Google Apps - A Bona Fide Competitor to Exchange

Microsoft still dominates the email world and desktop, especially in the enterprise. In a bid to maintain that dominance and compete with a growing range of Cloud vendors (especially Google), Microsoft is migrating customers to hosted Exchange and Office 2010 will include limited free web versions of the Office tools.

While larger organizations are not yet migrating away from Exchange and Office, it's not readily apparent to me how Microsoft is going to successfully compete with the new tools available, especially  Google Apps. Google continues to add functionality and integrate Google Apps with other applications in a much quicker development cycle than Microsoft. Add to that pricing - here is Google's online calculator comparing the cost of Google Apps Premier Edition to Microsoft Exchange 2007. For cost sensitive businesses, and who isn't these days, this calculator alone is a compelling reason to at least look at Google, if not make the switch.

When On-Site Technical Solutions looked at Google Apps late last year we pretty much scoffed at the application and told ourselves it was simply not an effective business tool. When we looked again early this summer, we found a tool that could certainly replace Microsoft Exchange, especially in smaller organizations running Exchange primarily for mail and shared calendars. We became our own guinea pigs before beginning to roll Google Apps out to our customers. Some of us are still using Outlook to manage the mail with Google Sync, but others are simply using the web interface. Since we rolled out Google Apps this summer Google has added or improved to do lists, folders in documents, sync, and well, take a look here.

The Los Angeles City Council approved a contract to migrate their 30,000 employees to Google and according to the LA Times Microsoft was furiously fighting off the challenge.

Google has been rolling along in the education arena with free email and collaboration tools for schools. Back in September Google highlighted their education success on their blog with the headline Five million students going back to school are "going Google." But the LA city contract is worth a reported $7.25m and opens the door to smaller cities if Google is successful in LA.

Swapping out mail in an enterprise is a very large project. I would expect larger organizations to lag in implementing a new mail system, or any cloud application for that matter. It's a very big, costly deal and the organization needs someone in IT to bank their career on driving the change.  As Google continues to add functionality it's going to be more difficult for Microsoft to compete with the current pricing.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Call or text me at 1-949-212-2168 and visit On-Site Technical Solutions.

Other Links:

Microsoft Exchange Server or Google Apps? A Comparison

Google Apps is now an Exchange-replacement; Users can even keep Outlook

Exchange 2010 tries to fend off Google Apps

Google Apps: A Long Road Ahead

Outlook Separation Anxiety Holds Back Google Apps

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Extend Your iPhone Battery Charge

We can get right to the point here on the iPhone battery. The three best ways to extend a charge on the iPhone battery life are:

1) A car charger
2) An external battery pack
3) Spare chargers wherever you happen to spend your days.

We're using more iPhones at On-Site Technical Solutions and we're finding that complaints about battery life are justified. When we bought the first one at the Apple store the genius (that is what they're called, no?) suggested we connect to WiFi networks as much as possible. That uses less battery than the 3G network. But it still won't get your heavily used iPhone through the day without a recharge.

Here is the official Apple link on iPhone batteries, where they tell us, "The most important thing is to keep your iPhone out of the sun or a hot car (including the glove box). Heat will degrade your battery’s performance the most."

iSmashPhone has a nice summary of what's practical and what's not in trying to keep that iPhone running at this link.

How To Actually Extend Your iPhone's Battery Life

This LA Times article explains some of the technology behind the lagging battery power in the new iPhones (as well as some whining from users).

IPhone 3GS owners bemoan its battery life

And from CIO
iPhone Battery Life: Three Tips for Getting More Juice

We're still waiting to hear, "Battery life on your iPhone stinks? There's an app for that!"

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H1N1 (formerly known as swine) Flu and Business

I've been meaning to write more about H1N1 but I'm glad the feds beat me to it with their joint news conference. I will be posting more on this later.

H1N1 is officially a pandemic and hasn't gone away at the end of the traditional flu season. This is nothing to panic about, but businesses should have plans in place to deal with (many) employees getting sick at the same time. This should be considered a part of any business continuity plan.

Once the kids are back in school we can expect more infections - how severe and how many I haven't seen anyone attempting to predict. We can rest assured that the kids will bring the gift of H1N1 home to their parents who will take it to work... and hence the need for planning in business.

Here is the LA Times coverage of Federal officials urge employers to prepare for widespread swine flu outbreak

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And Microsoft Strikes Back!

As a Microsoft Partner we've been concerned about Microsoft's direction in response to the assaults on their hegemony on the desktop, both the operating system and office tools. This was especially true in relation to the FREE applications being offered by competitors.

It looks like Microsoft is striking back in a big way by offering a free version of their flagship Office software with Microsoft Office 2010. We'll have to see how profitable this strategy will be, and it really doesn't do us partners any good.

For businesses that rely on Office to conduct business, this is nothing but good news. It's going to help hold down costs - whether it's for the core office products, not having to migrate to another tool (expensive projects!) or not having to train on another platform (expensive project!).

From Microsoft's perspective this will permit organizations to use a light versions of Office for collaboration on the web but keep the full blown versions on computers in the office (and laptops). No matter how it's rolled out, it will lead to lower costs for businesses and less of an Office cash cow.

We're currently using Google Chrome Browser and Google Apps and converting some of our customer base. We'll be looking at Google Chrome Operating System next year. This announcement may not slow that process, but it could keep our customers using Microsoft Office instead of looking at alternatives.

This is all over the Web and print, but here's an article from the LA Times on the announcement:

Microsoft plans free, online version of Office

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