2009 July | The WaveAdept Blog

Archive for July, 2009

What Do You Get When You Pay For Google Apps?

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

It’s quite a firmly held belief that the only extra you get when you pay for Google App Enterprise is an SLA – not true, you get all this for as many users as you want with NO ads:

Google Apps Mail: 25 GB of storage per user account, including powerful search, integrated chat, and enhanced message organization and retrieval.

Google Calendar: For coordinating meetings, events, and deadlines.

Google Talk: IM and VOIP client for text messaging, voice calling, and file transfer (with no file size restrictions).

Google Docs: Authoring tool for creating, sharing, and collaborating on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Google Sites: Collaboration site for publishing project-related Web pages using tools that team members can easily master.

Google Video: Tool for sharing rich video information, training, announcements, and other important communications.

Message Security for Google Apps Premier: Tools for enforcing corporate email policies.

Message Discovery for Google Apps Premier (optional upgrade): Tools for archiving and retrieving corporate email.

Having said that, once you’ve got Google Apps up and running within your organisation, then what – like-for-like replacement of (say) Microsoft Office is all well and good and will win praises for cost saving but the business will be scraping the surface of what it can do for them if they aren’t then taken through a planned next step.

Yes, we help you answer and deliver, “What next?”

Posted in Google Apps | No Comments »

Thank You To Decisive Flow For Our Website

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Working with Natalie and the team at Decisive Flow re-affirmed our own ideas that getting things done can be fun, active, focused and cost effective. They are such a cool web team and have created everything you see around you (on the screen I mean, not the chair you’re sitting on or the room or …)

Thank you and know we’ll be back when we want more (we always want more) AND have no hesitation bringing clients with us.

Posted in Thank You, Uncategorized | No Comments »

One FREE Ticket To BrewNZ Beervana

Monday, July 27th, 2009

We know there are quite a number of our readers that would love to go along to the BREWNZ Beervana event being held at the Wellington Town Hall on Friday 28th August (5pm-9pm) for:

Beervana hits Wellington for a celebration of the craft of brewing – full of events that promote the industry.

Come to the Wellington Town Hall for the ultimate beer tasting. Try beers from Auckland to Invercargill and even Australia! This opportunity happens only once a year to sample the freshest brews which have come from many many miles apart – all in one room, surrounded by fellow beer lovers.

Rub shoulders with 30+ premium craft brewers in one room, with tastings of up to 120 different beers.

Experience beer and food pairings (with Neil Miller and Martin Bosley) that you never thought possible!

Meet NZ’s leading female brewer and discover how women have had a huge part to play in beer’s history and will continue to play in the future.

So, how can we help? By giving you a free ticket!

What do you have to do?
Leave a comment (yes, traffic generation and all that) answering the following question

Explain ONE reason you would move your organisation to Google Apps?

We’ll pick the best answer out of the cyber-hat at 9am on Wednesday 19th August

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Here We Go Folks, It’s All On …

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

Here we go folks, it’s all on … strap yourself in for the ride of your life … weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee …

If you thought Google had lost its mojo, its panache, its disruptive nature by being bloody wealthy then you were wrong.

THIS is battle lines drawn.
THIS is bringing it on.

…. but THIS (Google Chrome OS) is where we (some) think it’s going:

… today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be

This battle will take around 18 months (ever had a child, it’s such a short time looking back eh!).

Can you feel the difference, are listening to the way your IT people are talking, feeling the weight that incumpents are carrying … the world is changing folks, are you?

BTW: I remember being at a IT conference in the 1980’s when someone stated that they, “… want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot … ” – 20 years to wait for something JUST TO BLOODY WORK, not too long to wait … is it?!?

Posted in cloud computing | No Comments »

3 Steps: How To Migrate “Your Mail” To GMail / Google Apps

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

Moving from one system to another is never fun the very thought of migration can can place a wall between you and a “better world”. This can be frustrating as hell when you can see the new world being used by others but you just can’t get to it because of the system you’re currently using.

In the email client world there hasn’t been a lot of innovation because, to be honest, once you’ve got sending, receiving and replying sorted what else do you want. There are clients that are slightly better at finding your emails, managing your contacts and hooking into your calendar system but fundamentally it’s been a world of “meh” for a long time.

But then along came GMail.

GMail initially and then the Google Apps version changed the way we look at:

Size: it is so big we no longer think about removing old emails to save space
Search: finding old emails is no longer an issue, it just works
Conversations: emails are no longer distinct elements but a part of a conversation viewable as one – see all replies in one place, yaay!
Available how you want: use your email via your iPhone, Outlook, Firebird, other web accounts … however you want. Plus consolidate your other emails accounts into GMail – one service to rule them all.
Spam: it is no longer an issue for Google Apps users, simple as that
Labels (“tags”): getting away from the “one folder” approach and allowing any conversation to be labelled (automatically if you want) with as many labels as you want makes finding conversations so much easier (if you’re not naturally a searcher)
Labs: there’s so many “if only it could” about products and the Google approach is to allow innovation and new stuff through all the time using the Labs “add-on” – eg, need to display online photos from an email, add in the Lab item; need to have more control over your IMAP access; add in the Lab item

All of these pieces of functionality add up to a seamless and smooth experience for communicating with people – it rocks!

OK, sounds awesome BUT …

How do I move my .PST files into GMail / Google Apps?
Can I use Microsoft Outlook with Google Apps?
How do I transfer my Lotus Notes email into Google Apps?
Can I get my mail when I’m not connected to the Internet? (yes,of course)
How can I move my contacts from Outlook into GMail?
What’s the difference between the GMail interface and Outlook?
I’ve heard that GMail goes down and there’s no way I can afford to be without email!
GMail’s OK for personal use but we need governance, security and archival – how can I get that?
… [enter your own question here ]

Yep, everyone has questions when there’s a change and that’s just how it should be, in fact my first step in the process of migrating your email to Google Apps is …

1. Question The Brave New World

My first question to you is, “Why are you moving to Google Apps?”

I know I should probably sell you all the pros as the silver bullets defeating all your woes and dismiss the cons as mere machinations of the competition but that’s not my job. My job is to ensure YOU get the best system for YOUR business.

Take a look at how your staff use your current email client – are there problems? Ask yourself where you’re going with your email in the future – do you need access anytime/anywhere? How do “real people” in your organisation use email, what are the links they have to other applications (particularly calendaring) that you have to think of?

In essence take the “shiny new toy” label off Google Apps, sit back with the real business reasons for changing and put them onto a piece of paper – if it all adds up then change, if not then don’t.

For those that decide that there is a definite business reason for changing (examples include lower operational cost, huge decrease in IT support requirements and increased flexibility for users) then you’ll start to think about how to get from A to B …

2. Do You Need To Migrate Everything?

Change is never easy and one way to avoid change is to not do it. By that I mean only change when you have to – do you have to change EVERYTHING?

Emails
Maybe you can get away with only migrating last weeks emails, last months emails, emails send by current customers, emails that were direct to you and not CC. Why migrate everything when you may never need to read them again? I’m not saying you have to pick a subset but this is a good time to have an email cull

Oh, and you may chose to migrate over time using dual delivery of email – mail goes to the new shiny Google Apps and to the old tired system

Contacts

Another good opportunity to dump those prospective client details from the 1990s – they aren’t calling you back and you’ve surely got all their wrong details anyway.

Experience

This is a hard one for a lot of people but if you think about it in the same light as above you can help people through it. Why try and take across/migrate to the new system with everything you already know – yes the “Compose email” icon might be comforting but it won’t be migrated. Your current set of rules might relish a revisit before being migrated across.

This is something that (probably) can’t be done at a corporate level but those migrating can provide help, guidelines and even real life examples of how they dumped the “old view”.

Links to other applications

And finally, email is no longer a client that sits all alone and interacts with others – CRM, calendar, to-do/tasks lists. You may not be able to migrate those links/applications across to Google Apps and if that is the case now is the time to revisit them.