BeardmoreWeb

While listening to this week’s TWIT (This Week in Tech) Chris Pirillo mentioned that he used Plaxo to sync his Outlook hosted exchange with iCal, Address book and Gmail.  I had been looking for an all in one application like this for quite some time but I had only found pay services that didn’t have as much capability. 

After about an hour of testing and setup,I have determined that Plaxo is perfect! It provides a ton of features for synchronization and it has a free version that takes care of all my needs!  I installed it on my MacBook Pro and on my tablet and everything is now syncing perfectly!  Before plaxo, I had to always go to Outlook to look up a contact or an event which took forever!!!  Now all I have to do is either go to GMail, iCal or Address Book to look up up information.  It is a much needed product that I am so happy to have found!  Check it out at http://www.plaxo.com

Thank you Chris for mentioning this killer application!

Things that are now in sync:

Outlook Contacts & Calendar

Motorola Q Smartphone connected via hosted exchange

GMail Contacts

GMail Calendar

iCal

Address Book

And I’m sure the list will grow in the future

This is just a quick post plugging the new sites that have launched in the last month.

www.Lancermusic.com was just totally revamped with Joomla! This new version will make it much easier for the Band and Choir directors to keep their site current.

www.princeofpeacealcrescent.org was also redesigned with Joomla! The goal here was to create a site with much more expandability so that more content can be added and yet still be organized in a way that will be intuitive and easy to navigate.

The Drupal site is still coming, I am waiting for the 6.0 release.

In the beginning of December, I was elected as Chief Web Officer for the University of Minnesota Entrepreneurship club. With this came the responsibility to update the site www.ceomakers.com and make it run with a CMS to allow more interaction with club members. I am pretty accustomed to using Joomla! with most websites that I launch for clients but I have recognized that it definitely has its weaknesses. Naturally because of prior experience, my initial thought was to use Joomla! for this site but unfortunately I couldn’t get it to do everything that was needed for the project.

My specific needs for this site are to have the ability to have a custom content type for the CEO’s that speak at our meetings. This schedule on the old site is added into the database using PhpMyAdmin and then the main page has a little blurb covering the events for the upcoming week. The speaker data is also available as a list and then when a user clicks on the speaker’s name, it takes them to an individual page that has a full bio of the speaker. This is a very important item that needs to be on the site and I just didn’t see any extensions for Joomla! that would add this functionality.

Because of this, I decided to check out Drupal because I had watched a Google Tech Talk session about implementing Drupal and it seemed like it would be able to provide the ability to add a custom content type. I decided to install Drupal on a stand alone server to take a look at its functionality. After playing with the software for two hours, I found that it has all the functionality that I need and much more. With Drupal’s CCK module, I was able to make the speaker content type in about ten minutes and then through the Views module, I was able to create all the content views that were available through the old site.

Another great thing will be that the new ceomakers.com will also have a graphical calendar that will pull from the speakers list and an events list as well.

After playing with Drupal, I came up with a list of things that I really liked.

1. CCK which makes custom content types is a tool that I can’t believe that I have lived without.

2. User control is so much more extensible than Joomla! Drupal gives the ability to create unlimited user permission sets and also gives the ability to create custom user profile fields right in the Drupal core.

3. Drupal modules are so much more empowering than Joomla! extensions. Drupal modules are more able to integrate with other site services to create a unified site. The best example of this is how the calendar module that I used was able to pull from multiple content types to create an integrated graphical calendar. Joomla! extensions just don’t provide that ability to work with other extensions to create a seamless solution.

All in all, I feel that my eyes have been opened to what a CMS should include. Drupal just provides so many more functions that Joomla! can’t do.

To document my experience of using Drupal, I plan on posting about my experiences as I go through the re-design process of ceomakers.com

I just wanted to update everyone on my complaint that OWA does not include the month view.  Finally Microsoft has addressed this problem with Exchange 2007 SP1.  I received their Technet email and under the new features notes, they commented that the month view will be available but from the looks of it, it will only be available in the premium version of OWA which currently only runs with Internet Explorer.  So, if you’re looking to use the month view in OWA, you’ll have to fire up IE again….sigh…

The list of other new features in Exchange 2007 SP1 can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676323.aspx

When Google enabled IMAP on all accounts I was finally given enough reason to move my primary email over to Google’s App’s service.  I had always wanted to switch to Google App’s for my email except the problem was that I couldn’t sync my email with IMAP and I need this important feature to make everything work.  My setup includes using Mail on OSX and using the built in mail application on Windows Mobile so POP would not have cut it in my situation.  So, as soon as I got word that IMAP was being enabled for Gmail I immediately created a Google App’s account for Beardmoreweb.com.  Migration was very easy, all I did was saved my messages from my old server running IMAP to my local computer and then reset my mail clients to the new Google App’s settings. (This documentation can be found on the GMail help site)  After making the changes to my mail client, I simply had to login to my Google App’s Gmail account and turn on IMAP.  Once this was enabled, everything worked great!

My email sync’s with the server faster than ever before and Gmail’s web interface is light years ahead of Squirrelmail which used to take at least two minutes to load all my emails.

Probably the best feature is that I get almost 5 gig’s of storage per account!  This is a huge increase from what I was dealing with on my old email server.

The hardest part of this was training my family how to use the Gmail web interface.  It took them a little bit of time to understand the conversation oriented layout because they had been used to Squirrelmail, they are still adjusting.

From a management standpoint, Google’s interface is great giving easy access to creation/modification of users and services.  I have no complaints at all, my only wish is that I could have done this long ago!

All in all, the transition took about 3 hours to change my mx records, to dump my email from my old mail server to the new Gmail account, to setup my two mail clients and lastly, to train the rest of my family to use it.  It was a very worthwhile move for me and I highly recommend Google App’s to anyone needing a great IMAP email server with a huge amount of storage all for the price of free!

To switch to Google App’s go to www.google.com/a

• Watching a movie at Coffman #

• At Sally’s for the Entre club part #
• Working on an online class all day #

• Dell finally came out with their own tablet! The best thing is that it’s multi touch! http://tinyurl.com/2×2pq2 #
• Headed to bed after a long evening of studying #
• Done with my test! #
• Going to the Thursday Entre club meeting #
• Doing Psychology research #

Since I am a student at the University of Minnesota I am constantly using my laptop on campus.  The SSID for the University of Minnesota is" U of M Wireless"  and I have it set in my wireless settings to automatically join this network.  Just the other evening, when I was in my apartment and I turned my MacBook Pro on, I saw that it was trying to connect to an adhoc network also named U of M wireless.  This scares me because someone could think that they are on a legit U of M wireless network but really be connecting to a rogue device.  One would think that Leopard would be able to differentiate between connecting to a regular AP and an adhoc device.  I am pretty sure that I saw that Tiger could do this differentiation and I am wondering why Leopard isn’t doing this.

If anyone else has had this same issue, leave a comment.

• I am having problems printing using Word 2004 for mac. Whenever I try to print, Word immediately crashes! sigh…. #
• I am waking up early tomorrow so it’s time for bed. #
• Studying for Economics today #
• In class until 3:30 then studying for Economics. #