technology, internet oddities & other random stuff
Groupware
It looks like my data snuck up into the cloud without telling me…
Feb 1st
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, More >
Gmail on mobile phones
Apr 6th
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 More >
Google Apps For Domains Migration
Mar 24th
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. More >
Open Source Document Management
Oct 26th
At work we used to be a small operation with very few documents and it was nice and simple to keep everything straight. I, as the CTO, am the keeper of all the operational procedures, network diagrams etc, and Pierre (our marketing guru) manages all the sales and marketing documents. The company web server runs a CMS called Joomla, which has a decent enough file manager, so we put the documents up there in a password protected area when they’re complete and we want to make them available to selected clients.
We’ve started to grow, both in head count and sophistication, so More >
The search for a Microsoft Exchange Alternative
Jun 4th
Back in the old days phone and fax was king. E-mail was nifty gimmick, but nothing more. All you needed to do to provide e-mail to your users was to give them access on their desktop. You could get away with draconian inbox size limits to simplify your storage and backup requirements. An outage of a couple of hours was no big deal.
Because of this we had loads of different options if you needed email. You could use an “enterprise” platform like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and the like, or you could roll your own with any number of SMTP, POP or More >
