MailShadowG is a single user Outlook Add-in that installs in 5 minutes with message content protection commencing immediately.
It’s helpful to note that MailShadowG installs quickly and has a small footprint on the desktop. The install package is under 10 Mb and the RAM footprint is typically under 50Mbytes when running, with CPU consumption under 5 percent during normal operations (during the initial sync period, CPU consumption will be higher). The installer has just a few options for the user to configure, such as Google account credentials and alternate email send preferences. Once it’s installed, MailShadowG runs in the background with a System Tray icon for enabling/disabling the product. For IT departments, the .msi install package can be pushed out to corporate desktops via an AD group policy (or via other automated software distribution solutions.)
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Both Outlook and Google have worked to develop a reputation for excelling in their industry: Outlook is known for it’s ubiquity in business as being “the” client for messaging and business critical information; Google is a search engine powerhouse online.
So, why not use the functionality of both to enable better business practices and simplify your life? You can with MailShadowG.
We’ve already mentioned the ability of using Outlook to compose offline e-mail messages for your Gmail account. But, what about searching for past messages – let alone threading messages in order to capture the entire online conversation?
True there is a search capability in Outlook to find e-mail, calendar and contacts; however, Google has focused on this niche for years, and they’ve made some pretty intuitive search tools.
Once you install MailShadowG, you now have the business functionality of Outlook and the search capability of Google at your fingertips. Then, the next time someone asks you for that e-mail with the business profile for XYZ Company, you’ll be able to search with ease.
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A recent article in The Processor confirms a position we hold strongly: e-mail management – including archiving, server maintenance and upgrades and storage—is a necessary evil. Every company needs to meet this basic requirement—but the smaller the company, the more onerous the logistics of owning and maintaining an entire e-mail infrastructure of their own.
We love the insight Gartner analyst Matt Cain provides in this article:
“…That’s part of why Gartner predicts that email using a cloud approach will grow from 1% of the market, where it is today, to about 20% of the market by 2012, according to Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner. Small companies, which have had the worst economics for premises-based email, will get the most out of moving their mailboxes into the cloud, Cain explains.”
The article quotes Cemaphore’s Tyrone Pike as well:
“’The fixed costs are much higher for SMEs because they are spreading it out over a limited, fixed number of seats,’ says Tyrone Pike, founder and chief executive officer of Cemaphore (www.cemaphore.com), a provider of email continuity and Exchange migration based on cloud email.”
The cost of staffing an Exchange expert in particular is one of the items that contributes most highly to infrastructure expenses. The need to have a geographically protected disaster recovery server, and to know that it is live and can be activated within the space of a few minutes is a cost consideration as well (although Cemaphore can handle that task quite gracefully with MailShadow v2.3.)
We fully support the Gartner findings that for SMEs – as well as for SMBs—the economic indicators are clearly pointed towards the economics and efficiency of moving an increasingly larger share of their e-mail continuity into the cloud.
What do you think? And is your organization ready for cloud-based e-mail? We welcome your comments. And we’ve included a link to the entire Sept. 5 Processor article. Click Here
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MailShadowG enables safe, sound migration from Exchange to Google or Google to Exchange
Here’s another interesting tidbit about MailShadowG: it permits users to sync data from their Google account to Outlook/Exchange and vice versa, giving users the ultimate e-mail freedom of choice. Users can move between both worlds, run both environments concurrently, or can migrate from one to the other and back again, at will.
Because MailShadowG keeps both worlds continuously in sync for as long as it’s running, you no longer have to force your users to perform knife-edge cutovers between Exchange and Google, or between Google and Exchange. Yes, there are differences between the way each system stores and categorizes data, and differences in certain data types and fields. However, migration is much easier on the user and on the IT department with MailShadowG because it allows the user to get used to the differences at their own leisure.
For IT departments, running both concurrently for some period of time helps to avoid the myriad support calls from users who have yet to gain a personal understanding of the sometimes subtle differences in data and operation between their Outlook/Exchange and Gmail environments.
Studies typically estimate the cost of the average support call is $25, and that the average employee places about 5 helpdesk calls every year.
If MailShadowG can save even 1-2 of those calls, the product has paid for itself in support costs alone, let alone the access to increased storage and continuity and the reduced infrastructure expenditure involved. Now that’s a true bargain.
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MailShadowG provides disconnected access to Gmail, Google Contacts and Google Calendar by caching Google content in Outlook for offline operations
Checking e-mail requires Internet access; writing e-mail doesn’t. Unfortunately, with web-based e-mail services you are severely limited in responding to e-mails – unless you want to write a bunch of word documents, then do a cut and past job once you get Internet access again. But how efficient is that, really?
On the other hand, Exchange-based e-mail coupled with the Outlook client gives you offline access to your e-mail, the ability to write e-mail and then store it in you outbox until your back online again. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the same functionality with a service like Gmail?
MailShadowG provides disconnected access to Gmail, Google Contacts and Google Calendar. MailShadowG acts as a third party that caches Google Apps content in Outlook for offline operations. This very literally removes the tether required to manage your Google content.
Now the same functionality you enjoy with an Outlook/Exchange setting can work with an Outlook/Google application.
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MailShadowG maintains full e-mail continuity to Outlook even when Exchange is unavailable.
We’ve all experienced the frustration of losing Outlook connectivity because the Exchange server is unavailable, or has gone down. We’ve come to accept it as one of the frustrating facts of doing business.
Just one case in point – an event manager recently posted a notice about the death of an associate’s mother to all the associate’s team members on a Friday afternoon. Not noticing that Exchange was unavailable, she shut her computer and went home for the weekend. Her message remained in the outbox until the following Monday morning. The notice didn’t get to the team members until the funeral was over—too late for them to send their condolences or to try to attend. Unfortunately, this scenario is all too familiar – the business proposal, critical presentation or timely notice that has to be sent out through an alternative method, or even worse, sits in the Outbox unnoticed until the deadline has passed.
However, one of the really exciting aspects of MailShadowG is that it automatically detects Microsoft Exchange unavailability (as seen by the Outlook client) and offers users the ability to send outbound e-mail through their configured Gmail account as an alternative delivery option.
The user can configure how long to wait if Exchange is unavailable before sending queued items in the Outlook outbox through Gmail, or you can set the system up for immediate delivery through Gmail if Exchange isn’t there. The e-mail gets sent with your Gmail address in the “From” field and is moved to the Sent Items folder.
If the recipient responds, the response is delivered to the Gmail address and MailShadowG will also deliver it to the Outlook inbox, even if Exchange is still down. Imagine the possibilities! As long as the Internet is present, e-mail continuity continues, with or without a connection to Exchange.
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Managing one address book is challenging enough, but keeping your contacts’ information in various locations only compounds the problem. And, it’s not likely you’ll have just work contacts in one and personal contacts in another. So, why not just merge all your contacts in one location?
Dennis O’Reilly made this suggestion in his regular Worker’s Edge column in Cnet News entitled “Merge your Outlook and Gmail contacts”. He’s spot on; managing your contacts from one location is far better than “Alt-Tabbing between… Gmail inbox and the Outlook account on [an] employer’s Exchange Server.”
This is one of the reasons why MailShadowG fully synchronizes your contacts. But that’s not all… By synchronizing e-mail, calendar and contacts between Gmail and Exchange, you can better mange your data from one location – Outlook.
Now, not only do you have your contacts in one location, you can edit contact information in one and have it immediately reflected on the other.
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MailShadowG’s bi-directional, real-time synchronization between Exchange and Google prevents having to re-read e-mail
“But I already did that!” No one likes to have to be told something more than once – regardless of the topic. So, why would you have a duplicate system for your e-mail, calendar or contacts that doesn’t provide a complete synchronization?
There are potentially hundreds of different ways to establish a back-up system for your e-mail, a lot of them have been piecemealed together with the hope that it works. However, these systems are merely that – a back-up system. You don’t want to use them unless you have to… but, why?
Chances are your back up is only a repository, or catch-all, for all incoming or outgoing e-mail – there is little or not synchronization for what e-mails have been read, flagged or even categorized. When you fail-over to the new system you’ll need to go back through your messages and try to recall what you need to follow up on, or what e-mails you’ve already read.
The MailShadowG proprietary system synchronizes all e-mail, which includes marking what items have been read and flagged. But why stop there? This can be done bi-directionally. Therefore, you can be working on an Exchange-based e-mail and have the changes visible on the Google Gmail – vice versa. And all this done in real-time.
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Tracy Scott, the VP of Marketing here at Cemaphore, was recently interviewed by Brad Baldwin of Rocky Mountain Voices, and provided a demo of Cemaphore Systems’ MailShadow for Google Apps. The product is sometime referred to as MailShadowG, and bi-directionally synchronizes with Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts through Microsoft Outlook to Exchange.
Watch the video below to learn more about MailShadowG’s functionality.
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What are the steps needed to take over the enterprise? What would change this from an idea to reality?
It’s an increasingly intriguing question. At Cemaphore, our entire business is based on the ways to enact and improve e-mail continuity, whether it be for enterprises, SMBs (the vast and currently underserved community) and even consumers. We’ve spent the past seven years with our own feet in the trenches with the enterprises our MailShadow technology currently serves.
We see the pain points of our current customers. As every company’s reliance on e-mail increases, we fully recognize the level of infrastructure required to adequately solve the growing disaster recovery and continuity needs of our enterprise customers.
These are the reasons that have compelled the very existence of MailShadowG. With more than 2,600 Beta registrants, the market has certainly indicated this full integration of Gmail and Outlook in the cloud is a giant step in the right direction.
However, what would it take for Google to fully take on the enterprise? Is it even a possibility? MailShadowG certainly increases the enterprise’s functionality in this regard with the addition of the Outlook client. On this front, however, still more work is required for elements such as advanced provisioning, delegation of authority, Global address list support free/busy designation, tight Blackberry Enterprise Server support, Active Sync support, further functionality in tasks, notes, etc.
As our role in advancing e-mail continuity in the cloud gives us a fairly unique perspective. Thanks to Google’s stellar reputation for uptime, we’re convinced there’s sufficient reliability to consider the enterprise’s complete move to the cloud. Is there sufficient security? What about the Data Life Cycle? Is full Blackberry support necessarily required?
In our opinion, while the phenomena of cloud computing is changing the landscape dramatically for many aspects of IT, and especially for the aspects of e-mail continuity, the final call is not ours to make – at the present, it’s still the responsibility of our customers (with our guidance, certainly) to decide how far their reliance on cloud computing should go.
Consider this interesting commentary by Robert Scoble in his recent Scobleizer blog:
“I’m convinced that Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has a five-year plan to put Google’s foot inside the enterprise door. Enterprise users aren’t easy to switch over… But the early adopters have already moved. When I ask audiences what they are using now, I see more and more Google customers.
I can’t think of a situation where the enterprise didn’t eventually follow the early adopter crowd. It might have taken years, but they do follow eventually.”
As his case in point, Scoble discusses the role Cemaphore is playing in making the transition to Google applications and cloud computing easier. In his words, “Google’s synchronizer sucks, compared to Cemaphore’s… So, why is this important? Because it lets Enterprises slowly introduce Google’s Enterprise products in.”
We couldn’t agree more. The role Cemaphore plays in cloud computing is that we are working to drive and enable this critical category. For the SMB, this is imperative. Given our role in helping organizations achieve e-mail continuity for the past seven years has made it painfully obvious that the one viable and cost-effective option for these smaller organizations is to move that e-mail continuity to a SaaS model within the cloud, with zero infrastructure required.
But for a larger organization, where is the viable and appropriate cutover point? That answer is somewhat of a moving target as the options and technology for cloud computing continue to grow and evolve. We can point out that at least two major corporations are currently launching pilot programs based on MailShadowG. Watch this space for news on their progress.
Again, a knife-edge migration is never a good strategy, particularly for a large organization. For now, MailShadowG’s best use within the enterprise is as a complement to current DR and continuity plans, which on the whole continue to be expensive and largely inadequate.
When would cloud computing have the potential to take over the e-mail strategy of an entire Enterprise? The market will need to decide. We welcome your thoughts.
