Collaboration at its finest! Office 365 Groups and how it compares to Shared Mailboxes, Distribution Lists, and Site Mailboxes

It's often been said that being social is, as a species, our most defining characteristic. We work and play in groups so we can talk, listen, collaborate, interact, and ultimately accomplish something.

These days, collaborating with colleagues can be a real challenge. You have various conversations happening all the time, a multitude of files stored in various places, and countless meetings to co-ordinate and keep track of. People need to be able to get together quickly in order to organize into a team and get stuff done. Members of a group know and trust each other, converse, and share reports and files.

The new groups in Office 365 can make this all a breeze. Groups not only allow you to collaborate but also extensively increase productivity and efficiency. So what is a group? A group is a shared work space for email conversations, files, calendar events, and more where group members can conveniently collaborate and find the important stuff in a sea of noise. Groups enable your company to work like a regular old offline network by simplifying the collaboration process and by connecting you to the people, information, and tools you need.

Creating a group or joining one that already exists is very easy, but keep in mind that groups are public by default, so while you can connect right away without waiting for permission, anybody else in your organization can as well. (You can also set up private groups, but this is a one-time only option; once you've selected a group's visibility, it can't be changed.) Each group features an inbox to keep everyone in the loop on all the latest discussions, as well as a dedicated calendar and document repository. Once you've subscribed to a group you can take part in any of its discussions from your own Office 365 inbox.

When there is a need to meet, group calendars make it a seamless process. Any group member can create or update events to keep the team involved, even if a group manager isn't available. To track group events, just add them to your personal calendar or display the group calendar next to your own.

Because collaboration usually involves working on content, file sharing is essential. One click is all it takes to upload files to OneDrive for Business and grant group members permissions to use them. You can edit or co-author from Outlook web app using Office online. As you work, the side-by-side conversation lets you discuss the changes without leaving the context of your inbox or document. When you're finished, groups automatically makes the latest version available to every member. You can even take your team with you on the road since groups are mobile- and touch-friendly so you can stay on top of conversations, events, and content from any device.

Microsoft offers a range of email collaboration tools including distribution lists, site mailboxes, and shared mailboxes. Each of these options has a different purpose, user experience, and feature set. It can be a little overwhelming to decide which tool is right for you, so here is a brief outline to help you decide which is appropriate for your business.

• Group: A shared workspace that works across all applications in Office 365. This includes a shared inbox, calendar, and OneDrive for Business site for storing files. Users can create, find, and join Groups right from their email or calendar. New and existing users with an Exchange Online or Office 365 subscription can use Groups.
• Shared mailbox: A mailbox for select users to read and send email messages and share a common calendar. Shared mailboxes can serve as a generic email address (such as info@companyname.com or sales@companyname.com) that customers can use to inquire about your company. When the 'Send As' permission is enabled on the shared mailbox, email sent from the mailbox will use the generic address (sales@companyname.com).
• Distribution list: A distribution list is used distribute email messages to two or more people at the same time. Distribution lists are also known as mail-enabled distribution groups. A variant of the distribution group, called the dynamic distribution group, is a mail-enabled Active Directory group object used to send email to a large and evolving group of recipients. The exact recipients are determined by filters and conditions that you specify, such as all members of a particular region or full-time employees.
• Site mailbox: A site mailbox includes SharePoint Online site membership (owners and members) and shared storage through an Exchange mailbox for email messages. A site mailbox brings Exchange email and SharePoint documents together. It serves as a central filing cabinet for the project, providing a place to file project email and documents that can be accessed and edited only by site members. In addition, site mailboxes can have a specified lifecycle and are optimized to be used for projects that have set start and end dates.

These tools are designed to help teams collaborate effortlessly, however groups can be used to replace shared mailboxes or SharePoint sites in some instances. Site mailboxes have project documents that are stored on a SharePoint Online site and team members send and receive project related email via the site mailbox. Shared mailboxes are used by users who delegate working on behalf of a virtual identity (e.g. support@companyname.com) and respond to email as that shared mailbox identity. Finally, Groups are generally used by users who want a collaboration workspace for their group messages, files, and calendar that is integrated with the Office 365 services that they already use. 

Office 365 groups is part of the first phase of Microsoft's plan to integrate Enterprise social features across platforms, including Yammer, Lync (Skype for Business), SharePoint, and Exchange Online. Office 365 Groups is the tool to use if your organization does not need a full-fledged social network experience. Groups makes more sense because it's a great alternative to public folders and distribution groups which are normally the go-to tools used for collaboration and collective productivity.

"Traditional" cloud-based hosting vs. Google App Engine

There is no doubt that we live in an era of rapid technological advancement. This means it's fairly easy to get left behind if you aren't adopting new ways if improving IT systems for your business. Using technology to your advantage as a business is nothing new. What matters now is how you implement that technology to work for you in the most efficient and cost-effective way. For example, setting up a web server or providing redundancy to the infrastructure are both examples of things that can now be fully automated. Automation is your friend. Learn to make it work for you and you can achieve wonders.

If you've adopted cloud technology as your business system, kudos to you! Cloud solutions are imperative if you are looking to augment abilities to better meet the specifics needs of your business. A great example of this is developing a custom web application. The question that arises here is whether or not you have the infrastructure to support it. The answer for many businesses is simply 'no.' But before we delve into supporting a custom web application, why would your business consider this? Here are a few good reasons:

• You want to streamline internal departments and functions, operations, sales and project management.
• You want to add more functionality to the already existing application.
• You want to take advantage of web-based applications flexibility and versatility by moving away from the traditional desktop application platform to the web application platforms.
• You want to gain more clients or better service current clients by offering convenient services and solutions online.
• You want to build new web applications to offer innovative services or solutions to online users and businesses.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest headaches of supporting a web application is the infrastructure and scalability. Building new infrastructure or upgrading existing infrastructure to meet use requirements costs valuable time and money that could be spent focusing on development and other aspects of your business. Downtime, lost data, unhappy customers, impossible machine configurations, and added complexities are all downfalls of traditional web application hosting. Even with a trained team of server admins, you only end up in a good position to recover from a disaster, not to prevent one from happening in the first place. Virtual private servers and traditional web hosts require far too much maintenance and disaster recovery.

The time it takes to maintain and scale infrastructure can now be designated elsewhere. So how do you save costs and time? The answer is Google App Engine. Google App Engine allows you to develop custom web applications with the ability to host and run them directly on Google's own infrastructure. Once you've created an app, you can easily upload it and Google handles both hosting and scaling. All of which is to say: no more servers to maintain! This means that you get to run on the same hardware stack that Google builds on; that's a huge advantage!

Now some may argue that there are drawbacks to using platform as a service (PaaS) providers like Google's Cloud Platform, and mainly this stems from not "owning" your own environment. To work around this, Google offers Compute Engine, where you get absolute freedom to run large-scale workloads on virtual machines. This combined with Google App Engine gets you PaaS-style functionality while also allowing you to run your own virtual servers.

Google is a powerful innovator in the technical services industry, and Google App Engine brings with it the ability to give businesses in today's market what they require to stay on target with their goals. It's reliable, scalable, efficient, cost-effective, and Google is constantly updating and upgrading their services.

So lets take a look at some of the major advantages that Google App Engine has to offer:

1. Focus on your business and allow technology to work for you.
2. Build on a proven hardware stack.
3. Proven cost savings. for example, you don't need to hire an engineer to manage your servers and you won't have to manage them yourself. You can invest the savings in other aspects of your business.
4. Multiple storage options.
5. Powerful built-in services.
6. Ability to deploy at "Google-scale" (you could scale up to 7 billion requests per day, if you wanted to).

It's important to understand that building your application with these 'cloud services' can bring huge benefits in cost and effort when what matters is delivering a great product. The people at Google are experts at setting up and maintaining machines. They are experts at data storage, data redundancy, and scaling computing power up and down to handle sudden bursts of user traffic. Their state-of-the-art data centres are constantly evolving to keep up with demand, and you don't need to incur any of that additional cost.

Check out this video to get an idea of what we're talking about:

You've now seen the great advantages that Google App Engine has to offer as an excellent content delivery network and so much more. Cloud computing is one of the fastest growing fields and it provides an easy and affordable way to run your applications.

"Traditional" cloud-based hosting and scaling applications on virtual machines comes with a cost. Even if the structure is virtual, you still have to manage it, do load balancing, bring instances up and down, take care of patching software and in general spend a lot of time and resources on just the infrastructure. With Google Cloud Platform, Google takes care of all the heavy lifting and back-end maintenance.

Google is a pioneer in the business of scaling, and now you can use their infrastructure. It doesn't matter whether your application is small scale or large scale, the scalability of Google's infrastructure is basically impossible to match in a traditional environment. Let them handle what they're good at while you focus on other important aspects of your business.

Don't Sink! Sync! - Google Calendar Sharing

Realizing that you've missed an appointment at the doctor's office or missed your kid's recital isn't fun. Sometimes there is just so much going on at once that it's hard to schedule and share everything with the people who need to know. You start sinking under all the events, commitments, appointments, and pressure magnetized to your fridge door. This is where Google Calendar comes in to save the day (and week, and month...).

If you already use Google Calendar, awesome! There is so much you can do to schedule events and track available/busy slots of time. With Google Calendar you have the ability to to see calendars that are important to you and share your own. You can send invitations to your events, track RSVPs by email, and even allow others to propose times that work better for everyone. It's all very intuitive and can be done from a single screen, allowing you to manage your business, personal, and other calendars. No more calling and emailing participants numerous times to schedule an event. When you know everyone is free, scheduling is a snap! Sharing is a great feature to help you schedule events, keep you in sync, and save you from missing what's important to you.

Share your Google Apps for business calendar as username@business.com with your personal@gmail.com account and give it rights to make changes. Here's how:

1. Log in to your Google Apps account and navigate to the calendar at https://calendar.google.com
2. Click the gear icon at the top right corner, then click Settings.
3. Click over to the Calendars tab, then click Share this calendar on the right-hand side.
4. Add your personal@gmail.com address and give it "Make changes AND manage sharing" permissions.
5. Click Save.

Now you can manage your business calendar while you're signed in to your personal account.

If your business calendar is on an Exchange server, you can share it to your personal Gmail account by following these steps. Note that you cannot make changes to your business calendar from Gmail.

Next, share your personal@gmail.com calendar with your business calendar and with the Gmail accounts of each of your family members, like child1@gmail.com, child2@gmail.com, spouse@gmail.com.

Enabling or disabling calendar sharing is a breeze. Add a couple of email addresses, and if desired, set their permissions (free/busy, see all event details, or make changes) so that they don't have to keep asking you to make changes since you've authorized them to.

1. Click on the drop-down arrow next to the calendar you want to share.
2. Click Share this Calendar.
3. Add the email addresses of people who you'd like to have access and set their permissions.
4. Click Save.

Once you have shared the appropriate calendars, ask your family members to share theirs with you as well so you can make changes to their calendars when needed.

Now you have the power to see what everyone else is up to (depending on the sharing permissions, of course) and other people can see what you're up to.

You also don't have to constantly check your calendar to see what's coming next in your day. Google Calendar provides several different ways for you to be notified of upcoming events including via text message, an email, or a pop-up. You can also get these notification on your iPhone or Android device if you've set up your Google Account to sync with it. If your kids have a smartphone or tablet, they can be synced to their Google calendar to receive notifications of events. (No more excuses for being late for your soccer practice or kids whining that they didn't know about it!)

With Google Calendar, you can access your schedule online from anywhere. If you forget your laptop or tablet, just open the Google Calendar app on your Android or iOS device to see all your events.

Organizing your schedule doesn't have to be a burden. With Google Calendar, its simple to keep track of all of life's important event all in one place. And the best part is, it's completely free!

Android Phone OS makes impressive gains

I've been using the LG Eve GW620 Android 3G phone from Rogers for a few weeks now.  I'm extremely impressed by the platform but it is ready for prime time use by heavy business users?

It's awesome if your company is already on Google Apps or Gmail as it synchronizes automatically with your email, calendar, and contacts plus uploads pictures directly into Picasa.  There are no extra applications to install or web accounts to set-up like you have to with a Blackberry.  You also don't need Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) to make everything insantaneous and eliminate the typical 10 to 15 minute delay for email.  Keeping everything in the Google family certainly makes everything simpler to set-up and simpler to use.

One limitation I've run into is the inability to create new calendar appointments that include other attendees.  Also, I can't run real time stock streaming software like Quotestream, however, I've opened a ticket with Quotemedia to see if there is a work around. (Update: Open this link directly to install the mobile Java version of Quotestream Wireless.  It works but cuts off the edges of the window if you hold the phone horizontally instead of vertically)

The Android phone platform is definitely growing rapidly.  I was surprised to see that Android has 27% market share compared to iPhone's 54% market share for mobile ads displayed.