Dump Gmail for Outlook.com ?

Outlook.com

There are four reasons why some users — especially professionals — will be legitimately tempted to make the switch from Gmail.

 

1. Automatic folders

The best new innovation in Outlook.com is its “automatic folders” feature. The system attempts to smartly sort some of mail for user by automatically creating virtual folders for common stuff like email newsletters, Facebook and Twitter alerts, and other repetitive messages that can end up burying more important emails from human beings you actually need to correspond with. Obviously, since this is run by an algorithm, there will certainly be some false positives and negatives and user might have to tweak it, but many user like the low-touch nature of this feature. Microsoft has also tried to streamline the process of setting up inbox rules as well in Outlook.com.

Microsoft’s Chris Jones summed up the feature. “Outlook.com automatically sorts your messages from contacts, newsletters, shipping updates, and social updates,” wrote Jones, “and with our Sweep features you can move, delete and set up powerful rules in a few, simple clicks so you can more quickly get to the email you really want.”

Another mail management feature in Outlook.com is that you can hover over a message and get a set of actions to delete the message or flag it as important or sort it to a folder — and users can even customize the functions they want to see on the hover-over.

 

2. Mobile experience

The biggest benefit that Microsoft has in designing a new web mail service in 2012 is that it can optimize it for today’s intensely-mobile world.

“The way people do mail on their mobile phone tends to be a little different,” said Brian Hall, General Manager of Windows Live and Internet Explorer. “They don’t do as much mail management.”

With that in mind, Microsoft used the automatic folder feature as its way of helping organize and prioritize users’ inbox in a way that can work in virtually any type of desktop or mobile email client.

“Most people on a phone or tablet use the native mail client,” said Hall. “In those instances you want to make sure you work with any inbox. It’s a different approach than Priority Inbox from Google because they have to go create clients for mobile or else it breaks Priority Inbox.”

Hall also stressed that Microsoft is focused on delivering an excellent mobile web experience. In fact, the company is so focused on the native client and mobile web experience of Outlook.com that it doesn’t currently have plans to build an app for Microsoft’s own Windows Phone 7. ”It works beautifully with the native client,” said Hall.

On the other hand, he said they are working on an Android app, because “Android devices are less likely to have an Exchange Active Sync client.”

 

3. Privacy protection

One of the creepiest parts of Gmail has always been the fact that it does text-mining on user emails and uses that information to surface targeted ads. That’s the price user pay for unlimited storage and a free service. 

For example, if you’re emailing back-and-forth with a family member about a trip to go hiking, Gmail will simultaneously surface text ads for things like Rocky Mountain vacations, hiking boots, and protein bars. While these ads are generally unobtrusive and occasionally even useful, it still freaks out some people to realize that Google is essentially “reading their mail.” This is especially true for business professionals and others who use email to transmit potentially valuable or sensitive information.

Capitalizing on this uneasiness, Microsoft is promising that Outlook.com will not do text-mining on inbox, while still offering its service for free and with “virtually unlimited storage.”

“We don’t scan your email content or attachments and sell this information to advertisers or any other company, and we don’t show ads in personal conversations,” Jones stated.

That doesn’t mean Outlook.com won’t have ads. There are right-column ads on the main inbox screen, but there aren’t ads on individual messages. Also, these ads are going to be targeted based on what Microsoft knows about the user in general, just not on the content of individual’s messages.

 

4. Social integration

One of plug-ins for Gmail is which fills the right column in Gmail with contact information about the person you’re emailing. It draws that information from Linked In, Twitter, and Facebook (once you’ve logged in to those services) and will even show you the Linked In job title and latest status updates from the contact you’re emailing.

Microsoft has taken this kind of functionality and built it directly into Outlook.com, filling the right column of its message screen with this same kind of social contact data, but displaying it in a little bit simpler, cleaner way that follows the Metro UI style. Outlook.com doesn’t appear to show quite as much data.

However, Microsoft has taken social integration a step further. User can not only view people in their social networks from within Outlook.com and see their latest updates, but from the “People hub” they can also respond to status updates on Twitter and write on someone’s Facebook wall, all directly from Outlook.com. You can also do Facebook chat within Outlook.com. The instant messaging functionality itself is another strong feature of Outlook.com. The implementation is certainly better integrated and more usable than GTalk in Gmail.

 

Bottom line

Hall said Microsoft was focused on several key priorities in Outlook.com: “Clean UI, design for tablets and all devices, connected with the services you actually use (Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In), works great with [Microsoft] Office and Sky Drive, and actually prioritizes your privacy.”

I also like that Microsoft isn’t afraid to admit that this is aimed directly at stealing some of Gmail’s thunder. Hall said, ”If you’re a heavy Google Docs or a Google+ user, then Gmail is probably for you. Otherwise, if you use Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and Office, then Outlook [dot com] is better.”

Facebook finally releases Admin Roles for Pages

Locate Admin Roles in the sidebar and select it. Here you see a list of  all current users with their assigned roles. You can change the role of an existing admin and to add new page administrators to the page.

      Up until now Facebook Page admins could authorize other users as admins, who then had more or less the same rights as the page creator. This approach was problematic for a number of reasons, for instance when someone in a company or organization should only have rights to post news on the page, but not to create new advertisements or unpublish the whole page.

     If you have been to a Facebook Page where you have admin rights today you may have noticed that it is now possible to assign different roles to users.  The easiest way to reach the preferences dialog is to click on the Manage button at the top of the page and then on settings in the context menu that pops up.

     You can change the role of an existing admin and to add new page administrators to the page.

     To add a new administrator enter a name or email address. Once you start typing the name you will see a list of Facebook users starting with friends that match the characters that you have entered.

     The following roles are available for selection:

     Managers are the core administrators that can manage admin roles. Especially the content creator and moderator roles should be interesting, while advertiser and insights analysts roles probably are only interesting for larger companies and organizations. According to Facebook, there is no limit to the number of admins a page can have.

     Facebook Page admin roles is a long demanded feature that has finally been implemented by Facebook. Especially companies can now assign roles with less rights to employees to protect the page from accidental or intended changes.

Revealed: The jobs that will be wiped out by cloud computing

Cloud Computing

As businesses switch to cloud computing demand for some traditional IT roles will plummet - but new, different jobs will be created instead.

Tech industry experts are predicting that demand for certain tech roles will dramatically decline over the next decade as organisations switch to cloud computing.

By 2020 the majority of organisations will rely on the cloud for more than half of their IT services, according to Gartner’s 2011 CIO Agenda Survey.

After organisations have switched to the cloud the number of staff needed to manage and provision individual pieces of IT infrastructure - the likes of networks, storage and servers - can be scaled back, as much of the virtualised infrastructure that cloud is built upon can be automated.

The upshot will be whereas 70 per cent of IT resources are devoted to operating IT infrastructure today; by 2020 just 35 per cent of resources will be used in operations, according to the Gartner report New Skills for the New IT.

Bye, bye server admins?

John Rivard, Gartner research director said that, while there will still be roles for people who want to specialise in particular infrastructure, in general IT professionals are going to need a grasp of corporate demands “or the business will bypass them”.

“The cloud is an ability to commoditise the non-differentiating aspects of IT, and increasingly IT’s role in differentiating the business is bigger and bigger,” he said.

“The kinds of roles are definitely going to change: you’re going to see much more automation, more cloud capabilities and less hands-on administration. Across the board, every organisation that I talk to is asking ‘How can I use less of the resources that I have on the run, and more of it on driving the business?’.”

There will be a move away from the IT specialist said Rivard, the kind of person who knows Wintel servers inside out and sleeps with technical manual, towards what he calls “versatilists”, who are skilled in multiple areas of IT and business and who readily “absorbs” new information.

As the Gartner report puts it, “the skill profiles for the new IT will, in many cases, be a hybrid of business and IT skills”.

In this new world, the report said, business designers and technology innovators will devise IT to support new ways of doing business, information architects and process designers will design and implement collaborative business processes that will allow for increased process automation, while solution integrators, service brokers and demand managers will manage a diverse group of cloud and non-cloud vendors.

New types of tech job

The shift towards cloud-based IT services and how it will change tech roles was a hot topic at the recent EMC World conference in Las Vegas. Howard Elias, COO for information infrastructure and cloud services at storage giant EMC, said:” There are not going to be fewer people involved in IT, but they will be involved in IT in different ways.

“If you are a server, storage or network admin, there may be fewer of those dedicated - what I call siloed component - skillsets needed.”

While these roles disappear, new jobs will spring up in their place both technical - focused on marshalling different services and technologies, and business orientated - analysing huge data stores for valuable insights and matching technologies to the needs of business and customers.

“We are going to need a lot more of what I would call data centre architects or cloud architects, where you still need to know enough about servers, network and storage, but you also need to know how they integrate and interact together, and most importantly understand the management and automation that occurs on top of that to deliver that IT as a service,” he said.

EMC is backing training and certification schemes for two roles it believes will be core to the future of business IT; cloud architect and data scientist. Cloud architects will deliver virtualisation and cloud designs to suit business needs, while data scientists will apply advanced analytics techniques to petabyte scale databases to identify beneficial business trends.

IT professionals looking to transition into one of these new, more business-orientated roles will also face competition not just from other techies, but from business analysts and graduates who’ve trained to fill these positions.

Gartner’s Rivard said that business-minded techies and technology-literate business types will be equally eligible for these new posts: “They can come from either side, but they’ve got to be individuals who want to continue lifelong learning and master all of it.”

And now for some good news…

But despite the competition for these new roles Rivard doesn’t expect IT professionals will struggle to find work.

“You’ve got the baby boomer retirement that’s going to take a significant part of legacy staff off the map. Also I don’t think we’re producing enough graduates on the technology or the business side, so I expect there is going to be a competition for the talent.”

EMC’s Elias said that IT professionals should see the change as an opportunity to broaden their professional opportunities.

“This is the challenge of creative disruption,” he said.

“As that happens there is more opportunity for everybody, some people are going to say ‘I don’t like that new opportunity’ and that is going to be a challenge for them, and there are those who want to embrace it, and believe me there are going to be more interesting jobs than there were in the past.

“You’ve got to take control of your career, it’s more about the individual, and the individual’s got to take the initiative.”

The challenge ahead

IT infrastructure managers are aware of the challenge of shifting the skillset of their workforce higher up the business value chain - service management and business partnership skills was the most commonly identified area in need of improvement in a recent Gartner poll of infrastructure managers.

“They clearly see that, within IT, those are the skills that are needed, and those are the ones that are going to be hardest to get,” said Rivard.

IT is in a constant state of flux with technologies coming and going every year, said Rivard, and so expects IT professionals to be able to handle the coming change.

“IT people are in this field because it changes; if they weren’t they’d be pouring concrete,” said Rivard.

“They generally like the technology changes, but these technology changes are driving them beyond just technology skills to become overall business leaders.”

Compare SkyDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox

SkyDrive vs Google Drive vs Dropbox

Supported Platforms

Dropbox is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, BlackBerry and Android devices. Windows Live SkyDrive is available for Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone devices while Google Drive is currently available for PC, Mac and Android phones /tablets. All services do offer a web mobile version that can help you access our files from the web browser of any mobile phone.

The other important difference is that Dropbox is also available for Windows XP and Linux while SkyDrive is not.

Storage Limits

Dropbox offers 2-3 GB of free online storage storage, Google Drive offers 5 GB while SkyDrive, if we are new, offers 7 GB of storage space.

We can upload files of any size to Dropbox through the desktop client while that limit is 2 GB in the case of SkyDrive. Both SkyDrive and Dropbox let we upload files up to 300 MB from the web browser while that limit is 10 GB in the case of Google Drive.

Storage Plans

If we are running out of storage space on SkyDrive, we can buy an additional 20 GB for about $10 per year or 50 GB for $25 per year. Dropbox Pro offers 50 GB of storage space for $99 per year while Google Drive offers an extra 20 GB for $2.49 per month.

Have a look on detailed comparison of pricing plans.

Price Comparison of Online Storage Services

Built-in File Viewers

Both SkyDrive and Dropbox web apps have built-in file viewers for most common file formats including Office documents, PDFs, videos and images. Google Docs supports even more formats – including Photoshop mockups and AutoCAD drawings – and no wonder that we can also view these files in Google Drive without additional software.

Unfortunately, maybe because of licensing issues, none of these drives will stream MP3 songs in the browser – we will to have download the MP3 file locally to play the audio.

Account Security

Since our Google Drive is connected to our Google Account, we can apply 2-step protection and non-authorized user won’t be able to access our online file even if they are aware of our Google username and password. This extra layer of protection is not available to Dropbox and SkyDrive users.

Google Drive and Dropbox also maintain a detailed log of every single change that was made to our files (or account) but this seems to be missing in SkyDrive.

Selective Sync

If we have multiple computers, all these “online drives” will copy our files across all our machines. Sometimes, we don’t want this to happen and both Dropbox and Google Drive offer we an option to selectively synchronize folders per computer. For instance, we can tell Dropbox not to download our family photographs folder on the work computer.  This saves bandwidth and our hard disk stays light too.

Selective Sync is however missing in SkyDrive.

File Search

This is one area where Google Drive has a definite upper hand.

When we search for a file on Dropbox.com, it returns results where the file names matche our search keywords. SkyDrive lets we search the content of documents that are in common Microsoft Office formats. Google Drive goes a step further as it can even read the text content of scanned documents and photographs using OCR. That is, if we have saved a photograph of the whiteboard to our Google Drive account, we should be able find that image by text without having to remember the filename.

File History

Our free Dropbox account will save any file’s history for 30 days meaning if we accidentally delete or change a file, we can easily restore the previous working version for the next 30 days. SkyDrive and Google Drive also store the previous versions of all files though they have not exactly specified how many reversions are preserved.

If we delete a file or folder inside SkyDrive web app, it’s gone forever whereas in the case of Dropbox and Google Drive, the files are moved to the Trash from where they can be easily restored.

Offline Access

The mobile apps of Dropbox and Google Drive let we save any document or file on our mobile for offline use.  Such a facility is not available in the iOS apps of Windows SkyDrive though we can always export the document to another app (like iBooks or Good Reader) from SkyDrive and access it offline.

What I like about Windows SkyDrive

SkyDrive offers plenty of storage space but the best part is that the SkyDrive web app lets we access files and folders of all our other computer right from within our browser. We just need to have SkyDrive on these machines and we can then easily access any of their files from any other computer, anywhere simply using our Windows Live ID.

SkyDrive is an absolute must-have service for Microsoft Office users because it gives we the ability to edit documents in the web browser while preserving all the formatting.

What I like about Google Drive

Google Drive offers the most pleasing interface, the search feature is brilliant and the new grid view lets we quickly browse our stored files visually. We can email any file from our Google Drive account to another user as an email attachment, a useful feature that’s missing in all the other online drives.

If we live in the Google ecosystem and do not have Microsoft Office on our computer, skip SkyDrive and go with Google Drive.

What I like about Dropbox

The basic Dropbox account offers a mere 2 GB of storage space but we can easily increase our account space to 16 GB by referring a couple of friends to Dropbox. Also, we can find tons of apps that make the Dropbox service even more powerful and useful.

Google Drive and Windows Live SkyDrive are extremely promising services but none of them support as many platforms as Dropbox does. The best part about Dropbox is that it just works and it won’t be easy even for Google and Microsoft to build the kind of developer ecosystem that currently exists around Dropbox.exists around Dropbox.