Google Apps for Business

So if you haven’t yet made the google apps plunge for your business, the new year is the time to do so.

Despite Google having made the standard edition of google apps more difficult to find (by the way it’s here) I really don’t think that most businesses require more space than is provided for by the free edition; seriously 7gb and growing.

Re-directing your domain couldn’t be easier Google has a simple set of instructions for you to follow. It does involve changing CNAME entries and the like but it really isn’t very difficult and google has some great advice: available here with popular instructions for most domain hosts.

I’d also really advise if you want your employees to be able to easily access your services to set easy to find addresses such as: mail.yourdomain.com, calendar.yourdomain.com, doc.yourdomain.com and sites.yourdomain.com. Google has some easy to follow instructions here.

Uploading your archived email is also pretty easy. For windows users Google has it’s own special uploading program found here. For Mac users once you have setup your email (IMAP is essential) then you can just drag and drop your emails from the old files to the new and wait for the upload process (it can take some time) and you’re done.

For calendars, just export from outlook or ical in the vcal format and you can import your calendar directly to your new google apps calendar. Then share as you like amongst other employees. This is particularly good for office wide holiday calendars and the like, keeping everyone up to date with whats going on.

And really that’s the basic setup. Questions in the comments. Oh and if you need some help please don’t hesitate to drop me a line.

MS finally concedes OpenOffice is a Threat!

It seems that Microsoft is finally waking up to the threat posed by OpenOffice. I’ve been slowly moving my clients over to OpenOffice for the past year, after all it’s free (which is attractive for SME), its interface is more like the traditional interface offered by MS Office in the good old days, and it’s Open Source so it’s continually improving (as a bonus at no extra cost!).

The largest obstacle I’ve found to the adoption of OpenOffice is resistance from staff, who in some instances seem wholly opposed to anything that is not labeled “Microsoft”. Then second is concern that they won’t be able to open .doc files, crazy I know, but people still seem confused. I’ve even got some people to use OpenOffice files as their standard format (usually if they don’t need to send files out).

Anyway there are many consultants like me who think that Microsoft’s days are numbered in the Office workplace, and that’s without talking about Google Docs. Anyway, others are finally cluing up to this. To read more see this article from computerworlduk.com that prompted my little comment.

Search Goddamn It…

I’ve only had Google Chrome installed a few weeks, but it is already changing my browsing habits.

The most evident of which is using the url bar to search. This is perhaps the single most natural development of the browser I have experienced in years. It is becoming, however, quite irritating… and you’ve guessed it: I keep on expecting Safari to search using the same method.

I’ve always considered Apple to be the leading light of software minimalism, after all look at the trouble Steve Jobs went to to get rid of the screws on the Macbook Pro or the edge to edge glass on the new iMac (tablet hint anyone?) so I am puzzled that there has been no adaptation of this Chrome method to Safari.

Come on Apple give me a little New Year cheer and adapt Safari now!

Bye Bye CDs / DVDs

So it’s the week before the New Year and like most of you out there I am considering my resolutions and doing some general spring cleaning. Now for geeks (and particularly those of an OCD bent) this normally includes a spring clean of various computer systems. And this year my focus has been on my CDs and DVDs.

Over the years I’ve built up a large collection of CDs and DVDs to which I’ve burnt backups of my systems, old client systems and the like. In fact I have a four stories high CD holder that my grandmother bought stuffed to the brim and overflowing to an artful stack carefully balanced on top.

I also have a much more artful and pleasing desktop CD holder from Eva Solo that perches by my iMac and gives me access to those essential daily CDs and DVDs. (Did I seriously just write that? Honestly I can’t remember when I last used a CD or a DVD… Snow Leopard installation perhaps?) Anyway if you fancy one for yourself you can buy it from Amazon here.

Unfortunately although I’ve always taken basic care of my CDs I’ve never been one of those people who is insistent about always putting them immediately back in the case (or paper slip rather, I’ve way to many for actual cases) and over time they’ve become scratched and generally worn down as this rather imperfect medium for storing information tends to get. (Did anyone seriously think they’d last a decade? I’m struggling with ones five years old).

Anyway as I started to transfer the CDs to my collection of HDs it quickly became apparent that I was going to have to give them a little more tender loving care than I thought. Now I can just about hear the sigh of some you reading who always take perfect care of their CDs and DVDs, but in my defence it’s perhaps because I stopped buying CDs when I got my iPod or because I never really got into DVDs beyond a service like LoveFilm but I never thought about how damaging a few scratches could be.

So demanding an easy, quick solution, using just what I might have around the house, I remembered an old geek tale that you could repair damaged CDs with banana skins. Surely it couldn’t be true… but what the hell, I had some bananas, was a tad hungry so it seemed the way to go. But before embarking without instructions I did a quick google and returned these instructions. So rummaged through the kitchen and came up with a not too brown looking banana (it is the holidays), some window cleaner, some kitchen roll and a handy duster.

So all good to go, I picked a CD that had been giving me some difficulty. One file was repeatedly refusing to copy across (the kind of frustration I was looking to remedy). Not reading the instructions right the first time I had eaten the banana (seriously was I gonna waste it on some CDs) so I had to just use the skin. And after a couple of rub downs, followed by some squirts of window cleaner, the CD was looking better, and low behold when I inserted it into the drive it copied the file.

I was now on a mission and five hours later (did I mention I had a lot of CDs  / DVDs – 158 if you want to know) and some 22.4 Gb of data transferred I was all done. Now I just have to find a sensible way to dispose of my CDs rather than sending them to landfill. Any ideas would be welcomed in the comments.

Oh and for those of you wanting to know if it’s sensible to push all of your backups on to some local HDs can I point you to my earlier post on dropbox where most of my files have now been backed up to. Great system.

Finally Google Chrome for Mac

It’s finally here. Some of you may have been using the developer releases and hacks to get google Chrome working on your Mac, I certainly have, however, it is now possible to get the real versions, albeit with plugins disabled. To join the google love visit: here.

Unfortunately for lots of Mac users google has only made Chrome compatible with Intel chips, which is a real shame as I know a good number of older Mac users who would really benefit from Chrome.

What does it look like?

Every once in a while I get a call like this morning from an old customer, who I no longer have remote access to, running an old version of OS X (10.4 in this instance) and they want me to guide them through a network problem they have (in this instance another computer had hijacked the manual IP used by their Mac) and I struggle to remember what the network settings panel for their version of the OS looks like.

After a quick google I was able to find this very useful website called: www.simplehelp.net which had pictures of what I needed. Though it wasn’t too clear how to navigate them at first (click on the highlighted part of the image) it did provide me with what I needed. So if your offering support I thought I’d post their screenshots for the following OSes:

- Mac OS 10.5

- Mac OS 10.4

Unfortunately they don’t have any older examples, or the newer 10.6 (but I’m running that so I don’t need it)

For windows fans (or those poor souls who have to support it :-/) they also have the TCP/IP Settings for the following OSes:

- Windows 7

- Windows Vista

- Windows XP

- Windows ME

- Windows 2000

So hopefully I won’t need to rely on either my memory or google to get me there again, I can just come here! Phew.

Buying More Google Space

So it seems that you can now buy additional google space, which is kind of cool, but it seems to me that google’s apps are still rather fragmented, for example: you cannot currently share your gmail space with your picassa account, although email takes up a infinitely smaller amount of space I’m currently using 2210 MB (29%) of my 7398 MB allowance covering about 50,000 emails and all their respective attachments, whereas I only have 13 albums in my picassa account and I’m using 378 MB (36.97%) of my 1024 MB allowance.

Although it is great to be able to buy additional space and it is certainly something I’d consider, if they can share purchased space why do they not allow us to have a single quota shared between all of the google apps? It’d certainly make more sense… In the mean time if you want to buy more space you can do so, at ever depreciating prices by visiting: here.

Upgrading to VMWare Fusion 3

So my aunt called me this morning and asked me to pop over and upgrade her VMWare Fusion 2 to the new version 3, which I had persuaded VMWare to give her a free upgrade to, after biting the bullet and buying version 2 as a replacement to parallels one day before the period for which they were offering free upgrades.

The upgrade process for the new program and her virtual machine went like a dream and in a little under twenty minutes after downloading version 3 we were up and running. This is, unfortunately, where the problems with VMWare tools began…

The initial installation ran the VMWare tools installer but it simply didn’t go anywhere and after about twenty minutes of waiting around for it I did some googling and came across this article on the VMWare site that advised me to uninstall the previous version of VMWare tools before proceeding. A few minutes later this was done, but now not even the installer ran.

After some additional googling I learnt that it worked by mounting an ISO to the virtual machine and then the hunt was on for where that file would be locally stored so I could manually burn it to a CD and side step this issue. After a good amount of time I found the ISO was stored here:

Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/isoimages/windows.iso

After a little playing around I copied it to a usb and mounted the usb in windows and voila I could now install the VMWare tools successfully. If it hadn’t been for the problem with VMWare tools this upgrade would have been an hour at most job, but as it was it took over two hours (ouch) so if any of you are having the same problem, rest assured that the solution really is quite simple.