Beginning November 22, 2011, we will end support for the Gmail App for Blackberry(installed native app). Over this past year, we’ve focused efforts on building a great Gmail experience in the mobile browser and will continue investing in this area.

Users may continue to use the app, if installed, however it will not be supported by Google, or available for download starting November 22. BlackBerry users can continue to access Gmail through the mobile web app at http://www.gmail.com in their BlackBerry web browser.

Anyone that has the app installed on their phones now will be able to continue using it. I wonder how long it will be before a system update to the Gmail service will break these unsupported apps? If you have to wipe your Blackberry after November 22nd (and let’s face it, we’ve all had to wipe our Blackberries before) you will no longer be able to install the application.

The best bet is to go ahead and start switching over to the mobile application now. I’ve always preferred to move to a new platform on my own time. Waiting until it breaks is a recipe for disaster. You’ll likely be stuck and waiting on the IT guys to return your call.

I can’t say that I am surprised by this. At work we have been encouraging our end users to migrate away from the Blackberry platform for a few years now. Most of our smart phone folks have moved to either the Android or iPhone platforms but there are still a few that like to use their Blackberries. I wonder which app will be the next to end support?

Beware the security devils!

This is the graphic that you now see when you are visiting a website with a valid certificate that is loading page elements that are not encrypted.  It’s not a terrible thing security wise but nevertheless, beware the red skull of security!  Even though I know it is going to generate support calls I still love it.  Well done Google!

Safe Searching!

Google has released the beta version of their https encrypted search website.  Google probably didn’t encrypt their searches from the beginning due to the increased overhead of the https protocol.  After several test searches I cannot tell a difference between the http equivalent.  Now we can all search whatever we want in the coffee shop without much worry of wireless sniffers watching our every move.  Very impressive!

Affected browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari.  All are running the latest patches as of this writing.

Steps to remediate for Windows XP users:

1. Start – Run
2. Run the program “cmd” for the command line
3. Enter “ipconfig /flushdns” and hit Enter
4. Restart the browser

Steps to remediate for Windows Vista/7 users:

1. Start – All Programs – Accessories
2. Right click on command prompt and select Run As Administrator
3. Enter “ipconfig /flushdns” and hit Enter
4. Restart the browser

I have seen some small issues with Ubuntu and Mac laptops.  We resolved those by dumping the browser cache, restarting the network connections and restarting the browser.  I will post an update as I learn more.

Update: June 10th @ 5:24 PM

I’ve done a good bit of googling and found out that the issue is most likely linked to our brand spanking new Linksys WRT320N wireless router (relevant threads can be found here and here).  Apparently that entire family of routers has trouble with DNS requests.  I didn’t see a sticker on the box when I bought it that said something along the lines of “I suck at DNS.”  Who knew?  I updated the firmware at our dinner break.  We’ll see how it goes from here.

Gmail interface - Work e-mail address!

Who could say no to an offer like that?  We are looking at the collaborative possibilities of having over 2,000 active accounts in one Google Apps system.  Our current e-mail infrastructure is a mixture of Microsoft and open source products.  We started off with a small Windows e-mail server and have grown over the years to support over 2,000 mailboxes.  We decided to go with a few different solutions for different segments of this user base over time as needed.  In the end we have five servers all working together to run and manage our communications infrastructure.  It’s a mess.  It’s also rather burdensome to administer.  Enter Google Apps with its unified management system, familiar end user facing interface, compelling and easy to use overall setup and the choice to switch is fairly easy.  We started off with about 10 beta users and then migrated the entire Communications and Information Technology offices.  Once we were convinced that the system was working well we began the roll out process to internal staff.  We are up to about 150 active accounts now but we have a long way to go.

What are some of the major benefits of switching to this system?

• We reduce our support surface from five different servers, operating systems and mailbox formats down to one integrated interface.
• We will have access to an whole host of collaborative tools that was not previously possible.
• Our end users will have reduced confusion.  Many times they call us and have forgotten which server they are hosted on (so do we!).
• We don’t have to write documentation anymore.  We just link from Google’s support website!
• We no longer have to constantly maintain our e-mail gateway anti-virus and anti-spam scanners.
• Microsoft Outlook integrates into the Google Apps system.  We have a good number of users that wish to continue using Microsoft Outlook instead of the web interface.

Google Apps allows a custom logo for each organization.

What kind of things can we do with this new system?  Here’s a few ideas:

• Easily share user calendars so that co-workers may know when they are available for meetings.
• Set up shared documents, spreadsheets and presentations for collaborative work within offices.  These documents can also be shared with the entire Conference or with all visitors to our website.
• Set up Google Sites for project based collaboration (rather than just individual documents).
• Easily manage e-mail and make use of the labeling system for filing away old messages for later retrieval.
• Easily set up a system group that I can use to communicate with all of my end users simultaneously.

What other ways can we use this?  We are concentrating on the migration from our existing systems now and will move on to feature implementation later.  I’m curious to hear other ideas as to what we can actually do with this system once we have everything in place.  I’ll post updates as we move along in the implementation process.  We are very excited about all that we can do with this new system!

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Google’s Chrome OS project, first announced in July, will become available for download within a week, we’ve heard from a reliable source. Google previously said to expect an early version of the OS in the fall.

Hardware support is a problem with all operating systems upon launch.  I hope the Mini 9 is supported soon…

What can we expect? Driver support will likely be a weak point. We’ve heard at various times that Google has a legion of engineers working on the not so glamorous task of building hardware drivers. And we’ve also heard conflicting rumors that Google is mostly relying on hardware manufacturers to create those drivers. Whatever the truth, and it’s likely in between, having a robust set of functioning drivers is extremely important to Chrome OS’s success. People will want to download this to whatever computer they use and have it just work.

We expect Google will be careful with messaging around the launch, and endorse a small set of devices for installation. EEE PC netbooks, for example, may be one set of devices that Google will say are ready to use Chrome OS. There will likely be others as well, but don’t expect to be able to install it on whatever laptop or desktop machine you have from day one. Google has previously said they are working with Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba on the project.