Crashplan vs. Mozy

We've been Mozy users since 2009 for cloud online data backup but had read various positive reviews for CrashPlan.  Two months ago we started testing it out and have completely switched over all our workstation and server backups to CrashPlan.  Today we cancelled our Mozy account before it renews.

Here's what we like about CrashPlan over Mozy:

• easier to understand user interface
• no lengthy delays selecting or changing which files are backed up.  On a home theatre PC with 23,000 files and 125 Gb I would open Mozy and go get a coffee before I could start making changes.  Then when you pressed OK it was another long delay.  No such long delays with Crashplan.  We had a similar even longer delay in selecting files to backup with MozyPro (business version) at a customer site on their file server.  We had to give up and put the customer on Storage Guardian which works fine but is way too complex for most small businesses to manage.
• Windows Servers can be backed up without any additional cost or restrictions with Crashplan.  We must admit that we were cheating by using MozyHome and running a batch routine to copy files from the file server to a workstation to then be backed up in the cloud on Mozy.  Crashplan runs fine on our old Windows Server 2003 file server directly.
• 3 way backup/social backup that's easy to setup.  Have a brother with some extra hard drive space?  You can use Crashplan for free and back up your data on his computer and his on yours over the internet.  Inside our office we backup both to Crashplan online and to a large hard drive on one of the workstations.  We do this because restoring from a local drive copy will always be  faster than downloading it from the web.

Certainly contact us at Interlockit.com if you would like some assistance with deploying your online data backup and disaster recovery plan.

Show your customer addresses on Google Maps

Do a Google Search on mapping customer addresses and you'll get all sorts of overly complicated ways to do it with third party stuff, etc.

Google Spreadsheets does it very easily "out of the box", well that is... in the cloud for free.

Follow these steps published by Google: http://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=91601 to use a gadget for mapping addresses from the rows of a Google Spreadsheet.  Last column as tooltip is how you can show the customer name.

In our case we used a Google Apps Script to populate the rows of the Google spreadsheet instantly from our Norada Solve360 CRM using this: http://goo.gl/DyV0F

So now with a few clicks we can display a real time map of our customer locations and refresh it instantly.

If you have a more complex reporting/spreadsheet need that might require Google Apps Script programming contact us at Interlockit.com.

Enjoy!

Google Apps Vault brings better integrated email archiving to Google Apps

As a Google Apps Postini Authorized Reseller we've handled numerous implementations of Postini email archiving and message security.  While Postini has great technology its user interface was ages behind the simplicity of Google Apps.  We're definitely excited about the release of Google Vault which is so much better integrated into the core Google Apps product.

Google Apps Vault eliminates all sorts of administrative headaches for Google Apps and Postini customers such as managing duplicate user lists, email aliases, and email distribution groups across the 2 systems.

Currently Google Vault is only available to new Google Apps customers but we expect Google to allow the migration of existing customers from Postini to Google Apps Vault soon.

By the way, Google Postini is still the best cloud spam and virus filter for Microsoft Exchange or other emails servers on the market.  It will continue to be supported and enhanced for the long term as there is a huge install base of existing users.  Since ~90% of all email is spam, Google Postini removes this heavy load from your internet data lines and on-premise Exchange server.  When we switch customers from an on-premise firewall based spam filter to Postini or Google Apps they are often shocked by the dramatic drop in load on their internet data lines.

Source: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ca/2012/03/google-apps-vault-brings-information.html