Sunday 29 July 2012

Google Apps - Security first

1 in 10 laptops stolen !

Are you still allowing your data to be lost, stolen, mislaid ?
  • 1 in 10 laptops are stolen in the first year
  • 66% of people lose USB keys
  • 60% of those contain confidential information




66% lose their USB data keys.. 



Confidential - Do Not Lose ffs..



With Google Apps your data is replicated in multiple data centres, broken into pieces and scattered under random file names, no single server contains all your data.

Google Apps is independently certified under  ISO 27001
Read more about Security & other aspects of Google Apps
Watch a video about Google's physical security
Read about Google Apps and Google App Engine complete SSAE-16 audit
Read Google's Security White Paper

Friday 27 July 2012

Where Are My Shoes Dorothy ?

aka... Google Fibre - serious bandwidth envy :-)

In his presentation yesterday in Kansas, Product Manager Fibre, Larry Yang joked about his daughter's bandwidth envy... it's not only his daughter <g>. With at least 100 times faster speeds this is next major step in the evolution of the Net. It is seriously exciting (and gratifying) to see Google driving this forward and it is long past time for the removal of the bottlenecks created and perpetuated by the Telcos, Cable companies and ineffectual leadership from the majority of governments world wide.

In Northern Ireland there are pockets of speed, Memeonics is fortunate to be able to achieve, on average, 80mb/sec, this places us in the top 10% in the world speedwise. But 937 ?

Read all about Google Fibre

..take an hour and watch the presentation !






Memeonics speed test 27.07.2012 !  http://www.speedtest.net/result/2086420696.png

We have FTTC, or Fibre to the Cabinet and since we are located less than 500m from the cabinet we can experience faster speeds. Tough for those located 2km away. The signal boost is just that, not a solution by any definition, it falls off over distance.

It seems strange that if the grid system works perfectly well for electricity why some of the 'experts'  did not/do not think of it as the correct means of delivery for real broadband in a largely rural community. Physical fibre itself is one of the cheapest elements. There have been millions spent here in Northern Ireland on broadband and we have a system that will never be able to deliver Gb speeds to the rural population.

14 Electronic Oases (to go please)

Via Project Kelvin we see a Hibernia Atlantic cable landing close to Coleraine and running down through County Tyrone and across the border to Monaghan and then to Dublin. With latency of 55.7 m/s - just 1.7 m/s over the theoretical limit. One would think then it would be logical to take this electronic desert that is much of rural Tyrone and create a series of electronic oases with access to the global backbone. 

Who should pay for the connection or more accurately the connectivity infrastructure ?  Government of course, with proper connectivity delivering a measurable increase in GDP it is so obvious it is almost impossible to imagine.. :-(


Monday 23 July 2012

the email log ninja !

Often the poor Administrator is faced with questions like;-
  • I sent it, it never arrived, Why
  • I'm not getting any mail from blah blah@blah
  • and the ultimate - my email is not working right
Alas Users always seem to see a different screen and attempts to replicate issues often end in failure, this generally brings no credit to the expert Administrator and is often met with;-

"well it wasn't working yesterday"  :-)

Enter the email log ninja !

Email log search gives administrators the ability to sift through the last month of delivery logs for their domains and evaluate message transit. This is useful for tracking down a sender or recipient's missing messages and identifying their route to your users' inboxes.




and also see
Viewing message details with email log search
Interpreting message details with email log search

Thursday 19 July 2012

Editing Documents Offline !!

It will be possible to edit & comment on Documents offline from July 24th with a number of caveats;-
  1. you must be running the latest version of Chrome or ChromeOS and install the Google Drive Chrome app to edit offline.
  2. Offline editing is only available for Google documents at this time. It is not yet available for Google spreadsheets or presentations.

There is a sequence of steps to be followed;-

1. Allow offline access for your computer

see http://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1628469

2. Sync items to view offline
see

http://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1628512


Tip: use offline editing just for documents that you own since any modifications made by the Document Owner have precedence !!

For more information see 
http://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107972