Delimiter » gmail

Sydneysiders quit Google to fix … Gmail

Renai LeMay — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 05:07:12 +0000

blog There’s been a couple of interesting stories published over the past two days about a trio of Sydneysiders who quit the Googleplex in order to found a startup, Fluent, to “fix email”. Probably the headline article was published at the Sydney Morning Herald, although there’s another great yarn at StartupSmart. The key paragraph from the SMH yarn:

“Cameron Adams, 32, and Dhanji Prasanna, 31, began work on Fluent full-time about six months ago, after becoming frustrated at Google’s work culture and leaving the company about the middle of last year. The third co-founder, Jochen Bekmann, left Google to join them in November.”

Personally I don’t find Fluent that interesting yet. There’s been a stack of startups launched over the years to “fix email”. Frankly, from my perspective, it’s not really broken. It works well for what it does, which for me, is primarily shuffling documents around. For other things there is social networking, which also works well. And, of course, the ubiquity of standards around email make it very hard to evolve the system at all.

However, what is hilarious and very telling about Google’s current corporate culture is that the three felt it necessary to resign from their (no doubt high-paying) jobs in the supposedly innovative GooglePlex in order to push the envelope forward on email, an area which Google itself revolutionised almost a decade ago with Gmail, which many people of my generation (including myself) swear by as the One True Email Platform. And when they left, what platform did the trio try to innovate on? Why, Gmail, of course.

These articles do much to validate what I wrote in November 2010 about the decline of Google’s startup culture and the loss of the company’s overall mojo. This is what I wrote at the time, and all of the same problems still plague the company now:

“Google is no longer a startup — it is now a company like any other — and one with a sizable headcount: More than 400 in Australia and 25,000 globally. It is struggling to get new products to market, or even to keep up to date with its existing product set — look at the poor adoption of Google Apps in corporate Australia, for example (because of its lack of local hosting), or the delays pushing its Netbook operating system, Chrome OS, into irrelevance. Or even the way that it appears unable to get updates for its Android handsets pushed out through manufacturers in a timely fashion.

Because of this fact, the company is no longer attractive to entrepreneurial change agent types … There is simply too much management inertia.”

It is becoming more apparent every day how accurate those comments were. And if you continue to doubt that Google is turning into the worst kind of stultified corporate juggernaut, I encourage you to check out the company’s Australian blog today, where it ecstatically discusses one of its latest sinister marketing programs: Turning Australian university students into “Google Student Ambassadors”, who “get the chance to learn about Google products and programs and organise campus events for their fellow students”.

Sinister. And remind you of anyone? Yup. Microsoft.

Image credit: Robert Scoble, Creative Commons

Griffith Uni dumps Lotus for Gmail

Renai LeMay — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 05:26:20 +0000

news Queensland’s Griffith University has become the latest educational institution to shift its staff email accounts into Google’s cloud, announcing yesterday that it would ditch IBM’s troubled Lotus Notes/Domino suite as it did so.

The university had previously shifted its 120,000 staff and alumni onto Google’s Apps platform in early 2010. However, up until now, the institution’s staff had still been using Lotus Notes/Domino, hosted on-premise in its own datacentre. According to a statement issued by the university last week, however, all that is about to change. Pilot groups of staff will move to Google Apps this month (October), the statement said, and most staff will move after the University’s examination period in November. All staff will be migrated by March 2012.

Google Apps will provide opportunities for staff and students to enjoy deeper, richer collaborations and tap into “the world’s latest communication innovations, according to Griffith’s pro vice chancellor (Information Services), Linda O’Brien.

“We were drawn to the fact Google shares similar characteristics to Griffith, with both organisations being innovative, youthful, fast moving, and committed to advancing knowledge — Griffith through its research and teaching, Google through making the world’s information and knowledge accessible,” O’Brien said. “Griffith is a leading research university that cares about its students and staff, so it makes sense to create an environment that places our staff and students in the same space, facilitating collaboration and learning.

“Our academics need the ability to collaborate globally, to communicate, share, and build strong research relationships if we are to advance knowledge and solve the world’s biggest problems. Google makes this borderless collaboration easy,” she said.

Griffith will give its staff access to the complete Google Apps suite, with 25GB of email storage space being unlocked and tools like Google’s Docs office suite, calendar and Talk collaboration suite being made available.

“We are very happy to see yet another leading University in Australia adopt Google Apps,” said Stuart McLean, Google’s Head of Enterprise, Australia and New Zealand. “Education cannot be restricted to the walls of a classroom, it is when ideas can be quickly expressed, shared and developed that learning takes a whole new meaning.” Google Partner Dialog IT will aid with the migration.

A number of major Australian educational institutions have migrated both their staff and students to Google Apps over the past several years. However, Microsoft has won more business than Google in the sector over that period, with its Live@EDU and Exchange platforms proving more attractive than Google Apps for most organisations.

Image credit: Robert Scoble, Creative Commons

Jellema’s ZeroMail wins Citrix funding

Renai LeMay — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 00:38:26 +0000

news One of Australia’s most high-profile technology entrepreneurs has just hit the accelerate button on his latest startup ZeroMail, winning entry to a global startup accelerator program operated by virtualisation giant Citrix.

In January, Bart Jellema co-founded ZeroMail, a startup which has the ambitious aim of ‘fixing’ what many see as a broken email paradigm through a variety of methods — dealing with automatic notifications in a streamlined way, intelligently adding task management features to aid people using their inboxes as ‘to-do’ lists, and cleaning up the traditionally cluttered webmail interface.

Jellema is well-known in the Australian startup community courtesy of his strong focus on building its foundations through events, as well as the successful exit of his own startup Tjoos in March 2010. Web developer Katrin Suess has also been involved from the start of the project.

Up until now, it appears ZeroMail has been funded primarily out of Jellema’s own pocket. But in a statement yesterday, the entrepreneur revealed ZeroMail had been accepeted into Citrix’s Startup Accelerator program, a global investment operation which offers startups up to $400,000 in seed capital, access to its own products, technology and executive advice, and a home, if they want it, at its Silicon Valley facility.

The number of opportunities for Australian startups to raise capital at the moment are rapidly growing — with a number of startup accelerator programs launching locally and international investors rapidly throwing money at fast-growing Australian companies. The level of interest from venture capitalists also appears to be growing, and private equity firms have also invested in a number of large Australian technology companies recently.

However, Jellema said over email that he was attracted to Citrix’s program because the funding available from most providers in Australia was “too small” for ZeroMail. “We did pitch to some angels in Australia, but in the end Citrix came through. On the choice of a corporate incubator rather than a more independent organisation, Jellema said Citrix’s setup was designed to operate as an independent group.

“From all the incubators that I’m aware of I think the Citrix Startup Accelerator is the best option out there,” he said.

Jellema acknowledged it would be easy to invest in his own company himself, but said that entrepreneurs who did so might not be “critical” enough. “With external investors, just thinking it’s a great idea isn’t enough, you need to convince them,” he said. “This makes you think a lot harder about the viability of your business. Investors also bring more than just money, such as connections, an outside perspective, accountability, etc.”

Citrix’s investment in ZeroMail won’t close yet for another two to three weeks, Jellema said, and he wouldn’t immediately disclose how much the company was investing, but noted Citrix would fund startups to the tune of anywhere up to $400,000 via a convertible note structure.

Although the Silicon Valley facility is available to ZeroMail, Jellema noted he would keep his company in Sydney for now — although he noted he might go over to the San Francisco centre from time to time. One of the reasons for staying in Australia, Jellema added, was the Federal Government’s new research and development tax incentive, which could make Citrix’s investment quite a bit more valuable locally.

Some screenshots of ZeroMail:

opinion/analysis
If anyone had any doubt before, let that doubt now be dispelled. There are now a huge amount of funding opportunities available for Australian startups. The rapidity with which Jellema and ZeroMail have attracted the interest of global incubators such as Citrix’s Startup Accelerator program bears witness to that fact.

Sure, Jellema’s an experienced and successful entrepreneur who’s already had a valuable exit with his previous company Tjoos. But both as a company and as a product/service, ZeroMail also seems relatively immature at this point — certainly I haven’t seen much hype around it, and I don’t believe the company quite has a business model organised for it just yet.

What this investment by Citrix says is that the company is prepared to back a startup like ZeroMail which is taking a long-term view on solving one of the IT industry’s biggest headaches — out of control email inboxes — going up against the resources of massive incumbent providers like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to do so.

One last thing: For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t be surprised if much of Citrix’s confidence in ZeroMail is based on the company’s awesome user interface for its email platform. You can view a demo online here. I’ve been playing around with it this morning, and ZeroMail reminds me of nothing so much as Google’s Gmail platform — but a bit more streamlined in places, and with Gmail’s smart spam handling intelligence extended to other areas such as newsletters and notifications from Facebook.

There is the gem of something awesome here — and I think that’s what Citrix has seen in ZeroMail. The IP which the company is building up would lend itself well to an acquisition by a larger company which wanted a great way to boost its email handling capabilities instantly — and I am pretty sure this is what Jellema is betting on long-term.

There’s always going to be value in creating something which reminds people of Gmail and seems to have much of the same style and functionality. It’s about time a smart startup realised that.

Google Cloud Sherpas land in Oz

Brenton Currie, iTech report — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:05:37 +0000

In a bid to capitalise on the slowly growing number of businesses in Australia making the move to Google Apps, US firm Cloud Sherpas has now opened its first Australian office in Sydney that will provide local support and advice for customers.

Cloud Sherpas originally began reselling Google’s App suite that provides businesses with a number of cloud-based Google apps including Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Video.

However the company has since expanded their offerings, building a business that provides sales, support and customisation of Google’s cloud platform for businesses both small and large that it says will assist them in supporting Australian businesses looking for a cloud solution. “We’ve heard that businesses in New Zealand and Australia have been slower to embrace cloud computing,” Jon Hallett, CEO for Cloud Sherpas said in a statement this week.

“But from what we’ve seen, companies in this market are aggressively looking to replace on-premise email and collaboration products with cloud-native platforms — particularly Google Apps.” It’s unclear at this stage how many staff Cloud Sherpas will have in the Sydney office, but Hallett says more will be added “quickly” thanks to the announcement overnight of the acquisition of New Zealand-based Google Apps reseller WaveAdept.

“We plan to staff up quickly in New Zealand and Australia, but the acquisition of WaveAdept gives us immediate help from senior managers and Google experts who know the local market inside-and-out,” Hallett noted.

Google Enterprise Sales Director for APAC Richard Suhr welcomed Cloud Sherpas move Down Under, and credits resellers of Google Apps as playing a “key” role in the platforms growth in popularity. “Google Apps Resellers have played a key role in the growth of Google Apps, and we’re delighted to see Cloud Sherpas move into this region,” Suhr said.

Google itself has recently undertaken a number of initiatives including a boost in advertising and running local events to entice local organisations to switch to the cloud. Last month the search giant ran a number of Roadshow events in Melbourne and Sydney, where leaders from Australian organisations were invited to listen to other Australian businesses who’ve already ‘gone Google’ and made the switch.

Image credit: Briony, Creative Commons

NSW Health to dump Novell GroupWise

Renai LeMay — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 02:14:44 +0000

blog Incredible though it seems in this age of cloud-based email (hello, Google Apps) and complex, feature-rich enterprise collaboration platforms like Microsoft Exchange, there are still large Australian organisations using legacy suites like Novell GroupWise.

Computerworld reports (click here for the full article) that NSW Health is finally preparing to migrate an unspecified amount of users off the Novell dinosaur and into a glorious new Exchange future, implementing a Quest-based archiving system to provide a half-way house for data stored in the legacy system:

“The new archiving solution will address “pressing GroupWise storage capacity concerns” and allow the historical GroupWise e-mail to be centrally stored and accessed without a dependency on GroupWise itself.”

To be honest, whenever we realise there’s still a GroupWise implementation out there, we kind of feel like we’ve discovered an untouched ancient archeological dig. Who knows what treasures can be found buried there, amongst the musty trappings of the past covered in dust? What glories await? What ghosts of the past?

Image credit: John Evans, royalty free

Having your Exchange cake and Gmail too

Renai LeMay — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 03:10:50 +0000

opinion For the past several years, many Australian chief information officers and IT managers have been hard-locked into choosing between just two options when it comes to evaluating the future of their email systems.

On the one hand has been the stalwart and ever-reliable Microsoft Outlook/Exchange; the safe choice; the feature-rich choice; the controllable and manageable choice; the suit and tie choice and most certainly the choice of Generation X and most of the baby boomers. Nobody ever got fired for buying Exchange.

But coming up fast from behind has come the new, cool kid on the block; the choice of Generation Y, the online-only, remotely hosted, software as service, cloud computing favourite; the ever-threatening Google Apps/Gmail alternative.

The only problem is, for many Australian CIOs, neither platform has been a fantastic long-term alternative for their in-house email needs, despite their relative strengths. If you speak to them about it, many IT executives will acknowledge that email is a technology which is rapidly becoming commoditised. They are looking for ways in which to offload email services to an external provider and take much of the cost of maintaining in-house Exchange systems off their balance sheets.

And yet using Exchange doesn’t play that well into this story. Whether you rollout Exchange as an in-house deployment, a managed service or outsource it completely to someone else’s datacentre or even to Microsoft’s cloud, the cost of maintaining the platform, buying Outlook licences and so on is not the lowest it could be.

However, shifting your whole organisation onto Gmail also has its problems.

The lack of on-shore hosting (or any real idea about which jurisdiction, in fact, your email will be hosted in), Gmail’s lack of the fine-grained features which Outlook offers, its diminished integration with the rest of Microsoft’s Office, Active Directory and Lync software stack … the list goes on. Gmail is far from perfect; and Google is far from responsive to customer requests for change in its global platform.

However, like many dichotomies, the Exchange/Gmail dichotomy is a false one; a fact proved by this week’s revelation by Jetstar chief information officer Stephen Tame that the airline had chosen not one of the two major email platforms on offer; but both.

Jetstar’s email strategy — which will see most of its corporate head office staff continue to use Outlook/Exchange, with most of the rest of the company (its support staff) shifted to Gmail, represents a viable way forward for many Australian organisations currently troubled by the false email dichotomy.

Tame, like many of his colleagues at other companies, has correctly recognised the fact that most of his company’s staff do not require feature-rich Exchange mailboxes. Yet he has also recognised the fact that some do.

By extracting various pieces of the email puzzle (security, archiving, etc) out from the traditional email paradigm, and setting up routing rules to ensure each platform handles the mail accounts associated with it, Tame has not only been able to achieve a practical solution to a problem which most have seen as being impossible to resolve without serious development work being done by either Microsoft or Google; and one that will also please all stakeholders within Jetstar.

The company’s head office will keep the Exchange platform its complexity demands, the rest of Jetstar’s staff will have a simpler but still highly functional alternative, and Jetstar’s chief financial officer Tristan Freeman is no doubt singing Tame’s praises right now to the company’s board.

Best of all, as Jetstar staff gain experience and move up the ranks to head office, taking Gmail with them, there will likely be a natural effect where Google’s platform will start to percolate through the entire organisation, reducing the long-term need for a dedicated heavy Exchange platform as staff better understand the benefits of software as a service platforms through direct exposure.

It’s a model which could easily be applied to many other industries. It’s not hard to argue, for example, that major banks, educational institutions, government departments and other commercial entities all have many so called ‘boundary workers’ which should rightfully be served with low-cost, low-priority and primarily outsourced technology solutions which meet their reduced needs when compared to the information workers who reside in corporate head offices.

We’ve seen many shadows of this many times in the past … the Commonwealth Bank of Australia was no doubt thinking along these lines when it evaluated Google Apps as an office suite back in 2006 and early 2007; and the current interest in thin client terminals and virtualised desktops is just another example; as is the self-provided IT movement, which seems to gain in strength every time a salesperson brings an iPad to work and demands that the company’s CRM platform work on it through the web.

Of course, Tame’s solution wasn’t the only one to his dilemma.

Exchange 2010 has a nifty feature which allows some mailboxes to be hosted in an on-premises facility, while others are hosted within Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure. And you can easily migrate mailboxes between the two.

Tame could have just as easily shifted most of Jetstar’s mailboxes into a cloud operated by Microsoft or a partner like CSC and locked most staff into only accessing their mail through Outlook Web Access, while corporate HQ used a local Exchange server throughout Outlook. This sort of option would likely have achieved the same goal as the Google option; although it probably would have cost more.

But overall, I like Tame’s strategy better.

The reason is that it demonstrates a contempt for the ideal of ‘technology for technology’s sake’ and the sorts of ‘one vendor’ pure solutions which so many technologists get hung up on, and put the focus squarely on using pieces of technology as the flexible Lego building blocks that they truly are.

False dichotomies are always set up in our minds because we have been conditioned to think a certain way; we convince ourselves that there is no other way to do things. Tame’s lesson to Australia’s IT industry this week — and a lesson he has been teaching us throughout his entire career — is that it’s OK … in fact, it’s usually best — to think different.

Image credit: Sarah Barth (photographer’s blog), royalty free

Jetstar to shift most staff to Google Apps

Renai LeMay — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 02:16:45 +0000

Low-cost airline Jetstar today revealed plans to implement a multi-pronged email strategy that will see most head office staff continue to use Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange platform, but about 2,200 support staff shifted onto Google’s Apps alternative, which features as its core the Gmail email service.

The airline currently provides an Outlook/Exchange-based service to all of its staff from a Jetstar-built server in one of the airline’s datacentres, maintained as a managed service by an external provider. However, the company’s chief information officer Stephen Tame confirmed in an interview this morning that he had put together a new approach for sign-off by the company’s management.

Tame pointed out that Jetstar had a significant population of staff who didn’t have their own dedicated PCs, such as cabin and tech crews and customer service officers at airports. “They’re probably hindered by having a central solution,” he said. “They’d get far better service if they had something in the cloud.”

However, unlike most other Australian organisations who have adopted Google Apps (one large example being AAPT) Jetstar will not shift the entirety of its staff onto the search giant’s collaboration platform if the strategy is approved. Tame noted that some 300 to 400 head office staff would continue to use Outlook/Exchange Microsoft platform, with the jump to Google being “probably too big” at this stage. There were a number of features which Microsoft’s full-featured suite currently did better, he said, such as integration with local storage, dealing with large attachments and so on.

In addition, with Jetstar using Microsoft’s broader Lync, Office and Active Directory products, Tame noted moving off the Exchange platform would diminish the value achieved through using Microsoft’s wider integrated product set, which was a valid suite for what those head office staff needed in their work.

Under Tame’s strategy, a number of other technologies will be used to bind the two competing suites together into one unified platform.

The CIO noted that all of Jetstar’s mail was currently processed through the cloud-based email security suite offered by MessageLabs, which has recently been re-branded under the Symantec.Cloud banner. The MessageLabs solution delivers email security to Jetstar, catching viruses and spam, for example, but it also conducts journaling and archiving activities on the company’s email.

When the Google Apps rollout takes place, MessageLabs will still handle all of Jetstar’s email, but it will route email to either the Microsoft or Google platforms, depending on which platform the recipient uses. Email addresses will remain the same, under the Jetstar.com domain, a single secure sign-on service will front-end both, and calendaring and directory integration (through Active Directory) will also be unified.

Tame said with Microsoft also providing a cloud email service, and the archiving, journaling and security constraints taken out of the puzzle, his decision on which provider to go with for the support staff came down to which one could give him “the best commodity price for a commodity service”.

“We wanted to make sure we had a negotiable position so that it didn’t matter which way we went,” he said of the strategy. After executive sign-off, the plan is that the email migration would take place by the end of the current financial year.

Asked whether he was concerned about the fact that much of Jetstar’s email will now be stored offshore, as Google does not operate an Australian datacentre, Tame pointed out that his company already used a number of other offshore cloud computing services — MessageLabs being a good example.

The airline has also implemented the performance management software provided by SuccessFactors, which runs on a software as a service model. “If you’ve got all your HR records hosted overseas, why are you concerned about email?” asked Tame, noting that as long as security controls were implemented (in this case, through MessageLabs), location was a moot point.

When Jetstar was first created back in 2003, the company was already using a cloud-based email platform supplied by Australian hosting company WebCentral (now part of MelbourneIT), Tame said. It had migrated off the platform when it ‘outgrew’ it.

Jetstar’s adoption of Google Apps will make it one of the few top-tier Australian corporate brands known to have rolled out the platform so far. The cloud email technology has mainly seen adoption in the education sector, as well as medium-sized businesses such as Mortgage Choice, Flight Centre and Ray White. AAPT is one large company known to have deployed the technology.

Other major corporations have typically deployed Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange platform in a hosted setting in an on-shore datacentre, where they have rolled out a new email system over the past couple of years.

The dual-pronged email strategy proposed by Jetstar is not without precedent in Australia.

In early 2010, Peter Carr, the managing director of analyst firm Longhaus, noted there were a number of examples where cloud email was being used in Australian corporates for staff who were on the edge of the corporate network. Examples could be the student populations of schools and universities or nurses in hospitals.

At the time, Carr pointed out that Jetstar parent Qantas had actually decided to stop providing Qantas flight attendants with an official company email account — instead, the staff provide Qantas with their own personal email address, which was often a Gmail or Hotmail free account. They are then paid an annual fee for their professional use of personal technology. The reason this sort of system works, according to Carr, is the low volume of official company email Qantas flight attendants need to deal with — just work schedules and so on. The analyst calls this type of staff “boundary workers”, because they work on the edges of the corporate technology footprint.

Image credit: Simon_sees, Creative Commons

Jellema’s ZeroMail launches paid beta

Renai LeMay — Mon, 23 May 2011 02:27:27 +0000

An ambitious Australian technology startup attempting to overhaul the dated email paradigm has launched a beta version of its service, charging $100 for a lifetime standard account.

Launched in mid-January this year and dubbed ‘ZeroMail’, the service was co-founded by local technology entrepreneur Bart Jellema, who is well-known in the startup community courtesy of his strong focus on building its foundations through events, as well as the successful exit of his own startup Tjoos in March 2010. Web developer Katrin Suess has also been involved right from the start of the project.

The aim of the initiative is to reinvent email to bring it up to date with 2011, by cutting out the types of emails that land in people’s inboxes and treating them differently.

For example, the ZeroMail site currently states that the service will only display email from real people in users’ inboxes — with notifications (for example, from social networking services like Facebook), newsletters and emails from groups being displayed in different locations. ZeroMail also pulls profile information about senders from social networking sites, introduced threaded email, and allows users to turn ‘to do’ emails into tasks.

The service works by copying a users’ existing mailbox (for example, from Gmail) onto the ZeroMail platform and mirroring changes — with users being then able to manage both of their email inboxes side by side until they become confident about ZEROmail’s abilities.

A notification on the service’s site published recently notes that the startup is currently looking for 100 people to sign up for a $100 lifetime account as part of a closed beta test. The service will cost $39 per month for a standard account after launch. News of the closed beta was first broken by the iTech report.

“As an early adopter, we want to reward you by offering you a lifetime standard account for only $100,” the site states Your feedback will help us to speed up the development of further features and let us create a personal email assistant that fulfills all your needs!”

When ZeroMail first launched, Jellema said the revenue model for the service wasn’t an issue — it was more important to solve a worthy problem. “First you solve the problem, than you think about the revenue model,” he said. “[About the revenue] I don’t know and I don’t care much”.

A number of other email services do provide base functionality which is similar to ZeroMail — for example, it is possible to manually set up filters in most popular online email services which allow users to filter certain types of messages out of their daily email stream. In addition, most online email services — such as Gmail, Microsoft’s Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail — are currently free for users.

However, the point of difference with ZeroMail appears to be that the filtering takes place automatically — without requiring a users to set it up manually.

Image credit: Screenshot of ZeroMail site

Hotmail’s secure, says Microsoft

Renai LeMay — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 02:08:37 +0000

Software behemoth Microsoft has maintained that its online services are secure, in the face of news that the department which houses Prime Minister Julia Gillard, her staff and the Cabinet would block public web-based email services such as Hotmail and Gmail from 1 July as a security risk.

In response to a report by the government’s Auditor-General stating that public web email services were insecure, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet yesterday stated it would comply with the auditor’s recommendation and shut down access to the webmail platforms — despite the fact that they were being used extensively by departmental staff.

Google declined to comment on the issue, but in response, Microsoft highlighted the security of its offerings.

“Microsoft’s online services adhere to many world-leading security standards, such as ISO 27001 and SAS 70, and we regularly investigate improvements to gain further certifications by independent industry organisations,” a spokesperson for the software giant said in an emailed statement yesterday.

However, Microsoft also acknowledged that different organisations had different needs.

“Microsoft recognises that governments operate in a unique environment and have complex personnel, business, legislative and communication requirements,” the spokesperson said. “We continue to work with the Australian Government to understand and develop IT solutions, both online and on-premise, that meet their needs.”

The news comes as debate continues to rage about the validity and practicality of the department’s move to comply with the auditor’s request. In an extensive blog post on the matter published this morning, e-government specialist and public servant Craig Thomler acknowledged risks stemming from web email access; pointing out that such systems could be easily used to distribute large amounts of government information — including classified information — and that they were also a potential source of malware.

However, Thomler also questioned what the fundamental nature of webmail services actually was — pointing out that platforms such as Gmail and Hotmail were really just websites which allowed people to upload files, and that a range of other similar systems — even web-based access to ISP email accounts — existed online.

In addition, he noted that webmail platforms may actually be more secure in practice than some corporate systems — as companies like Google and Microsoft could afford to invest more in security than any individual customer company — and had hundreds of millions of users.

Image credit: Bo Gao, Creative Commons

Prime Minister’s office blocks Gmail, Hotmail

Renai LeMay — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:25:17 +0000

The department which houses Prime Minister Julia Gillard, her staff and the Cabinet yesterday signalled it would bow to a request from the Federal Auditor-General and block access to public web-based email services such as Hotmail and Gmail from 1 July, with the auditor seeing the platforms as an inherent security risk.

In a report on the security of information held by government agencies first reported by iTNews, the Auditor-General Ian McPhee recommended that “agencies should not allow personnel to send and receive emails on agency ICT systems using public web-based email services”, specifically calling out ‘hotmail’ and ‘gmail’ as examples of such platforms.

The problem with such services, according to McPhee, was that they provided “an easily accessible point of entry for an external attack”, and subjected departments and agencies to “the potential for intended or unintended information disclosure”.

The auditor’s examination of the information security of a number of agencies — including the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, but also Medicare, ComSuper and the Australian Office of Financial Management, found that webmail accounts were accessible by staff in the Prime Minister’s department, with logs showing that some staff were using the accounts “on a regular basis”.

In response to the auditor’s recommendation, PMC agreed it would shut down access to the webmail platforms.

“Current access arrangements for web-based email will cease on 1 July 2011,” the department wrote. “While access to web-based email was in response to business requirements, there were control measures in place. However, we accept the threat and risk assessment has changed and access will no longer be permitted from departmental systems.”

The move raises questions about the technical differences between what the auditor’s office deems to be public webmail services, and corporate-focused email platforms such as Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite and Google’s Apps platform.

Like all of what Microsoft terms its ‘software plus service’ offerings, the vendor’s BPOS platform uses much of the same underlying technology as its Windows Live platform (including Hotmail), and is based on its Global Foundation Services infrastructure spanning datacentres around the world. The same is true of Google’s Apps platform, which is targeted at business and government use but shares the same infrastructure with its public Gmail offering.

A number of large Australian organisations have recently shifted to cloud-based email solutions from either Microsoft or Google, as part of a wave of interest in the area over the past several years. In addition, some organisations — such as Qantas with its flight attendants — are even recommending some workers use private email services for professional purposes, to simplify administration of staff who might not need daily access to email.

Microsoft and Google will be contacted this morning and asked for comment on the matter.

In general, the auditor’s report found agencies had implemented government security requirements well. “The agencies had established information security frameworks, had implemented controls to safeguard information, to protect network infrastructure and prevent and detect unauthorised access to information; and had controls in place to reduced loss, damage or compromise to ICT assets,” the auditor wrote. However, it noted some areas — such as the complexity of passwords, regular patching of software and so on — could be improved.

Image credit: Harrison Keely, royalty free