Network Velocity

Google to launch Priority Inbox

In the next week Google will be launching Priority Inbox. From Google's site: Priority Inbox attempts to automatically identify your important incoming messages and separates them out from everything else. Gmail uses a variety of signals to prioritize your incoming messages, including who you emailed most frequently and which messages you’ve recently opened as opposed to which messages you’ve deleted. The goal is to enable users to spend more time with the emails that matter most. A we...

RIP Google Wave

Last week Google announced they would stop development on Google Wave at the end of 2010. Google Wave was ahead of it's time. We wrote about Wave and your business in October of 2009. Although Wave held a lot of promise, we had problems finding the right ways to use the capabilities of Wave. But all is not lost on Google's experiment with Wave. Many of Wave's technologies, such as real time collaboration, have already made it into other Google products. Kudos to Google for being ambiti...

Staying Human: Google is great, until it isn’t

We blog about Google a lot and up until now it's all been positive. We've run across a problem we can't fix and it revolves around the way Google handles their products. Google is successful because so much of what they do is automated. For the most part this works great as Google excels at knowing what people need and fulfilling that need in a convenient and usable online format. The problem is that even with Google's technical capabilities some issues still require commonsense and a huma...

The cure for software upgrades?

A software upgrade can be a major disruption to a business. We've listed the revisions to Microsoft's core businesss products going back to 1995. Windows Servers Office Exchange (email) SQL (database) Windows 95 Windows NT (1993) Office 95 Exchange 5.5 SQL 7.0 Windows 98 Windows Server 2000 Office 98 Exchange 2000 SQL 2000 Windows 2000 Windows Server 2003 Office 2000 Exchange 2003 SQL 2005 Windows XP Windows Server 2008 Office XP Exchange 2007 SQL 2...

Setting up Email Filters will reign in an unruly Inbox

One of the most powerful ways to get control of your incoming email is to use filters. I'm not talking about filtering SPAM because Postini already does that for us. We're talking about automatically filtering email that you want to receive to a folder other than your Inbox. Automatically filtering your incoming mail ensures that less important email does not get in the way of messages that matter or are time sensitive. My current filters automatically divert ~20 messages per day to a folder ...

We’re a Favorite Place on Google

We're on Google's Favorite Places list.

City of Los Angeles Chooses Google Apps

The Official Google Enterprise Blog has a post about the City of Los Angeles choosing Google Apps for their new Email system that will serve 30,000 city employees. The entire post and video are available via this link. Some highlights from their post: Important decision. 15 proposals were submitted. The top four candidates gave oral presentations to city officials. The City Council unanimously chose Google Apps. Improved collaboration. Much of the city's work requires multiple people ...

The power of Google Apps: Forms

In this post we'll take a look at the power and ease of use of Google Apps Forms. We'll cover creating a form, viewing the data in a spreadsheet and using that data to create graphs. But first, a quick intro video:  Forms allow any Apps user to create a custom form for gathering information. Forms can be used for anything, from vacation requests or ordering lunch to complex business processes or client surveys . The sky is the limit. Below is a screenshot of creating a sample form: Notic...

Google Wave – Read This

In a previous blog post we stated that Google Wave was not yet ready for serious business use (after all it is still beta software). However, that does not mean you shouldn't keep your eye on it! The best article we've read regarding Wave and it's potential was written by Jason Kolb on his blog.  If the technical jargon in Jason's post throws you off at least read this excerpt from the link above: Take CRM and ERP systems for example. Instead of customers emailing you about a sale and the...

Google’s new office in Kirkland, WA

Would you like a tour of Google's new offices in Kirkland WA? Well then watch the video below! Google is quite proud of their inside nerd humor. The Sudo Cafe and Foobar Juice Station refer to Unix commands. Also, notice the 30" monitors on almost every desk. I think it's fair to say Google as a company is doing quite well! This might be urban legend, but supposedly all meals in the cafeteria are free and Google will even do their employee's laundry if they bring it in to work. I rememb...