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Andrew Price, Author at The Latest on Accounting Tech for SMEs

About Andrew Price

Enterprise Solution Engineer - Analytics Cloud at Salesforce

How to Back Up Google Apps

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One of the biggest concerns for businesses moving to cloud software is protecting data. While it is very unlikely that Google and Google Drive will lose any of your data, it makes sense to back it up in case a user deletes it.

Email has options that are easy and quick to activate. Email archive service Google Vault for Google Apps is well priced and provides businesses with peace of mind by recovering email removed maliciously or by mistake.

Documents, which in the Google Apps suite are stored in Google Drive, don’t have the same luxury. Google may expand Google Vault to cover documents in the future. In the meantime there are third-party applications that can back up your documents for you.

Backupify

Backupify has been the poster child for backing up Google Apps and other cloud software for a while. The service is very easy to use, competitively priced and backs up your most important data.

Backupify works by gaining access to the domain and copying across data in Gmail, Docs/Drive, Contacts, Calendar and Sites. Any changes in the data are backed up daily. Premium versions of Backupify will look to sync a number of times in a 24-hour period.

Backups are easy to restore. You can log into Backupify and search for specific documents or other data and download or restore these items into your Google Apps account. What makes the product even better is that you don’t need to be a Google Apps admin to use it. Standard users can login to Backupify and look and restore this data for themselves as well.

 

Spanning

Spanning Sync is very similar to Backupify. It backs up all Google Apps and Drive data using a similar, simple interface. It also has options to restore and access your data through the service.

 

There are some points to make when using tools like this for your business. These programs make copies of your data and not actual backups which breaks the sharing settings for each document. This means that restored files won’t be shared with the same people as the original file.

(An explanation: documents in Google Drive have a unique web link. Files restored from either Backupify or Spanning receive new links. People who could access the original document don’t automatically have access to the link for the new document.)

Cheaper plans have restrictions on the amount of data backed up and how often backups occur. Backup frequency is at a minimum every 24 hours; in more expensive plans your data is synced every few hours.

Five things you need to know about Google Drive

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Google Drive is an “online hard drive” where Google Apps users store, file and share their documents online. It’s easy to use but to get the most out of it there are a couple of tips that really help.

 

1. Adding files to a shared folder

Google Drive has been designed from the ground up for sharing, or collaboration. But the way in which we share and organise our files is very different to the way we would organise them on a normal hard drive. This sometimes causes headaches for network admins and users alike.
The two most confusing changes are:

  • Documents are owned by the user who created or uploaded the files by default
  • Documents are shared and not copied into a file store.

This can cause issues when a business needs to remove a user who owns documents or when a colleague needs a document but is unsure of where it is filed. Often these items are often owned by another user in a folder shared with us.

This can make the process of collaboration cumbersome and slow. You want to keep files and folders handy while you need to work on them rather than having to search for it every time.

We can do this by adding the shared folder to our own Google Drive. In Google Drive Click, on the “Shared with me” menu item. A list of files and folders will show up. When you find the file or folder you require you can add it into “my Drive” by holding the Option key on a mac or the Ctrl key on a PC.

Although it looks like the folder is in a different place, you have simply created a link in your Google Drive to the shared location. Now you can add files and other folders you own to this shared folder.

 

2. Taking Google Drive offline

Google Apps users frequently want to take their created and shared documents offline and work on them where there is no internet coverage for example on road trips or flights.

Google is in the process of taking all of their Google Drive services offline. Services that can already be used offline include:

Google Apps offline
Google Apps offline

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Users need to have the Chrome browser to take Google Drive offline. When you are both logged into Google Drive and in Google Chrome

  1. Click More on the left-hand side of the screen.
  2. Select Offline Docs.
  3. Install the Documents app from the Chrome Web Store
  4. Once installed it takes you back to Google Drive. Select the “Enable offline” button.

 

3. Google Drive Sync

Google Drive Sync was released in the middle of 2012. It allows you to sync your Google Drive between your desktop PC (Mac or Windows PC). It also syncs almost any format from your PC to your Google Drive so you can access the file without being on the computer holding the original file.

Google Drive will sync files that are part of your “My Drive” folder to a Google Drive folder on your PC that is created when you install Google Drive.

The product is very similar to Dropbox and Box. Google Drive Sync is very quick, the storage can be upgraded quickly and relatively cheaply, it ties into the Google Apps ecosystem and it allows you to use these files with the other productivity apps in the suite like Gmail, Google Hangouts, and Google Sites.

 

4. Free QuickOffice for Google Apps for Business

Google acquired Quickoffice last year to gain knowledge and technology about converting Microsoft Office documents. They have used this acquisition to two ends.

Google gives it away for free to Google Apps for Business users on the App Store so they can view and edit Microsoft Office products on their iPad.

Google has also improved the quality of conversions from Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents into the equivalent Google Apps formats.

The quality of the file conversion has come a long way since this acquisition. A large majority of documents, when uploaded to Google Drive, are converted almost perfectly into the appropriate Google format.

 

 

5. Real-Time Applications

Google recently gave Google Drive the ability to connect to other online or cloud programs using a connector called an API (application programming interface). Programs can send information and update Google programs instantly.

Here are two programs that use Google’s Realtime API:

  • Gantter is a free, web-based project management tool. When coupled with Google Drive Gantter allows multiple users to collaborate on a project plan at the same time. Gantter files can be stored on Google Drive and users can use Google Chat to further assist in productivity.
  • Draw.io is a similar program which lets a team collaborate and chat while editing a drawing simultaneously. It is produced by the team behind LucidChart.

Google Apps Gives Users Unlimited Storage

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Google Apps users have often complained about the 25GB limit on on their Gmail mailboxes. But starting in a couple of weeks, you will be able to buy additional storage for your Google Apps account.

Google’s attitude towards expanded storage was inconsistent – ironically, consumer users of the free Google Apps had it better than paying users. Consumer users could buy more storage for Gmail (emails) or Google Drive (documents and files) with a credit card on an account by account basis.

But this was not an option for Google Apps for Business users.This was often thought to have something to do with Google’s service agreement for business customers. Google no longer offers a free version of Google Apps.

Google Apps for Business users came up with an array of workarounds to deal with mailboxes close to or exceeding the 25GB limit. These included creating a new mailbox linked to the old one, and storing emails and attachments from Google on a low-cost service like Amazon Glacier.

Google is now unifying storage for emails and documents into one amount. Google Apps users will no longer have a 25GB limit for emails and 5GB for documents. Instead there will be a 30GB limit which can be consumed by either Gmail or Google Docs.

Additional storage can be bought through Google Drive Storage.

With this service you can give different amounts of storage capacity to different users in Google Apps domain. It is perfect for users with large mailboxes as it lets them have an infinite amount of emails at their fingertips.

For a while now you have had the ability to add Google’s archiving service Google Vault to Google Apps. Google Vault also gives you unlimited storage. When you delete an email in an account with Vault attached, the email will be kept for an amount of time set by the administrator. It lets you remove email from your inbox but still makes it recoverable in the archive.

Image: Google Apps

Can I use Google Apps Offline?

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When Google Apps was born there was an understanding that, being a cloud service, you needed the internet to access your Gmail. But things have changed. We now have various options to access your data in Google Apps offline via different devices and different applications.

A point to note is that Google Chrome is required for all offline functionalities.

 

Gmail

Gmail was one of the first applications to allow offline access. Offline access is available in Google Apps via the Offline Gmail App  from the Chrome Web Store. This has just been redesigned to have the same look and feel as the iPhone and iPad Apps. When the offline app has been installed in your Chrome browser it will run in the background and keep your email updated. If your internet goes down, or your catching a plane or are somewhere without wifi, you still have access to all of your emails.

 

Google Calendar

As above, offline access for Google Calendar happened at the same time as Gmail with the Google Calendar App. Once installed you can choose in the calendar settings to “Turn offline on”. Once enabled all of your calendars will be available offline.

 

Google Docs

Google Drive is in the process of rolling out offline access for each of its core Drive products; Google Docs (documents), Google Sheets (spreadsheets) and Google Slides (slideshow).

Google Drive App is available for PC and Mac. When connected the Drive tool syncs items in your “Drive” to your PC; it works like cloud file storage program DropBox. Things like Microsoft Office documents and other formats will sync between the desktop and cloud. Google Docs files will have icon links in the folder. Clicking on a Google Docs link will open it in the browser.

The second part of this process is to provide fully functioning offline apps. The first one to go offline was the Drive app Documents. When you are offline you can access, view, and edit the document, just as if you were online. Next was the ability to open and edit presentations in Google Slides offline.

Google Drawings and Forms have recently been changed to allow offline editing. The only app that we are waiting on if an offline version of Google Spreadsheets which is coming soon.

 

What comes next

Google is attacking the desktop world. The Chrome browser and ChromeOS operating system is a large part of this strategy. Chrome or Chrome devices such as Google’s netbook Google Pixel will be the gateway to cloud applications and will handle documents locally.

Three things have happened over the last couple of weeks that have signalled the end of desktops and applications as we know it.

The introduction of Chrome device management and remote management which were recently rolled out into the administration panel. You can set users’ welcome pages, whitelisting and blacklisting sites, network settings, and many more items. The highlight is that you can push out marketplace apps and extensions to your users from the control panel! Technically this is called group policies or System Center Configuration Manager for the cloud.

Secondly Google just recently announced Chrome-packaged apps. These apps are fully installed in the browser have chrome security and protection, and all data is stored locally.

A developer site had this explanation for how Chrome-packaged apps work.

Packaged app pages always load locally. This allows apps to be less dependent on the network. Once a user installs an app, they have full control over the app’s lifecycle. Apps open and close quickly, and the system can shut apps down at any time to improve performance. Users can fully uninstall apps.

The final piece to the story was the release of the Office Offline Viewer. This app will allow you to natively view Microsoft Word, Powerpoint and Excel in the browser from a website link. Currently in Beta and only available in the developer edition of Google Chrome, this is a work in progress but it already works really well. The next phase for this project I suspect is to provide full Read / Write options for Microsoft Documents in the Google Chrome browser without the need for an installed version of Microsoft Office.

Offline is an exciting space right now.

What Support does Google Offer Business Users?

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  • Google Apps includes 24×7 phone support
  • Service promises 99.9% uptime
  • Key services covered by Google Apps SLA 

Google Apps sometimes gets a bad rap for support because people make the mistake of comparing it with its consumer application Gmail. The paid-for Google Apps service does have several levels of support, underwritten by the Google Apps SLA, or service-level agreement.

Google Apps was created so that users can access their data at all times, 24 hours a day. In tech terms this is called a High Availability architecture.

Google backs up this architecture with a contract called a service-level agreement which promises to keep the program available 99.9 percent of the time. That translates to 10 minutes of downtime a week, or 44 minutes a month.

You can read more details in the Google Apps SLA.

The SLA only applies to paying Google Apps customers and on a number of key services. The supported apps are: Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, Drive, Google Groups, Sites, Talk and Vault.

Many of Google’s services are considered to be consumer services and aren’t part of any support agreement from Google. These include consumer versions of Google Maps, Google Analytics, Blogger, Picasa etc. Although there are premium versions of some of the services, on the whole, Google only provides support through online discussion forums or email for the consumer services.

In addition to the Google Apps SLA are the extended support services that are offered by Google. Google now offers 24×7 phone support to all Google Apps for Business customers. This is coupled with the ability to also create tickets with Google where they promise a response within 24 hours.

Another option for added support is to purchase licences through a Google Apps Partner which will often provide support on top of Google support. They have the ability to escalate issues internally through different channels so issues are resolved sooner.

Google also aims to be transparent with its customers. Products such as the Apps Status Dashboard and their help centre articles provide extra support when issues strike.

In a recent article a colleague wrote about the differences in availability between Google Apps and Office 365. Suffice to say that Google came out on top.

Image credit: Google

About D1

Digital First covers news and opinions on accounting technology and is read by tech-savvy accountants who understand the importance of technology in establishing competitive advantage.
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