Google’s Head of Communications, Elliot Schrage, is heading for social networking darling Facebook.

Schrage is the latest in a series of high profile Google staffers to leave for Facebook recently: Sheryl Sandberg, the former VP of Global Sales for Google is also now Facebook’s CEO; Ethan Beard was the Director of Social Media at Google and is now Facebook’s Business Development Director; One of Google’s top engineers, Ben Ling, is now running Facebook’s Platform Product Marketing; Gideon Yu was the CFO for Google’s YouTube business unit, and has also moved to Facebook as their CFO;

Google is famed for the standards of staff meals at their headquarters, known as the Googleplex. To add insult-to-injury, Facebook even managed to hire one of Google’s top chefs - Josef Desimone.

Other prominent Googlers to leave for positions elsewhere include Salman Ullah, who was Google’s Director of Corporate Development who left to found venture firm Copper River Partners; Dominic Preuss, who ran Google’s local ad initiative left for Meetup, a social networking event manager for startups; Gokul Rajaram, the “Godfather of AdSense” - Google’s cashcow - has left to pursue his own projects; Nathan Stoll, Product Manager for Google News was a recent departure; Kevin Fox, a leading user experience expert at Google left within a matter of days of Stoll; and Chris Sacca, Director of Google’s Special Initiatives has also left for a venture capitalist.

At one time Google was seen as ‘the’ company to work for. Started with lofty aims to ‘do no evil’ now thrown into the wind as they turn into another technology behemoth. Facebook is still trying to find its place in the market and monetise their user base, the influx of experienced and talented staff used to working together can only work to Facebook’s advantage.

The town where I was born, Bournemouth, is to pioneer residential 100 Mbps broadband delivered via the town’s sewer network.

The project has been dubbed Fibrecity and will connect 88,000 homes in the Dorset seaside resort.  Two further Fibrecities will follow in Dundee and Northampton, with long term plans for a nationwide roll out.

The carrier undertaking the project, Merseyside-based broadband provider H2O, has already been providing fibre connectivity via the sewer network for Bournemouth and Dundee Universities.

The 360,000 miles of sewers in the UK can be used to deliver fibre connectivity directly to the consumer’s property and wave division multiplexing can be used to offer huge quantities of bandwidth at a later date.  By utilising the sewer network, H2O will avoid the lengthly wayleave process involved in civil engineering projects that involve digging up the roads and pavements.

I have just finished reading Maureen Pennock’s excellent manual on curating emails.  While the manual has considerable focus on the retention of emails for research purposes, she also goes into considerable detail around the whole topic of retention and discovery.

The paper is now nearly two years old but many of the issues raised relating to long term retention are still valid today.

I will be presenting on Software-as-a-Service as a greener alternative to running dozens of e-mail support servers at the VXExplore VirtualizeIT Roadshow in Douglas on the Isle of Man on the 13 May 2008.

Details can be obtained from the organiser’s Website.

A Congressional report released last week details how a series of mistakes early in the Bush administration resulted in an estimated 5 million emails failing to be archived.

The 24 page report into the Electronic Records Preservation at the White House reveals some shocking truths and highlights that the Whitehouse was in breach of the Presidential Records Act, which came into force after the Watergate Scandal and clearly states that presidential records belong to the citizens of the United States, not the president and his representatives.

When George W Bush came to power, it was decided to move the Whitehouse’s email server from IBM’s Lotus Notes to Microsoft’s Exchange. It was found that the Whitehouse’s incumbent archiving server, the Automatic Records Management System (ARMS), could not handle the data from the Exchange server.

After it was found that the ARMS system would not work with Microsoft Exchange, a decision was made to use Exchange Journaling to collect all emails to and from Whitehouse employees into an email folder from where they would be manually collected and saved to a .PST file. These .PST files were then distributed across a number of Whitehouse servers.

It also transpires that the archived email was stored on Whitehouse servers is such a way that historical email was accessible by all users of that server, regardless of their security clearance.

At Mimecast we come across even 10 user organisations that recognise that exporting messages to PST from Exchange Journals as inadequate.

• Discovery against distributed .PST files is difficult, first having to collate the disparate .PST files and then using the limited tools provided with Exchange and Outlook.
• .PST files become inefficient storage repositories over time and require a manual compaction - a time consuming process.
• If the .PST files are stored in insecure locations, which these certainly were, they can be tampered with or deleted.

Many organisations take Mimecast’s service to ensure continuity of email service while migrating from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange, in fact this is exactly what global services company DTZ have done recently (here is the CNBC interview with DTZ’s CIO). If the Whitehouse had used a service like Mimecast, the would have immediately provided continuity for their email (according to the report, the migration took two years), as well as providing watertight email retention with strong chains-of-custody.

Many are hailing the loss of historical emails at a time where President Bush is increasingly under pressure as ‘convenient’, prudent use of an email archiving solution would have prevented the loss of the emails and put the President beyond suspicion.

A Software-as-a-Service company such as Mimecast has a very broad product offering. Mimecast covers a whole host of services that would normally require dozens of point solutions: firewall; Denial of Service mitigration appliances; disclaimer management; anti-spam; anti-phishing; clustered hot-standby mail server; archiving; discovery; email storage management; attachment policy enforcement; encryption in transit; data leak prevention…..

It is very difficult for someone to grasp the breadth and depth of a service offering like this. To assist a clear succinct message that grabs the listener’s imagination and is told with belief and passion is needed.

The job of the evangelist is to connect with ‘the community’ sell a clear vision to solve some form of issue you have today. This vision isn’t just snake oil, the evangelist will typically have a technical background with extensive domain and vertical market knowledge.

By connecting with the community, a feedback loop is created and the evangelist actively illicits feedback, correcting misconstrued or incorrect information about the product and providing the organisation valuable information about how the product is used and perceived in the real world.

So how does the evangelist engage with the community? - the answer to that question is proactively. The evangelist must demonstrate his credibility by actively participating - blogging, podcasting, contributing to forum discussions, creating customer communities.

This isn’t about a sales pitch, this is about embodying an approach to a problem and way of thinking about things - this is about providing thought leadership and trying to move the industry forward - it is not about simply shipping product.

So here begins the gospel according to Mimecast

I will be giving a presentation on Email Chains-of-Custody as a part of the Architecture and Management track at the South Africa Web Security Summit on the 8 May 2008.

The South Africa Web Security Summit is being held in Vodaworld, Midrand, South Africa on 6 - 8 May 2008.

My role within Mimecast will be changing as from today.

Until now I have been the Product Manager for Mimecast’s unified email management service, but I have been spending more and more time on the Product Marketing aspects of the job - giving briefings to the press and analysts; working on copy for the marketing department and fulfilling speaker slots at trade shows.

With Mimecast’s rapid 300% year-on-year growth it is impossible to keep up this level of engagement and also still remain an effective Product Manager so the CEO and CTO have created the position of Chief Product Evangelist which will allow me to focus my efforts in shaping, understanding and communicating the value of the Mimecast service to internal staff, channel partners, customers and prospects.

I will be giving a presentation on Email Compliance as a part of the Business Strategy stream of the Education Programme at InfoSec Europe at 11:20 on 23 April 2008. InfoSec Europe is at Olympia, London 22 - 24 April 2008.

Mimecast will be exhibiting on stand G206.

The presentation is also available for download.