DavePress » google

Google jokes

Dave — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 20:41:01 +0000

One of the things I like about Google is the way they try and inject a bit of humour into what they do. Being funny is a key part of internet culture, and Google’s occasional light-heartedness is a welcome break from other more po-faced tech companies.

Here’s a couple of examples:

1) Recursion

Search for ‘recursion’ on Google, and see the suggested result. It took me a couple of seconds to get it…

2) ASCII art

A real one for the geeks this. Seach for ASCII art on Google and see what happens to the logo…

3) Anagrams

Search for the word anagram on Google, and it offers this suggestion – ho! ho!

4) World Cup

This one came to my attention today via Google’s Matt Cutts, who posted this to Twitter:

And here it is:

Nice one!

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Use Google Docs without a Google account

Dave — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:49:24 +0000

Now, this is small but kinda neat. If you want to show someone how cool Google Docs is, or actually work on a document with someone who uses the service, without them needing to have a Google account, you now can by visiting docs.google.com/demo

Nice one!

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Election day

Dave — Thu, 06 May 2010 07:59:19 +0000

Go and vote.

Oh, and I love Google’s logo today:

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Moving to Google Apps…and surviving!

Paul McElvaney — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 07:48:59 +0000

Dave says: Paul is a director of Learning Pool, and thus my boss. When he offers to contribute a post to this blog, I don’t have to say yes, but it kind of makes sense to do so. As well as being someone who knows how to run a great business, Paul also has an understanding of big IT that I simply don’t, thus he is much better placed to write about this than me!

Everyone knows that Learning Pool is all about collaboration, sharing and saving money.

Over the last three years it has also been all about growing a busy and successful business too.

While most of us at #teamlovely just want to meet customers, sell business and do interesting projects, someone has to make sure the lights stay on and that our growing team can continue to work efficiently, no matter where they were.

A few months ago I realised that at least some of this responsibility was mine. I was sitting in an airport (can’t remember which one) unable to connect to our exchange server.Frustrated, I called our tech team and asked them what was up. They fixed the immediate issue but reminded me that the server we were using was

old;
underspecified;
overworked.

Some joviality along the lines of ‘it should see my diary and see what overworked really is!’ later, I received a quote to replace our internal systems with the latest that Microsoft and Dell had to offer.

The response left me running straight into the arms of Google!

We implemented Google Apps in around five weeks and are using the service for email and documents. In the next few weeks we’ll also be moving to Google Sites, from Sharepoint, having trialled this extensively and successfully.

While the project was pretty straightforward, there were a few things to consider that we would have thought should be just easy:

How do you set up a LAN without an expensive piece of Microsoft kit and associated licencing? – Google have no good ideas about this so we’ve gone with a standard Windows Server workgroup (much to the displeasure of @ianmoran!);
How do you deploy updates to each PC? – answer is that you don’t so you’re expecting all your users to be diligent about keeping their kit up to date;
What about all that historical data? – there are a number of solutions for getting archived email data into the Google cloud. We found a real restriction with our upload speed which made this process a pain we could have done without.

And so to Google Apps…

The Good

Excellent support. The guys at Google listened to what we wanted to achieve and then in a very matter of face way did it;
You can save money. The total cost of ownership of a Google based approach is much lower than a traditional solution. We’ve spent around £6,000 on hardware and licenses. The alternative was a £35,000 project. While we will need to pay an annual subscription to Google, having to pay out less cash has been very welcome;
Collaboration – Google docs just works. Several people can collaborate on a document across the net in real time;
Google works offline – we didn’t really expect it to, but it does!
No more Sharepoint – while I’m sure Sharepoint is a valuable and well built tool, it became the subject of intense hatred at Learning Pool over the last few years. I guess we didn’t invest enough in the initial set up and training. Although my experience is that Google Sites is far better in terms of its ability to enable collaboration.

The Bad

Google is a work in progress. I can pretty much guarantee that if you see something you don’t like, the answer from Google will be “we’re fixing that”. On the one hand that makes me feel better about the approach we take at Learning Pool – I have no doubt some of our customers feel the same frustration. At least we know they are working on it I guess;
Collaboration requires a Google account – I think this will be a seriously limiting factor in the long run, particularly as we work with organisations who are mainly public sector;
We still use Outlook – much and all as we would love to get rid of this, we’re reliant on Outlook for integration with our CRM – something we just can’t live without. No doubt though that Google mail works best in the browser;
Managing PCs on our ‘network’ is now pretty difficult – over time this could become a real overhead but we’re working on it as best we can for now;
Google Spreadsheets – in my opinion this just doesn’t work right now – the functionality isn’t rich enough and its routinely too slow to use and so there’s no way we can leave Excel behind just yet;
Google sites don’t really support hierarchy – this means that all your sites exist at the same level and you need to stitch it together with some html yourself;
Search on Google sites isn’t security trimmed. If a user searches all sites they’ll get documents returned that they don’t have permission to. We did have a bit of a chuckle at how Google have mucked up the search function – they are working on it of course (release due in a few weeks!)

On the whole then I’d recommend Google Apps as a way forward for providing groupware for a small to medium sized enterprise like Learning Pool. We like the idea of software as a service and five weeks into the project, most things work just as well as before and some things work a lot better indeed.

Nice work Google (and the Learning Pool and Konnexion teams too of course!). Kenny, our Head of Tech, has written two posts covering the operational side of the big switch over on the LP blog.

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Buzzin’ enterprise

Dave — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:51:47 +0000

Two interesting viewpoints on Google Buzz and its potential application behind the firewall, within organisations.

Firstly, Larry Dignan on ZDNet’s Between the Lines blog points out that perhaps Google has Sharepoint, not Twitter, in its sights:

The Google Buzz playbook will resemble the current Apps and Docs strategy. Aim Buzz at the smaller companies first since they are the low-hanging fruit. Large enterprises will stick with SharePoint for now until Google makes the ROI case over time like the company currently does with Exchange.

If Google Buzz becomes Google corporate Buzz it could be disruptive. Enterprises could potentially use it to save on Sharepoint licenses. It’s all about the collaboration.

But ReadWriteEnterprise questions how suitable Buzz will be in big organisations:

Google Apps has it own faults to work out, before Google Buzz can even be considered a viable service for the enterprise. The Google Buzz open architecture may be the difference though, creating real opportunities for customers to pull external data into its real-time environment.

It will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out.

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Google and China

Dave — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 23:20:38 +0000

Cripes:

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

via Tom Watson.

Update: Tom has thoughtfully blogged this too.

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From Small Acorns…

Dave — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 13:09:25 +0000

Whilst not quite making me a dotcom millionaire, it was still very gratifying and exciting to get a cheque from Google through the post – thanks to the adverts on LGSearch.

The amount was pretty small, but it pays for all the LGNewMedia hosting, making it a self sufficient enterprise. Very nice.

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Google Groups

Dave — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 20:32:37 +0000

Am pretty impressed with Google Groups, having had the need to play with it for a couple of days.

More here.

Tags: google+groups, lgnewmedia

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Using Google's Apps

Dave — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:28:43 +0000

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY2bpr1TAA4]

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I hate Blogger

Dave — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 09:17:27 +0000

I wanted to set up a free blogging account for a little project I’ve been wanting to start for a while and I thought I would give the all new Blogger a go.

I wish I hadn’t.

I must have just been spolit with WordPress for the last couple of years, because even the latest iteration of Blogger lags far behind. The editor is ridiculously basic (not allowing me to add title text to links, for example) and adding pictures is nigh on impossible.

So I gave up and created a new account at WordPress.com, called Free as in Beer.

Tags: blogger, wordpress, free+as+in+beer

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