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SaaS backup provider Backupify has recently examined its own customer sample to do some demographic profiling of Google Apps users. The results are somewhat intriguing, as you can see in the infographic below. If you remove .edu domains, Google Apps still has nearly 40% of all of its seats used by businesses with more than 10,000 employees. The company surveyed their customers who have at least 30 users.

Google Docs can now be exported from the Google Takeout menu, thanks to Google's Data Liberation Front. Previously, users could export and import documents in various formats, but they are now available alongside data from all other Google services in Takeout.

Google Takeout was unveiled in summer 2011. It allows Google users to export all their Google data to disk or just data from individual services. It's all thanks to the Data Liberation Front team, which builds tools to give Google users control over their data.

In the space of a year Precise, Software, a midsized provider of application management technologies based in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, Israel completely transformed its IT infrastructure to virtualization and cloud software, saving more than $2 million of its annual IT costs. This reduction came through cutting half of their IT staff and closely examining a variety of other technologies.

Today Novell released its 2012 version of its email software GroupWise, and the announcement was greeted by most with a big yawn. GroupWise? Seems so last century. (Actually, the last updates to the software were for version 8 back in 2008-2010.) According to one analyst, "GroupWise has 10,000 customers and is used by 47 of the 50 US state governments." It has been a distant third to Exchange and Lotus Notes for a while, and many GroupWise customers have switched over to Google Apps in the past several years.

It seems that the lowly spreadsheet can be used to do just about anything, apart from adding up columns of numbers. Spreadsheet abuse has been happening almost since its invention by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston (who wrote Visicalc) in 1979. But since spreadsheets have gone online, people have come up with even more creative ways to use them. Today on TrackVia's blog they have compiled their top ten most unusual applications, and some of them are quite quirky. We last wrote about them last summer when we compared online database tools.

Is it time to retire Microsoft Office, as my colleague Eric Lundquist says in his latest Information Week column? Much as I would like to, I can't. Part of the problem is addiction, part comfort, and part because it just works well enough that there isn't any reason to get rid of it. Office is the kudzu of the computer world: you can't easily get rid of it, it has grown like topsy to take over other apps, and it holds you in its grip something fierce.

So far in our series exploring cloud computing for consumers, we've looked at calendars and music. In the multi-device world we now live in, files from your computer are also increasingly being stored in the cloud.

One of the leading Internet companies of this era is essentially a hard drive in the cloud. Dropbox, by some measures the world's 5th most valuable startup, makes it easy for you to sync files across devices. There are other, similar services too. Or you can go completely virtual by using an online office suite like Google Docs. In this article we outline some of the ways that you too can use the cloud to store your files.

Cloud storage provider Box.net is moving to expand its reach beyond simple file sharing with a series of investments, partnerships and software extensions called the Box Innovation Network. They plan on investing two million dollars over the next two years to encourage a variety of add-on development around their core technology, as well as encourage more main-line enterprise software developers to use their resources and cloud services.

One of the main principles of cloud storage in the enterprise is that users should not have to know the physical locations of the devices that store their files. They're all pooled together into one virtual device that's well replicated and has enormous capacity. Up to now, these conveniences haven't scaled down to the consumer level. That's why, when you hear everyday folks ask about where they should keep their files, their questions boil down to, "Whose cloud would you recommend?"

It isn't exactly a cloud if it comes with partitions. Realizing that, a startup from June 2010 called Joukuu has been building a compelling solution: an all-inclusive desktop for users of multiple cloud-based storage platforms, including Box.net and Dropbox. The result is a kind of all-in-one Finder window for all files and documents, including Google Docs documents that you can edit inline.

Tomorrow marks day one of National Novel Writing Month, a 30-day, Web-enhanced festival of writing in which thousands of people force themselves (and encourage each other) to finally write that novel they've always had in the back of their brain. The NaNoWriMo website gives participants analytics to track the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days, and anyone who finishes is a winner.

We're longtime fans of NaNoWriMo here at RWW. Editor-in-Chief Richard MacManus documented his NaNoWriMo experience back in 2003, at the dawn of our site, and we checked back in after NaNoWriMo 2008 for its 10th anniversary. With the fun starting tomorrow (surprise!), Google Docs has offered some tips about how its free, cloud-based document suite can help us all win at NaNoWriMo.