Nate Beran writes about how it is time for IT to start trying to change business from within. I have to say that I agree.
This is where companies are going to rise or fall. When there is a partnership between IT and the business, big things will happen because IT does not have all of the answers … but IT does have some different answers or at least some different questions.
The future is coming.
OpenVPN Connect was released for iOS recently (January 17, 2013) … and I completely missed it.
I’m not sure how many people will be excited by this, but I know I am one. While the app won’t win any awards for design, it does do one thing really well:
It allows you to connect your iOS device to connect via VPN if you are using OpenVPN in your organization!
You have been able to do this in the past if you were willing to jailbreak your device, but I am unwilling to do that. However, now I don’t have to and it works really well. I am hoping that this will mean I won’t need to take a laptop with me on some shorter trips just to handle any emergencies that pop up while I am away.
I’ll just connect via our OpenVPN server and then administrate on the servers from the comfort of my iPhone or iPad.
Not bad.
I probably should have written this up earlier, but I’ll go ahead and toss it up now because … well … I’m lazy.
Over a year ago my friend, Phil Wels, and I started a podcast called This One Podcast. I just posted Episode 55: Unjump the Shark and it is crazy to think we have 55 episodes out there for the world to listen to.
Frightening because we keep doing it and we still have no idea what we are going.
We’ve added another host, Jonas Leyrer, and have also upped the quality of the program’s audio by having Phil handle the editing. He has a lot more experience than I do and I think he’s done an admirable job handling out audio that we toss at him.
We have also been working with a multiple-Skype setup recently to see if we would be able to centralize the recording at a single station where the mixing can happen instead of each of us recording out own audio and then sending it, via Dropbox, to Phil where he needs to import it into his editing program of choice (I think either Garageband or Pro Tools) where he can edit things for us.
I’m using a Blue Snowball microphone for most of my recording and it has worked very well. I would like to purchase something a little more “high end” in the future, but money is too tight for that right now.
The hardest thing for us has been keeping the topics lively, especially because we need to record in the evening when we have all put in a full day of work. While every show hasn’t been phenomenal, we continue to record because it is fun to get together with your friends and see where things go.
If you are considering trying out your own podcast here are my recommendations:
I don’t have any affiliate links or anything because this is mostly a brain dump. I’m hoping, though, that within the year I’ll be posting about Episode 100 and the delicious cake my wife is going to bake for us.
I’ve always been in a perpetual hunt for a hosted email provider that, well, just works for what I primarily need.
Email.
So this week I moved my personal and business email to Microsoft’s offering: Exchange Online.
Just to get it out of the way, I have tried the following three options for email:
They all have their benefits, but this is what I was looking for:
The only service that I could reliably get to fulfill all of those requirements was Exchange Online. Atmail would have worked well too, but I could not get push email to work in iOS, so I had to scrap it.
However, I’ll go into my Google dilemma a little bit more.
I use Google’s services a lot and we do use Google Apps for Education at work (and I just finished setting up Google Apps for Non Profits for another project). It works great. Gmail is a decent interface for email on the web and they offer a ton of services.
However, push email over ActiveSync is no longer supported on free Google accounts and they no longer have a free tier for Google Apps. That stinks.
So, I would have gladly paid the $5/month/user for a full Google Apps for Business account but for two reasons.
The second one is just a basic tenet of working with Gmail. Labels are not folders, even when you use it like one. Archiving in Mail.app creates an Archive folder that you cannot easily get into, which doesn’t sit well with me (the hack-y part) and I’m not willing to use the web interface exclusively (or the iOS app either). That is just a personal preference.
It also is a minor headache for me to deal with multiple Google accounts when working with Google Groups. If you want to send email from an email address that is signed up for Google Apps, you need to be logged in and subscribe with that Google Apps account. Makes sense, but if I have three (or four if I would have gone whole-hog), then it becomes a small headache to make sure I have the proper account signed up for the proper mailing lists.
It is much easier to have a single Google account (my old Gmail account) that I then use for all of my personal Google stuff. I’ll be able to sign up my personal and business email addresses from that single Google account all without needing to log in with a different account. Nice.
I also won’t be tempted to have multiple Google Docs, sorry Drive, or Google Plus accounts around either. Less complexity is a good thing.
So I find something different.
I have no idea. Right now, for what I need, it actually costs me less per-month to go with Exchange Online than either Google Apps or Atmail Cloud (since Atmail has a $10/month minimum). If something changes in the future, I’ll move right along again.
For now, Exchange Online does what I need with the least amount of hassle. Setting up on iOS and OS X just requires my email address and password and it really just works. The autodiscover feature of Exchange is really nice.
Push email works to my iOS devices and everything is just, well, good.
For now.
You are going to have to try out many different services to find something that will work for you. I’ve been in “transition” for a long time and have finally settled on Exchange Online, but Google Apps offers a ton of cool services to go along with email and Atmail Cloud is a viable and inexpensive alternative as well.
You really need to try them out and see what will work best for you. There are options out there, it can just be a pain to choose the correct one.
I’m glad I finally found something that works for me.
Go ahead and read How Idiotic People Can Be When It Comes to Innovation over at iHKDesign.
It is a critique of an article on CNN about innovation, specifically as it relates to Apple and Samsung. However, put that aside for a moment and read his critiques and apply them to something that is not so fraught with emotion and stupidity: Google vs. Yahoo when Google was young.
Google would have been considered the less complex at the time, but many consider and considered it to be far more innovative than Yahoo based sometimes on only the homepage. A single search box giving you access to the entirety of the Google catalog.
Much of that is still around today. Making things complex doesn’t make them more innovative, many times making things seemingly more simple is the harder and more innovative task.
Don’t get caught up in thinking innovation is only increased complexity. Sometimes it is working to hide that complexity that is truly more innovative and transformative.