The release of Google Buzz adds another new step in the ongoing evolution of online communication.  And I hope you’ve been paying attention to the evolution so far.

Buzz, along with Google’s other recent release Google Wave, add real-time communication to traditional email inboxes in ways that, quite frankly, most people will fail to grasp for some time yet.

These new Google releases are part of a long running change in the consumer side of online communications.  Looking back 10 years the average web user had email, newsgroups, and basic instant messaging, all performed on their computers.

Today we have blended platforms such as Facebook that include email-style messaging, real time chat, and broadcast communications such as status updates.  In addition to this more and more content is shared in non-text formats.  Photos and videos are exchanged between friends as often as written messages are.  Business deals are done on Twitter.  And no one ever complained that a sales pitch was too short.

Business communications are charting a similar, but slower evolution.  Email quickly replaced much of our phone and fax communications and became a collaborative workspace, albeit a highly inefficient one.

In recent years collaboration has moved out of the inbox and into document management systems and intranet workspaces.  Faxes go directly to electronic records management systems instead of being dropped on our desk.  And telephony systems are integrating with our real-time communications servers to make voicemail and presence data available to us at our desks or on our mobile devices. Continue reading What Will Email Be In 10 Years?

The City of Los Angeles has proposed using Google Apps for messaging and collaboration. Naturally, the bean-counters in the city office are all agog about the prospect of saving some money, which, during the recession, has taken front row at city council meetings all across the country. Not to put too fine a point on it, cities are going broke, and having to cut back wherever they can–and in some cases, where they shouldn’t.

Fortunately, there are a few dissenting voices in the crowd. Using Google for email may well have its place, but that place isn’t in organizations that are required to provide any degree of security and privacy. The World Privacy Forum expressed some legitimate concerns that transferring city records to a cloud-based provider could violate privacy rights, and possibly even state or federal laws.

Continue reading LA proposes using Google Apps, security worries abound

Email operations and email archiving needs to have safe and secure protocols in place, especially if the corporation is under the purview of a privacy-related piece of legislation, such as HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley. Generally, the best way to ensure that those privacy protocols are put in place is to avoid cloud-based email and storage services.

Google continues to try to get a seat at the enterprise with Gmail, and this week, some of the industry’s heavy-hitters took Google to the task over the issue. An open letter to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt says the company is putting users at risk unnecessarily, and that encryption should be enabled by default on their web-based apps, including Gmail.

Currently, SSL is used only during login, after which, all browsing is unencrypted, unless the user takes an active step to return to the https protocol. Unless that step is taken, which most users will not do, the user is vulnerable to attack and theft. In most cases then, Gmail is run in the clear–which is completely unsuitable for corporate use.

Google released a synchronization tool this week that allows Microsoft Outlook to front-end Gmail. The synchronization tool, which is available to users of Google Apps Premier, lets users keep their Outlook client and retain the familiar interface, while still using Gmail on the back end, and opening up the possibility of scrapping Exchange altogether. Cool piece of technology? Definitely. Good idea for the enterprise? That’s the million-dollar question, and the answer isn’t quite so clear.

On the surface, it seems like a useful piece of technology, but for corporate email, it may not be conducive to a secure environment. I’ve often noted that cloud-based email, especially the free varieties, are inherently insecure, and make it far too easy to bypass corporate email security policies. Deploying a tool to blend Outlook/Exchange and Gmail would tend to legitimize use of free public webmail systems in a corporate environment, at least in the eyes of users.

Google is of course, trying to take market share away from Microsoft and position the Apps Sync as a game-changer. However, security concerns and compliance issues will keep a lot of enterprises from going the Google route, if for no other reason, than to maintain control over where the emails and attachments are archived. Store and archive email in the cloud? Still not good enough–and compliance and privacy issues relating to cloud email storage are enormous.

Bottom line, Gmail is fine and quite useful for personal use and personal email accounts, but still needs to be kept separate from the corporate environment.

This week, a Vietnamese security company reported discovery of a new worm, named W32.Gaptcha.Worm, which breaks Google’s CAPTCHA, and then automatically creates multiple random Gmail accounts which are then used for distributing spam.

The attack sends the new Gmail accounts out to hackers, who use them until Gmail blocks the IP address of the infected machine. According to the report, if your computer becomes infected, you will see Internet Explorer launch itself, and then the Gmail account registration process takes place, with the worm automatically filling in random names and numbers to manufacture a bogus user. The worm is able to circumvent Google’s CAPTCHA system by sending the CAPTCHA image to a remote server, where it is broken. Gmail will later block your computer, preventing you from signing up for any new legitimate Gmail accounts.

The blog entry that highlights the discovery doesn’t specify however, just how the CAPTCHA is broken once it has been sent to the remote server. It is believed that some spammers actually use low-tech means, sometimes even employing low-cost laborers in third world countries to decode CAPTCHAs by the thousand, by hand.

The company discovered the worm in a honeypot trap.

Using public webmail accounts has been in the news ever since Sarah Palin’s infamous Yahoo account. And while I still don’t believe using one of these public webmail accounts for serious business is ever a good idea, there has been some back-and-forth on the issue around the blogosphere. First, Don Reisinger at Cnet wrote a blog detailing five annoying things about using Gmail. This was responded to on ZDNet by Garett Rogers, who sings the praises of Gmail–going so far as to claim that all other mail clients annoy him.

Whether Gmail is annoying or not is missing the point. There is probably something annoying, to someone, about every single mail client, web or otherwise. Gmail may well have more annoying features than most, I don’t know, I don’t use it. I have two email addresses, for one, I use Microsoft Mail on my local PC; and for the other, I access Microsoft Outlook through a corporate VPN using two-factor authentication. I do feel secure with both, am quite happy with the feature sets, and appreciate being in control of my own archives.

Continue reading Gmail annoyances considered