You enter your Sharepoint server URL or Dropbox authentication details, and you can browse your directories and view your documents right on your iPhone. You can also view your contacts and calendars, although Moprise has mimicked the iPhone UI so closely that you might be confused that you are looking at your phone's own contacts and calendar listings.
Getting started with Coaxion is a bit perplexing, as you are initially presented with a conversation dialog box. You have to start a conversation with someone to start sharing something, before you are allowed access to any of your content. Once you start a conversation, you can add photos from your phone, documents from your Sharepoint or Dropbox repositories, and include text messages. All of this content is preserved in a threaded context so you can keep track of things easily. And, when you are done sharing a conversation with someone, all the data is deleted from the phone's memory. That is a nice touch. If you have an AT&T version of the iPhone, you can be talking and sharing information concurrently, which is a great way to work when you are on the go.
Moprise has a separate free app just for browsing your Sharepoint content that has been available for some time. Coaxion isn't the first iOS Sharepoint app: there are at least a dozen, and several free ones on the iTunes AppStore, including iShare and OData. And Coaxion won't be free for long, expect a $10 per month subscription fee when they launch a new version that will be iPad native at the end of the summer.
For example, you'll need your secret decoder ring to find how to activate its iffy VPN support, forget about hooking up to some of your Wi-Fi WPA2 networks for the time being, and opening a file can be vexing too. But hey, how about those Google Docs? And it boots as quick as a MacBook!
Perhaps some of this is just early days of trying to force a browser to do everything that a real OS should do, or perhaps all of the overhype that preceded the Chromebook in May is just getting a reality test. But until the basic utility software that corporations run on such as VPNs, remote control programs like Citrix Receiver, and wireless security is ironed out, Chrome is colorless for corporations currently.
Today, as expected Office 365 came out of beta. Office 365 is Microsoft's consolidated cloud-services system that combines hosted versions of Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and Lync Server.
So how does it hold up to two older offers, Google Apps and Zoho?
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Pricing
Google Apps:Google Apps for Business costs either $5 a month per user or $50 a year per user. It's free for "accredited not-for-profit 501(c)(3) entities with <3,000 users, K-12 schools, colleges, and universities." Non-profits with over 3,000 employees are eligible for a discounted version of Apps for Business.
If you need fewer than 10 users you can use Google Apps for free. You can also use Google Docs, without Google Apps, for free.
Office 365: Pricing for Office 365 starts at $6 per user per month for small organizations with fewer than 25 employees. For organizations with more than 25 employees, pricing ranges from $10-27 per user per month, but there's also kiosk pricing at $4 or $10 a month. There are also discounts for education.
Zoho: Zoho Docs costs either $3 per user per month or $5 per user per month, depending on your needs. E-mail is a separate service and costs either $2.50 or $3.50 per user per month, depending on the plan. There are also free versions of both the e-mail service and Docs that offer basic functionality. Zoho has several other features that can be added on at various price points.
Storage
Google Apps: Apps for Business provides 25GB per user for e-mail and 1GB per user for documents. E-mail attachment sizes are limited to 25MB.
Office 365: The basic 365 plans provide 25GB of e-mail storage, but the more expensive plans offer unlimited storage. Attachment file sizes are limited to 35MB. Office documents are stored in SharePoint Online, with a limit of 2GB. Additional storage can be purchased for $2.5 per GB per user per month.
Zoho: Zoho Docs offers 1GB of storage space, and additional 5GB of storage can be purchased for $3 a month.Zoho Mail includes 10-15 GB per user depending on the plan. Attachments are limited to 10MB.
Compatibility
Google Apps: Users report being able to import documents with basic formatting with no problems, but more complex formatting tends to cause problems. That's probably not a problem for most users most of the time, but can be a show stopper at times.
Docs can import files in Office 97-2003, Office 2007/2010, OpenOffice text and RTF, CSV and a few other formats. It can't export in Office 2007/2010 format yet, but it can export PDFs.
Office 365: We're seeing reports that Office 365 can open most of the Office documents thrown at it quite well. However, since the Web-based version of the document editors can only support a limited number of features, you may be limited to looking and not editing. See the "Advanced Features" section for more details.
I wasn't able to find a list of what Office 365 can or can't edit online or export. It can import older Word files, but has to convert them into the new XML format for editing and saving/exporting. Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote seem to be limited to the newer formats entirely. Excel files using certain features can only be viewed, but I wasn't able to find a list of which features cause this issue. It can view, via the browser, text files, but not edit them. The truth is that Office 365 is meant to be used with a desktop version of Office, not from a browser. See "Advanced Features" for more info.
Zoho: Zoho has improved its ability to import documents with footnotes, headers etc. bringing it at least on par with Google Docs.
Zoho Docs can open a wide variety of files, including Google Docs, Office 97-2003, Office 2007-2010, OpenOffice, HTML, RTF, CSV and more. It can export most of these files as well, plus it can export in PDF and LaTeX.
Sharing and Collaboration
Google Apps: Google Apps famously supports real-time editing between multiple collaborators, and the ability to share files with anyone with a Google account regardless of whether they have an account in your own Google Apps installation. Files can also be exported in multiple formats (see above) and revisions are tracked (see below). If you want to to share a file publicly, you can create a direct URL for the document so that anyone can view it.
There are also several third-party integrations for collaborating on Google Docs, such as the Box integration we recently wrote about. Some of these can also provide offline access (see below).
Office 365: I saw several reports that real-time collaboration was being added to Office 365, but when I tried it out I got this error:
It turns out you have to install Lync to do real-time document collaboration with 365, which seems like a burden compared to the real-time editing and instant messaging built into Google Apps with no software to deploy. Also, after installing the Lync client, I was informed that I also had to install the Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Services client to use it. If this is required, why isn't it bundled with Lync?
Users from outside your organization can access your SharePoint Online files if you pay extra for the partner access feature. Windows Live Skydrive allows for more flexible sharing, but I haven't found a way to integrate it with 365.
Zoho: Zoho supports real-time collaboration, but it's not as slick as collaboration enabled by Google Apps. It doesn't require the installation of any additional software, though. Zoho also allows documents to be shared with any e-mail address. Collaborators can sign-up for a Zoho account, or use a Google, Facebook or Yahoo account to login. You can also create links for public viewing.
Next: versioning, mobile access, online access, advanced features, conclusions and more options.
What is part Nimble.com, part Constant Contact, part Web site authoring tool, part SurveyMonkey, part wiki all rolled into one? The answer is a new service called GreenRope, available now.
This is a Swiss Army Knife of the Web. There are more tools here than you can possibly review in a short article, and the idea is to put in one place everything you need to get started online.
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To get started, there are an impressive number of imports for your contacts, including Yahoo, Gmail. Salesforce.com and CSV uploads. It had trouble importing more than my 5,000 contacts, however. Once you have uploaded your contacts, you can group them, email them, and collect information on them such as their location or gender to refine your marketing and messaging.
Everything is done within a browser, with copious tabs and menus that for the most part segregates the various functions and makes it easy to find a particular feature.
Internet entrepreneur Lars Helgeson, who is also the creator of the popular Cooler Email system, developed GreenRope. It enters a very crowded market with Socialcast, Socialtext, Yammer and others. But it has an interesting focus, to handle marketing and other communications functions, and is worth a closer look.
If you have a small business and aren't familiar with the tools mentioned in our lead, then it is worth a try to see if you can use GreenRope to organize your business and improve your outbound marketing efforts and start collaborating with your colleagues. If you are already using Constant Contact or some other email list manager or Salesforce to handle your sales team and customers, then the cost of switching to GreenRope might be onerous.
There are lots of instructional video how-tos to help you get started and focus your energies. The basic starter plan is $10 per month that can handle up to 250 contacts and an unlimited number of users. There are other more capable plans that can cost up to $100 per month, as well as private white-label versions for your business.
Teambox, yet another social stream project management tool, has come out with some new enhancements to its service. If you are still using email to collaborate and send documents back and forth, maybe it is time to take a look at what they offer.
This is a crowded market, with tools from Yammer, Basecamp and Socialtext just to name a few. The core difference is that Teambox is both a collaboration tool and task management system integrated into a single tool. The tasks to manage are in line with all the communication and discussions.
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There are two new enhancements to the service. The first is the ability to add private elements, so that anything you create can be restricted to specific people, or remain private. This gives you a lot of control especially when you are working with subcontractors who are bidding on a job, so all of those people can be in the same project without having to create complex groups or separate projects.
Second is the addition of a series of task list templates and the ability to move a task to its own discussion or vice-versa, as you can see in the above screenshot. Several educational institutions are using this software with hundreds of users.
It's almost time for another Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, which means it's time for another Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad contest. The conference will be held June 20 to 23, and winners will be announced on the last day. Past contest winners have included Baydin, CubeTree and Meetzi.
The four finalists for the contest have been announced. Let's take a look.
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Acquia
Acquia is the for-profit enterprise support company for Drupal. Acquia was founded by Drupal creator Dreis Buytaert in 2007. Drupal was our enterprise CMS of the year in 2010 in part on the strength of Acquia. We covered Al Jazeera's use of Acquia/Drupal during the Egyptian crisis here.
Next Principles
Next Principles is the company behind the social CRM system nextCRM and its mobile counterpart nextMobile. The company website is sparse on details, and lacks any screenshots, so it's difficult to tell how well this company lives up to its promise to provide a more simple CRM solution. The sketches shown in the company's video submission seem straight forward, but it's hard to get a sense of what product is capable of and how easy it really is to use.
So, should you scrap those plans to deploy Chrome in the enterprise you made earlier this evening? Not necessarily. These results are focused on the browsers' native ability to block malware downloads - not the overall security of each browser.
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When navigating to a site known to contain malware, one should hopefully get a warning such as this one:
Firefox warning
NSS Labs tested several popular browsers against a list of sites known to contain malware. Here is a chart summarizing the results:
Of course, there are other tools that can help protect your users from socially engineered malware, such as end-point protection software. And there are other potential security holes in browsers (to say nothing about PDF viewers). Also, NSS Labs did not test the phishing protection capabilities of any of these browsers.
What the results may indicate, however, is that Microsoft's malware database is better than Google's Safe Browsing data feed. Chrome, Firefox and Safari all use Google Safe Browsing data feed to block malware. But then why the discrepancy between those three browsers? NSS Labs speculates that the discrepancy could be due to differing implementations of the API, calling the API at different times or differing parameters used.
Perhaps the most surprising result is that Opera's AVG powered malware blocking function failed to block a single malware download in NSS Labs' tests.
The report indicates that NSS Labs found that Opera did not block malware that AVG's Online Shield reputation system does indeed block. NSS Labs suggests that the integration of AVG's technology into Opera is incomplete.
Opera's PR Manager Thomas Ford told us that Opera's malware protection is a compliment to its Fraud Protection mechanism, which also protects against phishing and other security issues. "We have multiple providers for our Fraud Protection mechanism," Ford says. "It's unclear why NSS Labs did not manage to test our AVG feed, but it is very strange that they do not test results
from any of our other providers, including Yandex, which performs very well in our tests."
But this was not a test of Opera and other browsers' protection against phishing, it was a socially engineered malware protection test. (NSS Labs did a testing of phishing protection last year, and Opera faired much better in that test.)
Ford also notes: "We would welcome hearing more from NSS Labs about their methodology, including the URLs used, so we could more fully evaluate their findings."
It's difficult to asses NSS Labs' results without being able to access the company's malware samples. In the past, vendors have complained that NSS Labs charges steep fees for access to its sample list. However, NSS Labs President Rick Moy has explained to us in the past that consulting is how NSS Labs makes its money since the company has moved away from commissioned testing. Other independent testers such as AV-Comparatives and AV-Test.org don't tend to release malware samples either. That makes it very difficult for outside observers to evaluate the results of any of these tests.
As more and more companies begin offering cloud-based services and, in turn, as more and more companies begin to migrate to the cloud, there's an increasing demand for tools to monitor and assess cloud performance. Although we hear a lot of about security in the cloud, a study released late last year by the market research firm IDC listed "performance" as one of IT's major concerns, ahead of cost and vendor lock-in.
Last week, we looked at CloudFail.net, a blog that tracks the RSS feeds of major cloud providers in order to monitor service updates and outages. But a number of other services exist that can help customers assess the dependability of cloud providers.
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CloudSleuth
Developed by Compuware Gomez, CloudSleuth is a cloud performance visualization tool initially created as an internal resource to help us gauge the reliability and consistency of the most popular public IaaS and PaaS providers. CloudSleuth uses the Gomex Performance Network to measure the performance of an identical sample application running on popular cloud service providers, assessing two basic user experience metrics - response time and availability. The tests are currently run from locations in all 50 states and from 75 international locations, and there are plans to add the ability to benchmark a user's own application.
CloudHarmony
While much of CloudHarmony still in beta, it looks to become an important resource for evaluating performance. Currently, you can use its Cloud SpeedTest to test upload and download speeds, page loads and latency on several major services. The CloudHarmony blog also contains a number of analyses of various services, including encoding, CPU performance, and memory I/O.
Cloudstone
Cloudstone is a multi-platform, multi-language performance measurement tool for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing. This UC Berkeley project is described as "a toolkit consisting of an open-source Web 2.0 social application (Olio), a set of automation tools for generating load and measuring its per- formance in different deployment environments, and a rec- ommended set of constraints for computing a metric we believe makes more sense, dollars per user per month." While the results from the project aren't published, the developers have created an application that gives users the ability to do the research themselves.
Cloud CMP
Developed by Duke University and Microsoft Research, Cloud CMP "pits cloud against cloud," assessing computation, storage, and network services offered by different cloud providers, then estimate performance and cost of an application if it's deployed on a particular cloud provider.
Do you know of other resources out there to help gauge cloud performance? And what other assessments should tools like these be making?
The Windows Phone 7 received a lot of praise after its launch at the Mobile World Congress today for its elegant, minimalist interface. From what we've seen, it does look striking.
What we also find to be crystal clear: Microsoft is putting far more emphasis on the consumer market than its productivity features for the enterprise.
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Windows Mobile 7 Series is getting rave reviews. Bloggers say Microsoft really has started from scratch to get back in the game with Apple and Google. It is a brand new OS. And it's like nothing like we have seen on the market. It is similar to the Zune HD but apparently it goes deeper than that.
"First the look and feel. The phones are really secondary here, and we want to focus on the interface. The design and layout of 7 Series' UI (internally called Metro) is really quite original, utilizing what one of the designers (Albert Shum, formerly of Nike) calls an "authentically digital" and "chromeless" experience. What does that mean? Well we can tell you what it doesn't mean -- no shaded icons, no faux 3D or drop shadows, no busy backgrounds (no backgrounds at all), and very little visual flair besides clean typography and transition animations."
Microsoft is playing to win in the consumer space but we wonder where the enterprise fits in.
Philippe Winthrop of Enterprise Mobility Matters says there was almost no mention of its enterprise applications:
"However, the amount of time devoted during the presentation to "Productivity" was disappointing for me. Sure, I'm not expecting to see a full blown technical demo when a company is launching a brand new platform, but I would have loved to see how an actual email (and not just the Inbox), as well as accepting a calendar entry looks."
It's not unusual to have a lot of questions when a company like Microsoft makes such dramatic changes in its technology strategy. Microsoft is keeping mum about all sorts of issues that are important to the enterprise. Here are a few questions that are popping up:
Windows Phone will most likely not support Windows Mobile legacy applications. The OS is entirely different. What does that mean for the enterprise now using these applications?
What security features does it have? Can data be wiped from it remotely?
How will the Zune software be adapted to the enterprise? Will IT permit people to sync to their PC's?
How does Azure fit into the picture?
Is this a service the CEO would use or is it really best as a consumer service?
We are very curious about how this will play out. Enterprise collaboration is becoming deeply tied into mobile platforms. The Blackberry, iPhone and Android devices all have their spots in the enterprise. The Blackberry is a messaging device. The Android and iPhone are both application and Web-centric.
Windows phones are a bit of a mystery.
Consumer and enterprise markets continue to overlap. It may just be that people find Windows Mobile 7 more to their liking. And in that case, they will find ways to use the phones for their personal and business use.
These days, the words "social media campaign" are on the lips of everyone around, from media professionals to small business owners to college students in coffee shops. While the idea of a social media campaign is becoming widespread, the tools to manage one are often left for the former, while the latter look in awe at the price.
ViralHeat, a social media analytics firm, hopes to fill the space left empty by other, far more expensive services.
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The Basics
ViralHeat has been around for just over six months, providing a low-price but full-featured social media analysis for the budget minded. We had a chance to chat with CEO Raj Kadam and founder Vishal Sankhla today before the relaunch, which is unveiling support for Facebook monitoring, a new user interface and API support.
The fully Web-based app gives full analytics by monitoring an array of blogs, over 200 video sites, Twitter and now Facebook for mentions of your brand, which is set up as a profile. Each profile exists as a simple logic search, wherein you can keep track of your brand by searching for phrases, domains and hashtags, all in the syntax we've become accustomed to from using from sites like Google.
Champagne Tastes on a Beer Budget?
While ViralHeat compares itself on price to services like Radian6, there is a primary difference between the two services. ViralHeat offers a full set of analytics features, from standard mention monitoring to sentiment analysis using a natural language algorithm, but this is where it stays. It does not venture over to the content creation side, where we find the more expensive and extensive services like Radian6. Other services might offer workflow management, scheduled content delivery and other conversational tools, but this would be overkill for the users we imagine at this app's usability sweetspot.
We see that as an additional merit: ViralHeat has both the price point and the feature set fit for the company that wants to get on top of its image and perception on the social Web but can't afford to bring a social media expert on board - and on salary. The learning curve is suitable for the DIY set and the analytics it provides are self explanatory, not riddled with indecipherable, industry jargon.
For those of you that like the pricing but want to do a little more with the data, the service also allows you to export data into Excel format and access your data using the API.
The Price is Right
Speaking of pricing, this is a point that really brings it home for ViralHeat. With today's relaunch of the site, ViralHeat offers a three tiered pricing system, starting with a basic package for $9.99, a professional package for $29.99 and a business package for $89.99. The Basic package offers standard mentions analysis for 5 profiles, while the other packages offer sentiment analysis and API access for 20 and 40 profiles, respectively.
If we haven't drilled it in enough quite yet, here's the bottom line: ViralHeat looks like a solid social media analysis tool that is priced and designed for the more casual user, while offering simple features like export and API interaction that keep it flexible enough for the more serious user.
We have written about the rise of mobile apps that can connect you to your corporate documents previously such as Rover and MobilEcho. Starting this week, there is a free app called Coaxion from Moprise which can access your Sharepoint, Dropbox and Office365 file repositories as well as easily perform real-time threaded conversations. 
Today, as expected 
What is part Nimble.com, part Constant Contact, part Web site authoring tool, part SurveyMonkey, part wiki all rolled into one? The answer is a 
Teambox, yet another social stream project management tool, has come out with some new enhancements to its service. If you are still using email to collaborate and send documents back and forth, maybe it is time to take a look at what they offer. 
It's almost time for another 
As more and more companies begin offering cloud-based services and, in turn, as more and more companies begin to migrate to the cloud, there's an increasing demand for tools to monitor and assess cloud performance. Although we hear a lot of about security in the cloud, a study released late last year by the market research firm 
The Windows Phone 7 received a lot of praise after its launch at the Mobile World Congress today for its elegant, minimalist interface. From what we've seen, it does look striking.
These days, the words "social media campaign" are on the lips of everyone around, from media professionals to small business owners to college students in coffee shops. While the idea of a social media campaign is becoming widespread, the tools to manage one are often left for the former, while the latter look in awe at the price.
