In a The Future of Cloud Computing with Business Productivity Online Standard Suite webinar presented by Microsoft, details are provided about just how Microsoft intends to turn back the Google applications tide.

Jim Haigh from Microsoft does a good job making a case for Microsoft by highlighting first the economic issues that are getting customers to move to cloud computing in the first place, and then detailing some of the unique benefits of a Microsoft approach that already has a half million paid seats.

Included in that discussion are the benefits of being able to integrate Microsoft Office deployments on existing client systems with Office implementations in the cloud. As part of that effort, he notes that Microsoft’s Office implementation for the cloud will include synchronization services with Active Directory and the ability to integrate with other Microsoft cloud services, including SharePoint, Live Meeting and Office Communications Services.

He also added that security capabilities will be built into the service and customers will be able to convert existing client licenses to the Microsoft cloud offering.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars One of the best explanations of what Microsoft is trying to do in the cloud – TWM1.

In a From Perception to Plan: Strategies for Assessing and Improving IT Business Satisfaction webinar sponsored by Citrix Online, some ideas are presented about how to go about doing just that.

Most of the conversation sticks to a pretty high level. The most tangible recommendation made by the speakers is to make sure the IT organization is consistently surveying end users about their needs and the perception of the IT department.

Citrix then recommends that one of the more efficient ways to start delivering IT as a service is to use its Citrix Assist software to allow IT organizations to more easily take remote control of a user’s desktop when there is a problem. The fundamental argument is that this approach will make it easier for the IT organization to support mobile workers, while also resolving IT issues faster.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars The ideas are sound, but the details are light – TWM1

In a Migrating from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps webinar sponsored by Google, the IT leadership of Morgans Hotel Group explains the reasons why they just recently converted from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps.

Jason Harper, vice president of worldwide operations at Morgans Hotel Group, says the key issues that his IT organization faced were decreasing budgets, aging hardware systems, lack of internal expertise, limited bandwidth, not enough time to deal with all the patches and upgrades that Microsoft issues, expenses associated with add-on applications for Microsoft Exchange, and a tough time justifying the disaster recovery infrastructure required to keep Microsoft Exchange running.

Harper says his organization considered hosted alternatives to Microsoft Exchange, but found then to be still too expensive and cumbersome to deploy and manage.

Nicholas Hatch, director of IT operations for the hotel, goes on to describe the IT organizations general approach to rolling out GoogleApps to the hotel’s 1,700 end users.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars Succinctly lays out the issues driving thousands of customers away from Microsoft Exchange – TWM1

But in a Discover Hassle-Free, Safe and Secure Campus Computing webinar sponsored by Absolute Software it becomes pretty clear that these “Lo-Jack” services have evolved to include data governance capabilities and asset management services.

Stanton Gatewood, chief information security officer for the University of Georgia starts things off by describing how the university uses the Absolute Software service to keep track of notebooks deployed across 35 colleges and universities. He notes that the cost of a lost laptop goes well beyond the device when you think about the potential importance of a given piece of data and all the time and labor that goes into remediating the problem once the device is stolen.

Longer term, Gatewood hopes the Absolute Software services will be extended out to smart phone devices.

Carol Johnston, a senior product marketing manager at Absolute Software, does a good job of explaining exactly how the service works, especially when it comes to how the service is able to remotely overwrite and sensitive data on stolen machine.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars Shows how security as a service has really evolved – TWM1.

In a Riverbed: The Complete IT Solution webinar, a strong case is made for the value of application acceleration appliances that can improve network application performance by as much as 70 percent.

Nik Rouda, senior product marketing manager for Riverbed, says IT organizations have overlooked the downstream cost benefits of application acceleration appliances, especially when it comes to server consolidation and overcoming I/O issues associated with accessing applications on remote cloud computing platforms.

He notes that an application acceleration appliance is basically designed to make “something that is 3,000 miles away look like it’s only 30 feet away.”

Rouda goes into a fair amount of detail on how application acceleration appliances work, but there’s not much here in terms of differentiating Riverbed from any one of a half dozen other competitors in the same space.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars Opens IT eyes to a lot of possibilities – TWM1

In a Technology Trends for 2009 webinar presented by IT Strategists, attendees are treated to quick overview of the top ten IT trends currently transforming enterprise computing.

The overall presentation stays at a very high level starting with a description of the first five trends, which include cloud computing, online applications, document management, customer relationship management (CRM) software and unified communications. There’s not a lot of depth provided around any one of these topics, but if you need an overview of what is happening in IT these days this might be a good place to start.

The presentation gets a little more forward looking as it gets into how the Internet will transform as we move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 applications and the implications of predictive analytics in business intelligence applications. But the speaker runs out of time when he tries to meaningfully address virtualization/Green IT, mobility and social networking.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars If you’re completely out of the IT loop, this might be a place to start coming up to date – TWM1

In a How to Use Process as a Competitive Weapon webinar sponsored by Savvion, attendees are reminded that the primary value of IT is to create a competitive advantage by re-engineering an existing business process or enabling a new one.

Unfortunately, there are not a lot of specifics about how to go about accomplishing any of this. The presenters stress that any business process improvement project needs to get the support of business people because it will always involve some level of business process re-engineering.

But there is no detail on how business process management platforms are evolving to facilitate these types of efforts. About the only guidance offered is the need to be able to instrument processes in the first place in order to measure what is actually happening inside any given process and, given the current nature of the economy, the need to take an iterative approach to any project so IT organization can keep costs under control while meeting return on investment (ROI) goals.

One other tip offered also includes considering new approaches to BPM based in cloud computing platforms.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars Yet another amorphous conversation about BPM – TWM1.

In a How the University of Texas Averted IT Disaster during Hurricane Dolly webinar presented by VMware, the inherent disaster recovery benefits of virtualization are discussed in some detail.

The discussion is led mostly by Brian Matthews and Alejandro Herrera, two system administrators from the University of Texas in Brownsville. They describe how as Hurricane Dolly was getting ready to descend on the Texas gulf region, they were able to take a Microsoft SharePoint application that kept students and faculty informed of events on campus and dynamically move it to a set of backup servers located at the university’s Austin campuses. This approach eliminates the need to have a dedicated backup data center facility and all the associated costs will setting that facility up.

Ibby Rahmani, senior product marketing manager for VMware, describes the various levels of backup and recovery options that are available using VMware, ranging from simply provisioning a new server to deploying high-availability and fault-tolerance options.

Unfortunately, one of the speakers gets cut off about three-quarters of the way through the event.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars Good overview of the implications of virtualization on disaster recovery scenarios

In a Top Three Reasons to Try Hosted E-Mail Security Today webinar presented by Trend Micro, a good case is made for why security-as-a-service is becoming a better option for most IT organizations.

Eric Jenson, senior global product marketing manager for hosted security at Trend Micro, and T.J. Alldridge, product marketing manager for North America, lead a reasonably interactive discussion of why IT organizations should be out of the business of managing their own e-mail security. The top three reasons for this come down to the fact that e-mail is a mission-critical application that the business can’t do without; it takes IT out of the e-mail security maintenance business, and provides up-to-the-minute security updates.

Nobody in this event is suggesting that on-premise security people are not good at what they do. Trend Micro is just making an argument that it can provide e-mail security as a service more efficiently, thereby allowing the IT organization to concentrate on things that actually add more value to the business.

The two Trend Micro executives then go on to explain how customers should differentiate various e-mail security services, but for some reason there’s not a lot of hard data about the comparative return on investment (ROI) models about running email security as a service versus trying to run it yourself.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars Could use a little more hard data to back up a good argument – TWM1.

In a Fundamentals of Dynamic Virtual Environment Path Management webinar presented by EMC, a policy-based approach for balancing loads across virtual servers and storage arrays is outlined.

Tom O’Neill, an EMC senior manager for product management, shows how EMC’s PowerPath management tool can dynamically balance loads across either vSphere from VMware or Hyper-V from Microsoft and any storage array, including offerings from Hewlett-Packard and IBM. The basic idea behind PowerPath is to replace the path management software that comes with vSphere or Hyper-V with an offering from EMC that offers higher levels of automation.

There’s not much in this 30 minute presentation related to the cost of PowerPath or its potential value in terms of return on investment. But given the intense level of interest in dynamically balancing virtual loads in cloud computing environments, O’Neill makes some solid points.

Also, PowerPath is the first product that EMC is offering under a new electronic licensing model that is outlined by O’Neill.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars Worth a look for anybody wrestling with load balancing across virtual servers.