Snipitron

The best solution to capture, share, and find aggregated Internet research is Snipitron! Since I suffer from age induced “memorylossannoyance” I don’t know for sure how long I have used Snipitron but trust me, like we said about Jott, Snipitron is one of those web applications that I could not live without.Snipitron is a web based solution that allows one to capture, annotate, and share Internet pages.

Think of a smart card catalogue system that is web based and shareable with either people you invite to share information with or with the public in general and you can start to imagine what Snipitron has to offer. Obviously I am understating the features that Snipitron provides in their offering by calling it a smart card catalogue system for web research. The smart card catalogue system does, however, provide one with a good starting point to conceptualize what Snipitron has to offer.

Snipitron users can collect and catalogue web pages into “projects” that allow not only capturing web pages (with complete page previews) but also providing a place for users to annotate and or comment on the pages that have been captured. In addition users can attach files as well as invite other users to share the research / projects that have been captured at Snipitron. Once a user has registered they are provided a number of tools and options for capturing web pages into projects. For PC users there is a downloadable application but the real power is in using Snipitron’s add-in for web browsers that allow one to simply click on a Snipitron icon to immediately add a page that one is browsing. It is effectively a tool that follows along as one is browsing the Internet and whenever you have found a page, link, and or file that you would like to save into a project, you can immediately click on the Snipitron icon and add the page to a project.

Starting Sunday, April 27th, 2008, as part of OMBNexGen’s weekly Sunday Summary column, we will be providing a Snipitron research project that will have all the pages used in reviewing the weekly Google Apps news. So to see a Snipitron research project in action simply click here! Don’t just take a look at a Snipitron project, go and sign up for Snipitron now. This is a web based solution everyone needs!

CushyCMS

Take the work out of managing content! A pretty bold claim if you ask me. CushyCMS allows you to do just that.

This is an early look into a free web-based tool that allows you to specify what can be edited by adding a class tag to pages or sections of pages. Who can edit them is controlled in the CushyCMS system by editor, then by page and then by section if desired using the administrative Control Panel. In effect what CushyCMS is providing is an online Content Management System (CMS) for web sites controlled by you.

In addition to providing online CMS management, the editing of CMS items / content can be controlled granularly by various assigned rights by user level. On the surface this appears to be a good step towards a true online CMS solution. In the spirit of our motto, the Cloud is the computer, CushyCMS is one of those products we will be taking a more detailed look at and we believe you should Take A Look too!

If anyone out there is currently using CushyCMS, let us know your thoughts and experiences!

Adding Google Hosted Mail to Exchange

Upon initial read of Cemaphore Systems announcement of their beta release of MailShadowG (MailShadow For Google Apps) I kept scratching my head and wondering what! After further thought and some lively discussions with my colleagues I think I actually see some real value in the MailShadowG product.

To understand where the value is, one needs to grasp what is being offered through the MailShadowG product…. Read more

Sunday Summary

The one draw back to creating a Sunday Summary posting is there is a Sunday in every week of the year. Yes it has been a few Sundays since I posted a Sunday summary. I apologize for the irregular Sunday summary posting.

If you have been following the site, however, you will note that while there has not been a weekly posting of Sunday Summary items, there have been regular and frequent other posts.

Apology aside, here is my Sunday Summary for week 16 of 2008:

My Google Alerts for the week totaled 34 items. The bulk of those items were related to the Salesforce integration of Google Apps as part of the Salesforce offering. NY Times writer Miguel Helft provided a good summary of that news in his article of April 14th. titled, “Google and Salesforce Join to Fight Microsoft”. The article clearly tries to imply the news is a Google vs. Microsoft event. While that may be a valid perspective, it is hardly the intent and focus of Google. Everyone wants to make the efforts of Google to extend their offering beyond search into a Google vs. Microsoft battle. That misdirected analysis aside, the NYTimes article does a good job of noting what the real benefit will be in the Google Apps integration,

“… Dave Girouard, Google’s vice president and general manager, said the integrated offering would bring users new functions.”

Unfortunately the NY Times was not the only rag attempting to make the Salesforce news into a Google vs. Microsoft story. Most of the Google alerts were along the same general “created news” scenario. Given the predominant misdirection in the coverage of the Salesforce announcement, It would have been easy to miss the real news, in selecting Google Apps to integrate with Salesforce Zoho was left out in the cold. Salesforce had been chatting with Zoho to integrate their applications offering into the Saleforce solution. Who knows why the Zoho solution got left behind but as reported by David A. Utter of WebProNews who was quoting Zoho CEO, Sridhar Vembu,

“”Salesforce spends nearly 8 times on sales/marketing as it spends on R&D. Sounds to me a text book definition of “business model bloat’,” said Vembu. “If you are a customer of Salesforce, it makes you feel really happy that the company spends 8x on selling to you as in writing the code, right?”

Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu, after being granted a peek at Saleforce’s balance sheet, (paraphrased) “believes Saleforce and Google Apps offering is bound to fail.”

Monitoring the Google news for week 16 was a predominantly boring read of the same Salesforce news over and over throughout the week. It almost precluded one from noticing, if one happened to be lucky enough to be on the Google servers that were not impacted, that Google dropped their IMAP mail services with an unplanned outage.

Search Engine Land did not miss the IMAP services drop; in his realtime reporting of April 16th, Barry Schwartz did a good job of presenting the evidence of that Google was having service outage problems:

“It appears that Google is having major issues with their email server. … This seems to be a major issue, where hundreds of Gmail users can no longer use Gmail or their email on Google Apps…. “

Unlike the hyped news of the Google vs. Microsoft Salesforce announcement, Google Apps and hosted mail being down is indeed news! Perhaps week 17 will be more interesting or at least, hopefully, it will have fewer “like me” hype articles so I don’t have to read so many Google Alerts!

News Or Not?

To stay current with news about Google Apps I have subscribed to Google Alerts. Google Alerts monitors the Internet for news about Google Apps (or any other subject one wants to be alerted about). I started the Google Alert subscription on March 14, 2008. I have been diligent about monitoring and reading the alerts. To date I have received a total of 109 alerts. I have read every alert email message and followed most of the alert links to the source articles. While I have been alerted to some news, mostly I have been underwhelmed with news that is not news. The real news is most people and organizations writing about Google Apps don’t really know or understand anything about Google Apps. Let me explain….

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