Google Tuesday unveiled synchronization technology that supports Microsoft Outlook as the front end to Gmail, giving users an option to scrap Exchange on the back end while allowing users to keep their familiar desktop client.
Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook provides synchronization for e-mail, calendar and contacts between Gmail and Outlook/Exchange. It is only available to users of Google Apps Premier, the company's $50 per user corporate offering, and those using the Education (Edu) version.
As part of its offering, Google has developed a protocol called GDATA that is similar to its Gears technology to aid in the sync of Outlook and the Google back end. Gears supports offline use of applications.
"This is a case of Google leading with the strongest part of Google Apps and doing the right thing, which is saying we can save you money on the back end without disrupting your end-user environments," says Guy Creese, an analyst with the Burton Group. Creese says users should be able to save on two Microsoft licenses, one for Exchange itself and the other being the client access license to the server. "For some, Outlook is ingrained into the way they work, and if you take away Outlook, you are taking away their security blanket."
Google's offer to let users keep their familiar Outlook client while swapping out the back end is similar to moves made by other Exchange alternatives, such as Gordano and PostPath, which was bought by Cisco last year.
Google offers a number of synchronization tools that work between Outlook and Google Apps, but the new tool wraps everything into a single 5MB plug-in that can be deployed via Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager.
In addition, the synchronization is built into Outlook and is not an additional application outside the client.
The plug-in supports Windows XP SP3, Vista, and Outlook 2007, and is currently only available in English.
Google says GDATA provides for faster synchronization between the two platforms in comparison to IMAP, which had been the only sync technology available between the two. IMAP's slow performance has been a hindrance for those wanting to use Outlook against a Gmail back end.
"We saw Outlook performance as a major hurdle to rolling out Google mail across our enterprise," says Chris O'Connor, IT director at Genentec. He now has 1,000 users on Outlook out of 15,000 total. He says IMAP was the cause of the performance hurdle. "We have been using the new tool in our sandbox and have come to the conclusion that it looks like a native Outlook experience and the average user does not know what is on the back end. We expect quick adoption when we release this to our enterprise users."
The Google synchronization technology also adds a number of other features, including access to the global access list and the ability to look up another user's free and busy time. And a migration tool lets users move their Exchange .PST file into Gmail, a process the company says takes two clicks.
"People need speed and for it to be the same, it has to look and feel like Outlook," says Chris Vander Mey, senior product manager at Google.
Article by John Fontana, Network World
Microsoft announced on Friday a new service for Windows Mobile users called My Phone where you can synchronize all your email, calendar and contact items with a password protected Web site. With this service, data are not saved only at the phone but also at a web site. The service is for free, and will be offered up to 200 Mb storage at the site.
Three days later Google announced a beta service for mobile users that is based on Microsoft's ActiveSyn tecnology. The service will support iPhone, Windows Mobile and SyncML (like Nokia and Sony Ericsson) devices. The service will give the ability for Gmail users to synchronize mail, contacts and google calendar items.
Project management does not exist in a vacuum. We have embraced the various new methods of communication to encourage better collaboration and team-work. It is now practically inconceivable for a project not to be using email, tele-conferences, even video-conferencing to maintain contact with the participants.
But are we embracing the new technologies available now? Are we making best use of the tools we now have? With project teams becoming even more spread out over the globe, are we making best use of our new communication methods?
Introduction of Social Network sites has given a bundle of great tools to the hands of the Project Manager.
Twitter is a relatively new “social network site” that offers short exchange messaging (until 140 characters). The role is to keep people connected in a simple and efficient way. You can build communities, teams and even protected groups. More important, Twitter is not a one way communication, meaning that you can choose the people you would like to hear next and so on. You can use Twitter to keep you team members connected and up-to-date but also to inform on project status.
Blogs are the absolute trend. Information is spread with such speed and freedom like never before. But blogs are the ultimate tool for publishing updates and status reports. All major platforms (Blogger, WordPress …) offer a wide variety of settings. Polls, surveys, photo sharing, links are only a few of them. Also a blog doesn’t mean that anyone can access it. It can be secured and only after personal invitation can be accessed. In addition, RSS feeds or Google Reader can ensure that all the members will be notified when the blog is updated.
Social Network sites are about communication and collaboration, important and critical for Project Management.
Angel investors - financiers who give entrepreneurs their crucial first infusion of cash to bring their ideas to life.
Technology entrepreneurs are having a devil of a time finding angels.
Angel investors are the optimistic financiers who give entrepreneurs their crucial first infusion of cash to bring their ideas to life. Now, in the midst of a punishing economic downturn that is sparing few companies, these patrons are cutting back on their bets and threatening the very foundation of the technology economy.
Unlike venture capitalists, angels invest small amounts of their own money — as little as $10,000 and usually less than $1 million — in very young companies. But like all investors, many angels suffered deep losses when the market plunged last fall.
That has left them skittish, investing in fewer technology start-ups and demanding more of those they do consider, leaving founders struggling to find money at the stage they need it most. The slowdown, entrepreneurs and investors say, could stunt the growth of new companies and have long-term effects on innovation.
For TwoSmartDogs, an Internet start-up in
In 2007, the company raised $715,000 in its first round of angel financing from eight investors. When the founders approached current and new investors for more capital in September, they were met with silence.
“There was real interest,” said Rose Ors, a founder of the company. “But the economic meltdown ended all conversation.”
Unable to raise money, Ms. Ors and her partners decided to shut down the company and look for new jobs.
The angels who rejected them are not unusual. Half of the investors surveyed in November by the Angel Capital Association, the industry’s trade group, said they invested less than they had predicted in 2008, and one-third said the number of deals and dollar amounts they invest would decrease again this year.
“Crashes make liquidity vanish, and venture investing — especially angel investing — runs on liquidity,” said Steven McGeady, an angel investor and former executive at Intel. “When the markets go wonky, everyone sits on cash until the situation resolves itself. This makes capital hard to find, and if a company is caught unprepared or at the wrong time, that can be the end.”
Many professional angels — those who invest as a full-time job, rather than as a side project — are still financing start-ups, if at a slower pace. They say the best opportunities come during downturns, as companies’ valuations fall significantly. The median valuation of start-ups seeking angel financing fell 25 percent, to $3 million, from the third to the fourth quarter of 2008, according to Angelsoft, a Web service for angel investors and entrepreneurs.
“It’s getting tougher for companies to raise money, but I think the good ones are still getting it done,” said Ron Conway, a prominent professional angel investor in
Yet unlike Mr. Conway, most angel investors are hobbyists — wealthy friends and relatives of entrepreneurs who invest as a way to diversify their portfolios — and they have been hit the hardest.
Dan Martin, an angel investor based in
Last year, though, the Martin family’s stock holdings lost close to 30 percent of their value. Now the Martins are shying away from risky angel investments and looking elsewhere for returns, including in undervalued public companies.
Investing in the stock market “smells to me like a much better opportunity than investing in the friend of a friend who wants to open a green Chuck E. Cheese restaurant or software to let people choose their dental implants,” Mr. Martin said. “Those could be great ideas. But that versus Pfizer stock is an easy choice for us right now.”
During normal economic times, several years after a start-up raises angel financing, it seeks larger amounts of money from venture capitalists to grow. But as venture capitalists also cut back on investments, many angels are wary of investing in a start-up without the assurance that the company will be able to raise more money to keep growing.
“A lot of companies view us to be the on-ramp to the venture capital superhighway, and a number of angels are less convinced that they should count on the superhighway this year,” said John O. Huston, chairman of the Angel Capital Association.
Some angels are considering only low-cost companies that could become profitable without venture financing. Others are acting less like angels and more like venture capitalists, spending much more time than is typical advising companies, including taking seats on boards.
Aydin Senkut, a former Google employee who has invested in 40 companies, is serving on the board of one of his investments, ImageShack, a media hosting site, and spends two hours a week working at the start-up. “Where I can really help is building the next growth stage,” he said.
Some angels who are still investing have become pickier, making demands of start-ups that they would not have a year ago. When David Levine started Wireless Environment, which makes motion-sensor light-emitting diode bulbs, in November 2006, he quickly raised $135,000 from family members and business school friends, with few questions asked.
The angel investors he met with this fall, though, were far more demanding. “I could not believe the complexity,” he said. “For small investments compared to their net worth, they brought in financial advisers and a whole list of questions.”
Some made impossible requests, like proof of patents, which take several years to acquire. Others would not even meet with him. “I think we have a very compelling business, we’ve hit all our milestones. I set up lunches with friends and they just keep putting them off,” he said.
In December, he raised $400,000 in convertible debt from JumpStart, a nonprofit organization that makes early-stage investments in companies in northeast
Some angel investors are putting less of their own money on the line by finding other people to invest with them. Co-investments increased in 2008, according to the Center for Venture Research, and half of those surveyed by the Angel Capital Association said they would increase co-investing with other angels this year.
Since Drew Smith retired as a venture capitalist three years ago, he has invested around $25,000 in each of four young companies, including a market research software start-up and one that makes technology to play Web videos on phones.
Now, he said, “I’m cutting back. For me to make an individual investment on the order of $25,000, it would have to be a really great opportunity.” Instead, he is investing smaller portions alongside other investors. “I can reduce my bite size a little bit in terms of what goes into each investment, but still stay active.”
The real impact will hit
“If we don’t have angels that hurts us. Where are we going to be getting our next Series A deals if those entrepreneurs aren’t out there with the ability to move their idea forward?”
Source: The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER and BRAD STONE
Published: February 2, 2009
Article can be found at: Angels Flee From Tech Start-Ups - NYTimes.com
McAfee released the annual Virtual Criminology Report.
Virtual Criminology Report is a study on current facts and potential trends for Computer Crime. Some interesting parts of the paper follow.
“Three Key Findings Emerged
Firstly, cybercrime isn’t yet enough of a priority for governments around the world to allow the fight against it to make real headway worldwide. Added to that, the physical threat of terrorism and economic collapse is diverting political attention elsewhere. In contrast, cybercriminals are sharpening their focus. Recession is fertile ground for criminal activity as fraudsters clamour to capitalise on rising use of the Internet and the climate of fear and anxiety. Are we in danger of irrevocably damaging consumer trust and, in effect, limiting the chances of economic recovery?
Secondly, cross border law enforcement remains a long-standing hurdle to fighting cybercrime. Local issues mean laws are difficult to enforce transnational. Cybercriminals will therefore always retain the edge unless serious resources are allocated to international efforts.
Thirdly, law enforcement at every level remains ad hoc and ill-equipped to cope. While there has been progress, there is still a significant lack of training and understanding in digital forensics and evidence collection as well as in the law courts around the world. The cyber kingpins remain at large while the minor mules are caught and brought to rights. Some governments are guilty of protecting their in-country offenders. The findings suggest there is an ever greater need to harmonise priorities and coordinate police forces across physical boundaries. The report concludes with a look at suggested steps at both the local and international level to make the fight against cybercrime more effective.”
1. Significantly more training and resourcing for cyber cops, prosecutors and judges, alongside the mainstreaming of cyber evidence gathering and prosecution.
2. Legal or co-regulatory incentives for Internet Service Providers to follow best practice in network design and operation – Incentivising ISPs in turn to work both with other service providers and their customers to improve levels of security. ISPs should also be encouraged to work closer with police as the gatekeepers of the Internet.
3. Security breach disclosure requirements – We cannot expect a market in secure products and services to develop without the information needed to allow customers to quantify security levels. The new EU rules are a start but need widening beyond the telecoms sector and scrutinised to make sure they are not implemented in a token way, and to avoid customer ‘security fatigue.’
4. In the
5. Legal responsibility for both businesses and government agencies when customers suffer Internet-related security losses, except in cases of gross negligence by customers. Banks in particular must be given strong legal and commercial incentives to introduce more secure technology and better fraud detection systems, or they will inevitably cut margins on security as they struggle to ride out the credit crunch and economic downturn. Clear bank liability would reward banks that are taking security seriously, greatly reduce the problems customers have faced, and correspondingly increase online trust and convenience – vital for e-commerce and e-government to flourish in future.
6. Continued consumer education through focused programmes. However, systems must be designed to make it difficult for users to make security mistakes – we cannot expect the average Internet user to become a security expert. Media literacy programmes for informed consumer choice are not enough to ensure users prioritise security over convenience or short term goals.
7. Limited liability for software vendors when they are not following best security practice in their system design and operation. We cannot stop the flood of malware until operating systems and key applications, especially browsers and email clients, are significantly more secure.
8. The use of government procurement power to demand significantly higher standards of security in software and services – Incentivising security enhancements that will spill over to private users. Government information assurance agencies should follow the example of the US National Security Agency in working with software companies to significantly increase software security levels.”
The study can be downloaded at McAfee Website
More and more solutions are provided over the Internet to cover all aspects of corporate needs. The list of vendors and services is huge and is growing rapidly every day. A very good site that presents these solutions is Go2web20.net. It is surprising that most of the office day tasks are provided for a low monthly per user fee. In addition, advanced collaboration services are also offered, like Project Management tools, Time Tracking, and so on.
A few sites that draw attention are:
Project Office.net - PM tracking
LiteAccounting (ex meiraware) – Invoicing and track payment
BlueTie – Business Class Email Service
Woosabi – CRM for Small business
File123 – Web file Storage
Vizu – Online Surveys and polls
Xero – Online business Accounting Software
Most organizations implementing today kaizen strategies. One of the major aspect of such events is "continuous improvement", which in fact do not practice. What they practice would be better termed "continual improvement". The distinction between continual improvement and continuous improvement is a fine but important one. Continuous means "without interruption" while continual means "frequent or repeated". Continuous is "go go go..." while continual is "start stop start stop start..."
For some reason many organizations implement it from the middle of the organization outwards. One possible reason is that the sponsorship is at middle or senior management rather than the very top of the organization. This creates the need to implement improvement as a series of projects led by experts rather than a transformation led by a fully engaged leadership and management team. These projects may be very successful. Often they are designed to demonstrate how systems will deliver specific desired business results. But projects have scopes and boundaries and by definition are discrete or at best continual and not continuous activities.
The biggest
Instead, they are treating the financial crisis, which has left companies in many other industries starved of resources as the credit markets dry up, as vindication for a highly conservative financial stance that brought criticism in better times.
It’s not burning a hole in our pocket, it’s fine for it to just sit there,” said Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, which has amassed $16bn of cash.
“You’ll continue to see us long on cash,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, which has nearly $21bn. “In this environment, most people would tell you cash is king. Most people tend to guard cash pretty tightly, value having cash, because you never know when you might need some.”
The tech industry’s strong cash position has set it apart and left the biggest players with considerable financial flexibility. While companies including Microsoft and Cisco Systems have held large amounts of cash since before the tech bust early this decade, others such as Apple and Google have used the success of recent years to join the new super-rich elite.
Yet the experience of previous downturns and fear that they could need deep reserves to draw on in fast-moving technology markets has made them cautious to spend. Many in
Intel now has a rule-of-thumb approach of keeping enough cash on hand to fund one year of research and development and the capital needed to develop the next generation of chip technology, said Robert Burgelman, a professor at Stanford business school.
“Intel is in this relentless drive to make these massive investments that probably only Samsung can compete with,” he said. “The Japanese and the Europeans, they all blinked.”
Yet the cash cushions of other tech companies in less capital-intensive parts of the business now far exceed such requirements. Despite spending only about $2bn a year on R&D and capital investment, Apple’s $26bn in cash has left it with the biggest cash pile in the tech world – a big contrast to the last downturn, which it started with less than $4bn. The cash now accounts for about a third of its market value.
Since the last tech bust, many other tech companies have responded to pressure from shareholders to partially reduce cash balances by buying back shares and making smaller acquisitions.
Yet keeping a big cushion on hand also leaves the company with “a range of options” for the future, such as making acquisitions and investing its business, and also sends a strong message to customers about a company’s staying power, said Frank Calderoni, chief financial officer of Cisco, which has net cash of $20bn.
While saying the cash will help them get more value from their acquisitions, however, most tech executives say they are likely to continue to mount only relatively small deals and that even these may be few and far between.
“It is ultimately a strategic weapon,” said Mr Schmidt.
This article can be found at:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e729ed70-eb16-11dd-bb6e-0000779fd2ac,_i_email=y.html
By Richard Waters in
Source: The Financial Times Limited 2009
Apple announced on Tuesday that former IBM executive Mark Papermaster has resolved his dispute with IBM over a noncompete agreement and will start leading Apple's iPhone group on April 24.
IBM had sued Papermaster for allegedly violating the terms of a noncompete agreement in agreeing to join Apple as senior vice president of Devices Hardware Engineering, claiming that Papermaster would be in a position to divulge important IBM trade secrets. The two parties exchanged briefing papers for a few months but apparently found a way to settle their differences.
IBM and Mr. Papermaster have now agreed on a resolution of the lawsuit under which Mr. Papermaster may not begin employment with Apple until April 24, 2009, six months after leaving IBM, and will remain subject thereafter to all of his contractual and other legal duties to IBM, including the obligation not to use or disclose IBM's confidential information.
Following commencement of his employment with Apple, Mr. Papermaster will be required to certify, in July 2009 and again in October 2009, that he has complied with his legal obligations not to use or disclose IBM's confidential or proprietary information.
The preliminary injunction will be replaced by a court order under which the court will have continuing jurisdiction over this matter, including compliance enforcement powers, until October 24, 2009, one year after Mr. Papermaster's departure from IBM.
The settlement frees Papermaster to replace Tony Fadell, who stepped into a senior adviser role last year, and report directly to CEO Steve Jobs in heading up iPhone and iPod hardware development. The leadership transition has been a bit thornier than Apple would have likely preferred.
After a brief courtship early in 2008 for a different position, Apple identified Papermaster as the right candidate to head up perhaps their most cutting-edge development team in September, and he left IBM a month later to pursue what he called "the opportunity of a lifetime."
But IBM, in what was viewed in part as a message to its employees, sued Papermaster for violating a 2006 noncompete agreement on the basis that Apple and IBM competed in the server and chip markets, even though Papermaster would not have been working in either of those capacities for Apple.
The problem for both IBM, in this case, was that to argue that Papermaster would be in a position to spill its trade secrets, the company would have had to discuss those secrets in front of a judge. And likewise for Apple, in order to prove that Papermaster wouldn't be leading an effort to get the company immersed in chip development for game consoles, it would have had to shed some light on its future plans. Neither company was likely thrilled about that prospect.
A settlement always looked like the most obvious outcome, and that's where Papermaster, IBM, and Apple find themselves Tuesday. As noted above, Papermaster will have to recertify that he will not divulge IBM secrets to Apple as part of the initial agreement, and then do so again in three-month increments until October 24th, the first anniversary of his departure from IBM, when the noncompete agreement expires.
One of the reason that Projects fail is the unclear statement of requirements.
Follow the lin for this very interesting article.
http://www.theicpm.com/content/view/2759/370/
A very interesting article for the role and benefits on creating a Knowledge mapping (KM).
As Social Network sites are becomig a hot trend. the following document describes 10 basic security steps that an administrator of such a site must follow.
All measures are basic, but most the sites do not align.
http://threatchaos.com/2009/01/ten-security-measures-for-social-networking-sites/
There are a number of qualities a good project manager needs. A lot of these are so-called 'soft skills'. Let's have a look at some of them.
http://www.projectmanagementguide.org/project-management/project-management-what-qualities-do-you-need
