Webware

IT pros will often tell you that a lot of consumer technology isn't ready for the enterprise. It's not secure, it's not priced correctly, it can't be administered, yada yada. That doesn't stop businesspeople from using consumer tools in their jobs, though. It just stops the people who make the tools from profiting from their use.

Where there are IT administrators, there are budgets, and where there are budgets, there's market opportunity. And I'm not surprised that two very solid personal productivity tools are getting business versions this week and business models to match.

Xobni provides a heads-up display for e-mail.

(Credit: Xobni)

The Outlook add-on maker Xobni on Monday released Xobni Enterprise, a new version of the product with links into traditional business data sources. While the free and Plus levels of Xobni will search Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to give users more information about the people who are e-mailing them, the enterprise version will also tap into Salesforce.com, Sharepoint, and corporate directory services. It can also be extended to work with proprietary business apps. This could be pretty cool: users will be able to see latest internal database info from people they're communicating with them, automatically when they're doing the communicating.

And to help IT teams keep their users in line with whatever (ridiculous and restrictive) policies their companies have on employee access to outside data, Enterprise Xobni admins can also turn off access to the app's Twitter features and other parts of the product.

Admins, of course, can provision employees' computers for access to Xobni data from a central console.

Xobni Enterprise starts at $30 a user a year, with prices going down with volume or up for access to enterprise data sources.

The Business edition of SugarSync lets admins pool storage and control access.

(Credit: SugarSync)

On Tuesday, the cloud file synchronization product SugarSync gets a business version design for teams. The Business version of the product features pooled storage and central IT control. Customers pay for each user ($10 a month) and for the storage they want, in 100GB increments. Admins have access to all this storage, too. If an employee leaves the company, they can disable access, and then sign on as that person, and recover data. There's no "remote wipe" feature to remove company data from an employee's computer, but CEO Laura Yecies told me she's thinking about it.

A useful feature lets users send files to other people via the SugarSync service, instead of through e-mail. This could compete with the useful, but single-purpose and somewhat expensive product, YouSendIt, except that SugarSync's single-file transfer function can't password-protect files.

In the cloud sync category, SugarSync lagged its major competitor Dropbox in releasing of a free, limited version of the service. There's one now, and Yecies says, "We're finding that free is a good business." She bases this on "conversion" to the paid product, which she says is 5 percent to 10 percent, depending on the offers presented to users.

I use and pay for my own SugarSync account and highly recommend the service. Compared with geek favorite service Dropbox, it's got more flexible configuration options and better mobile device support. The business version freaks me out, personally--I don't want any IT manager getting access to files my hard drive--but this sounds like a good product for the security-conscious IT exec who wants to provide a team file-sharing product along with off-site backup to users.

The key feature in Mozilla's Weave add-on for Firefox is the ability to synchronize tabs, bookmarks, history, and other browser-sourced, data-rich fields. The latest update, Weave version 0.7, gives a big overhaul to the synchronization component, redoing the setup and configuration interface, and adding incremental download support.

Mozilla Weave's new My Account page, which opens in a new tab.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Compared to previous versions, the installation process on your first computer has been greatly streamlined, though the security questions asked remain the same. The wizard that guides you through the process has been redone to present the information through a tab-specific black overlay.

According to Mozilla, the incremental download support will grab your data in bite-size chunks to spread out, and reduce memory and network usage. To redo the synchronization settings, you still need to load the Preferences via about:weave, and then go to the Tools drop-down menu on the tab that opens and choose Start Over. I was unable to synchronize many settings, but that might be because of a conflict with an installed add-on.

The development of Weave, first introduced at the end of 2007, didn't really begin to take off until earlier this year. Since then, Weave has introduced multiple useful features that other browsers, such as Opera, have had for a while. Weave can also sync data between Firefox and Mozilla's mobile browser, Fennec.

Google made two significant enhancements to Google.com on mobile phones Wednesday.

The first, history sync, now makes it possible to carry over a record of your search queries when you switch between mobile and desktop versions of Google.com. Dubbed "Personalized Suggest," Google will now remember your searches and will add them into the list of search suggestions you see as you type into the search bar. The new feature saves you from browsing through your history to repeat a query.

Of course, you do have to be logged in to Google for this to work, and you've got to have Web History switched on. Enable it on a phone by selecting "save searches" in the Settings menu on Google.com. At launch, the feature is only available in the U.S. on Android, iPhone, and Palm WebOS phones.

Google Local on mobile.

(Credit: Google)

The second addition today similarly gets the mobile and desktop versions of Google.com talking to one another. Google has redesigned local search to make finding places of interest while on the mobile Google site much more finger-friendly. Click or tap "Local" on the mobile browser and you'll see a Start screen with categories you can browse to find restaurants and other businesses nearby, similar to what you can do on Google Maps. You'll need to have the My Location feature enabled.

There's also a category for viewing the points of interest that you starred as favorites on a Google Map. Starring essentially bookmarks the location's Google Place page. Bookmarking isn't anything new, but the browsable layout is relatively new to Google, which generally favors bare links to graphical enhancements. This treatment has the mobile Google site looking like a mobile hot-spot-finding app you might find in an on-phone app store. We have to say, it's a nice change.

The rejiggered Local Search kicks off in the U.S. and China, with support for more regions in the works.

It has only been a week since MySpace launched its two-way sync with Twitter, but already the service has made an impact on the popular microblog.

MySpace's "lnk.ms" is now the second most used link-shortening service on Twitter, according to statistics compiled by Twitter link tracker Tweetmeme.

Over the past 24 hours, lnk.ms was included in 15.66 percent of all tweets containing links, Tweetmeme claims. It follows only Bitly, which was used in more than 69 percent of tweets featuring links to outside sources. TinyURL, Owly, and Isgd follow MySpace's lnk.ms with 10.43 percent, 2.75 percent, and 2 percent share of tweets, respectively.

MySpace hasn't divulged how many users are syncing with Twitter. A company spokeswoman told me in an e-mail message that MySpace cannot provide any details on usage yet. Twitter did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The fact that MySpace has been able to make such a mark on Twitter in just one week is quite a feat. When the company announced two-way syncing with Twitter last week, it allowed users of both social networks to update their status and syndicate that to the other network. MySpace's lnk.ms is the result of that.

Whenever a user who has activated two-way syncing updates their MySpace status, a snippet of that update is syndicated to their Twitter profile. A unique lnk.ms link follows that tweet. When the user's Twitter followers click on it, they can view the full status update. If the updates are kept private, the update can't be viewed by followers who aren't also friends with the user on MySpace.

Before we get too carried away over the success of MySpace's link-shortening feature, it should be noted that Tweetmeme's calculations are based only on links it processes. Also, the company tracks link-shortening usage over the past 24 hours, so we have yet to see how MySpace's service will fare in the long run.

But so far, it seems that MySpace has made its mark on the service. And by the looks of things, it doesn't seem the Twitter community's use of lnk.ms will be slowing down anytime soon.

(Via TechCrunch)

Updated 5:45 p.m. PDT with more details about e-mail push.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Some of you who have been restlessly awaiting the arrival of Google's official Gmail push solution for mobile phones can relax now. On Tuesday, Google expanded the over-the-air syncing capabilities in its Google Sync service to include Google's e-mail--but only for the iPhone and iPod Touch (version 3.0), and for Windows Mobile phones.

Google Sync began as a beta service to sync Google calendar items and contacts to iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Symbian Series 60 phones. Owners of iPhones, iPod Touches, and Windows Mobile phones can now set it up to include Gmail messages as well.

The phones will receive Google Sync messages through their native e-mail, calendar, and address book apps. Depending on your settings, your phone could vibrate and/or chime to let you know that a new message has come in. Note that Google Sync will not push visual notification boxes to iPhone and iPod Touch interfaces. For that, you'll need third party apps like GPush for iPhone. Instead, it pushes e-mail from the server to the phone, rather than pulls in a list of e-mail messages, a request that the phone's e-mail client makes of the server. Push e-mail is often preferred over "pulled" e-mail for its real-time updates and its lower toll on battery life.

BlackBerry and Nokia Symbian Series 60 users won't have access to pushed Gmail yet, but they can still sync calendar and contact events to the phone's built-in address book and calendar.

To get started, visit m.google.com/sync from your desktop or mobile browser. The step-by-step setup process is best navigated from your computer, and will require you to ultimately configure your phone to sync over the Microsoft Exchange Server.

Related story: Gmail push on iPhone? Meet GPush

MySpace announced in a blog post on Monday that the company will now offer two-way syncing with Twitter. The service is being rolled out immediately.

According to the company, MySpace users can now update their MySpace status and syndicate that update to their Twitter streams. Twitter updates can also appear in the MySpace user's "status and mood." Users can decide if they want status updates to be one-way or two-way.

The new MySpace-Twitter sync in action.

(Credit: MySpace)

MySpace said in the blog post that it's using OAuth to sync with Twitter. According to the company, users will be able to share data between the sites, but all account credentials will be protected, keeping user information "confidential."

When users post a status update on MySpace and syndicate that to their Twitter feeds, the tweet will feature the message and its link to "make commenting easy" on the user's MySpace profile. Twitter will display "MySpace" as the service the tweet originated from, similar to its display of TweetDeck, Twitterfeed, and other services that allow users to update their streams away from the site.

So far, MySpace's Twitter sync is in beta. The company said that it will be adding other networks to sync with soon. For now, you can try out the Twitter sync in your MySpace profile by inputting your Twitter credentials under the "sync" menu in account settings.

Google ditched its browser sync plug-in for Firefox a year ago, but the idea is resurfacing in Chrome in a way that makes me think of possibilities the technology could hold for Chrome OS.

The company is preparing to build a system to synchronize bookmarks across different versions of Chrome, Google's Tim Steele said in a mailing list posting on Friday. Google envisions extending the feature to other data types, including passwords, Steele and fellow programmer Idan Avraham said in a follow-up posting.

"We wanted to focus on bookmarks and get it right first before we think about other data types. We chose bookmarks both because they are generally the most important to users, but also because they are the hardest data type to sync," Avraham said.

Synchronizing bookmarks is a fairly basic concept. The Xmarks plug-in, formerly called Foxmarks, has solved the issue for years on Firefox, so users could move from a work computer to a home computer and still have their saved Web addresses intact. Google had its own though now extinct option, and now Mozilla itself is building a plug-in called Weave that synchronizes bookmarks, passwords, tabs, and other information. Yahoo's Delicious service has been available for years for people to store bookmarks centrally in the cloud and to share them with contacts as well.

So it's no surprise Google feels compelled to add bookmark sync to Chrome--especially given that the company plans to use a person's Google Account to save the list. Google likes the idea of storing the state of people's applications in the cloud, even if they're relying on a local computer's horsepower to run.

Bookmark sync will arrive gradually; initially there won't be a way to sync bookmarks using Google Bookmarks service that can be used directly or through Google's browser toolbar, Steele said in another message. "For the first release, we've just focused on getting sync to work between Chrome instances," Steele said.

The synchronization feature may be a basic utility, but Google sees it as much more than just updating a list of links. In fact, it chose to use Google's own high-powered Google Talk infrastructure to handle the service, the design document states. Essentially, that means browsers only need to listen for broadcasts when a change occurs rather than frequently check in for them:

To make this sync infrastructure scale to millions of users, we decided to leverage existing XMPP-based Google Talk servers to give us "push" semantics, rather than only depending on periodically polling for updates. This means when a change occurs on one Google Chrome client, a part of the infrastructure effectively sends a tiny XMPP message, like a chat message, to other actively connected clients telling them to sync.

To put that gain into perspective, consider a three-minute polling interval. Three minutes is far from real time, or "immediately" as our goal was stated. But already, at the very least, every three minutes every client needs to ask the server if anything changed. Even with just one thousand users, we're already talking about a server having to handle a poll request every 0.18 seconds on average (or roughly 5.6 queries per second). And that's just when nothing is happening! Using XMPP pushes, the sync servers don't need to waste cycles for no reason.

There are other synchronization possibilities for the browser. Peter Kasting, another Chrome programmer, offered his personal wish list: "I'm more interested in history/visited link/omnibox syncing than bookmarks," he said in a posting. Synchronizing those elements would mean one instance of Chrome would behave more like another, for example being able to retrieve more easily the address of a Web site that a user already visited on another computer.

But the high-powered infrastructure raises some interesting possibilities in the long run. Who needs a hyper-responsive utility just for synchronizing bookmarks or browser history lists? When was the last time you were saving bookmarks so fast that there was a danger multiple updates would run afoul of each other?

The thought I had is that perhaps Chrome OS could benefit from a high-speed message-passing interface. After all, on Chrome OS, Chrome gets the glamorous job of running the Web applications, with the underlying Linux operating system handling more mundane hardware duties.

Perhaps there are situations in which sending lots of XMPP messages could help Google-hosted applications stay in tune with each other. Google Wave, which uses XMPP already to power its group-chat abilities, is one example that springs to mind. Today that's a Web application that doesn't need a browser to handle that lower-level interaction, but might it work better if it were built in? Gmail can use IMAP to keep the same inbox synchronized among different computers, but maybe this would be easier and faster?

Then again, as Freud said, sometimes a train is just a train.

The SugarSync start screen on Android phones

(Credit: Sharpcast)

Although Acer may be applying the brakes to its planned Android Netbook deployment, when the Google-y mini computers do hit the shelves, SugarSync will be ready.

On Wednesday, Sharpcast, SugarSync's developer, released a version of the cross-platform multimedia syncing management software for Android phones and Netbooks. SugarSync for Android lets you view and download files on your Android Netbook or mobile phone, and upload local files to your free or premium SugarSync repository.

Since SugarSync's applications are free (you just pay for the storage you use), you can use it as a makeshift remote access tool, and as online backup. Files you upload from multiple desktops, laptops, or mobile phones are accessible from other platforms or the Web. You'll also be able to share files and folders from the phone.

However, not all SugarSync managers have been created equally. The app is much more photocentric on Android phones, where being able to upload and download mobile photos to and from your SugarSync account is the only media format guarantee. Android Netbook users should be able to view the full range of supported file types.

SugarSync's Android start screen has you tap one button to access your uploaded files remotely, and another button to open local files on your Android phone or Netbook. A word to the wise: uploading files from an Android phone requires a long hold, where you touch and hold the file until you see a pop-up menu and the option to upload to SugarSync.

One complaint is that SugarSync takes some initial setup time on a desktop computer, which is where the bulk of your saved files will probably originate. Android Netbook users should have an easier job getting started, though only time will tell.

SugarSync is available from the Android Market on your Android phone.

SugarSync managers can also be found for the following desktop and mobile platforms:
SugarSync for Windows
SugarSync for Mac
SugarSync for Windows Mobile
SugarSync for iPhone
SugarSync for BlackBerry

Google App Sync for Outlook users can now search their Outlook folders using Windows Desktop Search.

(Credit: Microsoft)

It's once again safe to fire up Windows Desktop Search if you're a Google Apps user.

Google's App Sync for Outlook allows fans of Outlook to keep the familiar interface even if their company switches to Google Apps on the back end, but it debuted with a flaw: Windows Desktop Search couldn't find e-mails created with the new software installed. Google got together with Microsoft to work on a solution to the problem--which must have made for a few interesting meetings--and a fix has been released, Google announced Tuesday.

There are a few other outstanding bugs, such as the lack of support for the Adobe's Acrobat PDF Maker Toolbar, but Google made it a priority to fix the bugs that were impeding normal use of e-mail first, a representative said. Along with the restoration of Windows Desktop Search, Google also made it possible to turn autoarchiving on or off during installation and improved synchronization of the little notes attached to contact records.

Those who are currently using App Sync for Outlook will have the updates automatically applied to their software, and a new version can also be downloaded directly from Google.