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In the clouds: Microsoft and the New York City
New York City, perhaps with one of the biggest customer base with over 100,000 city employees certainly catches the eye when its Mayor Bloomberg wants to make an announcement with Microsoft, CEO Steve Ballmer. At City Hall, they both have announced a new five-year deal which will turn up dozens of separate city contracts with Microsoft into one master agreement and is projected to save the city an amount of $50 million. The value of the deal itself is about $100 million, or $20 million a year.
These savings will not only come from different contracts’ consolidation, but also by shifting some of the software needs of the New York City to the Cloud. The first phase of the deal impacts 30,000 city employees, and will include Microsoft Windows 7, Office, SharePoint, Exchange, Live Meetings, Azure, Windows Server, development tools, and database products. (also, when Office 365 becomes available that too could be show up as the part of the agreement).
City workers will fall into one of three buckets: occasional users, basic users, and power users. The city employs a lot of desk-less workers who are out on the streets. Giving them access to Office, email, and collaboration tools in the cloud makes more sense than giving them desktop versions of Office. Power users, on the other hand, will require both desktop and cloud versions. The more software that Microsoft hosts on its own servers, the more the city saves on hardware and IT costs.
Sync Windows Phone SMS with Gmail
Windows hasn’t been that bad with sync up things on the Cloud. This post highlighted a few of the same prospects from Microsoft. While considering sync up my phone text messages up on cloud, here is another great resource. It is an app for your Windows Mobile Phone device called SMSSyncUp that syncs your phone text messages to your Gmail account. One of the coolest things about this is that it will sync only those messages which were not synced previously in last synchronization, it also provides an scheduler.
Here is the resource: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=625378
Sync it up …
The advent of internet has made it all possible.
Microsoft may have been giants of software but somewhere down the isle, there are a few big names who are projecting a new paradigm of software, which is “Service”. Google, are the very first in this list who presented whole lot of services, you may call it Google Docs, spreadsheets, earth or maps, wave and voice, the Android and yes, above all, Chrome OS. It’s all good, better to say, great. However, the question is, where will all the existing stuff will go? How General People are going to adopt this in an instant? Are you ready to give it all up and start using this new paradigm overnight?
Perhaps those are a few reasons for me not being able to switch to Google wave yet. I mean why would I need to have a Google account in order to be able to see any wave anyone has just sent me? or, should I expect everyone to have a Google account with whom I communicate? That’s one point that perhaps no one would consider if communications were invented today.
On the other hand, the Google Docs has made a fine job there. Irrespective of browser or the platform you are using, you can still use the Google Docs. As far as I can see, I think they have written some application to run on the browser, didn’t they? if it is, then I guess it might take a very long time to make any web app as rich and interactive as desktop is now. Instead why not we develop some engine that could ship the very desktop apps to the web. If Google or any other are able to do that, they would no longer need to write an operating system for the browser, they can easily ship the whole Windows to the web.
As far as Microsoft is concerned, I’ve just had an experience to use Windows Live Essentials Beta, and I believe that with the 25 GB SkyDrive and online Microsoft Office Suite Web Apps together with Windows live sync beta, Windows live mail beta, movie maker and writer, has taken a huge leap ahead here. The point is, this all is basically the same software that I use on my desktop and now I’m using it on the internet. The same experience and the same usability. Just got synced up!
Cloud Computing is not hype.
Soon after the curtain rose from the much anticipated Cloud Computing platform and infrastructure “Windows Azure” by Microsoft at Microsoft PDC 2008, other cloud service providers also came into the scene.
Cloud Computing is not hype. Yes, I can say this, although we have been using internet cloud for so many years, our emails, our chats, our music, our files etc, almost everything that somehow is a part of daily life computing of man-kind, is shared and accessed through internet. Thus, is this the cloud computing infrastructure?
The answer lies beyond the traditional definition. Researchers are defining cloud computing as almost as same as the Grid or Cluster computing. More or less, the common factor among all is that, Grid, Cluster and Cloud Computing are all a form of computing that are composed of several distributed computing machines that are integrated to perform multiple tasks. Thus what makes Cloud Computing even more special?
According to a 2008 paper published by IEEE Internet Computing “Cloud Computing is a paradigm in which information is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include desktops, entertainment centers, table computers, notebooks, wall computers, handhelds, sensors, monitors, etc.”
The cloud is undoubtedly a symbol of internet, based on the several assumptions about how it is portrayed in the computer network diagram. It covers the concept of the complex internet infrastructure in which IT solution providing companies have the capabilities to provide their solutions as services at extremely low cost, highly scalable, robust, reliable and secure manner. Customers or end users don’t need to bother now to hire the whole of an IT department for the maintenance and support along with the purchase of any enterprise solution.
Services like GoogleAppEngine or Moss or Windows Azure now makes it possible to build applications on the cloud, and provide end users a highly scalable and on demand services for their home and enterprise. Similarly, office services like Google Docs and Microsoft Office Live are other online office suites as part of cloud infrastructure.
No matter you are an Enterprise user or a home user, no matter you are using desktop PC, MAC, notebook, PDA or other hand held device, or even watches. You are connected to billions of other users to share knowledge and information, to gain access of vast amount of data and information. This is what actually Cloud Computing is, the Live, Connected, and On Demand infrastructure of computing devices, information, and the users.
Dear Readers, we are heading towards the new generation of computing, the generation next. Where sharing of knowledge and information, across any kind of computing device among users everywhere is made possible.
Possibilities are endless – Have your say!
Technology Evangelist 