Awesome Apps for FREE*

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

We don’t like to get involved in politics, but here is a comparison of the policies each of the main parties in the current 2010 Australian election are standing by.

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

What all Gmail users have been eagerly waiting for – Rich text signatures within Gmail.

On the 7th July 2010 Google released rich text signatures that now allows you to add your own formatting, images and links to your email signatures.

Businesses can now add company, association and partner logos, also links to their website and professional networks.

How to Create your signature:
In your Gmail account, go to ‘Settings’ then the ‘General’ tab. The new rich text editor is in the signature section. Edit the formatting for your signature as you would like it to appear adding any formatting, images and links you would like included on all outgoing messages.  Click ‘Save changes’.

If you have configured your Gmail account to also send mail using the Send mail as/custom ‘from’ feature, then you can now also have a unique signature for each these other addresses that you’ve added to your account.

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

All of us at Cloud Assist are enjoying the real time collaborative typing in Google Docs. June is the month of graduations and new beginnings for millions of students around the world. The Google Docs team is also continually learning and we’re happy to announce that the new documents and spreadsheets editors have both graduated. 

Documents
Beginning today and rolling out over the next couple of weeks, all new documents will be created using the new documents editor. Docs already created using the older editor will remain there. We will be sharing more information on how to move those documents to the new version soon. 

The new editor was built for faster real-time collaboration, better imports, and more control over your document’s layout. Since the preview, we’ve added lots of features including a table of contents, a special characters dialog, a dictionary, search as-you-type, and re-sizable images. You can learn more about the new document editor here.

Spreadsheets
The new version of spreadsheets is available as the default to everyone starting today. Since thelaunch of the new spreadsheets, we’ve added a lot of new features, including formula highlighting, sheet dragging, sheet menu, faster scrolling, an editable formula bar, and autocomplete in cells, copy sheet from one spreadsheet to another and range sorting.

GoogleLookup and spreadsheet gadgets, which will be added to the new editor shortly, can still be used in the old version which can be accessed by clicking on the “Old version” link in the top right of any spreadsheet. The old version will be available for a few more weeks..

Thanks to everyone who has tried out the new editors over the last couple of months. Your feedback has been very valuable as we prepared to make it available to everyone. The new editors also let us develop new features more quickly, so let us know what you think on the forums.

Finally, there’s also good news for Google Apps customers: these new editors will become their default soon as well. We’ll begin activating the new editor for documents on June 21 and for spreadsheets on June 30.

Source: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-google-docs-graduates.html

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

Since the launch of Google Docs drawings, we’ve been excited to see you not only create really impressive and useful drawings, but also actively share them with the world. In order to make it easier for you to share your drawings, we’ve added drawings to the Google Docs template gallery. Sharing via the gallery gives you categories, ratings, and even usage counts for drawings you’ve submitted.

Here are a couple examples of drawing templates currently in the gallery:

Some other examples already available include a coin puzzle, a series of United States maps, a business model example, isometrics, a floor plan, and an interactive learning object.

Go check out the drawings in the gallery, and please submit your best drawings to the public, so that everyone can easily take advantage of your hard work. And, let us know if you’ve made something that will blow our minds, and you’d like us to feature your drawing here on the Google Docs blog.

Source: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/06/share-your-drawings-with-google-docs.html

Filed under: regular by Neil Rutherfoord

On Tuesday Google announced the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content they’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.

Some background for those of you who don’t build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you’re not searching the live web. Instead you’re searching Google’s index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need. (Here’s a good explanation of how it all works.)

So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, we’ve built Caffeine. The image below illustrates how our old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

We’ve built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it’s a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.

Filed under: regular by Neil Rutherfoord

Cloud Assist are delighted to announce that we are now a Gold Member Partner with Kentico. 

Filed under: regular by Neil Rutherfoord

Released on 5/20/2010

Some 24 new themes have been added to Google forms for subjects such as weddings, book reports, contact forms and parties.

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google forms

How to access what’s new:
In your Google Docs list, select ‘Create new’, then the ‘Form’ option. When editing the new form, click the ‘Theme’ button at the top to see all the themes available.

For more information:
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-themes-in-google-forms.html

Filed under: regular by Neil Rutherfoord

Released on 5/26/2010

New features in new Google documents editor now available

- Faster find
- Headings in the toolbar
- Bookmarks in the link dialogue

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Docs

How to access what’s new:
- Faster find: Press Ctrl+F (⌘+F on Macs) to see a dropdown box where you can type the word or phrase you’re looking for in your document. As you type, all the matches in the doc will get highlighted and you can press your’ enter’ key to jump to the next match. For more advanced options or to replace text, access the ‘Find and Replace’ dialogue from the ‘Edit’ menu.
- Headings in the toolbar: Paragraph styles have been added to the toolbar to quickly apply formatting changes to your text.
- Bookmarks in the link dialogue: If you’ve added bookmarks to your document, you’ll also see these bookmarks as options when you create a new link.

For more information:
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/05/faster-finding-and-other-document.html
How to enable the new editor

Filed under: regular by Neil Rutherfoord