Tag Archives: Zimbra Inc.

About 1571 days ago Business Software

Cloud Computing: Freedom to Be Productive

Technology is one of the fundamental reasons why today’s small businesses can break through with innovative products, compete head to head with large corporations, and even change the very rules of the game. The modern paradigm of entrepreneurship — fueled by inexpensive and available technology — emphasizes flexibility, responsiveness, and cost effectiveness, enabling small businesses to contend for market position in a way that was not even thinkable just a few years ago. Software provided as a service via the Web — or in the “cloud” — is the quintessence of what small businesses need for their information workers: cost effective, flexible tools that free them from physical dependency and allow for location independent operation and wide scale collaboration. The most common tasks performed by small business employees are definitely related to basic office communications and productivity. Such tasks can now be performed through and incredible array of choices that leverage the software in the cloud model and take advantage of the inherent collaborative nature of the Internet for very low cost, or even for free, offering strong alternatives to traditional desktop computing. E-mail, communications, and personal information management Web mail has been available for many years, but in the recent past has become a complete alternative to traditional e-mail clients such as Outlook, Eudora, or Thunderbird. Web 2.0 technologies have allowed in fact for such tools to offer very rich and complete user experience. Gmail is an appealing solution with its widespread adoption among consumers, more storage than you’ll ever need, full integration with traditional clients, and the unbeatable price — it’s free. Its true power though becomes evident when used in conjunction with the other Google applications, such as calendaring, contacts management, instant messaging, Google Docs and Google Sites. A premium, paid option called Google Apps integrates all these applications around your own domain name and allows for true workgroup functionality, plus extensive customer support for $50/year per user. Microsoft’s Hotmail has been around for as long as I can remember, but in the last few years it has turned into a communication platform actually usable by a small business with success. Now part of Office Live Small Business, it integrates with services such as online storage and your own website. Starts for free and you can add services for tiered fees. The best e-mail based tools though are the ones that allow you to get the best of all worlds: Web mail and client-side e-mail download and fully synchronized, together with online and offline calendars, contacts, tasks, and workgroup-level collaboration.  In this domain, Yahoo!’s Zimbra and Microsoft Exchange can now be purchased as online services with absolutely no technical knowledge required for setup. They’re both fantastic tools, but outsourced MS Exchange services are definitely the most mature and available. The domestic leader in the Exchange as a service offer for small businesses is Intermedia with robust and reliable hosting, full customer support starting at about $10/month per user. Less expensive, but more consumer oriented providers include 1&1 and mail2web that include a free Web-only service with no workgroup features. Office productivity suites In the past few years a new breed of online applications that perform most of the tasks that we are accustomed to perform with Microsoft Office have reached business maturity and are getting ready for prime time. The one that I find to be the most reliable and well featured online alternative to Office is ThinkFree. It has been around for many years now and it offers both a Web-based office application and an identical companion for the desktop that requires no connectivity. The Web offerings are rounded by documents storage services, great workspace collaboration, and smartphones integration. Basic service is free; premium services and products can be added for modest fees. Google Docs is clearly becoming a strong contender. Free, well integrated with its other services, it provides extremely simple interface with native collaborative features: multiple users can concurrently work on the same documents with no chance for confusion. Don’t expect too many bells and whistles though. It’s a solid, collaborative office suite at no cost with essential features. A recent entry in the Web productivity market that has made very good inroads is Zoho. While its services go well beyond the basic productivity suite and extend into teleconferencing, project management, e-mail, and customer relationship management (CRM) and are accessible mostly for free, their products are not exactly ready for robust applications yet, but they are certainly moving in the right direction. Definitely worth take a look.   A number of other Web-based applications designed to make small business more collaborative and flexible are finally reaching maturity. Some examples include file transfer (YouSendIt), intranets and collaboration (HyperOffice, Web Office), and project collaboration and management (Central Desktop and Basecamp.) With the emergence of more and more applications leveraging the low development and distribution costs afforded by the software-as-a-service model (SaaS), small businesses are going to see a growing number of offerings tailored to their needs and responding to their functional requirements much better than what is available today on desktop software. In my next column,, we will explore options for Web-based accounting and financial management. Stay tuned. Andrea Peiro is the Small Business Market Expert at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Founder of the Small Business Technology Magazine, a recognized authority, author, analyst and speaker on high-tech marketing and use of information technology in small and mid-sized businesses, he has been frequently interviewed and featured in such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Inc. You can reach him at us.andreap@gmail.com.

About 1968 days ago Business Software

E-mail Alternatives: Time to Ditch Outlook?

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Perhaps you’ve had this experience: you’re on the red-eye from L.A. to New York. You realize you need to access your e-mail. But you can’t: you’re offline. It will be hours until you land, and you’re stuck. For some companies, this scenario is one of several good reasons to seek out a better mousetrap than Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. Products such as Google’s open source-based Google Gears API, Zimbra’s Suite and Desktop, and IBM’s Lotus Notes & Domino offerings allow users to work offline in a similar environment to their online product. While Microsoft does have offline offerings, they do not have the same functionality as their online product, users say. A seamless transition “What we can offer is a more seamless transition between online and offline,” notes John Kobb, vice president of marketing for San Mateo, Calif.-based Zimbra, which was recently purchased by Yahoo! “You can take it on a plane with you. The administrators are saving the same information on the same server — you can go and access the same information from a different computer,” he notes, whether that computer is an Apple or PC. For small and mid-sized businesses, hosted solutions such as Zimbra’s have considerable appeal, because “you don’t have to deal with storage and backup,” notes Erica Driver, principal analyst for enterprise messaging and collaboration with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. Other reasons to look beyond Outlook and Exchange, says Driver, include: wanting a system based more on open-source standards, preferring to cobble together a “best of breed” email/backup/archiving system to what MS offers, wanting a system not based on Microsoft due to lack of MS skills among workers wanting a system that allows workers to move from computer to computer, including Apples to PCs, seamlessly Zimbra’s Kobb also notes the inherent cost savings in using a hosted system that is a “one-stop shop” for messaging, archiving, and anti-spam/anti-virus protection, as opposed to budgeting each of these separately, either through several hosted solutions or in-house hardware. “The total cost savings could be significant, “he says, noting that Zimbra’s hosted solution runs about $4/month per user. Web 2.0 ready Another consideration is that offerings like Zimbra’s cut their teeth on Web 2.0-based technologies, so it’s easier to link them to blogs, wikis, and other collaborative tools than the older Outlook. “This is a real plus for products like Zimbra and Google,” says Driver. “They have been quicker to adopt 2.0 into their products.” Likewise, IBM’s Lotus Notes is well-known for its collaborative abilities, but is largely an enterprise-class product with a higher price tag. The bottom line: MS Outlook and Exchange is not the only game in town. Keep an eye on these alternatives– they may be a way to save your business time and money. SIDEBAR: Email Alternatives to Watch Zimbra offers hosted solutions featuring email, anti-spam/anti-virus, archiving, and collaborative tools. IBM Lotus Notes & Domino offers a range of desktop options, including calendaring, email and collaborative tools. IBM also offers a range of archiving, security, and other solutions. Google Gears API offers open-sourced based browser extension; easy to customize with additional functionality.

About 1999 days ago Setting Up a Website

2008: What a Mashup!

This is the time of year when all sorts of predictions appear on old media, new media and not so new media alike: from what’s going to happen in the Presidential elections to what energy sources will replace oil and how much closer mankind will actually be to getting to Mars. Not to disappoint all my wonderful readers, here are the technologies that will be hot for small businesses in 2008. Writing about the future of technology is actually a cozy tradition for me, and this year it is my privilege to do it on IncTechnology.com. 1. Web 2.0 collaborative applications Small businesses need better, low cost and easy to manage tools to work collaborate within the company and to pool together resources across multiple businesses to better tackle large jobs. In 2008 you will see a proliferation of online tools that will make things a lot easier. Web 2.0 based applications are software tools accessible via any internet browser and are natively well suited for collaborations. A new crop of developers is taking full advantage of this capability to create great things, sometimes even offered for free! Office productivity suites that allow multiple users to work together, share information and collaborate in real time such as ThinkFree and Zoho. Project management tools such as Basecamp Messaging, communications and collaboration environments such as Zimbra and HyperOffice Don’t you think for a minute that the big guns like Microsoft and Yahoo, that have steeply increased their attention for the needs of small businesses in the past few year (see Yahoo! acquisition of Zimbra and Microsoft’s upcoming Office Live Workspaces) will just sit there and watch.  So expect a lot of competition for your attention and lots of low cost ways to leverage the web to collaborate. 2. Cached Web applications Ok, so what happens to all these wonderful Web tools if you cannot connect to the Web? Expect many of these applications to launch an offline “companion,” software that runs on your computer and replicates the online functionality. Wait a minute, what’s happening here? Software goes online and online applications go offline? Yes, that’s right. Traditional software is here to stay, but the new demands of the market are imposing more and more to make software available concurrently as a service and as a locally stored application, frequently with automatic synchronization of data files between the online and local storages. In a sense, Microsoft pioneered the concept at a Local Area Network and VPN levels with MS Small Business Server and Web Outlook . Now the concept is going mainstream and “on the Web cloud.” Expect tons of Web applications to come with offline companions or to work in “cached mode” without requiring Web connection; and expect more and more desktop software to become available as a complementary service, part of the software licensing fee. 3. Mashups Mashups are Web applications that derive data from different sources into one integrated tool. A popular example of a mashup, cited by Wikipedia, would be to combine the cartographic data from Google Maps with real-estate listing from Craigslist to get a new Web service that provides location information to those listings. Consumer mashups are becoming quickly popular, like iGoogle, mapmyrun.com or housingmaps.com. Expect the development of business applications that leverage this concept and bring you the best of all worlds. Currently the most common type of business mashup is the dashboard. There are tools like Serena that allow building mashup-based applications on the fly. Yahoo! has Pipes and Microsoft and Google are in beta testing with Popfly and Mashup Editor, respectively. Expect in 2008 many pre-developed mashup services bringing together your most commonly used business Web services. 4. 3g network connectivity Wireless operators are in full swing with the deployment of their 3G networks, offering data and voice connectivity almost anywhere at the sped of entry-level DSL. 3G data cards are almost free with contracts, all-you-can-use plans are as cheap as $30 per month and reliability has gone up to very acceptable levels. Watch for more and more laptops to come outfitted with wireless WAN cards. The technology is ready, the price point is affordable and the convenience is unparalleled for mobile workers. 5. Online data backup Internet connections are becoming faster everywhere and backup software is becoming smarter and cheaper. A new set of inexpensive online backup solutions that really work is emerging targeting small businesses. Some even have unlimited storage for a fixed fee. Online backup maybe a bit more cumbersome to setup and manage, but ensures a very high level of data protection. Check out some of these: Live.Skydrive.com, Xdrive, Carbonite, MediaMax, eVault, and Box.net. Surely one of them will meet your online backup needs. 6. Biometrically protected notebook computers Fingerprint readers and data encryption software will become very popular in 2008, as the technologies are mature and the costs have gone down. Look for tiny fingerprint readers on laptops and keyboards that unlock the computer instead of passwords. Also look for full hard disk encryption to become much more popular to safeguard the privacy of your data: Microsoft has made available BitLocker on Windows Vista Business and Premium versions. A good, easy to manage alternative is PGP. And what after that. Other technologies that in the next few years will land on the lap of American small business include: 4G mobile telephony Fully IP switched data/voice wireless networks that will deliver ultrafast connections to any mobile device. That is how small businesses will go online in a few years. Keep your eyes on Google. In-text advertising The new frontier of contextual advertising is in-text. Vibrant Media is the leader in the space, but look for more to start playing. RFID It is taking time for this new and initially costly technology to take foot, but the pressure of large supply chains, such as Wal-Mart Stores is forcing the adoption. Watch for RFID tags to appear on all sorts of retail goods. We’ll see at this time next year if I’m right! Andrea Peiro is a recognized authority, author, analyst and speaker on high-tech marketing and use of information technology in small and mid-sized businesses. He has been frequently interviewed and featured in such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Inc. He can be reached at us.andreap@gmail.com..