analyzing the business and technology of the web
Have you ever wondered why once you’ve clicked on “view as thumbnails” you can see little thumbnails of image files but not .psd (photoshop) files? Well I have, and after doing some research I found out that it is no longer supported. It use to be before CS came out but I found a solution to your worries.
Thumbview is a program that makes this possible again! If you are like me, and want to see your .psds as thumbs, go check it out.
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Tomorrow I am getting everything cleaned off and reinstalled on my work machine because its just running slow. I just couldn’t bring myself to do this without saving and backing everything up, especially my firefox goodies. I looked for something like this a while back, but couldn’t find it till tonight.
It’s called the Firefox Extension Backup Extension. It saves everything for you all in one directory so you can just replace that with what is currently there, and all your extensions, passwords (i believe anyway) themes, everything is there just like you had it before you wiped it clean. And when your all done with the backup process, it takes you to a screen where it lists, in detail all the things is saved you hours of trouble from having to do :)
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Evan Williams put together a great one page printable Gmail shortcuts list for download. If you didn’t know about Gmail shortcuts than you haven’t really used Gmail.
Gmail Shortcuts (printable cheatsheet)
technorati tags:google, gmail, shortcuts
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I just posted about how Google embraces Software as a Service (SaaS) for the small company as well as how we are now providing consulting in this space. So, I decided to give you an inside peek on what I actually mean by laying out how we have implemented SaaS, why we have done it, what we use, and the benefits we have seen from this.
We use Gmail under the Google Hosted platform for our email. If you are familiary with Gmail at all chances are you are hooked and will never go back to using anything else. Well imagine that for your corporate or small business email. It sells itself. There are not currently as many administrative features as there should be nor are there as many features as an enterprise level mail system. But I definitely recommend it.
Calendar
Here is another Google product we use – Google Calendar. It is easily the best web calendar implementation I have seen thus far. And, what really sells it is its integration with Gmail. Calendars can be shared, you can set up appointments, run multiple calendars. It’s a full featured implementation that is just great to use.
Word Processor
Not too long ago, Google acquired Writely – a web based word processor that is much more than your traditionl word processor. Essentially it is a documtent management and collaboration platfrom that happens to have a word processor built into it. It allows you to create, share, and collaborate on documents. It has built in versioning with the ability to compare differences between document versions. You can tag documents, publish them to your blog, and be notified of changes and additions via RSS.
Spreadsheets
Kudos to Google – yet another product on the list. I do not use spreadsheets a lot. I don’t know why but I can generally create a web application faster than a spreadsheet so if I have something that requires tabular data and calculations that is often the way I go. But when I do, I use Google Spreadsheets. The interface is the same as a standard spreadsheet interface with the ability to update and view from anywhere and share with whomever you want.
Blogging / Content Management
We use WordPress on all our blogs and recommend it for client’s blogs. It’s simply the best product we have found to customize that maintains its usability. They have also added value through allowing community driven extension and plugin development so you can enhance your implementation any way you like. This is a product we host ourselves but you can find many hosts (or we can help you) and wordpress.com offers free hosting.
Wiki
We use a wiki for many different functions. It maintains our knowledge base, code standards, design standards, client lists, server environments, project documentation, and the list goes on. For this we host our own MediaWiki. We have used some .NET implementations before (because we do .Net) but none of them can yet compare to MediaWiki. Some great hosted solution exist out there if you don’t have the means to do it yourself. JotSpot and WetPaint are great solutions.
Project Management
I used to use Microsoft Project and I am so happy I’ll never have to again. We started by using Basecamp from 37Signals which is an excellent product but decided to move to activeCollab recently for the simple reason that it was free and I could host it internally. Both are great products and I recommend them to any company who needs a great tool for time and project management.
IM / Communications
Two words, Google Talk. It’s integrated with Gmail. You can send files, leave voice mails, and do VOIP. Start using it and you will never go back. Best IM client I have ever used.
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That wraps it up for this round, focused on productivity. If there are any areas for which you would like to know the tools and software we use, leave us a comment and we will include it next time.
Next will either be the tools I use personally – browsing, blogging, to-do’s or about social / new media tools.
technorati tags:office 2.0, web 2.0, office, productivity, google, gmail, activeCollab, google calendar, calendar, email, project management
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At Simplifive we have been using Google Hosted for quite sometime which is essentially a private, branded version of GMail, GCalendar, and GTalk. I absolutely love it, not to mention it being free.
By my calculations we have saved several thousands of dollars by not having Microsoft Exchange and the time it would take for me to administer it. For these reasons we have begun offering consulting on web services like these to small companies who can embrace offerings like Google’s and others that provide hosted productivity solutions. I recently wrote several articles about Software as a Service like the ‘Saas Case Study‘ and ‘Office 2.0 in a Web 2.0 World‘.
Now, Google has a new but similar offering to that of Hosted, simply ‘Google Apps for Your Domain‘. It includes use of Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and Google Page Creator. You can sign up here. I wonder why Spreadsheets and Writely are not integrated (although I am sure they will soon).
I also stumbled upon Google Apps for Education which seems to be simply a versioning ploy of bundling their software for an additional niche (hey, Google learned something from Microsoft).
Fom the edu site:
Sharing information and ideas is vital to learning. So imagine how valuable it would be if your entire campus community shared a set of powerful, easy-to-use and integrated communication and collaboration services. With Google Apps for Education, you can offer all of your students innovative email, instant messaging, and calendaring, all for free.* You can select any combination of our available services (see below), and customize them with your school’s logo, color scheme and content. You can manage your users through an easy web-based console or use our available APIs to integrate the services into your existing systems — and it’s all hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.
technorati tags:google, office 2.0, web 2.0, office, productivity, services, saas, SOA
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