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  Gmail's New API: Email as Enterprise Platform

  Google has announced the availability of a new Application Programming Interface (API) that allows 3rd party services to offer contextually relevant content and functionality inside the email interface of Google Apps Gmail users. It's just the latest sign that the email sector is heating up again.

  If you've noticed the way that certain Google properties like YouTube and Picassa have been treated differently when linked-to inside an email viewed in Gmail (both have resulted in video or image previews for the past few months) then you've got some idea how other applications can now relate to the contents of your mail. Now imagine other parts of an email being built on top of by a developer ecosystem. The potential here is very exciting.

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  Email remains a rich and important platform for communication, now Google hopes it will become a platform for development too. The API will for now be limited to Gmail for Google Apps, where it can be deployed to entire groups by an Apps customer via the Google Apps Marketplace. A related move in the consumer version of Gmail came this Spring, when the company launched OAuth for IMAP. Earlier this morning the company announced the availability of new automating scripts for Google Apps as well.

  Ten services have been selected as launch partners and offer all the more indication of the possibilities.

  In Google's words:
  Several new contextual gadget integrations for Gmail are available to Google Apps customers in the Apps Marketplace today:
  

  • AwayFind lets you mark certain contacts or message topics as ‘Urgent’ and then alerts you via phone, SMS or IM when relevant messages arrive.
  • Kwaga displays social network profiles and lists recent email exchanges with people you correspond with.
  • Gist brings together information from across the web about people you’re corresponding with, providing rich person and company profiles, news and updates.
  • Pixetell detects email links to video messages created with Pixetell’s video software and lets you preview, comment on, and share those videos without leaving your inbox.
  • Smartsheet lets you access and update entries in Smartsheet’s sales pipeline and project management tool.
  • Xobni, Rapportive, Manymoon, Newmind Group, and BillFLO have also launched their own contextual gadget integrations.

  Email is Hot

  Email may be tried and true, but it's also a hot area for development these days. Good old Hotmail topped the news yesterday with a new version, for example.

  Over at Yahoo! there have been Mail APIs for years, though they've primarily been used internally to add new social features to Yahoo! Mail. That may change soon as well, however, as Yahoo's Eran Hammer-Lahav, celebrated community leader in developing the OAuth mashup protocol, has recently shifted his focus to doing open standards development under the Yahoo! Mail department. Access restrictions to the Yahoo! Mail API were just lifted last month.

  Disclosure: Microsoft, the owner of Hotmail, is a sponsor of ReadWriteEnterprise.

  Discuss

  

  

  3 months on
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  SAP StreamWork Integrates With Google Wave

  SAP Streamwork is launching an integration with Google Wave this week at Google I/O.

  Google Wave is still officially in the research lab but the service is starting to show more connections to Google Apps as demonstrated with SAP StreamWork. StreamWork is a collaborative decision making service.

  For example, a Google Document can now be pulled into StreamWork where it can be shared through Google Wave. It's the co-editing feature that makes this compelling. The activity stream in StreamWork can be used in connection with the co-editing capabilities that come with Google Wave.

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  David Meyer leads the Streamworks team. He says SAP is exploring how to extend the service into Google Apps and potentially the Google Apps marketplace.

  

  In the next several months SAP will also provide the capability to integrate Google Wave into an on-premise environment through what Meyers calls an "enterprise agent," that will connect the service to Google Wave.

  Discuss

  3 months on
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  Is Your Startup Too Geeky?

  If you tell most folks that Diaspora is promising to build a distributed, open-source social network, they are apt look at you glassy-eyed. Perhaps they'll nod and say, "Oh. Cool." Tell those same people that Diaspora is promising to build an alternative to Facebook, and they're much more likely to know what you are talking about. And as of late, it's much more likely they'll nod and say, "Oh! Cool!" - and mean it.

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  Now, it's not that the idea of a distributed, open-source social network is a bad one. To the contrary. But the stars that lined up for Diaspora this week and that resulted in their securing over $100,000 in microfunding probably wasn't due entirely to the technical specifications they boasted for their project: "Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances), Complete PGP encryption, External Service, Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data), Version 1 of Diaspora's API with documentation, Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code."

  Of course, these details matter. Building an anti-Facebook might be a timely idea, but you also need to have (or hire) the technical chops to bring that idea to fruition.

  No matter how beautiful or brilliant your code, investors and customers are probably not all that interested in, for example, the intricacies of how you plan to use JSON to handle your payload. They need to know that your product works and works well, and just as importantly, you need to show them why they'd want to use it.

  There are exceptions, for sure, and times when it's necessary to speak to the technical details. You might need to address why you've chosen to build your new smartphone app in Flash, for example.

  My point isn't that your ideas are too geeky or complex. Here at ReadWriteWeb, we love geeky, complex ideas. The point is that when you sharing your ideas with others that you need to pay attention to who comprises your audience. You need to make sure that you help them understand why they should care in your ideas (why they should invest in your startup or become your customer) and you need to craft your message accordingly.

  You want to give someone a reason why they should use your product. But you needn't give them the user's manual.

  Brain coral photo from Flickr

  Discuss

  

  

  3 months on
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  OneSocialWeb: We’re Ahead Of Diaspora In The Creation Of An ‘Open Facebook’

  

  

  For all the attention the Diaspora project has been getting, largely thanks to the New York Times, another alternative called OneSocialWeb has been desperately trying to raise even just a couple of eyebrows.

  Which is frustrating to them, they say, because the goals of both projects are perfectly aligned, while OneSocialWeb is self-reportedly much further ahead of Diaspora in many ways.

  So what gives?

  Here’s how OneSocialWeb bills itself:

  The purpose of onesocialweb is to enable free, open, and decentralized social applications on the web. Its protocol can be used to turn any XMPP server into a full fledged social network, participating in the onesocialweb federation. The suite of extensions covers all the usual social networking use cases such as user profiles, relationships, activity streams and third party applications. In addition, it provides support for fine grained access control, realtime notification and collaboration.

  The project was built based on other standardization initiatives aiming to open up the web: activitystrea.ms, portablecontacts, OAuth, OpenSocial, FOAF, OpenID … you name it.

  Sounds like a dream if you’re into the whole ‘open’ thing and not happy with how Facebook and other social networks are evolving, right? So why has it been flying under the radar so much?

  Maybe their timing just wasn’t right – Diaspora got introduced to the masses by the NYT at a time when a lot of spotlights are turned to Facebook and its privacy policies – or maybe it’s the fact that OneSocialWeb isn’t an initiative of four geeky college students but the Vodafone Group Research and Development (which acts as a double-edged sword).

  Either way, the people behind OneSocialWeb (Laurent Eschenauer, Alard Weisscher, Lorena Alvarez and Diana Cheng) have a dream of building exactly what their name suggests, one social Web, and they realize it’s not going to be a walk in the park.

  And that something isn’t going to be attractive to the masses simply because it’s open source, based on XMPP or decentralized – there needs to be added value.

  The OpenSocialWeb team is also impressed with the energy the team behind Diaspora is displaying – they even invited them to come work at Maastricht for the Summer – so it’s not like there’s any bad blood between them.

  Which is good, because I happen to think that building multiple open social networking alternatives in a lot of different ways will only make things more complicated, and probably assure that none of them grow into anything meaningful.

  OneSocialWeb’s Eschenauer isn’t concerned about that, but he hopes that there can be some common language for social networks in the future, like SMTP for email. He adds that he has high hopes for Google Buzz, and expects the Mountain View company to announce a couple of interesting things next week at Google I/O. Eschenauer will be travelling to Silicon Valley next week, too, in order to meet with people from the industry who can help him make his ‘one social web’ dream a reality.

  OpenSocialWeb is currently developing beta versions of a Web client, an Android application, and more. We’ll see how far they can take this – the service and protocol is expected to be ‘consumer ready’ by late Summer.

  

  CrunchBase Information

  Diaspora*

  Information provided by CrunchBase

  
  

  

  

  3 months on
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  Is Sharepoint 2010 Cloud Ready?

  It can get a bit confusing when you start to unravel what Sharepoint 2010 looks like as a cloud offering.

  Perhaps it's due to the fact that Sharepoint 2010 is not cloud ready.

  As Information Week pointed out today, Microsoft hardly gave a nod to cloud computing in its launch that took place on the Saturday Night Live set at NBC Studios.

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  It's surprising, especially considering the deep commitment that Microsoft says it is making to cloud computing.

  Information Week's Doug Henschen points out that Microsoft's cloud-oriented bundling of Exchange Online and Sharepoint Online never came up today:

  "But the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) -- Microsoft's cloud-oriented bundling of Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, never came up. "Perhaps that's because SharePoint 2010 won't show up as part of BPOS until later this year. Microsoft says BPOS-D will bow by year end; but that's not hard given that "D" simply means that its conventional Exchange and SharePoint hosted on dedicated hardware. BPOS-S, the true Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, will only reach beta by year end, so look toward mid 2011 for broad availability. Competitors have pounced on the differences between Microsoft's on-premise and cloud offerings. ' "

  Confusing, isn't it? But it gets even more contradictory when Microsoft executives say that Sharepoint 2010 is truly a multi-tenant service with its only delay being the roll out of Microsoft's provisioning and online billing systems.

  But it really is not multi-tenant ready. According to Information week, a number of functions are handled at the server level or at the SharePoint Farm level.

  The goal is to make Sharepoint Online identical to the Sharepoint on-premise offering launched today.

  But it looks like it may be some time before we see that true transparency.

  Discuss

  

  

  3 months on
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  PaaS Is The Future Of The Cloud Services: Heroku Is Ready To Be There

  

  Image via CrunchBase

  This is the third post in the PaaS is the future of cloud services series but a long overdue one. The focus of the series is to highlight the fact that PaaS, not IaaS, is going to play an important role in the future of cloud services because of the value it brings to any organization interested in embracing cloud computing. In my last post, I highlighted how VMWare realizes this future and partnered with Salesforce.com to offer VMforce platform. Venture capitalists are also seeing such a PaaSy future and it was evident from the news that came out on Monday. Heroku, a Ruby based PaaS provider, has secured $10 Million Series B funding led by Ignition along with existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Baseline Ventures, and Harrison Metal Capital. This is going to push this Y-Combinator kid further into the PaaS game and position themselves as a leading player in the PaaSy future. They already have more than 60,000 apps deployed on their platform and additional funding will help them expand further. In this post, I am going to dig a bit deeper into Heroku’s offerings.

  Simple Workflow: Heroku greatly simplifies the life of developers making it easy for anyone to create, deploy and manage apps on the cloud. Let me briefly discuss how it is done and then dig a little bit on their architecture. With Heroku, creating apps are very simple. For example,

  $ sudo gem install heroku

  $ heroku create yourappname

  Created http://yourappname.heroku.com/

  git@heroku.com:yourappname.git

  Once created, the deployment process is same as what many of the developers are already familiar with, a Git workflow. The deployment process is a push to the repo inside Heroku and, bingo, the app is ready. Everything else needed for the app can be managed by their API.

  Simplified Architecture: PaaS is exciting because it completely abstracts away all the underlying complexity for the developers. They just don’t have to worry about failing hardware, network issues, scaling, etc.. That is exactly what Heroku is offering to developers. They abstract away everything from the hardware to virtual machines to middleware to framework. The developers have to write the code and push it into Heroku platform and watch it scale based on how exciting their app is for the users. It can’t get any easier than that for the developers. As it is the case with any aaS offering, Heroku platform is multi-tenant platform offering high performance and scalability. Let me now discuss the underlying nuts and bolts of the Heroku platform briefly. Even though the advantage of PaaS is not to worry about the underlying nuts and bolts, it is important that we understand the underlying dynamics before investing on a platform service.

  From the application users point of view, their platform has an entry layer comprising of HTTP reverse proxy, HTTP cache and a routing mesh. HTTP reverse proxy handles the the http-level processing such as SSL and gzip compression before the requests are passed on to HTTP cache. Most of the modern web applications have a caching mechanism built in to offer much higher performance for the applications. As the request comes into the cache, it responds if it has the content cached already with immediate results. If not, it passes it on to the routing mesh which balances the requests by routing intelligently to the available computing resources. The computing resources include a highly scalable dyno grid, scalable databases and memory based caching system.

  From the application developers point of view, when they push the code into the Heroku platform, it compiles their code into what is called as Slugs, a self contained read only version of the app including all the required libraries. This compiled code is then run on Dynos, a single process running the ruby code on the servers in the Heroku grid. It is similar to Mongrel application server but it can run on multiple servers. The servers in the Heroku grid are Amazon EC2 instances running on Amazon datacenters. Based on the traffic for the app, the developers can increase the number of dynos to scale. Since the app is already compiled into ready to run “containers”, the dynos can be started in 2 seconds, allowing a seamless scaling. Each dyno contains the app along with the framework (Rails or Sinatra depending on whether it is a full app or lightweight app), middleware, App Server, Ruby VM and a POSIX environment. By taking the POSIX route, they are implementing the battle tested unix permissions system over a security model running inside the Ruby VM. This ensures that the apps are running in a secure environment completely isolated from other tenants in the system.

  Simple Extensibility: The high point of Heroku platform is their Addons offerings. These are third party solutions like Amazon RDS, WebSolr, Memcache, etc. and other value added functionalities like Cron processes, SSL, etc., which developers can easily integrate inside their apps. I spoke with both an add-on provider, Northscale offering Memcache, and a developer. The Northscale folks told me that it is extremely easy for them to plug their services into the Heroku platform. They said Heroku platform offered them a faster access to the market without worrying about the nitty gritty tasks like billing, reporting, etc.. They just have to send a small file containing some config information. As simple as that. From the developers side, they can add any of the addons with a few clicks. They have to select the “size” of the addon, pay with a credit card and the addon is ready to be integrated inside their app with a slight modification of their code. The addon marketplace is going to be one of the biggest factors in Heroku’s success. In fact, for any PaaS offering to be successful, it is important that their platform is extensible like Heroku’s platform. In some of the future posts in this series, I am going to dig deeper into the extensibility of the plarforms and also about some of the service providers offering their services through such addon marketplace.

  Conclusion: Heroku has set a bar on the kind of platform services that can be offered in the marketplace. Of course, not everyone likes such a higher levels of abstractions. Heroku competitors like Engine Yard are filling up those gaps (I will write about Engine Yard in this space one day). But by making app development child’s play, Heroku has pushed the envelope further up. Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure (well, Microsoft is planning to open up VM level access and it may not entirely fit in the mold of Heroku) are doing the same but Heroku has the momentum. It will be interesting to see the evolution of Heroku as they now have the necessary financial backup.

  Related articles by Zemanta

  • Former Microsoft Execs Lead $10 Million Round In Ruby On Rails Startup Heroku (techcrunchit.com)
  • Heroku Raises $10M for Its Ruby Platform (gigaom.com)
  • Heroku raises $10M for Rails apps in the cloud (deals.venturebeat.com)
  • Yearning for the Heroku of life science applications (mndoci.com)
  • Former Microsoft Execs Lead $10 Million Round In Ruby On Rails Startup Heroku (techcrunch.com)
  • Former Microsoft Execs Lead $10 Million Round In Ruby On Rails Startup Heroku (W08) (ycombinator.posterous.com)
  • Ex-Microsoft power pair puff Ruby cloud (go.theregister.com)
  • Ignition Partners backs Heroku (techflash.com)
  • Heroku: Ruby Platform Sees 50 Percent Increase in Apps Since November (readwriteweb.com)
  • Ruby - Heroku (elegantcode.com)

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  3 months on
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  EMC rebrands CMA (aka ECM) to IIG #ecm #EMC

  It seems to be acronym soup week, and though we can all be guilty of cooking this particular recipe at times, EMC is becoming a master chef.

  This week the parts of EMC that involved Enterprise Content Management software (Documentum, Captiva, Legato etc) -- and were formerly known as the Content Management and Archiving division (CMA) --  decided to rename themselves and restructure as the Intelligent Information Group (IIG) division.  

  All I can say is "Good Lord." It is of course up to the storage hardware giant EMC what they want to call themselves and their various divisions, but it really doesn't make life easy for buyers and end users of their technology. 
  
  Every vendor we research and evaluate tries to tell us that they are unique, yet none of them are.  Each one does exhibit subtle and distinct differences that make it a good fit for one buyer, while a poor fit for another buyer.

  Every vendor we research and evaluate tries to tell us that they don't really compete much with any other vendor.  This is patently untrue, as the many RFP's we advise upon so clearly inform us. 

  But what is true is that every vendor wants to avoid the shortlisting process, and gain business via a non-competitive route. In some cases this is by selling a department on a SaaS option that sidelines the procurement and IT teams, with an entry price is so low that anyone can sign off. Or more commonly via a free bundling of ECM software into larger storage, application server, or database deals.  Only nothing is ever for free in business, and "free" deals often turn out to cost the most in the long run.
  
  In rebranding to IIG, EMC is trying to to better position itself in the marketplace, away from the bastardization (thanks to SharePoint) of the term ECM, away from the old-fashioned sounding term Document Management, and avoiding the confusing GRC (Governance Risk & Compliance) term, and thereby attempting to carve out their own complete information management niche. 

  I can understand why they might want to do that.  EMC has some excellent technology (which we evaluate in detail), but they have been hit harder by the SharePoint's commoditization of ECM, and by fierce competition from IBM and latterly Oracle at the higher end of the market (both of whom commonly try to avoid competitive selection processes themselves). 

  But rebranding doesn't make life easier for buyers, who continue to struggle to simply make sense of this increasingly complex market. Sadly, as a result more buyers have unknowingly bought quite unsuitable technology to meet their needs, often via too-good-to-be-true bundled deals.
  
  Our advice: never sidestep the competitive procurement process for any ECM or Document Management deal; always carefully compare and contrast one offering against another competitive offering.  Vendors might call themselves different names, and try to play in different markets, but you need to see beyond that and see the platforms for what they are -- expensive pieces of software that if used correctly can help you manage your enterprise documents better.  It's that simple.

  3 months on
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  Google Moderator API Available

  Today, Google announced that the a "formal API" for Google Moderator is now available "to access, update, and participate in Google Moderator from custom interfaces."

  Among internal projects Google gives as use examples are one to allow attendees to Google I/O to ask questions and another that allows Moderator to be downloaded and used on Android.

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  Suggested uses of the API include the following.
  

• Create: create new series, topics, submissions, or votes on behalf of the currently authenticated user


• Vote: allow authenticated users to vote on submissions, or to review their own votes on submissions in a series


• Discover: retrieve topics in a series, or submissions in a particular topic or series. You can also track the current aggregate status of votes

Download the Google Moderator API code here.
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