In case you’ve not been keeping up with the debate over ‘net neutrality’ and Google/Verizon’s proposals, here’s a handy infographic summary!
Posts Tagged ‘Google’
Net Neutrality Infographic
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010Google Search Appliances support OpenSearch and Windows 7
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
A while back I posted up some info on using the OpenSearch features of Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 to provide search integration into SharePoint.
OpenSearch is a protocol for easily sending search queries and sharing the search results. Windows 7 and IE8 use OpenSearch to allow external sources of data to be searched directly from Windows as shown in the screenshot below.
![SharePointSearchinWindows71[1]](http://refraction.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/SharePointSearchinWindows711.jpg "SharePointSearchinWindows71[1]")
Personally I think it’s a really nice bit of functionality, it’s something I use all time now I have it. So it’s good news then that a couple of days ago Google announced support for OpenSearch on it’s Google Search Appliances (GSA).
If you’ve not seen these before they’re essentially a server running Google indexing and search that you can plug into your network and use to provide search internally to your business. You basically pay for the number of documents you index.
This new support will allow you to send search queries to a GSA and have the results displayed in Explorer or IE just as shown above.
You can find detailed technical info on the Google site and download the feature on the Enterprise Labs site.
Google Wave for Apps Premier and Domains
Saturday, May 22nd, 2010I meant to post something up about this the other day… it’s just a quick post about Google making Wave available for Google Apps Premier and Apps for Domains customers.
If your Google Apps running on your domain, you can add Wave by going to your admin control panel, clicking ‘Add more services’, finding Wave then clicking ‘Add it now’.
What’s more you can give your Apps users a nice friendly URL for Wave, for example ‘wave.mydomain.com’ in the same way as the other Google Apps. Simply create a CNAME for ‘wave’ in your domain DNS records, then from Admin console, go to the Google Wave Settings page and click the ‘Change URL’ link. Enter in your details and you’re away. (More detailed instructions are available from Google!)
Now if only anyone else I knew used it!
Google Wave
Sunday, December 6th, 2009
I was just reading a thread about Google Wave on Seloc where someone posted this pic – seems pretty accurate to me so far!
There are clearly some very clever ideas in Wave, and I can see some of them being very useful… but will it ever replace email? Not sure to be honest… whilst email is old tech, its strength is that everyone on the internet has an email address, and probably knows how to use it to send and receive messages. Will Wave ever be that ubiquitous?
Giving away the server component is probably a good start, and I guess embedding it into GMail would probably help too. But even with a free server component, how may clients will there be? Will people want to check their email and their waves? I have to admit when I first looked at Wave I wondered if I could set it up to send me an email alert when there was an update… then realised that was probably missing Google’s point :)
Configuring OCS connectivity to GMail and Jabber
Sunday, October 4th, 2009Following on from this weeks release of an XMPP connector for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (how do Microsoft come up with those catchy names eh?), the OCS team have posted some detailed information on the configuration needed to enable communications between OCS, Jabber and Gmail users.
Information on configuring the gateway for Jabber can be found here.
Info on the setup for connectivity to Google Gmail is here.
(Topology images from the OCS Team Blog)
OCS connectivity for Google Talk and Jabber
Thursday, October 1st, 2009Earlier today Microsoft made some interesting announcements around their Office Communications Server (OCS) product.
OCS and its predecessor Live Communication Server have always had the ability to communicate with some of the public instant messaging networks through MS’s Public IM Connectivity (PIC) service. This provided federation between your internal LCS or OCS system and the public Live Messenger, Yahoo and AOL networks. In exchange for a per user, per month subscription of course.
Half the good news in today’s announcing is that from October 1st a PIC license will no longer be required for federation with AOL. Combined with a similar announcement about Live Messenger back in June this means that only federation between a companies internal IM and Yahoo requires additional PIC licenses. Though I’m guessing with MS’s moves towards Yahoo this may not last long either. The good news is that the cost of the PIC licenses has been reduced accordingly.
Alongside this news MS has also announced a new XMPP gateway for OCS 2007 R2. This gateway will allow internal OCS users to add contacts from XMPP based IM systems, share presence with those contacts and hold 1-to-1 IM conversations.
So what’s XMPP? Well its the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. This is the protocol that is used by both Google Talk and Cisco’s Jabber, both of which have been tested by MS. In theory this now means that OCS can communicate with pretty much all the other major IM networks and systems (IBM provide a gateway between Sametime and OCS).
The XMPP gateway is fully supported by MS and a component of Office Communication Server 2007 R2 and is free to download. There’s a video on Channel9 that talks more about the gateway and the resulting architecture (embedded below). You can download the gateway from here:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=141529
Google Voice
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
I just read a good article with some first impressions of Google’s Voice service. It’s worth a read and cover most of the good and bad points.
If you’ve not come across Google Voice (GV) before it provides you with a single phone number that you can link to multiple phones – for example your mobile, home and work phones. When someone calls your GV number all phones ring until you pick one up. GV will also forward text messages to mobile phones.
Through the web interface you can setup groups for your contacts and set behaviours for voicemail etc. on those groups. It also does things like transcribe voicemails.
It’ll be a few months before it’s available here in the UK, but I can’t wait as I have a couple of numbers that I use and consolidating down to one number will be fantastic.
Anyways, take a look at the post here:
Google Moon
Monday, July 20th, 2009To help celebrate the 40th anniversary of the moon landings Google has added the moon to Google Earth.
“Forty years ago, two human beings walked on the Moon. Starting today, with Moon in Google Earth, it’s now possible for anyone to follow in their footsteps,” said Moon in Google Earth Product Manager, Michael Weiss-Malik. “We’re giving hundreds of millions of people around the world unprecedented access to an interactive 3D presentation of the Apollo missions.”
Google Aims for the Enterprise
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
A few months ago I spent a day at Google talking about their products for enterprise customers. Whilst their products at the time were impressive, there were a few key things that I thought were missing, in fact I posted some thoughts here about what I would do if I were them. It seems I wasn’t too far off the mark (woohoo).
As they have posted on their blog today, Google have released a host of new features aimed at luring large companies away from the likes of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.
Over the last few weeks and months there has been support for Blackberrys, Outlook and Offline access. Now today they have announced support for email delegation and mail retention, both features that companies would look for in an email solution. Oh and they’ve taken off the ‘beta’ labels!
So what questions remain? Well there are a few obvious ones like does delegation work with the Outlook integration? Delegation is one of things that most people won’t use, but those that do will be the PA’s of important people who will make lots of noise if it doesn’t work. So you want to make any move of email system as easy as possible, Outlook support would be a big help.
The other gap I can see is in the Unified Communications area. Microsoft have a very good suite of products in the area with Exchange and Office Communications Server, and IBM have a pretty good solution in SameTime. Google Talk – from what I have seen – isn’t nearly as convincing. They have the makings of a wider service, but nothing solid as yet.
The good news for Google is that MS’s Online services don’t currently do a great deal in the Unified Comms space, if you want that you need to go with an on premise solution.
I think I’ve written before that personally I think Microsoft moving Exchange online might be Googles biggest opportunity. By going online MS are validating the cloud messaging model in a big way, and companies looking to move to Exchange 2010 will have to ask themselves whether to go the traditional server route or go online. With Google now supporting Outlook as a client, Google is a legitimate alternative to an online Exchange product.
It’ll be interesting to see what MS do to fight off Google. With Exchange 2010 online and web based versions of Office they have the makings of a great product. But the pricing will have to be very good, Googles $50 a year per user is hard to ignore.
Google App Sync stops Outlook indexing email
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009(Please note the update at the bottom of this article)
If you you’re a corporate user of Google Apps you may well have been playing with the Googles recent release of Google Apps Sync for Outlook.
It’s basically a plug-in for Outlook that allows it to access email, calendars, contacts and global address lists from Google Apps rather than Microsoft Exchange. It’s a pretty big release for Google I reckon. With everyone including MS moving email services into the cloud, if Google can provide the same level of Outlook user experience from Apps as people expect from Exchange (at least for these basic services), it positions Google Apps as a more credible alternative to Exchange Online than ever before.
In practice the add-in seems to work a lot like the Live Mail add-in. Rather than enabling the MAPI protocol on the backend, the add-in extends Outlook so that it can communicate with Google directly (though I should qualify that… I’ve not looked into it in detail, but that’s what it initially looks like).
Anyway… Whilst looking for some other stuff this morning I spotted this KB article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. It looks like Google have been a little cheeky with some of the settings that are configured when installing the add-in. From the article:
“The installation of the Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook disables the ability of Outlook to search the Outlook data. When you install the sync plug-in for Outlook, the sync plug-in changes a registry key. This disables Windows Desktop Search from indexing and providing search functionality for all Outlook data, not just the Outlook data being synchronized from GMail. Because Outlook search relies on the indexing performed by Windows Desktop Search, Outlook search functions are broken.”
Whilst I’m sure that there are sound technical reasons why Google chose to disable the integration between Outlook and Windows Search, the cynic in me does wonder if the Google recommend fix might be install Google Desktop Search :)
Fortunately you can turn the searching back on by changing the registry key back:
1. Click
, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.
2. Locate the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search
3. Double-click the PreventIndexingOutlook registry entry.
4. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
5. On the File menu, click Exit.
(backup your registry, I take no responsibility, yadda yadda!)
Update: It looks like I posted to soon – it looks like Google have released a fix that solves this problem and addresses a few other niggles. It’s really good to see Google and MS working to fix these things quickly. Thanks to @MattBrowne for pointing out yesterdays update from Google!
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