Oxygen as an enterprise alternative to Dropbox

My son has been VERY actively trying to persuade me to look into using Oxygen Cloud as an adjunct to Dropbox. Today he sent me this link which is worth taking a moment to read. There’s also a video to watch that explains/describes the model of file-sharing.

From this you can see that the main difference between Dropbox and Oxygen is the encryption which immediately addresses the recent “scares” about Dropbox releasing information to the US government upon request (of course you can still operate your own private encryption on Dropbox files if you want – but that’s a bit of a hastle).

So, Pete has allowed me to be one of his team members and so “family files” will be shared in the cloud using Oxygen. For any small team of five or less, why not use the free trial Oxygen service. If it meets your requirements, consider paying for secure storage in the cloud.

You wait for a bus, and then …

Yes it’s an all-action day in “Thought grazing Towers”. I’ve been meaning to poll for a day/time for our next socialmedia cafe event, but you know, the time never seemed just quite right, there was always something else that was “more pressing” {don’t laugh}.

Anyway, with Google+ in the wild (OK, under some kind of control in the wild) and with some other interesting developments:

  • What is visible.me, do you see a use case for it?
  • The emergence of Oxygen as a competitor for Dropbox in the enterprise.
  • Should we be pushing Posterous more as an easy-entry socialmedia tool?

… not to mention the feedback from, and follow-up to the Learning and Teaching Conference in May, we need to meet and chat over coffee don’t you think?

There’s a link to a meet-o-matic invite here. I’ll tweet it as well. When I see a good number of folk clustering around a given day/time I’ll re-tweet a revised meet-o-matic. Then I’ll update the side panel and tweet the event – so watch out for further updates. I’ve been thinking about using the cafe at Julian Hodge – what do others think? You might also note one option is late Friday afternoon, that would allow for an adjournment to a local hostelry for the dedicated.

I’ve not been asleep, just resting … it won’t be a roar, but it won’t be a whimper either!

Google+ has landed …

Well something had to wake me up! It arrived this morning, courtesy of an invite from Paul Hobson which worked! I guess it’s connected to having your Google language set to English(US) – yes it rankles but it has its benefits. Anyway, I’m up and running and have given it the once over.

I like Circles – they look a much better alternative to Facebook Groups in two use cases (at least):

  1. For closely defined groups that you want to keep reasonably leak-proof for people you trust (ie family and REAL friends) or who have a coherence of their own (ie a volunteer group, charity, etc), it could really work as a virtual meeting-point and archive of activity.
  2. For corporates frightened of Facebook and never having taken to Yammer, then Circles could be the answer as you can define your own circles and again (and I haven’t checked the security model in detail yet) retain an element of firewall to the circle. [I’ll report back on that in a later post.]

In addition to Circles, I do like the way Google+ is presented; the way your profile is shown, the way you can edit it and the detail you can change so that you can really present yourself, the way you want to be [I haven’t quite worked-out the various communication symbols yet … but I will by the end of the day!]. I also like the presentation on the iPad – the mobile version – it’s really clean and passes usability tests (for me). Finally (and here I’m speaking as a Chrome and iGoogle user) the integration with the rest of the Google stuff on the desktop is really good. In my Chrome taskbar, I now have a David+ tab, and a notifications button, and the same is true of iGoogle – a new tab has appeared.

You can see the future on the Google desktop therefore – this is what it will look like. I think, just possibly, Google may have got this right – perhaps the time and effort in getting it wrong with Wave and Buzz might have not been so bad a thing after all.

Finally, the integration with Picasaweb is also very good and I wait to test the video chat functionality – this could be the real killer functionality. I think Facebook have got a real competitor this time, and for corporates (as long as the security model is granular) there may be a good entry-level collaboration suite to add to the increasing Google in the Cloud offering.

April meeting notes

A larger than before attendance helped by a specific invitation to participants in the forthcoming Technology Enhanced Education Conference being held on May 6th in the Optometry Building to meet and discuss the programme. So we had @amcunningham, @egrommet, @mrsimonwood, @joenicholls, @sphericaln, @agentjohnson, Sarah, Nathan and of course @thoughtgrazing in attendance for some or all of the three hours from 12 ’til 3 on April 6th. Perhaps Wednesday afternoon (and a little bit later) suits folk better. No matter, I’m back from my world-travels and I’ll be more active in canvassing for dates and encouraging attendance from now on.

I couldn’t hear all that was being discussed – my hearing’s not what it used to be in any case, but nine people talking at any one time is just a little bit beyond my capability – but some interesting things were raised, apart from discussing the forthcoming conference.

A lively discussion took place between @egrommet et al on @amcunningham’s tweets about listening to Etienne Wenger the previous day. I’m not sure what the context was but it led to the names of George Siemens, Brown and Duguid (ie Cognitive Apprenticeship) and others being thrown into the argument. Such is the discussion of educational practitioners.

I was involved in a discussion about web hosting (I need a “proper home” for thoughtgrazing.com et al) and @mrsimonwood came up with 5quidhost – looks well worth a second look! I also had Rackspace recommended by @sphericaln, but I think (even with the recent BCS discount) that it’s a bit OTT for me.

Next stop was QRcodes and a discussion on which readers to recommend. [The conference flyer promotes a very large QRcode.] The QRCode Code Machine which both encodes and decodes QRcodes and is available as iPad and iPhone apps (and others ??) was mentioned – it’s now on my brand-new iPad {smug grin}.

This led onto iPhone apps in general and @egrommet showed me iProcrastinate (a neat task manager) which I just had to have; as well as Vtok which purports to enable Google Video Chat on the iPad (I’m yet to test that – although it has been installed).

Finally, as the time flew past just so quickly and as I swallowed my last bite of baguette to go with the second cup of coffee (certainly not up to Twin Peaks standard unfortunately), we started talking about what I will call (loosely) “digital citizenship”. I’ve blogged in other places about digital identity and the importance of context – knowing when and where and what to tweet, blog, whatever, in social media; @amcunningham retold the events of a recent social media “encounter” which caused her to examine what were the boundaries of her contributions to public websites, even though she kept her professional identity apart from those interactions. What should we be advising our students, future professionals, about why and how they should use social media? Does this have a part in Information (or Digital) Literacy – I feel it does. We need to be able to provide leadership in this challenging field where for instance facebook openness meets professional responsibility.

Final thought – does anyone other than @egrommet do regular and systematic “vanity searches” on the web to trawl for personal references. As a professional, perhaps this is something we should all be doing. We need to protect our professional digital footprint.

Emergent enterprise (and disruptive technologies)

[Originally posted on “Lofty thoughts …” 28th May 2009]

I was pointed towards this article from a non-traditional source – retail banking. I think there are some lessons to be learnt from it, foremost amongst those being “have a little courage”.

Quite a while ago I posted my first blogpost on what was being called then “disruptive technologies”. I didn’t like that term then, and I still don’t. I said at the time that there was no way one was going to get Web 2.0 technologies adopted in any organisation – if you called them disruptive. I used the term Information Services 2.0 to describe the type of changes that I felt need to occur within a central IT Services organisation if it was going to be able to “consume” web 2.0 apps into its service offering. Since then we have seen Library 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 emerge as terms describing very similar ideas. I refer you to Brian Kelly’s really excellent blog for further discussion on these and other web-related matters.

However in James Gardiner’s blogpost he makes it clear that giving employees unexpected freedom to express themeselves can have unexpected and to be welcomed consequences. He says …

“Unsurprisingly, a year on, none of the doomsday scenarios
hypothesised when we made it possible for staff to create their own
internal communities have come to pass. Of course, such a fortuitous
outcome would largely be expected by everyone who participates in broad
web based communities externally. It was not, however, to long term
traditionalist used to iron control, but they have largely been
mollified by the lack of significant negative consequences.

But now we are beginning to see a new phenomenon. I call it
the Emergent Enterprise: staff are not only having their say, they are
actually changing the way things work in material ways.

You see, along with social media, we gave our people the
ability to create rudimentary business process and publish those as
well. The idea was that workgroups would be able to automate things
they did on a day to day basis easily, and without any input from the
central IT function.”

Now you can see that this has a distinct hint of “lean thinking” in it, so yet again a concordance between the lean and the emergent enterprise as typified by Cardiff University’s Modern Working Environment programme. James goes on to say …

“My real interest in this “emergence”, however, does have
to do with the strategic questions which face us going forward. As
innovators, we know the biggest long-term threats to institutions
rarely come from large, established competitors. No, it is the start-up
crowd, with their nimbleness in responding to boutique opportunities
and niche segments which are the competitive issue here. The problem is
there are so many of them that a strategic level response is neither
possible nor appropriate.

But an “emergent” response, forming and norming by itself is
just what is needed. Then, when a competitor becomes strategic, our own
response will have grown to the point where it can be strategic as
well.”

… and this strikes a real chord with me. The Emergent University in a post credit crunch world will be a nimble university, one that has enabled its staff to effect change and one that is fully equipped (and that means educated and trained staff) to make full use of its strategic technological investment. James’ closing comments are these …

“What I don’t doubt, though, is that emergent behaviours in enterprises
– especially banks – will be one of the most powerful competitive
weapons we’ll have in the future. You see, everyone always says that
“people are the most important resource” and that “the war for talent”
will be one of the great competitive battlegrounds in the coming years.
The thing about the Emergent Enterprise is that it allows all that
great resource to actually make a difference.”

And I say amen to that too!