gary's web sofa » Google

It looks like my data snuck up into the cloud without telling me…

gary — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:12:10 +0000

I bought a new laptop recently. This isn’t my first PC upgrade. I think I’m on my 9th laptop at this stage. It’s always been a dreadful chore, exporting, packaging, burning, installing, copying, saving, importing and then configuring everything. it used to take a solid weekend before I was 100% comfortable. This time around was very disconcerting. I basically switched on my new laptop, installed a few tools, entered my MS Office license key and I was pretty much good to go.

Because my current work style is very fluid, where I hop between my office and home PCs, a laptop, a netbook and an iPhone, it made sense to try and keep my data where I could access it regardless of device. I basically have 3 categories of data: email, my web browser environment (bookmarks, stored passwords, history) and unstructured data (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, JPEGs etc. files). I use a few cloud based services to supplement these, but more on them another time.

Documents: I’m fairly neat when it comes to organising data on my laptop. Everything is in the My Documents folder. I used to use Beyond Compare to manually sync my desktop and laptop but for the last while I’ve been using Microsoft Live Mesh Beta to keep everything in sync automatically. A change or addition on any system ripples around to all the rest in real time. This means I can start work on a document in the office and seamlessly pick up where I left off when I get home without having to do a thing. On the new PC I just installed the Mesh client and left it to do it’s thing over night. It pulled my data from the online copy and placed it just where I’d expect it.

Email: POP is for noobs; IMAP is king. Seeing as Google are generous enough to give away 7GB+ of email storage I’d be a fool not to use it. A few years ago (pretty much as soon as it was available) I created an @garypigott.net Google Apps account and shoved all my email up there. Right now there are 118,527 emails, occupying 2298MB of space, and vitally, it’s completely searchable in exactly the same way you’d search the web using Google. I access exactly the same data using Gmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, and the iPhone mail client.

Web Browser Environment: My browser of choice is Firefox, which is handy a) because it’s multi-platform and b) because of Weave. Weave is an add-on that moves your bookmarks, history and passwords into the cloud. You can install the add-on on each of your computers, regardless of OS and everything is kept in sync. Weave is open source, so surely some enterprising and generous developer out there will churn out a Weave add-on for IE, Opera and Safari…

Gmail on mobile phones

gary — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 11:22:36 +0000

The company’s Google apps deployment went mostly fine. The one pain in the ass is with our smartphones. We all still use Nokia e61 phones and used to rely on push IMAP for email on the go. You’d connect once and stay connected all day. The Blackberry platform is great if you need centralised management and control, but total overkill on a small technology company where there’s a reasonable technical competence across the board.

While push IMAP worked perfectly fine with our previous service, it’s a bit flaky on Gmail. We tend to see random disconnections without warning and the phone’s “reconnect every X minutes” function seems to be a bit of a crock and isn’t fixing it……

Google Apps For Domains Migration

gary — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:09:48 +0000

At work we’d been kicking around a migration from our IMAP/SMTP hosted email service for a good while now. Our provider was top notch, but we wanted shared calendars & workspaces too, so we needed to move on. We could have deployed something like Exchange internally, but that means buying in another server, Windows, Exchange, SharePoint and anti-virus software, getting it all put together, and then spending the time maintaining it and fixing it when it breaks. Our engineering resources are a) pretty much fully committed and b) not Windows specialists, so we’d probably end up subbing it out to a contractor. We’re a small bunch (9 inboxes and another 20 distribution lists and email aliases), so the €7k+ spend over 3 years (€260/inbox/year) to deploy this solution didn’t make much sense.

Outsourcing to a managed service provider is the only thing that makes sense if you’re small and have these functionality requirements. I could sign up with someone like Intermedia on a syndicated Exchange server for $125/month. ActiveSync (mobile device synchronisation) is another $2.95/inbox/month, and there’s loads more optional, but essential extras, like additional storage. Basically at the end of it you’re looking at €150/inbox/year, which is a big improvement, especially when it means that I’ve no hardware to manage, and no housekeeping to do.

Google have had their Google Apps for Domains suite out for a year or so now. You get Gmail with your own domain name instead of @gmail.com, a calendar app, a basic browser based word processor, presentation & spreadsheet app that allows multiple users update the same file simultaneously, and a Wiki. We started using it informally when they launched the “Team Edition”, that gave you everything but Gmail, so you didn’t have to move away from your email provider. The Premier Edition gives you 25GB inboxes for $50/inbox/year, and the standard edition, with conventional Gmail adverts and a 6GB inbox is free!

We went with Google and threw the switch last Tuesday and it’s bedding in nicely. Over the past week though a couple of “wouldn’t it be nice if…” things have come up:

Full contact information, and not just name & email address would be good.
Proper contact sharing would be nice. Contacts are shared, but only in as much as the auto-complete function can pull addresses from other employee’s address books when you’re composing an email on gmail.com.
The ability to sync contacts with Outlook and mobile devices would be a huge step forward.