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Tag Archives: Sync

Google Apps for Domains Problems for the Enterprise and Business

Google Apps for DomainsIn 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.

Web Workflow

A long important requirement for me has been the ability to have the perfect web working environment on whatever machine I happen to be using – the netbook, the ultralight laptop and the clunky desktop replacement at home. I have long been using Mozilla Firefox with initially Google Bookmarks, but have since moved on to a combination of Xmarks and the Delicious extension for Firefox. Fairly recently however I have been moving away from Firefox for no other reason than to have a little spice… in fact I have been using Internet Explorer because of some corporate reasons, and Google Chrome because my main hosting provider for services has become Google, and for some reason Google likes to require Google Chrome for some of the nicer features.

A big problem for me has been getting all my extensions and saved passwords securely on all of these browser instances and I have had reasonable success with both Firefox and Internet Explorer, and in the last few days with Google Chrome. Safe to say, I believe I can now use whatever browser on all of my machines with complete access to all of my bookmarks and other browser stored data.

What is a problem however is making sure that all of my extensions for these browsers is on all of my machines. This has been a manual process but now comes this news: Google Chrome Working on Extension Syncing Feature | Webmonkey | Wired.com.

Now if this sees the light of day, this could start the push for me to change my default browser to Google Chrome. After all, Google Chrome seems way faster than anything else I have…

Meshing around

I have blogged before about using the Microsoft Mesh software for keeping multiple computers in sync so that I can pick up any of my machines and pick up exactly where I left off with all of my most important (actually all of them) files with me regardless of which machine I have in front of me. I also use it to ensure that if I do lose any of these machines then I am safe in my knowledge that I have access to all (almost to be pedantic) of my files still.

mesh Well this week I moved one of my netbooks over to Windows 7 which because it had XP meant that it was a clean install. Of course, as part of the installation I set up Microsoft Mesh and selected the normal folders to pull down onto the machine. Well three days later, the sync had not finished and was looking like it was stalled. A quick check through the logs showed an error WinError 18, with the associated text missing file. Checking around I found that the Live Desktop was at 5GB used (which it was not before) and this immediately sprang an idea in my head. Mesh is pretty dumb at times.

It has always been the case that you could setup sync and exceed your online storage and just ignore it. In fact, Paul Thurrott blogged about it in the early days but what was missed was the effect of exceeding your storage, something that I only saw when I also checked my Broadband data usage through my ISP’s nice dashboard. When the online storage is full, Mesh continues to attempt to sync and in this approach it uses bandwidth over and over again so it creates network traffic needlessly. This is a bit poor, particularly when this also seems to hit the processor usage of the machines involved.

Removing the online data store usage of Live stopped the whole repeated sync and suddenly everything is happy again. The world is good, and I am no longer frustrated with the never ending sync.

So come on Microsoft, fix Mesh and give it better behaviour when online storage is exceeded. Additionally, why do you keep it at 5GB? What is wrong with integrating this with the 25GB Live Skydrive?