We will be presenting in partnership with Google’s Enterprise Division to a select group of individuals on how Google’s Enterprise Search and Google Maps technology is being used to transform the way organisations such as yours do business.

The sessions will run from 8.30am to 10.30am on Tuesday 19th June and will include a presentation from the Google Enterprise Team & Stoneburn as well as a demonstration of some of the innovative ways in which Google’s Enterprise Search and Maps technology is being used for intranets, extranets, web sites, Knowledge Management, and within Business Process Management.

Date & Time: 8.30am to 10.30am, Tuesday 19th June 2012
Location: London
Cost: Free!

If you would be interested in attending this event, please complete the registration form.

Stoneburn, in partnership with Google’s Enterprise team, would like to invite you to join a webinar to learn more about Google’s cloud e-mail and collaboration platform, Google Apps.

We will show you how Google Apps is being used to transform the way organisations such as yours do business and collaborate internally, and give you a demo of the product. We’ll also tell you how you can easily move to Google Apps with Stoneburn’s unique fixed price deployments.

You can pick one of three sessions, all of which run from 15:30 to 17:00:

• Tuesday 1 May
• Wednesday 2 May
• Thursday 3 May

During the webinar, we will cover:

• Introduction to Google and Stoneburn
• Challenges that companies face in relation to messaging and collaboration
• Differences between on-premise and cloud based solutions
• Demonstration of
• Google Mail
• Google Calendar
• Google Docs
• Google Sites
• Licenses and fixed price deployment costs

If you would like to attend, please register here!

Vault lets you set your archival policies on your native data store, which means you don’t need to duplicate your data (as with the previous Google Message Discovery platform) – it’s all managed for you.

Check out the introductory video from Google’s blog post announcing the product:

Vault offers all users – IT, management, HR and legal – a simple search interface to find and manage information by message content, dates, senders, recipients and labels.  All in a few clicks!

The G-Cloud strategy is designed to help the Government adopt cloud computing.  It identifies five areas of advantage:

• achieve large, cross government economies of scale;
• deliver ICT systems that are flexible and responsive to demand in order to support government policies and strategies;
• take advantage of new technologies in order to deliver faster business benefits and reduce cost;
• meet environmental and sustainability targets;
• allow government to procure in a way that encourages a dynamic and responsive supplier marketplace and supports emerging suppliers.

Stoneburn can be found in the “specialist cloud services” section of the CloudStore, and expect to see more of our offerings listed soon.

You can read more about our Google Apps (SaaS), Amazon Web Services (IaaS) offerings on our Products & Services page!

Berkeley’s FAQ states:

As part of our budget reduction strategy and in line with an emerging trend in higher education, UC Berkeley is migrating to Google Apps for Education to provide much needed and often requested services to the campus. Google meets these needs, and also provides our faculty, students, and staff with many additional benefits.

Savings will be achieved through the elimination of non-productive, redundant services, and some decrease in infrastructure expenditures.

As part of their evaluation, Berkeley have produced a thorough matrix explaining how Google Apps compared to Microsoft Office 365 in the areas that mattered to their particular deployment. While Office 365 won out in some areas, Google Apps was the winner on the day.

Stoneburn recently helped a UK university migrate over 15,000 students to Google Apps for Education. Contact us and see how we can help you!

Red Gate Software, who run the hugely successful sqlservercentral.com for Microsoft SQL Server users, have recently launched ACloudyPlace.com for cloud developers.

Craig’s first post explores the history of Amazon’s NoSQL storage, looks at the new DynamoDB service, and talks about why it may or may not be the right technology for you.

Check it out now.

2011 was an amazing year for Stoneburn, and 2012 is set to be even better. Due to our continuing growth, Stoneburn, UK’s leading Google Enterprise partner, are recruiting for Google Apps deployment consultants and a sales executive in the Enterprise Search and Cloud Computing disciplines. Interviews are being arranged immediately. Check out the job descriptions and get in touch now!

The message of cost savings and increased agility with Google Apps, Google Search and Amazon Web Services resonates in all areas of IT, and was especially popular with the 2e2 team.

Congratulations to Alex Muir, the winner of the Google Chromebook prize!

Since 2003, the standard for in-memory caching has been memcached, developed by Brad Fiztpatrick for LiveJournal. While there have been many other cache programs written since then, many use the memcached protocol, including many with persistence (such as memcachedb and Redis).

In August, Amazon launched ElastiCache: this allows you to build clusters of nodes running a distributed, in-memory cache.

By design, the memcached protocol is designed to be simple and fast. It doesn’t have any authentication. In a well-written app, even if your caches go down, your application should still function, albeit slower. With an automation tool such as Chef or Puppet it’s pretty easy to spin up a memcache cluster.

So why use ElastiCache instead?

Well, firstly, not everyone has a Chef or Puppet infrastructure.  (Though we thoroughly recommend that you should.  Contact us and we’ll talk!)  The new update from Amazon today introduces CloudFormation support, which makes installing a cache cluster as easy as this:

Next up, there are dozens of metrics from ElastiCache which you can access and graph in CloudWatch:

ElastiCache was launched in US East (N. Virginia) only in August, but as of today, it’s now available in four more regions: US West (N. California), EU West (Dublin), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

While users love the fact they can access corporate e-mail on mobile devices — even those they provide themselves — corporate IT departments like to know what is connecting to their services, and to ensure that adequate security policies are available on any devices that can connect to corporate information.

In today’s world, staff commonly have a mobile device that is newer and more powerful than what a business provides — especially if the business has a standard device which it only updates every few years. This is the same “consumerization of IT” that tells us if you do not offer as good an e-mail solution as what you can get for free on the Internet, people will simply route around your internal communication system. Another compelling reason to adopt Google Apps!

Google’s mobile management functions allow you to control which of your user groups can use the mobile sync features to download e-mail onto a device, as well as security features for that device, including password strength and device encryption (for supported devices).

You can also get information about trends in your mobile fleet, including software version number:

And of course, you can find your Android devices on a map:

Meanwhile, BlackBerry manufacturers RIM are hoping to stem the flow of enterprise users and remain relevant by releasing a management platform for iOS and Android devices. BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, currently in beta, is due in March 2012. Google’s tool is ready today, supports Windows Mobile, iPhone, iPad and Android, and is free for all Google Apps for Business users.