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

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.

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

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

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

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