Google Apps for Domains Problems for the Enterprise and Business

In my business we are a heavy Google Apps for Domains user with several domains setup, some business and some free. I moved across from hosted Exchange a few years ago and everything has been pretty great until the last few weeks which caused me to question whether Google Apps for Domains was suited to Business in general.

The start of my problem was the in my use of Google Sync for Outlook, a tool that gives almost native desktop integration for the Google mail features. This has worked great and I noticed no problems until about three weeks ago I noticed that my laptop was sucking battery and ran hot all the time that Outlook was open. A little investigation found that the Sync of Notes was always running and syncing despite the fact that I don’t use the Notes feature of Outlook or Google at all (I prefer Evernote). Further checks found that I had a significant amount of Notes that I discovered was actually all of my .txt files that I had stored in Google Docs/Drive (I use Google Drive desktop sync and Insync to sync my main files, something I had added a load of files to about three weeks previously). The penny dropped, that because Google Apps Sync for Outlook syncs all ‘notes’ found in Google Docs to Outlook, all of the many text files (many GB by the way) that I sync were between machines and the cloud using Insync were also being synchronised into my Google Mail and because there were many GBs, it was taking a very long time and killing my laptops in the meantime.

I had to stop the synchronisation of Notes and contacted Google Apps Enterprise support for help (because I could not find anything online about how to do it). Their response was sort of expected and not expected… Google Notes sync is beta and the disabling of the sync was not supported. The last point is the killer for me, and what led me to think that Google has a big problem. They activated without my control a Beta feature (Notes Sync) but don’t provide a single way for me (a Live user) to disable a Beta feature, at least they don’t support it! Not Enterprise friendly and that has to change Google.

Anyway, they did provide some ‘unsupported’ registry settings to disable it in the end, so fine I used the settings but unfortunately it did not work – in fact the modifications were supposed to allow me to disable the sync of one or all features of Google Sync for Outlook but NONE of the changes did anything. I contacted Google again but their response was that they could not provide support on the unsupported registry modifications and I was ON MY OWN! Not friendly at all, they effectively hung me out to dry to a problem caused by their enforcement of the use of a Beta feature AND providing a fix that simply did nothing. Google, you have a problem right there in the use of your services with the Enterprise and you need to fix it right now. Don’t deploy Beta features without the ability to enable/disable them, and don’t leave businesses high and dry without a resolution caused by your own ineptitude otherwise you will LOSE to everyone else. I had to consider stepping back from Google Apps for Domains, back to a traditional hosted Exchange solution before I found the fix (we also considered stepping back from Google Docs/Drive as a smaller step).

Anyway, for those who need the fix I hunted over several nights through multiple Google Groups looking for a solution and finally found it, but that was no thanks to Google. For those who are looking to be able to enable or disable individual syncs in Google Sync for Outlook you need to modify the follow the instructions:

1. Go to http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?answer=1041455 , go to Enable/Disable Import Options.

2. Follow Step 1 to Create the “SyncFlagsEnabled” value with DWORD value set to 1.

3. Skip Step 2 because it is redundant to what you want to do

4. Follow Step 3 for each of the services you wish to control (NotesSync in my instance) but add the following to the registry key for the service:
registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Apps Sync\NotesSync

Modify HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Apps Sync\TasksSync by adding the following DWORD Values:
DWORD Value: UploadEnabled
Modify the DWORD Value as follows:
Set the Value data = 0

DWORD Value: DownloadEnabled
Modify the DWORD Value as follows:
Set the Value data = 0

All I then had to do was remove the almost 3GB of notes from my Notes folder and then compact my PST to get everything back to where it needs to be, and then go an provide a registry import for these settings to provide to all of my users so that they don’t have the same problem of the laptop whizzing about synchronising a whole load of nothing, using processor and bandwidth a plenty. All I need to do now is watch Google for the next Enterprise mess up with Google Sync for Outlook.

Changes afoot with mobile data?

Time was that I either had to hunt out the Wifi or figure out how to get a local SIM or take a roaming SIM with me, to get connectivity when travelling overseas. This still is the case right now for PC usage in the main, but there are changes afoot caused by the EU restricting what mobile providers can charge for roaming data for mobile phone usage. Some providers like Vodafone had already made some changes and offered 25MB of data a day for £2 per day (and £1 per MB after that), and now O2 in the UK is also making changes which seems to offer exactly the same thing.

In the spirit of these changes, I signed up for a Vodafone SIM (O2 does not makes its changes for month or two more, and they are my home network) and inserted it into a little Android unlocked mobile phone I have, and suitably added some credit. By default, the £2 for 25MB data is activated on PAYG/Pre-pay SIMs so I was ready to go. Rather helpfully the Android phone offers a 3G data usage tracker that is easily accessible from the notification drop down, so I could keep track of my usage as I went.

I set off on my travels by train this morning and ended up in Belgium, where I turned the phone on for the first time. I then began using the phone for email pickup, some very light twitter use, a look at Facebook once and about five Foursquare checkins covering me from Brussels to the border with Luxembourg… and then all of a sudden I had used half of my allowance. I had been careful to turn off my data every single time I stopped using it so that there was no ‘leakage’ from the phone. Then I arrived at my destination and a single check (unsuccessfully) on Google Maps took me to 23MB of my 25MB and then I turned it off because even at £1 per MB, charges would rack up pretty quickly at that rate.

So all in all, I am glad that some new tariffs are coming through however they do not reflect anyone’s usage of a smartphone and I hope that things will go further still in enforcing a reduction in the ‘banditry’ that is roaming mobile data very soon. 25MB for one day is insufficient for ANYONE, who really wants to use a smartphone in a realistic way, how about 100MB or even 150MB for £2 for one day? That would be a little more realistic for £2 and not the £125+ that it would cost today on Vodafone PAYG (note that would be £450 on my CURRENT O2 tariff).

Customers prefer thin over working mobile phones WTF!

I am shocked appalled at this report…

At an event today, HTCs vice president of product strategy Bjorn Kilburn noted that the company had conducted research last year to find out whether customers preferred thin smartphones to those which compromised thickness for better battery life. The answer, interestingly, was that they generally preferred thinness, at which point its plans for 3,000mAh-plus devices were removed from the roadmap.

via HTC: customers prefer thin phones to better battery life | The Verge.

What the hell was the question they asked? Do you want a brick with excellent battery life? or a wafer thin mint that will run for 8 hours? I can only guess two things here, that Steve Jobs was right and you shouldn’t ask customers what they want or that they did ask the most stupidly and self serving research questions in the world!

I don’t think we need a phone that lasts a couple of days, but I truly believe the middle ground is that the phone MUST last under normal to heavy voice, video and data usage for 12 to 14 hours but it must be less than2 to 3 cms thick (which frankly is thin in my book). This is achievable today with good design. Right now phone manufacturers are making the equivalent of cars with 1 gallon fuel tanks… great around town near a petrol station, but useful for doing anything for longer. A car such as that would be seen as being fundamentally flawed and would sell like a plague carrier, so should a mobile phone that lasts 8 hours or less.

There are two types of users…

… those that backup and those who will.

Thanks to Mark Hurst, Bit Literacy.

Seriously, you need to be backing up on a continuous basis now, especially if you travel. Sync is the start, but you also need to be backing up one of your sync points at least once a day.

Backups on a different level

With the cost of computer hardware today and the availability of file and folder sync solutions, it makes great sense to always have a second backup laptop available to you at all times such you can alternate or switch between them based on the emergency (machine is dead) to the having a larger presentation laptop and a smaller travel laptop. The sync solutions that work well for me are Microsoft Live Mesh and the Insync solution with Google Docs. Both of these solutions allow you to setup sub folders of your Documents folder as a complete file store that is synchronised to the other machine(s). In the past I have used the sync solutions to provide full files/folder backup and recovery for moving to a new laptop, but with the large amount of data I now sync that has sometimes taken me up to a week to get back and in operation. I see it now as a much better solution to always have two machines on the go simultaneously.

Live Mesh is more flexible in allowing you to have multiple folders all over your machine that you set to sync across all machines, but it does not offer much cloud storage (5GB but you can peer to peer sync without going to this storage) and there are mild rumours that with the coming Windows 8 that it will be ceased. This has proven very reliable for my situation where I have been syncing 80-120GB across three machines but I am not sure I will be sticking with it.

Insync is a much more interesting tool that allows you to use the universal storage nature of Google Docs to sync all your machines to Google Docs, and due to the low cost of Google’s storage ( free for 1GB, $5 for 20GB, $20 for 80GB, $4,096 for 16TB! per annum) you have ultimately unlimited storage. This service also allows you to share individual files and folders using the sharing functionality of Google Docs, and your remote and mobile access is via standard Google Docs on whatever device. I can see me transitioning to Insync only in the coming months.

Email is just a matter of using a webmail solution or one that offers full sync or IMAP to a PC client such as hosted Exchange solutions (Office365) or ,my favourite at the moment, Google Mail for Apps. Both of those solutions offer a complete storage solution for all your email, contacts and calendaring needs. Google offers more capabilities in being able to share calendars with people outside of your organisation and having access to some very interesting Google Apps platforms solutions such as CRM. Microsoft is definitely more behind in that side of things, and way more costly.

On top of that, using Google Chrome with full browser sync also makes sure that every bookmark and extension is synchronised to every machine I use. The final piece of the puzzle is the use of Lastpass to ensure that I have secure access to every password that I need.

So you have no excuse but to have access to a laptop with all of your data, all of the time, and even have access to your data in the cloud.

My Next Ultralight Laptop

The launch of the new iPad (sometimes referred to as iPad3) has given the tablet form factor an absolute brilliant piece of functionality – the Retina display, a screen with a higher resolution than a HD TV. This is revolutionary and will greatly impact new Tablets being released during the coming two years. It will also have an effect on the laptop market, where we are already seeing 1920×1080 resolutions on the 13″/15″ laptops, particularly with the new Ultrabooks.

My first 12.1″ laptop in modern times from 2006 had a 1280×800 resolution screen. My current 11.6″ laptop has a 1366×768 pixel screen, thus giving realistically no difference in quality from the last 6 years. Ultrabooks with this form factor are still sitting at 1366×768 to my dismay.

What I am looking forward to is 1920×1080 or even higher panels being used on the 11.6″/12.1″ form factor, not as a way to provide more screen real estate, but as a way of increasing the visual quality. I really believe that by the end of 2012 there will be laptops with these screen resolutions appearing in stores, and I will be first in the queue to get one.

Cannot wait.

Samsung S2 Battery extender

Battery life is the bane of the Smartphone user and for most getting 10 hours use out of their mobile phone is an achievement. There are a great deal of workarounds for this problem, most involving carrying a large external USB charger device as I have talked about before on this blog or a battery jacket of some sort. The big issue with those are that you have to attach them to your phone for some time during the day which makes it all a little unwieldy at times. During last summer I upgraded to a Samsung S2 mobile phone and for a great deal of last year, this phone had excellent battery life, getting 10 to 15 hours of usage each day. Then I returned to work in the UK for an extended period and I quickly noticed my battery life was significantly down, getting between 6 and 10 hours depending upon my usage. The penny dropped – my data usage was now going over 3G and not WiFi. My phone battery life was suffering from the vagaries of the signal reception causing additional battery drain and the fact that 3G is a higher drain anyway.

I started the search for an extended life battery and stopped first with Samsung themselves. What they had was a 1950mAh extended life battery which I could not describe as extended life as the standard battery is 1650mAh and this was for a MRP of £19.99! What a waste. I kept looking and found a 3rd party extended battery which provides 3500mAh on Amazon.com from Accessories Online. Now 3rd party batteries are a little troublesome due to a past record of safety and quality issues, but I crossed my fingers and ordered one for the grand price of £7.90 (price seems to vary a little) thinking if it did not work I only lose the money and possibly my fingers in the resulting fire

However that is not how it has turned out, the battery has turned out to be a fantastic addition to the phone and certainly pushes the Samsung S2′s real world usage up beyond 20 hours of normal everyday use away from WiFi networks. In fact some days I find that I am putting it on charge with 50% still on the phone as I go to bed. I can really recommend it with two provisos. The first one is a stupid one, it does take twice as long to charge it obviously. The second is that this battery is double the thickness and you can thus see the problem – how the hell does it fit in the phone. The simple answer is that it doesn’t, it fits into the phone space and you have to have a new back plate that doubles the maximum thickness of the phone. You also have to realise that it also adds a bit of weight to the phone.

However I am fine with the extra thickness as it only makes it as thick as an older style phone or an iPhone 3GS in a case. It fits very comfortably in the hand and I have never really had thin as a required feature for my phone. The problem is that no cases will now fit and if you use a desktop cradle that is also not usage (unless you can modify the fitting as I have done to make it work). The additional weight is also not something I care too much about but it does make the phone seem a lot more solid rather than heavy.

I have been using this now for four weeks and I have not suffered a problem with it, and it has really liberated me for my phone usage on an every day basis. In fact during the time I have been using this battery, Motorola US has released the Razer Maxx which does something very similar but with a more svelte fitting than this bolt on is. This is as a smartphone is supposed to be.

Death of Netbooks

A little over 4 years ago I bought an Asus PC701 4G Netbook. It was small, light, and did the job… well mostly. I struggled with the inability to have Outlook on a Linux based PC and I really needed Outlook. I upgraded to Windows XP and it all worked out well enough. At least for a secondary machine that is. In the end, that little SSD died and I upgraded to my next netbook – one that I actually used as my main machine for quite some time, a rebadged MSI Wind U100. This one was more sprightly running as it did an Atom processor with an (upgraded) 2GB of RAM, and an (upgraded) 160GB HDD. I could do everything on that little machine, even running Windows 7 Premium Home as soon as that came out. It is still a fine machine, if a little sluggish at times but with excellent battery life running above a real 4 hours.

Since then I have moved away from those little netbooks to my current Ultralight machines (a 13″ Asus UL30 and an 11.6″ HP DM1), but those machines owe quite a bit to those early netbooks, which in my view leads very much into today’s Ultrabooks. Netbooks identified the following very important requirements for a laptop – it had to have good to excellent battery life, be very light, have enough storage and sufficient performance. Those little Atom based machines have sufficient performance for browsing, a little wordprocessing, email and playing music – exactly what the average family need in laptops that are owned by every member of the family, and in fact what most busy business travellers also needed. All of these features have made their way into pretty much every single 11.6″ and 13″ based laptop today. Netbooks also helped greatly in the removal of the need to have an optical drive, so much so that very few actual machines these days have built in optical storage and most people don’t miss that except about twice a year, when a separate drive can be used.

Unfortunately things have moved on in the processor stakes, the memory stakes and the required workload stakes. Netbooks as they are today have not moved on except in the growth of the 11.6″ based ultra light laptop which also corrects the other main problem of netbooks – the manufacturers margins. The new “netbook” is the 11.6″ ultralight running Windows 7 Premium Home with 4GB of RAM, 320GB of HDD, a 1366×768 screen, and most importantly a dual core processor that is also ultra low power to give 5 to 6 hours of battery life for normal use.

So I do agree Netbooks have died but they begat some very interesting children. Without Netbooks we would all still be paying £600/$750 for a 14″ monster with 2 hours of battery life. Be thankful for Netbooks.

O2 and its telephone number leak update

O2 has now posted on its blog, its own description of the problem that occurred today. It describes it pretty much as a misconfiguration that allowed a provision for ‘selected partners’ to receive the client’s phone number in the headers of the HTTP request to spread to be applicable to all sites.

Although seemingly a reasonable explanation, it is the first time that I have heard that O2 would be using this with ANYONE. Almost certainly I will find the clause buried down in my terms of use somewhere (still looking), but this is a shoddy and appalling lack of privacy and control around something that a few people (not me but I still don’t want to share it with web sites unless I choose to) keep VERY private. To not be expressly clear to the user or to provide a mechanism for blocking it is bad. I am reminded of an old Internet Explorer feature that had to be disabled very quickly in the 1990s whereby the browser would present the username of the logged in PC user to every website. The feature was useful in authenticating in a corporate environment but unfortunately they allowed presentation to every site – a horrible privacy AND security issue. The disabling came in to the user control through Security Zones but it was by default turned OFF. This is something that should be the case here.

We shall have to see how this issue progresses. Certainly I am thinking twice about having O2 as a service provider. I will also be more careful about my use of SIM cards from providers I am new to in the future, after all they could similarly do this.

O2 and its Telephone number leak

This morning a twitter comment alerted me to an issue with the O2 mobile phone broadband data service. In common with all broadband internet services, O2 passes its traffic from customers via a transparent proxy which can additionally do things like reduce the file size of pictures through compression. This is normally specified in the APN configuration of your phone. The ‘new information’ though was that it was making use of a feature of the Openwave WAP proxies to additionally tag a HTTP request header on to each transaction that gave away the subscriber’s mobile phone number. The HTTP request header is the very clear x-u-calling-line-id. You also need to know that this happens regardless of the client device you are using as it is built in to the Openwave proxy.

This is a serious breach of privacy for any mobile phone owner as EVERY SINGLE WEBSITE that the subscriber visits via the broadband connection will then have a copy of the subscribers mobile phone number. No opt-in or opt-out. Also it is quite likely that this has been happening for many years, in fact it could be as old as 3G Broadband from O2. To confirm if you are affected, I suggest you visit a site that displays all of your headers and look for your phone number or other personally identifiable information such as http://www.cylog.org/headers/.

Right now O2 is scrambling to deal with this PR and possible legal issue. I am personally offended that they do this as well. However you need to think wider than this. O2 is not necessarily the only company doing this, nor does it have to be via the same HTTP request header. After all, that header is something that Openwave provides which can be being used by any mobile operator in the world. Additionally other mobile operator WAP gateways manufacturers can and do use different methods of doing the same thing. The result is that privacy can be being breached worldwide, whenever you use your 3G Broadband connectivity.

This means that not only can someone personally identify you very easily, they can pair the informaton directly with the IP address that you are operating on which will also allow the identification of where you are.

If you are interested in background as to what you can be sharing when using your Mobile Broadband connectivity, please look at these two sites http://mobiforge.com/developing/blog/useful-x-headers and http://www.mulliner.org/collin/academic/publications/mobile_web_privacy_icin10_mulliner.pdf.

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