Corey Stokes

I’ve been saying , since I became smart in this business,  that the corporate standard should switch to an apple based product.  It seems apple had their eyes on the enterprise industry all the while.  With more and more enterprises going mobile, in 2010 Apple  made its move!

If you hadn’t heard here’s the story…

——————————–
By Bill Snyder, InfoWorld
You won’t find many businesses with a more complex, security-conscious environment than JPMorgan Chase. So when the huge bank decided to deploy iPads in its investment-banking arm — following similar moves by Crédit Suisse and Citigroup — it was more than just a straw in the wind. Apple, long rooted in education, creative endeavors, and (more recently) consumer electronics, is now an enterprise company.

The most obvious trend driving the company’s shift, of course, is its smashing success in consumer-oriented electronics. Because so many businesspeople use iPhones and now iPads, IT departments have been forced to accommodate them at work. And despite early concerns for security, few, if any, major business breaches have been blamed on those devices.

“Enterprises have become more consumer-centric. Simplicity and elegance sell; complexity doesn’t,” says analyst Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research. At the same time, Apple is recognizing that playing in the commodity market for servers is a mistake, he says, adding that the decision to drop the Xserve, Apple’s only rack-mountable server, was in line with that strategy.

When the iPad debuted in April 2010 and the iPhone before it, many questions were raised about the fitness of those devices for the enterprise. Yes, there are still obstacles, as InfoWorld.com has revealed, but we’ve clearly reached a tipping point.

The JPMorgan deployment, revealed by Bloomberg News in late November, is a major indicator of that shift. Bankers will be able to access emails, contacts, calendar, and attachments via Microsoft Outlook, as well as have the ability to mark up and annotate confidential documents and make client presentations, according to the report. They will also be allowed to download applications for personal use, according to a JPMorgan internal memo obtained by Bloomberg.

Other financial service giants moving toward deployment of Apple products include Morgan Stanley, Crédit Suisse Group, Citigroup, and Bank of America. At some of those companies, the iPad displaces the BlackBerry, the iconic device of frantic-fingered traders and bankers. Apple’s gain is very much a loss for Research in Motion.

The shift goes well beyond financial services. Consider the experience of RehabCare, a publicly traded company that employs 19,000 workers and operates 35 acute care hospitals and rehab facilities. It has to comply with both the Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA laws, so security and related issues are certainly major concerns. The company is developing critical iOS apps for some 8,000 iPod Touches, 700 iPhones, and 120 iPads. All tallied, three iOS apps will touch every facet of RehabCare’s business, from improving patient care to winning new business.

Are the devices enterprise-ready? “There’s this myth IT people perpetuate that these Apple devices can’t work in the enterprise,” RehabCare CIO Dick Escue tells our sister publication CIO. “We get so many benefits from doing it in the cloud and leveraging consumer technology.”

Three signs that Apple understands and is exploiting how receptive CIOs are today to its mobile technology and even to the Mac platform:

InfoWorld executive editor Galen Gruman has been told by several CIOs that Apple engineers are actively visiting enterprises to find out what CIOs want in future iPads and iPhones.Apple’s growth in business — via iPads, iPhones, and Macs frequently showing up outside of traditional creative departments — now comes up in almost all his conversations with enterprise (and decidedly non-Apple-oriented) technology industry executives.Apple has quietly opened conference rooms in some of its Apple Stores to meet with corporate customers. If Apple is sneaking into the enterprise, the enterprise is quietly leaving the doors open to let Apple in.

As published in InfoWorld December 31 2010  Top news story of 2010.

Read story from the issue here

Maximizing your GMail
written by Corey L. Stokes
(view as .pdf)

If you are new to Google’s G-Mail service you may not know all there is to know about your g-mail account. From Google Books to Google Voice, Google has truly created a once stop shop to stay connected.
If you thought your g-mail and your search engine was all that Google had to offer, you may want to take another look. Recently, I began researching a way to get my news in one area. With my email being clogged with useless information or at least information that was not useful to me, such as advertisements and spam,  I came across Alerts, Google Reader and a host of other applications i found very useful… well it really didn’t just fall in my lap, a few clicks off of Google’s home pages and they were right there in front of me.   But not just applications for news and readers;  a slew of applications that provided a variety of solutions.

Google Alerts, one such solution,  according to Google web site description allows you to receive email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.  Making is much easier to stay up-to-date on exactly the information you want. With a few click to customize your settings you can start receiving  updates on say… the latest technological advances… or the last news on political offices.  Instead of searching everyday for articles that are posted on your topic  Alerts allow you to receive those post in your email on a daily basis.  Hows that for cutting the search out of research.  In the same fashion,  Google reader, an RSS reader allows you to subscribe to the news feeds of all your favorite news outlets, like the BluestripesIRM.com RSS Feed.  Similarly, If you are not getting over flooded with information already,  Google’s blog search, allows you to search through and subscribe to the blogs to see what others are saying about a given topic.   Whether you are looking for videos, images, news, financial data,  and blogs,  to quote a famous phrase from the popular apple commercials, “there is an app for that”.  And it’s  all right from your g-mail account.

Pursing Google’s web site however, was not only to find the latest news updates, or the newest blog posts from other technology guru’s.  while completing a Masters of Science Google Scholar provided the a library’s worth of scholarly journals or, as Google puts it,  scholarly literature, that kept me informed what the professionals where saying about  a given topic.  In addition to feeding my inner nerd,  Google Books satisfied my fancy for entertainment reading; without leaving my computer or my g-mail account. With thousands of e-books, including many of those in the public domain which are available as an Adobe download.   With the e-book market rapidly growing Google books give you the opportunity to enjoy the many e-books in publication without having to purchase a reader.  For mobile enjoyment of e-books however, choosing to purchase an e-book reader of your choice may be beneficial.  Google list of solution however, doesn’t stop with scholarly studies or Entertainment Reading,  their repertoire also includes various types of apps for web design, 3D model building,  and photo sharing and even a desktop side bar.

So let’s see, we have email, rss reader, desktop tools, an online library for entertainment and scholarly reading but… what if you merely wish to connect with friends, check email, use spread sheets, and type documents? Google still has something for you.  Of course you’ve heard of glue of it all G-mail, which is adding new services and features everyday. Google Documents gives you mobile access to any document, spreadsheets and more.  It also makes editing and sharing your documents that much easier than basic email or document tracking. But don’t think of it as a replacement for your current word processor however, if you have not purchased the licensed copies of other word processes it makes for a viable and competitive option. Even the G-Talk application provides VOIP, Chat and a Video chat, that also allows for file share.  It seems Google has thought of everything.  Even connecting your telecommunication  devices and land lines to one number with Google Voice.  So what’s the Buzz around the net… If you ask me it’s Google.

Chances are, even if you don’t use G-mail, you have everything that I’ve highlighted here. but you probably use several different usernames and passwords, and different applications..And you are probably getting along just fine.   Google however,  gives you one place to go with one username and password remember. And the best part… Its Free!!!  So I ask you Are you getting the most out of your GMail?