Chromebooks and centralized management of devices

We've mentioned in past blog posts that we're well-equipped to tackle anything we might need with nothing more than a web browser and a laptop. So why bother spending hundreds or thousands of dollars outfitting the team with laptops that will only run a web browser? Why not invest in smaller, cheaper, faster laptops that are designed around a suite of web-based applications? That's where Chromebooks come in.

Google's Chromebook Pixel

Chromebooks can boot to the desktop in less than 10 seconds, automatically update on their own, include built-in virus protection, and integrate very tightly with the Google Apps suite. If you're already using Google Apps, it's the perfect laptop for your sales team that uses email, calendar, contacts, Solve360 CRM, Google Drive, and more. Chromebooks can even edit Excel and Word files for no additional cost.

If you still need to run Windows-exclusive software, install one of many RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) clients from the Chrome Web Store and connect to a Windows Terminal Server or Windows desktop computer.

Add in the Chromebook Management Console and you can manage thousands of Chromebooks from your Google Apps admin control panel to make your life even easier. You can configure wireless networks so users are up and running as soon as they log in, allow or block guest access to the machines, and much more. By design Chromebooks are encrypted and highly secure, and since all your data is stored in the cloud, users can pick up any available Chromebook and be productive in seconds.

A Chromebook even works great offline for drafting emails, managing appointments, and editing documents.

The best part is, as always with Google, the price. Chromebooks start from as low as $249 CAD and a one-time license for the management console costs just $161 CAD for businesses or $32 CAD for education users, available from us here at InterlockIT.com.

How Google Apps for Business Turned Cobblestone Into an Even More Efficient HR Machine

Employing client-tailored solutions that are unique in a crowded marketplace, Cobblestone Human Capital is a recruitment and HR optimization firm trusted by some of Canada’s top employers, Fortune 500 multinationals and companies across North America and in Europe. Empowering clients with tools, knowledge, experience and support, Cobblestone (www.cobblestonepath.com) drives the success of diverse organizations by helping them to recruit top talent and efficiently manage their human resources at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.

Information Technology (IT) is a critical part of what they do.

Being highly experienced, knowledgeable experts, Cobblestone’s employees operate independently and remotely, yet still function as a team to deliver the various components of any HR mandate. Keeping a widely dispersed staff continually in the loop demands both real-time access to information and easy contact with each other.

The Dark Ages

Unfortunately, this demand was increasingly not being met. As Cobblestone’s business grew, so too did the strain on their antiquated backend systems.

The company’s technology was old school. Server-based applications, individual user licenses, constant IT fixes: not a cloud in sight.

Specifically, managing client information was a chore. The team accessed their CRM via virtual private network (VPN), which led to constant delays and lost time. Giant headaches were the norm, usually caused by repeated banging of heads to walls. It was such a hassle accessing the shared server that staff sometimes didn’t enter key information in a timely fashion. As you can imagine, for a client-focused business like Cobblestone, incomplete or inaccurate CRM is deadly.

Furthermore, the CRM required individual licenses specific to each employee’s operating system. Not only was this costly, it required constant IT supervision. Not a week would go by without a service call from an IT specialist to fix the latest glitch.

And nothing talked with anything else. Client management, invoicing and accounting, all handled by standalone apps, sat in separate silos. So huge amounts of time were wasted shifting between each system and trying to ensure consistency across them.

IT had become a constant distraction. It was affecting business relationships and the bottom line. Staff were fed up with inefficiencies that were making business and project administration more challenging than it needed to be. Something had to give.

The Clouds Part

Being an HR shop, Cobblestone’s leaders listened to their team. They recognized that growing the business while continuing to deliver maximum value to clients warranted a complete rethink of their IT systems.

Cobblestone expertise lies in HR & recruitment, not IT. Of course, its people have a firm grasp of the technologies that can power an effective backend. But when it comes to implementing specific solutions, they knew it was critical to turn to outside experts.

Enter Blair Collins at Interlockit.com. His task was to pick up where Sheepdog (a cloud computing consultant) left off. He worked to help Cobblestone redesign their IT systems, with a goal to streamline all their processes, from CRM to communications, to invoicing and accounting.

Blair worked with Cobblestone to build on the foundations of Google Apps for Business deployed by SheepDog. This provided the platform through which various applications now connect and work seamlessly together. He also made informed recommendations on which third-party apps to consider for managing sales prospects, billing clients and keeping track of finances.

Thanks to Blair’s good work and sage advice, Cobblestone’s operations now hum along nicely:

• Team members connect through conference calls within Google Hangouts.
• Incoming calls, including those to the toll-free number, are routed through a VoIP system.
• And through API connections and single sign-on, Cobblestone’s Google Apps link to its other cloud-based applications: Solve360 for CRM; Freshbooks for invoicing; Xero for accounting; and Compas for ATS.
• A change made in one application is immediately communicated to and reflected in other relevant apps. So for example when a client pays an invoice, the CRM and accounting data gets updated accordingly, and notifications get sent via email to the right team members.

Critically, the ancient server got the boot. Everything has moved to the cloud, ensuring that information is accessible in real-time, wherever and whenever needed.

And just as importantly, costs have dropped significantly. It’s less expensive to use Google Apps and other solutions than the old system. And with the efficiencies made possible by the change, team members spend less time managing information and more time on servicing clients. Cobblestone can in turn pass savings on to clients, who benefit from rates up to fifty percent below the competition’s.

All in all, these changes have given Cobblestone the edge it needs to focus on delivering HR and Recruitment value to clients.

Case Study in Google Doc format

Customer case study: Google Apps and Xero work together to drive efficiency

At InterlockIT.com, we're Google Apps Resellers with a CPA on staff who noticed that there was a distinct lack of integration between accounting software (specifically Xero) and the wonderful collaborative features built in to Google Spreadsheets. We wondered if there was a way to maybe get the two to work together...

We built our powerful Xero reporting engine called Blink Reports to give users a faster and easier way to produce financial spreadsheets and reports from their accounting data. What we've learned along the way is that we can do so much more with the new Google Spreadsheets and Xero than we ever imagined was possible.

TargetCW is a leading provider of contingent workforce services across the US and overseas. Their corporate Kaizen philosophy of continuous improvement applies to their accounting and financial processes too. Xero recommended that Ryan Anning at TargetCW test out our Blink Reports for Xero reporting engine to overcome the limited number of columns that are normally shown on the profit and loss statement. Ryan's goal was to produce a revenue and cost analysis by worker which requires a report with more than a few hundred columns! It turned out that his need was so unique that initially our Blink Reports engine would produce an error due to waiting too long to receive the data from Xero.

On a standard profit/loss report, it's unlikely that you'd need such a wide spreadsheet, and indeed Google Sheets has traditionally had a 256 column limit. Thankfully, with the new version of Google Sheets (now the default), this limit and a number of others no longer exist. Need to generate a huge 100% cloud-based spreadsheet, with up to 2 million cells and the share it securely in real time with others? Not a problem. Google Sheets will do it for you right from within your web browser.

The technical side of how we fixed Ryan's challenge is quite clever, but we won't go into too much detail here. Mainly, we're using Google App Engine to handle all the hard work between the user's Google Spreadsheet and their Xero accounting data. Due to the flexibility of Google App Engine we were able to adapt our code, test it live without impacting existing Blink Reports users, and then make it the production version with zero downtime.

The solution means that Ryan can now generate large reports like the one you see below (click to enlarge). Note the columns stretch all the way to KJ—representing nearly double the original column limit—and it will continue growing as needed.

Xero's built-in reporting engine has good functionality, but when you need to analyze the data in a spreadsheet you're forced to export the report to Excel or Google Sheets format. This leads to static financial data that becomes quickly out of date. To put it bluntly, Xero simply cannot generate reports to rival what we can do on the Google Cloud Platform with Google Sheets.

With Google Spreadsheets and Blink Reports, all of a sudden you can review this month's revenue and expenses by worker, then change two date fields and see a different month (or even year) for comparison.

Offloading the pain of financial reporting to Blink Reports from Interlockit.com means that Ryan at TargetCW can now work more quickly through his finances and focus on the things that matter: generating business instead of generating spreadsheets.

Microsoft Azure vs. Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)

In our increasingly cloud-based world, it can be difficult to work with more traditional client- or server-side tools to do what we need. At Interlock IT, we're well-equipped with nothing more advanced than a web browser and a laptop for day-to-day work, but sometimes we just need that little bit of extra horsepower.

So, what to do? Well, we could spend thousands of dollars building our own workstations and servers, but why not leverage the cloud once again? A couple of years ago, we started using Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service; a central part of their Amazon Web Services infrastructure. AWS powers a host of websites, services, and more that you probably use every day—including, notably, Netflix.

EC2 allows you to get servers up and running in an Amazon datacentre fairly quickly and relatively painlessly. But even Amazon, for all their consumer-friendliness, hasn't managed to make it quite easy enough just yet. Setting up a new server takes many steps, including opening ports, setting security groups, assigning storage blocks (and choosing which type you'd like), and more. It's a lot of initial setup work, but once you're up and running, it just works.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has been steadily building out it's own Azure cloud platform since it launched in 2010. While Microsoft's service is a little younger (Amazon had a four-year head start with EC2), it meant that Microsoft could take a look at what Amazon was doing and set up their service a little bit differently.

Instead of having to wade through fifteen menus to get a new server up and running on Azure, there's five simple screens that ask you for a bit of information to set up your server, and then Azure does the rest.

I've done this repeatedly over the course of the last few months since we started using Azure and can get a new server up, running, and connected in less than five minutes. It's great!

To make things even better still, if you pre-pay your Azure account, the system can track your daily usage and forecast what your bill will be at the end of the month. No more worrying if you're going to be stuck with a huge bill at the end of the month.

We've switched most of our Windows cloud server needs to Azure because we find it a more powerful, easier-to-use option than Amazon's venerated EC2.

Google Docs merging with Norada's Solve360 CRM

With the introduction of add-ons to Google Docs and Sheets last month, Google has greatly simplified what used to require the manual copying and pasting of Google Apps Script code.

Our most-often recommended CRM product, Norada's Solve360, has now introduced their own add-on for Google Docs that allows you to create merged documents and labels from records that already exist in your Solve360 database. We've tested it, and it works very well, with a couple of caveats. The biggest is that you can't create a form letter and mass-email it to your contacts; you can only email a merged document to an individual contact. Additionally, the merged document is attached to an outgoing email as a PDF.

Before you can start merging, you have to lay the groundwork for these new features. If your Google Apps domain is on Scheduled Release rather than Rapid Release, you'll need to manually enable add-ons for your users through your admin control panel. Next, either search "Solve360 CRM" in the add-on store or click this link to open the add-on's page. Click the  button in the top right-hand corner of the page, follow the prompts, and the add-on will be installed for you, though it could take up to an hour if you're adding it to an existing document.

Note that add-ons are installed on user accounts and are not domain-wide; if you want all your employees to have access to this feature, they each need to enable the add-on.

Most often when you're merging from a CRM to generate a document, it's some sort of form letter that is semi-personalized for multiple recipients. In this case, you'll need to change the first drop-down box in the add-on control panel to "set of documents" from its default, "documents". (If you want to create a single form document, feel free to leave this setting at its default; Norada has some great help docs here that you can follow.)

This feature works best if you use Category Tags to separate your contacts into appropriate groups. For this example, we'll use our "Customer-Google Apps" tag:

After clicking "Load records", we're presented with a brief summary of the number of contacts (in this case) that we'll be merging. You can see that our category tag contains 206 contacts that match the tag "Customer-Google Apps".

Switch back to your document and write out your message. Make sure that you write it in such a way that you can simply drop your Solve360 fields in place using the "Insert fields" button to insert the appropriate Solve360 fields into your message, like the document below.

Click "Create document" and wait for the system to chew through all the records (it could take a little while). You can now view the merged document in Google Docs or download it as a PDF. To send multiple messages, open the merged document in Google Docs, select the first merge, and copy and paste it into an email.

Google Docs and Sheets add-on functionality will only grow as the services become more full-featured, so if there's something you want to do with Google Docs that you couldn't in the past, check them out.

There are already dozens of add-ons available and they've only been around for a month!

The Heartbleed bug and why a secure password matters even more now

In early April 2014, a huge vulnerability was uncovered in a cryptographic software library used by an estimated two-thirds of web servers currently in use around the world. This vulnerability allows an attacker to request data from the memory of any server that uses OpenSSL and potentially read unencrypted passwords, confidential or sensitive information, e-mails, or anything else the server happens to return.

According to Ars Technica:

The leak is the digital equivalent of a grab bag that hackers can blindly reach into over and over simply by sending a series of commands to vulnerable servers. The returned contents could include something as banal as a time stamp, or it could return far more valuable assets such as authentication credentials or even the private key at the heart of a website's entire cryptographic certificate.

Just how bad is this bug? Mark Loman, a malware and security researcher at SurfRight, tested a few public servers after hearing early reports of this bug and noticed that plain text usernames and passwords were being returned to him by Yahoo Mail, one of the world's most widely-used webmail services. Further investigation showed that Flickr, Tumblr, and a number of other Yahoo properties were vulnerable, potentially exposing millions of users to account compromises.

Mark posted a pair of screenshots to Twitter that show account credentials in plain text (see below). Mark courteously obscured the usernames and passwords affected, but it's not hard to imagine other people being somewhat less polite.

Tell me the truth, doctor, how bad is it?

On a scale of 1 to 10, the general consensus is 11. Remember, the servers involved have potentially been leaking their private security keys which means anyone can 'fake' being them, and you'd have no way of knowing for sure.

What does this mean for me?

If you're a systems administrator who controls a number of servers, it means lots of work to get everything patched and authenticating properly again.

One option is to start using a password manager. So many web servers use OpenSSL that it's likely some service you've encountered at some point will be compromised. Limit the attack vectors to your accounts by using unique passwords, and even if someone gains access to that forgotten account you set up once, they won't get access to that important account that you use every day.

Also use two-factor authentication wherever you can. Two-factor authentication protects you even in the event that someone does manage to get your password by requiring a second, randomly-generated "token" that expires every 45 seconds or so to allow you to access your account.

Thankfully, if you use Google Apps or Microsoft Office 365 you're safe. Microsoft doesn't use OpenSSL and instead relies on its own encryption mechanism and Google Apps/Gmail has been using forward secrecy since November 2011. Google is patching other services affected by the Heartbleed bug, but it never hurts to change your password regularly.