Control Group Blog

Outside My Hotel in Malaysia – Do Not Feed The Monkeys!

I know the last time I posted here I said I’d be following up with another technical post, but instead I thought I’d share an experience I just had as I took a last minute trip for a client.

Normally if I take a trip it’s no big deal. I can write a blog post from where ever I go. My email is online, this blog is online, if I need to access something in my office I can just use our VPN to get connected. To use any of these I’d just need to have an Internet connection. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case when last week I went to a fairly remote part of Malaysia.

A few coworkers and I were trying to make last minute adjustments to a product that one of our clients is launching. At first I wondered why even send us out there when we can get remote access or talk someone through it on the phone. When I arrived onsite I realized why this wasn’t an option — getting connected is near impossible there. We could head to a coffee shop and get some free WiFi, but with over twenty hops to servers in the United States and a twelve hour time difference, getting anything done was difficult.

The lack of connectivity was challenging. One of my responsibilities was interfacing with the local IT department and writing some scripts to integrate the client’s system with existing systems and processes. I quickly realized how much I depend on online references and documentation. When you can barely get connected to look up the answer to a question about syntax you really have to use your head. Not to mention, each software build for the project is about 300 megabytes and getting this from our office in New York was difficult and time consuming.

The idea of ubiquitous Internet connectivity is something that we take for granted. As connection speeds get faster and more reliable we lose efficiencies that we once had. I learned that the Internet is really an extension of my knowledge and a valuable tool that I need to do my job. Being cut off from it was an interesting and overall positive experience. Solving every problem by thinking and working it through was difficult and took more time, but genuinely figuring things out for myself was very rewarding.

Towards the end of my time there we found a cell phone store that sold GSM modems and prepaid 3G SIM cards that allowed us to get connectivity. While this does make the job a lot easier, I’m glad I had the experience of being mostly cut off from the rest of the net — something that will surely happen less often as the world becomes better connected.

Last week, I shared some thoughts on my ongoing trial of Google Apps in place of Outlook and Exchange. I wrote about some of the killer features in that post… however, where Google Apps succeeds in its simplicity, it can fail in terms of flexibility. There are some things here that could mean game over for a lot of people:

Conversation view — how about an option to turn it off?

Conversation view, conversation view, conversation view!

It’s terrible. I have finally gotten used to it, and I still think it’s terrible. If only there were an option to shut it off. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a feature that groups email of a thread together. But it isn’t perfect and it can be pretty awkward. Emails tend to get jumbled up, and sometimes mixed into the wrong thread. Someone high up at Google must have came up with this one because it is one of the most complained about features and still they wont give you a way to shut it off.

Mobile device integration is really weak.

Being a Blackberry Enterprise user, the move to IMAP is a big downgrade. Sent mail is important! Email in under 2 seconds is hard to give up; with IMAP, be prepared for a full minute, unless you manically hit refresh. Google offers their mobile mail client, but it leaves a lot to be desired, it gives you labels (aka folders) and sent mail, but it’s clumsy and lacks basic things like original email text in the body of replies and copy/paste, to name two biggies.

Google plans to release Blackberry Enterprise Server integration this summer, but my hopes aren’t too high. Since one of my goals is to live in the cloud, having a BES server at our office doesn’t fit into that fantasy. Plus, calendar sync is one-way, and email sync is “under 1 minute,” but — I have to say it again — BES and Exchange give me email in under 2 seconds!

Return on Investment

I am willing to overlook these inconveniences, and many others because the ROI from an administrative/business owner perspective is really that good. Take Instant Messaging as an example. If you wanted to implement a company-wide IM platform with Microsoft, prepare to drop $5-$7k on hardware, another $3k+ on software, and about the same on installation. Then add in maintenance, training, and once (if) it gets adopted and people can’t live without it, get ready to plan on backup, archiving and a data recovery plan. We are talking at least $20k to do it right.

With Google Apps, you want company-wide IM? Check a box. You want all IM messages saved and searchable? Click another box. Cost? $0. You want video and voice chat too? Done. Gone are the days of patching servers, mailbox limits, backups running during the day, defragging information stores, Google Apps’ greatest strength is in the fact that it’s not there. It’s everything a cloud application should be.

“In Google I Trust”

One of the biggest drivers in my support of the Google platform is my trust in Google to quietly innovate and release new features and updates. I trust they will get mobile device synchronization right soon. Maybe Microsoft will cave and license them the rest of Active Sync. But  I still have mixed feelings about Google Apps. Life in the cloud is the future — if I was starting a new business, there’s no doubt I would go with Google Apps.  Coming from a Company with 10 years of Exchange process and history, it’s a harder decision. But I still might choose the new pain over the old.

We are six weeks into a Google Apps pilot. Four have dropped out, there are six of us left. It’s been tough, but Stockholm Syndrome is setting in and I think I am starting to love Google Apps.

Google Apps for Business has been getting a lot of press recently — both positive and less-than-positive — so I wanted to share some thoughts on my experiences testing the platform as a replacement for the traditional Outlook/Exchange ecosystem. It’s been six weeks using Google Apps with a small group of guinea pigs here at CG. And after 10 years architecting, deploying, backing up, patching, defragging, archiving, replicating, maintaining, recovering* and yes, using Microsoft Exchange, I was definitely ready for a change and I was pretty eager to find out how the hype and marketecture lived up to a real world test.

After digging deep into Google Apps for my everyday communications, I found both some really cool features and some stinging gotchas for the average user. I also wanted to share some insight from the perspective of the administrator and the business owner. Here are a few quick thoughts on the positives…

Strongest points:

• Having one console for 90% of what I do, from any computer, Mac or PC is a relief. It’s fast, and simple. I have had enough ‘mandatory coffee breaks’ – waiting 20 minutes to have Outlook open up because it’s reindexing my local mail database.
• The document collaboration, particularly spreadsheets is really nice. It’s definitely not something to produce finished quality work, and rich change tracking that you might use for editing a contract is out, but in terms of getting an idea out there quickly, sharing it and collaborating with your team, I have not found anything simpler, faster, or easier. And I really like the paradigm of individuals maintaining ownership of documents and allowing others to edit them. File servers need to go the way of the newspaper.
• Google-powered search of my email is a no-brainer killer feature. Add Google Chat to the Google Mail window, and you’ve got an email client that’s hard to beat (though I do have one major complaint with Google Mail…. I’ll share more in a follow-up post).

Next week, I’ll share more thoughts on Google Apps, focusing on some of its weaknesses. Update: read Part 2 here.

*eseutil /R — ’nuff said

Is your Inbox full of messages from MAILER-DAEMON? We frequently help our clients deal with spam and junk-filled Inboxes — here’s some info about why this can happen, and what can be done to help prevent it.

Inboxes full of messages from MAILER-DAEMON are frequently the result of non-delivery reports (NDRs) from spoofed spam messages.  A spoofed spam message is an email from a spam mailer that has been masked with your valid sender email address.  When these spam messages are sent to addresses that don’t exist, an NDR is generated and sent back — this is the email equivalent of the post office returning a letter as undeliverable.  In theory, one is sent to the invalid sender address, the other is sent to you.  Since the invalid one doesn’t actually exist, you are the only one to receive it.

Lots of messages from Mailer Daemon or Mail Delivery Systems can be symptoms of Spoofed Spam

Here are some frequently asked questions about Spoofing:

Has my email been hacked? Probably not — 99% of the time your account has not been compromised.

How did the spammer get my email address? Email addresses can be harvested in a number of ways.  The most common are as follows:

1. If your email is posted on a website, spammers use “bots” to crawl through websites searching for email addresses.
2. When you sign up for access to a web service, some sites will sell your email address and personal information.
3. A virus on your machine or on someone’s machine that has your email address on it either as a contact or even just an email to/from you.

What can be done to stop them? Once a spammer has your email address, there’s not too much that can be done to stop them from spoofing their emails with your address.  The messages themselves are not being sent by the spammer but by mail servers doing their job and alerting the sender that the recipient doesn’t actually exist.

How long is this going to happen? Generally spammers use a group of email addresses for about a week and then move on to the next batch that they have harvested.  You will likely still receive them for a few days up to a couple of weeks.

Can’t you block them at the server or through Postini?  Technically it is possible but this can be a double-edged sword.  Blocking messages from MAILER-DAEMON will result in actual NDRs being blocked that you may want to receive.  If you were to send a message that didn’t reach its intended recipient for any number of reasons, you wouldn’t know about it.  Another reason is that not all mail servers will send their NDRs under the name MAILER-DAEMON.

Here are some steps you can take to help prevent this from happening again in the future:

Schedule regular virus and malware scans. By scanning your system regularly, you will help to catch viruses and malware that will harvest email addresses from your computer.  This has the added benefit of making sure that your system is virus/malware free to prevent other issues such as system performance issues and identity theft.

Be careful of where you use your email address: If you need to have your email address posted on a website, use a non-standard format such as John.Smith [at] ControlGroup [dot] com.  This will help to confuse the “bots” that are used to scour websites for addresses.  If you need to register to access a website, it helps to have a separate email account setup for this through a free service such as Gmail.com  By keeping this separate email address simply for signing up for websites, any spam you may receive by signing up will be sent to this email address instead.

Even with taking these steps and being diligent with them, there is always the possibility of someone with whom you have emailed with getting a virus that can collect your email address.  Unless you are prepared to be tech support for everyone that you email with, your best bet is to help educate them on the issue to help save both you and them the headache of being Spoofed.  You can even link them to this blog post to help them learn how they can prevent this from happening to them.