Long time readers of my ramblings here are aware that I drink the Google kool-aid. And they also know that I've been caught tweeting, on occasion. And, despite my disappointment in Google's last big thing (Wave), I am so appreciative of other work of theirs -- GMail, Android, Picasa -- that I couldn't pass up a go with their answer to Facebook and Twitter, Buzz.
Google, perhaps because their revenue model is based on giving people ad-displaying products, as opposed to selling applications, takes more design risks than their software-developingcompetitors. Freed of legacy design concepts like "the computer is a file cabinet" or "A phone needs a "start" menu", they often come up with superior information management and communication tools.
What is Buzz?
Buzz, like Twitter and Facebook, and very much like the lesser used Friendfeed, lets you tell people what you're up to; share links, photos and other content; and respond to other people's posts and comments. Like Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter (if you use a third party service like Twitterfeed), you can import streams from other services, like Google Reader, Flicker, and Twitter itself, into your Buzz timeline.
Unlike Twitter, there is no character limit on your posts. And the comment threading works more like Facebook, so it's easy to keep track of conversations.
How is Buzz Different?
The big distinguishing factor is that Buzz is not an independent service, but an adjunct of GMail. You don't need a GMail account to use it, but, if you have one, Buzz shows up right below your inbox in the folder list, and, when a comment is posted on a Buzz that you either started or contributed to, the entire Buzz shows up in your inbox with the reply text box included, so that continuing the conversation is almost exactly like replying to an email.
The Gmail integration also feeds into your network on Buzz. Instead of actively seeking out people to follow, Buzz loads you up from day one with people who you communicate regularly with via GMail.
Privacy Concerns
Buzz's release on Tuesday spawned a Facebook-like privacy invasion meme the day that it was released -- valid concerns were raised about the list of these contacts showing up on Buzz-enabled Google Profile pages. A good "get rid of Buzz" tutorial is linked here. To Google's credit, they responded quickly, with security updates being rolled out two days later. I'm giving Google more of a pass on this than some of my associates, because, while it was a little sloppy, I don't think it compares to the Facebook "Beacon" scandal. Google didn't think through the consequences, or the likely reaction to what looked like a worse privacy violation than it actually was (contact lists were only public on your profiles if you had marked your profile "public", and there was a link to turn the lists off, it just wasn't prominently placed or obvious that it was necessary). Beacon, in comparison, started telling the world about every purchase you made (whether it was a surprise gift for your significant other or a naughty magazine) and there was no option for the user to turn it off. And it took Facebook two years to start saying "mea culpa", not two days.
Social Media Interactions for Grownups
Twitter's "gimmick" -- the 140 character limit -- defines its personality, and those of us who enjoy Twitter also enjoy the challenge of making that meaningful comment, with links, hashtags, and @ replies, in small, 140 character bursts. It's understood now that continuing a tweet is cheating.
Facebook doesn't have such stringent limits, but you wouldn't necessarily know that to glance at it. It hasn't shaken it's dorm room roots; it's still burdened by all of the childish quizzes and applications; and, maybe more to the point, cursed by a superficiality imposed by everyone having an audience composed of high school buds that they haven't seen for a decade or two, and who might now be on the other side of the political fence.
But Buzz can sustain a real conversation -- I've seen this in my day and a half of use. Partially because it doesn't have Twitters self-imposed limit or Facebooks playful distractions; and largely because you reply in your email, a milieu where actual conversation is the norm. This is significant for NPOs that want to know what's being said about them in public on the web. I noted from a Twitter post this week that the Tactical Philosophy blog had a few entries discussing the pros and cons of Idealists' handling of a funding crisis. But Twitter wasn't a good vehicle for a nuanced conversation on that, and I can't see that type of dialogue setting in on Facebook. Buzz would be ideal for it.
The Best is Yet to Come
This week, Google rolled out Buzz to GMail. Down the road, they'll add it to Google Apps for Domains. The day that happens, we'll see something even more powerful. Enterprise microblogging isn't a new idea -- apps like Yammer and Socialcast have had a lot of success with it. I'm actually a big fan of Socialcast, which has a lot in common with Buzz, but I was stumped as to how I could introduce a new application at my workplace that I believe would be insanely useful, but most of the staff can't envision a need for at all. What would have sold it, I have no doubt, is the level of email integration that Buzz sports. By making social conversations so seamlessly entwined with the direct communication, Google sells the concept. How many of you are trying hard to explain to your co-workers that Twitter isn't a meaningless fad, and that there's business value in casual communication? Buzz will put it in their faces, and, daunting as it might be at first, I think it will win them over.
A few months ago, I blogged a bit about Google Wave, and how it might live up to the hype of being the successor to email. Now that I've had a month or so to play with it, I wanted to share my initial reactions. Short story: Google Wave is an odd duck, that takes getting used to. As it is today, it is not that revolutionary -- in fact, it's kind of redundant. The jury is still out.
If you haven't gotten a Wave invite and want to try it, now is the time to query your Twitter and Facebook friends, because invites are being offered and we've passed the initial, competitive "gimme" stage. They should be easier to find if you speak up. And, once you get there (or if you are there and don't know what to do), there are some excellent ways to start learning and playing, which I'll discuss below.
Awkwardness
To put Wave in perspective, I clearly remember my first exposure to email. I bought my first computer in 1987: a Compaq "portable". The thing weighed about 60 pounds, sported a tiny green on black screen, and had two 5 and 1/4 inch floppy drives for applications and storage). Along with the PC, I got a 1200 BPS modem, which allowed me o dial up local bulletin boards. And, as I poked around, I discovered the 1987 version of email: the line editor.
On those early BBSes, emails were sent by typing one line (80 characters, max) of text and hitting "enter". Once "enter" was pressed, that line was sent to the BBS. No correcting typos, no rewriting the sentence. It was a lot like early typewriters, before they added the ability to strike out previously submitted text.
But, regardless of the primitive editing capabilities, email was a revelation. It was a new medium; a form of communication that, while far more awkward than telephone communications, was much more immediate than postal mail. And it wasn't long before more sophisticated interfaces and editors made their way to the bulletin boards.
Google Wave is also, at this point, awkward. To use it, you have to be somewhat self-confident right from the start, as others are potentially watching every letter that you type. And while it's clear that the ability to co-edit and converse about a document in the same place is powerful, it's messy. Even if you get over the sprawling nature of the conversations, which are only minimally better than what you would get with ten to twenty-five people all conversing in one Word document, the lack of navigational tools within each wave is a real weakness.
Redundant?
I'm particularly aware of these faults because I just installed and began using Confluence, a sophisticated, enterprise Wiki (free for nonprofits) at my organization. While we've been told that Wave is the successor to email, Google Docs and, possibly, Sharepoint, I have to say that Confluence does pretty much all of those things and is far more capable. All wikis, at their heart, offer collaborative editing, but the good ones also allow for conversations, plug-ins and automation, just as Google Wave promises. But with a wiki, the canvas is large enough and the tools are there to organize and manage the work and conversation. With Wave, it's awfully cramped, and somewhat primitive in comparison.
Too early to tell?
Of course, we're looking at a preview. The two things that possibly differentiate Wave from a solid wiki are the "inbox" metaphor and the automation capabilities. Waves can come to you, like email, and anyone who has tried to move a group from an email list to a web forum knows how powerful that can be. And Wave's real potential is in how the "bots", server-side components that can interact with the people communicating and collaborating, will integrate the development and conversation with existing data sources. It's still hard to see all of that in this nascent stage. Until then, it's a bit chicken and egg.
Wave starting points
There are lots of good Wave resources popping up, but the best, hands down, is Gina Trapini's Complete Guide, available online for free and in book form soon. Gina's blog is a must read for people who find the types of things I write about interesting.
Once you're on wave, you'll want to find Waves to join, and exactly how you do that is anything but obvious. the trick is to search for a term "such as "nonprofit" or "fundraising" and add the phrase "with:public". A good nonprofit wave to start with is titled, appropriately, "The Nonprofit Technology Wave".
If you haven't gotten a Wave invite and want to, now is the time to query your Twitter and Facebook friends, because invites are being offered and we've passed the initial "gimme" stage. In fact, I have ten or more to share (I'm peterscampbell on most social networks and at Google's email service).
Last week, I shared my impressions of Google Wave, which takes current web 2.0/Internet staple technologies like email, messaging, document collaboration, widgets/gadgets and extranets and mashes them up into an open communications standard that, if it lives up to Google's aspirations, will supersede email. There is little doubt in my mind that this is how the web will evolve. We've gone from:
The Yahoo! Directory model - a bunch of static web sites that can be catalogued and explored like chapters in a book, to
The Google needle/haystack approach - the web as a repository of data that can be mined with a proper query, to
Web 2.0, a referral-based model that mixes human opinion and interaction into the navigation system.
For many of us, we no longer browse, and we search less than we used to, because the data that we're looking for is either coming to us through readers and portals where we subscribe to it, or it's being referred to us by our friends and co-workers on social networks. Much of what we refer to eachother is content that we have created. The web is as much an application as it is a library now.
Google Wave might well be "Web 3.0", the step that breaks down the location-based structure of web data and replaces it completely with a social structure. Data isn't stored as much as it is shared. You don't browse to sites; you share, enhance, append, create and communicate about web content in individual waves. Servers are sources, not destinations in the new paradigm.
Looking at Wave in light of Google's mission and strategy supports this idea. Google wants to catalog, and make accessible, all of the world's information. Wave has a data mining and reporting feature called "robots". Robots are database agents that lurk in a wave, monitoring all activity, and then pop in as warranted when certain terms or actions trigger their response. The example I saw was of a nurse reporting in the wave that they're going to give patient "John Doe" a peanut butter sandwich. The robot has access to Doe's medical record, is aware of a peanut allergy, and pops in with a warning. Powerful stuff! But the underlying data source for Joe's medical record was Google Health. For many, health information is too valuable and easily abused to be trusted to Google, Yahoo!, or any online provider. The Wave security module that I saw hid some data from Wave participants, but was based upon the time that the person joined the Wave, not ongoing record level permissions.
This doesn't invalidate the use of Wave, by any means -- a wave that is housed on the Doctor's office server, and restricted to Doctor, Nurse and patient could enable those benefits securely. But as the easily recognizable lines between cloud computing and private applications; email and online community; shared documents and public records continue to blur, we need to be careful, and make sure that the learning curve that accompanies these web evolutions is tended to. After all, the worst public/private mistakes on the internet have generally involved someone "replying to all" when they didn't mean to. If it's that easy to forget who you're talking to in an email, how are we going to consciously track what we're revealing to whom in a wave, particularly when that wave has automatons popping data into the conversation as well?
The Wave as internet evolution idea supports a favored notion: data wants to be free. Open data advocates (like myself) are looking for interfaces that enable that access, and Wave's combination of creation and communication, facilitated by simple, but powerful data mining agents, is a powerful frontend. If it truly winds up as easy as email, which is, after all, the application that enticed our grandparents to use the net, then it has culture-changing potential. It will need to bring the users along for that ride, though, and it will be interesting to see how that goes.
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A few more interesting Google Wave stories popped up while I was drafting this one. Mashable's Google Wave: 5 Ways It Could Change the Web gives some concrete examples to some of the ideas I floated last week; and, for those of you lucky enough to have access to Wave, here's a tutorial on how to build a robot.
I’ve been thinking about task management lately. Seemed like a good thing to reflect on over the long weekend. If you are like me, the biggest problem about task management is just plain old too many. Some weeks I feel like I’m gliding through my lists until a loved one reminds me, I just have too many.
If you have too many tasks, then you need to focus first on having fewer of them. That’s what some systems (philosophies? Self-help psychologies? Emergency medical care?) are all about. Dave Allen's "Getting Things Done" has a lot of popularity in this department. If you haven’t read the book, check it out. Most people probably can’t fully live the GTD way. I personally grant permission to cherry pick from its choicest rules. Things like, if you can deal with something in less than two minutes, do it now. If you can’t, put it where you can find it so you don’t have to clutter your mind with it until you can deal with it. And on from there. Too Much Mail
For many of us, even before we get to our task lists per se, we have to face our email inbox. My inbox is like a tide washing up new tasks every day. I’m not going to tell you exactly how big my inbox is right now. It’s embarrassing. I’m working on it.
I get a lot of help form using the GTDInbox for Firefox + Gmail. GTDInbox adds a life-saving layer of task buttons built on top of Gmail’s labeling. (GTDInbox is independent of Dave Allen, and just carries forward some of the methodology. ) If you use Outlook, the Dave Allen company (www.davidco.com) has a nifty full-featured add-on. And if you use Thunderbird or other mail, Dave A offers an inexpensive PDF guide to adapting GTD manually.
For me, for now, GTDInbox rules. You can find it as a standard free Firefox add-in, and you can learn more at GTDinbox.com. I’m sure a premium version is heading our way, and I suspect a lot of folks will jump for it.
Too Many Projects
After too many tasks, my second biggest problem is having too many projects. Collaborative software commonly used for project management software generally comes with ways of dividing up project tasks. In Basecamp (www.basecamphq.com), you have a simple structure of milestones that give you due-dates, and to-do lists that assign responsibilities for meeting those dates. As I mentioned here recently, the new Open Atrium for Drupal has projects and cases, also in a clear intuitive organization that favors collaborative discussion, blogging, and document management. Microsoft Sharepoint, Central Desktop, Zoho and others also have their equivalent.
These systems are definitely a great thing for getting a team already discussing project goals and needs to now focus in on discrete chunks of work. If you are blessed to not have too many projects, this can also work for your individual daily task management. I use and need these features. Yet for much of what I need to get on top of every day, I find myself getting bogged down in navigating down and up the hierarchy of client-project-milestone-tasks.
For Basecamp at least, there are cool Windows or Mac desktop integration add-ons that simplify the to-do process. See http://basecamphq.com/extras for ideas. Some are even free; some have costs that add up as you add users. I have sporadically used the Project Recon add-in.
Like many people, even if I end up duplicating PM entries, I need to quickly get in, order and prioritize all the things to do today, tomorrow, this week and beyond in one place. I need a task list tool, pure and simple. Sometimes I come back to the idea that the best task list tool is the same small notebooks I carry around all the time. Notes with pen and paper. If you have been at meetings with me, then you have likely seen me with one of those black moleskine notebooks. http://www.moleskines.com/klmb712.html. Compact, rugged, no batteries and low carbon footprint, visual, fun, well-engineered, works in weak wireless area all the rest.
Where the notebook falls short is getting those tasks on your calendar. There is definitely a virtue to coming back to my desk, looking through my notebook entries for the day, and reorganizing them into on-line memos, events and tasks. To be useful, those tasks have to wind up on or close to my calendar. That’s the biggest advantage of a software task list.
Too Many Tasks
Maybe you still use a paper pocket calendar. Maybe you can fit your tasks in the margins of the dates on the calendar, and don't have to share your task list with anyone else. I admire this and recognize that you live a different life than me. Fortunately for me and probably most readers here, there are some amazing good software choices for simple task lists. I’ll mention a three favorites, and hope you will help fill in the gaps with others.
Google tasks: If you use Google calendar, why not use its own task list? The task capability has been recently spruced up to include list categories and dates. For most purposes, will do the trick, and if you have mobile Gmail, you can see them there as well.
Remember the Milk(http://www.rememberthemilk.com/) adds some pretty nifty features. You primarily use it on its web site, which has a simple, uncluttered interface. And you can add your notes and stuff to a task as it comes into play. You can do more visual organizing of your tasks, with a tag cloud, location map and other options you may find soothing as you face a daunting list of things to do.
And lots of cool stuff being done through the RTM API to lets you see your tasks when and where you want. You can also integrate RTM (yes, its adherents have claimed its 3 letter acronym) with your google or Apple iCal calendar. It will send you reminders via email, SMS text, Twitter, or IM, iPhone app, or off-line Google gadget. And if all else fails, you can share your task list with trusted contacts, who will hopefully help you reduce the task load rather than add to them. RTM has enough going for it that I've read blog posts arguing for abandoning more complete project communication systems like Basecamp in favor of just sharing lists with contacts on RTM.
Last I’ll mention Evernote. Evernote has flexible task lists like the others. It is also a polished, modern desktop app that enables pretty slick note taking, both text and web/multimedia clips. If you use your laptop in a lot of meetings, take notes on phone calls, or are constantly clipping articles and multimedia for later reference and writing, evernote has a lot going for it. It syncs an installed Mac or Windows desktop application with an easy, secure web site. Unfortunately, the desktop app will not run on my trusted lightweight Ubuntu netbook, but the web interface is cool enough I might go back to it again.
All three of these are ideal where you do have to manage tons of tasks day in and day out, and your your immediate tasks don’t always line up with a small, tight, hierarchical list of projects. Try them all and see what supports you best.
And having finished this, I get to cross an item off of my task list! Even better, thinking through the choices and casually interviewing a few folks recently about their habits has been therapeutic. Still too many tasks, and yet more confident about the choices in managing them.
Google is on a fishing expedition to see if we're willing to take web-surfing to a whole new level. My colleague Steve Backman introduced us to Google Wave a few months ago. I attended a developer's preview at Techsoup Headquarters last week, and I have some additional thoughts to share.
Google's introduction of Wave is nothing if not ambitious. As opposed to saying "We have a new web mashup tool" or "We've taken multimedia email to a new level", they're pitching Wave as nothing less than the successor to email. My question, after seeing the demo, is "Is that an outrageous claim, or a way too modest one?".
The early version of Google Wave I saw looked a lot like Gmail, with a folder list on the left and "wave" list next to it. Unlike Gmail, a third pane to the right included an area where you can compose waves, so Wave is three-columner to Gmail's two.
A wave is a collaborative document that can be updated by numerous people in real-time. This means that, if we're both working in the same wave, you can see what I'm typing, letter by letter, as I can see what you add. This makes Twitter seem like the new snail mail. It's a pretty powerful step for collaborative technology. But it's also quite a cultural change for those of us who appreciate computer-based communications for the incorporated spell-check and the ability to edit and finalize drafted messages before we send them.
Waves can include text, photos, film clips, forms, and any active content that could go into a Google Gadget. If you check out iGoogle, Google's personal portal page, you can see the wide assortment of gadgets that are available and imagine how you would use them -- or things like them -- in a collaborative document. News feeds, polls, games, utilities, and the list goes on.
You share waves with any other wave users that you choose to share with. User-level security is being written into the platform, so that you can share waves as read-only or only share certain content in waves with particular people.
Given these two tidbits, it occurred to me that each wave was far more like a little Extranet than an email message. This is why I think Google's being kind of coy when they call it an email killer - it's a Sharepoint killer. It's possibly a Drupal (or fill in your favorite CMS here) killer. It's certainly an evolution of Google Apps, with pretty much all of that functionality rolled into a model that, instead of saying "I have a document, spreadsheet or website to share" says "I want to share, and, once we're sharing, we can share websites, spreadsheets, documents and whatever". Put another way, Google Apps is an information management tool with some collaborative and communication features. Google Wave is a communications platform with a rich set of information management tools. It's Google Docs inverted.
So, Google Wave has the potential to be very disruptive technology, as long as people:
Adopt it;
Feel comfortable with it; and
Trust Google.
Next week, I'll spend a little time on the gotcha's - please add your thoughts and concerns in the comments.
Even if you will never tweet, it's obvious that Twitter is a source of useful information, and, in some cases, a more timely source than traditional search engines and media. If you use Firefox as your main web browser, and have the popular Greasemonkey add-on installed, which serves as a kind of macro language for the web, then the Twitter Google Results script adds some real power. Any Google search you perform will also search Twitter, posting the top five relevant results. Why is this useful? Well, when we heard rumors that a bomb had gone off somewhere near our Bozeman, Montana office, the Twitter results had current info and links that weren't indexed by Google yet
Namechk checks for your preferred username on a slew of Web 2.0 sites, from Bebo to Youtube. I found this useful to reserve peterscampbell at a few sites that I want to use but hadn't signed up for, and to learn that some other guy named peterscampbell had already grabbed it at Youtube, where I had used a different loginname... snap!
This is a tip, not a tool - if you've been stymied by Facebook's recent changes to how it handles updates, you can make a lot more sense of it by making lists of related friends, and then filtering the updates by group. Click on Friends and the "Create New List" button is at the top of the screen. I have lists for family, nptech, Boston friends, SF Friends, and a special one called "no tweets", which filters out everyone who cross-posts all of their Twitter updates to Facebook (my default view). Keeping up with all of this info is always a challenge, so the ability to filter out the echoes is a must.
Exhibit is a web site that lets you upload spreadsheets, maps and other data to an information rich, filterable, active web page that can then be shared. If your org works with a particular environmental cause, seeks a cure for a disease, or supports a particular community, you can share data about your cause dynamically and expressively with this amazing site.
Google revolutionized email with GMail, the first email platform in decades to question the basic assumptions about how email should work (by filing important email into folders). They're about to do the same thing with Voicemail. A year or two ago, they purchased Grandcentral, a service that allowed you to route multiple phone numbers to one shared voicemail box. A few months ago, they opened the revamped Google Voice to existing Grandcentral customers, and, surprise, it looks a bit like GMail.
When I look at GMail, Google Voice, and the recently announced Google Wave, a real-time communication and collaboration platform, and then picture these all integrated into a Google Apps account, it becomes clear that our phone systems are moving into the cloud as fast as our servers are, and, while it is always that controversial proposition of Google giving you stuff in return for the right to market to you based on all of your data, it still looks like they are poised to offer one of the most powerful, integrated communication platforms that the world has ever seen.
Have you run into any awesome things lately worth sharing? Leave a comment!
Say you sign up for some great Web 2.0 service that allows you to bookmark web sites, annotate them, categorize them and share them. And, over a period of two or three years, you amass about 1500 links on the site with great details, cross-referencing -- about a thesis paper's worth of work. Then, one day, you log on to find the web site unavailable. News trickles out that they had a server crash. Finally, a painfully honest blog post by the site's founder makes clear that the server crashed, the data was lost, and there were no backups. So much for your thesis, huh? Is the lesson, then, that the cloud is no place to store your work?
Well, consider this. Say you start up a Web 2.0 business that allows people to bookmark, share, categorize and annotate links on your site. And, over the years, you amass thousands of users, some solid funding, advertising revenue -- things are great. Then, one day, the server crashes. You're a talented programmer and designer, but system administration just wasn't your strong suit. So you write a painful blog entry, letting your users know the extent of the disaster, and that the lesson you've learned is that you should have put your servers in the cloud.
My recent posts have advocated cloud computing, be it using web-based services like Gmail, or looking for infrastructure outsourcers who will provide you with virtualized desktops. And I've gotten some healthily skeptical comments, as cloud computing is new, and not without it's risks, as made plain by the true story of the Magnolia bookmarking application, which recently went down in the flames as described above. The lessons that I walk away with from Magnolia's experience are:
You can run your own servers or outsource them, but you need assurances that they are properly maintained, backed up and supported. Cloud computing can be far more secure and affordable than local servers. But "the cloud", in this case, should be a company with established technical resources, not some three person operation in a small office. Don't be shy about requesting staffing information, resumes, and details about any potential off-site vendor's infrastructure.
You need local backups, no matter where your actual infrastructure lives. If you use Salesforce or Google, export your data nightly to a local data store in a usable format. Salesforce lets you export to Excel; Google supports numerous formats. Gmail now supports an Offline mode that stores your mail on the computer you access it from. If you go with a vendor who provides virtual desktop access (as I recommend here), get regular snapshots of the virtual machines. If this isn't an over the air transfer, make sure that your vendors will provide DVDs of your data or other suitable medium.
Don't sign any contract that doesn't give you full control over how you can access and manipulate your data, again, regardless of where that data resides. A lot of vendors try and protect themselves by adding contract language prohibiting mass updates and user access, even on locally-installed applications. But their need to simplify support should not be at the expense of you not having complete control over how you use your information.
Focus on the data. Don't bend on these requirements: Your data is fully accessible; It's robustly backed up; and, in the case of any disaster, it's recoverable.
Technology is a set of tools used to manage your critical information. Where that technology is housed is more of a feature set and financial choice than anything else. The most convenient and affordable place for your data to reside might well be in the cloud, but make sure that it's the type of cloud that your data won't fall through.
In the last week or two, Google's GMail app added a bunch of new features, at least three of which are, to my mind, insanely significant. As you probably know, GMail is about three years old, still in beta, and from it's release, the most innovative approach to email that we've seen since the whole folder metaphor was first thought up. The three new features are Offline, Keyboard Shortcuts for Labeling, and Multiple Inboxes. Offline and Multiple Inboxes are added through the "Labs" section in settings;if you use Gmail, you can use the label if you have Keyboard Shortcuts turned on.
I love Gmail because it is designed to do a lot of my maintenance for me, and I can keep all sorts of mail (I'm up to 729 MB) and find anything instantly. Key to all of this is GMail's gleeful abandonment of the file cabinet metaphor, an imposition on computing from the early days that is intuitive to humans, yes, but not the most efficient way to manage online information. And maybe this is why I've always appreciated Google - they got from the start that you don't organize massive amounts of information by sorting it all into separate piles, an idea that most of their competitors have not let go of.
Here's how I use Gmail: Using pop forwarding, I feed three separate email accounts into my primary GMail account. I have it set up to reply using the address that the email was sent to, and each account is automatically labeled with a specifically colored label identifying it's origin. I have 36 labels defined, and 66 filters that primarily label messages as they come in. I "star" messages that relate to current projects, and I try to keep my inbox to less than 50 messages at any given time. Cleaning up the inbox is a matter of labeling the messages that aren't accounted for by the filters, deleting the ones I don't want, and archiving.
Offline, of course, simply gives me a local copy of my inbox for those rare times when I'm out of plugged in, wireless, or AT&T 3G range of a connection. But having a local backup of my inbox is, um, priceless.
Last week, Google introduced new dropdowns for labeling and "moving" messages. The "Move To" tab is somewhat ironic, because GMail doesn't store messages in different places. It identifies them by their labels. New messages, on arrival, are labeled "inbox", and "archiving" a message is simply the act of removing the "inbox" label. So the "Move To" menu was strictly a concession to those who can't let go of the folder idea, so I have little use for it. But, in addition to the new dropdowns, Google also introduced a keyboard shortcut. Typing "l" (lowercase "L") brings up the labels dropdown; typing the first few letters of a label takes you to that label, and hitting "Enter" applies it to the current message or the selected ones. This allows me to select and label messages far faster than was possible when the mouse was required to open and then scroll through the dropdown menu.
Multiple Inboxes allows you to put as many boxes of messages meeting specific criteria ("has label", "is starred", "is a draft", any search criteria) on your GMail home page. For users with wide displays, these can be placed to the right or left of your inbox. Since I work a lot on my 15" laptop screen, I chose to add inboxes under the main inbox. To start, I've added starred items in a box under my inbox, which lets me keep things that don't need immediate responses, but should be handy to refer to, right where I want them. Another creative use (as tweeted by Sonny Cloward) is to have a box with all items labeled "task", but I actually use the recently-added "Tasks" function for that.
Regardless, you've heard me rave about Gmail here if you follow my communication posts, but that was all before they added these features, making GMail another 33% more awesome than the competition to an information management geek like me.
My big post contrasting full blown Microsoft Exchange Server with cloud-based Gmail drew a couple of comments from friends in Seattle. Jon Stahl of One/Northwest pointed out, helpfully, that MS sells it's Small Business Server product to companies with a maximum of 50 employees, and that greatly simplifies and reduces cost for Exchange. After that, Patrick Shaw of NPower Seattle took it a step further, pointing out that MS Small Business Server, with a support arrangement from a great company like NPower (the "great" is my addition - I'm a big fan), can cost as little as $4000 a year and provide Windows Server, Email, Backup and other functions, simplifying a small office's technology and outsourcing the support. This goes a long way towards making the chaos I described affordable and attainable for cash and resource strapped orgs.
What I assume Npower knows, though, and hope that other nonprofit technical support providers are aware of, is that this is the outdated approach. Nonprofits should be looking to simplify technology maintenance and reduce cost, and the cloud is a more effective platform for that. As ReadWriteWeb points out, most small businesses -- and this can safely be assumed to include nonprofits -- are completely unaware of the benefits of cloud computing and virtualization. If your support arrangement is for dedicated, outsourced management of technology that is housed at your offices, then you still have to purchase that hardware and pay someone to set it up. The benefits of virtualization and fast, ubiquitous Internet access offer a new model that is far more flexible and affordable.
One example of a company that gets this is MyGenii. They offer virtualized desktops to nonprofits and other small businesses. As I came close to explaining in my Lean, Green, Virtualized Machine post, virtualization is technology that allows you to, basically, run many computers on one computer. The environmental and financial benefits of doing what you used to do on multiple systems all on one system are obvious, but there are also huge gains in manageability. When a PC is a file that can be copied and modified, building new and customized PCs becomes a trivial function. Take that one step further - that this virtual PC is stored on someone else's property, and you, as a user, can load it up and run it from your home PC, laptop, or (possibly) your smartphone, and you now have flexible, accessible computing without the servers to support.
For the tech support service, they either run large servers with virtualization software (there are many powerful commercial and open source systems available), or they use an outsourced storage platform like Amazon's EC2 service. In addition to your servers, they also house your desktop operating systems. Running multiple servers and desktops on single servers is far more economical; it better utilizes the available server power, reducing electricity costs and helping the environment; and backups and maintenance are simplified. The cost savings of this approach should benefit both the provider and the client.
In your office, you still need networked PCs with internet access. But all you need on those computers is a basic operating system that can boot up and connect to the hosted, virtualized desktop. Once connected, that desktop will recognize your printers and USB devices. If you make changes, such as changing your desktop wallpaper or adding an Outlook plugin, those changes will be retained. The user experience is pretty standard. But here's a key benefit -- if you want to work from home, or a hotel, or a cafe, then you connect to the exact same desktop as the one at work. It's like carrying your computer everywhere you go, only without the carrying part required.
So, it's great that there are mission focused providers out there who will affordably support our servers. But they could be even more affordable, and more effective, as cloud providers, freeing us from having to own and manage any servers in the first place.
If your nonprofit has 40 or more people on staff, it's a likely bet that you use Microsoft Exchange as your email server. There are, of course, many nonprofits that will use the email services that come with your web hosting, and there are some using legacy products like Novell's Groupwise or Lotus Notes/Domino. But the market share for email and groupware has gone to Microsoft, and, at this point, the only compelling up and coming competition comes from Google.
There are reasons why Microsoft has dominated the market. Exchange is a mature and powerful product, that does absolutely everything that an email system has to do, and offers powerful calendaring, contact management and information sharing features on top of it. A quick comparison to Google's GMail offering might look a bit like "Bambi vs. Godzilla". And, as Michelle pointed out the other day, GMail might be a risky proposition, despite it being more affordable, because it puts your entire mail store "in the cloud". But Gmail's approach is so radically different from Microsoft's that I think it deserves a more detailed pro/con comparison.
Before we start, it's important to acknowledge that the major difference is the hosted/cloud versus local installation, and there's a middle ground - services that host Exchange for you - Microsoft even has their own cloud service. If you are evaluating email platforms and including GMail and Exchange, hosted Exchange should be weighed as an additional option. But my goal here is to contrast the new versus the traditional, and traditional Exchange installations are in your server room, not someone else's.
Server Platform
Installing Exchange is not a simple task. Smaller organizations can get away with cheaper hardware, but the instructions say that you'll need a large server for mail storage; a secondary server for web and internet functions, and, most likely, a third server to house your third party anti-spam and anti-virus solutions. Plus, Exchange won't work in a Linux or Novell network - there has to be an additional server running Microsoft's Active Directory in place before you can even install it. It can be a very stable product if you get the installation right, but getting it right means doing a lot of prep and research, because the slim documents that come in the box don't prepare you for the complexity. Once you have it running, you have to run regular maintenance and keep a close watch - along with mailbox limits - to insure that the message bases don't fill up or corrupt.
GMail, on the other hand, is only available as a hosted solution. Setup is a matter of mapping your domain to Google's services (can be tricky, but child's play compared to Exchange) and adding your users.
Win - GMail. It saves you a lot of expense, when you factor in the required IT time and expertise with the hardware and software costs for multiple servers.
EMail Clients
Outlookhas it's weaknesses - slow and obtuse search, poor spam handling, and a tendency toward unexplained crashes and slowdowns on a regular basis. But, as a traditional mail client, it has a feast of features. There isn't much that you can't do with it. One of the most compelling reasons to stick with Outlook is it's extensibility. Via add-ons and integrations, Outlook can serve as a portal to applications, databases, web sites and communications. In a business environment, you might be sacrificing some key functionality without it, much as you often have to use Internet explorer in order to access business-focused web sites.
But where Outlook is a very hefty application, with tons of features and settings buried in it's cavernous array of menus and dialog boxes, Gmail is deceptively uncluttered. The truth is that the web-based GMail client can do a lot of sophisticated tricks, including a few that Outlook can't -- like allowing you to decide that you'd rather "Reply to All" mid-message -- and some that you can only do with Outlook by enabling obscure features and clicking around a lot, like threading conversations and applying multiple "tags" to a single message. Gmail is the first mail client to burst out of the file cabinet metaphor. Once you get used to this, it's liberating. Messages don't get archived to drawers, they get tagged with one or more labels. You can add stars to the important ones. It's not that you can't emulate this workflow in Outlook, it's that it's fast and smooth in GMail, and supported by a very intelligent and blazingly fast search function. Of course, if that doesn't float your boat, you can always use Outlook - or any other standard POP3 or IMAP client - to access GMail.
Win - GMail. It's more innovative and flexible, and I didn't even dig deep.
Availability
Exchange, of course, is not subject to the vagaries of internet availability when you're at the office. Mind you, much of the mail that you're waiting to receive is. And Outlook - if you run in "Cached mode" - has had offline access down for ages. GMail just started experimenting with that this week. If you're not in the office, Exchange supports a variety of ways to get to the mail. Outlook Web Access (OWA) is a sophisticated web-based client that, with Exchange 2007 and IE as the browser, almost replicates the desktop Outlook experience. OMA is a mobile-friendly web interface. And ActiveSync, which is supported on many phones (including the iPhone) is the most powerful, stable and feature-rich synchronization platform available. Exchange can do POP and IMAP as well, and also supports a VPN-like mode called Outlook Anywhere (or HTTPS over RPC).
GMail only supports web, pop and IMAP. There's a mobile GMAIL app which is available on more phones than Activesync is, but it isn't as robust or full featured as Microsoft's offering.
So, oddly, the Win for remote access goes to Microsoft over Google, because Microsoft's offerings are plentiful and mature.
Business Continuity
So, not to belabor this, Exchange is well supported by many powerful backup products. In cached mode, it mirrors your server mailbox to your dektop, which is additional redundancy.
GMail is in the cloud, so backup isn't quite as straightforward. Offline mode does some synchronization, like Exchange's cached mode, but it's not 100% or, at this point, configurable. Prudent GMail users will, even if they don't read mail in it, set up a POP email program to regularly download their mail in order to have a local copy.
Win - Microsoft
Microsoft also Wins the security comparison - Google can, and has, cut off user's email accounts. There seem to have been good reasons, such as chasing out hackers who had commandeered accounts. But keeping your email on your backed-up server behind your firewall will always be more secure than the cloud.
But I'd hedge that award with the consideration that Exchange's complexity is a risk in itself. It's all well and safe if it is running optimally and it's being backed up. But most nonprofits are strapped when it comes to the staffing and cost to support this kind of solution. If you can't provide the proper care and feeding that a system like Exchange requires, you might well be at more risk with an in-house solution. The competence of a vendor like Google managing your servers is a plus.
Finally, cost. GMail wins hands down. The supported Google Apps platform is free for nonprofits. Microsoft offers us deep discounts with their charity pricing, but Dell and HP don't match on the hardware, and certified Microsoft Administrators come in the $60-120k annual range.
So, in terms of ease of management and cost, GMail easily wins. There are some big trade-offs between Microsoft's kitchen sink approach to features and Google's intelligent, progressive functionality, and, in well-resourced environments, Microsoft is the secure choice, but in tightly resourced ones - like nonprofits - GMail is a stable and supported option. The warnings about trusting Google -- or any other Software as a Service vendor -- are prudent, but there are a lot of factors to weigh. And it's going to come down to a lot of give and take, with considerations particular to your environment, to determine what the effective choice is. In a lot of cases, the cloud will weigh heavier on the scale than the colossus.
At this Thanksgiving time of year, we are supposed to reflect on things we take for granted. Don’t worry, I’m not going to start in on Thanksgiving. I just want to acknowledge that I tend to take some of my desktop tools for granted. Case in point this morning: don’t take your browser or you web mail for granted.
I admit that I have a lot going on in both Firefox and Gmail. This morning, trying out a combination of new Google labs settings for Gmail plus the Getting Things Done Firefox add-in, I suddenly and abruptly got logged out of Gmail. I got a polite, but unbelievably firm “locked out” message. For up to 24 hours!
Searching on user groups, I saw that some people once locked out wound up locked out for days at a time. And one person found that once unlocked, all old email was gone. I prepared for the worst—I submitted an email pleading my greediness and asking to be let back in. I looked at my alternatives. And decided to blog about it. I want to say that 3 hours later, I’m back in. In the meantime, I thought about some lessons. Much of this falls under the category of don’t take things for granted.
Not taking things for granted begins with testing add-ins meticulously. I had modified my settings a few days ago, but not restarted Firefox. This morning, I added something else, restarted. Quite possibly the installation of both together into Gmail clashed and triggered the lock-out out. Add things one at a time, restart each time, and make sure the new thing tests in a clear environment.
I often have a lot of Firefox tabs open. And sometimes, not seeing my Gmail or Google Calendar tab, I end up opening another. In the help pages, it says clearly that being logged in multiple places and switching active sessions can trigger a lock-out. I will not take Firefox’s stability for granted and be more careful about my tabs.
Don’t add more add-ins to Firefox than you need. I love my add-ins and I am going to write something at some point about my favorite add-ins, but, hmm, not today.
Have a back-up plan. This is probably the most important lesson. After using Eudora for years, trying out Outlook (I’m sure you have heard of it), I settled in on Thunderbird, which has been fine. In the last while, however, I have been testing Gmail to consider moving our email hosting there. Fortunately, all my webmail could still download to Thunderbird. I was able to confirm that even though I couldn’t open Gmail, Google still was faithfully, if more slowly, receiving and forwarding email to Thunderbird. Nothing wrong with that. If you rely on web mail, it makes sense to still have a POP or IMAP local account somewhere that backs everything up and that you can use in an emergency.
Clear you cache once in a while. I do that in IE and Opera, but not in Firefox. Letting browser cache get all messed up is also mentioned as something that can contribute to triggering a lock-out.
Be careful with beta software. Yes, look closely, almost everything beyond search you use from Google is still marked as beta. Gmail Beta, Documents Beta, Calendar Beta. Can’t a big company like Google get its big stuff out of Beta? And if not, be careful trusting critical organizational stuff there. At least have the alternatives and back-ups in place, as mentioned earlier.
Be careful with software you can’t get support for. As I mentioned, I’m using Gmail a lot as an experiment. If you have a basic Gmail account, you have limited recourse if something goes wrong. Take that into account in your planning. Only with the paid business or free nonprofit apps edition can you get phone support for “critical issues.”
So I’m back where I was, lessons often mentioned as general advice to others, now reinforced in my own case.
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