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The growth of digital data is threatening to spiral out of control. More than 452 exabytes of information have been created and replicated this year — an amount higher than the world's available storage capacity , according to IDC.

Not all data should be preserved, but efforts to save important information are being stymied by many factors: complacency, fear that the problem of long-term digital access and preservation is too big to take on, inadequate funding, confusion, and lack of alignment among stakeholders, a new report says. A better model for preserving data is needed, and it requires worldwide collaboration, says the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, which consists of experts from universities, major libraries, and one tech company ( Microsoft ).

[ Get the latest on storage developments with InfoWorld's Storage Adviser blog and Storage Report newsletter. ]

"The long-term accessibility and use of valuable digital materials requires digital preservation activities that are economically sustainable — in other words, provisioned with sufficient funding and other resources on an ongoing basis to achieve their long-term goals," task force co-chairman Brian Lavoie of the Online Computer Library Center said in a press release.

Although the task force says an industrywide solution is needed, there obviously are many steps individual IT shops can take to implement a better data preservation plan. The task force's second co-chair, Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, offered a list of 10 tips for preserving data in a recent article. 

Here is a look at Berman's advice:

1. Make a detailed plan for the stewardship and preservation of your data, from its inception to the end of its lifetime.

2. Be aware of data costs including hardware, software, support and time, and include them in your overall IT budget. Determine whether it is more cost-effective to regenerate some of your information rather than preserve it over a long period.

3. Associate metadata with your data. Identify relevant standards for data and metadata content and format, and follow them to make sure the data can be used by others.

4. Make multiple copies of valuable data. Store some copies off-site and in different systems.

5. Plan ahead of time for the transition of digital data to new storage media. Plan budgets for new storage and software technologies, file-format migrations, and time. Move data to new technologies before your storage media become obsolete. ( Compare storage products.)

6. Plan for transitions in data stewardship. If the data eventually will be turned over to a formal repository, institution or other custodial environment, make sure it meets the requirements of the new environment and that the new steward indeed agrees to take it on.

7. Determine the level of "trust" required when choosing how to archive data. Are the resources of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration necessary, or will Google do?

8. Tailor plans for preservation and access to the specific needs of users. Gene-sequence data used daily by hundreds of thousands of researchers worldwide may need a preservation and access infrastructure that's different from the infrastructure needed, for example, for digital photos viewed occasionally by family members.

9. Pay attention to security. Be aware of what you must do to maintain the integrity of your data.

10. Know the regulations. Know whether copyright, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the U.S. National Institutes of Health publishing expectations, or other policies or regulations are relevant to your data. That way, you can make sure your approach to stewardship and publication is compliant.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate

The growth of digital data is threatening to spiral out of control. More than 452 exabytes of information have been created and replicated this year — an amount higher than the world's available storage capacity , according to IDC.

Not all data should be preserved, but efforts to save important information are being stymied by many factors: complacency, fear that the problem of long-term digital access and preservation is too big to take on, inadequate funding, confusion, and lack of alignment among stakeholders, a new report says. A better model for preserving data is needed, and it requires worldwide collaboration, says the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, which consists of experts from universities, major libraries, and one tech company ( Microsoft ).

[ Get the latest on storage developments with InfoWorld's Storage Adviser blog and Storage Report newsletter. ]

"The long-term accessibility and use of valuable digital materials requires digital preservation activities that are economically sustainable — in other words, provisioned with sufficient funding and other resources on an ongoing basis to achieve their long-term goals," task force co-chairman Brian Lavoie of the Online Computer Library Center said in a press release.

Although the task force says an industrywide solution is needed, there obviously are many steps individual IT shops can take to implement a better data preservation plan. The task force's second co-chair, Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, offered a list of 10 tips for preserving data in a recent article. 

Here is a look at Berman's advice:

1. Make a detailed plan for the stewardship and preservation of your data, from its inception to the end of its lifetime.

2. Be aware of data costs including hardware, software, support and time, and include them in your overall IT budget. Determine whether it is more cost-effective to regenerate some of your information rather than preserve it over a long period.

3. Associate metadata with your data. Identify relevant standards for data and metadata content and format, and follow them to make sure the data can be used by others.

4. Make multiple copies of valuable data. Store some copies off-site and in different systems.

5. Plan ahead of time for the transition of digital data to new storage media. Plan budgets for new storage and software technologies, file-format migrations, and time. Move data to new technologies before your storage media become obsolete. ( Compare storage products.)

6. Plan for transitions in data stewardship. If the data eventually will be turned over to a formal repository, institution or other custodial environment, make sure it meets the requirements of the new environment and that the new steward indeed agrees to take it on.

7. Determine the level of "trust" required when choosing how to archive data. Are the resources of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration necessary, or will Google do?

8. Tailor plans for preservation and access to the specific needs of users. Gene-sequence data used daily by hundreds of thousands of researchers worldwide may need a preservation and access infrastructure that's different from the infrastructure needed, for example, for digital photos viewed occasionally by family members.

9. Pay attention to security. Be aware of what you must do to maintain the integrity of your data.

10. Know the regulations. Know whether copyright, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the U.S. National Institutes of Health publishing expectations, or other policies or regulations are relevant to your data. That way, you can make sure your approach to stewardship and publication is compliant.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate

The growth of digital data is threatening to spiral out of control. More than 452 exabytes of information have been created and replicated this year — an amount higher than the world's available storage capacity , according to IDC.

Not all data should be preserved, but efforts to save important information are being stymied by many factors: complacency, fear that the problem of long-term digital access and preservation is too big to take on, inadequate funding, confusion, and lack of alignment among stakeholders, a new report says. A better model for preserving data is needed, and it requires worldwide collaboration, says the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, which consists of experts from universities, major libraries, and one tech company ( Microsoft ).

[ Get the latest on storage developments with InfoWorld's Storage Adviser blog and Storage Report newsletter. ]

"The long-term accessibility and use of valuable digital materials requires digital preservation activities that are economically sustainable — in other words, provisioned with sufficient funding and other resources on an ongoing basis to achieve their long-term goals," task force co-chairman Brian Lavoie of the Online Computer Library Center said in a press release.

Although the task force says an industrywide solution is needed, there obviously are many steps individual IT shops can take to implement a better data preservation plan. The task force's second co-chair, Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, offered a list of 10 tips for preserving data in a recent article. 

Here is a look at Berman's advice:

1. Make a detailed plan for the stewardship and preservation of your data, from its inception to the end of its lifetime.

2. Be aware of data costs including hardware, software, support and time, and include them in your overall IT budget. Determine whether it is more cost-effective to regenerate some of your information rather than preserve it over a long period.

3. Associate metadata with your data. Identify relevant standards for data and metadata content and format, and follow them to make sure the data can be used by others.

4. Make multiple copies of valuable data. Store some copies off-site and in different systems.

5. Plan ahead of time for the transition of digital data to new storage media. Plan budgets for new storage and software technologies, file-format migrations, and time. Move data to new technologies before your storage media become obsolete. ( Compare storage products.)

6. Plan for transitions in data stewardship. If the data eventually will be turned over to a formal repository, institution or other custodial environment, make sure it meets the requirements of the new environment and that the new steward indeed agrees to take it on.

7. Determine the level of "trust" required when choosing how to archive data. Are the resources of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration necessary, or will Google do?

8. Tailor plans for preservation and access to the specific needs of users. Gene-sequence data used daily by hundreds of thousands of researchers worldwide may need a preservation and access infrastructure that's different from the infrastructure needed, for example, for digital photos viewed occasionally by family members.

9. Pay attention to security. Be aware of what you must do to maintain the integrity of your data.

10. Know the regulations. Know whether copyright, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the U.S. National Institutes of Health publishing expectations, or other policies or regulations are relevant to your data. That way, you can make sure your approach to stewardship and publication is compliant.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate

The growth of digital data is threatening to spiral out of control. More than 452 exabytes of information have been created and replicated this year — an amount higher than the world's available storage capacity , according to IDC.

Not all data should be preserved, but efforts to save important information are being stymied by many factors: complacency, fear that the problem of long-term digital access and preservation is too big to take on, inadequate funding, confusion, and lack of alignment among stakeholders, a new report says. A better model for preserving data is needed, and it requires worldwide collaboration, says the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, which consists of experts from universities, major libraries, and one tech company ( Microsoft ).

[ Get the latest on storage developments with InfoWorld's Storage Adviser blog and Storage Report newsletter. ]

"The long-term accessibility and use of valuable digital materials requires digital preservation activities that are economically sustainable — in other words, provisioned with sufficient funding and other resources on an ongoing basis to achieve their long-term goals," task force co-chairman Brian Lavoie of the Online Computer Library Center said in a press release.

Although the task force says an industrywide solution is needed, there obviously are many steps individual IT shops can take to implement a better data preservation plan. The task force's second co-chair, Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, offered a list of 10 tips for preserving data in a recent article. 

Here is a look at Berman's advice:

1. Make a detailed plan for the stewardship and preservation of your data, from its inception to the end of its lifetime.

2. Be aware of data costs including hardware, software, support and time, and include them in your overall IT budget. Determine whether it is more cost-effective to regenerate some of your information rather than preserve it over a long period.

3. Associate metadata with your data. Identify relevant standards for data and metadata content and format, and follow them to make sure the data can be used by others.

4. Make multiple copies of valuable data. Store some copies off-site and in different systems.

5. Plan ahead of time for the transition of digital data to new storage media. Plan budgets for new storage and software technologies, file-format migrations, and time. Move data to new technologies before your storage media become obsolete. ( Compare storage products.)

6. Plan for transitions in data stewardship. If the data eventually will be turned over to a formal repository, institution or other custodial environment, make sure it meets the requirements of the new environment and that the new steward indeed agrees to take it on.

7. Determine the level of "trust" required when choosing how to archive data. Are the resources of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration necessary, or will Google do?

8. Tailor plans for preservation and access to the specific needs of users. Gene-sequence data used daily by hundreds of thousands of researchers worldwide may need a preservation and access infrastructure that's different from the infrastructure needed, for example, for digital photos viewed occasionally by family members.

9. Pay attention to security. Be aware of what you must do to maintain the integrity of your data.

10. Know the regulations. Know whether copyright, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the U.S. National Institutes of Health publishing expectations, or other policies or regulations are relevant to your data. That way, you can make sure your approach to stewardship and publication is compliant.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate

The growth of digital data is threatening to spiral out of control. More than 452 exabytes of information have been created and replicated this year — an amount higher than the world's available storage capacity , according to IDC.

Not all data should be preserved, but efforts to save important information are being stymied by many factors: complacency, fear that the problem of long-term digital access and preservation is too big to take on, inadequate funding, confusion, and lack of alignment among stakeholders, a new report says. A better model for preserving data is needed, and it requires worldwide collaboration, says the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, which consists of experts from universities, major libraries, and one tech company ( Microsoft ).

[ Get the latest on storage developments with InfoWorld's Storage Adviser blog and Storage Report newsletter. ]

"The long-term accessibility and use of valuable digital materials requires digital preservation activities that are economically sustainable — in other words, provisioned with sufficient funding and other resources on an ongoing basis to achieve their long-term goals," task force co-chairman Brian Lavoie of the Online Computer Library Center said in a press release.

Although the task force says an industrywide solution is needed, there obviously are many steps individual IT shops can take to implement a better data preservation plan. The task force's second co-chair, Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, offered a list of 10 tips for preserving data in a recent article. 

Here is a look at Berman's advice:

1. Make a detailed plan for the stewardship and preservation of your data, from its inception to the end of its lifetime.

2. Be aware of data costs including hardware, software, support and time, and include them in your overall IT budget. Determine whether it is more cost-effective to regenerate some of your information rather than preserve it over a long period.

3. Associate metadata with your data. Identify relevant standards for data and metadata content and format, and follow them to make sure the data can be used by others.

4. Make multiple copies of valuable data. Store some copies off-site and in different systems.

5. Plan ahead of time for the transition of digital data to new storage media. Plan budgets for new storage and software technologies, file-format migrations, and time. Move data to new technologies before your storage media become obsolete. ( Compare storage products.)

6. Plan for transitions in data stewardship. If the data eventually will be turned over to a formal repository, institution or other custodial environment, make sure it meets the requirements of the new environment and that the new steward indeed agrees to take it on.

7. Determine the level of "trust" required when choosing how to archive data. Are the resources of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration necessary, or will Google do?

8. Tailor plans for preservation and access to the specific needs of users. Gene-sequence data used daily by hundreds of thousands of researchers worldwide may need a preservation and access infrastructure that's different from the infrastructure needed, for example, for digital photos viewed occasionally by family members.

9. Pay attention to security. Be aware of what you must do to maintain the integrity of your data.

10. Know the regulations. Know whether copyright, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the U.S. National Institutes of Health publishing expectations, or other policies or regulations are relevant to your data. That way, you can make sure your approach to stewardship and publication is compliant.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate

The growth of digital data is threatening to spiral out of control. More than 452 exabytes of information have been created and replicated this year — an amount higher than the world's available storage capacity , according to IDC.

Not all data should be preserved, but efforts to save important information are being stymied by many factors: complacency, fear that the problem of long-term digital access and preservation is too big to take on, inadequate funding, confusion, and lack of alignment among stakeholders, a new report says. A better model for preserving data is needed, and it requires worldwide collaboration, says the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, which consists of experts from universities, major libraries, and one tech company ( Microsoft ).

[ Get the latest on storage developments with InfoWorld's Storage Adviser blog and Storage Report newsletter. ]

"The long-term accessibility and use of valuable digital materials requires digital preservation activities that are economically sustainable — in other words, provisioned with sufficient funding and other resources on an ongoing basis to achieve their long-term goals," task force co-chairman Brian Lavoie of the Online Computer Library Center said in a press release.

Although the task force says an industrywide solution is needed, there obviously are many steps individual IT shops can take to implement a better data preservation plan. The task force's second co-chair, Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, offered a list of 10 tips for preserving data in a recent article. 

Here is a look at Berman's advice:

1. Make a detailed plan for the stewardship and preservation of your data, from its inception to the end of its lifetime.

2. Be aware of data costs including hardware, software, support and time, and include them in your overall IT budget. Determine whether it is more cost-effective to regenerate some of your information rather than preserve it over a long period.

3. Associate metadata with your data. Identify relevant standards for data and metadata content and format, and follow them to make sure the data can be used by others.

4. Make multiple copies of valuable data. Store some copies off-site and in different systems.

5. Plan ahead of time for the transition of digital data to new storage media. Plan budgets for new storage and software technologies, file-format migrations, and time. Move data to new technologies before your storage media become obsolete. ( Compare storage products.)

6. Plan for transitions in data stewardship. If the data eventually will be turned over to a formal repository, institution or other custodial environment, make sure it meets the requirements of the new environment and that the new steward indeed agrees to take it on.

7. Determine the level of "trust" required when choosing how to archive data. Are the resources of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration necessary, or will Google do?

8. Tailor plans for preservation and access to the specific needs of users. Gene-sequence data used daily by hundreds of thousands of researchers worldwide may need a preservation and access infrastructure that's different from the infrastructure needed, for example, for digital photos viewed occasionally by family members.

9. Pay attention to security. Be aware of what you must do to maintain the integrity of your data.

10. Know the regulations. Know whether copyright, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the U.S. National Institutes of Health publishing expectations, or other policies or regulations are relevant to your data. That way, you can make sure your approach to stewardship and publication is compliant.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate

While Google is often cited as having a golden touch, the company's productivity application suite is still a mere bronze competitor to Microsoft's Office and collaboration tools despite upgrades over the past year that focused on evolving and securing the online tools for corporate users.

Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE), the vendor's $50 per user productivity suite targeted at businesses, has proven worthy in certain situations, most involving universities or small and midsize businesses (SMB) looking to cut costs.

[ For more analysis of Google Apps' chances of dislodging Microsoft Office, read "Can Google Apps move up market?" | And discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

The platform, however, still lacks some key features for large companies that build applications around productivity tools and demand tight integration and security, along with administrative controls.

GAPE is made up of messaging, including Google Gmail, Calendars and Talk; collaboration including Google Docs, Video and Sites; and e-mail security and compliance.

Over the past year, Google has been adding tools and APIs to satisfy customer demands, as well as Web 2.0 tools such as video that put a new twist on collaboration. But the work is far from over.

Model for success
Even critics, however, believe Google has the right model to succeed — delivering the software as a service to corporate users.

Microsoft , whose Office suite boasts more than a 90% share of the market, is among those critics.

It endorsed the online model in October when it introduced the first online versions of fully functional Office applications available via a browser. Office Web Applications are in private testing and are slated for inclusion with Office 14. Microsoft already has its toe in the water with Office Live Workspaces and with Exchange and SharePoint Online Services.

While the future may hold promise, the current position for GAPE is the role of worthy alternative and not as serious contender to replace Office or other collaboration platforms.

Google, however, may make its mark not by rising to the top of the heap, but by redefining collaboration and carving the most innovative turns around Web 2.0.

Growing up
"The Google model is not wrong, it is just immature," says Guy Creese, a Burton Group analyst who for years has been tracking Google's efforts to produce online productivity tools. This month he is releasing a report entitled: "Is It Time to Ditch Microsoft Office?"

It is an interesting question because Google isn't lagging for lack of trying.

The company is refining its platform to include new features and controls that appeal to — and are required by — corporate users. And it is adding Web 2.0 twists and integrating social software.

In July 2007, Google made its biggest investment yet toward satisfying corporate users when it laid out $625 million for e-mail hygiene vendor Postini, which provided the compliance, archiving and e-mail protection GAPE lacked.

The Postini service provides security for e-mail, instant messaging and the Web; archiving; message encryption; and policy enforcement of Transport Layer Security.

And because Postini's archiving and compliance only covers e-mail, Google last month released an API to address documents.

"We let you connect your Google Docs with the others systems you use for compliance," says Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps. "We continue to mature the product set."

To further back that claim, Sheth also cites the addition of Google Sites, a wiki-based team sharing tool, and Google Video, based on capabilities inherited from its YouTube division.

Google also has added an service-level agreement and is working on an administrative dashboard that shows how its systems are running and their health. The tool comes after a string of outages that crippled GAPE in the past months.

And in November, Google earned its SAS-70 Type II certification, which public companies under the Sarbanes Oxley Act require from their hosting providers.

In addition, Google and its partners are busy ratcheting up the feature set , such as Panorama Software, which has developed a slick — and free — business intelligence tool called Analytics for Google Spreadsheets.

"This is not about replacing, it is about solving old problems in new ways with Google Docs," says Oudi Antebi, vice president of strategy for Panorama. Antebi, who came to Panorama after eight years at Microsoft, says one reason for lagging enterprise interest in GAPE is that many are looking at it as a replacement instead of an extension to what they already have.

Seeing is believing
One example of Google's potential power is seen in the District of Columbia government, which is using Google's productivity suite to foster cost reduction, anywhere access, mobile integration and a collaboration platform that evolves on Internet time for its 38,000 employees.

Vivek Kundra, the CTO for the D.C. government, is blazing such a path with his Google-based projects. He is rumored to be helping President-elect Barack Obama's transition team work through its technology agenda focused on "cutting-edge technologies to create a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America's citizens."

Kundra's innovations around Google Apps include a video job board, where D.C. hiring managers post descriptions of openings; a wiki built with text and video explaining and soliciting participation in D.C.'s procurement process; and his latest project where he has provided a list of contractors D.C. has hired, the projects they are working on and their pay rates.  

"What we have created is transparency," Kundra says. "Taxpayers can hold us accountable."

Kundra also launched Apps for Democracy, a contest to build applications on top of the Google platform using any of the 216 data feeds from the D.C. Data Catalog, including most recent road-kill pickups.

The contest yielded 47 applications in 30 days at a cost of $50,000. Kundra estimated the price would have been $2.6 million if done using D.C.'s old form of in-house development. Seven of the applications are now running in production.

"This is the power [you get] when you greatly democratize the ability to create, publish and distribute content," Kundra says. "Before, you relied on a massive IT operation with developers, Web editors and writers. Now we shift power to the individual employee."

But Kundra recognizes Google Apps also has its weaknesses.

D.C. still uses Microsoft Office, which he says is better suited for creating complex documents, and he is still waiting for Google integration with Exchange calendars.

Climbing the mountain
One barrier to Google's success is the fact that it is a crowded race to become second fiddle and take a run at Microsoft's dominance.

Since launching GAPE in February 2007, Google has earned $4 million compared with $12.2 billion for Microsoft's Office, according to Gartner. Google won't clarify its number of paid users other than to say it has "hundreds of thousands."

And there are a host of other competitors including IBM Lotus Symphony, Corel WordPerfect Office, OpenOffice.org, Sun StarOffice, ThinkFree and Zoho, as well as lesser known vendors such as Ability Office, Celframe Office, Koffice, GNOME Office and Softmaker Office.

In a study released last month, ClickStream found that use of free versions of productivity tools such as Google Docs and OpenOffice remain low and that use of Microsoft Office showed no decline.

ClickStream spent six months tracking usage among 2,400 adults using the tools at home and found that 51 percent used Microsoft Office, while only 5 percent used Open Office, 1 percent Google Docs, and 0.3 percent Google Spreadsheets.

ClickStream concluded that "although Google Docs and Spreadsheets has been touted as a potential competitor to the Microsoft Office suite, OpenOffice is currently the more likely app to take that position, possibly indicating the value of offline and local processing enabled by installed applications."

What's missing?
Critics and Google agree there is work to do.

Burton Group's Creese says Google provides only rudimentary e-mail distribution lists, lacks the ability to do administration via roles, and does not support Office 2007 file formats.

"If you standardized on [Office 2007] you are in trouble," he says. The software also does not translate all graphics from Word documents, supports only a dozen or so fonts, does not provide in-box delegation features and imposes file size limitations when importing documents.

"If you are trying to collaborate on PowerPoint you could hit the limit," Creese says.

He thinks SMBs may be able to go completely to GAPE, but "a large corporation cannot do that. It will always have a mixed environment and you have to worry about these translation issues."

He adds that for Google Apps to take off it has to present new ways of working rather than just making software less expensive. "In the long run, we will see a movement to the software-as-a-service office suite in some form," he says.

Google's Sheth would not provide details of coming features for GAPE, but agreed with the list of issues cited by Creese and others. "I think we already have a robust enterprise offering, of course there is more we can do. We are building that list and adding more and more functionality," he says.

The challenge is clear to many.

"Google needs to keep innovating around new ways that people work," says Tony Safoian, president and CEO of SadaSystems, a consulting and development firm that is both a Microsoft and a Google partner. "I can work with five people at the same time on the same spreadsheet and get the work done. That is how people work today. Google needs to continue to move along the lines of the collaborative work environment where people find things in a few seconds instead of hours or days. That is where Google's edge is now."

SadaSystems has made a significant investment in building Google Apps implementations and will continue to move users to the cloud.

"We are betting big on this technology," Safoian says.

Now the question is whether corporate users bet big on Google and its innovations or stick with Microsoft as it moves to its hybrid world of software and services.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate

Microsoft released an emergency patch for the Internet Explorer flaw this week after Chinese security researchers accidentally posted the attack code for it last week, but that isn't stopping the damage. More consternation was created by word from Apple that it is bailing out of the Macworld Conference & Expo after the 2009 event in a few weeks and CEO Steve Jobs will not be giving the keynote speech.

1. Microsoft fixes IE bug and Hackers exploit IE bug with 'insidious' Word docs: Internet Explorer users were urged to immediately install an emergency patch released by Microsoft to fix a flaw in the browser that was inadvertently made public by Chinese security researchers last week. Hackers immediately began using the flaw after the attack code was posted and it is expected to be more widely used to plant malware on Web sites. Hackers also quickly began to exploit the flaw by stashing malicious ActiveX controls in Word documents. McAfee's Avert Labs director of security research and communications, David Marcus, summed it up: "This is a pretty insidious way to attack people, because it's invisible to the eye, the communication with the site."

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

2. Apple announces its last year at Macworld, no Jobs keynote and Apple at Expo: What went wrong?: Apple is done with Macworld after the 2009 show in three weeks and Jobs won't be giving the keynote when the show opens Jan. 5. That announcement surprised — even shocked — many industry watchers and also renewed speculation about Jobs' health. Macworld, the Web site/magazine, took a long look at the news, including what it says about the state of trade shows generally and Apple specifically, in a number of articles and columns.

3. Bribes, scams cost Siemens $1.6 billion: Siemens and some of its subsidiaries forked over more than $1.4 billion in bribes to foreign officials, scammed the United Nations Oil for Food program and — as if that wasn't enough — "cooked" financial records for years until being busted by U.S. and German prosecutors. As a consequence, the parent company and subsidiaries will pay $898.4 million in criminal fines to the U.S. Additionally, in a separate civil proceeding that involved some of the same incidents, Siemens agree to turn over $350 million in profits linked to the shenanigans. "Today's filings make clear that for much of its operations across the globe, bribery was nothing less than standard operating procedure for Siemens," said U.S. Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich.

4. Undersea cable cuts disrupt Internet access: Three major underwater cable cuts affected Internet and telephone access and traffic between Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The cuts were on lines that connect countries between Singapore and France and the U.K. and Japan, France Telecom said. The cause of the cuts was unknown, though it could have been an undersea earthquake or a ship passing through the area of the cables, which are located in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Sicily.

5. Outsourcers warn of H-1B visa cutbacks: Companies that hire employees on H-1B and L-1 visas are warning investors through U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings that it might be harder to get those visas in the future. Some are saying they aren't sure that President-elect Barack Obama and the new Congress will be much help in that regard. Obama repeatedly pledged as he campaigned that he would push to "stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas" and offer incentives to keep jobs in the U.S., but he hasn't provided specifics about how he'll aim to accomplish that or how H-1B visas might be involved.

6. Red Hat offers 18-month term for enterprise maintenance: Red Hat enterprise customers — and would-be customers who haven't cared for the company's previous approach to maintenance options — got good news with word that the company is making it more cost effective to run and maintain one version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for 18 months instead of six.

7. RIAA stops suing individuals: Are we home free?: The Recording Industry Association of America is going to stop going after individuals for allegedly illegally downloading digital music and will put the burden on Internet service providers to keep tabs on customers and rein them in if they appear to be engaged in download-related online misbehavior.

8. Open-source success due to Microsoft, report says: Well, this is a twist, but one that, in hindsight, we could have seen coming — the success and growth of open-source software owes less to evangelism and developer enthusiasm than to its commercialization by the likes of Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun and other vendors, according to a report by Saugatuck Technology.

9. Reproduction of 2,100-year-old calculator deepens mystery: The Antikythera Device, a mysterious, complex astronomical calculator that is more than 2,000 years old, has been reproduced using discoveries announced a couple of years ago by an international research team. Former museum curator Michael Wright created the new model. He had previously created an earlier model after decades of researching the device. The shoebox-size device contains 27 bronze gears and dials that are turned by a knob on the side — the complexity of the gears was not found again until the Middle Ages, 1,000 years after the astronomical calculator was devised.

10. 2008: Yahoo's year to forget: Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang heralded 2008 as the year for the company's turnaround and his enthusiasm for the possibilities was infectious within his company as well as among many industry observers and analysts. But as the year winds down, 2008 hasn't worked out that way at all, with Yang planning to step aside as CEO as soon as Yahoo, which is struggling more than ever, finds a replacement.

Brocade Communications on Friday completed its acquisition of Foundry Networks, a deal that brings a solid Ethernet LAN company into a giant of storage-area networks.

The companies agreed to an approximately $3 billion deal in July , but soon afterward, downturns in the stock and credit markets raised questions about large transactions and the health of IT spending. Brocade got financing for the deal, but Foundry's shares declined, and in late October Brocade lowered its bid to $16.50 per share in cash, or about $2.6 billion. A vote on the transaction by Foundry shareholders was delayed several times, and they finally approved it on Wednesday.

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Foundry's products and its approximately 1,100 employees will now be integrated into Brocade. But Bobby Johnson, who founded the company in 1996, won't join Brocade. Johnson "now has the opportunity to pursue several charitable activities that he did not have the time to do while serving in his capacity of CEO," Brocade said in a prepared statement.

Though Brocade won't get that networking veteran, it has hired two others. On Friday, the company said it had hired former Force10 Networks CEO Marc Randall as senior vice president of products and offerings. Randall led the maker of enterprise and service-provider routers and switches from 2003 until this year. He was once vice president of engineering at Cisco Systems, where he led development of the Cisco 7500 Series router, according to Brocade.

Also on Friday, Brocade said it had hired Dave Stevens as CTO. Stevens founded firewall maker Palo Alto Networks and was CEO of the company until he left in June. He is a former Brocade executive who joined the company through its acquisition of Rhapsody Networks in 2003. Stevens' long resume goes back to seminal networking companies such as SynOptics and Bay Networks, as well as Nortel Networks and Atmosphere Networks.

Brocade is a major player in SANs (storage area networks), with more than 55 percent of the market for modular SAN switches in the third quarter of this year, according to Dell'Oro Group. Its nearest competitor, Cisco Systems, trails in that segment with about 44 percent. With Foundry, Brocade goes head-to-head with Cisco across entire enterprise and data-center networks.

The combined company will be able to branch out from a SAN market with approximately $2 billion in annual revenue to the IP network market, which is ten times as big, Brocade CEO Mike Klayko said in a video commentary on the news posted Friday.

While Google is often cited as having a golden touch, the company's productivity application suite is still a mere bronze competitor to Microsoft's Office and collaboration tools despite upgrades over the past year that focused on evolving and securing the online tools for corporate users.

Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE), the vendor's $50 per user productivity suite targeted at businesses, has proven worthy in certain situations, most involving universities or small and midsize businesses (SMB) looking to cut costs.

[ For more analysis of Google Apps' chances of dislodging Microsoft Office, read "Can Google Apps move up market?" | And discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

The platform, however, still lacks some key features for large companies that build applications around productivity tools and demand tight integration and security, along with administrative controls.

GAPE is made up of messaging, including Google Gmail, Calendars and Talk; collaboration including Google Docs, Video and Sites; and e-mail security and compliance.

Over the past year, Google has been adding tools and APIs to satisfy customer demands, as well as Web 2.0 tools such as video that put a new twist on collaboration. But the work is far from over.

Model for success
Even critics, however, believe Google has the right model to succeed — delivering the software as a service to corporate users.

Microsoft , whose Office suite boasts more than a 90% share of the market, is among those critics.

It endorsed the online model in October when it introduced the first online versions of fully functional Office applications available via a browser. Office Web Applications are in private testing and are slated for inclusion with Office 14. Microsoft already has its toe in the water with Office Live Workspaces and with Exchange and SharePoint Online Services.

While the future may hold promise, the current position for GAPE is the role of worthy alternative and not as serious contender to replace Office or other collaboration platforms.

Google, however, may make its mark not by rising to the top of the heap, but by redefining collaboration and carving the most innovative turns around Web 2.0.

Growing up
"The Google model is not wrong, it is just immature," says Guy Creese, a Burton Group analyst who for years has been tracking Google's efforts to produce online productivity tools. This month he is releasing a report entitled: "Is It Time to Ditch Microsoft Office?"

It is an interesting question because Google isn't lagging for lack of trying.

The company is refining its platform to include new features and controls that appeal to — and are required by — corporate users. And it is adding Web 2.0 twists and integrating social software.

In July 2007, Google made its biggest investment yet toward satisfying corporate users when it laid out $625 million for e-mail hygiene vendor Postini, which provided the compliance, archiving and e-mail protection GAPE lacked.

The Postini service provides security for e-mail, instant messaging and the Web; archiving; message encryption; and policy enforcement of Transport Layer Security.

And because Postini's archiving and compliance only covers e-mail, Google last month released an API to address documents.

"We let you connect your Google Docs with the others systems you use for compliance," says Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps. "We continue to mature the product set."

To further back that claim, Sheth also cites the addition of Google Sites, a wiki-based team sharing tool, and Google Video, based on capabilities inherited from its YouTube division.

Google also has added an service-level agreement and is working on an administrative dashboard that shows how its systems are running and their health. The tool comes after a string of outages that crippled GAPE in the past months.

And in November, Google earned its SAS-70 Type II certification, which public companies under the Sarbanes Oxley Act require from their hosting providers.

In addition, Google and its partners are busy ratcheting up the feature set , such as Panorama Software, which has developed a slick — and free — business intelligence tool called Analytics for Google Spreadsheets.

"This is not about replacing, it is about solving old problems in new ways with Google Docs," says Oudi Antebi, vice president of strategy for Panorama. Antebi, who came to Panorama after eight years at Microsoft, says one reason for lagging enterprise interest in GAPE is that many are looking at it as a replacement instead of an extension to what they already have.

Seeing is believing
One example of Google's potential power is seen in the District of Columbia government, which is using Google's productivity suite to foster cost reduction, anywhere access, mobile integration and a collaboration platform that evolves on Internet time for its 38,000 employees.

Vivek Kundra, the CTO for the D.C. government, is blazing such a path with his Google-based projects. He is rumored to be helping President-elect Barack Obama's transition team work through its technology agenda focused on "cutting-edge technologies to create a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America's citizens."

Kundra's innovations around Google Apps include a video job board, where D.C. hiring managers post descriptions of openings; a wiki built with text and video explaining and soliciting participation in D.C.'s procurement process; and his latest project where he has provided a list of contractors D.C. has hired, the projects they are working on and their pay rates.  

"What we have created is transparency," Kundra says. "Taxpayers can hold us accountable."

Kundra also launched Apps for Democracy, a contest to build applications on top of the Google platform using any of the 216 data feeds from the D.C. Data Catalog, including most recent road-kill pickups.

The contest yielded 47 applications in 30 days at a cost of $50,000. Kundra estimated the price would have been $2.6 million if done using D.C.'s old form of in-house development. Seven of the applications are now running in production.

"This is the power [you get] when you greatly democratize the ability to create, publish and distribute content," Kundra says. "Before, you relied on a massive IT operation with developers, Web editors and writers. Now we shift power to the individual employee."

But Kundra recognizes Google Apps also has its weaknesses.

D.C. still uses Microsoft Office, which he says is better suited for creating complex documents, and he is still waiting for Google integration with Exchange calendars.

Climbing the mountain
One barrier to Google's success is the fact that it is a crowded race to become second fiddle and take a run at Microsoft's dominance.

Since launching GAPE in February 2007, Google has earned $4 million compared with $12.2 billion for Microsoft's Office, according to Gartner. Google won't clarify its number of paid users other than to say it has "hundreds of thousands."

And there are a host of other competitors including IBM Lotus Symphony, Corel WordPerfect Office, OpenOffice.org, Sun StarOffice, ThinkFree and Zoho, as well as lesser known vendors such as Ability Office, Celframe Office, Koffice, GNOME Office and Softmaker Office.

In a study released last month, ClickStream found that use of free versions of productivity tools such as Google Docs and OpenOffice remain low and that use of Microsoft Office showed no decline.

ClickStream spent six months tracking usage among 2,400 adults using the tools at home and found that 51 percent used Microsoft Office, while only 5 percent used Open Office, 1 percent Google Docs, and 0.3 percent Google Spreadsheets.

ClickStream concluded that "although Google Docs and Spreadsheets has been touted as a potential competitor to the Microsoft Office suite, OpenOffice is currently the more likely app to take that position, possibly indicating the value of offline and local processing enabled by installed applications."

What's missing?
Critics and Google agree there is work to do.

Burton Group's Creese says Google provides only rudimentary e-mail distribution lists, lacks the ability to do administration via roles, and does not support Office 2007 file formats.

"If you standardized on [Office 2007] you are in trouble," he says. The software also does not translate all graphics from Word documents, supports only a dozen or so fonts, does not provide in-box delegation features and imposes file size limitations when importing documents.

"If you are trying to collaborate on PowerPoint you could hit the limit," Creese says.

He thinks SMBs may be able to go completely to GAPE, but "a large corporation cannot do that. It will always have a mixed environment and you have to worry about these translation issues."

He adds that for Google Apps to take off it has to present new ways of working rather than just making software less expensive. "In the long run, we will see a movement to the software-as-a-service office suite in some form," he says.

Google's Sheth would not provide details of coming features for GAPE, but agreed with the list of issues cited by Creese and others. "I think we already have a robust enterprise offering, of course there is more we can do. We are building that list and adding more and more functionality," he says.

The challenge is clear to many.

"Google needs to keep innovating around new ways that people work," says Tony Safoian, president and CEO of SadaSystems, a consulting and development firm that is both a Microsoft and a Google partner. "I can work with five people at the same time on the same spreadsheet and get the work done. That is how people work today. Google needs to continue to move along the lines of the collaborative work environment where people find things in a few seconds instead of hours or days. That is where Google's edge is now."

SadaSystems has made a significant investment in building Google Apps implementations and will continue to move users to the cloud.

"We are betting big on this technology," Safoian says.

Now the question is whether corporate users bet big on Google and its innovations or stick with Microsoft as it moves to its hybrid world of software and services.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate