Here's the situation.  I have a corporate email account on hosted exchange (Microsoft BPOS) and this is my work email, calendar, and contacts.  I also have a Google apps domain for my personal email, calendar and contacts.  I am a Google voice user and share my Google apps calendar with my wife.  It is essential that these calendars and contacts are the same.  I also have an iPhone that uses the exchange active sync connection and have to Goggle apps account setup for email only.

In the dark days of owning my blackberry, I tried to sync everything using the Google app on the phone.  The results were disastrous.  I had to undo the sync and restore from a backup.  I also received errors all the time saying that the contacts and calendar were being synched by another program (Enterprise activated) and could not complete or a duplicate would be created.  

This time around, I said that I need the application to reside my desktop to handle the issue.  I searched and searched for something free to do this but could not find it.  Add to the complexity that I am running office 2010 x64 edition.  This only further narrowed my options.

After searching for a while, I found Gsyncit. (http://www.daveswebsite.com/software/gsync/).  I read all about it and decided it was going to do everything I wanted it to.  The app is $14.99, but very much so worth every penny.  It took about 10 minutes to setup, and then I had some de-duplicating to do in contacts because the contacts between Google Apps domain and Outlook were already out of sync from me manually doing it when I remembered to.  The de-duplication process to about 20 minutes.  I have almost 300 contacts so not to bad.

But here's where I ended up after my $14.99 purchase and 30 minutes of work.  All contacts and calendars are synched between the two accounts.  If I make a change on my phone while I am on the road, it gets updated to corporate exchange.  Then when I get back to the office, I load Outlook and all those changes are synched back to the Google side.  I can also accept invitations from either of my accounts in any method I want.  Then changes are synched later when Outlook is loaded on my desktop.  Finally, since all my contacts are in sync, Goggle voice calls are very rarely unknown callers any more and I am no longer required to press 1 to accept the call of an unknown caller.

To be a complete nerd for a little bit, I have been trying to accomplish this for a very long time.   I have seen Gsyncit for a while but really didn't want to pay $14.99.  It has been a frustrating uphill battle to get these all in sync but now that they are, I feel major satisfaction.  

I have switched all my person email to a Google Apps account.  I wanted the email control and the customized domain.  Only problem was that I couldn't use most of the other Google products.  In particular: blogger, picasa, and voice.

I searched for some time trying to figure out how to do this.  Nothing useful was coming across my screen.  I accidentally discovered how to do what I so desperately wanted Google to do when I was trying to setup adsense.  

Here's how you do it:

Create a new Google account.  Here is the link. 

https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount.  

Use your Google Apps domain email address and follow instructions.  Once complete / confirmed, you can use most of the Google products.

Bonus tip:

If you want to transfer your Google voice account from your Gmail.com account to your Google Apps domain, click this link.  

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=cjlWRDFTWERkZEIxUzVjSmNsN0ExU1E6MA.  

You must complete the Google account setup first though.

My definition of CLOUD:  The most over used buzz word of recent times.  Putting that aside, some IT solutions just fit better with someone else hosting and maintaining that part of your business.  Today, I am focusing on email.  

Money: Yes, money talks.  You can host email offsite for as little as $4.17 / month / user and a maximum of $10 / month / user.  This isn't with some fly by night company either.  We are talking about Microsoft and Google.  Let's case study a company with 30 employees needing to upgrade their email server and say that the company replaces equipment precisely every 4 years.  Option 1: Purchase new server and replace.  Cost: Approximately $7500.  (Server + Software + Licensing) .  Option 2: Google apps domain: Yearly cost $1500 and total cost over 4 years is $6000 plus initial setup (man hours). Option 3: Microsoft hosted exchange: Yearly cost of $1800 and total cost over 4 years $7200 plus initial setup (man hours).  Option 4: Microsoft BPOS: Yearly cost of $3600 and total cost over 4 years $14400 plus initial setup (man hours).

With the last 3 options, the best news is that after the first four years, your company is purchasing new equipment.  You continue to pay your monthly fee and upgrades and improvements are added to your hosting solution in the cloud with out any intervention from your IT staff.

Maintenance:  I am in no way saying the cloud is maintenance free, but I am saying that your IT staff will spend much less time maintaining the email hosted in the cloud once the initial setup is done.  Think of this, the burden of backups, uptime, equipment and so on is now rolled up into a nominal fee you are paying.  

Reliability: Service Level Agreement!  What would it cost your company to place a redundant email system to a data center that offered very high speed internet and redundancy.  I have recently priced this and $20k - $30k for hardware alone.  Add on a $500 - $1500 monthly fee for the data center and internet.  All this exercise was to get your SLA up to 99.9%.  Or, when you buy a hosted solution, it comes with that SLA bundled in you low recurring fee. 

Eat our own Dog Food: Not only do we recommend these solutions, but we use them too. Our corporate email is hosted with Microsoft BPOS.  Personally, I have a Google apps domain for my family.  I like both products and they both are reliable and quality products.  

Ready to buy yet?   If this peaked you're interest and you are ready to switch, give Strickland Networks a call.  Not only can well help you chose the right solution, we can help you implement it as well.

Ever wanted to know how much internet bandwidth your company is actually using?  Does your internet come to a crawl at about the same time each day?  Do you really need as much bandwidth as you're paying for or could you survive a slower connection?  How much internet traffic are we actually using.

Many of our clients were asking us these questions.  The problem of evaluating how much bandwidth a business needs can be quite a dilemma.  Of course, you can throw money at a big internet pipe, but what if your connection is sitting unused most of the time?  What if you could save a couple hundred dollars a month?

We've put together a bandwidth monitoring website to answer these questions for our clients.  This website analyzes the current traffic utilization for your connection every five minutets and then creates graphs of internet usage.  It will show statistics on inbound and outbound traffic over the course of time.  The graphs scale from hourly usage stats all the way up to yearly traffic stats.  We've been able to use this software to identify patterns in client's bandwidth usage and resolve issues like computers downloading updates in the middle of the day instead of overnight, or users streaming video all day long.

If you're interested in finding out more, call us at 817-224-2100.

Here are some examples of the graphs:

5 minute average

Monthly Average

Drill Down