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Chromebook fans claim the integration of Android apps on touchscreen Chromebooks brings a new dimension – but how well do the key apps work?

Word

As you would hope and expect, the Word app is perfectly at home on a Chromebook. If you’re a OneDrive or Dropbox user, your accounts can be automatically integrated into Word, solving the problem of where to save documents — albeit restricting offline access. Unlike on the desktop, documents autosave by default, which takes a little getting used to.

The app’s mobile roots are also apparent in the behaviour of the Ribbon interface. The Ribbon is hidden by default and only revealed when you click the down arrow in the top right-hand corner. This might be a bonus for those who favour the uncluttered approach, but it’s an irritating extra click for those of us who constantly dip in and out of menus. And who do we have to bribe to get one version of Word that understands that we want to spellcheck
in UK English and not the US bastardisation?

Excel

Like Word, Excel also benefits from being able to stretch out on the larger screen of a Chromebook, but those expecting a fully-fledged desktop experience from the Android app are going to be disappointed.

On the plus side, Excel retains the content and fidelity of any workbook, but there are limitations to what you can do. Conditional formatting is displayed, for example, but you can’t apply new conditional formatting to a set of data in the Android app. Nice touches such as the live preview of charts are also absent, as is the option to create pivot tables. Naturally, you can forget about any desktop Excel plugins, too.

On the plus side, it coped fine with a password-protected worksheet, but overall it’s probably best to think of Excel for Android as more of a glorified worksheet reader than a true Excel replacement.

OneNote

Of all the main Office apps, OneNote is the one that struggles most with operating on a full-size laptop screen. It feels like a stretched mobile app, rather than the full-blown desktop app I’m used to. Maybe it’s just ingrained muscle memory, but having notebook sections running vertically down the side of the screen rather than horizontally across the top just feels awkward and wrong on a landscape screen.

That said, the app’s mobile-first design does work well in windowed mode, allowing you to pop a small OneNote window on top of, for example, the web browser and make notes while referring to the content in the background.

There’s little in the way of editing options, but arguably that’s not a major drawback for a note-taking app. If your Chromebook has stylus support, OneNote instantly kicks into Draw mode when your stylus come in contact with the screen, letting you scribble notes or draw a diagram without fuss.

Powerpoint

Whether you’re using a Chromebook to deliver a presentation or create one from scratch, there’s plenty to admire about the Android app.

It includes Presenter Mode, allowing you to preview forthcoming slides or take a look at your notes while delivering a presentation, although some of the fancier tools — such as turning your mouse into a virtual laser pointer — are missing from the app.

Creating new decks is reasonably straightforward, too. Granted, there aren’t many templates to choose from and you don’t have the option to go online and hunt for more, like you do on a PC, but there’s still enough here to knock up something that won’t show you up in the boardroom.

Moreover, Dropbox and OneDrive integration makes it easy to insert items such as photos into your slide decks. You can completely forget about video, though, whether viewing or inserting it.

Slack

Slack on a Chromebook looks much like Slack on the Windows desktop. There are a few missing functions: the ability to have side panes showing threads, documents or activity is absent, as is the option to make Slack audio/video calls to your colleagues. Curiously, these features are available in the Slack web app, which is accessible via Chrome, making you wonder why the Android app can’t catch up. Perhaps the developers have yet to see the demand for full-sized screen usage.

One other convincing reason to use Slack in the browser is the fixed font size — it’s near unreadably small on the new Pixelbook, but much kinder to the eye in the browser, where you also have the option to zoom in and out.

Outlook

I’m a big fan of the Outlook Android app on my smartphone. In many ways, I think the free Android app is better than the desktop app I’m paying £8 a month for as part of Office 365, not least in the way it separates mail wheat from chaff.

Unfortunately, it’s something of a problem child on the Chromebook. When you attempt to add an email account, the Outlook app demands that you «need to install a compatible browser». The help files tell you to download Chrome: it’s looking for the mobile version of the browser, rather than the desktop version installed on the Chromebook. Once that was installed from the Play Store, it was all sorted, but it’s further evidence of Android apps not being quite ready for Chromebooks yet.

The other downside is the same one that afflicted the Slack app — the default font size is fixed and uncomfortably small to read for a fortysomething. Webmail is perhaps the way forward.

Chrome Remote Desktop

You might think that one way around some of the app restrictions we’ve identified would be to remote desktop into your regular PC. It’s a nice idea, but it’s flawed.

I used Chrome Remote Desktop to hook into my Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga X1, wondering whether it would let me use InDesign, Photoshop and all the other apps for which there’s no good Chromebook equivalent. Whilst making the connection wasn’t too painful, actually manipulating the desktop was.

The Lenovo’s desktop was badly shrunk within the Chromebook’s browser window, making it very difficult to read anything on the screen and impossible to hit small icons with the mouse. Any attempt to do serious work within InDesign would lead to a Chromebook being flung at the wall in a fit of rage.

Skype

Whether you’re making a business call or trying to call home from a trip abroad, Skype is an app that most people always have to hand. It works perfectly well on the Chromebook, but it’s one of those apps on which the full screen is wasted. It’s best to keep it docked in a small window for the optimum interface.

Here’s a little power tip for Office 365 subscribers — you get an hour’s free calls to local landlines as part of your subscription. Usefully, you can use these when you’re abroad to place a call to landlines in the UK, if the person or office you’re calling doesn’t have Skype.

Another day, another earnings report where cloud is cited as the primary mover. This time it’s Red Hat, whose fourth quarter and full year revenues have gone up 23% and 21% year over year respectively.

Full year revenues were at $2.9 billion (£2.05bn) while fourth quarter total revenue was at $772 million (£546.4m). The company’s subscription revenue from infrastructure-related offerings was at $510m for the most recent quarter, representing two thirds of total revenue, while total subscription revenue was 88% of overall revenue.

The key highlight for Red Hat over the past quarter was the acquisition of CoreOS, a provider of Kubernetes and container solutions, for $250m in January. The move was cited by president and CEO Jim Whitehurst when speaking to analysts and, on a wider scale, the importance of container technologies for Red Hat going forward.

“The acquisition of CoreOS further enhances our ability to help customers build applications and deploy them across hybrid environments,” said Whitehurst, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “By combining CoreOS’s complementary capabilities with Red Hat’s already broad Kubernetes and container-based portfolio, including OpenShift, we aim to further accelerate adoption and development of the industry’s leading hybrid cloud platform for modern application workloads.”

Back in 2016, this reporter attended the London Red Hat Forum where open source software reigned supreme. At that time, Red Hat saw itself as the #2 player in Kubernetes and Docker. The company remains the second leading contributor to Kubernetes, which itself has gone from strength to strength, ‘graduating’ from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) earlier this month.

“We continue to believe that the next era of technology will be driven by container-based applications that span multi and hybrid cloud environments and that Kubernetes, containers and Linux will be the foundation of this transformation,” added Whitehurst.

You can read the full results here.

Clare Hopping

Over the past few weeks in the UK, thanks to the ‘Beast from the East’ – with a third instalment potentially on its way – we have seen the usual grinding to a halt of the nation as snow has hit.

For business, such a simple, uncontrollable and unexpected event can be eventful, painful and even catastrophic depending on your business type and how you have planned for such occurrences. Snow has a wide sweeping effect, but also consider unfortunately in today’s times, terror attacks and the more localised effect of businesses also not able to get to work.

Whenever we experience the snow we see headlines, news reports and discussions ensuing over the cost to business. Should we not already be mitigating against this – and should a simple weather impact be able to affect work so easily in today’s world?

The costs and impact can be very simple. Take petrol station sales, down 10% the last time this happened. Building projects are stopped. Cafés, restaurants, taxi drivers and train operators receive less throughput. Likewise, there are those whose business requests go up; gas engineers, breakdown services, takeaway restaurants.

Be it you cannot get to work through being snowed in yourself, the office itself being shut, or through having to stay home to look after the kids as their school is shut, the outcome is the same – you are not at your desk and, for many roles, therefore not able to perform your duties.

For a customer service, call centre, support or sales environment, this can have a severe impact on your clients and your own productivity. For businesses the effect is costly, as if you have not empowered your workers to ‘be able’ to work, you cannot put the impact onto your employees – the law prevents this.

Assuming that, as you’re impacted, so may be your clients, is a false sense of security. Not all regions may be affected; your customers may still choose or need to call. If they now have downtime due to the weather, they may choose to make that call they have been putting off sorting an issue or order out. Therefore, it can be argued that you may incur spikes of need at a time when your team is weakened to respond.

In today’s world, the technology to empower true business continuity, fast and affordably, is in reach of us all. Mobile phones, laptops and tablet devices all enable workers to be mobile and have that virtual office and are within financial reach of even the smallest company. Indeed, you will likely find your employees already have their own tech, often better than what you are providing to them.

The missing component today is often the fundamental of your own business phone system. How easily and quickly, when caught short by the weather, can you, as an employer, switch users to fully remote working? Can you have their desk phone calls routed to their mobile, a soft-phone or web-phone, and all routing, call queues, wallboards and reporting of calls working as normal? You should be able to remotely switch on a DR policy that makes this happen. Wouldn’t it also make sense to have users able to make outbound calls that come as if working at their desk?

Imagine the snow hits; you make a decision that all or some employees need to work but be remote today. You want all working as normal despite their physical location. Wouldn’t it be ideal if all the user had to do was to login to their CRM or service desk system on any PC, and be immediately on their desk phone right there from the browser session.

Today, this is easy, simple for the user, and something you can deploy quickly to even the largest of teams. Once the snow thaws, you move onto day to day business, seeing the issue as passed and not planning to take any further action – until it happens again and you wished you had.

Weather patterns are getting worse, terror attacks unfortunately are growing, and we can expect increased disruptions over the coming years. Don’t let your customers and staff be left out in the snow. In today’s cloud technology world, there is no need. The solution to this is practical, affordable and here today. Don’t be giving excuses or apologies – be the one giving service.

Pivotal Software, the arbiter of the open source Cloud Foundry project and one of the many horses in Dell’s stable, has filed for an IPO worth a potential $100 million (£70.4m).

The S-1 filing revealed Pivotal posted overall revenues of $509.4m for fiscal 2018, at an increase of 22.4% from the year before, with subscription revenue exceeding services revenue for the first time at $259m.

The company said it had 319 ‘subscription customers’ – defined as companies who spend at least $50,000 annually – at the end of the 2018 fiscal year, up from 275 compared with end-year 2017. Pivotal added that this increase was deliberately conservative as it was focusing on renewals rather than net additions but expected more of an increase in the coming 12 months.

Despite this, Pivotal has posted increasing losses – $282.7m for fiscal year 2018, compared with $232.9m and $163.5m respectively. Dell Technologies, the entity comprising Dell and EMC following the largest tech deal in history, will retain a controlling stake in Pivotal.

Pivotal has raised approximately $1.7 billion in funding across three rounds. The series A and B, both announced in April 2013, saw a $946m investment led by EMC and VMware – the former acquiring Pivotal Labs in 2012 – and a $105m raise led by General Electric (GE). 2016 saw a $653m series C round with five investors, most notably Ford.

Rumour and conjecture persisted at the start of this year around Dell’s wider plans. The latest theory is around a ‘reverse merger’ with VMware. Dell’s approximately 82% ownership of the virtualisation and end user computing giant forced the company to issue a filing at the beginning of February confirming it was ‘evaluating potential business opportunities’, while VMware for its part put out a statement saying it was ‘not in a position to speculate on the outcome of Dell’s evaluation of potential business opportunities.’

The scope of Pivotal’s filing however should not affect any wider speculation on Dell, according to Dale Peters, research director at TechMarketView. “Pivotal may have a big role to play in helping Dell move into the cloud, but this move is unlikely to be the major component of its wider strategic plans,” wrote Peters. “Rumours of a Pivotal IPO have been circulating for far longer than recent discussions concerning Dell’s future options. We will have to wait a little longer to see what its big move is going to be.”

Organisations still believe their information is safer on-premise rather than in the cloud – and it’s a mindset that IT security firm Barracuda Networks wants to change.

According to the company, who polled more than 600 respondents around their experiences with cloud security, more than four in five (83%) said they were concerned about deploying firewalls in the cloud, while more than half (57%) of EMEA-based respondents said their on-premises security was superior to cloud.

When it came to the struggle around firewalls and cloud, two in five (39%) said pricing and licensing was ‘not appropriate’ for a cloud model, while a third (34%) argued ‘lack of integration prevents cloud automation’. Almost all (93%) respondents who had adopted DevOps-based practices said they faced challenges with security integration.

Evidently there are still challenges which need to be overcome – but what about the positives? Those who have taken the plunge on cloud-specific firewalls say the primary benefits are integration with cloud management, monitoring and automation capabilities, as well as being easy to deploy and configure by cloud developers.

What’s more – if this particular set of respondents are anything to go by – the shared responsibility cloud security message is getting out there. 71% of EMEA respondents said cloud security was a responsibility shared with cloud vendors, with only 19% believing it is the vendor’s responsibility alone.

These figures certainly make for better reading when compared to a Barracuda report from July last year, which expressed concern over organisations’ misinformation. Yet Chris Hill, Barracuda director of public cloud business development, argues education is still needed in other areas.

“There still seems to be a lack of understanding in cloud security, and a misplaced belief that on-premises security is a lot stronger,” wrote Hill in a blog post. “One thing is for sure: as the move to cloud only increases in pace, for organisations that are used to operating under traditional data centre architecture, moving to the cloud will require a new way of thinking when they approach security.”

You can read the full survey results here (email required).

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