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.

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.