gmail can, can you?

[Malachi]

I actually noticed this the other night on another site that would happily allow you to discard 30 minutes of thinking and typing with the errant click of a close tab button.

Then it bit me here today. I've yet to grovel through the gmail code to even know how hard it is to pop a dialog on a "dirty" entry page asking for confirmation or is it just a simple onunload handler?

As it is a minor tragedy for fellow SLUts to miss an iota of my deep thoughts, it would be cool if you can easily implement it. And no, putting black tape over the tab's red X's isn't as effective as I wanted it to be.

[Charlemagne Allen]

I can Can Can...

YouTube - Conan O'Brien Can Can Dance

YouTube - Conan O'Brien Can Can Dance

(it is a good idea,btw)

[Cristiano]

Malachi,

I have found a simple solution for you that requires zero modification on my part. If you are writing a post and you accidentally close the tab, in Firefox 3, go to History-->Recently Closed Tabs-->SLUniverse Forums - Reply to Topic. The tab will reopen with your writing intact. I just tested it out to be certain.

[Kristian]

Safari asks you to confirm before closing tabs where you've entered text.

[FlipperPA Peregrine]

This is slightly off-topic, but I converted my RL job from MS Exchange to Google Apps this past year. This isn't a Linux versus MS post or anything like that - the "big win" for us was moving off of hosting our own servers to a free, expandable, world-wide available solution.

For those not familiar with Google Apps, they offer drop in, network ready web apps to replace Word, Excel, and so forth. In my opinion, most of these aren't nearly as feature rich as the MS Office Suite.

However, email is ready for prime time. Google Apps allows you, for free, to host your entire organization's email with @yourdomain.com email addresses, for free. 8 gigs per account. Up to 100 without having to contact Google for more free accounts.

It has been a big win for us. I've managed to replicate our organization, which includes over 100 email addresses, Blackberry integration, calendar, tasks, contacts, auto-complete Outlook, and so on, with a seamless transition. It can do a lot. The email part of Google Apps is awesome. POP and IMAP access are free, and my desktop users don't know the difference... they all still use their beloved Outlook. It still syncs perfectly with their Blackberries.

If anyone has interest, I'd be happy to post my white paper on migration. There are headaches, but when we looked at an average cost of $10,000 a year for Exchange hosted at our data center, administration, etc... and $30,000 for upgrading to the latest versions and new servers... it was a no brainer.

If you own your own domain, and need an address or two (like me, with peregrinesalon.com or fetedinnercore.com), Google Apps is easy to set up, and free. Check it out:

Google Apps

We lost power last week - but everyone still had access to email. That was huge. We've also hacked it so Google Apps imports all of our office voice mail (as a .WAV attachment) into their Google Apps inbox, so if they're on Blackberry, they get their office voicemails on the road to their Blackberry. WIN!

Regards,

-Flip

[Malachi]

Originally Posted by Kristian

Safari asks you to confirm before closing tabs where you've entered text.

Are you offering to buy me a Mac and thousands of dollars of software?

[Walker Moore]

Originally Posted by Cristiano

Malachi,

I have found a simple solution for you that requires zero modification on my part. If you are writing a post and you accidentally close the tab, in Firefox 3, go to History-->Recently Closed Tabs-->SLUniverse Forums - Reply to Topic. The tab will reopen with your writing intact. I just tested it out to be certain.

That is a fantastic tip!

[Travis Lambert]

I just installed Firefox 3.01 (I'm slow )

I loved Firefox 2, but I didn't use it much because many of my work sites require IE (OWA, Juniper VPN, etc).

So, after installing 3.01, I crossed my fingers & hoped...... bah, no luck

Then I did a little google searching, and stumbled upon this gem:

IE Tabs!

Now I can use FF for everything

[Decadent]

IE Tab is especially invaluable if you're a web designer, or at least a designer that cares about the people still using a piece of crap bit of software. I only test in Safari, Opera (and even that's relatively obscure) and Firefox now, but will use IE Tab in a blue moon.

[Cristiano]

Originally Posted by Decadent

IE Tab is especially invaluable if you're a web designer, or at least a designer that cares about the people still using a piece of crap bit of software. I only test in Safari, Opera (and even that's relatively obscure) and Firefox now, but will use IE Tab in a blue moon.

That is a mistake, as IE still has more than 70% of the browser market overall. You bother testing in Opera, yet it does not even have 1% of the browser market.

[Kristian]

Originally Posted by Malachi

Are you offering to buy me a Mac and thousands of dollars of software?

They do make safari for windows, you know.

No one bought me my mac, so I'm not buying anyone else one either. :-P

[FlipperPA Peregrine]

2008  	IE7   	        IE6  	        IE5  	        Fx  	        Moz  	S  	   O
August 	26.0% 	24.5% 	0.1% 	        43.7% 	0.5% 	2.6% 	2.1%

Not quite 70%, but 50%, according to:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

[Kristian]

Originally Posted by Cristiano

That is a mistake, as IE still has more than 70% of the browser market overall. You bother testing in Opera, yet it does not even have 1% of the browser market.

Try doing websites for schools that haven't completely dropped Netscape 4 (YES. REALLY.) sometime. It took forever to explain to them that no, it wasn't possible for the website that looks great on the superintendent's brand new computer to look as good on the decade-old P3 sitting in the language lab -- it was hard enough just getting the website functional on that !@#!@# thing.

[Sobriquet Kryakutnoy]

Flip, if you're still in this thread I would be very interested to hear about your experience migrating your work to Google Apps. I recently convinced everybody at my place of employment to move over to it, and generally they have taken well to the Gmail and Google Calendar interfaces, but there are several features of Outlook/Exchange that cannot be replicated in the webmail interface that they would benefit from.

Are you guys using the integrated calendaring at all? How does it tie in with Outlook's calendar? I personally just have iCal tied into it, but obviously that is not an option on our windows workstations

[Decadent]

Originally Posted by Cristiano

That is a mistake, as IE still has more than 70% of the browser market overall. You bother testing in Opera, yet it does not even have 1% of the browser market.

It'd be a mistake if even 100 people ever looked at the websites that I design, yet they don't. Those that do are mostly other designers, who also use Firefox.

[FlipperPA Peregrine]

Sobriquet, we have switched our whole organization to Google Apps with Outlook. We never really used the shared Exchange calendar, and that is really all we lost.

Here are some tips to migrating with Outlook to Google Apps from Exchange:

(1) Exchange routing paths for email. Go to each person's contact list, and make sure than any email address of type "EX" (versus SMTP) are switched to SMTP. Otherwise, they'll have messages sitting in their Outbox, looking for an Exchange server.

(2) Same with Autocomplete Email Address. There's a great app called NK2View which allows you to sort and edit the autocomplete email addresses. Remove an "EX" types using NK2View.
NK2View - View/Delete/Edit Outlook .NK2 AutoComplete Information

(3) If using Blackberries, Blackberry Internet Service works great. There are two ways to do this. Sprint, Verizon and Nextel (and probably others) allow you to set up one email address for the device, or pull in unlimited POP addresses. We typically use POP through the web interface, and have the Blackberry pull from Gmail's pop servers. The other option, if you don't want a 30 second delay for messages to be received, is to set up the device email (something like company_your.name@sprint.blackberry.net) for the Blackberry device, and set Google Apps through the web to forward a copy of each message to the device email address, with the Reply-To address set to be the actual user's email address. This achieves the "push" for messages to the device.

(4) Google can be set up for IMAP or POP. For our laptop users (or people who don't need access at home), we typically use POP. For people who need to access from multiple locations (home, work, laptop on road), we typically use IMAP so everything stays "in sync" at all locations. POP and IMAP must be activated from the preferences for each individual user (which is a bit of a pain as is the CAPTCHA activation, but necessary).

Here's part of the document I wrote up for our company when I was pitching Google Apps:

Google Apps

Google Apps is a collection of services that Google offers businesses for free, hosted on their grid. This includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and many others, but the main one we'd be interested in is the customized Gmail offering. I would strongly recommend watching this 10 minute overview before reading on:

Google Apps overview

Space Considerations
We currently have a 30 gigabyte drive dedicated to our email. It is currently 22 gigs full. That leaves us 8 gigs, shared, between all of us. We have a total 41 total accounts on our domain (some of which are probably un-necessary). That gives us each 0.75 gigs of storage space. Google Apps gives each account 8 gigabytes each of storage, so we would never have to worry about filling them up.

Server Considerations
Our servers that power email, the old system, and the domain were bought in 2002, and are currently running Windows Server 2000, an operating system almost eight years old. We also have an out of date version of Blackberry Enterprise Server. While over the years, Microsoft has improved their stability somewhat (Server 2000 to 2003, ASP to .NET), it still doesn’t rival the stability we see in our Linux / PHP servers (which power the web portal and have had almost zero downtime). Linux, Apache, and PHP continue to have market dominance over Microsoft Windows / IIS in the server market, and the Linux / Apache / PHP combination is used by some of the biggest names on the net, including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Youtube, Linden Lab and IBM.

The only servers we have had problems with are the Microsoft based servers, which is ironic, as our single production Linux server powers most of the company. Add to that running those four machines 24/7, and the cost is fairly high. To upgrade the two essential servers (the domain controller/Blackberry machine, and the mail server) would cost:

- 2 HP servers (for the low end server): $6000.00
- Windows Server 2003 (2008 launches soon): $1029.00
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Enterprise: $3999.00
- Blackberry Enterprise Server w/20 licenses: $3999.00
- Hire professional for installation: ~$2000.00
- Spam Marshall: $1000.00 per year

Server Maintenance
Our email servers are Windows based, and we have seen their stability track record. Our Linux servers never seem to have a problem, and have great up time, however, our Windows servers are constantly having issues. The amount of time we would save by not having Windows servers is significant. Google Apps runs on their server farm of Linux servers, and in my nine months of using their service for my personal domain, I have not witnessed any significant down time.

Accessibility – Outlook
We currently have the ability to use Microsoft Outlook outside of Crompco’s building disabled for security concerns, as security is not our forte, and opening up those ports raises some issues. With Google Apps, you will be able to access your crompco.com email from anywhere, through Outlook, instead of having to use web mail.

Accessibility – Mobile
Google Apps gives several options for accessing your email through your Blackberry (or mobile phone). You can use the existing Blackberry mail system we’re all familiar with, and have your email forwarded via the web, or you can use the customized Google Mobile Mail application, which has a different style and feel than Blackberry’s. More info on Google’s mobile options:

Google Apps

Improved Web Mail Access
If you don’t have your outlook handy, the web mail interface uses the same interface as Google’s award winning Gmail service. The web interface is so popular with some that many have started using it exclusively instead of Outlook or another email client. The option is yours.

Changes to the Current System
There is one shortcoming to Google Apps from our current system which must be addressed, even with all of the benefits listed above. The Outlook shared calendar will no longer work.
However, your personal calendar will; you can still set up your own appointments, as most people do now. The only people I have seen use the shared calendar functionality are X and Y. For setting up meetings, we can do it via email or Google Calendar, which should work perfectly fine.

I hope this helps! Having a lot of Blackberries has made this migration easier.

[Sobriquet Kryakutnoy]

Thanks, Flip!

That helped a lot, and I think I will try to convince my coworkers to start using Outlook as a frontend to their Google accounts in-house soon. Calendaring is obviously the outstanding issue, and I do have them working off of shared Google Calendars, but perhaps soon Google will implement some trickery to allow Outlook to play nice with their calendars other than their little Google Calendar Sync utility.

[FlipperPA Peregrine]

Originally Posted by Sobriquet Kryakutnoy

Thanks, Flip!

That helped a lot, and I think I will try to convince my coworkers to start using Outlook as a frontend to their Google accounts in-house soon. Calendaring is obviously the outstanding issue, and I do have them working off of shared Google Calendars, but perhaps soon Google will implement some trickery to allow Outlook to play nice with their calendars other than their little Google Calendar Sync utility.

BTW, Google Apps DOES work with shared appointment scheduling, as long as all users are on Outlook.

So, if I invite X, Y, and Z to a meeting using Outlook, and they all have Outlook, they'll get the standard Outlook "Accept / Decline / Propose NewTime" interface. If accepted, it will add to their Outlook calendar. That's the more important part of the functionality, as far as I'm concerned.

Shared resource scheduling (conference rooms and such) were really the only thing we lost.

Regards,

-Flip

[FlipperPA Peregrine]

Oh, one last tip for Outlook.

Go to TOOLS, EMAIL ACCOUNTS, VIEW OR CHANGE, then select the Google Apps POP or IMAP account and click CHANGE again.

Go to MORE SETTINGS, ADVANCED. Under "Server Timeouts", move the slider far to the right (10 minutes). This allows for temporarily "blips" in service (hiccups that commonly occur) without presenting the user with a dialog saying, "UNABLE TO CONTACT SERVER." This is a bigger problem for IMAP users, but still handy to change.

Also on this screen, I check "LEAVE A COPY OF MESSAGES ON SERVER" and "REMOVE FROM SERVER WHEN DELETED FROM DELETED ITEMS" for POP users. This keeps their Google Apps account relatively clean.

Regards,

-Flip