Google Gmail bug affects 150,000

According to a post by Paul McNamara of Network World, Google apologizes for a Gmail bug that shook 150,000 users. McNamara quotes Google's Gmail blog.

"I know what some of you are thinking: how could this happen if we have multiple copies of your data, in multiple data centers? Well, in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data. That's what happened here. Some copies of mail were deleted, and we've been hard at work over the last 30 hours getting it back for the people affected by this issue."

It is not known if any users of the CSU campus Gmail systems were affected.

Scotland Yard Reportedly Investigating Google

Last summer our university migrated its employee e-mail to Google. According to a post in the Science and Tech section of Mail Online by Vanessa Allen, "The internet search giant was forced to confess it had downloaded personal data during its controversial Street View project, when it photographed virtually every street in Britain." Allen said:

In an astonishing invasion of privacy, it admitted entire emails, web pages and even passwords were 'mistakenly collected' by antennae on its high-tech Street View cars. [Read More]

Because university e-mail between faculty, counselors and students is often very confidential this may be of concern to some university employees and students. According to Allen "Scotland Yard is already considering whether the company has broken the law."

Gmail users no longer forced into threaded mail view

In a September 29, 2010 Googlewatch post, Clint Boulton explains that now Gmail users can turn off threaded view of their Gmail. Boulton said, "Hewing to its pledge to provide choice for its 180 million or so e-mail users, Google has backed off its adherence to its beloved "conversation view" by allowing users to receive e-mail messages in chronological order."

In another post TothePC offers detailed information on how to turn off the feature:

You can easily turn off conversation view in Gmail settings and get each reply listed as separate message in the inbox. [Read Detailed Easy Instructions]

Boulton said, "The thread, which Google calls conversation view, makes it super easy for users to find entire message exchange sessions between users. Ideally, this saves time. Still, enough people used Outlook, or Eudora for enough years to become comfortable with the traditional chronological view."

Google Apps Security Problems for LA

Like SJSU, the City of Los Angeles has been migrating to Google and, at least for LA, there have been some major problems. According to an article posted in Network World by By Tony Bradley of PC World magazine, "project delays resulting from ongoing concerns prove that the cloud still has some security growing pains to get through." According to Bradley:

Vendors of all shapes and sizes--including powerhouses like Google and Microsoft--are aggressively pushing the cloud as the next great frontier in computing. But, as the first major implementation project for Google Apps, the LA project illustrates that there are still some hurdles to cross before the cloud exodus can really occur. [Read More]

Bradley goes on to say, "All of the promises, commitments, and security measures, though, can't undo a security breach." Bradley's post said:

Companies fall under a wide variety of state, federal, and industry compliance mandates requiring that data be processed, stored, and protected in certain ways. As of yet, the cloud does not provide sufficient controls to meet many of those compliance requirements, and the regulatory bodies that govern the compliance frameworks have not issued addendums or specific guidance for securely processing and storing sensitive information in the cloud. [Read More]

As SJSU migrates to Google, I wonder if all the security issues we face have been adequately addressed? I sure hope so, but I do not think so...

SJSU Google Support Structure

Support for SJSU Google Apps and Mail is structured in the following manner:

• First Level : Calls go to the Department and Division IT Techs. (The folks who fix your computer the same way you do it if your computer is broken.)


• Second Level : University Technology Services (UTS) will troubleshoot problems that the IT Techs are still having issues with. The IT Techs will call UTS (to escalate to level 2.)


• Third Level ; Google, this is in the event e-mail, google docs or the calendar are totally not functioning. UTS will make this call.

If that is not good enough...

Thanks SK for this information:
On UTS' home page under the active projects tab. It says that they are migrating to a unified e-mail system (Gmail). However it does not say who will support the migration process.

On http://mail.sjsu.edu, it only states that if you have problems logging in (SJSUOne), please contact the University Help Desk. But it does say that San Jose State University e-mail is provided by UTS. If you click on UTS, which redirects to http://uts.sjsu.edu, you can see that their number (408) 924-2340

Summary:
The help desk is only authorized help with login issues via SJSUOne but not with migrating to the new e-mail system. According to the mail.sjsu.edu website, the e-mail system is provided by UTS and their number is listed on UTS' page. Specifically:

"According to the public facing website I'm looking at, the Google e-mail is provided by UTS and this is their number, 408 924-2340. If I were you and I did not have a Desktop support person around, and needed help, I might want to call UTS. But, don't tell them we (the help desk) told you to call them. We are not authorized to tell you to call them."

Google and age dicrimination

According to an article in today's San Jose Mercury News, former Google Engineer Brian Reid's case alleging age discrimination on the part of Google is going to be heard by the California State Supreme Court. The article said:

Reid's (age 54) long-running legal feud with Google has reached the California Supreme Court, which this week will hear arguments that will determine if the age discrimination allegations will ever be aired to a jury. [Read More]

I am not saying Google is guilty. However the sheer number of allegations we have seen and heard lately about Google's business practices makes me wonder. We are planning to give Google all our campus e-mail. What is the back out strategy should we decide we need to stop doing business with them at a later date?

UC dumps Google

According to a post on Neowin by Brandon Boyce, entitled University of California ditches GMail:

Last week the University of California CIO, Peter Siegel, and several IT council members sent a letter to staff that they have decided to end their GMail pilot. The goal was to make GMail the primary mail system for the 30,000 faculty and staff at the University. But the faculty expressed doubt that Google could keep their correspondences private. [Read More]

In light of the growing privacy concerns over Google is this really a great time to be locking ourselves into a long term contract with them? Could this "free" service cost us more than we should be willing to pay?

My concerns over Google @ SJSU

Commentary:

As the state budget is tightening the CSU is looking for ways to save money. One of those ways appears to be outsourcing to supposedly free service providers. Various campuses in the CSU system are outsourcing, or planning to outsource soon, employee and/or student e-mail to Google and/or Microsoft.

Reportedly the vendors are going to be doing this for free. But, is it really free? According to the editor of Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson, who also wrote the book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, "All forms of free boil down to shifting monies around...cross-subsidies." In other words if they give something away, they have to be making money elsewhere off the free gift. Where are Google and Microsoft making money on this? That question has not been adequately answered as of yet.

The outsourcing also has other unanswered questions; like, what do we do if the plan fails? It is amazing for such a big plan to be executed without a back out plan. One of the basic principles of change management is the need to plan for the unexpected. This includes the need to provide back out if the plan fails and the need to define the criteria on which a decision to back out will be made. So, what is the back out plan? That question has not been adequately answered as of yet.

A mystery also surrounds the issue of displacement of university staff. San Jose State University has already outsourced its student e-mail to Microsoft and is in the process of outsourcing faculty and staff e-mail to Google. SJSU has recently announced the layoff of 73 staff members, 21 of these are from unit 9. SJSU Chief Information Officer William Maguire said in a meeting in early 2010, “100 techs at SJSU support e-mail.” If each of tech supports legacy e-mail ten percent of the time, on average, that is the equivalent of ten positions supporting e-mail. Few may actually be supporting e-mail 100 percent of the time; but when the work is contracted out and the positions are cut, it is hard to argue there is no impact.

The classification of the people doing the work also comes into question. Typically the top-level people running the e-mail servers are Operating System Analysts. When there is a problem with an e-mail server it is an Operating System Analyst that fixes it. When that work is contracted out someone will still have to be reporting problems to the vendor, but; it is not likely that person will that be an Operating System Analyst.

A lot of information sent via e-mail between students and faculty is very sensitive. Security and privacy is a major concern. On April 19 privacy and data-protection officials from 10 countries, including Germany, Canada and France sent a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The officials said Google "too often" forgets people’s privacy rights as it rolls out new technologies.

According to a post by Ellen Messmer of Network World, Cloud computing makes IT access governance messier. Messmer said, "IT professionals are finding it harder than ever to set up access controls for network resources and applications used by organization employees, and cloud computing is only adding to their woes, a survey of 728 IT practitioners finds."

Not everybody is finding outsourcing to Google to be the slam-dunk it appears to be in the CSU system. According to a March 30 article by David Tidmarsh of the Yale Daily News at Yale University, "Information Technology Services has decided to postpone the University’s move from the Horde Webmail service to Google Apps for Education." The article went on to say, "Deputy Provost for Science and Technology Steven Girvin said, “There were enough concerns expressed by faculty that we felt more consultation and input from the community was necessary.”

Few answers to these questions and issues have been forthcoming about these so-called free solutions. There is an old saying, if a deal appears too good to be true, it usually is. As SJSU appears on the verge of leaping into the pool of free e-mail for all, maybe we should be looking a little more carefully beneath the surface.

Google too careless about privacy?

According to an Associated Press story in the Mercury News by Barbara Ortutay:

Officials from Germany, Canada, France and seven other countries are raising privacy concerns about Google's mapping service and the company's fumbled foray into social networking. [Read More]

According to Ortutay, "The bulk of the complaints are over Buzz, which Google launched in February as part of its Gmail service."

SJSU Web page on Google plan

Here is a Web page with Webcasts that provides information on the planned rollout of Google at SJSU:

Welcome to University Technology Services' temporary Google Apps Implementation project page. When the new UTS website is rolled out, more comprehensive documentation will be available. [Read More]

When the new page is available I will link to it.

Article says cloud computing "messy"

According to a post by By Ellen Messmer of Network World, Cloud computing makes IT access governance messier. Messmer said:

IT professionals are finding it harder than ever to set up access controls for network resources and applications used by organization employees, and cloud computing is only adding to their woes, a survey of 728 IT practitioners finds. [Read More]

SJSU is about to embrace cloud computing in a big way with the move to Google.

The new Google Docs

Coming to a university near you?
Click on the picture to see a video on YouTube on the new version of Google Docs.

Yale University puts Google on hold

Will SJSU also rethink Google Mail?

According to an article by David Tidmarsh of the Yale Daily News at Yale University, "Information Technology Services has decided to postpone the University’s move from the Horde Webmail service to Google Apps for Education." The article goes on to say:

Deputy Provost for Science and Technology Steven Girvin said, “There were enough concerns expressed by faculty that we felt more consultation and input from the community was necessary,” [Read More]

Dave Kearns of Network World wrote a different perspective of this when he said, "Privacy and cloud computing have recently been in the news, with stories coming out of academia (Yale University) and government oversight agencies (Canadian Privacy Commissioner). Both, in my view, got it wrong." [Read More]

The buzz about Buzz

O'Reilly's online managing editor Mac Slocum recently wrote Google Buzz: 5 Things You Need to Know. This is a great post for O'Reilly Answers about Google Buzz. In the post Slocum efficiently covers the key points of Buzz and compares and contrasts it to social media tools like Twitter and Facebook.

Why Google Apps for Education?

Members of the Google Apps Education team explain Google Apps, how Google Apps work, the benefits of Google Apps as well as provide some information about Google's education program.

Solutions: Linking Apple and Google Calendars

This video, by Gary Rosenzweig of MacMost.com, shows a free way to link Apple iCal Calendars and Google Calendars so that when you put an event in one it appears in the other. This is a good way to get Google Calendar events to appear on your iPhone, for example. There are other, not free, solutions as well including Spanning Synch. I like Spanning Synch if you have multiple Apple Macs where you will be entering calendar events, or want granular control to link multiple calendars.

How we use Google Docs at the Help Desk

We have been using and are crazy about Google Docs at the San Jose State University Help Desk. Why? Because Google Docs have greatly improved our ability to collaborate efficiently. Rather than e-mail copies of Word files from person to person and hope the end result is not mass confusion; we invite users to work together of the documents we have stored in Google's Web cloud.

We build right sized collaboration teams of subject matter experts (SMPs), staff users, writers and editors around a document based around the need to get the job done. In this post we will illustrate how we do this.

For any of this to make sense; you need to understand the concepts in the following video. This is how Google Docs works:



Sharing a document with others is very simple. Here is another video that shows you how to add people to collaborate on a Google Document.

As you follow the progress of a team around a document, you may want to view the revision history to see who did what to the document. It is easy to do this. Select "see revision history" from the file menu of the Google document.



After you make this selection you can see the work of the multiple editors of, or contributors to, the document and/or roll back to a previous version.



Using Google Docs we have been able to create teams around on-line and training documents based of the expertise and the skill sets needed to create successful documentation. We have also been using this approach for several years for asset management. This work flow has significant potential also for group efforts like department newsletters. It is hard to imagine reverting to our old inefficient work flow of mailing Word files and tracking changes to those files.

Apple vs. Google battle part of a philisophical tech war?

According to a recent Business Week article, "The Valley giants both want to determine how users access the mobile Web. Eric Schmidt's exit from Apple's board may be the shot that starts the race in earnest." The article goes on to say:

"By most measures—revenue growth, stock appreciation, magazine cover stories—Apple and Google are the two most successful and influential companies of the past decade. Yet their visions for how the computer industry will shape up in the next one could hardly diverge more."

I love Apple's hardware and interfaces, but the company is far from being open. Its closed position on things as simple as employees blogging, to its tight grip on developers, has been noted many times. In my opinion Apple is a closed company, tightly guarding its public image. The secrecy of the health of its CEO is just one of many examples of the walled garden that is Apple.

Google, on the other hand, has embraced open source technology and philosophy. In my opinion this is not just about companies, it is another battle in a bigger philosophical tech war. The real war is the war of open source vs. proprietary computing.

As Apple is the Microsoft of hand held computing devices (like the iPhone) this battle was to be expected. It is Linux vs. Microsoft all over again, except this time the battle is not over desktops. This battle is over what is in the palm of your hand. This war is far from over

Technorati Tags: Google, Open Source, Apple, ssloansjca

Google expands mobile news platform

New Google G1 (way more than a) Phone

The future is increasingly mobile, increasingly pervasively connected computing. The new Google G1 has been released. It joins the iPhone and other similar devices that provide an Internet delivery system using standard Web protocols, independent of Wi-Fi networks. You can expect almost everybody to have such devices in about 24-months, given the rate people replace their phones.

This technology is providing a medium to deliver compelling content to everybody all the time. Since these devices are increasingly aware of their physical location, thanks to integrated GPS, this opens up all kinds of new and interesting ways for journalists to deliver content.

Thanks to "easy access to all Google Applications" these devices really leverage the power of Cloud Computing and in my opinion they should be thought of as hand-held computers and not mere phones or mere PDAs.

[Device Specs]

Technorati Tags: Google, gphone, Android, ssloansjca

Androids are coming

Android Developer Contest Winners Announced

Remember Android?
Android was announced an Internet eternity ago on November 5, 2007. According to Wikipedia, "Android is a software platform and operating system for mobile devices based on the Linux operating system and developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. Google has pledged to make most of the Android platform available under the Apache free-software and open-source license, once it is released in 2008." Android has been heralded as an open source alternative to Apple's iPhone platform.

Well, we are approaching Q4 of 2008. There was a contest, called the Android Developer Challenge, to design applications for this platform. Does the Android platform measure up to the iPhone platform? Let's look at some of the winners of that contest.

Technorati Tags: iphone, gphone, Apple, ssloansjca