The diagram above talks about “cloud-aware printers” but I don’t know of any of those, nor do I own anything similar. So I went down the legacy printer router. The First thing you need is a printer attached to a computer that’s running Chrome. That was easily arranged; I installed Chrome, and configured Cloud Printing to be running on the machine. It’s a relatively straight-forward process and once it’s set up your printer is visible from wherever you may need to print.

And here’s where I got stuck. I thought you should be able to print from any computer or application you wanted to. Or, maybe a website that can produce print output like www.123print.com could use a cloud based printer to output your work to your local printer. But it seems that the Google Cloud Printing isn’t that mature yet. Reading the FAQ on the Google Labs page, they say:

Any app can use Google Cloud Print. When a web app uses Google Cloud Print, it should just work in any browser on any device. Browsers themselves can also use Google Cloud Print

However, I couldn’t find any way to actually print to the printer. Digging a bit further, I came across a different FAQ on Google Support site that said:

We’re working hard to provide Google Cloud Print integration with many Google products and services, the first of which are Chrome OS, Gmail for mobile, and Google Docs for mobile.

Right, seems rather limited, but I did have Gmail for mobile on my Nexus One. So I fired it up and looked for a Print option. But it was to no avail, I just couldn’t find a Print option anywhere, which meant that I couldn’t actually use the printer. I did give a check to make sure I’m on the latest version of Gmail and that was an affirmative.

So, I’m just going to leave things as they are for now. The printer is set up, but there doesn’t seem to be much I can do with it. I would have expected that my Android phone would be able to use it, but maybe I have to wait a bit more for that.

Any luck out there using Google Print Services?

It compares the actual outage of Gmail over the last year against industry standard downtime for GroupWise, Lotus and Exchange. It’s not a 100% fair comparison, as the platforms the solutions run on are different (cloud vs data centre), but a user isn’t really concerned about how the technology is delivered, just what level of service they are exposed to.

The post also talks about another development on Google’s side. They are extending the 99.9% SLA promise to Premier Edition customers across a number of other cloud offerings including Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Talk. It’s an interesting development, particularly as my personal biggest concern with cloud computer is reliability. This move will help drive expectations and the levels required from other providers. 99.9% reliability works out to 10 hours downtime per year (if my calculations are correct), which should be enough for pretty much anyone (although not everyone would agree)

Do you use Google Apps? How reliable do you find them?

Thanks to Techmeme, I just came across a great article on Business Week that talks about Cloud Computing, what it’s all about and what it means to all of us. It’s a great place for someone who hasn’t been exposed to all this “computing in the cloud” or “Software as a Service” terminology to get reading and get up to speed on what it’s all about. Here’s how the article defines it:

The term “cloud computing” encompasses many areas of tech, including software as a service, a software distribution method pioneered by Salesforce.com about a decade ago. It also includes newer avenues such as hardware as a service, a way to order storage and server capacity on demand from Amazon and others. What all these cloud computing services have in common, though, is that they’re all delivered over the Internet, on demand, from massive data centers.

It’s interesting to see how the idea has been around for 10 years, but it’s only now that it’s entering into the public space. Innovation always follows the same pattern, where early adopters take advantage of new technology, but eventually it enters the mass market and the playing field evens out again. Cloud computing is currently still in it’s early stages, so the playing field is still quite turbulent. However, you’d be surprised at how many websites and services you use everyday that make use of this concept to offload static files, or call on reserves when they need them.

It will be interesting to watch the market develop and whether Dell will manage to trademark the term!