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.
I recently in the past month subscribed to hosted Exchange for my email. I decided to go with Exchange 2007. Previous to that I had used Exchange 2003 for about two years and did enjoy my Outlook Web Access experience. There were a few bugs that were annoying such as the contacts area but that was manageable. After switching to Exchange 2007 the first thing I notice that I am not able to live without is the month view on the calendar! I cannot believe that Microsoft did not keep this feature in OWA. I always view my calendar by month so being limited to viewing my calendar in week view is a HUGE pain! Seriously, how hard would it be to keep the month view in OWA? Hopefully when Microsoft sends out their big exchange update they will fix this problem because it is really annoying to me!
Everything else in the new OWA is top notch with many new enhancements that make it more like Outlook than ever before, my only complaint so far is the calendar!
As of right now, these are the only options available! (Day, Work Week and Week) Where is my Month View?
Google just released an online presentation app to go along with its Docs and Spreadsheets applications. I just began to play with it, but so far I am quite impressed with the interface. The app can import from PowerPoint documents that are uploaded to the system which is very cool. It also comes with many different design templates and layouts which look very professional. Working with text and other media objects on the slides seems very easy. As with Docs and Spreadsheets, collaboration is allowed which makes it possible for multiple people to work on a presentation which is great and much easier to do in this environment rather than working with just one file and trying to merge the changes.
I see this app having great potential when used in conjunction with an app like SKYPE or Google Talk because it would allow meetings to take place online without the need for expensive specialized services. The presenter can start a show and then give people the url of the presentation. From there, users can login with their Google accounts and watch the presentation that is controlled by the presenter. There is even a chat feature built into the presentation window so that people can give you feedback even if you choose.
The only con that I see to this system so far is that there currently is no way to save a presentation file out of the app yet, so once it is in the presentation app, you are pretty much stuck to staying with it this way.
I hope that in the future export options are made available and I also hope that this can somehow integrate with Google Talk to make this a really great online presentation system.
The system does require you to signup for a free Google Account which I recommend everyone do because Google has many great services that everyone should take a look at.
I would like to welcome mississippiriverwild.com to BeardmoreWeb. This site is for Mississippi River Wild which is an organization that is in support of keeping the Mississippi river an enjoyable habitat for all.
This is a volunteer project that I did to help the organization get started. The group is just getting off the ground so check out the site in the near future to see what events they have planned to help the Mississippi River.
I just wanted to give everyone a status update as to what I’ve been up to lately.
First off, I have transferred to the University of Minnesota Twin Cities to finish my Bachelor degree in Management Information Systems from the Carlson School of Management.
My new address is 2515 University Ave. SE Apartment 109. Minneapolis, MN 55414.
My new work phone number is 608.498.4950 (Courtesy of Grand Central)
Second, I am no longer with CESA #4. I have turned to doing technology consulting for various organizations. One such organization that I will be spending quite some time with is Redman & Associates LLC. My official title is Technology Consultant. I will be working mostly on the website and the day to day needs of the company. Most of this work will be done remotely.
Well, I kept meaning to post this picture somewhere, but I could not figure out just the right place, so I just gave up and decided to post it here. This is a picture of Terry at a rest stop on our way to the Bunker Ranch Observatory. www.bunker-ranch.org
He didn’t know what hit him until he realized what sign he was resting his arm on! muahahaha!
For those of you who haven’t seen this, I thought I’d post it on my page for easy access. This article talks about implementing biometric finger print scanners in the lunch point of sale system at La Crescent High School. This project was done in conjunction with a company out of Caledonia Minnesota called Educational Biometric Technology. They helped us greatly with giving us the necessary software and scanners to implement the system.
After several hours of being down, beardmoreweb.com is back up. Turns out that I had old name server entries for this domain name and the domain name for the old name server entries expired meaning that the pointer was no longer valid. So…the long and the short of it is that I had to update my nameserver information to the new settings so that everything will work fine again, and so far everything appears to be up again!
