Mary Jo Foley at ZDnet writes an article with ten questions from Microsoft to ask (and answer) before deciding to switch to Google Apps rather than Microsoft Office in an enterprise environment. Google Docs and Spreadsheets in it’s Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) edition is being targeted at enterprises, and, due to the cost, churches and non-profits. Non-profits even enjoy a lot of free benefits from Google although I don’t have a full comparison handy. I think these questions are worth asking, because many I don’t have answers for. I keep being tempted to take a look at Google for more than just hosting personal email (even using my own domain), but I’m not convinced that for business use they are appropriate in more than a few cases right now, especially the apps. I actually have one “business” domain that I am going to convert to Google Apps email but I have very specific reasons, and it’s not the whole company! But this post is more about the Docs and Spreadsheets aspect of their offering, which I have even more reservations about. Here’s a taste:

9. Google says that enterprise customers use only 10% of the features in today’s productivity applications which implies that EVERYONE needs the SAME 10% of the feature when in fact it is very clear that in each company there are specific roles people play that demands access to specific information – how does Google’s generic strategy address role specific needs?

Thanks to Vladville for the post with the original link.

They finally added it. I no longer have to rant about it. Via Brett (thanks!).

Shortest. Post. Ever. (For me. :-)

Well, Church IT Podcast Episode 15 is in the bag, with some good discussion on VLANs, DHCP Relay, and web content filtering. I got the show notes wiki page updated with some notes and links I remember now, having just finished the podcast, but others will hopefully fill in the blanks I forgot about! To my knowledge the podcast is the only place you can hear yours truly online via audio. I’ve been a listener and contributor to the live podcast for all of its life I believe, although I had to miss a few episodes in the middle. I usually find some topic to try and speak somewhat intelligently on (whether I succeed is another matter!) in each podcast I’m a part of, but I always get more useful tips from the others than I could possibly contribute, which is as it should be for a collaborative “conference call” style environment.

One tool mentioned in the podcast this time is called Remote Task Manager, which is a remote control (at a granular level, not just a remote desktop viewer tool) for networked PCs. It sounds very useful and worth checking out the demo when I have the time!

I have a small problem that still has me stumped after some Google searching. One of my users forwarded me a spam that got through our spam filters (one of those image spams) asking if we could do anything about it. The spam filtering service asked me to forward just the headers of the message but not the entire message so it wouldn’t get blocked by their spam filter (like it did the first time I forwarded it). Sounds easy, right? Just open the attached message that was forwarded to me, and click View->Options… to get the internet headers. But they’re blank. Why? Well, I don’t know, Outlook decided that there were none, apparently.

This isn’t the first time this has happened; I tried the same thing with another email that had spam issues and Outlook also thought the attached email had no headers, even though it came from the internet (rather than being originated in Exchange) and certainly did have headers. I even managed to get that one forwarded through to the anti-spam support, and they were able to find the problem; in the headers. So I know the headers are there, since they will get forwarded with the message again. But how can I view them? Anyone with a working answer will be greatly appreciated with a reward of me posting his or her name in a new post thanking them for the solution :-)

I’m using Outlook 2003 connected to Exchange 2003 Standard, and my user is running the same, and forwarded the original spam to me “as an attachment.” Google does turn up plenty of results from my searches, but they all reference how to view the internet headers of a regular message, not one attached to a forwarded email.

Well, it’s online to school, anyway. This week begins my second year (chronologically; I’m half-time so I’m still a freshman) of college. I’m taking two online classes this semester, a Technical Writing course and one on Database Design. Both appear very interesting, although fortunately they should be somewhat easy given my experience. I’m looking forward to learning some new things, but between classes, closing on and moving to our new house next month, and Roundtable travel, etc., my blogging may slow down more than it already has. Or, if I end up writing a bunch of interesting stuff for my Technical Writing class, I may post some of it and get some extra-good content! That, and if there’s an assignment where I want to procrastinate, what better to do than write a blog post instead? :-) We’ll see how it goes, no promises! I won’t stop completely, so don’t think I’ve disappeared!

There are some really cool things I’m seeing both in and out of the Church IT specialty in my feed reader, even though I’m lurking. I’ll be at Jason Powell’s Roundtable next month, and possibly at the national CITRT in Kansas City in early October, but that’s still to be determined. If at all possible, I’ll be at both! As sad as it would be to spend time away from our new house we’ll have only been in for half a month! Not to mention my wife — we’ve never spent a night under separate roofs since we got married in 2005, and our second anniversary is in October. Fortunately, it’s not the 3rd or 4th! :-D

When I try to view my Gmail account, I’m getting a “Server Error: Temporary Error (502)” message that says:

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to log in while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try logging in to your account again in a few minutes.

Very strange. Even more strange is that I can log into one of my Google Apps for Domains accounts just fine, just not my main Gmail account.

Update at 10:30 pm: Seems to be working fine now. Not sure how long it was actually down. Around an hour or less from what I saw, but who knows how long before I checked it went down, and how soon in the interim it came back up.

My wife has been a social butterfly at several social networking sites for a while, but she’s finally ready to branch out with her own WordPress blog: LibraryGal.com: The life of a librarian. Besides being a great wife and mother, she’s a librarian with a graduate education. When I want to find something, I’ll often let my laziness kick in and ask her a question, because she can find anything and enjoys doing it. She can even find my keys, pen, papers etc. when I misplace them, but that may just be the woman thing in general (just like losing them tends to be the a man thing :-) She even posted about the new toys (software) she’s getting to play with at work, just for the occasion of me sending my tech friends over :-)

And remember, unsubscribing from a blog feed in your feed reader is anonymous and even easier than unsubscribing from an email list, so there’s no harm in adding her blog for a trial run, right there alongside mine and Nathan LaGrange’s (unless you categorize your feeds by topic, of course). Subscribers even get free cake!^*

*Not really, but it made you want to subscribe, right?

A while back I wrote a post about a nice, free Outlook 2007 PDF Previewer plugin so you could preview PDF documents within Outlook just like the preview for images and other Office documents that comes built-in. That post is possibly my most popular entry of all time! Apparently a lot of people search Google for information on adding PDF preview capabilities to Outlook 2007. This traffic will likely come to an end, because Ryan Gregg, the original author of the free add-in that provided this functionality, has updated his entry removing the download, because Adobe has apparently included this functionality in their Adobe Reader 8.1 release. In memory of the useful plugin, I’ll say: So long, and thanks for all the fish! (At least it has a happy ending.)

Update in April 2008: If you don’t like the Adobe Reader software, try using Foxit Reader, a free alternative that loads much more quickly. Outlook 2007 PDF Preview is not built in, but Tim Heuer has used Foxit to create Previewer add-ons for Outlook 2007 that work in both Windows XP and Windows Vista. See my original post here about Outlook 2007 PDF Previewer that I updated with links to all of these!

Firefox Upgrades Interfere with Kiosks

I ran into a small issue with the SteadyState/Firefox setup that was a relatively easy fix: Firefox tried to update itself and the theme when new versions came out. Why it does this as a limited user when it can’t run the upgrade (for the program itself; the theme should work if it weren’t locked down) is beyond me, maybe I’ll file a bug report or something. Anyway, to get rid of the upgrade reminder, I logged in as Administrator and installed the Firefox program upgrade. Then I unlocked the profile and disabled Disk Protection, logged in as the locked down user, not not locked down, and upgraded the theme. Then I changed the Options (Tools->Options->Advanced->Update) and unchecked all of the automatic update options. Now updates won’t automatically (try to) apply, and I don’t even have to worry about security holes much because of the Disk Protection feature. I also took the opportunity to install the Auto Reset Browser extension and disable the old auto-restart mechanism (see below for the reasons).

Accessing Firefox Settings

To get to the Firefox settings, because of the R-Kiosk extension disabling menu access, I had to use the Firefox (safe mode) option from the Start menu, tell the statup box to disable add-ons and restart, and then it came up with no theme and no extensions active. I made my settings changes, installed the Auto Reset Browser extension, re-enabled the theme and the R-Kiosk extension, and restarted. Back to normal, with all changes made!

Firefox Auto-Restart Method

Paul Marc left a comment on my original post asking about how I made Firefox auto-restart if closed and on idle. I was using a batch file called start.bat that I found online, but I can’t seem to locate it again with Google (I recall it took some searching to find originally as well). I’ll have to grab the bookmark off of one of the computers I set it up on when I am able.

It seemed like it was a great solution when I set it up. However, I had several issues crop up in actual use. Sometimes it would get “stuck” in a loop of starting unending new Firefox windows as fast as the computer would open them. The only solution was to log off or restart (or kill the script, but the Task Manager won’t open under lockdown!). This only happens sometimes, and I’m not exactly sure why, but it makes the system unusable when it does happen.

I have made the above changes on three of the four computers (the last one isn’t switched yet because I ran out of time), setting them to not use the start.bat file, and instead installing the Auto Reset Browser extension in Firefox. It restarts the browser after every five minutes idle. The downside is, if a user closes the browser manually, it doesn’t reopen automatically. There is one icon on the desktop though, to open Firefox, so I don’t think this will be an issue, although it’s not as nice as the original solution when it worked correctly. And either way, closing manually or on idle, Firefox still runs the Clear Private Data option I had set up (per my original post) to get rid of the prior user’s cookies or other saved information.

Network Connection Details

In my original post, I neglected to include details of the network connections for the locked down systems. It’s pretty simple: stick the computers on the same VLAN (wired) as the free Wi-Fi internet access. I added each system’s MAC address into the Nomadix gateway so it doesn’t ask for a username or password, and I can control bandwidth on a per-computer basis (they don’t have much). The free Wi-Fi is firewalled so only OpenDNS can be contacted over the DNS ports, so they are subject to the OpenDNS adult site blocking we have in place, just like everyone else.

…and if I don’t want to, for that matter! I may be another year older, but it doesn’t quite make me feel as old as having a seven-point-five month old son, or building a house that we’re closing on next month, or approaching my second wedding anniversary in October. Isn’t all this stuff what old people do? And I haven’t even hit a quarter-century yet. At least all of the above are very good things! Awesome, in fact. And for now, I can concentrate on weird facts, like my son will be 2.5 when I’m 25. (In case you didn’t know, I like weird numbers that have some sort of symmetry. The patterns of numbers I enjoy seeing on my car’s odometer would likely shock and scare you both due to the frequency and reasoning of why I like them.)

Yesterday and today were the craziest days in the office in a while, including (but not limited to):

• A Mac that won’t boot (only partially to the solution on this)
• Reinstalling Windows from scratch on a laptop (only thing actually scheduled)
• Helping the new youth ministry interns get their computers/email up and running
• Setting up and troubleshooting internet/printers/email for our current resident missionary
• Reconfiguring some financial programs on the recently-rebuilt computer of our accountant
• Setting up and troubleshooting some network issues with a temporary training setup for our bookstore
• Making up the weekly one-on-one with my awesome boss today that I had to reschedule yesterday (who am I kidding? Like he has time to read my blog…I think he does more than this list in his own department(s) before breakfast each day :-)

Not that it wasn’t interesting, and it’s all for people I love to help! But just looking at the length of that list (and it’s not even complete) and remembering it all makes me tired. Oh wait, I actually was already tired. Maybe I should stop staying up to find cool stuff on the internet (or registering for classes that start in a week, or writing the blog entries about web hosting and websites I keep mentioning and not actually writing). Maybe I should even stop writing this post.