Google apps, an enthusiastic academic.

The final session this afternoon was from Professor Matthew Collins from York University about using Google apps for research. York, like us is a Google site, using the apps for education suite.

It was a passionate talk. I love listening to academics :-). It was based on the premise that Academics tend to write papers together, and do it quickly. So, they need good collaboration tools. They also process and store lots of data. Cloud services are great for this.

He moved from a Mac laptop to chromebook as an experiment, so he was forced to use cloud services. He has obviously never looked back!

He made the interesting point that all academics use gmail, no matter what you think they're using. He collaborates with academics using docs from many universities, and if they don't have a gmail account from their university, they log in with their personal one. He has rolled out lots of cloud services to academics who loved them.

He pointed out the difficulties of collaborating in other ways, such as track changes in word. His example was 30 authors collaborating on a paper which had to be completed in two weeks, which was successfully done using google docs. Would have ben impossible in word.

I was reminded of something which happened here recently when someone wrote a document in Google docs, asked for comments on it from a group of us, and someone converted it to word, used track changes, and emailed it to the group!!

He also uses Google Plus a lot with closed communities around separate research communities. When this is indexed it becomes a massive collaboration tool.
Some of the tools integrated with Google apps are very powerful. A free GIS tools allows mapping, and a cloud based based bibliography tool, Paperpile, looked particularly good and we'll certainly be investigating it.

He has 1.5m docs on Google drive!! This led to Google stopping his access because they thought he was doing something dodgy.

He has tried other cloud services eg iCloud, One drive, but in his opinion they were not as good as Google.

He's now using it for teaching preferring Google classroom to Blackboard, and
Google slides instead of Keynote or PowerPoint. I hadn't realised how integrated Google slides was with Google scholar, allowing you to select images which you can drag to a slide and it will provide the citation of the origin of the image.

He's also using Google plus for teaching. Students will post stuff there because it's a closed community and not part of their Facebook and Twitter worlds. They engage with it in a way that they won't with Blackboard.

Excellent talk, and some discussion afterwards. Especially liked the question, will Microsoft ever catch up, and his emphatic "no" as a response.



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Graduation Round Up complete with Google Glass

Sorry for interval to blogging - been on my hols to Turkey for a couple of weeks. A bit earlier than we normally go, and as such I missed Graduation Week for the first time in many years. Very disappointed as I always love it - its the culmination of the year, and always brings it back home to me what our jobs are all about.

As usual, we tried to make it as good a day as possible for our students and family and friends, and our creative media team did a great job again. As well as live streaming of the ceremonies, and recording them on USB sticks and DVDs ready soon after the ceremony, we had out famous handshake videos - those few seconds as the graduand walks across the stage that everyone is really interested in. My favourite one was of Alan - famous for replying to the whole list about not having any robes, and starting the hashtag #prayforalan. He got his robes, and graduated to a huge cheer:

 A great moment!

We also had the gigipixel photos available again thanks to our friend Ed from Business Tours UK which are taggable on Facebook.  A new development this year was The University of Sheffield Yearbook, a set of photos taken during the week of students, staff and family and friends, together with their stories - definitely worth a look, there's some lovely stories.

And finally, our Corporate Affairs department showed what you can do with Google Glass - fantastic film:

Fame at last ?

I seem to have made it to the home page of Google's Apps for Edu site, with a quote from my blog. Not sure how long its been there, but its about 2 years old.

Enterprise Google

Went to a session this morning on Google for the enterprise. I know we've been a Google customer for several years, but there was nothing else on I wanted to go to, and I was interested to see how they would pitch it, and whether there was anything new. Good session. Pitched very much at the enterprise customers, and selling points were innovation (200 new features released each year), collaboration, and 24/7 support. Security and privacy obviously covered, and they showed the data centre video - I love the disc crusher!

They did a nice demo of the integrated nature of Google apps, including maps using an iPad and I learned things I didn't know were possible. I also learned that if anyone from Google asks you to go on stage as a volunteer say yes! You come away with the mini iPad they were using. 5m companies worldwide now use Google, including 44% of the FTSE100 and 74 of the top 100 US universities.

Showed a nice video from Ocado on how they use Google.



And they'd produced an app for the conference, and at one point had us all standing up playing golf by swinging our phones. First one to get a hole in one got a chromebook!



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Still here....

Lots of stuff to catch up - sorry for lack of posts. Lots happening both at work and in the evening and just haven't had a minute. Last week we had a meeting about how we're doing on our iTunesU Project. It will be launching in the New Year and we're working with our colleagues in Corporate Affairs to deliver it - looks like being very exciting.

Also saw the results of a study of the different points of contact into the department we have.  Although we might think we have a single interface - the Helpdesk  - the truth is we have many. Some are for good reasons, others could be consolidated. Also a lot of variation in how things are recorded - we are trying to standardise on our helpdesk software, but there are still groups using spreadsheets or inboxes. Lots to look at to both improve services, and make sure as a department we're more aware of our interactions with customers.

We had a meeting with a colleague from janet to review the services we get from them, and how we might work together in the future. Today I found myself being interviewed by janet about their super high definition TV project which was premiered last year. Done a lot of interviews recently - as well as three at the Google/janet event last week, I had a phone one on Friday, and have just been asked to do another. I'm in demand darling....

We got quite a bit of media coverage from the interviews, here, here, here and here ;-)  Not all of the quotes are entirely accurate....

Today was our Service Strategy Board, where we catch up on progress on projects - everyone can look at our news page which is here, and is updated shortly after each SSB. One of the issues we touched on was how to get rid of Windows XP. It won't be supported after next April, and although our managed service is based on Windows 7, there are still quite a few unmanaged XP users out there. Our unified comms project is getting underway, and we're working with Corporate Affairs on redesigning our website. Of course, there are still projects we can't progress because we just haven't got the resources, but we prioritise and deliver as much as we can.

janet and Google announce framework agreement

Today I was at Google HQ in London for the launch of a framework agreement between janet, (part of JISC), and Google Apps for Education.  The agreement will make it easier for Universities and Colleges to sign up for Google Apps by using a model contract which has been approved by janet as meeting UK legal requirements. There's also a detailed guidance note to help Universities which is part of the agreement. There's more information in the press release here.

I was there as we've been a Google client for several years - we went Google in 2007 for students and 2009 for staff, and now have over 56,000 live accounts 15,000 of which are used daily.  We didn't have the benefit of this framework agreement, and did the due diligence and legal checking ourselves.

Today it was interesting to hear from Google and janet about how they see this partnership developing, and to take part in the customer panel with other customers. We were asked why we'd moved to Google  - better service provision, innovation, accessible of all devices including mobile, affordable (free), releases resource to concentrate on more value added services. We also talked about some of the really innovative ways our staff and students are using the full range of apps to collaborate, for learning, for information dissemination and for research. The usual questions about security and privacy and gave the usual answer - know the risks and manage them. It's really not a big issue. Also had an interesting question about the whole ecosystem of cloud based services - it's not just about the apps, but the infrastructure (connectivity, wireless), policies and processes, and support.

Lots of press there, and I did give a couple of media interviews - will look forward to seeing any coverage the event gets. Oh, and Google's offices were pretty good - who wouldn't want somewhere like this to sit in and work?

We're on Streetview

Edward, our friend and graduate who set up Reaxive, has done some sterling work for us photographing our degree ceremonies in very high definition and turning them into taggable pictures on Facebook, and he's also done some Google streetview images  of the interior of the Information Commons.  We were so impressed with his work, that the University engaged him to extend this across the campus. We have a Virtual Open Day in our department of Physics and Astronomy where you can walk around the Hicks Building, and seven other buildings are now open on Streetview.

Today we even made it into The Guardian!

,

Cloudbusting

On Friday it was the MMIT (Multimedia Information Technology Group, part of CILIP) conference here in Sheffield. I was very pleased to give the opening welcome, and as the theme of the conference was "Cloudbusting - Demystifying the cloud", to give a very short overview of our experience of cloud services. So, I did a quick run through of the challenges facing us -
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Consumerisation of IT.

• 24/7
• User interfaces
• Mobility
• BYOD
• User interfaces
• Social networking
• User expectations
• Critical nature of IT

No surprises there! My point was that all of these can be drivers to move to cloud based services, such as our move to Google. What's important is the quality of the service - it isn't about cost cutting. A recent benchmarking exercise shows that our email service is about 70% cheaper than a peer group, which is good obviously, but the real driver should be about service provision. A better service, available and support 24/7, more accessible, more mobile, and more innovative - google can innovate much faster than we can. Which is mainly a good thing, but not always :-)

I couldn't stay for much more of the conference, but the keynote speaker talking about Searching in the Cloud was fascinating.  How do we find all of the stuff that's out there, and a particular issue, how do we link internal and external information. It can also be difficult yo keep track of your own personal stuff when it's outside the boundaries of your local system.  How true!

The University of Google

Exciting session now, our own Andy Tattersall talking about our move to the cloud (Google) and how he's been using it to aid collaboration in an academic department and the shift from enterprise software to Google Apps.
Popular session, almost standing room only.

Why did we go to Google? Interesting to hear this from one of our users. Luckily, Andy's reasons are exactly the same as I would have given :-)
Because they do it better. Our students and staff demand more than we can give them. Data storage, better ease of access, better communication tools, more resilient systems, social platforms, better interfaces. Students were already using google apps.
Staff were using tools like Dropbox. We had small amounts of storage, and a perceived lack of social collaborative tools. Also propriety tools are expensive.
Moved in two phases, students first. More adaptable than staff.
Then staff, no opt out, all moved across.

Andy's journey began before the University's in 2007 by doing 3D sketch up of the library, and started a ScHARR library blog. Then YouTube Channel. In 2010 moved the enquiry desk form to Google Forms. By 2011 when everyone moved he had a lot of experience.

Encouraged department to start to build web sites, more staff can use google sites and blogs for creating small bits of content. A lot of integrated functionality in google apps, - can easily embed docs, calendars, videos etc. into sites.
University still at stage of early adopters, but in front of many. On Gartner hype cycle, we have people on all parts of it, some have reached plateau, some hurtling to trough of disillusionment. Need champions, (nice picture of Graham McElearney there).

Awareness raising sessions in SCHARR include 2 hour hands on workshops, 20 minute bite size sessions, screencasts, webinars and hangouts. Also university wide events such a Making the Most of Google Day.

Need to change old habits, such as moving away from client to Google interface, using Google hangouts for meetings, presenting sessions. Sharing ideas is happening, lots of collaboration going on.
Doing things differently. Will get different results, will make mistakes, but will get better. And as Google moves forward, so will the University.

Interesting in the Q and A, Andy got asked a lot more questions about the use of the apps, different sorts of apps, what happened if apps get withdrawn etc. When I talk about our move, I tend to get asked about the technology aspects, and that old chestnut, security and privacy. A different audience I suppose, and also a very different presentation.

Excellent talk, and it generated a lot of interest.










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Platform Wars

Next up a session on Platform Wars, someone else I follow on twitter, Charles Arthur Technology Editor from The Guardian.

Written a book, "Digital Wars, Apple, Microsoft, Google and the battle for the Internet"
We've had the digital wars, Google vs Microsoft in search, Google won but may be anti-trust issues.

Apple vs MS in digital music. Apple won with iPod. Zune never took off. Came in far too late, just as iPhone coming in.

Google vs Apple vs MS in smartphones. Apple initially won, but huge growth in Android.

Google vs Apple vs MS in tablets. Too early to say who's won because a young market. Changed the way people thought about mobile computing. Tablets will overtake desktops soon, and eventually maybe laptops.

The next war is a Platform War.
Windows used to be only platform that mattered. Apple used to be an also ran. But apple hugely changed what it does and has expanded.
Smartphone will pass PC installed base in 2013.
Platform is a matrix, not just about OS. What about google+, twitter, Facebook, Skype, 3rd party apps. These all want to be on as many things as possible.
Success depends on users, how many, and how many £s per user you get.
Few users, more £s. Niche quadrant. Eg Windows phone
More users, less £s. Commoditised quadrant eg android
Few users, less £s Quadrant of doom eg RIM?
More users, more £s, Quadrant of Dominance eg Apple

Good picture of different apps and platforms



Monetization is a complicate interplay between desktop and mobile. Need to monetise at scale, but hard to do.





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KITs, ICE and satisfaction.

This week has involved a lot of KITs. No, not little cats, but Keep in Touch meetings. Vitally important for building networks, finding out what's going on, and sharing ideas and experiences. I try and meet most of my senior colleagues for an hour once a month, and this week a lot fell together - Coffee Revolution has done very well out of me this week, but I feel slightly high on caffeine!

Monday was spent in a design team meeting for our New Engineering Building, and we all trooped outside to put different cladding samples out so we could see them in daylight - such a lot to choose from, but luckily we were all agreed, and even agreed with the architect's choice. I think the building will look stunning, and although this isn't a very good picture, gives an idea of what it will look like. Of course, the reason we're involved is the amount of student-led, IC type space it will have in it, including group study rooms and creative media pods which will complement what we have in the IC.

Yesterday we had a meeting to discuss the results of a recent staff survey with our senior managers. This was a University wide survey asking a number of different questions about staff satisfaction with their jobs, their department, their management and the University.  It's fair to say the results were mixed, some good, some where there's room for improvement. So, an action plan is being  drawn up, together with some facilitated discussion events so we can better understand the reasons behind some of the answers.

Today I've been taking to the Janet Brokerage Service about our move to Google, our experiences of contract negotiation, and some of the concerns other Universities seem to have. Hopefully they will be able to take the lead in discussions with Google, as they have done recently with Microsoft, to make it easier for more Universities to move to cloud based services.

Starting the week tripping over a cat

Well this week didn't start too well - I tripped over the cat walking down the stairs, hit myself in the face with my laptop, and gave my self a black eye!  Luckily it got a bit better after that. On Monday I was in the last of the workshops that I've been involved in looking at equality and diversity issues in the University.  I've been in a team looking  at staff and student recruitment, and we've set some objectives for the University which go to UEB next week for approval. We've seen some interesting data, the most recent of which used postcode mapping software to look at where we appoint our staff from, and it's very obvious that we only recruit from about half of the city. Hopefully some of our recommendations will address that.

Today I've been with other Professional Service Directors looking at how we can refresh the Strategic Plan, and how we can make it  relevant to more staff. We came up with some interesting ideas, and we'll be working on them over the next few weeks. Rest of the last couple of days have been spent mainly on HR matters and responding to an audit report.

Also over the last couple of days I've been keeping an eye on a problem we've been having with mail. Most of you will know that we have outsourced our mail to Google, and normally we get a very good service. However, over the past few days we've experienced an issue, and what it's demonstrated is how different this is when the solution is not in your control. Luckily the problem looks as though it's been solved, but it has raised questions about how we manage support for such services.

Does the cloud pay for itself?

Next up is Oxford Brookes, talking about making the cloud pay for itself.

How much does the cloud cost?
Consumer view is that its free, eg iPlayer, mail. So, is the cloud free? No, not that simple! Even consumers have costs, connections, data tariffs, devices, etc. So, there is a consumer cost.
Also costs borne by organisations - we provide devices, connections, Janet, hardware, software, people, skills etc. Content is an immense cost.

So, the cost of the Cloud is a lot! But a simple RoI is not the right metric. Need to see it not as a cost, but an investment. Look for business benefits, driven by customer expectations.
Innovation is another key driver. Everyone wants self service, mobile delivery, anytime, anyplace etc.
Carbon reduction targets also important.
Operational excellence, adopt best practice - buy a solution and use it out of the box. In principle can do this with cloud solutions.

Oxford Brookes have gone with Google for staff and students. Are some cost savings, eg licence costs for exchange. Not a lot of savings for docs, hangouts, sites yet. There are other ways of doing most of these things, so they are providing business benefits but not saving money.

Other cloud examples at Oxford Brookes include Moodle VLE  and web content management system. Doing some experiments with virtual desktop on Google Chromebooks. Also have a mobile app, but again not saving money, because not turning anything off. Just providing different way into services.

So, there is a lot of cost efficiency, ease of engagement, innovation, anytime anywhere  etc. Not necessary saving money.

Might be a cost in terms of reputational damage if services go down. Will nearly always be us that take the flack, not Amazon!  Need an exit strategy.

Conclusion - cloud services are probably not saving us money, but are getting business benefits and innovation.

From tomorrow we can Hang Out

It's been a quiet few days - last week I went to help colleagues at another University review their IT strategy, which as always was very interesting. This week so far its mainly been preparing presentations for a couple of conferences coming up that I've been asked to speak at, and a strategic liaison meeting with our Faculty of Medicine and Health.

Tomorrow we are making Google + available to all of our staff and students - It isn't part of the apps for education suite but a consumer product, so it's an opt in service, and we've announced it on our latest monthly newsletter.  We'll be watching to see how much use is made of it.  There's quite a lot of interest in using the "hangouts" for desktop video conferencing. I've tried it a couple of times and am quite impressed with the quality and the fact that you can talk to 10 people at once.

We've also started to redesign our web pages, and the Google+ ones are just the start.

A few weeks ago I posted about our use of social media, including twitter, a blog for our news page, and a newly launched Facebook page. I was therefore interested to see this article today, which a colleague alerted me to via twitter, which apparently showed that the University came bottom in a list of Russell Group Universities in terms of its presence on social media sites. As I know we're not the only department engaging with social media, I found this a bit difficult to understand. So, I tried to look a little more closely at what they'd actually been measuring, and it got a bit harder - there's not a lot of information about what data they collected, how it was collected, or how it was analysed. Still, I suppose if we'd been top, I wouldn't be interested....

SSB, release and business continuity

Given that it's the run up to Christmas, its still extremely busy, and lots of meetings to attend. Monday was our Service Strategy Board, where we discussed a real variety of issues. Google features on most agendas these days as we start to roll out more of the apps, and see more use of it. Google+ has been activated now on the University domain, so we're piloting it with some people in CiCS at the moment, hoping to roll it out in the New year across the University. It will be very interesting to see the response. Those of us who have personal G+ accounts may find it confusing, or may like to see a separation of work and social circles. We will be watching whether it gets taken up in the learning and teaching area.

We also looked at issues around resourcing, especially in the development area - we have many projects ongoing, some outside of our control such as the changes imposed on us by UKBA, others are new projects we need to get on with such as our new portal.

Yesterday I had a catch up with our finance manager to see how our expenditure was looking against the budget, and looking at future financial planning. Also we had a really good discussion internally about how we implement release management into our service and project management framework. Interesting to see how the releases come not just from projects, but from small pieces of work we instigate, and from upgrades etc imposed on us by suppliers.

Today it was the Business Continuity Operational Group, where the main item on the agenda was a paper looking at Business Continuity issues around Teaching and Learning and how the University would deal with both major and minor incidents which might disrupt teaching or assessment.  A really good set of guidelines for academic and professional service departments.

Google+, Libary Clouds and the future of student computing rooms

I spent most of last week doing things I can't really blog about - promotion and regrading meetings, scoring Exceptional Contribution Award cases, that sort of thing, so sorry for lack of posts!

A couple of interesting things happened, which its probably worth mentioning.

Google announced that Google+ is now part of the apps suite. We've already enabled it as part of our test domain, and now we'll be looking at the implications of rolling it out.  I'm particularly interested in how we can use "hang outs" for desktop video conferencing across campus. There will be issues for those of us already using it for our personal accounts, I'm not sure how that will work.

We had a meeting with our colleagues from the Library, who are replacing their existing library management system with a totally cloud based one. They have signed up to be part of the  Ex Libris early adopter programme to implement this next generation of library systems. They hope to migrate fully by summer 2013, and we look forward to working with them on this exciting development.

And finally, one of the sessions I didn't get to at Educause  (there are about 20 parallel sessions so often there's two or three on at the same time I want to go to), was on the future of the Computer Room for students.  As student ownership of laptops increases, and we can virtualise more software, we're often  asked why we provide open access machines. In practice, they are one of our most popular facilities, in the Information Commons there are about 550 available 24/7, many of them pre-bookable, and there is stil huge demand for them.  Peter Tinson attended the session, and has written a really good blog post about it and some of the issues surrounding the provision of student machines, and I recommend a read of it here.

OpenClass

Just had an interesting presentation and discussion about a new VLE just launched by Pearson. It's called OpenClass, and is free! It's totally cloud based and integrates seamlessly with Google apps. It looks very interesting. Easy to use interface, content looks easy to create and upload, and from the student perspective you can create communities, collaborations and share stuff very simply. You can get to your gmail from within it, see your google calendar, Skype students directly and chat. It's available on the Google market place, and in the 48 hours since launch has been downloaded by 500 schools and colleges already using Google apps.

It's attracting a lot of attention, and there's a lot of buzz about it here.

Straight back to meetings..

Back from hols, and the usual trawl through several hundred emails, then straight into meetings. 

Service Strategy Board yesterday, and as well as updates on all of our projects, some interesting discussions. Many centred around our move to Google Apps, and how we can make better use of the app suite, and how it integrates with our other services. For example, we currently run a collaboration suite (uSpace) based on Jive, and given than a lot of the functionality this offers for learning and teaching is now provided in Blackboard 9, and we have Google apps, and our licence runs out next year, it's definitely time to review it. We also talked about the need for a "dropbox" type of service. Many of our staff use dropbox or something similar to store files and synchronise then between different devices, and we need to decide whether to provide something similar, standardise on Dropbox and offer guidance on security issues, or use Google apps. One area where we have already decided what to do involves instant messaging, where we will be turning our current service off soon and moving to Google chat.

We also looked at the relative priorities of improving our reporting mechanisms, Service Orientated Architecture, and a new identity management system. Some concensus that identity managment has the highest priority, but that it's not just a technical issue and will involve a much better understanding within the university of the different roles individuals have and the impact of this on services they can access. SOA also important of course, and we'll be continuing to embed it.

We also looked at how to better manage the transition from a project to an operational service, and there was some differing views about the value of a transtition group - options paper to be discussed at next meeting.

Today I had a really interesting meeting with the Education Officer of the Student Union, about the use of technology in learning and teaching. We looked at how feedback to students could be improved, issues around printing, what new technologies were available especially in teaching areas, lecture capture and podcasting, and how we encourage and help teaching staff to be more comfortable with using technology. very positive meeting, and lots to think about.

This morning we had a CiCS User Group, about 40 of our customers from all areas of the University. Normally we give some presentations of new developments, but this time changed the format and four of our service managers gave an overview of what was going on in their areas. We covered teaching and learning, research and innovation, communication and collaboration and corporate information.

Finally we had a short presentation on our Managed Staff Printing project. We have a target of reducing printers across the University by 65%, and a move of a number of Professional Service departments into newly refurbished accommodation in the Arts Tower which is happening in the next couple of months will achieve a reduction of 80% - not bad!

Collaboration products for SaaS

This session gave an overview of SAAS  (Software as a Service) in the collaboration and social sector looking at the three main players Google Apps, LotusLive and Microsoft Office 365

SAAS is different to software. It's mainly pay as you go, outsourced, only lightly integrated, and configured not customised. Software tends to be the opposite, so they are complimentary to each other. Gartner believes that a hybrid model of a mixture  of in house and outsourced will be around for some years.

Google released Apps Premier Edition in 2007, and this was market altering. IBM and MS have been plying playing catch up ever since,  MS Office 365 not being released until June 2011.  Both are  investing heavily in this area.

Email and web conferencing are the most mature and popular applications in all suites.

Business drivers for moving to SaaS in this area are:
Agility, on line capabilities can be spun out quickly.
Cost savings, especially in education where solutions are free. Also not all workers require rich capabilities provided for example in MS Office
Scalability, eg in  web conferencing  which can be used for large meetings.

Inhibitors are:
Third party data storage may not be in-country
SAAS still a relatively new delivery model and downtime continues to occur, also risk mitigation, laws, etc are still evolving.
SAAS lacks integration with in-house systems and transferring data between in house and cloud systems sometimes leads to data loss esp between MSOffice and Google docs

So, you should look at SaaS for collabotartive tools to gain scalability, to decrease costs, to support disenfranchised users and to avoid or decrease the IT footprint. I was really surprised that no mention was made of offering a better service. It was certainly one of the drivers in our move to Google.

The strengths and weaknesses of the different offerings are:

Google
Strengths - easy to use; low cost
Weaknesses - no web video conferencing, no software counterpart,  its only web so no hybrid solution ; it's missing some enterprise capabilities because it grew out of consumer product
Popular in Education and SMEs

IBM LotusLive
Strenghts - Familiar interface for IBM users
Weaknesses - Missing a portal; Email apps notes and inotes are incompatible; rarely a one to one mapping of SaaS to software
Popular in IBM installed based

MS Office 365
Strengths - Widest application portfolio; integrates with other MS products; Familiar interface
Weakness - can be expensive; Exchange and Office are comparable to their software counterparts, Sharepoint and Lync are not
Popular in education and enterprises

Recommendations
Decide whether SaaS as a delivery model is acceptable
Calculate your internal costs  - which are often not well understood
Clarify SaaS advantages over software
Decide on needed functionality
Segment the user base, decide who needs what. Especially important for MS licensing purposes
Create the migration and deployment plans, including escalation procedures

Quite a good overview of the three products, and interesting to see he differences in decision making about moving to SaaS in sectors which are not Education.



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Google as a Strategic Disrupter

Gartner has analysts who specialise in looking at particular vendors. This morning, early, I listened to Tom Austin, lead Gartner Google analyst talk about Google. Short presentation, but some interesting stuff. Amongst the analysts, Google is viewed as either naive, arrogant or brilliant.
They are definitely viewed as disruptive amongst all of them, along with Apple.

What does that mean? Disrupt as a verb, means to break apart, throw into disorder, to interrupt the normal course or unity of.

Google's drive to defy conventional wisdom is disruptive, and some examples are:
New business models (adsense)
Revolutionary technology (googles infrastructure),
Asymmetric warfare ( google apps)
Head fakes (reshaping wireless). Apparently this is a sports term, meaning to look one way and go the other

They are similar to other firms in these areas:
Worried about cash flow, growth
Threats from security, reliability, privacy, patent claims
Fear of obsolescence
Innovators dilemma, someone more agile coming in and undercutting them

But there are differences in:
Culture
Philosophy
Critical assumptions
Operating model
Business model
Investment approach

The Google operating model is based on the following principles:
Question authority. Don't trust experts. Very analytical. Don't accept conventional wisdom
They don't share everything, like roadmaps. The transparency master lives in an opaque castle. I like this quote. The company that has made the world transparent....
30% of their investment goes into long term projects which they don't tell anyone about until they're unveiled. Rest is short term projects, experiments, upgrades every two weeks. Rapid iteration with hard data and analytics.
Constantly dissatisfied with the way things are.

Their revenue is mainly from ads. Gartner estimates that Google Apps is only 0.5% of total revenue. It is growing but is a very small part of their business.
R and D spending is going up, and Sales and Marketing. They are generating a lot of cash flow and bought 27 firms last year.

Their strengths are Ads, search appliance, analytics, apps, android, cloud development and chrome.

Their weaknesses are antitrust, patents, Office 365 pressure, opacity. There's also the "Google knows best" culture which some see as a weakness.

Google apps are far more capable than the Microsoft office web apps, but inferior to the full suite of Office. But they cost a lot less. So, Google apps cost less, but you get less. That is probably good enough for many organisations.

Google develops what its data says enterprises need, not what enterprises say they need.

Interesting quick overview of Google and their philosophy.

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