15 April

Keeping your feet on the ground (when your head is in the Cloud)

 

At the end of February 2009 Google's email service suffered a well-publicised crash, locking thousands of users around the world out of their accounts for over two hours.

 

While this crash perhaps wasn't the major catastrophe described in this Financial Times article, when it mentions the "downside to not keeping applications on the PC's hard-drive" the FT raises an important point for anyone thinking about moving their vital data into an online environment (such as a Trovo Online Office).

 

The Internet has become a great deal more robust, and also more ubiquitous, over the last decade, but it is still not without its faults (as my friend who has been waiting over a week to have a new broadband account connected to his farm would testify). If you're using the web to watch repeats on BBC IPlayer or to download music then such outages are merely (very) annoying... But if you're depending upon a web connection to get vital work done they can become expensive and can even cause complete business catastrophes.

 

The need to not become over-reliant on a functioning web connection has been recognised by Microsoft, however, and this forms an important distinction between their Office suite and Google Docs: Microsoft Office is designed to be run on the desktop but has the capability to interact with data stored online, whereas Google Docs is a pure "Cloud-based" application run from the web via a browser. (And it will remain so until Google Gears drags itself out of Beta).

 

Even though MS Office is not dependent upon a functioning web connection (or indeed, functioning server farm) to work, you can still fall foul of Internet outages if your only copies of important documents are kept online and you can't get to them when you need them, however. At Trovo, we keep all our most important information in our Online Office, but by doing that, aren't we risking periods of inactivity and missed opportunities should the web disappear?

 

Well, no we aren't, because we have Outlook 2007. Outlook 2007 allows Document Libraries in SharePoint / Office Live (which is the system our Online Office runs in) to be synchronised with the hard-drives of our local desktop machines. This means that copies of the documents in our Online Office are also stored locally and made accessible via a folder in Outlook. It also means that Outlook will check the Document Library to see if changes have been made to any of the documents since the last synchronisation. If it finds any modifications have been made, it then downloads the latest version of the document quietly in the background.

 

How difficult is this to set up? Well – if you have an Online Office and a copy of Outlook 2007, it's very easy. All you have to do is visit the Document Library you would like to synchronise with Outlook, and (with Outlook open and running in the background) select Actions > Connect to Outlook (shown below).

 

 

If you are using Vista you will then be asked if you're happy for the Online Office to launch a program. Click Allow and a dialogue box will open in Outlook asking if you're sure you want to connect to the SharePoint library, so click yes. (Aside: people often complain about all these warnings and dialogues in Vista and Office 2007 – but personally I like to know every time my computer tries to download a load of files from the Internet, even if I did ask it to do so myself...)

 

Outlook will then synchronise with the Document Library and download a copy of every file in the library to a new folder specially created for the purpose (so it's best to synchronise with Outlook early in the lifetime of the Document Library before there are hundreds of documents in it). The new folder and list of documents are then available via Outlook (as shown below) and can be accessed even if your Internet connection drops out.

 

 

Even though synchronisation of documents is all handled automatically (i.e. Outlook checks for changes and keeps them up-to-date every time it sends and receives mail), connecting a library to Outlook is not without its issues, however. Chief among these is security: one of the key advantages of an Online Office is that it stores all your important (and often confidential) files away from local machines, meaning they can be accessed from anywhere without carrying them about (on a USB data stick, for example). Connecting a Document Library to Outlook breaks this clean security model, though, as it means copies of files start to spread onto everyone's local machines.

 

To mitigate this, Trovo recommends:

 

1. Don't connect Outlook to your Online Office on a laptop that gets carried around a lot: try and reserve your Outlook / Document Library connection for home desktop machines or laptops that largely stay at home.
2. If you have no alternative but to use a laptop that's on the road with you all the time, make sure your user account for the laptop has a strong password and if possible use BitLocker, the drive encryption software that ships with Vista Enterprise and Ultimate editions, to encrypt the laptop's hard drive.

 

 

03:25 GMT  |  Read comments(16)

27 February

Blogging with Office Live and Live Spaces

 

The newly–launched trovo.co.uk website displays a feed from all three Trovo blogs. Trovo likes to eat its own cooking, so we have set up our website using the web development tools that come as part of Office Live Small Business (OLSB), as we'd like to offer products and services that are based upon OLSB.

 

OLSB gives you two options for publishing a Blog within your public website:

 

1. Create a Blog Business Application in the OLSB back-end and publish that to the website with the built-in List Publisher tool.
2. Add a feed from a Windows Live Spaces blog to the site.

 

The table below shows the conclusions we drew about each solution.

 

 

So either solution has its pros and cons. On the setup and integration front, both come out about equal; setting up a Live Spaces blog took a little bit of tinkering, but adding lists and forms to an OLSB website page can be quite fiddly too.

 

Not being able to completely integrate a Live Spaces blog into OLSB is a bit of an issue, and I can see that being a show-stopper for a lot of companies that might see Live Spaces as being a bit too "domestic". Of course, the fact that you can only integrate with Live Spaces, while unsurprising (why shouldn't Microsoft promote one product with another?) will also be a major issue for some, too.

 

However, the clincher for us was the ease of adding new posts. Being able to use Word really did it for us, as we're a new small business and we're busy people! One of the keys to Blogging is to try and stick at it and post often, so we wanted as few barriers as possible to getting our posts online. Writing a Blog post shouldn't be any more hassle than writing an email – we just wanted to be able to type, publish and see each post in our website.

 

Which is just what I'm going to do now!

06:59 GMT  |  Read comments(0)

22 February

Welcome to the Trovo Collaboration Blog

 

The idea of improved collaboration is one of three central concepts upon which Trovo is based (the others being search and organisation). We see the technologies of today and the future unifying these three concepts to allow the modern business to work in ways that are not only more efficient and cheaper, but which are also more respectful to employees and the environment.

 

At Trovo, we are sure that the business world is on the brink of a major change. At the time of writing this initial post in our Collaboration Blog, most of the business change we're hearing about is negative, not to say upsetting.

 

But Trovo has looked behind all the bad news and is taking a more positive stance. Innovation is still happening across the globe at an increasing pace. Ever more bright ideas keep surfacing. And there is an increasing desire among business people and workers alike to question the accepted traditions of business and ask the question: "can we work together smarter?" The current economic climate is, if anything, fuelling such enquiry.

 

The Trovo Collaboration Blog aims to highlight some of the best of these new ideas and try and bring them to a wider audience. But note that Trovo is always about the cutting edge never the bleeding edge. We are not inventors – we are users of innovative technology and it is our mission to help others to benefit from it too.

 

We are also pragmatists: Trovo's Technical Director has over a decade's experience of working with web technology (since before Google was ever thought of... unfortunately); so we are more than capable of setting up our own servers, writing our own blogging application, creating a CMS for our website and so forth... But what would be the point? Such tools are now ubiquitous, cheap if not free to use, can be made to look extremely professional and (crucially) can be built upon and adapted to very specific requirements. So why waste time re-inventing them?

 

Also – the fact that tools such as Office Live Small Business, the numerous blogging and Wiki frameworks, and even SharePoint are so cheap to use brings them within the price-range of even the smallest of businesses. So the capability of breaking down the office walls and letting staff work in more flexible, adult and human ways (not to mention more productively) is no longer just the preserve of the big boys.

 

We hope you find the Trovo Collaboration Blog, and its sisters, an informative and useful resource. And we'd like you to make it even more so by adding your comments and knowledge to it.

 

David Gerrard – Trovo Technical Director

 

03:10 GMT  |  Read comments(0)