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I’ve previously written about the actual email migration portion. There are no major changes from that post; it ended up going very smooth once I figured out how to successfully get the mail moved over.

Completely Ditch Outlook

I decided fairly early on that I was going to try to force our users into using the web based program for at least two weeks. I didn’t disable any features, so if they could figure out how to get Outlook working I wasn’t stopping them. I just wouldn’t support it.

It turned out that was one of the best decisions that could be made. After a month only one user that I know about has figured out how to get Outlook working. Everyone else has made the transition without all that much complaining (well, after the initial moan-fest).

Document, Document, Document

Before flipping the switch over to Google Apps I created a Google Site for documentation. This started as a long welcome email to users, but it quickly turned into a 10 page email that no one would read.

The web site became a place where I would write something once and then give the link out whenever I would get the same question again. It was a huge time saver.

Now that users have transferred over to the new system we are going to use the document for new hires. This will give them some very good documentation on how to get started with our email setup if they’ve never used Gmail before.

Plan end user training

Something I did not do was preplan training for users. I have no idea what I was thinking, but that was a huge mistake. I had tons of documentation, including videos that Google provided; that wasn’t nearly as sitting down with people and actually showing them how to use specific features.

For example; I had one user state that she absolutely hates Gmail and wondered if it would be possible to switch back to Outlook. After sitting down with her for about 30 minutes and showing her the power of search and some other features she was a convert. The following day I received this email from her:

Hi Zac,

I just wanted to let you know that I have had a change of heart and I LOVE GMAIL.  I love the labels and think that it will help me keep more organized than Outlook.  It was really helpful for you to come in person and let us ask questions.

Thank you!

That person then turned out to be one of the best advocates for Google Apps at that location. This solidified the fact that I needed to sit down with more people and show them how to use the product.

Google Apps Tips Group

Starting from day two I created an opt-in Google Group that I used an email blast for tips on various features of Google Apps. It turned out people loved these tips. It showed features in bite sized chunks that allowed people to digest them easier.

A few of the subject lines of the emails I sent out:

• Advanced Search Features
• Attaching A File
• Calendar Events in Different Colors
• Disable or Edit Web Clips
• Find All Unread Emails
• Gmail Compose in its own Window
• Google Labs Features
• How to Get Inline Spell Checking
• How to Print an Email
• Show Search Options

Users do the Darndest Things

We had quite a few users who were sending huge PDFs around a ton. They were actually passing the 25MB attachment size constantly. I had no idea that so many huge files were being transferred over email.

To get around this limitation we setup Google Docs to share the PDFs around. We were able to create permissions so only the correct people could see the files.

One Interface to Rule Them All

An issue that I ran into all the time with Exchange was the horribleness that is the Outlook Web Access. The interface is just kludgy (Exchange 2007) and with any browser other than Internet Explorer it is pretty much unusable. The top level team at my company pass around a MacBook Air for travel, having an unusable interface is just not acceptable.

With Google Apps your computer no longer matters. No matter where you login from it looks exactly the same.

Side note: With Office 2011 there is finally Outlook for the Mac. It is actually very usable, but the interface is quite different than any Windows version of Office.

Gmail + IE + Old Computer = SLOW

We have a lot of older computers at my work; we very quickly ran into Google Apps running slower than Outlook on the same machine. Internet Explorer on Windows XP on a box from 2003 does not render javascirpt heavy pages all that well.

The fix: Install Chrome.

My initial concern about Chrome was the amount of memory it would use. It turned out to be a non-issue; Chrome with two tabs open for Gmail and Google Calendar uses less memory than running Outlook.

The biggest issue I’ve had so far is with the built-in pdf renderer. When trying to print with Google docs the pdf page would show up rather than printing out the page. If you switch over to Adobe Reader in about:plugins then the issue goes away. While I would love to get rid of adobe reader on the web, the Chrome plugin is just not quite ready yet.

Summary

After a month with Google Apps we are very happy with it. I actually can’t imagine going back to an Outlook based solution at this point. I am also fairly sure that the vast majority of the end users would say the same thing.

Use the Right Tool
If you do not have administrator access to the Exchange box you should still use the Exchange migration tool. It allows you to use IMAP for the migration. So far, it has been the best solution for moving a mass quantity of emails (~500k emails).

Avoid the web based IMAP importer
As tempting as it is, don’t use Google’s IMAP email importer on the Google Apps web site. I spent a good week trying to figure out how to get that thing to work successfully and it just keeps failing and doesn’t offer nearly enough options.

Get a hosted box with ton of bandwidth
Unless you have an awesome upload speed, don’t even attempt to move the emails on your own pipe. It is not worth the effort. I even went so far as to setup a box at one of our remote offices with a Comcast connection, it still wasn’t fast enough. I am now using a dedicated server from SingleHop where they are currently offering 20TB bandwidth and either a 100 meg or 1 gig connection. They also offer 72 hour cancellation policy, so you only need to give 72 hours notice prior to giving up the machine.

1 Cup Ground Garbanzo Beans
2 Tablespoon Flour
3 teaspoons Ground Coriander Seed
2 teaspoon Dry Parley
1 teaspoon Ground Cayenne Pepper
1 teaspoon Turmeric
2 teaspoon Garlic Powder
2 teaspoon Onion Powder
1 teaspoon Kosher Salt
1/2 teaspoon Baking Soda
1 teaspoon Sesame Seeds

3/4 cup Water

Enough Corn Oil to fill your pan approximately 2 inches deep

Directions

1. Grind Garbanzo Beans.
   • I used a spice grinder to grind the garbanzo beans. Then used a strainer with a decent size hole to sift the mixture to get rid of any large parts. This took a long while to grind up a decent amount, but these little beans are hard and I didnt want to ruin a blender or something else.
2. Mix All dry ingredients together
3. Add water
4. Let sit 30 minutes
5. Roll into balls
6. If you prefer flatten into patties, I’ve found that you need less oil when cooked this way
7. Fry in corn oil at 300F until golden brown. Falafel will float near the time it is done cooking
8. Set on a paper towel to soak up any extra oil
9. Enjoy.

This dry mix makes it very easy to mix up a huge batch to always have around then just mix with water and fry.

Feel free to share this recipe around. If you post it anywhere online please either link back or post a comment letting me know. Also let me know how you like this falafel.

My original reason for choosing the app was for great IMAP support. This email protocol is one of the best, it allows you to keep all of your email on your remote server and it looks the same everywhere. Thunderbird is the only real great IMAP client out there that is not a terminal application.

I’ve been slowly thinking about making the switch to a web based application, I tried to find a good client to run on my own server. The only decent looking project I could find was RoundCube. This solution might work for some people, but on my locked down server it just wont work. The mod_security rules I have in place blocked the script from running. This pretty much stopped me in my tracks. If it does something that my rules block I really do not want to run the software on my server.

At that point it was fine just to stick with Thunderbird. Finally last week I see in my RSS feeds that the only two paid developers on Thunderbird are no longer working for Mozilla. This was the point I knew for sure I needed to find something better. The project will still be around, but I now have no security in the projects future.

It was time to choose a web based email client. For me the only logical choice is gmail; hotmail is, well hotmail and Yahoo mail looked tempting, but just did not suit my needs. The real feature that won my over was search. As I have stated in the past I do not use bookmarks I use google instead. The gmail philosophy is perfect for me.

Now for the fun part, trying to import all of my email into gmail. Like most people I have quite a bit of email that I want to keep for reference purposes. Importing all of my normal email into gmail was fairly easy, I just created a new email account on my own server and put all of the emails in it. Then I used the POP3 access in gmail to import the messages. I did this folder by folder so I could tag all of the messages correctly.

The next part is where I spent hours, importing the sent mail. I had over 700 emails I wanted to import and no clear way to do it easily. A google search led to Google GMail Loader (GML). This little tool should send all of the emails to your gmail account and either put them in your inbox or sent items. I made this mistake of starting out using the Windows version of the tool. I would start the import process and the application would freeze up. The only way I could fix the issue was to end the process. I spent about an hour trying to get the program to play nicely with me without luck.

I then searched around for another tool to do the same thing. Everything I could find led me back to the same place. I finally decided to wait until I could get on a *NIX machine to use that version of the program.

After taking a break and switching over to OS X it was time to try again. This version of the tool requires some dependancies that I had some issues resolving, that was until I found a great tutorial on the subject. I still had some error come up saying that a cnf file was missing, but I found it in the install directory and placed it in the location it asked for. It was then time to test out the application. I filled out the information just as I had done on the Windows side, but this time I had the terminal window to show me output. The application still froze up when it was working, but I could see exactly what it was doing by keeping an eye on the terminal.

Time to figure out how to do email forwarding to gmail. For this domain, zacgarrett.com I’ve only ever used a forwarder in the past to my other account. Simple fix, just forward the email to gmail instead. For my primary email I decided to use the gmail pop service. This will allow me to save an email on my external server for the time being so that if I decide to switch back it will not be all that painful.

I did find out that gmail now offers to send your email from another email address. You have to verify that this is your email, but I was able to setup several different aliases for my different emailing purposes. Quite simple and a very nice feature for converts like myself. I want my email to come from my own URL. Gmail does not look that bad to most people today, but I prefer my own domain.

So far I am happy with gmail. I installed gmail notifier on my primary machines and it allows me to keep track of the emails coming in. It actually does this better than Thunderbird on OS X. On the Windows side of things they are about equal in my eyes, both popup with the subject and brief description.

I do not see myself switching back to a client based email client for my own email at this point in time. I still have to keep the client around for work related email, but it is nice to get my personal email out of there. Time will tell how much I like using this service.

This device is simply ingenious and needs to be standard in every CCNA classroom. My class could have been much shorter if it wasn’t for trying to teach everyone ANDing for subnetting.

Being a Mac user one might expect that I would refuse to buy any Microsoft product to go along with that computer. The problem with that thought is that using a Mac is fine, but I still need two buttons and the Mighty Mouse just does not cut it. I used two fingers on the touchpad for a long time and I am happy using that; the touchpad is kind of difficult to use when connected to an external monitor.

When I first opened the box I noticed something that was quite odd, it included a massive base station. Most of the wireless mice I’ve used as of late have a receiver the size of a thumb drive. This mouse however has a receiver about the same size as the mouse itself. I found this to be quite odd, but this is just going to sit on my desk so I have no real issue with it.

When connection a Microsoft mouse to a Mac I was expecting issues, but had none. Right out of the box the mouse worked with drivers built into OS X. I found the mouse to be kind of slow by default so I decided to download the latest drivers from Microsoft. This not only fixed the issues with the speed, but it allowed me to choose what to do with the two side buttons on the mouse. I played around with the settings for a while and eventually decided to disable them. I found the side button locations to be a little odd. To be honest, I’ve never used anything on a mouse besides the two main buttons and the scroll wheel. I’ve had seven button mice in the past and the buttons just get in the way for me.

When picking a wireless mouse over a wired the first thing that comes to mind for me is my first generation wireless mouse. It was such a beast and would eat through batteries as it they were Pez. I’ve not had a good wireless mouse since as I always avoided them in the past. No so surprisingly this mouse has great battery life. I’ve been using the mouse non-stop for nearly a month now and the meter says the battery life is still full. I’ve done nothing special to help the batteries survive, I use the mouse as I would use any other mouse. When not in use I do not turn it off, it just sits on my desk.

One of the most important things about a mouse is the feel of it. This mouse fits my hand perfectly. I don’t believe I’ve ever owned a mouse that felt so good to use. Quite a few of the mice I’ve used in the past were “ergonomic”, but I found most of them to be annoying in actual use. The one thing I did notice was that this is only a right handed mouse. If you try to use it in your left hand it just doesn’t fit, sorry lefties.

Overall I am quite happy with this mouse. The issues I’ve read about with this mouse I’ve found to be a non-issue for me. I recommend taking a look at this mouse if you are in search of one. It is not something that is so great that you should buy one just to own.

The left screen is my 15in MacBook Pro running at 1440 x 900 and the right is a 24in Samsung running at 1920 x 1200. On the left the wallpaper is an image I found on the web of China I believe and it is rather calming. By contrast the right screen is a photo of a nightline in Japan and is calming in its own right.

Applications running in the Dock

Finder

Firefox

Thunderbird

Minefield — Nightly version of Firefox

Adium

Terminal

Cyberduck

Azureus

iTunes

Path Finder

Grab

Activity monitor

Menu Bar Items

Adium

Path Finder

Wakoopa

Wireless Signal

Modem Status

Screen locking tool

VPN Status

Volume