Vivek M. Chawla

Page-Level Permissions Now Available for Google Sites

I fired up Google Reader this morning and came upon the most wonderful news.  Normally, I'd simply share the item with a quick note, then move on to the next shiny bit of news.

But not today.  Not for this. This is too awesome.

The most glaring limitation of Google Sites, a key part of the Google Apps suite of cloud-based productivity and collaboration applications, has finally been addressed.

Google Sites now supports page-level permissions!

Anyone who has built or maintained an effective Google Apps installation has made the difficult choice between creating several redundant "private" Sites with limited users, or one big free-for-all Site where everybody sees everything.

For example, if you wanted a corporate intranet, you were forced to make one Site where each department could see the content for every other department.  This is fine for companies whose corporate culture is somewhere between "Kumbaya" and "We Are the World".  

If you work someplace like this, please email me directions to where your leprechauns keep their gold.  

Back in the real world, you probably found yourself doing something like this:  You'd create several departmental sites, linked awkwardly from one to the next, and tie them all to one large "Master Site". Need to change something that effects the "whole" intranet? Well, cancel your weekend plans because you've got a ton of manual changes ahead of you. Fun times, eh?

Thankfully, that's all in the past now that Google has debuted page-level permissions for Sites.  Thank god!

Enabling Page-Level Permissions for Google Sites

According to the Google Docs Blog, only site owners can enable page-level permissions, which are turned off by default.  Once enabled, page-level permissions make some pages private for certain users, while allowing other pages to be viewed by a wider audience.

The new permissions work much as you'd expect.  Pages can inherit current site-level permissions, and you can elect to include, or ignore, any future site-level changes.  For more information, check out Google's getting started guide.

What's Next (Hopefully) For Google Sites?

Truly, this is a HUGE upgrade.  Page-level permissions open up a world of new possibilities for any organization using Google Apps.  Make no mistake, though.  There is a LONG way to go to truly perfecting Sites.

For starters, Google must extend the permissions scheme to include comments.  This would allow site viewers to participate in discussions without requiring them to be site editors.  After all, just because I want you to read and comment on my blog, doesn't mean I want you editing my posts. 

The editor for Sites could also use an update. Table editing, in particular, needs some love.  For that matter, Google Docs needs a better table editor, too. Come on, Google...Two birds are sitting here waiting for you to pick up this stone!

It would also be very useful to save page drafts. Perfect for when you're working on something that you don't want to share with everybody just yet.  This functionality already exists when adding posts to pages created with the "Announcements" template.  I hope that Google can find a smart way to incorporate this functionality more broadly within Sites. 

Finally, I'd also like to see a way for custom URLs to be used for non-public Sites.  This is a tough nut to crack given Goolge's distributed infrastructure, so I won't hold my breath for it.  Besides, I'll have my hands full consolidating all those departmental Sites into single, secure, one-stop-shop Intranets.  

Sweet!

Google Apps Gets Serious About Business

It had to happen eventually, but part of me never really believed that this day would come.

Google is changing the billing options for Google Apps, reducing the number of free users you can create under the standard Apps account from 50 to 10.

That's right...TEN.

An 80% decrease in the number of accounts you can set up before having to upgrade to Google's premium "Google Apps for Business" service is a dizzying change to people (like me) who have been allowed to use the best email and collaboration platform in the world for FREE over the past 5 or so years.  

For small businesses (and the people who support them), Google has long provided an irresistible platform on which to build a basic, solid, IT infrastructure.  Running 50 users for free on Google Apps almost felt like stealing.  It was so good, so solid, so compelling, and so cheap (FREE!), that to do anything other than run your small business on Google Apps seemed like a complete mistake.

Despite my indulgent, reactionary whining about the change, this change is not all bad.  Google is also introducing a "flexible billing" option which charges only $5 per user, per month.  This is a bit more on an annual basis than the $50 per user, per year that Google currently has, but it does allow for more flexibility for those who only need services over a very short term.  Seasonal businesses could really benefit from this new model, saving a significant amount of cash over the old, annual-only plan.

Google's still going to honor the 50 user limit for everyone who signed up before May 10, 2011.   And May 10 just so happens to be the opening day of Google IO.  I wonder what new and exciting features will be released to coincide with this new pricing?

As for me, I'll be across the Pacific in Malaysia that week, instead of at Moscone West.  I'll keep an eye on the Twitter streams of my San Francisco bound peers to get the first read on whatever it is Google's going to do next with its more evolved, more "flexible", Google Apps platform.

Is Google Losing Its Mojo?

Marc Benioff stunned a room of 15,000 DreamForce 2010 attendees yesterday during his keynote address about the future of the Salesforce.com platform and application clouds.

No, it wasn't Database.com, Chatter Free, RemedyForce, or the super-cool debut of SiteForce.  Don't get me wrong, those are great stories with game-changing potential for Cloud developers (again, SiteForce...Wow!). They just weren't heavy duty jaw droppers.

This one was.

Salesforce.com is acquiring Heroku for $239 Million.

What is Heroku, and what does this have to do with Google's mojo?

Heroku is a multi-tenant platform and hosting environment for Ruby on Rails. Using Git, an application developer pushes code to a repository on Heroku.  This code is automatically compiled into a self-contained, read-only application, ready to run on the Heroku grid.  They manage all the infrastructure and software layers, actively curating everything to ensure stability and scalability.  It's an example of a Cloud Technology concept called Platform as a Service ("PaaS"), and it's part of the most important evolution of IT in over a decade.

Google's been in the PaaS game for almost two years with Google App Engine.  First previewed in spring 2008, App Engine promised something amazing: Give developers access to the same building blocks that Google uses for their own applications, then run and scale them reliably...even under heavy loads with large amounts of data.  As someone who loves application development as much as I loathe system administration, App Engine was the most exciting thing I had seen in a long time.

Since it's launch, Google added a Java runtime to App Engine and worked very hard to extend application quotas and increase reliability (not always successfully).  But what's been happening lately with App Engine?

Aside from last week's release of the 1.4.0 SDK, Google's been pretty quiet about App Engine the past few months.  Check out the App Engine Blog and you'll see an alarming decline in posts since August 2010.  Normally, I wouldn't think too much of this, but after Google suddenly pulled the plug on Google Wave earlier this year, anyone working with a "Beta" Google product should ask themselves the following: "What has Google done lately to demonstrate that this technology is going to be around next year?"  

Meanwhile, in roughly the same time frame, Heroku has delivered a beloved service to a large, active development community.  They seem to have taken the promise of App Engine, and simply kicked Google's ass at execution.  Now Salesforce.com sweeps in and scoops them up, betting $212M cash (and another $27M in stock) that PaaS for the masses has legs.  With that kind of commitment, I think it's safe to say that Heroku will still be here when Dreamforce 2011 rolls around.

What does this have to do with Google's mojo?

As an IT professional, I've believed for years that Google is the platform of the future.  Stop me at a cocktail party and I would talk your ear off about how Going Google will change your life.  Google's services weren't always perfect, but they were innovative.  Sure, they lacked features sometimes, but improvement came incrementally and consistently.  And best of all, the price point (free) was impossible to argue with.  Betting on the Cloud was easy because the Consumer's biggest barrier to entry (price) was eliminated.

I think that Heroku's success indicates that a profound change has occurred.  Moving to the Cloud is not just about "free" anymore.  Moving to the Cloud is about being FAST.  The argument is no longer how much money you can save, but how quickly your business can pivot when it needs to.

I still love Google, even as I worry about App Engine's future.

Full disclosure: I absolutely love Google.  I'm proud to be called a Google Fanboy, especially when photographic evidence exists to support the claim.

My enthusiasm for all things Google has survived the death of Wave, the birth of Buzz, and the completely useless introduction of Instant Search.   But watching Heroku mature this year (not to mention Salseforce.com's multi-million dollar endorsement yesterday), has made me realize that Google is not always going to be as innovative as I want to give them credit for.

In the end, that's why I feel like Google is losing its mojo.

When an unashamed fanboy like me pulls himself out of the Google-juice long enough to ask "why is Google dropping the ball so much lately?", maybe an alarm bell should be ringing somewhere in Mountain View. 

 

 

George Hu Demonstrates Siteforce at Dreamforce 2010

This is unbelievably cool!

If Siteforce works even HALF as well as it appeared to in this demo (and if Salesforce.com sets pricing low enough to appeal to non-enterprise customers), then this is going to change small business IT forever.

I hope Salesforce is looking harder at lowering prices for small customers.  Chatter Free is a nice first step towards finding a middle ground between Google's low cost suite of (very cool) apps and services, and Salesforce.com's expensive (and also very cool) apps and services.  

Let's see if SFDC will continue the trend as things with Siteforce shake out over the coming months.

 

Brant Cooper Opens the UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge Fall Lecture Series With Customer Development Principles and Practices

Keeping with the "Lean Startup" theme from the Fall 2010 kickoff event, the UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge lecture series opens Wednesday evening with Brant Cooper talking about Customer Development Principles and Practices at the Robinson Auditorium.

Mr. Cooper organizes the San Diego Tech Founders: Lean Startup Meetup, and is the founder of Market by the Numbers, a local high-tech marketing and customer development firm.  Brant really seems to know his stuff, and I'm looking forward to an interesting and insightful evening.

RSVP here if you plan on attending (Wednesday, November 10, 6pm).  Things begin with dinner at 6pm, so come early to nosh and network!

For anyone interested in more events like this, be sure to become a fan of the UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge Facebook page. 

See you there!

"Lean Startup" Guru Eric Ries Helps Kickoff the 2010-11 UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge

Calling all entrepreneurs!  The fifth annual UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge kicked-off last night with a special event at the Price Center East Ballroom on the UCSD campus.  A few hundred local entrepreneurs, business leaders, and students were treated to a fantastic keynote address by Eric Ries, a guru / evangelist of the Lean Startup movement. 

Eric is a passionate and engaging speaker with a hell of a story to tell.  He begins with the assertion that, as entrepreneurs, we need to Stop Wasting People's Time.  He argues that our traditional approach to running startup companies needs an overhaul.  Taking lessons from his five year, birth to death experience with a massively funded (and spectacularly failed) Silicon Valley startup, Eric helped build and grow a company that focused on short, iterative release cycles, and (most importantly) continual involvement of the customer to validate product development.

If you can spare 15 minutes, you MUST take a look at Eric's 2010 Web 2.0 Expo address, "The Lean Startup: Innovation Through Experimentation".  It's a condensed version of his presentation last night, and it's awesome.

 

Following Eric's keynote was a panel of local business leaders including the CTO of Qualcomm, the CSO of Life Technologies, and the CEO of Genomatica.  Moderating the panel was local venture capitalist Leo Spiegel, a Managing Partner with Mission Ventures.  It was great to listen to such a luminous panel of business and technology leaders, but the night really belonged to Eric and Lean Startup.

 

Fortunately, members of the San Diego Tech Founders: Lean Startup Group got to enjoy a special Q&A event with Eric later that night at Rock Bottom.  Many thanks to Brant Cooper for scoring such a great inaugural guest speaker.  I'm definitely looking forward to the next Meetup!

 

And what about the Entrepreneur Challenge?  Round one, The Fall 2010 Elevator Pitch, opens today!  You must be a student of UCSD to participate, but anyone can (and should!) subscribe to the Entrepreneur Challenge mailing list.  There are about a dozen different events held over the year where you can learn and be energized by the dynamic and diverse community of San Diego technology entrepreneurs.  

 

(*Note: If the events are not listed yet, they should show up at that link sometime soon) 

 

Finally, I suggest bookmarking the UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge resource page.  You'll find some incredible material there, all available to the public.  Stuff like this makes me proud to be a product of UCSD.  :-)

 

Good luck, entrepreneurs!

 

Steve Jobs Debuts iPhone 4 at WWDC 2010

As a longtime PC guy, I sometimes hate myself for loving my iPhone so very, very much.  I've got years...no...DECADES of time invested in disliking Apple products.  But there's no debating the fact that my iPhone is simply the most delicious piece of hardware I've ever owned in my life.  Sigh...

And now iPhone 4.0 is here.

I'm trying to hold the line here, but it's getting harder and harder to dislike Apple just because I've "been a PC" for so long.  Not sure, but the 4th generation iPhone might just be my Waterloo.

Check out Steve Jobs giving the WWDC 2010 Keynote from June 7th.  The iPhone 4 debut appears at 27:27 in this video.  Make sure to cover your keyboard to protect against falling drool...  ;-)

Agile Connect 2010: Day One Recap

NOTE: Links to session videos should be added within the next 24 hours once Agile Journal makes them available.

It's been an excellent day at the 2010 Agile Connect virtual conference.  The speakers for the two morning presentations, Tim Lister and Robert C. Martin, were both superb.  The passion that these gentlemen have for professional software development practically bursts through your screen.  

Mr. Lister was particularly entertaining and engaging during his talk, so if you ever see his name come up as a presenter at a future conference, make sure you add his session to your agenda. 

A great takeaway from Robert Martin's presentation, "Are You a Development Professional?", was his request that everyone in the audience make sure that the next book they read would be MIT's influential "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (check out the full text for FREE, direct from MIT).  He's right.  This is an absolute must-read for every software development professional, including those of us who've been writing code for years.

On a related note, MIT is very generous with the materials associated with this course, from the full text of the book to actual MIT classroom lecture videos.  This Google Search results page should give you an excellent jumping off point for finding more information.

The second half of the day saw sessions that focused less on programming, and more on life-cycle, project management, and process adoption.  Good stuff, but not the blood-stirring talks of the morning for the hardcore coders among us.

Jeffrey Hammond from Forrester Research discussed the changing face of Agile-based Application Life-cycle Management, and how modern tools for Agile ALM are helping to bring about the reality of a results-oriented work environment.  I was gratified to see Rally Software recognized as one of the strongest Agile ALM solution providers in Forrester's May 2010 Wave on Agile Development Management Tools.  Go Rally!

Aside from my Rally Software Fanboy itch being scratched, a nice takeaway from this session was the idea that Agile best practices can live with other methodologies.  Heck, sometimes it's just got to be that way.

It's easy for those of us who are passionate about Agile to want the rest of the world to join us for some planning poker and sign off on 2 week iterations.  Unfortunately, not everybody wants to (or can) go Agile.  Coming up with a hybrid ALM solution that can be adapted to the skills and abilities of the team at hand is going to be more likely to yield success than shoehorning teams into solutions simply for the sake of "going Agile".

In the day's penultimate session, Dan Rawsthorne gave a step-by-step walkthrough for building and monitoring an Agile release plan.  For software project managers who already have some experience with Agile planning and monitoring, but want to solidify their understanding of Agile methods and practices, this session is extremely valuable.  Dan covers things at a furious pace, so make sure you have enough time to view the session and slides twice.

Note that Dan's session is NOT tailored to someone who's an Agile newbie.  You'll get the most out of this session if you already understand (and have used) key Agile concepts like User Stories, Story Points, Use Cases, Iterations, Burndowns / Burnups, etc.  If you are brand new to Agile, you can get a quick introduction to these concepts by checking out Agile Development and SCRUM on Wikipedia.  Once you've got the basics, check out some of the Agile Development videos / webinars from VersionOne and Mountain Goat Software to help round things out.

Finally, Michael DePaoli closed the day with a presentation on introducing and scaling Agile development within an organization (i.e. "Agile Transformation").  This presentation is perfect for business decision makers who are currently thinking about making an Agile Transformation, but currently lack a roadmap for doing so.

Michael's session had the highest-level content of the day, but knowing Agile / Scrum basics is still a requirement if you want to get the most out of his talk.  One interesting note: Michael presents an organization's adoption of Agile as an Agile project itself.  In his example, Agile is introduced over a series of Releases, with each release building on the successful implementation of the previous one.  Sound familiar? 

Another great point is that organizations making an Agile Transformation should focus on process, then organization, then tools.  Too often people download or subscribe to an Agile ALM software suite, and think that they will suddenly start absorbing Agile development practices by osmosis.  I've never seen it happen like that, and it was instructive that the guy working for a company that makes Agile tools has not seen it work that way either.

A final note: Make sure to stay through to the end of this session, as Michael discusses what motivates knowledge workers (approximately 40 minutes in). I'm a firm believer in trying to understand what motivates people, so Michael's take on developer psychology was a welcome addition to an already interesting presentation.

All in all, day one of Agile Connect 2010 was well worth the time.  Can't wait to see what tomorrow's sessions bring.

SaaSy Keynotes and Agile Connect 2010 Online

Here's a quick heads up for Cloud Technology geeks and Agile Development enthusiasts.

On-demand video from May's "All About The Cloud" SaaS Summit is now available.  Currently, the keynotes, "thought leaders", and a couple of panel videos have been released.  I'm hoping that they will eventually publish videos from the presentation sessions, too.  Some of them look very interesting.

On the Agile front, next week (June 9th and 10th) marks the seventh year CMC Media has put on online events with the live streaming of Agile Connect 2010.  Attendance is free, and you can register here.

Google I/O 2010 Session Videos Are Here!

Awesome news for anyone who did not make it to Moscone West last month for Google I/O.  Starting today, Google will begin unveiling all the session videos and slides.

Here's the schedule for when each track will be released.  

• Tuesday June 1: App Engine, GWT
• Wednesday June 2: Enterprise, Android
• Thursday June 3: Google Chrome, Social Web
• Friday June 4: Tech Talks, Fireside Chats
• Monday June 7: Geo, Google APIs, Google Wave

For those of you who are looking for less technical, but extremely thought provoking lectures, make sure to check out the Tech Talk sessions.  The good news is that those come out this Friday!  Perfect day for "sharpening the saw" at work, right? ;-)

Finally, for anyone who's not already subscribed, make sure to check out the Google Developers Channel on YouTube.  Google is good about updating that channel regularly throughout the year, so you'll get the scoop on way more than just the BIG stuff, like Google I/O.

Happy Video Watching, everyone!