New footer in site feed

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

This evening, I’ve made a change to the markwilson.it site feed (which, incidentally, makes me feel warm and fuzzy as I see more and more people subscribing – and is a good way to keep up with the stuff I post on this site). The change involved adding a footer to each item in the feed. It’s only short, I hope it won’t spoil your enjoyment of the content, and it looks something like this:

Creative Commons LicenseThis blog post was written by Mark Wilson for markwilson.it. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2004-2008 Mark Wilson and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. (What is this footer about?)

Why did I do this? Basically, it’s an attempt to make sure that where people scrape this site they don’t abuse the effort that I put into writing original content. The content here is copyrighted but I license it for non-commercial use, with attribution, as long as it is not altered or transformed in any way.

By including a footer which sets out where the original content can be found and highlighting the terms under which this content is offered (with a link explaining what the footer is about), I’m making it clear where the feed content originates from.

If you’ve come here by following a link from a site that is not the original source, please let me know.

In the spirit of Creative Commons, I should point out that I “stole” the idea from Merlin Mann, whose site at 43 Folders is much bigger and better than mine (I hope that this content is sufficiently original not to count as a derivative work) and that I use Sherief Mursyidi’s Feed Footer Joost de Valk’s RSS Footer WordPress plugin to make it happen.

“How Do I?” videos on the Microsoft TechNet website

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

One of the things I’ve been working on recently is producing some “How Do I?” (HDI) videos for Microsoft. Basically they are 8-30 minute screencasts looking at implementing a particular technology and these IT Pro-focused videos are coming online on the TechNet website.

The two I’ve produced so far are both concerned with the server core installation option for Windows Server 2008 and are based on my presentation at the UK user groups Community Day last April. My first two videos are available at the links below:

Hopefully people will find them useful – I’d be interested to hear any comments.

After more than four years of avoiding Skype, I discovered it’s not bad at all…

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

In 2004, one of my colleagues tried to get me to use Skype. I wasn’t impressed, especially as I was working on a client site and the proxy server kept on blocking connections to strange educational sites all over the world.

I’ve since learnt that was because of the peer-to-peer networking nature of Skype with it’s system of supernodes but, even so, for the last few years, I’ve managed to avoid it, favouring traditional voice communications and more recently, SIP-based VoIP. Then, as I blogged previously, James Bannan and I decided that we would like to put a podcast together and, as he’s in Australia and I’m in the UK, Skype looks like the most sensible communications option. I listen to a lot of podcasts where the presenters are geographically dispersed and apart from the odd glitch when someone is clearly on a weak connection or running some CPU-intensive software, everything seems fine.

Skype main pageSkype main page
So, one night last month, we gave it a go (we’ll only need audio but we tried the full video capabilities) and I was actually quite impressed. I was at home, using Skype 2.7.0.330 for Mac OS X with the built-in iSight webcam in my MacBook and James was using a recent version of Skype on a Windows PC in his office.

Don’t be put off by the pixellated picture… that was just because it wasn’t exactly the best picture of James (stills from video calls rarely are) but, apart from the deliberately mosaiced face, you can see that the video quality is not bad at all.

Skype technical informationGiven that I have a consumer broadband connection and that James was on the other side of the world (although I don’t know what sort of network connection he had), things were pretty good.

If you check out the technical call information screenshot you can see that the round trip (of at least 21,000 miles, through 4 relays was taking an average of 374ms (just about the limit before delay becomes noticeable but not exactly causing a problem) and there was negligible jitter and barely any packet loss, although the SVOPC codec is designed to tolerate packet loss (I found a forum post on a German site which describes the various metrics used by Skype). Most notably for me, both CPU cores on my 2.2GHz Intel Core2Duo were being hammered as Skype encoded/decoded the video conversation but we were still managing a respectable 15 frames per second.

So, in all the whole experience was a good one. Of course, like any VoIP connection across the Internet, experiences will vary according to the traffic conditions at the time but I was suitably impressed.

I hope it gets better than this…

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few weeks back, I wrote about Microsoft’s Mojave Experiment and got slammed for being too pro-Microsoft. Well, last night Microsoft ran the first ads in its new Windows consumer campaign and I’m not going to win any friends at Microsoft for saying this – this new campaign sucks. Maybe it’s because I’m not American. Maybe its because I don’t watch Seinfeld but it’s a minute and a half of… I don’t know what. It just leaves me empty. Windows, The Future, Delicious… WTF?

Watch it and see for yourself:

Microsoft says that the ad is:

“More than just a quirky ad about nothing, the newest Microsoft ad for Windows signals the beginning of a series of initiatives to improve consumers’ experience with Windows products – in retail, on the Web and working with manufacturers to make PCs faster and easier to use.”

OK, so maybe this is a teaser. Maybe it will get better – after all, Brad Brooks, Corporate Vice President for Windows Consumer Product Marketing, says that this is just to engage conversation, and that future ads will tell a story through Microsoft’s employees, through the products that Microsoft is building around Windows and how they connect the software, online services and PC experience in a way that’s new for consumers. Brooks continues to say that the campaign has two end goals:

  1. Re-engage consumers emotionally around the Windows brand.
  2. Drive a great customer experience at all touchpoints and all levels.

Sounds good… now, let me think of a competitor that enjoys tremendous brand loyalty (for all its faults) and is strong on customer experience… umm… that’s a tough one… oh yes, Apple!

For all their untruths, the Mac vs. PC ads are funny and that’s how they engage people.

I’m not saying that Microsoft should copy Apple’s ads, or counter them in some way – too much water has passed under the bridge now and anyway, they will get slated for being defensive. A big campaign highlighting the benefits of Windows is a great idea but this is too conservative, too slow. Microsoft uses some great videos at its launch events and conferences. Videos with drama, excitement and humour. They have used some good public ads in the past too – like the Xbox ad that got banned (Life is short, play more) – sure, it may have been distasteful, but it was humourous and it got people talking, so the Xbox marketing team got their next ad banned too (getting something banned is not always bad – it worked for Frankie Goes To Hollywood in the 1980s). I’m not suggesting that an ad has to be controversial to be effective (the Microsoft Unified Communications video that I featured in yesterday’s post is a good example), but it does need to grab hold of people and make them want to watch it!

Like I said, maybe it’s because I’m British and, just as our sense of humour is not appreciated globally, maybe I don’t “get” the Seinfeld ad – after all, this is a national campaign for the USA, not Europe. Maybe that’s why I’m an IT architect and not a marketing professional. I just hope it gets better than this…

Microsoft Unified Communications: part 1 (introduction)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

As well as struggling to understand what I do for a living (“Mark works in computers”), my mother-in-law struggles to understand the concept of working from home. In fact, many people above a certain age do – in the same way that they may struggle with the concept of not wearing a suit and tie, or with flexible working hours – but, to sum it up on one sentence, work is something that I do – not a place where I go.

Work is something that I do – not a place where I go.

I work from anywhere, with colleagues in the UK and Europe, but also with contacts in the US and Australia (i.e. in different timezones).

So the business challenges in this new world of work are about working together in real time, keeping people up to date, sharing information and working in any place, at any time. Whilst it’s important to amend business processes (and personal attitudes) to accommodate these requirements, technology plays its part too. I was recently freed from the shackles of our corporate infrastructure to use a skunkworks mobile working platform that gave me access to Exchange Server 2007’s Outlook Anywhere functionality (no need to VPN into the corporate network) and Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 but I still have some challenges to overcome – like many people, I suffer from communications chaos – playing “telephone tag”, getting stuck in “voice mail jail” and suffering from “e-mail overload”. Then there’s RSS feeds to keep up to date with and I often find instant messaging to be a distraction. Finally, I have to turn something off and MAKE IT STOP!!!

Inbox Zero helps with the e-mail overload. I’ve now reset all my RSS feeds and try and spend time at the start of each day reading the latest updates. My calendars are synchronised and my mobile phone is diverted to the VoIP desk phone in my home office when I’m not working somewhere else, and if I’m at home but away from my desk or on a call, the voice mail is forwarded to my e-mail Inbox (and filters prioritise it for action). In a way, I’ve started to unify my communications but only at an individual level.

What about my colleagues? Some of them have desk phones and mobiles – which should I call? I might be able to see their calendar and work out if they are at their desk but time of day could also be a consideration. If they are travelling then I might call the mobile. But sometimes I actually want to reach their voice mail (e.g. if I want to leave a message outside their normal working hours). If they only have one mobile phone (I have two so I can keep work and home life separate) then I don’t want to disturb them when they are on holiday – e-mail might be a better option. That’s why we need to unify the communications chaos.

World War 2 Propaganda Poster - Is Your Journey Really Necessary?Then there are meetings. As I consider whether my journey is really necessary (the picture here dates back to the second world war but these days the issue is rising fuel prices and a need to cut back on carbon emissions), I take part in an increasing number of conference calls and webcasts but I miss the interaction too… sometimes it’s useful to meet up face-to-face (where I work, my team has not met face-to-face for over 2 years, despite having been re-organised several times) but even if that’s not possible, video conferencing, and smart conference phones like the Microsoft Office RoundTable can really help.

So far, I’ve covered some of the reasons to unify communications but there’s another term that’s often banded about – unified messaging – what does that mean? Unified messaging is a form of unified communications and in order to understand the need for unified messaging, it helps to understand the concepts of synchronous and asynchronous communications.

The telephone is an example of synchronous communications – where we communicate in turn. We even have a three-way handshake at the beginning of a telephone call (phone rings, I answer, you reply). Other examples of synchronous communications are video conferencing and instant messaging.

But what if I don’t pick up the phone? It’s likely that the call will be diverted to voice mail and the caller’s brain struggles to switch to an asynchronous mode as they leave a message with all the pertinent points to be acted on later). Other examples of asynchronous communications are letters, faxes, and e-mail.

Unified messaging brings synchronous and asynchronous communications together – for example allowing fax and voice mail messages to be accessed together with e-mail in a single Inbox. Unified communications take this concept further and integrate unified messaging with instant messaging, presence awareness, video conferencing and desktop sharing.

To demonstrate the Microsoft view of unified communications, check out this short video based on the film “The Devil Wears Prada“:

In the video, a variety of Microsoft technologies are used to unify communications (all of which are available today):

  • Phone call and secretary takes message (hard desk phone – the traditional way of working – although this could be integrated with Exchange Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007).
  • Call on soft phone (Office Communicator) from a mobile contact (Windows Mobile) – forwarded to hard desk phone (Office Communications Server).
  • Instant message to instantly warn colleagues of an impending event (Office Communicator and Office Communications Server).
  • Message sent from smart phone to bring forward a meeting (Windows Mobile).
  • Conference call set up in a matter of seconds (Live Meeting, with Office RoundTable conference phone in meeting room and personal webcam in remote office).
  • Desktop sharing (Live Meeting).
  • Mobile voice access to mail and calendar – move a meeting back and call by name (Exchange Server Unified Messaging).
  • Status updates available at an instant (Windows Mobile).

Having set the scene for unified communications, subsequent posts will examine the technology in more detail, together with some of the challenges around implementation.

Credit

This post was based on the opening session from James O’Neill‘s presentation on the Microsoft View of Unified Communications earlier this week.

Installation error for Google Chrome

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’m not going to review Google Chrome – there’s plenty of people doing that all over the Internet at the moment; however I did run across an interesting error whilst trying to install it on a Windows Server 2008 (x64) computer today. I downloaded the installer from Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 and after downloading, I elected to run the installer. UAC was not invoked (it would normally be expected for an executable with the word setup in the filename) but installation failed with the following error:

Error 1625 when installing Google Chrome

I retried the installation with Administrator privileges and it succeeded, suggesting that this error was caused by insufficient permissions.

Using Google Apps with Outlook 2007 to keep my personal and work life in sync

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last year, I wrote a very long blog post on the problems I was having with calendar synchronisation but I never reached the point where I was ready to publish it. Almost a year on, and I finally have something that’s working well for me but, as it’s such a long story, I’ve tidied up the original post and published it (for the full history) and I’ll write a new one here that describes the working scenario.

Calendar synchronisation… shouldn’t it all be a bit easier than this?

First up – to recap on the original problems:

  • Due to limitations with Microsoft Office’s Online calendar functionality. I was synchronising local calendars at home and work, using Google Calendar (GCal) as an intermediary.
  • The main problem was synchronisation between Outlook 2007 and GCal and, after trying a huge list of products, each of which nearly worked, but not quite, I got it working using CompanionLink for Google; however the various other products I’d used along the way had left me with duplicate and missing calendar entries – and a sour taste in my mouth.
  • On the Mac at home, Apple iCal was working with GCal but there were still some issues around synchronisation with a local Exchange Server via Entourage.

Back to the drawing board

After having implemented Google Apps for my home/small business IT, I decided to have another go at calendar synchronisation.

This time, to minimise the scope for synchronisation errors, rather than merging my work calendar into my home calendar, I decided to set up another Google Calendar to mirror the Exchange one I use for work. In addition, the process was simplified as Google now has a synchronisation product (Google Calendar Sync) which can handle the Exchange/Outlook-Google side of things and I am no longer using Entourage or Exchange Server at home.

The whole thing looks something like this:

Calendar syncing between home and work

As can be seen in the diagram, I actually have three calendars:

  1. My work calendar exists on a corporate Microsoft Exchange server (accessible via Outlook Web Access but primarily used with Outlook).
  2. I’ve also created a Google Calendar to hold a copy of this “work” calendar in the cloud and Google Calendar Sync does the magic to keep the two in sync.
  3. Finally, there’s my “personal” calendar, which lives at Google Apps.

Google Calendar sync is set up for a 2-way sync and, even though I can synchronise as frequently as every 10 minutes, Outlook performance suffers whilst the sync is taking place so I have it set to synchronise hourly. The main drawbacks with this approach are: the need for a client helper application; the 1:1 nature of the synchronisation (i.e. you cannot sync with multiple calendars); and the inability to set synchronisation schedules (or even to control the date range for synchronisation) – on the other hand, it’s free.

In Google Calendar, I have given my Google Apps account access to my “work” calendar, which means that I have full read-write access to it from anywhere that I use Google Apps. That access could be via a browser, of using native applications on my iPhone, MacBook, or another device (e.g. a Windows PC). Basically, my work calendar is visible everywhere.

My “personal” calendar is… personal. I can access it directly from any of the devices that I use for accessing Google Apps but I don’t want my colleagues to know that I have certain appointments and one thing I found with the Google Calendar Sync (luckily I spotted it early) was that appointments marked as private in Outlook were visible once they got to Google Calendar. I still need to think about how to pass my personal free/busy information back to Outlook/Exchange at work but, for now, my “personal” calendar exists in Google Apps and is visible in my “work” Google Calendar account but I don’t sync it back to Outlook. Basically, if I look at Outlook, I see work appointments but if I open a browser and got to the Google Calendar, I can see work and personal information.

What does it all look like?

In this screen-shot of Outlook 2007 connected to my corporate Exchange Server, my “work” calendar is visible but there are no appointments from my “personal” calendar:

Outlook Calendar

Viewing either of the Google calendars in a browser (in this case it’s Safari on a Mac) shows my “work” and “personal” calendars using different colours:

Multiple calendars viewed in Google Calendar

I can also subscribe to these calendars using the iCalendar protocol from Apple iCal, Windows Calendar (or another desktop client):

Multiple calendars in Apple iCal
Multiple calendars in Windows Calendar

On the iPhone, I can use either the built in calendar application or a browser application (I prefer the browser version as the iPhone Calendar assigns different colours to the various calendars):

Multiple calendars in the iPhone Calendar applicationMultiple calendars viewed in Google Calendar on an iPhone

You may notice that I also subscribe to a public calendar which provides the details of UK public holidays. Doing this means that the public holidays show up in my calendar using a different colour to the other calendars but there are other calendars that I could subscribe to – for instance sports calendars (e.g. the Northampton Saints fixture list) – or anything that uses the iCalendar format described in RFC 2445.

Summary and other points of note

In all, this solution seems to be working remarkably well for me and provides a suitable level of abstraction between work and personal calendar details whilst still letting me (and my family – or anyone else that I share my calendars with) see everything that I’m up to. I still need to work on getting personal free/busy details to populate my “work” calendar but, other than that, I’m pretty happy with the solution – and all of the software involved is free (apart from Outlook and Exchange Server – for which the licenses are provided by my employer).

I’m using Google’s technology but I could also have used Microsoft products, as Sarah Perez describes with Windows Live Calendar and the Outlook Connector. Either should work – it’s just a matter of preference – and as I was already using Google Apps for one part of the solution, adding Windows Live Calendar into the mix seemed to over-complicate things slightly for me.

Finally, this information may be useful when diagnosing problems:

The browser wars just got interesting again…

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer 8 logoIt’s well known that, after Microsoft won the “browser wars”, development of Internet Explorer (IE) all but stopped at a time when use of the Internet was exploding and new features were required to keep up to date with the emerging technologies (and standards). That’s why, a few years ago, I was only too happy to promote a viable alternative (i.e. Mozilla Firefox) and Firefox has come a long way since then. Mozilla Firefox logoUnfortunately, it’s not been a bed of roses. I lost too many open tabs to Firefox 1.5 and 2 crashes so these days I only use Firefox when I’m testing new code on my website – Safari (with all its faults) is the default browser on my Mac and IE7 is my normal browser on Windows.

Even so, if it hadn’t been for Firefox, it’s unlikely that Microsoft would have made the huge step forward that IE7 represents when compared with its predecessor. And, aside from the controversy over the various modes in which IE8 can work (I think that Microsoft made the right decision in allowing standards mode to be the default), it seems to be shaping up as another significant step forward for Microsoft (just as Firefox 3 is reported to have been for those who wish to use an alternative browser).

From my point of view, it can only be good that for the last few years there have been two major competitors for our web browsing – choice promotes competition – and competition generally leads to an improved user experience. The need to develop for multiple platforms encourages web developers to adopt standards (at least in part) and the days of “this site is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4 or later at 800×600 resolution” are, thankfully, a distant memory (as I write this in a maximised browser on a 1680×1050 display).

Last week, Microsoft released a new beta of IE8 (beta 2), together with a fact sheet providing an overview of the new features and there is some really good stuff in there (the IEBlog post about IE8 beta 2 availability is worth a read too). Whereas beta 1 was targeted at developers, beta 2 is for anyone to look at. I’ll be installing it on my system (just as soon as I have worked through the seemingly never-ending list of tabs that I’m doing something with…).

Google Chrome logoThen yesterday, out of the blue came a new twist – it seems that, after much speculation, Google is to launch a beta of it’s own web browser today. Whereas IE 8 carries forward a legacy of backwards compatibility, and Firefox is struggling to win back the hearts and minds of those who were burned by buggy releases with poor memory management, Google Chrome is concentrating on serving the requirements that today’s rich Internet applications require, whilst remaining stable, fast, secure, and simple to use (see the Comic book for more information). Sounds like a tall order but, if anyone can do it, Google probably can.

It looks to me as though this just became a three horse race.

Getting started with Google Apps

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Google Apps logoEvery now and again, my ADSL connection hangs and I need to reset the router. If this happens whilst I’m away from home (as it has done on a number of occasions), e-mail doesn’t make it through to my server and a non-delivery report is generated for the sender. It’s an annoyance but I could also have lost important messages, so I signed up with a store and forward service called Dynu. Unfortunately, but no sooner had Dynu processed my credit card but their website went offline and I had to get my credit card issuer to refund the payment as Dynu was not responding to any support queries. I started to look into alternative services (like Exchange Hosted Services) but these are aimed at corporates – not small business like mine so, for the last week, the vast corporation that is markwilson.it (actually, it’s one person, albeit with enough IT to run a medium sized business…) has been running its core infrastructure on Google Apps (formerly known as Google Apps for Your Domain).

I decided that I don’t have any privacy any more so I might as well cross to the dark side and let the big G index all my e-mail…

…well, something like that anyway – in reality, as well as trying to improve the reliability of my e-mail service, I’m trying to reduce the number of servers (virtual or otherwise) that I’m running (I am, after all, just one person) and moving from Microsoft Exchange Server to a service “in the cloud” let me turn off another 2 virtual machines (both of which needed upgrading to the latest versions). Why was I using my own mail server at home when my hosting provider‘s mail service will work just as well for me? Because my original reason for using Exchange Server was to keep my Exchange technical skills up-to-date – but that’s less of an issue these days as I spend more time architecting solutions and less time getting stuck into technology details. Don’t misunderstand me – I’m not saying that corporates should dump Exchange Server (far from it) and, as I commented on a recent post comparing software as a service (the Google approach) with software plus services (the Microsoft approach):

“I’m a one man band and I wouldn’t suggest [Google Apps] to any of my enterprise customers. In fact, I’m not convinced that anyone other than small-medium businesses and cash-strapped schools, charities, etc. will follow the SaaS route in it’s entirety (and it’s probably off limits for government departments – both local and central – as they will struggle to get around the various security restrictions).”

For smaller organisations who don’t want the hassle of running their own IT infrastructure servers, Google Apps is a reasonable choice (just as is Microsoft Small Business Server for those whose requirements are a little more advanced). Microsoft also has a cloud based service for consumers and small businesses – Windows Live Admin Center (formerly Windows Live Custom Domains) but I decided to go with Google (largely because their website told me what I’d be getting, whereas it wasn’t at all clear from the Windows Live Admin Center site – frankly, Microsoft’s online offerings are a marketing mess).

Once I’d decided which domain name to use, setting up Google Apps was straightforward – I simply completed the registration wizard, verified domain ownership (I had the choice of using either an HTML file or a DNS record) and switched the MX records to point to Google’s servers. I then set up a few users, associated another domain with my Google Apps account and started using the service.

For a few hours after that I was receiving messages on both the old and new servers but, once the world’s DNS servers had caught up, everything was arriving in my Google Apps/GMail mailbox.

I like the GMail interface a lot – for a start it challenges many of my preconceptions about how e-mail should work, storing almost everything in my Inbox and grouping it into conversation threads. I’m still not completely familiar with all the GMail settings but the first problem I came up against was how to implement Inbox Zero when GMail doesn’t support folders. It does, however, support a labelling system so I can apply labels to messages and use the labels for my various Inbox Zero states (and other IMAP clients – e.g. Apple Mail – see them as folders, although moving a message to one of those folders in another application does not assign the label to the message in the GMail web interface).

Another minor annoyance is that the domain name I use for e-mail does not match the one I use for my Google Apps and so some e-mail clients will show my messages as sent from Firstname Lastname [user@googleappsdomain.tld] on behalf of Firstname Lastname [user@secondarydomain.tld] but that’s something I can live with for now.

It’s worth pointing out that I’m not using all of the Google Apps features – at the moment it’s just for e-mail and calendar – but if I had people I needed to collaborate with then Google Sites would allow me to do so (my WordPress blog is still hosted externally – and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future). I have Microsoft Office 2007 so I’m unlikely to adopt Google Docs in any big way and, as for Google Talk, I avoid instant messaging when I can as I find it too big an interruption (and often an inefficient way to communicate).

So, was it worth it? Almost certainly – I get no spam. Seriously. None at all. Zero spam messages in my Inbox for a week now (and no false positives in the 394 messages that Google has identified as spam and quarantined for me). And another huge benefit is search. I still use Xobni with Outlook 2007 at work (and I could still use Outlook as an IMAP client at home) but GMail’s search is excellent (as I would hope in a service provided by a company that has a mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”).

In some follow-up posts, I’ll describe some of the challenges I’ve faced with keeping e-mail, calendar and contacts in sync across various platforms and devices, as well as importing my legacy messages into the 7GB of space that Google gives me for my mailbox.

Further reading

Lifehacker: What does Google Apps for Your Domain actually do?

Creating HTML signatures in Apple Mail

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I recently switched my e-mail service from my own server to Google Apps. I’ll write more about the move (and the reasons behind it) in a separate post but, as a consequence, I’ve also started using the Apple Mail application to access my GMail over IMAP. On the whole, Apple Mail is pretty straightforward but one of the things I couldn’t work out is how to create an HTML signature.

HTML signature in Apple Mail
Melvin Rivera has the answer in his post on custom CSS signatures in Mail and the basic gist is to create a dummy signature in the Mail preferences; close Mail; create some custom HTML (with inline CSS to keep GMail happy – Melvin has an example linked from his post); save that as a .webarchive file using Safari; copy the new .webarchive file over the .webarchive file that corresponds to the dummy signature stored in ~/Library/Mail/Signatures (keeping the same filename); fire up Mail and open the preferences; rename the signature if required, then drag it to the mail account(s) with which it should be associated.

(To think that I thought Microsoft Outlook’s options were over-complicated!)

Sadly, neither Apple Mail, nor GMail seem to recognise the tel: links for phone numbers.