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

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. #

• In class until 8:20 #
• In class until 9:45 and then studying #
• The Price is Right just isn’t the same with Drew Carey #
• I finally signed up for a del.icio.us account www.delicio.us.com/abeardmore #
• update: www.del.icio.us/abeardmore #
• so I guess the www. doesn’t work so here’s the real link that works for my new del.icio.us account http://del.icio.us/abeardmore #

On Tuesday evening Google started rolling out IMAP support to Gmail and Google Apps accounts! This will be a great new feature because it now will allow people to use multiple devices to keep track of their email.

For example: I use my email account on my Mororola Q for quick email checking and then I use Mail.app on my MacBook Pro as my mail email program. This is possible through the IMAP protocol because all email is saved on the server not on the client side.

Before IMAP Google just provided POP which was not the best solution for multiple email clients and that was the reason for my hesitancy for switching to Google Apps. Now they have added the single feature that I needed so now I am switching as soon as possible!

While I was browsing the Google’s services page a few months ago I stumbled upon an awesome tool for small organizations all the way up to large corporations. Most people are familiar with Google’s applications services that include things like GTalk, Docs & Spreadsheets, Reader, Calendar and many more. These services are amazing because they are all in one place and very easily accessible.

One of the best things to do with these tools is to use them for collaboration on projects. For example: if I create a document, I can easily share it to other people that have Google accounts so we can work together and finish a document. This is great for businesses so that people can quickly work together to finish projects. Another thing that can be done is a group can chat at the same time using GTalk’s VOIP technology. There are pretty much infinite uses for all of Google’s services.

Businesses use more traditional methods for all these tools such as Microsoft Office for document creation and Microsoft Exchange Server for email and collaboration tools. These features are all quite expensive and most startups or nonprofit’s find it pretty difficult to have to purchase all this software.

An alternative for this is that a company or organization could use Google’s applications to do most of the tasks of collaboration for the great price of FREE! Google has released a service that organizations can utilize to create their own groups that they can use just for themselves. www.google.com/a has the details but essentially what you can do is sign up for an account which allows you to administer your organization and it gives you the ability to add users so that they can be under the group and use collaboration tools such as calendar and GTalk. The other really neat thing that can be done is that a person can purchase a domain name relatively inexpensively and be able to set the email to work with Google’s Gmail interface. I love this because then a user can login to one place which can be a custom URL that is setup for your domain name and they can access all these services and it is cordoned off so that only the users that are in the organization have access.

For example, I have adambeardmore.com’s email going to Google’s application service so that I can have email through Google. So instead of having to worry about a server going down or problems with my hosting company’s mail system, Google takes care of this and all data is safely hosted in their data centers. It takes a load off a tech because these critical services are already taken care of so they can concentrate on other things in the organization.

The process of setting this all up is relatively simple and Google’s site has a great step by step walk-through that contains instructions for several different scenarios of setting this system up.

I highly recommend this system to anyone who needs to get a small business or organization up and running quickly and if they don’t have enough capital to purchase all the expensive collaboration software right away. I have only scratched the surface of the power of the system. You really have to check it out yourself to see all the amazing things that can be done with this tool.

Check it out today at www.google.com/a