In general, using Outlook with Google Apps is just like using it with Exchange. This is because most features supported by Outlook, such as sending and receiving mail, scheduling events, looking up contacts and so on, are supported by Google Apps, too. This information is easily synchronized between Outlook and your Google Apps account in the cloud, meaning you can access it equally from either Outlook or the Google Apps interface.
However, there are a few features normally available with Outlook that Google Apps doesn’t support. Some of these aren’t available at all when using Google Apps Sync. Others, such as Tasks, Notes and Journal entries, are available, but only from Outlook (not from the Google Apps interface). These features aren’t used in Google Apps and therefore can’t be synchronized with the cloud. Instead, they’re stored locally on your computer.

General Differences

The following differences apply in general when using Google Apps Sync:

Public folders aren’t available. You can’t make a folder public to share its contents with other users. This is because folders in Outlook map to email labels in Google Apps, which don’t have permission properties. With Google Apps Sync, the Permissions settings in folder Properties (which you use to make folders public) aren’t available.

Can’t delegate access to your mailbox or calendar. You can’t use Outlook’s Delegates option to let an assistant manage your mailbox or calendar. (This feature isn’t available when using Google Apps Sync.)

Tasks, Notes, and Journal entries aren’t synchronized with the Google cloud. You can still use these features from Outlook, but only for personal work, not for multi-user interactions (so you can’t do things like assign tasks to other users or share your Notes). Also, this data is stored locally on your computer and available only from Outlook, not from the Google Apps interface.

Posts and other non-mail items in folders aren’t synchronized: You can keep storing posts, contacts, and other non-mail items in folders. But these items don’t appear with the corresponding email label in Google Mail (because labels in Google Mail apply only for mail messages).

See topics below for differences specific to each application.

Using Outlook with Google Mail is a lot like using it with Exchange. However, there are a few features Google Apps doesn’t support, as well as some more subtle differences.

What’s not supported by Google Apps Sync
Delegating access to your mailbox: You can’t use Outlook’s Delegates feature to let an assistant manage your Inbox, responding to mail on your behalf. This feature isn’t available when using Google Apps Sync.

Multiple types of flags in Google Mail. You can use different types of flags in Outlook, for example, to schedule follow up tasks, and you’ll still receive reminders. But this additional information isn’t synchronized with your Google account in the cloud (since Google Apps only has a single type of star), and therefore isn’t available from the Google Mail interface.

Recovering deleted items: After emptying your Deleted items folder, you can’t use “Recover Deleted Items” in Outlook’s Tools menu to get the messages back as you can in Exchange. This option isn’t available with Google Apps Sync.

Specifying a delay for emailing calendar invitations: In Outlook, you can specify a delay for emailing calendar events, after saving the event (using the “delay email by X minutes” option). However, Google Apps Sync synchronizes attendees’ calendars right away, inviting them immediately regardless of any delay you specify.

Importance levels in Google Mail: Using Outlook with Google Apps Sync, you can send mail marked as “Important” or Low Priority,” but these values don’t show up for Google Mail users (since Google Apps doesn’t support these properties). They do, however, show up for other Outlook users.

Other Differences in Mail

Messages can have multiple labels: In Google Apps, a message can be associated with more than one label. A message with budget information for a project, for example, can have both the Budget label and Projects label. In Outlook, this message therefore appears in both your Budget folder and Projects folder.

Note that deleting the message from one folder in Outlook also deletes it from the other.

Folder names are limited to 40 characters. Clean reply headers may look different. Clean reply headers in email threads between Google Mail users and Outlook users look different than in threads between Outlook users. This is because Google Mail sends slightly different headers than Outlook.

Receiving POP vs. IMAP mail: Using Google Apps Sync, email sent to a POP3 account appears in your Inbox (just as it does with Exchange). Email sent to an IMAP account goes to that IMAP account.
Receiving web pages from IE or Office: If someone emails you a web page from Internet Explorer or Microsoft Office using the “Send > page by mail” option, the message is sent immediately if Outlook is open. Otherwise, it’s sent the next time you start Outlook.

Your Outlook Calendar also continues to work with Google Apps much as it did with Exchange. However, there are a few features not yet supported by Google Apps, some differences in behavior to watch out for, and a number of minor differences that hopefully won’t be a bother.

What’s not supported by Google Apps Sync

Multiple calendars: You can’t create multiple calendars in Outlook, such as one for work and one for home. Instead, all your events are stored in your primary calendar.

Share my Calendar feature: You can’t share your calendar in Outlook using the Share my Calendar option in the left navigation pane. However, you can share it as an Internet calendar. For details, see above under “Using Google Apps Sync.”

Delegating access to your calendar: You can’t use Outlook’s Delegates feature to let an assistant manage your calendar, creating, accepting, or declining your meeting invitations. This feature isn’t available when using Google Apps Sync.

Optional attendees: Google Calendar doesn’t differentiate between Optional and Required attendees. So even if you mark an attendee as Optional when inviting them to a meeting, they will appear as Required to everyone else.

Accepting new meeting time proposals: You can propose a new meeting time in Outlook, and the organizer receives the proposal in email as usual. However, the organizer can only accept the proposal (by clicking Accept in the email) using Outlook 2007, not when using Outlook 2003 or the Google Apps web interface. Also, clicking “View all proposals” in the email using any version of Outlook, will not display other attendees’ proposed times.

Calendar attachments: If you add a document, contact, or other attachment to a calendar event in Outlook, you see the attachment in your calendar, but other attendees don’t see it in theirs. This is because attachments aren’t synchronized with the Google Apps cloud and therefore don’t update to other people’s calendars.

Conversely, if a Google Calendar user attaches a Google Docs document to a calendar event, Outlook users don’t see the attachment. For Outlook users to access the document, Google Calendar users should paste the URL to the document in the event’s description.
Differences to watch out for

You can’t save without sending: In Outlook, an organizer can create or update an event, such as with a minor change, and choose not to send the update to attendees (by closing the event window and choosing “Save without sending”). In Exchange, attendees would not learn of the update, either by email or in their calendar. Google Apps, however, synchronizes all calendar data with your domain in the cloud, whether or not you send updates from Outlook. Other attendees won’t get an email, but their calendars are updated.

Similarly, if you create an event and save it without sending (say, because the event isn’t yet fully drafted), attendees you’ve already added will still see the event on their calendars.
Forwarding meeting invitations: If an organizer creates a meeting in Google Calendar and unchecks the “Guests can invite others” option, then an attendee forwards the meeting, the recipient gets the forwarded invitation, but clicking Accept doesn’t add the event to the recipient’s calendar.

Requesting invitation responses: If you create a meeting in Outlook and choose not to receive responses from attendees (you don’t select the Request Response option), you might still receive responses. This happens if you have enabled Notifications for your calendar in your Google Calendar settings.

Event replies aren’t stored in Calendar: When you reply in Outlook to a meeting invitation, you can edit your reply before sending. Your reply is indeed sent via email. But it’s not stored as a note in the calendar event itself.
Google Calendar users don’t see links or formatting: You can add rich content such as links and formatted text to a calendar description in Outlook, and other Outlook users see it. Google Calendar users, however, don’t see the links or other rich content.

Invitation emails from Google Calendar don’t show all attendees: If you receive a meeting invitation in Outlook from a Google Calendar user, you won’t see all attendees in the invitation email. You will, however, see all attendees in your calendar.

Recurring Events

Maximum number of recurrences: With Google Apps, a recurring event is limited to 365 recurrences. If you import a daily recurring event from Exchange that was scheduled January 1 2005, the event will stop recurring January 1 2006.

Scheduling a recurring event: If a Google Calendar user schedules a recurring event that begins on a different day than the meeting recurs, Outlook users don’t see the first event. For example, if a Google Calendar user schedules a weekly meeting for Monday that recurs every Tuesday thereafter, Outlook users will miss the first meeting. (This is because in Outlook, you can’t schedule a recurring meeting that begins on a different day than the remaining series.)

End-of-month recurring events: If a Google Calendar user creates a recurring event on the 31st of every month, Outlook users will see events on the last day of every month (even those with only 30 days). Google Calendar users, however, will see events only in months with 31 days, as the organizer likely intended.

Modifying recurring events doesn’t delete exceptions. If you modify a recurring event in Outlook, existing exceptions aren’t necessarily deleted even though a dialog says they will be. So if you schedule a weekly meeting at 2pm, move this week’s meeting to 1pm (creating an exception), then reschedule the entire series to 3pm, this week’s meeting will still be at 1pm. (In Exchange, this week’s meeting would be moved to 3pm.)

Google Calendar users can’t schedule First Weekday or First Weekend Day recurrences. Outlook users can schedule a recurring meeting on the “First Weekday” or “First Weekend Day,” just as you can with Exchange. The meeting is properly scheduled for everyone in your domain, Google Calendar and Outlook users alike. However, you can’t schedule such a meeting from the Google Calendar interface.

You can’t remove attendees from an exception. Removing an attendee from an exception to a recurring event, doesn’t always remove the attendee.

Declining a recurring event from Outlook 2003: If an attendee using Outlook 2003 declines an invitation to a recurring event organized by an Outlook 2007 user, the 2003 user is removed from the organizer’s attendee list, rather than just listed as declined.

Moving an all-day recurring event: If you schedule a recurring all-day event, such as a daily Out of Office event for a week-long vacation, then move one recurrence to another day that’s part of the series (say, you move Monday’s event to Tuesday), Outlook will still allow only one event on Tuesday. A Google Calendar user, however, sees two all-day events on Tuesday.

Other Differences in Calendar

Organizers in Google Calendar can decline their own meeting: When using Outlook, you can’t organize a meeting without being listed as an attendee. If you schedule the meeting in Google Calendar, however, you can remove yourself from the attendee list.

Resource names don’t update for previously scheduled events: If your domain administrator changes the name of a conference room or other resource, Outlook users don’t see the new name for meetings that have already been scheduled. They will, however, see the new name when attending or scheduling any future meetings.

New time zone rules can affect meeting times: Google Apps uses current time zone rules to do UTC-to-local time conversions, not those that apply when the event is originally created. This can affect meeting times in regions where time zone rules tend to change. For example, if you create a 2pm meeting in New Zealand when the time zone is GMT +13, and New Zealand’s time zone subsequently changes to GMT +12, the meeting will now show up at 1pm.

Choosing a new time zone affects all-day events: Unlike in Exchange, if you have an all-day event on your calendar in Google Apps, then change your time zone, the event is still shown as an all-day event. In Exchange, by contrast, the event becomes a 24-hour event that crosses day boundaries.

Minor event updates are marked as exceptions: If you update an event in Google Apps without changing the time or location, for example, by adding a comment, the event in Outlook appears as an exception (the exception icon is shown), even though it really isn’t.

As with Mail and Calendar, there are a few features of Outlook Contacts that Google Apps doesn’t support, as well as some other minor differences.

What’s not supported by Google Apps Sync
Global Address List data other than names and email addresses: The Global Address List created by Google Apps Sync’s GAL Generator currently shows any Names and Email Addresses (Phone Numbers will be available soon). Other information, such as Job Title and Company aren’t shown in global addresses (but they are in your personal contacts).

Follow-up flags in the Google Apps interface: You can flag a contact for follow-up in Outlook and the information is stored with your account in the Google Apps cloud. However, contact flags don’t appear in the Google Apps interface.

Distribution list synchronization: If you create a distribution list in Outlook, it’s available in Outlook but not from the Google Apps interface. This is because distribution lists work differently in Outlook than in Google Apps and therefore don’t synchronize with the Google Apps cloud. (Outlook lists can include addresses that aren’t in your Contacts, while Google Apps lists can’t).

Updating Contacts from Google Apps: Currently, updating a contact from the Google Apps interface can cause unexpected results in Outlook. For example, a full name in Google Apps might appear as a first name or last name in Outlook. Also, if you update a Notes field in Google Apps, your updates don’t appear in Outlook, and subsequent updates in Outlook overwrite changes made in Google Apps.

We’ll be removing some of these limitations soon. But for the time being, we recommend updating contacts only from Outlook, not from Google Apps.

Rich formatting in Google Apps Contacts: Links, bolding, and other rich content added in Outlook to a contact’s Notes field, appear as plain text in Google Apps.
Long Notes in Google Apps Contacts: A long Note entered in an Outlook contact is truncated in the Google Apps interface. The full Note, however, remains available in Outlook.

Other Differences in Contacts

Google Apps supports contact information that Outlook doesn’t, such as “Google Voice.” In Outlook, this information appears as a read-only attachment to the contact.
If you have pre-existing contacts in Google Apps (created before installing Google Apps Sync), their Full Name might appear as the Last Name in Outlook. This is because Google Apps doesn’t have separate fields for First and Last names.

We regularly encounter businesses that are using offsite, remote, Internet based backup providers such as Mozy, iDrive, Dell DataSafe (which is Mozy, re-branded).  This is always a concern for us, as it gives a false sense of security that your data is protected.  If you read my previous post “Forget Backup, Think Recovery“, you’ll know where I’m coming from.  Having your data backed up is just the first step, what you’re really after is a Recovery plan.

I was reading some blog posts from another IT provider, and read a great article on how an attempt to restore data from Mozy turned into a complete nightmare.  You can read the full post here (it really is worth reading in entirety).   In short, it took 11 days before the data was available to start the restore process.  There was still more time involved in the actual restore process – they  had to rebuild their Active Directory and Exchange databases from scratch.  Could you imagine your business being down for 2 weeks straight?  This particular customer was without email, files, without a network essentially.  Insane.

The best way we’ve found to properly include Recovery in your Disaster Recovery Plan is to have the ability to use your backup system as a stand-by or fail-over server.  You can’t afford to wait days for data to be downloaded or shipped and then finally restored.  Having the recovery capability built into your backup system means you can be up in running in minutes, not days.  For many businesses this is a must, not a ‘would be nice to have’.

I know that Mozy is cheap.  They have plans for as low as $4.95/month for unlimited storage.  But you have to ask:  “Am I going to trust one of my most important assets to a company based purely on what’s the cheapest?”  Would you go to the cheapest dentist you could find?  Or go hire a lawyer or accountant based on the fact that his/her hourly rate is the lowest?  You’d probably try to get a referal, and talk to some of their other clients, and look for the best value, and most importantly work with somebody you can trust.  Don’t get me wrong, these services have their place, it’s just that  Mozy is probably better suited in the home environment, where you can afford to wait for a restore.

Affordability is key, I get that, but when the ‘stuff’ hits the fan, and your business is at risk, you need to be able to rely on your Recovery system.  I’m sure that it was the longest 11 days the owner of that business ever faced, wondering if all their data is even going to show up, let alone be restored.

If you’d like to get a  Backup and Disaster Recovery audit, where we actually put your systems to the test, please Contact Us. Don’t wait until you’re down – a little bit of planning today, will save your business tomorrow.   Hope is not a strategy.

PS – I’ve got to give thanks to the author of the blog post I referenced (no author listed).   It’s easy to blog about your successes, but the sharing of his nightmare will hopefully serve as a valuable reminder on how critical it is to have a full Recovery plan.  It also highlights the importance of testing your Recovery system on a regular basis.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you’re well aware of the coming 2010 Olympic Games to Vancouver.  While this is exciting for our city and all the opportunities it can bring, a lot of people are bracing themselves for the impact.

VANOC and Translink have stated in press releases that a lot of downtown will be closed off during the games, and have suggested making alternative plans.  I’ve even heard reports of officials suggesting that it may be a good time for some businesses to go on vacation!  I’m not sure about you, but I don’t have a pile of cash that I’m sitting on in order to send our employees on a 2 week vacation.  We’ve put together some tips to help you.

There are plenty of alternatives available and we’re working closely with our customers, particularly those in the downtown core to make this as easy as possible.

Now would be the time to come up with a plan for having key personnel work from home and telecommute.  Prepare your IT infrastructure now to safeguard important data, and to allow secure remote connections to your information systems for both data and voice communication.

There are numerous technologies that are available to allow employees to work from home just as if they were sitting in front of their computers in the office.  Here’s a quick run-down of some things you’ll need to think about before February 2010, when the games are scheduled to begin.

• Have a look at the planned road closures.  You can find the maps that VANOC has provided to the public of their transportation plans.  Check to see if your business is going to be affected.
• Translink has setup a series of pages of tips for businesses on how to deal with the impact.  You can see them here.
• Translink is suggesting that anyone  not staying downtown Vancouver for the Games or event to leave the area by 2:00pm every day.
• Work with your IT Provider to setup and document a plan for employees to telecommute during the games.  Do this now, rather than waiting until the last minute.  You’ll be surprised at how easy and affordable it is to do this.

What’s nice about this, is that even after the games are over and long gone, you’ll still have your IT systems setup for remote working.  This is useful in many ways, including employees that are sick, or are concerned about the effects of H1N1 Flu, and need to stay home.

Contact us today to discuss what your options are, and schedule a free analysis to see how we can help prepare your business for teleworking before, during and after the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games.

Microsoft has launched a new flavour in the Microsoft Server suites, Windows Server 2008 Foundation.  Basically it’s the little brother of the very popular Small Business Server.   It’s target market is the smaller business with 15 or fewer users.  Its low cost of purchase, easy licensing and a host of other benefits  make it attractive for the small office / branch office.  Unlike the other Server suites, it is only available by purchasing server hardware from the likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo etc.  If your a small company on a tight budget, this just might be the right fit.
What does this mean to the small business owner?

• You can have all your data centralized (ideal for backup and disaster recovery)
• Sharing of information and resources
• Control security access rights of sensitive data to staff
• Ability for remote access
• Low cost of ownership (but must be purchased with server hardware from specific vendors)

It is an ideal ‘first server’ to run on your core business and network that can help manage security risks. A low cost option for small businesses that don’t already have a server running in a ‘workgroup’ type peer to peer networks. Windows Server Foundation is not sold as a standalone product but only available through OEM hardware vendors (Dell, HP and IBM) and comes pre installed on new hardware. The starting costs for these bundled systems are expected to be under $1000.

If you are a small business owner with 15 or fewer users not expecting to grow that fast, looking for an affordable solution, this may be the right server for your business. The affordable cost will make it possible for businesses to grow, innovate and stay competitive in today’s market.

However, if your on the growth track, or expect to have more than 15 employees in the next 3 years, it would probably be advisable to move up in the stack to Small Business Server.

Feel free to let us know your comments or questions and we will do our best to answer any queries you may have.

A lot of what we do here at Transparent revolves around protecting data and systems and ensuring business continuity for our clients.  We’ve seen our fair share of failed servers, crashed desktops and fried routers.  Almost all the new clients we meet have experienced some form of interruption, whether that is from a break-in, virus, hardware failure etc.  They’ve felt the pain.  They don’t want it to ever happen again.  We hear that message loud and clear!

We’re not immune to it ourselves.  You name it, I think we’ve experienced it.  At one point in the early days of the company we had a neighbouring business that was an incense factory.  They had a fire that ripped through the entire complex and basically destroyed everything, including our offices.  Some of our old paper records STILL smells like lavender from the incense fire.  We moved out of that office (or what was left of it) into our new home.  Within two weeks of getting setup, we were broken into and cleaned out.  All of our laptops, desktops, monitors, the works.  What a horrible feeling.  As we grew, we needed to move again.  Three months into a yet again new offices, and the floor above us sprung a leak and  water poured all through our shop all through the weekend.  Anything electronic was destroyed.   How much downtime did we experience or data did we loose?  Zero.

It’s a given that most businesses have some form of backup (sadly there are still some we encounter that have none).  However what they really need, is Recovery.  Too much emphasis is put on backup, it’s really should be called recovery.  That is the goal after all – to quickly recover.

Imagine this scenario – your server experiences a critical hardware failure and crashes.  Won’t come back to life – your not sure what’s wrong with it at this point.  You quickly get your IT manager (or whomever was handling your backups) to bring in the last backup tape.  Now what?  Hopefully all of the latest data is on that tape.  What do you do with it?

Well first before you can do anything, you need to get your server up and running before you can even start the restore process.  If that server is new, then you should have a hardware warranty with it.  Call in the technicians.  If you’re lucky they are there the next day to diagnose the issue, find out what parts need to be replaced or repaired.  If you’re lucky, it’s fixed a day or two later.  If it’s not under warranty, your shopping around for a new server, and the pressure is on to get it ordered and delivered in record time.  Before you can start to restore any critical data, first you have to get the operating system up and running with the right software and drivers.  Finally, you can start to restore the data.  You are hoping that the tapes have the latest valid data, but the reality is that tapes fail to restore far too often.  That is compounded by the age of the tapes.  While all of this is going on, your staff is without access to their data, email, calendars etc.

The end result is 2-3 days of downtime, and a if you’re backing up nightly, probably an entire day of lost data.  The high cost of rushed emergency labour and replacement of hardware is a drop in the bucket next to the lost wages, lost productivity, lost revenue, lost sales and potentially a tarnished reputation from frustrated customers.

All this assumes that everything went as planned, and that all data was on the tapes and tested.  In our experience that’s rarely the case.  In fact majority of issues that we’ve come across could have easily been prevented by simply testing the backup systems and trying to restore something.  Unfortunately most businesses wait until disaster strikes before they put their backup system to the test.

This begs the question – ‘How should businesses be preparing themselves for the inevitable crash or downtime?’.  I’m glad you asked

Here’s some minimum requirements  that every disaster recovery solution should have:

• Backs up everything automatically. Rather than trying to decide on what is important and what is not – assume everything on your server needs to be backed up.
• Backs up very frequently. Once a day is quite often just not enough.  Loosing a full days worth of data is a significant loss.
• Backs up both locally and off site.  Data needs to be kept off site in case of fire/flood/theft, however it also needs to be kept locally for rapid restoration.
• Easy to test restore. You shouldn’t have to bring down your entire system, or wait hours, or search for tapes to try to test the restore functionality.
• Restores all data, or just a single file quickly. Sometimes you don’t need to do a full recovery.  You may just need a single file or email.  It should be just as easy in either case.
• Provides the hardware required for continuity. Here’s a key item – your backup device should be able to act as an on-site standby server.  Ready to kick in at a moments notice.  That’s true recovery.
• Requires almost no human intervention. Your backup system should not rely on somebody having to remember to change tapes or drives.  It should work every time without a manual process.

That sums up the minimum requirements in a nutshell.  In reality we’ve just scratched the surface.  There are a lot more questions that need to be answered, such as:

• What is an acceptable amount of data loss for our company?  A day?  A week?  A month?
• What is our recovery time objective?  Do we have to get things back up and running in an hour?  A day?  A week?
• What happens to our email and  phone systems?  Do calls get forwarded?  To whom?
• Is there a manual process in place to complete orders and make sales?
• Who makes the decision to invoke the disaster recovery plan (ie who can pull the fire alarm)?
• Is the plan documented, and more importantly are key staff members aware of the plan and is it practiced?
• If the office is not accessible, where do staff work?  Do they take the day off?  Do they work from home?
• What business functions need to continue, what will get put aside temporarily?

As you can see there is lots to think about here.  Is it worth it?  You better bet your business on it!  I can personally say, without a shadow of a doubt that having the above systems in place, and a plan saved our business from being shut down, not once, but three separate occasions.  We experience the fire, the theft, the flood.  Is something else waiting for us around the corner?  Probably. But I’m not loosing sleep over it.  We have a plan and a system.  Its tried, it’s true and more importantly – it’s tested!

As always if you have any input or questions about this, please contact us, or leave a comment.

Google Wave = Email on steroids.   The same development team that brought us Google Maps (Lars and Jens Rasmussen), takes a crack at Email 2.0.

Email has been around for some 40 years.  They apparently thought to themselves – “What if we were to create email all over again, from scratch, what would that look like?”

It’s called “Google Wave”, a mix of Chat, IM, Twitter and Google Docs in REAL-TIME.

Check out the demo videos and explanation!

“Plain English” version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS9AbePnE08&feature=related

More Detailed version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itc4253kjhw&feature=related

Demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqDiz2HVJA8&feature=related

Can’t wait to try this tool went it goes live!

Canada is in the process of adopting new rules on the retention of electronic records by financial companies—and if affected, you may not have much time to act.

The rules are part of proposed National Instrument (NI) 31-103, which will create a new set of nationwide regulations for securities firms, such as asset managers, investment advisers, and dealers.

The first draft of NI 31-103 was published in February 2007. After receiving comments, the second draft was published earlier this year.

Although the rules aren’t yet final, it’s easy to see what kinds of requirements are coming. NI 31-103 requires a registered firm to maintain all records necessary to accurately document its business activities, financial affairs, and client transactions. These include e-mail, regular mail, and faxes.

It appears that record keeping will be required for seven years from the date of the act for “activity” records (which relate, for example, to specific purchase and sale transactions), and seven years from the date the person or company ceases to be a client of the registered firm for “relationship” records (which relate, for example, to the ongoing relationship between a firm and its customer).

Moroever, for the first two of those seven years, a firm must keep the record in a manner that permits it to be provided promptly to the regulator.

NI 31-103’s new requirements are consistent with a wider societal trend toward record keeping—and if approved by the appropriate government authorities in each jurisdiction, the law could come into force at the end of September 2009. Therefore, it would be wise to begin e-record retention now.

Many solutions are available to help you streamline your archiving process, and we can help you choose the best one for your business. Contact us for details.

Related articles:

• Financial e-record keeping law
• Tough e-mail archiving laws coming soon to Canada—and how to prepare

Transparent Solutions ranked no. 45 on Business in Vancouver’s Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies list.   We’re on that list with a lot of other great organizations, so it’s certainly an honour.

Our staff have been working very hard over here, so it’s nice to get recognized.  We’d especially like to thank our customers.  None of this would be possible without their continued support as we’ve grown.

Thanks again, and I hope we can make the list again in 2010!

I just received an email from the good folks over at Google that Transparent is now officially authorized as a Google Apps Reseller.  As far as I can tell we’re one only a handful in Canada, and even fewer here in Vancouver.  Google requires that Authorized Resellers have a excellent understanding of their platform, and can demonstrate bringing value to its end users. I believe there is just over 1000 worldwide at the time of writing of this post.   Compare that to the some 400,000 Microsoft partners.   I have a feeling that will quickly change in months and years ahead.

We’re pretty excited over here about the opportunities that will bring, for both us and for our clients. It’s means more options at the table as far productivity software and collaboration, and that’s long overdue in my opinion.

So what does that mean for your business?  Well, in a few words: a highly available and scalable infrastructure with no upfront capital expenses.  That fits quite nicely into our mantra of converting large capital costs into predictable monthly operational expenses.

For our initial Google Apps project, we migrated a local Vancouver company’s Microsoft Exchange mailboxes to the Google Apps platform.  We looked at the costs of purchasing, installing, licensing, and managing a Microsoft Exchange server for 15 users and compare that to the costs of Google Apps. It was pretty compelling, to say the least.

Google Apps will cost $50/year per user.  It comes with 25GB of storage, and include anti-virus and spam filtering.  For this particular customer that works out to $750 per year.  That’s less than the licensing alone for Exchange.  A lot less to worry about too – no patching, upgrades, antivirus, antispam, backup…. the list goes on.

Not to say the project went without a hitch – there’s always seems to be a few ‘gotchas’ lurking, but all in all it was rather smooth.  We performed the migration in phases, to give everybody time to adjust and deal with any glitches as they came.  Users could continue to use Outlook, or the Gmail web interface, depending on their preference.  That removed any anxiety that users felt – “Don’t mess with my Outlook!”.   We learned a lot in the process, and are excited to do more of these types of projects.

Naturally there’s a lot more to it than just putting your mail up into the cloud and washing your hands of any IT woes.  You’ve still have  specialized applications, desktops, anti-virus, files and documents, and issues with privacy laws (depending on your industry and region).  There’s a long way to go here, and not everything is ‘cloud ready’.  It helps to have a trusted IT advisor help navigate the options.

Well, I’ve resisted for as long as I can.  Blogging.  I have to admit, that the thought of it stirs some of the same emotions as visiting the dentist.  Avoid it for as long as I can stand the pain – then go, realize it’s not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, and feel a great sense of relief.

Why blog now?  I’ve held out for years now.  Simple – there’s just way too many cool and exciting changes taking place in the small business technology arena.  I want to share our experiences and successes with helping small business make the most out of technology.

I’ve been helping companies leverage their IT systems to stay competitive and grow for over 15 years now.  I’ve got a lot to share, and still even more to learn.  This blog will be that avenue, and if only a handful of people read it, and get something out of it, I think it will be worth it.

To sum up, the focus of this blog will be about:

• Solving business problems with technology
• Leveraging existing IT systems to reduces costs and increase productivity (ie better, faster, cheaper)
• Integrating new technologies that are emerging to stay ahead of the curve (and your competition), and increase profitability.
• Protecting your data and systems from any threats including viruses, failures, hacking, etc.

I look forward to any comments, and plan to add to this regularly.