Category: Technology

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Technology

Moving to Exchange Online

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.

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:

  • Easy setup on iOS and OS X
  • Push email to my iOS devices
  • The ability to archive in OS X without the need for any hack-y stuff
  • Filters

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.

Why not Google Apps?

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.

  1. I already have two Google accounts (personal Gmail and work)
  2. The way Google handles archiving and labels doesn’t mesh with how I want to work with email

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.

Will I Stay?

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.

Conclusion

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.

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Technology

Not Innovation

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.

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Technology

Ubuntu Shows off Tablet OS

tablet-multi-taskingIt was going to happen at some point, but today Ubuntu, with Mark Shuttleworth at the helm, released a video and area of its website about its work on providing a tablet-optimized experience for its OS. This is on the heels of another such announcement earlier about a phone-optimized experience as well.

It seems to demo pretty well but the proof will have to be in what the OS feels like when actually using it.

The idea of a single OS, a single install, moving from phone, to tablet, to PC, to TV is an interesting one (and one that Microsoft seems to agree with in principle), and I happen to consider Linux and Ubuntu my second-choice OS after Apple’s offerings, so this is kind of exciting to me.

I’m considering getting a Nexus device to take a look at what the tablet offering might end of being like. My hope is that with the quick development that Ubuntu seems to pride itself in, there might be a third or fourth leg to this increasingly interesting mobile space.

 

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Technology

The Cloud is not The End

I host this site on a VPS from DigitalOcean. Great prices, great speed, great value. I’m very happy with them.

If/when I build a Rails app or need some sort of backend for an iOS app, I’ll probably look at a Cloud platform like Heroku or maybe even another VPS just to keep things simple.

I understand that “The Cloud”, as it is most often called (and I’ll stop using the quotes), is an exciting thing but it isn’t new. It also isn’t the death of hardware. If anything, it is a change of the hardware that normal people need to keep around in order to get something done.

The Cloud is hardware, somewhere. It isn’t necessarily in your house, but there is a physical box somewhere that needs to be setup and maintained so that your information isn’t lost and so that you can get at it fast enough. Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

This enables devices to be smaller, do less, and have other advantages (like longer battery life) that matter to consumers more now than in the past. That is a good thing. The Cloud, however, does not replace the need for hardware.

It just changes it.

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Technology

A New Development Tool: Kaleidoscope

Black Pixel has been getting a lot of airtime recently, especially after one of Apple’s Developer Relations people decided to head over and join them.

Kaleidoscope App

Well, I have picked up one of their apps this past week, Kaleidoscope, to help me when working with merges. It is billed as a file comparison app for the Mac, but it can also take a look at changes in whole folders, help you view the visual changes in an image, and look at text files. It integrates with Git and many 3rd party apps and I have liked it so far.

It is available on the Mac App Store (you’ll find the link on their site), but you will have to pay for it. Otherwise, if you want to try, you can find a 15-day trial on their site as well. Why not give it a shot?