Stop Buying Servers » Google

The big boys get hacked, too

David Schrag — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:31:11 +0000

A rather disturbing report in the New York Times about an attack on the password system at Google. I’m not going to stop using Google, but I might start changing my password a little more often.

100 Great Google Docs Tips

David Schrag — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:22:29 +0000

The folks at Accredited Online Colleges compiled a list of these Google Docs tips. They say the tips are for students and educators, but almost all of them apply to business users as well. (I’m not sure about the value of GoogleTournament in small business!)

Check out the list.

Sharing folders in Google Docs

David Schrag — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:41:52 +0000

Document sharing in Google Docs has been around for a long time (relatively speaking, of course), but sharing entire folders is new. Here’s how to do it.

For Google Docs, published equals public

David Schrag — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:46:39 +0000

Received today from the Google Apps team:

We wanted to let you know about some important changes around published documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

In a few weeks, documents, spreadsheets and presentations that have been explicitly published outside your organization and are linked to from a public website will be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines. There is no change for documents published inside your organization or shared privately.

If you wish to prevent users from publishing documents to the public internet, we now offer an admin control in the Google Apps Control Panel that allows users to continue to ‘share documents outside the domain’ without allowing them to publish the files to the public Internet. To change this setting, follow these steps:

- Login to your admin control panel
- Select Service Settings > Docs
- Un-check the option ‘Users can publish documents to the public internet’

If a user does not want their published Docs to be crawled, then the user must unpublish them by doing the following:

- Go to the ‘Share tab’
- For documents and spreadsheets, choose ‘Publish as web page’. For presentations choose ‘Publish/embed’
- Click on the button that says ‘Stop publishing’

For more details, please see this Help Center article: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60781

This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people!

My initial reaction was WTF?, but I suppose it’s not that outrageous. It’s like putting a note on your front door for the package delivery guy – do you somehow thing the rest of the world won’t be able to read it? At least they give you the option to hide the docs from crawlers.

It’s now. Do you know if your Google Apps are working?

David Schrag — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:04:45 +0000

The first thing I did today when my Google Mail stopped responding was to get on Twitter and ask if Google Apps was (were?) down. Better idea: Check the Google Apps status report. It includes both a current report and a history for the past several days. As of 4:02 pm EDT on 9/1/09 …

Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next 1.2 hours. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

Users can access their email via IMAP or POP. You can find instructions for how to do this here.

If setting up an IMAP account, don’t forget the special settings for the incoming and outgoing servers!

Collaboration in the cloud

David Schrag — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:36:46 +0000

ChannelPro-SMB’s Rich Freeman has put together a nice chart listing features of several on-line collaboration suites.

Google Voice – is that Work, Mobile, or Other?

David Schrag — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:03:33 +0000

Lots of friends and colleagues are starting to get their Google Voice numbers. I’m still waiting for mine. I went to enter my brother’s new number into my Google Contacts database and saw that the choices for phone number type were still limited to Home, Work, Mobile, Home Fax, Work Fax, Pager, and Other. I think it’s time for Google to add a new choice of “Universal,” “Multiple,” or “All.” And if they had to remove a choice to fit the new one in, I don’t think too many people would mourn the passing of Home Fax or Pager.

Resources for Google Apps users with BlackBerries

David Schrag — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:39:50 +0000

Subscribers to Google Apps Premium Edition have access to some pretty good tools for synchronization with BlackBerries. But it’s harder than it should be to find instructions for setting this up. So I’m taking this opportunity to provide some direct links to the Google help documents.

BlackBerry users can also download the Google Mobile App by visiting http://m.google.com from the BlackBerry itself.

Don’t get scared by the headlines

David Schrag — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:17:05 +0000

“Gmail accounts hacked via unpatched hole!” That’s the headline on this article from Windows Secrets, which is generally a very good source of information. Based on the headline alone, you might think that using Gmail is inherently insecure. But a closer reading of the article reveals that Gmail accounts can only be hacked in this manner if they are protected weak passwords, which is akin to leaving your keys in the lock.

ALL computer systems are vulnerable to hacking if they have inadequate security measures in place. This is by no means limited to cloud computing applications. You should use strong passwords all the time, whether in the cloud or not.

EPIC complains to FTC about Google

David Schrag — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:11:12 +0000

Following the recent privacy gaffe at Google, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. Some of the language in the complaint seems a bit hyperbolic, and the request that Google be compelled to contribute $5 million to support electronic privacy research seems a bit self-serving. Obviously, though, a cloud computing provider had better make its privacy and security standards very clear to its end users.

When considering the security of putting your corporate information in the cloud, remember to compare the security of the cloud to the security of your own on-premises systems – which for many small businesses is practically non-existent. Also consider the type of information you plan to store in the cloud. If you plan to keep electronic records containing sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, and health records, you’ll need to pay extra attention to how that information will be transmitted to and from the cloud and how it will be stored for you.