On April 23rd, 2018 Google announced the availability of dial-in phone numbers for Hangouts Meet. Previously this feature was only available with G Suite Enterprise subscriptions for $25 USD/user/month. Enterprise users still get the added benefit of international dial-in numbers and a 50 user versus 25 user per meeting limit.
The US based dial-in conference numbers work for all G Suite Basic and Business customers for no additional cost. This is awesome news!
We want to highlight that it works great for Canadian organizations too! Most of our customers have flat rate long distance plans in North America so a US based dial-in number is typically of no concern.
If you haven't yet tried Hangouts Meet you're missing out. It's far superior to Skype and even superior to most expensive commercial video conferencing solutions. You can equip your boardroom for high quality video conferencing with Google Hangouts Meet Hardware.
As always feel free to contact us at Interlockit.com with any questions!
Interlock IT is cloud-focused and cloud-centric. We believe it's imperative for businesses and organizations to adopt cloud based solutions simply because this is where the future of technology lies. In the second quarter of 2013 more than half of Fortune 500 companies were paying for Google enterprise products, and some 5 million companies were using Google Apps for Work. Since then, it's become an even more powerful tool with even more users! These companies and organizations have thoroughly recognized the potential and security that Google Apps delivers.
What's happened in the last few weeks in Fort McMurray and surrounding areas is unfortunate. As we know, many thousands of people have been displaced and many hundreds of businesses and schools have been destroyed. What's worse is the wildfires continue to rage and thousands of firefighters remain in battle against the inferno after several weeks. Here is the latest: http://www.alberta.ca/release.cfm?xID=41701E7ECBE35-AD48-5793-1642C499FF0DE4CF
A few minutes is all it can take for nature to claim your life's work. Companies using Google Apps and other true cloud-based solutions understand that their data isn't at risk of being stolen or destroyed by natural disasters like we see in Fort McMurray today. All their emails and other invaluable documents are stored in the cloud for easy restoration in the event of a natural disaster. They also worry far less about data breaches and theft. The concept is simple; if you're like most reasonable folks, you don't stash large sums of cash under your mattress. You more than likely use a bank where your hard earned money is secure and easily accessible. Similarly, Gmail is the world's most trusted email solution with over 1 BILLION monthly active users and counting. User's have the peace of mind knowing their precious data is safe and only a click away.
Google has additional ways of safeguarding your data through The Google Analytics security and privacy principles which include operational security and disaster recovery. This is to minimize service interruption due to hardware failure, natural disasters, or other catastrophes. Google also implements a comprehensive disaster-recovery program at all of its data centers which covers data replication, geographical distribution of data centers, resilient and redundant infrastructure, and a continuity plan in the event of a disaster. Google has you covered!
We at Interlock IT take it upon ourselves to educate technology users of the importance of cloud computing. Uploading your data to cloud based services such as Google Apps is a smart way to ensure you are prepared and protected for the unexpected. Email and communication is terribly important in any industry, so destroyed hardware tends to result in major data and productivity loss. Cloud based users however, can jump to any other machine and retrieve all their work instantly from anywhere at anytime. This mitigates the loss of productivity and assures the continued function of the company.
It's always better to be prepared before a disaster strikes than after. Be sure to contact us to learn more about Google Apps and how we can assist your organization seamlessly migrate to the cloud!
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:
Focus on your business and allow technology to work for you.
Build on a proven hardware stack.
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.
Multiple storage options.
Powerful built-in services.
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.
Interlockit.com is currently the only Custom Integration Xero Development Partner in North America!
Xero provides online accounting, bank reconciliation, and invoicing services and integrates with a wide range of powerful software solutions and add-ons.
We have extensive experience building live integrations between Xero and Google Spreadsheets, credit card payment gateways, FreshBooks, Solve360, and more.
