Less is more

Lunch & Learn: Google Apps--working and collaborating from anywhere

In this lunch & learn webinar session productivity consultant, Gus Elliott, presented participants with a live demonstration of the Google Apps functionality. Gus demonstrated everything from the more familiar Google e-mail and calendar to Google document and site management and explained how Google Apps can help remote workshops and virtual teams to better collaborate and increase productivity.

Overall, the presentation familiarized participants with a free set of powerful collaborative tools. Especially helpful was Gus' overview of the Google Apps Excel function which allows posting and editing of Excel files online. Team members can access and edit Excel documents simultaneously while also chatting online. Google Apps also provides a convenient revision tracking function, allowing teams to view the revision history of a document in its entirety.

Join us for our upcoming free lunch & learn session!

Microsoft Groove—working and collaboration from anywhere (on Thursday October 9, 2008 from 12:00 noon to 12:45 pm Pacific Time)

Register for Microsoft Groove

Our lunch & learn program description and registration

Get your brown bag lunch (or snack) ready, and join us online every Thursday at 12:00 noon Pacific Time for 45 minutes to learn the latest and most innovative tips and techniques for individual and team productivity, and get the latest updates about important workplace and productivity issues.

Review program and register for our lunch & learn webinars

Upcoming Google Apps Lunch & Learn Webinar

Anyone looking to increase their company's or their own productivity will benefit from People-OnTheGo's Thursday, October 2nd lunch & learn session: Google Apps--working and collaborating from anywhere with productivity evangelist Gus Elliott.

Google Apps, in addition to e-mail and calendar, provide you the ability to create and manage documents and sites. In this session Gus will demonstrate the Google Apps functionality and discuss how it can help remote workshops and virtual teams to better collaborate.

Join us for lunch and to learn more about the topic!

Google Apps—working and collaborating from anywhere (Thursday October 2, 2008 from 12:00 noon to 12:45 pm Pacific Time)

Register for Google Apps lunch & learn webinar

Our lunch & learn program description and registration

Get your brown bag lunch (or snack) ready, and join us online every Thursday at 12:00 noon Pacific Time for 45 minutes to learn the latest and most innovative tips and techniques for individual and team productivity, and get the latest updates about important workplace and productivity issues.

Review program and register for our lunch & learn webinars

Google Apps Day #7: E-mail conversations in Gmail, my first Google error today

Gmail groups e-mail conversations together into one entry, which you can then expand and therefore view each of the e-mail messages within the conversation.

So if you send a message to someone and they respond to it, both the original message and the response are grouped together in one entry in the Gmail inbox:

Clicking on the conversation will cause Gmail to display the underlying messages. Initially the unread recent message content is fully displayed, but you can click on any of the previous messages in the conversation, and see its content. You can reply to any of the messages in the conversation.

The conversation model is really efficient. It makes managing e-mail faster and more convenient. This is especially true when considering that in our corporate environment many messages are sent to multiple people and many back-and-forth replies are exchanged. Instead of having all these messages individually scattered throughout the mailbox, they are all kept together.

Not only the conversations are kept together in the inbox, but also when you label them, and archive them. And if someone replies to the conversation after it has been labeled and archived, the whole conversation is then moved back to the inbox, with the new response.

My first Google error

Even Google Apps are not prone to cryptic errors:

When I tried to find what error 102 is, by searching the help system, I got "Your search - server error #102 - did not match any answers in our Help Center."

Google Apps Day #6--To file or not to file, and Gmail labels

"To file or not to file?" That is the question. You probably know already that in Gmail, you cannot create e-mail folders and move messages to folders. Instead, you have the ability to create labels, and apply labels to your e-mail messages. Then when you want to see messages that were assigned a certain label, you click on the desired label (in the left navigation menu).

To create a label, you click on the "Edit labels" link:

   

This will take you to the appropriate settings screen where you can create the labels:

Once you label a message in your Gmail inbox, you can click on the Archive button (see below), which will remove the message form the inbox view, but keep it accessible in the corresponding label view, as well as in search results, and in the All Mail view (as we mentioned on Day #2).

If you are a "filing" addict, and like to have a nicely organized filing structure, you are likely to find labels limiting. Not only they are only one level, but you can only see 20 or 30 characters of the labels, so you need to keep them short.

If on the other hand you tend to file "lightly" or not file at all, then labels are likely to appeal to you. They are efficient and easy to use. Combined with the Archive capability, they allow you to get messages out of the inbox, and still be able to quickly refer to them together if/when necessary.

Talking about storage

The standard version of Google Apps provides something like 6 or 7 GB of storage for each user, and premier version provides something like 25 GB of storage for each user. This, combined with the search capabilities, brings some real advantages. All this time you may have been spending archiving, managing archives, and referring back to them, is no longer necessary. So you may end up with a few extra hours per week or month, which you can apply to more important activities!

Google Apps Day #5--Importing Calendar entries and Contacts

Today was the time to bring the Outlook Calendar and Contacts to Google Apps. This process involved exporting the Calendar entries from Outlook into a CSV file (comma delimited file), and then importing them into Google Calendar, and then exporting the Outlook Contacts also to a CSV file, and then importing them into Gmail.

To import the calendar entries into the Google Calendar, you click on the Add drop down arrow (on the left navigation menu) as shown below, and then select the Import Calendar menu item, and then indicate the name of the CSV file to which you exported the Outlook Calendar:

The process is quick and easy. Note however that recurring events in the original Outlook Calendar don't stay recurring after the export and import process. They are imported as single occurrences for the period that you select during the exporting process.

To import the Contacts into Gmail, you following a similar process:

   

My first observation relating to Calendar has to do with color coding. I am used to my Calendar appointments being color coded, and was surprised to see that there is no such a thing in Google Calendar. You can choose a color, but this is for the calendar as a whole. Individual calendar appointments cannot be colored, and cannot be labeled.

More tomorrow!

Google Apps Day #4--Feeling "naked" in the Web 2.0 World

Last week, my iPhone stopped working for no reason, and I had to make a trip from San Francisco to San Jose without my iPhone. This seemingly minor inconvenience brought some awkward feelings. Strange enough, I felt quite disconnected, and quite exposed to the risk of not being able to reach the outside world easily in case of emergency or "perceived" emergency (such as a last minute update), and not being easily reached by the outside world (we seem to become quite dependent on our technologies).

This week, I had some severe connectivity issues, and was without Web access for a few hours. This brief time without Internet was another feeling of being exposed and isolated from the Web world.

One thing to note here is that with Google Apps, when there is no Web access, there is no access to e-mail, calendar, contacts, etc. So you cannot continue to work on your e-mails offline, check your calendar and schedule meetings, and lookup contacts. This isn't a problem for me yet, because I still haven't imported my calendar and my contacts to Google Apps. This is the next item on my list.

The good news for now is that Web access was restored, and My iPhone got replaced by a new iPhone and activated within minutes at the Apple Store in San Francisco, and the world came back to the way it is supposed to be. And now, I am ready to continue the Google Apps experiment.

Google Apps Day #3--no e-mails, try Google Reader, or maybe something else!

As I continue the Google Apps deployment ("deployment" may be an overkill here, I think it is more like a light implementation than deployment, considering how easy it is to get it going), it seems that a few nice surprises have come up.

First, when you migrate to a new e-mail system (and not move your e-mail messages with you), you experience a sense of relief. It is like a fresh start. Furthermore, it is easy to get your inbox down to zero. That is a nice surprise and it is worth writing home about. In addition, you get this additional little surprise message:

Let us zoom in so you can read this message better:

"No new mail! Want to read updates from your favorite sites? Try Google Reader"

Not a bad idea, but if I have no new mail, I would rather try to focus first on more important activities, that relate to my top priorities (then I will catch up with the Google Reader when I am ready for a break).

One more observation from today relates to spam e-mails. If you click on the Spam link in the Gmail left navigation menu, you can see the Spam messages. The spam filter is already doing its work, and seems to be quite robust. So far, when scanning the Spam message, I only saw spam messages.

Google Apps Day #2--the Archive button in Gmail

One of the techniques we teach in our "Managing and Organizing Your E-mail Inbox" class is to create a "catch-all" e-mail folder, and use it to file finished e-mail messages which are not important, but that you may need to refer to in the future.

The Archive button in Gmail does exactly that. When you click on the Archive button, it will move the selected message(s) out of the inbox, but the message will still appear in:

1. The All Mail view

2. The relevant Label views (if you have applied a label to the message)

3. In search results

You can see the Archive button in the screenshot above. Note that when you are using the standard edition of Google Apps, which is available at no cost, you also see the sponsored ads appear in Gmail. But those who get the premium edition which costs $50/user/year will have an ad-free Gmail.

More observations from today

First: The Archive button/feature is helping me keep the Gmail inbox clean instead of having it cluttered with read messages. I seem to be using the Archive button with ease and trusting that I can easily find these messages if/when I need them. After all, I am in the "search" kingdom.

Second: The "New Window" link (see picture below) allows you to open a new window displaying the currently selected message. This is helpful because it allows you to use the new window to reply to the message, and be able to refer to other messages in the Gmail window at the same time:

   

Third: Gmail does not beep when a new e-mail message arrives--one less distraction!

Googls Apps--another 81-day-experiment may have started

Well, after having some drastic server problems yesterday, and lost access to our Exchange server and to a number of other services, we decided to give Google Apps a try. Okay, this is not all. We have been wanting to give Google Apps a "real" try for some time, and it seems like this is a great excuse to get started. Obviously our main purpose is to continue to educate our readers about new technologies and new offerings in the market, and how these technologies can be helpful to them in their daily work.

So am I going to continue using Google Apps for the next 81 days and report my daily experiences? Like I did with smartphones last year? I am going to start this process and see what happens. I will take it one day at a time.

The initial process of setting up Google Apps and creating a new domain and some new accounts was seamless. In just about 15 minutes, I got a whole set of applications up and running including the new domain (which took another 15 minutes or so to become active). My initial impressions are very positive. There is some degree of lightness and user-friendliness about the interface which are desirable. I will continue to report my progress, so stay tuned.