Using Google Apps for e-mail and contact management

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about how I’d switched a big chunk of my home/small business IT to Google Apps and was using it as part of a solution to keep my work and personal calendars separate, but in sync.

Calendar is all very well, but e-mail is still my main communications tool. So how have I found the switch to Google Mail and how do I keep my contacts in sync between devices? Actually, it’s been remarkably straightforward but I have learnt a few things along the way and this post describes the way I have things working.

Switching to GMail was as simple as updating the MX records for my domain but having done so, I needed to get my various devices working together – that means home and work computers as well as my iPhone.

My home computer is a Mac, so I simply enabled IMAP access on my Google Apps mail account and made sure I followed Google’s recommended client settings for setting up Apple Mail. There’s not more to say really – Google provides an IMAP Service and Apple provides an IMAP client.

Apple Mail

On a Windows PC I would have used Windows Mail/Outlook Express (depending on the version of Windows) or Outlook to achieve the same thing. Even so, on the Windows PC that I use for work, I have Google Chrome installed, so I set myself up with a Chrome application shortcut for my Google Apps e-mail account. It’s only webmail, but GMail is dripping with AJAX and so highly functional and very usable.

Google Mail as a Chrome application

With my PCs set up, that left the iPhone. Again, Google publishes advice for configuring IMAP with the iPhone (as well as recommended client settings) and I followed it. Folder list in Mail on the iPhone
I’m still a little confused about what is being saved where – my iPhone mail application has a Sent folder with some items in, but there’s another one called Sent Mail underneath [Google Mail] – similarly, I have two Drafts folders – as well as both Trash and Deleted Messages. None of that really matters though as all my mail seems to be in the Google Mail account (automagically… I’m not going to get too hung up on the details). Push e-mail would be nice (at the moment I have to tell the phone to periodically check for e-mail) but I’m sure Google will add that feature in time – the important thing is that it seems to work.

I tend to use the iPhone’s built-in mail application most of the time but the iPhone interface to GMail is pretty good too and has the advantage that it groups messages by conversation, rather than using the traditional approach of showing individual messages.

Mail on the iPhoneGoogle Mail on the iPhone

With e-mail working, I turned my attention to my contacts. Google Mail was doing a good job of identifying the people I’d sent e-mail to and creating associated contacts but I wanted to make that I had the same contact list available natively on the Mac and the iPhone. No problem – the Mac OS X Address Book application includes Google Contact syncing although I’m a little confused why I have it enabled in both the Address Book application and in iTunes (Contact Sync uses iTunes for synchronisation). Then, Address Book and iTunes worked together to make the contacts available on the iPhone (regardless of the Google part of the solution).

It’s worth noting that I didn’t think the address book synchronisation was working, but signing out of Google Mail (and then back in again) seemed to force a refresh of the contact information inside Google Mail.

Importantly, Google Mail’s contact functionality does not destroy information stored for contacts that it doesn’t know what to do with. For example, I’ve followed Jaka Jančar’s advice for adding Skype usernames to the OS X Address Book and Google Mail just ignores the extra information.

That just left bringing all of my legacy e-mail into my Google Apps mailbox. I haven’t been brave enough to do that yet (actually, it needs a lot of consolidation first) but I will do it eventually – and, when I do, I’ll be sure to blog about how it went…

Virtualisation as an enabler for cloud computing

Posted on By Mark Wilson

In my summary of the key messages from Microsoft’s virtualisation launch last week, I promised a post about the segment delivered by Tom Bittman, Gartner’s VP and Chief of Research for Infrastructure and Operations, who spoke about how virtualisation is a key enabler for cloud computing.

Normally, if I hear someone talking about cloud computing they are either: predicting the death of traditional operating systems (notably Microsoft Windows); they are a vendor (perhaps even Microsoft) with their own view on the way that things will work out; or they are trying to provide an artificial definition of what cloud computing is and is not.

Then, there are people like me – infrastructure architects who see emerging technologies blurring the edges of the traditional desktop and web hosting models – technologies like Microsoft Silverlight (taking the Microsoft.NET Framework to the web), Adobe AIR (bringing rich internet applications to the desktop) and Google Gears (allowing offline access to web applications). We’re excited by all the new possibilities, but need to find a way through the minefield… which is where we end up going full circle and returning to conversations with product vendors about their vision for the future.

What I saw in Bittman’s presentation was an analyst, albeit one who was speaking at a Microsoft conference, talking broad terms about cloud computing and how it is affected by virtualisation. No vendor alegiance, just tell it as it is. And this is what he had to say:

When people talk about virtualisation, they talk about saving money, power and space – and they talk about “green IT” – but virtualisation is more than that. Virtualisation is an enabling technology for the trasnformation of IT service delivery, a catalyst for changing architectures, processes, cultures, and the IT marketplace itself. And, through these changes, it enables business transformation.

Virtualisation is a hot topic but it’s also part of something much larger – cloud computing. But rather than moving all of our IT services to the Internet, Gartner see virtuaInternetlisation allegiancetransformationas a means to unlock cloud computing so that internal IT departments deliver services to business units in a manner that is more “cloud like”.

Bittman explained that in the past, our component-oriented approach has led to the management of silos for resource management, capacity planning and performance management. Gartner: Virtualising the data centre - from silos to clouds
Then, as we realise how much these silos are costing, virtualisation is employed to drive down infrastructure costs and increase flexibility – a layer-oriented approach with pools of resource, and what he refers to as “elasticity” – the ability to “do things” much more quickly. Even that is only part of the journey though – by linking the pools of resource to the service level requirements of end users, an automated service-oriented approach can be created – an SoA in the form of cloud computing.

At the moment internal IT is still evolving, but external IT providers are starting to deliver service from the cloud (e.g. Google Apps, salesforce.com, etc.) – and that’s just the start of cloud computing.

Rather than defining cloud computing, Bitmann described some of the key attributes:

  1. Service orientation.
  2. Utility pricing (either subsidised, or usage-based).
  3. Elasticity.
  4. Delivered over the Internet.

The first three of these are the same whether the cloud is internal or external.

Gartner: Virtualisation consolidation and deconsolidationVirtualisation is not really about consolidation. It’s actually the decoupling of components that were previously combined – the application, operating system and hardware – to provides some level of abstraction. A hypervisor is just a service provider for compute resource to a virtual machine. Decoupling is only one part of what’s happening though as the services may be delivered in different ways – what Gartner describes as alternative IT delivery models.

Technology is only one part of this transformation of IT – one of the biggest changes is the way in which we view IT as we move from buying components (e.g. a new server) to services (including thinking about how to consume those services – internally or from the cloud) and this is a cultural/mindset change.

Pricing and licensing also changes – no longer will serial numbers be tied to servers but new, usage-based, models will emerge.

IT funding will change too – with utility pricing leading to a fluid expansion and contraction of infrastructure as required to meet demands.

Speed of deployment is another change – as virtualisation allows for faster deployment and business IT users see the speed in which they can obtain new services, demand will also increase.

Management will be critical – processes for management of service providers and tools as the delivery model flexes based on the various service layers.

And all of this leads towards cloud computing – not outsourcing everything to external providers, but enabling strategic change by using technologies such as virtualisation to allow internal IT to function in a manner which is more akin to an external service, whilst also changing the business’ ability to consume cloud services.