123 and VisiCalc. For several years after they were introduced, Excel pivot tables have helped me solve many a data problem.

Excel, for me, is the flagship of the Microsoft Office suite and the app that will be hardest to miss in my new experiment: How long I can do without MS Office on my new MacBook. I don't expect to do without a spreadsheet or without a word processor. For the latter, Writely (now owned and run by Google) has been a good tool for the past half a year. Many of the documents I write are not solo and the collaborative editing far outweighs lack of rarely used advanced features.

For spreadsheets, there is now a choice of several free options that may help delay an investment in MS Office. For some time, Thinkfree has been offering a word processor, a slide composer and a spreadsheet - all of the apps can import/export to the Microsoft file formats. And this week, Google released Google Spreadsheets: It too can import/export to the .xls format and it supports collaborative real-time editing à la Writely.

But neither Thinkfree nor Google Spreadsheets offer pivot tables. Is it possible to live without them?

Tags: Google spreadsheet spreadsheets Google Spreadsheets MS Office Microsoft thinkfree writely

An internal market for Google ads

Search is one of our primary interfaces with content and services. Ads are funding much of the content and many of the services we use. Internet style search is fast being adopted for enterprise content but there is a case for using advertising style services on intranets as well.

The right hand side column for Google search and gmail has always been used to serve ads, but along with Google's launch of new products the space is increasingly being used to link to other services - maps, stock quotes, calendar, shipment tracking etc. - some run by Google but not all.

Google is expanding its range of products for the enterprise, the latest being the OneBox - internal search with connectors to typical enterprise apps like Oracle, Exchange and Salesforce. Imagine if the appliance came with AdWords functionality built in. It could be put to use to place "advertisements" next to searches or emails. Or change the layout of intranet pages to make space for "ads" in a right hand side column. The stuff you would want to promote is the organisation's own knowledge and services - plus content from knowledge services that the firm or the user subscribed to.

On top of bringing knowledge closer to the situations where it is relevant, tracking of click-through rates would produce a potentially useful map of "hot" knowledge, information with long-term value and other patterns. The organisation's own database of intentions.

Tags: Google search adwords auto discovery

How do you plan to use Google Calendar?

Planning one's time is nothing new of course and it is a critical discipline of leading an effective business and personal life. Yet, for decades, computer based calendars did little more than mimic paper based ones.

It is a sign of the technology sector's recent focus on people and collaboration (sometimes referred to as web 2.0) that we are seeing lots of activity in the market for calendaring. Group calendaring has received a boost with services like Eventful and Upcoming; individual calendar products include Mozilla Sunbird and the nifty 30Boxes. Earlier this month, Google launched their Calendar (in beta, of course) as a calendar for individuals but with lots of ways to co-ordinate events, share information and integrate to other services (such as maps).

You can use the Google Calendar in a simple way, or you can create several "layers" (confusingly called calendars), decide what you share with friends and colleagues - or outright publish any aspects of your diary on the internet. I expect blogs to be awash with good advice on how to harness the features of Google Calendar if you are a group of friends, a small company, an independent consultant, a family, an event organiser or, say, a sports club. (Stowe Boyd gives a few tips on how to use gCalendar).

It will be interesting to see what lessons will be generated that can be carried over into the enterprise world, still stuck largely on the Microsoft Outlook calendar which works well inside the organisation but is horribly broken when challenged with how business is actually done. I look forward to learning more about the latest in the field when Larry Cannell moderates a panel on the subject at the Collaborative Technologies Conference in June with participants from IBM, Zimbra, TimeBridge, CalConnect and Airena.

Writely so

Last year, I started using a real-time collaborative word processing tool called Writely (via a link from Stowe Boyd). The same concept as a wiki but for a single document. Same concept as 37Signals' Writeboards but a lot more formatting options. Same concept as Microsoft Word but as an online multi-user service.
   Today it started saying ©2006 Google Inc at the bottom of the Writely page that lists my documents. Well done to both companies. I am personally hoping for an integration with the Gtalk IM and voice client so that the parties chatting can decide to move from dialogue to co-creation in real time. But the concept has many more potential uses.
   I have used Writely to plan holidays, write proposals to clients, collect research and more. I have worked with up to nine participants on a single document and up to four concurrent editors (the document updates every few second to reflect changes that others have made). There are still a few bugs to be ironed out (Writely maintains a "beta meter" on the main page, currently at 59%) but the service is fully functional. The elegant user interface mimics a word processing application so closely that there is almost no learning curve.
   Writely-type interfaces could become the norm for writing documents. Even if you start writing a document on your own you might want to include other authors later on. Crucially, it does away with the serial email based process for multi-author editing that has almost become the norm in the past 10 years and where it is so easy for versioning to spiral out of control.