Conversationware

Talk about email storage to IT managers and they tend to start going this funny colour. Users can’t seem to manage their Inbox apparently, although not the exact words they use.

This has come up time and again, where, on behalf of the user experience, it is up to me to persuade I.T that voice messages have to reside in the email store.

During the conversation you can see this assume huge proportions in the minds eye, and I always show my own mailbox to calm them down……a bit.

So its an area of interest.

I just saw that in my personal email, on Google, that I’ve used 93MB of 6 Gig. In a year and a half.

So I check my Exchange work mailbox, I now have ALL historical emails saved locally - although I’m good at deleting very large emails first - I have 2.5 Gig, in 3 years. Including unified messaging.

By my calculations then Google are effectively giving me unlimited storage. They seem to put it up every month, I could easily have 7 years of email before deleting anything at all. Which is surely what most people would ever need. Or am I behind the multimedia times.

You gotta love that.

When I looked for free web based email, I knew Gmail was going to be the best option.

With huge amounts of storage, accessible from my various PC’s, Spam filters and desktop notifications (so I don’t have to check for new mail, which is the most important), plus Gtalk Instant Messaging on the same login - so it proved.

Thus, when I wanted to have separate ‘blog’ email, I took a look at Google Apps (it’s free, so why not).

Google Apps is Gmail, but with your own domain - (e.g. mail is sent to name@company.com) but with all the above benefits, and more. Being free, I think it’s great value, and even at the premier edition at $50 per user per year - compared to the cost of running premises based equivalents is a no brainer.

Setting it up does mean you need your own domain, and access to the control panel to follow google’s instructions in moving the Email MX records…..it’s easier than it sounds though, and knowing someone who can help is useful.

On first impressions, it was good. But last year…..

I had the problem of trying to access two separate Gmail accounts from the same machine - it turned out to be very unwieldy flicking from account to account and notifications weren’t as timely if I wasn’t logged in.

It’s amazing how the little things prevent you from using and being completely happy with software.

Recently however, Google Apps and Gmail have both moved to supporting IMAP, and my problems have been solved. It’s brilliant!

One of the most useful additional applications is Docs - great for sharing information between boundaries….accessible from anywhere. I haven’t worked out my three different calendars yet, but there are apparently synching apps available.

I’m now using Thunderbird to receive and send mail from multiple gmail accounts (as well as a separate email account for work!). I can still be logged in to my primary gmail account (personal) for most of the day.

With all the above facilities, Google Apps is aimed at companies - but I always wondered whether companies would get over the trust issue. That is, trusting Google to look after their email.

I figured for my own part that if Google let any information go, their share price would slide, and therefore they had more to lose than I did.

There is an extremely interesting article here, showing a Legal company have made exactly the same decision.

Email server, Software, support, Spam software, archiving, the list of savings just goes on.

If you don’t need to support a LAN to run documents and email (with failover support), this tends to help free up both funds and the staff from looking after it, not to mention users who can literally work anywhere with mobile broadband.

It has to be worth most small companies time in having a look at this, and if Legal companies are happy to trust their customer’s information, then that shouldn’t stop anyone.

RSS is a completely radical communications technology.

Communication is already valuable, and yet how much more valuable is it when automated?

Somehow though when you try to explain it to people there is often a muted response. (In case you are a fellow enthusiast, showing is much more effective than telling).

Nevertheless, I feel the tide is just about to come in.

One of the leading protagonists of this world changing technology is Newsgator, and today they started to give away their RSS Readers, for free. Some cracking solutions they have too.

Sometimes things you read ‘chime’, and today is one of those days. I think it’s called synchronicity (by Carl Jung) which is ironic in some respects.

I was reading a long exposition on the effects of technology (all driven by RSS) on journalism, over on the Publishing 2.0 blog.

As an aside, I like reading journalism blogs, because it’s fun when journalists argue in written form. They know how to wheedle a point. And if all else fails, they express their anger in the most delightful way.

From the comments, it is clear that the panic isn’t far from setting in, and disruption is in full progress, illustrated by one of the comments on media’s digital future: he says

“I feel a rather pertinent point is being missed out: who is going to pay for it?
The product is being given away for free, advertisers are looking for more targeted audiences and the powers-that-be do not want to spend to invest.”

And summarises

“Before this revolution really kicks off, we should be looking at defining what we expect of journalists and others in this move to a fully digital era.”

Here is the evening news: The revolution already kicked off, and amusingly for me the commenter would seem to have answered his own question. (Does any Journalist who doesn’t run a blog miss the point?)

Advertisers are looking for more targeted audiences, and importantly, in the last few years Google has introduced a radical concept.

You can start to measure the results of money you spend on marketing -you can’t do that with print advertising.

Completely unheard of only a couple of years ago, but this has resulted in the quickest growing company ever created. Advertisers will pay Billions to have their message played to people.

Google turnover

• 2005 - $6B
• 2006 - $10.6B
• 2007 - Extrapolated to $17B

Whilst Advertisers pay per person vaguely interested (voluntarily clicking), Paul Sweeney illustrates the next point, that those being advertised to are also happy to be more closely targeted - a win win.

Knowing what people are interested in looks like it will pay off big time - and who knows how much having that better picture of the audience might just mean.

That’s where Newsgator are placing their bets, as along with a number of other good reasons, Jeff Nolan explains that discovering the ‘reader’s attention is a key driver to making the client software free. (APML has also become part of the plan)

I admired the company the first presentation I got about 15 months ago, Synchronisation is a great strategy as RIM proved all to well.

So, this is just another good decision, and (one of?) the original investors agrees.

Google helps fight crime.

Mr Canoe man, (John Darwin, Anne Darwin’s husband) is probably saying already - “I would have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for those pesky kids” (Sergey Brin and Larry Page)

Can you imagine a better story to dine out on for the next few years

“I googled and found a dead man.” That would keep the evening going with a swing.

Apparently, someone googled “John Anne Panama” and Google images instantly delivered a 2006 photo of the fraudster, and his scheme unravelled from there.

I’ve heard hundreds of jokes already….it’s got legs, as they say.

More here about the googler, at the daily record.

The google email blog is always useful to keep up on new development - I’ve said before that this product has the potential to disrupt the market and gives SME’s excellent reasons to not spend a fortune on email software.

I could bang on about why I switched my personal mail to google very quickly, but they’ve done a silly video to help explain. Funnily enough, it’s on You Tube and not google video. (more…)

According to Michael Arrington at Techcrunch, Google is to acquire GrandCentral shortly. Thanks for the point Alec, are you next ? Google acquisitions are at a frantic pace right now.

This is remarkably quick work, as I only asked them for Unified Communications in my post on Saturday.

I believe this is a great move for Google, and I’m sure they’ll be pleased I think so. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure this puts them closer to Unified Communications than most any other provider.

Google have email, voice mail..sort of, instant messaging and video conferencing and now they ‘have’ telephony - the inbound flavour at any rate.

This may be considered a consumer move, but actually, not having to integrate with a company’s existing infrastructure to deliver functionality, and get users, is a key point. Integration is one of the harder aspects of on premises Unified Communications platform integration. It certainly confuses customers at any rate - the first question is usually “is it voip or not?”, and the answer is usually, “well, it could be”. Not a great start.

Inbound call handling is one of those items that is difficult to solve with on premise equipment because callers can choose to ring through different networks (mobile or landline) before the call even gets to the PBX, and if somehow manage to persuade callers to route all inbound calls through the company’s PBX first, there are extra call charges to consider when diverting off net, plus you don’t easily get telephony status, or ‘presence’ from the switch for trunk to trunk calls to mobiles - this is achievable, but in some (not all) cases can be extremely expensive.

Google (Grand Central) don’t need to bother with all that, and will appeal to individual consumers, but don’t forget that all consumers usually work for someone too! If this news is true, people could use Google Inbound services immediately without involving internal IT, by overlaying the service onto existing numbers.

It reminds me a little of when Rim and Blackberry started with marketing mobile email to high value individuals, and then steamrollered into the Comms room later on, once hearts and minds had been won.

One of my first posts on this blog was that Hosted Unified Communications was unlikely (ok, I said no chance), mainly because companies were unlikely to trust hosting companies. BUT, I hadn’t taken into account the Google factor. Google has so much invested in being trustworthy with companies’ and individual’s data already, that one might trust them - despite all of the rumblings from those technically savvy commentators.

Another post was about Google disrupting corporate email, because the reduction in costs could be colossal if only corporations would trust a hosting company with their email. The potential reduction in costs is massively increased if replacing Unified Communications as well.

I’m an advocate of Gmail, with instant messaging, voice and voicemail built in - this coupled with desktop notification is significantly more useable for me than collections of web and client software from other vendors. Especially impressive is the ability to pick up gmail (and voicemails) on your mobile There is now a meebo-like web embedding of a group web chat facility,

The integration of a RSS reader with the email is more than convenient and with feedburner joining the ranks, I can see all of these things eventually supplementing the google desktop search tool to deliver me a very personalised search and delivery of tailored information.

Google has provided google docs, online hosted documents for groups to share, be updated and notified about. The aquisition of Jotspot hasn’t really hit yet, on the surface at least, but I’m looking forward to some basecamp type project collaboration from that, and now with google aquiring Zenter, we can have online slideshows and presentations too.

Youtube is starting to get quite useful, and I didn’t even mention google maps yet, which apart from giving me a quick, and slick, way to calculate journey times, has now gained a user business review facility

People question whether it is right to trust all your information to google, in the same way we trust banks with our money. But when I used Google Checkout to pay for a new laptop recently, instead of paypal, it occurred to me that many of us already do.

Where’s our unified communications Google? I know we can get voicemail through the mobile email, but surely that’s only the start.