Exploring the adjacent possible and liquid networks

As I was reading Dr. Brewer's blogpost on Spreading Good Ideas using enterprise microblogging platforms, I started thinking about ways to faciliate and catalyze the exploration of the adjacent possible and creation of liquid networks. I think one way is to abandone the pre-concieved notion of the "groups" and not re-create (or import) the corporate groups in Yammer or Chatter that reflect the corporate heirarchy. Let the users create groups as needed and take them down when no longer needed. There will be Yammer Communities or Chatter Groups that will include employees from an entire organization, but I don't think it is a good idea to create a Yammer Community for each individual group in the company. 

Trying out the new Office Web Apps in Microsoft Skydrive

Trying out the new Office Web Apps in the Microsoft Skydrive. I have to say I am very impressed. Microsoft has come a long way in creating a Office Suite that works in a web browser without requiring any plugins. Personally I am a Google Apps fan. I think Google has trail-blazed in this area and will continue to do so. Microsoft is playing catch-up. But if for some reason you can’t use Google Apps, Microsoft’s new Office Web Apps are your friend.

To test out the new features in Office Web Apps, I created a the following presentation in Urdu Language:

http://karba.la

Check it out.

Questions for the Google Cloud Print team @ Google

We are very interested in using Google Cloud Print for printing from ChomeOS (Chromebook & Chromebox) and the Mobile devices.

Here are some questions we have for the Cloud Print team:

1. When will Google Cloud Print be out of BETA? :) 
2. Are there any plans to add management of Cloud Printers to the Google Apps for Business Control Panel? Currently each Printer Server admin has to use Chrome to add Cloud Printers to Google Apps accounts. Which is very awkward, to say the least. 
3. Are there any plans to overlay Google Cloud Printers that the user is authorized to use on a Google Map? A typical user has access to many printers, and when they are traveling it is not easy to discern what printer is at which site. 
4. Will Google provide a native Cloud Print app for Android? What about one for iOS? The ones that are available in the marketplace are costly, not user-friendly, and flaky at best.

If you work with the Google Cloud Print team at Google or have some insights to any of these questions, please tweet me.

Freeing up space in your Gmail Inbox

Users of Google Apps for business get 25GB of space in their Gmail. Once the user reaches this limit, emails stops flowing in, and the user has to delete emails to free up space. This is not always convinient because the users want to retain older emails especially if they are in the R&D group with Patent specific emails in their Inbox. It is not easy to sift through the Inbox to figure out which emails can go. 

I have been searching for an app that we could use to free up space in Gmail Inbox by letting users archive (offload) emails to their personal computers. I stumbled upon BeyondInbox. BeyondInbox let's you pull down the entire Gmail Inbox at scheduled intervals. The emails are stored on the computer in EML format with attachments encoded. The benefit of EML format is that the Windows Desktop Search can search the contents of theses files. Users will be able to quickly search the local email corpus on their computers especially if they have Windows Search Indexing enabled.

In addition to pulling down the Gmail Inbox, BeyondInbox also has a feature which lets you "Reanimate" i.e. perform an Inline Restore of the email back into the Gmail Inbox.

So here is what I am thinking: Let the users who are reaching the Gmail Inbox quota run BeyondInbox every 30 mins on their personal computers. This will bring down emails. And then the user can go and delete older emails from the Gmail Inbox to free up space. In case they ever need to look up a deleted email, they can simply search for it on their personal computer and re-animate into the Gmail Inbox if needed.

Thoughts on this process? Will this work? What are the alternatives? Please tweet me with your thoughts.

Comments / discussion feature for PDFs in Google Docs

Looks like the comments and discussion feature for PDFs in Google Docs is finally rolling out:

We have been waiting for this for a long time!!! 

Thanks Google!!!! :)