Would you trust your data to an unknown?

With Googles launch of there paid-for 'office' suite of web based applications the future looks rosy for online collaboration and multi-user documents.

Google aren't the only people offering this, but it does raise the question - would you trust your business documents, secrets, data and future business streams to cyberspace?

Essentially your trusting your entire business livelyhood to a 3rd party, of which you know nothing about how the data is stored, where its stored, how its backed-up, how it can be recovered and who's looking at it.

Since the US government requested search logs from providers, how long before they request all your business documents, as is? I assume they can anyway, but if you provide them you can give context, a 3rd party can't.

Not only is your data in an unknown place, if, in the unlikely even Google goes bust, where does that leave you? Where's your data?

Microsoft also offer (or are planning to offer) similar services, and I'm sure Yahoo et. al. will follow. Your data, in the hands of people aiming to index the worlds data for online search by all? Surely its only a matter of time... by fair means or foul

What if they get hacked or a vindicitve employee leaves? Your business could be all over the internet for all.

So, do you spend a few hunded pounds on your business and setup a secure remote access server (sFTP), real-time collaboration (sharepoint, Wildfire IM, etc.), and a NAS RAID drive, or send your business data into the unknown, to be looked after no-one you know, backed-up using methods unknown, held on computers you'll never see, trusted to a 3rd party that may go bust one day, or spend a couple of hunded pounds and ask the geek in your company to sort it?

I know what I'm doing.

Office 2007 BETA 2 : Initial View

Got my hands on a copy of the latest Office 2007 BETA 2 today. So far I’ve only installed the end user apps, and none of the server stuff.

Initial impression is that there may be something worth buying here. With the BETA you do get everything in all versions, so the cost of all this BETA stuff when it’s in production would be in the thousands rather than the hundreds (and that’s not including the server apps) I suspect, but still, it looks good.

The user interface is completely new in the basic office apps (Word, Excel etc) although Outlook is pretty similar. I’d guess that when its finalised everything will have the new GUI.

Unfortunately the VISIO BETA 2 just crashes each time I try and load it, and since it’s all running on a clean install of XP SP2 then I presume it’s just broken. If it isn’t going to work on that then where is it? Hope it will be fixed soon.

The other (very) annoying feature, which I presume will be fixed in the final release is that when you open Outlook it spurns multiple Word windows (when you create and email, add a contact etc). There just blank and you can’t close or minimise them. I think this problem goes back to Office 2003 as it happened on there too, but you could turn off ‘Use Word to edit messages’ which fixed it. That options not available here, and I suspect using Word is pretty integrated to save creating two spell checkers, two grammar checkers etc.

That problem only seems to appear on multiple monitor setups, so if you’re on a single screen then all should be well. At least, that’s what I found in Office 2003. Primarily I’ve noticed this with Matrox cards, probably something to do with the way they manage the desktop (far superior to other ‘gamer’ cards trying to power two screens from one chip).

Still trying to see what InfoPath and Groove do for me that you couldn’t do with a well tuned SharePoint setup, but we’ll see.

One final point of note so far with Outlook 2007. With an IMAP connection it seems to want to do a lot more to keep the folders synchronised than the 2003 variant did. I’ve not had it installed enough to see what it’s doing, but it’s certainly a lot slower than 2003. Whether this is due to BETA or a new way of looking after IMAP folders we’ll have to wait and see. A bit more digging required there!

Still, a promising start for a BETA application and I’ll wait and see how I get on with it over the coming days and weeks.