Web Worker Daily

Google Apps is a favorite tool of many web workers, but soon it might be just as well-known to many of our cubicle-bound corporate colleagues. That’s because Google is making great strides into the enterprise, taking on the likes of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino with the enterprise version of the product.

With its recent earnings statement, Google noted that growth in its enterprise business was accelerating. That acceleration includes some recent large wins with enterprise customers for Google Apps — with some big names in the bunch, including Jaguar Landrover (15,000 users), Rentokil Initial (35,000 users), Motorola’s handset division (20,000 users) and Konica Minolta (7,000 users), adding to some large customers reported earlier this year. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the reasons that I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard was the new ability to sync the Mac OS X Address Book with Gmail’s or Google Apps’ Contacts. This function has been around for a while, but for some reason, it was previously available only to iPhone users.

I really appreciate well-produced synchronization, because I’ve experienced firsthand how difficult it is to get right. It seems that software developers can never quite agree on how to organize contact information, so everyone’s databases are different. For a long time, for instance, one of the major makers of financial management software didn’t even create city, state and ZIP/postal code fields, opting instead for an address field where all of that information was run together, making the data very difficult to parse.

So I’ve been pleasantly surprised with Snow Leopard’s “sync with Google” function, especially because I have a fairly large address book, and most of its entries have photos associated with them, something that very few sync solutions even try to support. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, we covered the release of the Microsoft Office 2010 Web Apps Technical Preview. While it was great to get a first look at this release, it was even more interesting to pull back and read the flurry of blog postings, pundit pontifications, tweets and articles that were all over the web, ranging from those stating that this was the end of Microsoft Office, to those saying that Microsoft Office 2010 Web Apps is going to wipe Google Apps and Zoho off the map.

Most of these reviews were written by people used to trying out early release beta software. However, it is one thing for a new web office offering like Office Web Apps not to live up to its potential in a periodical’s lab environment; out in the wild, billable hours go up in smoke, deadlines get blown, and reputations get bruised if you adopt a web office app that doesn’t live up to its promises or mangles a document.

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I spent the weekend updating my Mac to OS X 10.6.1 Snow Leopard. It went well, thanks to a little planning and a lot of patience. Windows users are facing the decision as to whether and when to upgrade to Windows 7. Here are some questions to consider when you’re faced with an operating system upgrade. Read the rest of this entry »

A new iPhone app called reMail gives iPhone users the email archive search functionality available in applications like Gmail and Outlook.  reMail is priced at $4.99 until September 1st ($9.99 after that date). The creator of reMail is Gabor Cselle, who has previously worked on Gmail at Google, and who was the VP Engineering at Xobni, an Outlook add-on which has previously been reviewed at WWD.

The iPhone does have Spotlight search already built-in, but Spotlight has a limitation. It can only search what is stored on your phone. For an email account, this means that it can only search a couple hundred messages, not the account’s entire archives. And how often is the email you are searching for one of the most recent two hundred? In my case, the answer is rarely. Read the rest of this entry »

As web workers, we are often asked to help friends and relatives fix computer problems. For me, the majority of these problems seem to be related to email. It’s ironic, as email is now less popular than social networks.

So why is email such a hassle?

• It’s more than 30 years old. Email has come a long way, but its underlying protocols haven’t changed much since the 1970s.
• It’s really three different systems. Sending (SMTP) and receiving (POP or IMAP) are totally separate functions, and are often handled on different servers. That’s why I often hear comments like “I can receive, but I can’t send” from clients.
• It’s being used for a lot of things it was never designed to do, like send images and attachments, highly formatted messages, signatures and calendar entries.
• It’s been overrun by spam, and even well-designed spam filters aren’t perfect, and cause unwanted side effects, like messages that get misidentified as spam, or just go away.
• Email software is too complex. These programs that were originally built for offline use; that is, they were set up so that users could read and write messages without being connected to the internet. Sending and receiving would happen in batches. That made sense when internet connections were slow, expensive and charged by the minute. Now that most people have always-on connections like cable or DSL, that process is less necessary. Desktop email client software is a pain to set up and use; as someone who helps many people with email, Outlook is the bane of my existence.
• Many of us connect to the Internet in more than one place — at work, at home, and on cell phones. It can be very frustrating to realize that we’ve left the message we needed to reply to at the office.
• Many of us have more than one email address. I try to keep my work and personal email separate, plus I have a series of email addresses that I use when registering on websites that might try to send spam. And I have several email addresses that were given to me, such as the ones that are automatically created when signing up for instant-messaging services like Yahoo, AIM and Windows Live/MSN.

What can be done to overcome these problems? Here are some tips that might help you and your clients and friends be more productive. Read the rest of this entry »

The Gmail team at Google has been busy lately, haven’t they?

Last week, Google introduced the Multiple Inboxes Lab, which works for both @gmail.com and Google Apps addresses. This lets you sub-divide your inbox into multiple views; check out Simon’s Multiple Inboxes screencast from yesterday for an overview. I didn’t enable the feature for a few days, thinking that I already had a pretty good system for getting to Inbox Zero and staying on top of what needed to get done. Turns out that multiple inboxes makes a good system even better.

You can get quite creative with the panes you have set up in your Multiple Inboxes beyond the default is:starred or is:unread that it comes with out of the box. Here are two inbox panes I’ve configured that are helping me stay organized.

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With no Stevenote at this year’s Macworld, the world not only awaited Apple’s 2009 lineup with bated breath, but also the company’s inaugural Schillergram. Sadly, Apple’s announcements were widely accepted as being underwhelming, lacking the razzle-dazzle of previous Macworld keynotes; no iPods, Mac minis or iPhones, but a slew of application updates and the death of DRM for music (yay!)

Om provided a great overview and perhaps the most pertinent release for web workers was the beta launch of iWork.com, Apple’s foray into web-based office productivity applications.

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