Michael Gibbs » Page 18

Author: Michael Gibbs

I'm a technologist at heart, assisting companies best utilize the Internet to market themselves and sell their products and services online. This includes organizations as large as Google and as small as one or two individuals.
At Over The Top and Exhibit A Communications, I've programmed solutions for Google as well as at least one other company that was later acquired by Google.

I've been CTO of an Internet SaaS company and spent my time pretty evenly between guiding the future technical strategy of the company, architecting software solutions for my dev teams, designing and running a data center to service our clients world-wide as well as being a technical evangalist/sales engineer to our media clients large and small.

I've also been Chief Photographer of the Daily Sun/Post newspaper back when it was a 5-day a week daily newspaper.

I also spent a great many years as a beach lifeguard for the City of San Clemente as well as Jr. Lifeguard instructor and then as it's program coordinator.
Bragging rights
Private Pilot with Instrument rating and proud husband of soon to be 25 years (and counting).

Google Apps gets iPhone Support; to Hell with PocketPC-based Phones

Nice new note from Google Apps blog today:

If you have an iPhone (or an iPod Touch), Google Apps is now available with a streamlined mobile interface, where you can easily bookmark a single web address and seamlessly switch between applications.
…

How to access what’s new:
Bookmark http://www.google.com/m/a/your-domain.com from your iPhone’s browser. Be sure to replace ‘your-domain.com’ with your actual domain name.

Well, that’s awfully nice for the iPhone folks but what about us Windows Mobile (aka PocketPC, etc) users? We’ve got a nice, capable browser built into our phones but no, no loving from Google! Going to the page shown above with my T-Mobile Wing (yes I sbustituted your-domain.com with my real domain name that has Google Apps setup) yields nothing more than an empty, white page.

Sigh… Perhaps someday…

Google Docs confusion?

Have you or your users gotten trapped by this problem? Say you have a Google Power User (GPU?) who has a ton of documents in Google docs using his company email address (name@company.com). Then you’ve recently moved your company’s email and collaboration services over to Google Apps (wise move) but now your GPU is coming to you complaining that he has to juggle his two accounts. How do you help him? Well, this Google support note should help!

Google Apps: I had a public Docs account before I had a Google Apps account — How can I move all of my documents, spreadsheets and presentations into my Google Apps Docs account?

To move your documents, spreadsheets and presentations between accounts, you must meet the following criteria:

  • Both your Google Account and your Google Apps account must use exactly the same username and domain (i.e. user.name@yourdomain.com must have been used to sign in to both accounts). If there are any differences between the accounts that you use to log in to your Google Account and your Google Apps account, you won’t be able to use this feature to transfer your documents.
  • Your Google Account must have existed before your Google Apps account. In other words, after you create a Google Apps account, you can’t change or create a Google Account for the purpose of migrating your documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

If you meet these criteria, and would like to move your documents and spreadsheets into your Google Apps Docs account, follow these instructions:

  1. Sign in to Google Docs and click the Settings link in the upper-right corner.
  2. Under the General tab, click move your documents and spreadsheets.
  3. In the message that appears, click OK to authorize this move.

Your documents, spreadsheets and presentations will now appear in your Google Apps Docs account.

If you met the above criteria, you’ll notice that any documents, spreadsheets and presentations shared with your public Docs account were automatically migrated to your Google Apps Docs account. Learn more.

Please note: These options will appear only if we detect that you have matching usernames connected with both your Google Account and your Google Apps account. If you don’t see these options, it’s because we didn’t detect this. If you feel that you meet this criteria, but aren’t able to access these settings, please contact us.

GASS Customers Unite!

Are you a GASS customer with Exhibit A? Are you happy with the job we did for you in setting up your business with Google Apps? Well, now’s the time to give back a little lovin’ our way :).

Please visit our Google Solutions Marketplace vendor profile at http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewVendorListings?vendorId=60 or jump directly to our Google Apps Setup Service profile at http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?productListingId=3843101+10016837894806171368 and post a review about what a bang up job we did for you!

Or better yet, if our implementation of Google Apps for you was able to help you solve a critical issue in your business, let’s write up a case study and see if we can’t get it published at the Google Solutions Marketplace Customer Success Stories Blog (phew, that is a mouthful) at http://solutionsmarketplace.blogspot.com/. Not only will that help us out, it can’t hurt to get a little free publicity for yourself and your company!

If you have any thoughts on this or other matters addressed in this blog, please use the Comments feature below so we can carry on this conversation.

Getting Google Docs in Gear…

Currently using Google Apps for your business but not feeling that you can really utilize Google Docs to its fullest extent since it requires you to be online all the time to use it? Well the boffins at Google Apps have thrown us all a nice bone.

Google Docs is now offline enabled using Google Gears! Wanna learn more about it? Then check out this short video…

Of course, nothing is perfect yet. You are currently limited to viewing and searching your document list and viewing/editing word processing documents. However, hopefully they will get the spreadsheets and presentation documents offline enabled soon.

So, get in gear and take your laptop outside and get some work done. Just in time for Springtime!

More Google’y Goodness!

Just stumbled on this posting in the main Google RSS feed. Having had a number of clients ask about which sync for Google Calendar to use, I thought perhaps this might be worth looking at. I’m gonna give it a spin but in the meantime, here is the posting…

Posted by Shirin Oskooi, Product Manager, Google Calendar
I’ve suffered major headaches trying to sync all my calendars. I used the Microsoft Outlook calendar on my desktop computer at home, but since I wanted to be able to access my schedule from anywhere, I also kept a copy of it on Google Calendar. When I traveled, I’d import my Google Calendar data into my laptop’s Outlook calendar so I could access it offline. This was not only annoying to maintain, but also quite error-prone. If I made updates on any of the copies of my calendar, I had to make sure to make those same exact changes to the other copies, too.
This was my life for a whole year before we started working on Google Calendar Sync, a 2-way synching application between Google Calendar and the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. I was probably the most excited person on the team when we started developing it, because now I can access my calendar at home or on my laptop, on Google Calendar or in Outlook. When I add an event to the Outlook calendar on my laptop, Google Calendar Sync syncs it to my Google Calendar — and since I also have Google Calendar Sync running on my desktop, the event then syncs from Google Calendar to Outlook calendar on my desktop. All of my calendar views are always up to date, and I can choose whichever one I want to use.

 

I’ll give it a shot and try and post something more about this interesting tool as soon as I have a little more seat time with it.

What’s New Google Apps?

Finding it hard to keep up with changes and updates to Google Apps? Too many posts on the main Google blog to weed through just to get what you are looking for news about Google Apps? Well, worry no more, Google has FINALLY posted an RSS feed of updates to Google Apps!

The latest improvement will help technology departments and those of you who already use Google Apps keep up with every change, no matter how often they appear: Now we’re documenting all updates in an RSS feed, so you can get notified as they happen.

Thanks for listening and making this feed available!

Email Marketers Meet and Share Ideas

Those who’ve known me for some time know that I kind of have a love/hate relationship with MarketingSherpa and the information they provide. At times they provide great support and numbers from the industry to use when crafting your own campaigns. At other times, they frustrate me no end when I find that I disagree with their conclusions…

All that being said, they recently released a short summary on the Email Marketing Summit 2008. Below are some of the top dozen takeaways:

  1. Don’t get caught up in only being a marketer – Put on the hats of those in your organization that you are trying to co-opt to your way of thinking. How can what YOU do assist those above and beside you in the organization.
  2. Landing pages are becoming de riguer – Most marketers wouldn’t think these days about testing a marketing campaign without having strong landing pages associated with them. Suggestions include building the landing page as soon as the offer and message are defined to ensure that the work gets done before the emails go out.
  3. It is message, stupid – stick to your message at every step of the campaign. This includes the subject line, the text and images of the message and the landing page itself. Tips: Landing pages shouldn’t carry all the site navigation elements to prevent distracting from the message in the offer.
  4. Don’t waste too much energy worrying about deliverability – while important, this is becoming less and less of a concern as opposed to ensuring that your message comes across to those who do get it.
  5. Segment your audience – One size doesn’t fit all and you’ll find that many small, targettable lists will out perform a massive but unspecific list any day.
  6. The rumor of the death of email is just that, a rumor – don’t give in to talk that email marketing is dead as email loses it’s day in – day out value to Internet customers and users. A resurgence of email availability is seen with the large swings of consumer to connected devices like Blackberries, iPhones and Windows Mobile devices.
  7. Be Interesting – Give your targets a reason to open your emails. You can do this by trying different subject lines across your segmented list (you are segmenting your list, aren’t you? If not, see #5 above). Be irreverent, be obtuse, just please be something other than predictable or boring.
  8. Close the door on Open Rates – While there is some value to open rates, this is being too short-sighted. You need to keep your aim a little higher. You should be concerned more with conversion rates or click-through rates; depending upon your goals.
  9. B2B, or not 2B – The answer to this question is that B-to-B email marketing is on the upswing but keep it targeted, interesting and directly personalized to get recipients engaged in the message of the campaign.
  10. Ask and ye shall receive – Use the communication opportunity to your customers to ask questions about anything you can think of. These provided great opportunities to learn more about your customers and targets alike.
  11. Get Mobile – Reaching out to mobile users with your message will become a key target in the coming years as the penetration of email capable devices continues to grow over the next few years.
  12. And lastly… TEST, TEST, TEST

Interested in how EMM can help with these? Here’s the high points:

  • Need to segment lists? Use Custom Queries to create repeatable groups of campaign recipients. You can slice and dice your users by network, by zip codes or just about any data point available in ASPDNSF customer records. With some SQL creativity, you could even target your lists at customers who haven’t bought recently (or ever) or even ones who bought a specific product.
  • Accountability? Track not only opens, but more importantly, use the click tracking to monitor the success of actually driving your customers to your landing pages, site or other location
  • Mobile ready? Taking full advantage of multi-part messaging available in EMM to reach mobile devices of varying email capabilities by letting the device sort out which of version of your campaign to display.

If you have any thoughts on this, or any topic, please DO use the comments feature below start a dialog with MJG or any other readers of this blog!

Google Tips #00001 & #00002

Create surveys with Google Docs

A common use case for Google Docs is to create a spreadsheet and circulate the link to collect data. For instance, you might create a spreadsheet to collect your colleagues’ preferred dates and topics for a guest speaker.
Instead of giving everyone access to your spreadsheet, you can now create a form in your spreadsheet and send it out to anyone with an email address (not just Google Apps users). Read more at the Google Docs Blog post:
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2008/02/stop-sharing-spreadsheets-start.html.

 

More Docs printing options

Understanding that the key to printing documents is proper formatting, and Google has added PDF-based printing to Google Docs. Go to File -> Print, select how many slides you’d like on a page (up to 12), and preview your choice.
You’ll see exactly what the printed version will look like in your preview window.

New and Exciting from Google Apps

Google has recently announced the addition of Google Sites to Google Apps. How is this different from Google Web Pages that was previously included in Google Apps?

Well, one thing to know is that it doesn’t replace Google Web Pages, it exists in addition to it. However I think most of our customers will find the extra versatility of Google Sites will make using Google Web Pages a thing of the past.

One of the first new features is that you can set domain-wide standards for sharing site pages just like you do for docs.image 
This can be a powerful feature, allowing you to truly create a secure intranet or making the site public to all or any of the other options between these two extremes shown in the screen capture above. When you create a new site within your Google Apps domain, you’ll find that you have the option to set the sharing for this page. The choices you made at the corporate level will determine the options that show up when you create a new page. If you’ve selected the most restrictive option in the configuration, you’ll see this when you create a new site: image while if you selected to allow users to make the sites public,  you’ll see image .

imageIn addition to creating single or two column layouts based on a number of different themes, this tool also has some great Inserts that you can use to spice up your pages. Here is a screenshot of the current offerings:

For those of you looking to use this as an intranet, this is probably the closest thing, so far, to getting a Gdrive for Google Apps. With 10GB of storage with all levels of of Google Apps (with an additional 500MB for each user in the premium and education versions), you’ve got plenty of room to post PDFs or other items to share with your users that just can’t be done in the world of Google Docs. The only downside is that you are limited to no more than 10MB per file so this probably isn’t the best place to be sharing your music collections with the users in your domain.

 

imageWant to get this set up on your site? You can turn this on for yourself by going to the administrative control panel found at https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomainname.com and clicking on the "Add more services" link. 

Some of you may find that you already have the Google Sites icon image active on your home page since recently a portion of the Google Apps setup allows you to choose to image. If this was turned on for your domain, you should find that this feature is automatically enabled on your Google Apps setup.

If you’d like assistance setting this up on your Google Apps, we can make the required DNS changes and turn on this feature for you if you’d like for a low one-time fee.