One of the greatest leaps in technology in recent years was the ability to share my work calendar with my wife. No longer did we have to have long conversations of when I might be available, but instead, she’d just make appointments on my calendar for me.While I was on a PC, there were some good syncing apps between outlook (what I used) and google calendars (what she used). When I switched to a Mac, it got hard again. Then when we switched to Google Apps at Gateway, all was well. However, now my wife uses her iPhone 90% of the time rather than her computer.

For the past 18 months (at least), Sara has had an iPhone and she’s had access to my calendar and all has been well. However, for the past 2-3 months, she’s not had access to my calendar. I’m not sure what happened, maybe Apple or Google changed something. After about 15 questions in a row this morning about my calendar I snapped, “Don’t you have my calendar on your phone?” Not my finest moment. She reminded me that she’s been telling me this for months. Oops. So, I jumped on her phone to fix it quickly, but kept getting stuck and it wasn’t doing what I wanted. Here was the situation.

She has her gmail account on the phone and we’ve set it up under the Exchange settings. The reason for this is that using the gmail settings allows you to sync email and calendar, but not contacts. When you used the Exchange settings, you can sync email, calendar and contacts. What was important though is that once her gmail account was all set up, I could only seem to access her one main calendar. I followed all the steps I’ve done before by going to  http://m.google.com/sync and authorize your phone and select the calendars you want to sync, but it just wasn’t working at all. After messing around for a while I came to the conclusion that perhaps you can only sync one calendar through Exchange. Again, I could be wrong, but I just couldn’t get it to work.

The solution was to set up Sara’s email and calendars through the gmail settings. I was having problems getting  http://m.google.com/sync to work, so I ended up going to  https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect instead and picked the calendars that I wanted to sync. Once it all loaded, all the calendars came through perfectly. Ah, but what about her contacts? That was easy enough. I just set up another account using the Exchange settings and told it to only sync contacts. So in the mail/calendar/contacts, she has one account (gmail settings) for mail and calendar and one account (exchange settings) for contacts only.

Feel free to comment, maybe you know something I missed… or can explain why this was working just fine a few months ago, but isn’t anymore.

On Saturday, my good friend Matt McKee helped me with a Q & A session with Jim Wideman during the first general session. We took questions via text messaging that came through my Google Voice account which is a part of my Goolge/Gmail account. Because my computer was being used elsewhere, I logged into my Google Voice account on Matt McKee’s computer.

He informed me yesterday via a public tweet that his computer was still logged into my gmail account. Perfect. I only have the last 7 years of personal email storred in that account. Good thing I trust Matt… otherwise he might know all my secrets.

It took me a few hours to recognize though that he did indeed leave record of his presence. First of all, he changed my theme profile to a cute pink and blue profile fitting for a 13 year old girl. Nice. Secondly, he changed my profile picture to his picture. I didn’t notice that right away either. Actually, my wife called me this morning and she seemed to have gotten distracted when I answered and the first question out of her mouth was “Why am I seeing a picture of Matt on my phone when I’m calling you?”

Good one Matt. I owe you.

Fortunately, I work hard not to click on unfamiliar attachments or facebook/twitter spam that might compromise my accounts. However, I need a better level of defense in protecting me from getting hacked by my friends (Last May they hacked my facebook at the Orange conference immediately after I told them about how to do it). With friends like these, who needs enemies?

]]> http://childrensministryonline.com/humor/hacked-again/feed/ 4 http://childrensministryonline.com/technology/multiple-inboxes-with-gmail/ http://childrensministryonline.com/technology/multiple-inboxes-with-gmail/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:30:00 +0000 Kenny http://childrensministryonline.com/?p=5819 I think most of you know by now that I’m a big google fanboy, maybe as much as Sam Luce is an Apple fanboy.

So I’ve been using multiple inboxes for gmail for the past 6-8 months and I’ve not really thought a lot of it. Corey, my children’s pastor from our South Campus came to me today and said, “you gotta show me how you split your inbox up that way.” Again, I kind forgot that I was using multiple inboxes, so I had to remember how I did it. I found this post from lifehacker and it reminded me how I did it to begin with and gave me some ideas for some of the inbox panes.

Don’t know what I’m talking about?… Read the rest

I think most of you know by now that I’m a big google fanboy, maybe as much as Sam Luce is an Apple fanboy.

So I’ve been using multiple inboxes for gmail for the past 6-8 months and I’ve not really thought a lot of it. Corey, my children’s pastor from our South Campus came to me today and said, “you gotta show me how you split your inbox up that way.” Again, I kind forgot that I was using multiple inboxes, so I had to remember how I did it. I found this post from lifehacker and it reminded me how I did it to begin with and gave me some ideas for some of the inbox panes.

Don’t know what I’m talking about? Basically, multiple inboxes is a google labs feature that you can “turn on” for your gmail account. Rather than just have your inbox take up all your screen real estate, you can divide your screen into multiple panes giving the appearance that you have multiple inboxes. Each pane shows specific email. You’re regular inbox will always be visible, but you might have a pane with just unread email, a pane for starred email, a pane for email with a specific label and all other kinds of stuff. Currently I have starred, unread, mail with a “gateway” label and any mail containing an attachment in my panes. If you use your gmail as a place where email from multiple accounts come, this might be a setup you really like. Create a filter that any email coming from “x” account gets label “x” and set up one of your panes to display emails with label “x.” Even though all your email will show up in your inbox, you can see all your email from “x” account in one little place. Cool, huh?

So, here’s how you create multiple inboxes.

Log into your gmail and click on “setting” at the top right.

Click on “Labs.” Scroll down until you see “multiple inoxes.” Click on “enable.” While you’re there, you can turn on other lab features that let you add all kinds of great functionality to your gmail page.

After you’ve enabled multiple inboxes, “multiple inboxes” will show up as a tab under your settings. Click on it.

Once in this setting tab, you can create up to 5 panes. Look at what I did as an example or the examples on lifehacker. Play around with the order and configuration until your happy.

Disclaimer: Multiple inboxes really only works if you have gmail open at full screen. If you don’t it looks all scrunched and crappy.

]]>

Yesterday I stopped using Entourage. Done. For good.

I switched to a Mac over a year ago. There was a lot of things to get used to. Some of them good, some of them bad. Email was one of the bad.

I’ve been an Outlook user for years and for the most part, it was a great product. It did most things I needed pretty well. The problem has always been syncing. Getting my calendar to sync with my wife’s calendar is MONUMENTAL. Almost two years ago, Google created a program that would sync my outlook calendar with my google calendar. It was an answer to prayer and all was happy in the Conley household. Then I switched to a Mac.

Entourage is just stupid. It’s a watered down version of Outlook that doesn’t have all the functionality. There are plenty of things that I hate about Entourage, but the one that hurt the most is that it won’t sync with my Google calendar. There are several other 3rd party apps that do (or claim to do this). Most of them involve you syncing your Entourage with your iCal account and then syncing your iCal with Google Calendar. I’ve been unsuccessful at doing this. The last time I attempted this, it broke Entourage completely.

So, I finally said “no more.” I emailed the IT department and asked them to forward my email to my Gmail account. I love Gmail. Now I can have the same experience with my work mail that I do with my personal mail. Best of all, my personal calendar and work calendar are now one. Now my wife can see what I’m up to at any time or add things to my calendar. No more calendar meetings. The only downside is that most of my co-workers are on Outlook/Entourage, so I can’t really see their availability unless I open up Entourage.

Gateway is talking about moving to Google Apps. I hope we do. If that happens, then calendar sharing and seeing co-worker availability will be so easy! So, if you hate your email, you might want to consider switching to Gmail too.

I came across this interesting article last week. I’m a big fan of Google. I like the way they think. Interestingly, Sara and I had long discussion (we’ve agreed to disagree) on the whether Google is really an evil company or not in how they run their AdSense program. That’s another post.

So, Chrome came out of beta but Gmail remains beta-licious for who knows how long.

So, why is Chrome out of beta and Gmail not? Chrome is a downloadable application and Google wants market share. So far Chrome has a respectable user base that has mainly come as a result of word-of-mouth and advertising. However, Google want’s more users. Google wants Chrome to come pre-installed on machines along with internet explorer or firefox. In order to get this, they had to get out of beta. Enterprise markets need to trust that Chrome is going to work and with “beta” attached to the name, they’re not going to feel comfortable. This is why Chrome has dropped the beta tag.

So then, why is Gmail still beta? This video clearly explains the difference:

Gmail is server-side software that is still being developed. Improvements are added on a regular basis. The “beta” communicates to us that they’re not done creating.

So whether you believe this or not, Google has two standards of beta. On one side they dropped beta to communicate that their software (Chrome in this case) is dependable and secure. On the other side they’re keeping beta to communicate that they’re still being creative. If you like what you’ve seen so far, hang on and see what we cook up next.

So, let’s shift to our ministry.

What are we doing that that needs to come out of beta? Is it our policies and procedures? Is it the way we train volunteers? Is it our expectaitons we place on our volunteers? Maybe it’s the way we approach parents? Are these things communicating dependability, security and stability? If not, we probably need to see what needs to be done to pull them out of beta. Strengthen them, give them direction and make them what they need to be and proudly stand behind them. That’s what it means to drop the beta.

What are we dong that needs to be in beta? Maybe it’s a program that crusty, old and unrelatable. Is what we’re doing flexible? Is it evolving into something better? Does it have a framework to support change? If not, we probably need to see what needs to be done to pull it into beta. We need to create the culture among our volunteers and parents where they don’t expect things to always be the same becasue we’re willing to do whatever it takes to reach a generation that is constantly changing. That’s what it means to add the beta.

What do you think?

So, if you haven’t tried it yet, you really should.

When I was between jobs, I stopped using Outlook. The only reason I used Outlook was because at church we usually had an exchange server and we could take advantage of email, calendar sharing, tasks and all the other things that come with Outlook. However, since I wasn’t a part of all of that, I just used my gmail account. As soon as I came on staff at Gateway, I started using Outlook again. I immediately missed using gmail as my primary email. The search function of gmail is so amazing and it absolutely puts Outlook to shame. If I’m looking for a particular email to a certain person, I could waste quite a bit of time scanning emails looking for the email in question. Then there was Xobni. Xobni brings Gmail type tools (and a lot more) to the Outlook environment.

Ultimately, it indexes your email and allows you to search email by the word (or even part of a word). Even if you don’t have any contacts loaded (I don’t yet) it will create contacts within Xobni. It will tell you how many times you’ve emailed them, how many times they’ve emailed you. I don’t know why it would matter, but it even charts when during the day you communicate the most. It will put your conversations in threads as well. Okay, here is the really cools stuff. It will search the context of your emails and look for phone numbers and if it finds a number, it will make it the contact’s phone. If in any of your emails you or that person copied someone, it puts them in that contact’s network all right there at your fingertips. Last of all, it creates a little bin at the very bottom of every attachment you and that contact have ever sent each other. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen something this cool. So, check out the video below and think about installing it. It’s super easy and very free!