Cloud Assist Blog – Google Apps for Business | Google Search | GMail News

After last week being a bit light on in Google news, this week there has been heaps of good news from the Google camp. On the Cloud Assist front we have been busy as always especially with the website audits. We have seen a great interest in these, so if you haven’t requested one make sure you do! Anyways on with the news.

Google Apps gets Two Factor Authentication – Cloud Assist
Big news out this week is that Google Apps now has Two Factor Authentication! This is really great news for those security conscious organisations who require the next level in security. If you’re an existing Google Apps user who thinks they need it, just contact your current administrator and they can enable it for you. Overall I think this is a really great step forward for Google Apps and for more information about it make sure you read the entry over at the Google Enterprise Blog.

Three million businesses have gone Google: celebrating growth, innovation and security – Google
This week saw the three millionth business choose to use Google Apps as their platform of choice for their mail and collaboration and I don’t see this slowing down any time soon. It is quite interesting though how many people we talk to who are hesitant to the idea, but why? Before you make the decision to go one way or the other, get educated and see why so many organisations have made the jump to Google Apps. Talk to us now!

5 Tablet Offerings Explored, An Infographic – HotHardware
With Christmas just around the corner, one item that will be hot on everyones wish list is going to be the Tablet. So you want an iPad right? Well before you go shopping this Christmas research your options as there will be a number of tablets available and there may be one that suits your needs a little better than the iPad. The HotHardware article is a great visual representation of what to expect from each device. Make sure you check it out.

Fact of the Week: It is impossible to lick your elbow.

Well that’s it for another week. As always have a great week from everyone at Cloud Assist!

Filed under: Cloud Assist, Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Innovative Innovation, Managed Migration, Maximising Mobility, regular, Tech News, Technology by Neil Rutherfoord

And there you have it, almost another week down, but before we wrap the week up we better do our Weekly Industry update. It has been a very busy week for us with staff travelling all over Australia as Google Apps and Search continues to be the hot topic! Let’s get started with the update.

The Feds Australia Goes Live – Cloud Assist
You may have seen this on the blog already, but I thought it would be worth throwing in this weeks update as well. The Feds Australia website designed by Cloud Assist went live last Friday and the feedback so far has been nothing but positive. The purpose of the project was to expand on their existing one page website and for that they chose our brochure website package. This package met all the customers requirements and has provided the business with a platform they can use to expand along side their business growth. Make sure you check out their website at thefedsaustralia.com.au.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9: What’s the fuss all about? – Digital Trends
Just when it seems the browser war may be cooling down it looks like it’s about to heat up again. Internet Explorer 9 will soon been released by Microsoft and it seems it has some new features that will put it back in the ring swinging with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. One of the neat features that I like is that it will utilise your computers GPU to help render pages faster. For those who are interested in the browser war make sure you give the article a read.

Here Comes the New Twitter.com – Mashable
I can’t say I am big user of Twitter as I just don’t have the need, yet… In saying that, I am always looking out to see what updates are being made, and this week as the company plans to integrate multimedia into the stream, Twitter announced a new version of the web client. Further to that, I believe the long term goal here is to take the added features of the third party clients and bring them back to the web client. For more about the upcoming changes make sure you read the article.

Android Will be Number 2 Platform Before 2011, Challenge Symbian by 2014 – intomobile
We’re a little lite in Google announcements this week, so I thought I would cover off something I saw in the market during the week. When I bought my Samsung Galaxy S, I was a little worried by the Android OS but I had read sales were taking off in the US so that helped me in the decision to buy the phone. This week, Gartner released a study that shows Android will be the second largest platform by 2011 and no, iOS (iPhone’s platform) won’t be first. So what does this mean? Well, for me I see companies jumping on the iPhone/iPad application band wagon. If that’s you, you may want to stop for a second and think about where the mobile market is heading and if iPhone/iPad is correct or would an Android app be a better fit, especially with the Android iPad killers hitting the market around Christmas. If you need more information around Android Apps make sure you get in touch with us – cloudassist.com.au

Filed under: Cloud Assist, Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Innovative Innovation, Managed Migration, Maximising Mobility, regular, Tech News, Technology by Neil Rutherfoord

It keeps coming thick and fast today. The Feds Australia have just launched their new website. It was a quick refresh, moving away from their one page site to our five page brochure website where they chose to utilise their existing print as the base design. Their goal was to ensure their site design tied in very closely with their existing marketing efforts, which our team quickly achieved.

Visit thefedsaustralia.com.au now!

This was a very quick and simple project which has given The Feds Australia a good leg up. If you feel your website could do with a quick update or refresh, make sure you check out what we can do for you at www.cloudassist.com.au.

Filed under: Cloud Assist, Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Innovative Innovation, Managed Migration, Maximising Mobility, regular, Tech News, Technology by Neil Rutherfoord

Welcome to the second ever weekly round up. It’s was good to hear positive feedback after the first one. Plenty of announcements this week from around the globe and a couple by us too. So here we go for another weekly round up.

Is your website working for you? – Cloud Assist
If you subscribe to any of our social portals (see Weekly Industry News Update #1), you may already be aware that Cloud Assist are happy to announce we are offering FREE website audits. We all know website aren’t neccessarly cheap, but are you getting the return on investment that you should be? See how healthy your website is by signing up for a FREE audit now.

Google Instant – Google
Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. Google are pushing the limits of technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Their key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type. 

Earthquake-proof your business – Computerworld
The Christchurch earthquake at the weekend and the current floods in Victoria are a timely reminder for IT management to dust off its disaster management plans and ensure they are up to date and effective.

Cloud Computing: The Invisible Revolution – OSnews
While trolling the news sites this week I came across this article about Cloud Computing. Every day I still get asked what Cloud Computing is? I find this really interesting as the term now has been around for a couple of years and we all know what it can do for our/your company. But whats really behind the marketing term “Cloud Computing”? If you have a spare 5 minutes and want to get a better understanding of what Cloud Computing encompasses I highly recomend reading the article.  

Hands on: Samsung Galaxy Tabreview – TechRadar
This week saw the official release of Samsung’s answer to the iPad. Since I received my Samsung Galaxy S last week and so far been nothing less than impressed with the device I was keen to find out more about the tablet equivalent. You will always have you Apple ethuists out there which will tell you nothing comes close to the iPad, but if you can filter through that, so far the feedback has been very good! I’m pretty sure if this device came with a nice little Apple logo , people would be lining up to get one and crying if they missed out. The device has been seen in Australia so expect them to come out soon but in the mean time read the full review here. 

Microsoft BPOS down for 90 minutes; second outage in a month – ZDNet
Unfortunately Microsoft’s hosting suite of enterprise applications has seen it’s second outage inside of a month and once again relating to network issues. We all know in a connected world what an outage of 90 minutes across your whole organistation could potentially cost you! I don’t want to turn this into a Google vs Microsoft piece, but it is a worry when you compare the number. I can’t help to think, is Microsoft rushing to play catchup? 

Fact of the Week
The shortest English word that contains the letters A, B, C, D, E and F is “feedback” 

As you can see a very interesting week in our sector. As always until next time, have a great week from everyone here at Cloud Assist.

Filed under: Cloud Assist, Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Innovative Innovation, Managed Migration, Maximising Mobility, regular, Tech News, Technology by Neil Rutherfoord

Cloud Assist is proud to announce as of today we will be offering FREE website audits so that you can determine if your website is working online for you or not. We all know websites aren’t cheep, but are you getting the return on investment you should be? Find out now!

Sign up for your FREE website audit.

Filed under: Cloud Assist, Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Innovative Innovation, Managed Migration, Maximising Mobility, regular, Tech News, Technology by Neil Rutherfoord

Weekly Industry News – Cloud Assist News
Welcome to the first edition of the Cloud Assist Weekly Industry News update. As a lot of us a very time poor these days and we don’t have the time to be running all over the internet, we have decided to put together an update of the weeks important news to keep you up to speed. We plan to post this every Friday with input from all our team members across a wide range of topics. Feel free to drop us a line with your thoughts/comments on how we can improve it to make it more useful for you.

Social Update – Cloud Assist News
Since we are launching this update we have given our social sites an update. With this we would like to take the chance to remind you of where you can find us on the social web.

• Twitter: http://twitter.com/CloudAssist
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cloud-Assist/109371419091584 (Don’t forget to become a fan to be kept up to date)
• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1085884 (Don’t forget to follow to be kept up to date)
• Cloud Assist Blog: http://blog.cloudassist.com.au  (Tumblr is a great Blogging engine. Join today, and follow us there as well)

Google Postini Messenging Service Enterprise partner – Cloud Assist News
Cloud Assist is proud to announce that we have recently become an Enterprise Partner of Google’s Postini Messaging Services. Along with that, you can now find us on the Google Marketplace. Feel free to leave a customer review as well.

Get Through Your Email Faster – Google
This one would have slipped under my radar unless one of the other guys told me about it. In saying that, I can’t believe there hasn’t been more noise made about it as I can see this as being as big of an  as the spam filter was when it first came out. Priority Inbox automatically identifies your important email and separates it out from everything else, so you can focus on what really matter. It also learns what is more important to you over time. Hopefully it will develop into something quite functional as it’s a great concept. The promo video has a cool tune as well, check it out.

Chrome Celebrates Second Birthday with Sixth Release – The Register
Google is celebrating Chrome’s second birthday by releasing a new stable version of its rapidly evolving browser, offering a slightly simpler user interface, an automatic form filler, and the ability to synchronize extensions and form data across machines… Both Firefox and IE are slowly losing share to Google’s browser. Chrome now stands at 7.5 per cent of the market, with Firefox at 23 per cent and IE at 60.4 per cent.

Augmented Reality Game on Android – Tech News
The term Augmented Reality has been around for a while now. I guess the easiest way to describe it is when the real world and the virtual world collide. This week one of the guys here sent me a link, to a YouTube video of someone with a piece of paper, containing a few dots and had an Android phone. The result was quite miraculous, a game (virtual) was overlayed onto the ‘real world’. I first thought that it couldn’t have been real, that couldn’t really be done with a phone, could it? But it was real, you too can play it now, it’s called ARDefender (you do need an Android phone though). So what’s next? Will we be running around the streets playing skirmish through our phones? It’s not too far away.

Fact of the week: 23% of all photocopier faults worldwide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their bottoms.

Well there you go, edition one of our weekly release. We hope you got something from it and as always we would like to hear your feedback, good or bad. We’re already looking forward to next weeks edition, until then, have a great week from everyone here at Cloud Assist.

Filed under: Cloud Assist, Cloud Computing, Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Innovative Innovation, Managed Migration, Maximising Mobility, Mobile, Tech News, Technology by Neil Rutherfoord