Google recently released a Drive plugin for Microsoft Office that allows you to open files from Google Drive directly in Microsoft Office, without the Google Drive sync client. If you're a Drive loyalist who happens to love using Office, this tool can make your life easier!
The plugin makes it easy to edit Office files stored in Google Drive so you can use the apps that you're already comfortable with. This is especially useful when sharing files with others or accessing your files across devices. Google's idea here is to continue to make Drive into more of an integrated storage tool for its users. Alternatively, you can just use Google's desktop application for Drive to sync locally stored files with Google Drive already, but the new plugin makes this a far more seamless experience for Office users.
The set-up is quite simple and familiar: anyone running Office on Windows can now open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents stored in Google Drive, edit them locally in Office apps, and then save any changes back to Drive. This will allow you to keep all your important files in one place, without needing to have a dedicated folder on your computer that syncs everything to the web.
If you have a slow or unreliable internet connection, this plugin can help smooth out the bumps by only syncing what you're currently working on, not everything that's changing behind the scenes.
A common question Google Apps Administrators ask is, "How can I move my old Google Apps data to a new Google Apps account or across domains?"
There are multiple ways of handling this when using Google Apps. Let's take a brief look at a few of them.
Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange (GAMME)
You can migrate email, contacts, calendar, and public folder data from on-premises and some hosted Microsoft Exchange servers. GAMME also allows you to migrate data from a series of PST files and email data from some IMAP servers. You can find more details on how to migrate data from Exchange using GAMME here. However, if you're using GAMME to migrate from one Google Apps account to another, you'll only be able to use it for mail data. [Free]
Migrator by Backupify
Migrator for Google Apps allows you to transfer the complete contents of any single Google Apps account from one domain to another, or to merge all the data in one account with another account on the same Google Apps domain. This migrates Gmail, contacts, calendars, and Drive data. You can also use Migrator to move data between a free gmail.com account and a paid Google Apps account, so if you used a consumer account to "test drive" the Google Apps system but don't want to lose your data, Migrator is your best bet. [$15 per migration - first migration is free]
Google's Data Migration Service
This method is simple and allows you to migrate without having to install any client software. Simply enter some basic information about the environment from which you're migrating, specify what to include in the migration, and select the users whose email you want to migrate. You can even monitor the status of the migration for each user's account in the admin console. Details here. [Free]
You can also move contacts, calendar, and Drive data manually (though Drive data can only be moved within the same Google Apps install automatically; to move it to another domain, use Migrator). It is a bit more time consuming but you can easily see what has and hasn't been moved. Here are the ways to move your data manually: Exporting Contacts, Importing Contacts, Exporting Calendar, Importing Calendar, Transferring Drive Contents.
What about Google Vault? We recommend exporting the contents in MBOX format and keeping a backup either locally or on a service like Google Drive. This will help you reference the information as needed by opening the mailbox in a client like Thunderbird. In most cases, all important data will remain in the user's account and get transferred into the Vault of the destination user when migrating the inbox. Here is how a Vault export works.
Hopefully this has helped you retain your valuable data. InterlockIT has led many migrations and our team of experts are available anytime to assist.
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.
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.
