And then you find the Apps in the Marketplace like Promevo gPanel that truly make a difference to those of us who have to manage and support multiple users (and multiple domains). I've only been using it for a short time, but at this point I can say that I never want to touch a Google Apps domain without it again.

The regular Google Apps control panel gives some very basic administrator controls for managing email settings for individual users and globally. You can click on a user name and force reset their password, set nicknames (alternate usernames) and include them in the shared contacts directory (more on that later). That's about it.

When you have a user who complains that they can't use their desktop email client or phone to get their email and you ask them "did you enable POP or IMAP?" they stare blankly. So you send them instructions, or you stand over their shoulder and talk them through how to configure the right setting and why. How about when the user creates a Google Doc and has no clue how to share it with everyone in the domain, or they've shared it and it's set to view-only and it should be editable (or visa versa)? Google Apps can be incredibly intuitive and maddening at the same time. 

As an administrator, we can of course do it for them without an extra tool. We just have to either ask them for their password or force a password reset and then log in as them and make the necessary changes. I hate doing that. I firmly believe that users should have private passwords and they should stay that way. Don't share with anyone, don't share with me. I don't want to know, and I don't want to read your email. I want to go in, change the setting that needs to be changed and get out.

Promevo gPanel lets administrators configure user email settings without needing direct access to the account! Hurray!

Frankly, users don't care whether it's POP or IMAP or what it does, they just want to be able to get email on their phone. So set their POP access for them and call it a day:

Not sure who has ownership of which document and if it's shared properly if it's not shared directly with you? gPanel gives admins a bird's eye view of all Google Docs across the domain...ownership, sharing, type...only thing missing is file size (although that might be in another area of the control panel I haven't uncovered yet).

Administrators can't open private documents from gPanel, which is just fine. When you open a document from here, it uses the access privileges on the document as the user set it. As it should be, unless there is a reason it should be otherwise. Like in email, I don't want to know nuthin'. But if there's a document that was mis-shared, I can easily fix that for the user without needing to access the document directly (and then concentrate on user training so they do it correctly for themselves next time). I can only see titles:

Here's just a short list of what I can do in gPanel that goes beyond anything easily available without it:

• Add contacts outside the domain to the shared contacts directory and edit user profiles that are already in the directory (Google has the option to automatically add domain users to the shared directory, but it only includes name and email address)
• Set labels and filters for a user
• Turn IMAP on/off for a user
• Turn those annoying WebClips off for users
• Set a default signature for a user (doesn't yet work with the new multiple signature feature)
• Set a vacation message for a user
• Set forwarding for a user (the Google Apps email destination routing doesn't work well...this is helpful for users who will continue to use other email addresses but need access to docs & calendar in your domain)
• Transfer document ownership from one user to another

The support from the folks at Promevo is top notch. Yesterday I got an error message while changing sharing settings on a document. I reported the issue and within 15 minutes, no lie, my phone was ringing. Aaron worked through the problem with me while I was on the phone with him, found it was a bug, and by that evening the problem was fixed. These guys are techies who know how to manage email and digital assets in large corporate environments, and they're a pleasure to talk to.

And the price? Very reasonable. For a nonprofit/education environment the cost is just $2/user per year. Not per month. Per year! It goes up to $8/user for commercial clients and works with all editions, with varying available features.

Aaron tells me that they're working on interface improvements (sorely needed in spots), better calendar management, undos and some backup solutions. I also wish they add something in for managing Google Chat settings and short links. 

It's not perfect. The interface lags in spots and since it's such a new product, there are bugs. I found another one this morning which I reported and Aaron already responded that it should be fixed shortly.

There are similar administrator tools in the Marketplace such as Power Panel but I think I prefer the Promevo approach which treats administrators like administrators and not just bigger end users who would be afraid of not seeing the same Google look & feel. It's a complex interface, but it makes sense and is very clear and clean...especially when configuring user email settings.

Do you use an app to manage your Google Apps domain(s)? What do you think?

All well and good, but it does't work for Google Apps or Google Docs, and it's driving me batty.

At this time, I have one regular @gmail.com account that I use for my personal email, as well as any Google service that isn't in Google Apps (Reader, AdWords, Voice, Maps, etc.) I find it easier to have one account for most of these services than juggle between accounts unless necessary. Supposedly Google is working on a way to bring Account-only services to Apps, and when that happens maybe I'll rethink my plan.

I use 6 different Google Apps accounts. One for Colorectal Cancer Coalition where I spend most of my day, one account each for momathome.com and judisohn.com (I don't use those for personal email anymore but I do deploy addresses for family members), and the others are for local organizations that I have volunteered to help with tech.

For a while I used a single account to read/reply to all the email. But that doesn't work well because 1. Google still sends email "on behalf of" one account when you send from another. Too many of my contacts are using Outlook to ignore this issue. There's a workaround if you combine POP email accounts, but not if you're using Google's own email which makes no sense. 2. I'd still have to load Docs, Calendar and Sites separately anyway so what was the point? and 3. it was harder to manage working this way on the iPhone.

For the most part, browsers have no problem maintaining separate email sessions for each Google Apps account. So I can be in my browser of choice and have a separate Gmail tab for each email address I check, each logged in and working fine. I don't have a problem with Calendar because I tend to combine all my calendars in such a way that no matter which account I'm looking at, I'm seeing the same calendars.

But there is no way that I know of to have a single Google Docs view that shows the content of all accounts. In fact, there can only be one session of Google Docs at a time when a document is open!

I get this screen constantly:

Problem is, there's a bug of some nature...no matter which account you select, the screen above typically just reloads. The only way I've found to get to Google Docs from here is to start signing out of the other accounts until the browser sees the "front" account as the one you're trying to reach.

Or, sometimes it happens that you can load the main Google Docs page but when you click on a document you get this:

Even though you have an active session for the user you want, and you clicked the document from the main Google Docs view of the right account, Google is only recognizing the last account signed in to actually get to the document. You have to peel back the layers to get to the right account.

Lately I've also been occasionally hitting a Google help page which says that I have to clear all cookies and cache to get to Docs. Lovely.

It's maddening. 

The temporary solution? Incognito mode (similar to private browsing in Firefox or Safari). You know, the one that everyone snickers at as the "porn mode"? It's noted for not leaving any trace in cookies or history...but it also doesn't take any traces with it from already signed-in sessions.

Now when I want to open something in Google Docs, I right-click on the link and open it in Incognito right from the menu:

Neither Firefox or Safari have this right-click option to open a link in their private modes that I can find.

Works well. No matter which accounts are sign-in to the main window, I get no complaint when I open Docs Incognito. I just have to sign in to the right account in the new Incognito window.

I could always use separate browsers for each account (Firefox for one, Safari for another, etc.) but I find "going Incognito" a much better solution. I can even designate the extensions I need to work in Incognito windows (such as 1Password).

Anyone else doing the multiple account dance and have a better solution until Google fixes this once and for all?

I shut down the iPad completely and restarted. No difference. Her iPad has parental restrictions turned on, but nothing in those settings would cause this behavior. In an effort to avoid restoring the device, I hit the internet. Nothing came up in Google searches, so I searched just the Apple forums and found this thread which nailed the problem and the solution:

It took me 2 tries to get my finger on the right spot in time, but sure enough it works. 

Seems the issue goes in the other direction as well. And here's another thread on the problem which solves it with a reset/resync (not restore), I think the other way is easier. 

Long ago I submitted the official page for the auto-bot-stupid page created for C3. But has it changed? No. And there are 5 people who like it who I'm not sure if they've found their way to our actual page. 

This shows just how auto-bot-stupid it is. 

I logged into Facebook and this is what's "Recommended" to me:

Hmmm... Judging by the images, there are 2 different pages on the same word. Curious, I click through to the first one (names intentionally blanked out). Which appears to be intentionally created by someone.

And then the second:

So a page is created for Knitting. and a separate auto-bot-stupid one for Knitting (notice no punctuation)? Great, tomorrow will Facebook suggest me to like Knitting? How about Knitting!

I love when I get a recommendation to a real page based on what I've already liked. Great idea. But these auto-bot-stupid things have got to go.

I tried to import all the old posts here. Just didn't work. With nearly 2,000 posts and over 5,000 comments the standard importer would not have worked. After 5 days of waiting for the uploaded file to import, I gave up and imported the file to a WordPress.com site instead. Took a grand total of maybe 15 minutes. Apples to apples makes things easier, I guess. I search my own blog from time to time to spark my memory or remember a tip I shared. Nice to have it all back.

All the posts and comments are there. Unfortunately, I didn't make sure that I had absolute paths to images and so any image hosted on old blog is now broken, and some much older posts that relied on text fomatting plug-ins I experimented with look funky now. I can live with that, at least for the time being. There's also a few miscellaneous pages I have to find a new home. My hosting account with MediaTemple isn't gone for good until the end of the year.

* MediaTemple makes it sound like folks who had their sites attacked hadn't updated WordPress in years. In fact, I was running whatever was the previous version released in December 2009. Would I have been more secure with 3.0? Probably, but that had only been released a month earlier. A month! If you can't wait even a month to decide whether you want to go to the latest and greatest then something is seriously wrong somewhere. That's what I like about Posterous and even WordPress.com now...keeping my site free of malware and vulnerabilities is their problem which they seem to take seriously, not mine.

Update: I chose wisely. After 5 days, I tried a 2nd upload using the same file that went to WordPress.com. I just got an email that my blog finished importing. Great news! the email shown below told me. But when I went to the page to see if it the import was better than what I already put in WordPress.com...not so much.

So I've been going back and forth about what I want to do with my personal domains. I have two, judisohn.com and momathome.com Momathome.com is legacy. It doesn't make a lot of sense now, given what I do for a living, but it was my first identity on the web and I know there's a lot of history out there tied to it. I primarily use it now for the kids' email and it redirects to judisohn.com.

I started transitioning the web side of things to judisohn.com but my heart wasn't in it. It came down to the fact that all the hassles of maintaining a domain just aren't worth it to me anymore. I'm no longer concerned with who can find me through a random Google search. I only care about the people in my network and extended network... nonprofit geeks, knitters, friends, family, techies etc. If anything, I can't stand when some stranger not connected to any community I care about emails me about an ancient post. I'm a totally different person now, with different perspective and goals. 

Posterous is a good fit for me, and I love that I only focus on content and they do the rest. Posting by email means I have a backup. It's by no means perfect, but good enough.

This morning I went to log in to my old WordPress blog for some reason I can't remember right now and saw this:

Oh that's just grand.

I logged into Webmaster tools, found what the offending code was and managed to remove it, no easy feat since my browsers weren't thrilled with even letting me in to the WP admin page. It was a line of script on the most recent post pointing to some malware site I obviously won't say here. I found the exact issue on the WordPress support site if anyone is interested. Looks like an issue with a MediaTemple (gs) database, although they'd probably deny it.

That was the final straw. I'm done with personal website hosting and I'll save $125 a year to boot. 

I've requested through the Webmasters tool that Google re-review my site so browsers won't complain, and then I'm redirecting judisohn.com and momathome.com here once and for all. I have no idea how long it will take for Google to clear the domain. 

I have an up-to-date export of all the old blog's content which I've been trying to get imported. If the import doesn't work, maybe I'll set it up on a WordPress.com site to have as an archive. Then I can ask Google (once again through the Webmasters tool) to re-index the domain and call it a day.

Apologies in advance for all those old URLs that will break. It's going to happen, can't lose sleep over it. Time for a fresh start.

And I'm sorry if anyone gets malware from me.

Update: I've found more information about what got into my site. I found this post, and sure enough there were multiple "JohnnyA" administrators in my site. I've deleted them all, and hopefully my site will be re-cleared by Google and redirected to Posterous before whatever happened happens again. Seems like MediaTemple has a problem on their hands, soon enough it won't be my problem too.

It probably seemed like such a good idea at the time. Google added the ability to make the Google home page more Bing-like with background images, and showed it off by adding their own images to everyone's home page for a day. Big deal. 

Apparently it was. They stopped the promotion a bit early and now Google is plain vanilla white again (reason why in the blog post linked above). I barely noticed since I "Google" using Chrome's address bar. I rarely go to Google's home page directly.

Yesterday, Eric and I went out for lunch. I happened to overhear two women at the next table talk about the change and how unsettling it was. "Can you believe it about Google this morning?" was the quip that initially got my attention. I thought I missed something really important so my ears perked up. Then they went on about it. How they couldn't figure out how to turn it off. How finally a colleague showed them how to upload a big blank white image to get the old Google back. This wasn't a fleeting moment. This stopped productivity in some business while employees dealt with the crisis. I know it was rude of me to listen to their conversation. I'm sorry. Couldn't help myself. 

Sometimes those of us in the if-it's-five-minutes-ago-it's-old tech cocoon forget just how jarring change like this can be to normal people.

Like many kids with autism, she needs a lot of structure in her life. She always has to know what's happening next or she gets very stressed out. She also has fine motor issues. She can write, but it's barely legible. She's very comfortable on the computer. She never had much interest in email, but does communicate with classmates from time to time on gaming social networks that are kid-appropriate. I just turned off her cell phone account because she was never using it. Only recently has she mastered answering and using the telephone at home. She also has an internal filter that's better than any parental control software. She refused to see a PG-13 movie until she was actually 13. She doesn't like to hear bad words. If she stumbles across something she shouldn't see on YouTube, she'll switch it off faster than I could react. She loves to read and write, but needs help making sure her stories have a beginning, middle and end.

We've decided to get her an iPad this summer. This isn't a toy or entertainment device, although we certainly expect her to use it for that when appropriate.

 

We have a team of 7 staff members. Each of us works on different projects for different programs. From time to time, we work with consultants or outside vendors.

 

We are an efficient bunch, but what we lack is centralized project and task coordination. We need to be able to see how our projects are progressing over time. Where the bottlenecks are. What is falling behind. What the next year will look like for projects we know we're going to take on but haven't started yet.

 

Folks are comfortable in email and instant messenger. It's where most of the conversation happens between us and we get a lot accomplished. Yet working this way, we miss that "big picture" overview.

 

It seems obvious that there should be a tool we can use to help us here. We don't have a server so we don't want desktop software. We want something that works in the cloud. You would think that with so many choices we'd find exactly what we need.

 

I have spent the last week or two trying more of these online project management tools than I can count. Many of them are here. 

 

So frustrated that none are singing to me the way Salesforce or Google Apps did when I first tried them out.

 

Here's what I want:

• Uncluttered interface - folks have to spend less time managing projects than doing them. It doesn't have to be simple or designed for idiots - I work with very smart, technically capable people. It needs to be streamlined and without features and distractions we don't need.
• A task management system folks will actually use - When they finish a task, will they remember to go to this tool and check it off?
• Centralized administration and management - Administrator can create/assign projects - only assigned managers can edit milestones and the phases of the project
• Bird's eye view of all projects and where they stand ("What's the next step? Who's responsible?") - Dashboard shows status of active tasks - not just recent activity
• Gantt and/or clear calendar view that includes milestones and multi-day phases - bonus if it syncs with Google Calendar
• Integration with email (receive notification via email, bonus if you can reply to attach discussion to a task)
• Files only as essential for project - not just to dump stuff
• Invite outside users to projects as needed
• Don't want tickets/case management, don't want wikis, don't want blogs, don't want "here's what I'm eating for lunch" status updates - need to be able to to tailor interface to only what we need/want. We have other tools, I want to avoid duplication as much as possible.
• works across platforms and modern browsers - not so much an issue these days, but still needs to be considered
• Cost: total of under $50 per month but can make a case for spending more if it's exceptional.

What follows is my impression of what I've tried so far and why it falls short.

 

The biggest problem with these tools is that they are designed for teams that work with clients. Or they are designed for teams that work on software development. Or they are designed for teams that work work with clients on software development. What about project management for teams that produce newsletters? For teams that are working on a conference or event? For teams that are tracking a year-long editorial and strategy calendar for fundraising campaigns? Not so much.

 

I've been whining about this in Twitter a bit. I've been asked to summarize my findings. 

 

These are the tools I've evaluated/looked at and why I like them/don't like them.