Google Calendar update for Android app

Google Apps

There is good news in store if you’re an Android user who relies on the scheduling power of Google Calendar to keep your life in order. A recent update has brought significant improvements to the user experience of the Android version of the Google Calendar app, meaning you can now further reap the organizational and productivity benefits of Google’s suite of cloud apps, while not compromising on the comfort of using your favorite device.

Google Drive integration

Making for an even more seamless experience using the whole suite of Google apps, Calendar is now more integrated than ever with cloud storage solution Google Drive. Whether it’s a meeting agenda or a hotel booking confirmation, you can now attach files from your Google Drive account directly to a Calendar event. No more emailing files around, only to have to resend them a week later to those who have mislaid them – Calendar even makes sure that all your event invitees can open the files you attach.

A week at a glance

When using Google Calendar on the web, we take it for granted that we can flick between a daily view of our schedule, a look at the work week, the full seven days or even a month at a time. But on Android devices, these have been features missing for too long – at least until now. The app previously supported a monthly view before it was axed; now the seven-day week view returns to allow you to get instant perspective on what’s on the horizon. Couple this with a new pinch-and-zoom capability that allows you to focus in on specific appointments – albeit that this feature frustratingly is only supported in the seven-day view – and it makes for a more efficient and rewarding calendar experience.

Link up with Google+

Take-up of Google’s attempt at a social network has admittedly been lower than some expected but, if you’re one of those who has jumped on the Google+ bandwagon, new integration between it and Calendar means you can quickly and easily import all your friends’ birthdays from your Google+ account. This saves you manually entering them into your diary and, with the option to receive timely reminders by SMS and email, you’ll never miss your colleagues’ special days again.

If you haven’t yet upgraded your Google Calendar for Android app, now’s the time – the latest version is available in the Google Play store. To learn more about deploying Calendar and other cloud-powered Google Apps to transform your company’s organization and productivity, give us a call.

Published with permission from TechAdvisory.org. Source.

How to pin tabs with Chrome

Google Apps

There is a good chance that when you work in your browser, you usually have a number of tabs constantly open in the same window. For example, you may have Gmail open, Google Drive, etc. If you close the window, you will no doubt need to open the tabs again and again, which can be frustrating. To make browser use easier, Chrome has created the Pin Tab feature.

What is Chrome’s Pin Tab feature

When using Chrome’s tabs, you will notice that tabs open from left to right. When you browse the Internet, you likely open the most used or important sites first, which means they will open to the left. The problem with this is we often have so many tabs open that it can be tricky to find or quickly navigate to the tabbed sites we use the most.

One way to solve this problem is by pinning these to the tab bar. When you do this, the tab will be pinned to the left-hand side and made smaller. This makes it easier to find your important tabs and keep these sites and tabs more organized.

How do I pin tabs?

If you would like to pin tabs:

  1. Open the site you would like to pin in a new tab.
  2. Right-click on the tab.
  3. Select Pin Tab.

This will shorten the tab to just the site’s icon and move it to the far left of the tab bar. Pinning other tabs will also move them to the left, beside the other pinned tabs. Any new tabs will be opened to the right of pinned tabs.

It is important to note here that because the pinned tabs are smaller any live tabs, such as Gmail’s unread message counter, or Facebook’s chat reminder, will no longer be updated. For most tabs this is not an issue, but for tabs like Gmail you will have to physically click on the tab to check if you have any new emails.

How do I unpin or move tabs?

You can unpin tabs by right-clicking on the pinned tab and selecting Unpin Tab. You can also move the order of pinned tabs by clicking and holding on the pinned tab you would like to move and moving it left or right. As you do so, you will notice other tabs change order.

If you would like to close the pinned tab, either unpin it first and then press the X at the right-hand side of the tab, or right-click on the tab and select Close Tab.

Looking to learn more about using Chrome? Contact us today and we can show you how to enhance your business functions.

Published with permission from TechAdvisory.org. Source.

Email in the Cloud with Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365

Interested in setting up your company’s email in the cloud? Here are two options to consider—one from Microsoft, the other from Google. See how they compare. Google Apps Google Apps is a service from Google that started in 2006, with the introduction of Gmail—a hosted email service, and which later incorporated other apps such as Google Calendar, Groups, Talk, Docs and Sites. Google Apps allow customers an independently customizable version of these Google products under their own domain name. The entry level option is free, but the package offered for Businesses is a paid service with an annual fee per user and additional storage space. Storage. Gmail, Google Apps’ email service starts with a sizable 7GB of free storage. Business users get 25GB. Bear in mind however that this storage space is shared with any data you have in other Google properties such as Picasa Web Album and Google Docs. Extra space can be bought however starting with USD $5 per year for an extra 20GB of storage. E-mail attachment sizes are limited to 25MB. Calendaring and Task Management . Gmail can be integrated with the overall excellent Google Calendar application. Google Calendar allows you to easily share personal calendars with colleagues, or create shared calendars used by groups of people (such as a calendar to track meeting room reservations, marketing events and others). Google Calendar also offers a built-in, but somewhat underpowered task management tool. Tasks can readily be added with due dates, but not readily shared or cannot be nested or linked with other tasks. Spam filtering, security and reliability. Gmail’s spam filtering features a community-driven system. Email tagged as spam by users help identifies similar messages as Spam for all other Gmail users. Generally the system works well, although some have complained that it can get over aggressive in its filters. In terms of security and reliability — Gmail has been criticized in the past with showing ads in its free Gmail service that display based on key words in the user’s messages — potentially violating their privacy. Its paid service offers however the option of disable these ads. Reliability is generally good with very few, but widely publicized disruptions in service. Usability. Gmail offers a host of unique usability enhancements that make it different from most other mail services. For one for a web app it loads really fast, as Google has been known to studiously optimize web page loading performance for their products. Another is that it offers a threaded view of messages by default. It also uses a starring/labeling system to tag and segregate messages instead of using folders. Another interesting enhancement done recently is the ability to sort messages by “importance” where it learns based on your usage over time what email messages it thinks you think are important. Mobile access. Gmail offers a version optimized for mobile devices, as well as support for a variety of devices for their native mail applications such as iOS and Android. Overall Gmail is a solid mature choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud and are not afraid of being on the bleeding edge of cloud services and technology. Microsoft Office 365 Microsoft Office 365, like Google Apps, offers a host of applications such as online versions of productivity tools which we all already know and use such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Most however work best when they are used in conjunction with your desktop-installed Office applications. Focusing on email, Office 365 offers a Hosted Exchange service, which transforms the mature, business-proven on-premise application to an on-demand service. Compared to Google Apps, it is quite new — being introduced only last June this year, although its suite of products in an alternate form has been around for much earlier. Storage. Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange email service gives users 25GB of storage. Attachment file sizes are limited to 35MB. Additional storage can be purchased for $2.5 per GB per user per month. Calendaring and Task Management. Exchange integrates a mature feature set for personal productivity including calendaring, resource management, and task management. As an example tasks can be grouped, color coded and easily sorted. Emails can be converted as tasks and so on. Spam filtering, security and reliability. This is an area where perhaps Microsoft easily outshines Google with Exchange’s roots as an enterprise-class application. It offers spam protection, antivirus and others via Microsoft’s Forefore Online Protection for Exchange technology. It offers other features such as more full features user management, identity access management, mail archiving, etc. If you are in a highly regulated industry like financial services or healthcare these features may be essential for your business. Usability. While the web apps of Office 365 is not as fast loading or as slick as Google, it does offer familiarity. Modeled after their desktop brethren, or directly integrating with them — they offer a smoother migration experience for users specially if they have been weaned on Outlook. Mobile access. Like Gmail Microsoft made sure to support a variety of devices on launch, as well as integration with a variety of devices — specially enterprise stalwarts like Blackberry mobile phones. Overall Office 365 is a solid choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud but may be hesitant with changing the apps your users already know and use. Also if you are a business with strict policies related to security and compliance — this service may be something your auditors and IT people may be more comfortable with. Interested in learning more? Can’t decide which to try? Let us know and find out how we can help get you the right balance between your existing IT systems and infrastructure and the cloud.

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