Posts tagged Transition
Yahoo & Microsoft Proceeds With Search Ad Transition In 2012
Nov 9th
Microsoft announced they are now ready to move forward with transitioning over the search ad technology from Yahoo to Microsoft in the European regions. Microsoft said, the “European roll out is scheduled to begin with the UK, Ireland and France in the second quarter of 2012.” Yahoo and…
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Top 10 Tips to Transition Old-Fashioned Content Into Real Time Web Writing
Oct 24th
As the Internet has become an integral part of every company’s marketing strategy, there’s been a feverish push by companies of all sizes to create more easily discoverable online content. A massive explosion of content has, in part, d…
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Yahoo Completes Global Organic Transition To Bing (Except Korea) by @rustybrick
Oct 19th
Twenty months later, Yahoo and Bing have announced the completion of the organic (algorithmic) transition from Yahoo powered search results to Bing powered search results globally, with the exception of Korea.
If you do a search on any Yahoo powered site via your desktop or mobile device, with the…
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Making the Transition to Apple’s iCloud
Aug 11th
If you are an Apple MobileMe customer, now is the time to start planning your transition to Apple’s iCloud service as some parts of MobileMe are going away. While the move from MobileMe to iCloud is bound to be rocky, the good news is that there are third-party alternatives. However, there are some services that people have taken for granted which just won’t be available when Apple pulls the plug on MobileMe next summer. While Apple never really seemed all that committed to MobileMe anyway, many of its features didn’t keep pace with the competition. And with some planning and exploration of alternatives, other MobileMe users are likely to find they’ve wound up in a better place as well.
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A Brief History of the Apple Cloud
Apple’s tried to find its place in the cloud for a long time–since well before anyone called it that, and that’s not even counting the 1994-1996 AOL-like service “eWorld.” Back in 2000, the company introduced iTools, a set of Internet services for the Classic OS. Free, the service included online storage in the form of iDisk, a website builder and host called HomePage, an online greeting card service called iCard, and a .Mac email address.
That last service, .Mac, gave its name to the next cloud offering, a paid subscription service launched in 2002. In addition to the four services from iTools, .Mac included software for making automatic backups to iDisk.
Jake Widman is based in San Francisco, California and works as a freelance writer and editor for a variety of publications, specializing in digital printing and graphic arts, Apple and Mac-related products, consumer technology and gadgets, and cloud and collaboration services. He can be reached at jakewidman@email.com.
The changes continued with the launch and renaming of the rebranded, subscription-based MobileMe in 2008. In this edition, Apple dropped iCard, reflecting the growing competition from other online greeting card sites, and added new services, reflecting users’ changing demands on cloud services. The primary change was the ability to sync data — Safari bookmarks, iCal calendar items, Address Book contacts, Mail accounts, and more — among multiple Macs and with Apple’s increasingly popular mobile devices (iPhones and iPod Touches). MobileMe also included browser-based access to mail, contacts, and hosting; hosting for sites created with Apple’s basic Web design tool; and the ability to publish galleries of photographs from iPhoto.
But recently Apple announced that MobileMe would soon be replaced by a new service called iCloud. MobileMe subscribers will be moved to iCloud automatically when it’s rolled out this fall, and MobileMe will close its doors for good on June 30, 2012. The new service, as with the previous versions, keeps some features and adds some new ones but also drops some existing services, which users will have to find replacements.
First, what’s staying the same: iCloud will still offer syncing of mail, contacts, and calendar items, along with access through a browser. (The initial announcement of iCloud didn’t mention the Web apps, leading to speculation that it would only support syncing information to devices. But Apple now says that “if you happen to be away from home without your computer or one of your iOS devices, you can access your mail, contacts, and calendar — ad-free — from any computer at icloud.com.”
New features include document storage and syncing services for compatible programs, as well as music and photo storage and syncing. The music offering has drawn a lot of attention Amazon and Google have also recently launched cloud music services.
What Services Are Going Away
Now let’s look at what MobileMe offers that iCloud won’t continue offering. Three major items will be missing:
- iDisk, the online file storage area that’s been part of MobileMe/.Mac/iTools since the beginning. The new iTunes in the Cloud and Photo Stream will store your music and photos, but there’s no longer the ability to drag files of any sort to an online folder in the Finder. Besides that convenience, users are likely to miss iDisk’s public folder, which made it easy to share files with other people.
To replace iDisk, most people will probably turn to the popular Dropbox, which duplicates most of the functions and the convenient drag-and-drop functionality of iDisk. Businesses and users with more advanced needs could use alternatives like Box.net, which integrates with Google Apps and has its own suite of third-party add-ins, or Egnyte.com, a “hybrid” solution that combines storage, backup and file sharing, or more than a dozen others that are available.
On the other hand, compatible programs — notably, to start with, Apple’s own iWork suite — can use the new “Documents in the Cloud” option to push documents to iCloud and sync them to other devices. Apple has provided APIs to enable other developers to make their products work with Documents in the Cloud as well. Whether the service will also support collaborating on the documents with others is not yet clear.
Finally, users could presumably store some files on iCloud by sending them as attachments to e-mail. This is an old-fashioned and klutzy approach, however.
Storage on iCloud starts with a free 5 GB. Extra space for mail and documents (photos and music are handled separately) costs US$20/year for an additional 10 GB, $40/year for 20 GB, and $100/year for 50 GB.
- Photo galleries. The new Photo Stream will let subscribers sync their photos to all their devices but doesn’t provide a way to share them on the Web. It’s easy to understand why Apple might want to get out of this business, since strong competition has made MobileMe an also-ran in the category. A Yahoo advertising page claims that Flickr has more than 51 million registered members. Google offers the smaller but still popular Picasa.
It may turn out to be a non-issue anyway. Facebook claims that there are more pictures shared on Facebook than on all other photo sharing sites combined. The whole concept of a cloud photo sharing site may be passé before long.
- Web hosting. This will be the big hurdle for a lot of MobileMe users. By June of 2012 people and businesses who’ve used MobileMe to host their websites are going to have to find an alternative. (The future of iWeb itself is also in doubt: the Wikipedia page for the software alternates between present and past tense and refers to the product’s “discontinuation,” though Apple hasn’t made an official announcement on the subject.)
For people who choose to continue to use iWeb as long as they can, recent versions of the software also allows publishing to a non-MobileMe Web host. Users will have to find a new host and possibly transfer their domain name, but the process should be straightforward.
Others — or everyone, if iWeb goes away — can either find another Web host and another Web design program, or turn to combination website building and hosting combinations. Some of the most popular are Squarespace.com, Weebly.com, and Cloversites.com. These sites offer an interactive, WYSIWYG approach to building a page, as does iWeb, and provide a place to host the site as well. Another site, Jimdo, has even explicitly offered to help users transfer their iWeb sites to Jimdo and provided instructions.
Finally, businesses often complained that MobileMe was too slow, and the support too lacking, to serve as a good web host. For them, a dedicated hosting company with a modern webpage builder might work out better.
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Sponsor Post: Here’s Why You Need to Transition Your IT Sandbox Environments to the Cloud
Jul 5th
Editor’s note: We offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write posts and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.
Today’s IT managers are facing a classic conundrum.
On the one hand, we all recognize that IT sandbox environments are an emerging necessity. Companies increasingly need a place for dynamic workloads, such as migration and software evaluations, security testing, pre-production test beds, training sessions and IT labs.
And yet these IT sandbox environments typically aren’t compatible with the capital-intensive in-house data center resources we’re accustomed to utilizing. Unlike well-planned data center workloads, sandbox workloads are characterized by fluctuating capacity needs and other rapid changes, and they often require intensive tactical IT support – none of which is well-suited to the traditional data center model.
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Essentially, it boils down to “what we need” vs. “what we have,” a debate that’s now commonplace in IT shops around the globe. Is there a solution to this puzzle? How can organizations take advantage of all the benefits IT sandbox environments offer if these dynamic workloads don’t fit conventional IT ecosystems?
At Skytap, we believe we have found an answer to the conundrum. The solution, as we see it, is in the cloud.
In fact, in many ways, IT sandbox environments are ideal candidates for transition to the cloud. Think about it. First, sandbox environments offer a low-risk adoption path to cloud computing. Plus, they also can provide high ROI, since resource utilization can be aligned with demand and users can be empowered with self-service -both of which can significantly reduce costs and IT support burden.
Need more proof? Let us walk you through three of our top ten reasons why it makes sense for you to rethink the way you’re managing your IT sandbox environments. For example, if you transition your IT sandbox environments to the cloud, you can:
- Eliminate infrastructure constraints on the business. A cloud service enables infrastructure capacity to be added quickly – often in less than a day! – to meet business demand. What’s more, costs go down because cloud services are provided using a utility billing model, so you only pay for what you use.
- Avoid expensive application rewrites. Ensure your cloud provider supports a wide variety of operating systems, databases, application servers and infrastructure tools so that your machines can keep the same networking settings and host names and connect to onsite infrastructure as required. The goal is for your IT and development teams to use a cloud service as an extension of their on-site IT environment and to run existing applications, virtual machines and systems unchanged in the cloud.
- Reduce data center cost and complexity. Why use costly in-house data centers to support dynamic workloads? By contrast, cloud services are generally billed on a variable, pay-as-you-use model, so an organization can convert large upfront capital expenditures into needs-based operational expenses. Savings can be immediate. In addition, aligning computing capacity with demand helps minimize ongoing support costs, and you can apply quotas to individuals and organizations to cap usage and/or hard budgets. Skytap’s solution even enables virtual data center environments to be automatically suspended when not in use to avoid unnecessary charges.
. . . and that’s just the start of our list!
Want to learn even more? For additional information, please download this white paper:
Top Ten Reasons to Transition Your IT Sandbox Environments to the Cloud.
We’re convinced that it’s time for you to rethink the way you manage your IT sandbox environments. By transitioning these dynamic workloads to the cloud, you can start reaping a wide range of significant IT benefits, including lower costs, enhanced agility and improved productivity.
Photo by trublueboy.
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Last Call: Yahoo’s adCenter Transition Tool About To Close
Jan 3rd
Quick note for any readers who have been slacking over the past few months and have not yet transitioned your Yahoo Search Marketing account over to Microsoft adCenter: The account transition tool inside your Yahoo account is shutting down on Wednesday, according to a post today on the Yahoo…
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Surviving The Impending Yahoo-Bing Ad Transition
Oct 18th
After a year of planning, engineering and collaboration by teams at Yahoo and Microsoft, it’s go time for the search alliance. Within two weeks we’re told, all paid search ads appearing on Yahoo will be powered by Bing through Microsoft’s AdCenter servers.
For members of the search alliance [...]
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