Important mail going to spam? Read this!

It happens to a lot of users. Your boss, colleague, or client asks if you've completed the first draft and you look at them with a blank face, with no clue as to what they are referring to. You either missed the email or it somehow landed in your spam folder which you rarely ever check. "Why is important email landing in my spam" you ask? Simple, you get Gmail to stop checking for spam - sort of.

If you're finding that wanted incoming email is landing in spam, here is a way to redirect it to your inbox. Filters are one of the most powerful tools integrated in Gmail. If you understand the power of email filters, you can do quite a lot with them to manage your inbox efficiently and productively. Follow these simple steps to setup a domain filter to automate "spam email" to redirect into your inbox.

1. Click the gear icon in the upper right corner of your inbox and select Settings.

2. Select the Filters and Blocked Addresses tab and at the bottom select Create a new filter.

3. In the resulting popup, place this text (without quotes) “is:spam” into the "Has the Words box", enter the domain name from which wanted mail is landing in spam, and click Create filter with this search.

4. Check the Never send to Spam box (and any other boxes you'd like a match for) and click Create filter.

That's it! You've now created a filter to prevent wanted mail from that specific domain from going to your spam folder. Technically we haven't stopped Gmail from checking spam, but this filter functions in practically the same way, so no more scavenging through your spam folder to find that lost unread email. Next time you get an important email from that domain in spam, it will automatically pass along to your inbox as a regular piece of mail.

In our next post we'll cover why your sent mail may be going to your recipients spam folder and why having your domain's SPF and DKIM records up to date is crucial to having your email delivered appropriately. To learn more about how Gmail and other Google Apps can make your company more efficient and productive, be sure to contact our InterlockIT team! 

Googlization of Education

Google Apps for Education (GAFE) has taken the K-12 system--and even post-secondary education systems--by storm. It's a core suite of productivity applications that Google offers to education institutions for FREE, allowing them to offer more productive, collaborative, and efficient learning experience. GAFE is more than just Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs and Sites. It includes dozens of other collaborative tools supported by Google such as Classroom. Everything is in the cloud which means that creations can be accessed from any device with an internet connection.  

The new generation of students don't install desktop software to check email. In fact, email is barely even used by teenagers. The majority of top 100 educational institutes have already adopted Google Apps which has seeded the next generation of works. GAFE is growing rapidly with currently more than 50 million users, and is anticipated to reach 110 million users by 2020 according to PR Newswire. 

Here are a few Canadian schools that have already upgraded:

• Edmonton Schools (roughly 90,000 users)
• University of Alberta
• Wilfred Laurier
• Lakehead University
• Nipissing University
• University of Windsor
• McMaster, Mount Royal, Trent, Ryerson, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan, Ottawa-Carleton School Boards, Memorial
• Calgary Board of Education
• Greenwood College
• Upper Canada College
• Lakefield College
• York School
• Royal St. George

Google Apps for Education isn’t just about the core education services, it's a complete suite of communication and collaboration cloud applications. Although collaboration isn’t new to schools, the GAFE approach enables students and teachers to drop legacy desktop software and work together in a much more effective and productive way. For example, teachers don’t have to collect giant stacks of assignments to haul home; everything is online. Furthermore, the teacher’s comments can be placed in-line on the assignment in question, allowing students to quickly and effectively assimilate the feedback.

Google Apps for Education is leading the way for schools who are changing the way they think about education and technology. Chromebooks, for example, are fast, low-cost, easy-to-use notebooks that meet the requirements of most students. With more student-owned devices coming into schools every year, and with the conversion from wired to wireless access, it's vital that students are equipped with a consistent set of learning resources anytime, anywhere. By providing students with access to GAFE, new teaching and learning workflows can be developed and adopted to support student learning anytime, anywhere with single sign on access.

With an already huge and expanding market, coupled with an all-accessible powerful app suite at a low cost, it's easily a winning combination. Google Apps for Education is seeing an explosive surge in user growth, with schools maturing into much more advanced and collaborative learning institutions. Contact our InterlockIT team today to learn how to increase the retention of your staff and prepare for tomorrow's generation of students and teachers with superior technology.

Gmail vs. Outlook - Which one?

We spend a significant amount of the day reading and replying to emails, so using the right email client is imperative for optimized productivity and efficiency. The most prominent and favoured email solutions to date are Google's Gmail and Microsoft's Outlook.

To decide which solution works best for your business, it's crucial to address the kinds of features and functions your users require. Outlook is generally the 'comfort zone' option for a lot of users, and has been for some time; it's a familiar and popular application. However, Gmail has been steadily growing in popularity (surpassing 1 billion active users in Q4 2015) and in our experience, it's taken the throne away from Outlook—but how? While Outlook and Gmail both offer a similar experience with basic send/receive functionality, Gmail has taken a step further with lightning-fast mailbox searching, integrated voice and multi-person video chat, and other productivity enhancements such as Priority Inbox. Furthermore, Gmail integrates Google Hangouts, the communication platform of choice of the next generation. Gmail also includes the ability to easily attach and link files stored in Google Drive. Google Apps Learning Center offers a great overview of Gmail and Google Apps.

Although the majority of Gmail 'converts' really enjoy it, we've come across users who prefer Google Apps but insist on using Outlook because of their familiarity with the old-school interface. Many users may struggle and even dislike the change to conversation view in Gmail, but once trained on the benefits, the majority find it really helps manage large volumes of emails without using time consuming methods like sorting by sender and filing in individuals folders. Placing Outlook on top of Gmail excludes users from many powerful Gmail features that can really boost productivity and efficiency. For example, Gmail can merge emails into a single "conversation," which makes it much easier to navigate messages compared to Outlook. This enables the user to view or hide any related correspondence with a simple mouse click, instead of having to shuffle through multiple messages from the same sender. Gmail also upgrades folders with labels, which means that one email can have as many labels as needed versus Outlook, which only understands folders so users can only file a single email in a single folder - how old school is that?! Despite being able to assign multiple tags to one email, once trained with tips to use Google's powerful email search capabilities, many users stop filing in folders and using labels altogether.

Having instant access to your email and files, along with seamless collaboration, is another big selling point for Google Apps. There is no need to download, install, update, and sync legacy applications like Outlook since Google handles all the related maintenance and automatically updates Gmail, so users always get the latest innovations. This way, when you click open your browser or pick up your tablet or smartphone, it just simply works.

One of the other powerful features of Gmail is it's advanced spam filtering system. Gmail offers superior spam filtering which acts like a funnel through which only legitimate mail can pass. By the time you step into your office in the morning, Google ensures that any email that was collectively marked spam by others across the world does not end up in your inbox. Neat!

Gmail spam filtering

Although Outlook offers a familiar interface, Gmail and Google Apps for Work remain the email service of choice for most of our customers. More than 5 million businesses worldwide have moved to Google Apps, allowing their employees to productively collaborate, wherever and whenever they work. Be sure to check out some of the differences and benefits you'll get by switching to Gmail from Outlook and a legacy Exchange ecosystem. We here at InterlockIT have led many migrations, so contact us to schedule yours!

Hybrid Cloud - Not a permanent solution

InterlockIT - We're a pro-cloud company and proud of being part of a disruptive way to providing cheaper, more convenient, and simpler business solutions that work.

Many cloud prospects over-complicate the process of divorcing their on-premises system by wanting to implement a hybrid cloud architecture as a long-term solution. A hybrid cloud is a combination of private cloud combined with the use of public cloud services where one or several touch points exist between the environments. The purpose of this setup is to conjoin services from a variety of cloud models to create an automated and easy to manage IT infrastructure.

As a cloud strategy company, we can confidently say that hybrid systems are not a permanent solution. CTOs rush to adopt cloud technologies for a number of reasons such as lower costs, increased agility, mobility, and so on, but many fail to understand that embracing a hybrid system is a journey with a final destination - the cloud. It shouldn't be a never-ending journey and for good reason! Each organization's cloud migration is different depending on the company size and infrastructure. Larger companies that rely more heavily on legacy systems may run a hybrid cloud system for a longer period of time than smaller companies that are comfortable moving more quickly. To understand why hybrid systems work better as temporary solutions it's important to recognize a few major misconceptions. Amazon Web Services outlines some of these myths in their post.

A common assumption companies make about hybrid systems is the ease of moving applications between their on-premises and cloud architectures. It's crucial to understand that cloud and on-premises infrastructure are not equally capable. Simply put, companies move to the cloud for features that enable them to have true elasticity, security, fixed costs, and improvement updates. On-premise systems and private clouds don't have this versatility and therefore cannot be permanently unified with the public cloud without drawbacks. Companies that do adopt a hybrid cloud system are often presented with technical, business, and management challenges such as the need for hybrid clouds to have good API compatibility and solid network connectivity. Gartner Inc, a leading technology adviser, polled that 95% of private clouds had encountered problems.

Although a hybrid cloud architecture allows for a "mix and match" approach, there is still the issue of cost. Most companies that have a smaller budget usually can't afford a rollout of a hybrid cloud solution. The initial cost of servers on the private end of the scale is a substantial one, and the needs of smaller businesses can typically be well catered to by cloud providers like Google or Microsoft.

Hybrid/private clouds increase the chances of security issues versus public clouds. Maintaining and ensuring that your public cloud provider and private cloud are in compliance isn't a walk in the park. This includes the means of coordination between the two because hybrid systems allow for information to be transported across a network that can be subject to third-party tapping. Additionally, a hybrid cloud operator won't have a comparable budget to spend monitoring their security that public cloud providers like Google and Microsoft have. It's an unnecessary risk that many companies are unfortunately oblivious to.

It can be tempting to prolong the use of a hybrid solution when your company is so accustomed to legacy applications, but you'll often get much better performance from the public cloud element if you find a solution from a specialist provider like InterlockIT. Be sure to contact us to learn more about cloud migration and what we can do to make your IT infrastructure work efficiently and cost-effectively for you.

The world's most-used Android app may surprise you

You'd expect to see apps such as Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp on top of the most used lists for Android, but this isn't the case. According to app analytics tracking firm Drawbridge, the most used app of Q4 2015 was Clean Master by Cheetah Mobile, a Chinese mobile internet company. Clean Master is an app management platform that promises to "improve your device's performance by cleaning junk files, optimizing device memory, providing complete protections against viruses and managing the apps you installed."

The company targets their app directly at the low level of tech know-how of the average consumer. Plain and simple, most users just want their device to perform fast! Without understanding what the application really does, they see a promising illusion of a 'speedier and cleaner' device. It's hard to blame consumers when the appeal is so great and the marketing and design is done exceptionally well.

Apps like Clean Master may have once been useful but Android has progressed far enough that they are now obsolete, unnecessary, and can be harmful. The Android operating system has it's own native handler for assigning RAM to apps and making sure that all of it is being used in the most optimal way. In fact, Android purposely tries to keep apps loaded into RAM for better performance. Remember, RAM is fast, so on mobile devices every bit of speed is crucial for a good user experience. Therefore, keeping apps in RAM is actually a good thing!

Not only does Android handle RAM assignment, but it also keeps track of background apps, automatically closing or hibernating them so that there isn't a noticeable performance hit for leaving apps loaded in RAM.

App killers, memory boosters, performance enhancers and the like, all claim that freeing up your memory will speed up your device. With current versions of Android, this simply isn't true and actually does quite the opposite. Task killer apps kill other apps which use resources to process. When the operating system restarts those tasks, or other apps to fill the memory again, this takes even more resources. The task killer app kills again and the process repeats itself continuously. Essentially, these apps reduce performance and decrease battery life by restarting apps again and again. It's important to understand that dormant apps on your device don't consume any additional resources (for example, CPU time and battery life) in the first place. Additionally, apps like Clean Master barrage your device with unnecessary notifications, like how a certain app is stealing x-amount of RAM and how another app is violating privacy (without any proof), which often hurt productivity and can be quite distracting and annoying for the user.

Beware of apps that claim to instantly 'breathe new life' into your device. Android's RAM and cache management systems are rock solid. Because these task killer apps clear out even the essential processes of the operating system, restarting them is a big drain on system resources. Whatever speed increase the user feels is purely imaginary which makes this probably the best example of a placebo effect in the Android world. Be sure to check out the Lifehacker article to learn more about task killer apps and alternative ways to increase the performance of your device. For expert advice on technology and Google related assistance, be sure to contact our InterlockIT support team!

Google Drive files - How to transfer ownership

If you create a file in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides or upload a file into Drive, you are the 'owner' by default. What does this mean? There are essentially three kinds of users in Google Drive: owner, editor, and viewer. Although most users are able to view and edit a single document, there can only be one individual owner at a time. Being an owner of files, even pdfs or other other file types, counts against your 30 GB quota if you are on regular Google Apps (not unlimited) - this is a good enough reason to transfer ownership of files to stay under your storage limit.  Here is a chart outlining each type of user-privilege in Drive and what sets them apart from one another:

As illustrated in the chart above, the highest right an owner has over their files and folders is the ability to delete and transfer ownership. There are two kinds of ownership transfers: transferring ownership of single documents and transferring ownership of all documents collectively.

Transferring ownership of single documents in Google Drive

1. In Drive open the Doc, Sheet, Slides, file, or folder that you'd like to transfer the ownership of.
2. At the top right corner of the screen click the blue Share button as shown in the image below.

3. Click Advanced in the bottom right of the sharing box.

4. Type the email address of the person you want to transfer ownership to and click OK. (You can choose to send them a notification by checking off the Notify button)
5. Once their name appears under 'who has access', click the 'Can edit' drop down menu next to their name and assign 'Is owner'.

6. Click Done.

Transferring ownership of all documents in Google Drive: 

If you're an administrator for your Google Apps domain, you can transfer ownership of all documents in Drive from one user to another. Being able to transfer ownership of all documents can be useful in the event of an original owner leaving the organization. It's important to note that once a user is deleted from the domain, their documents cannot be transferred. The good news is that administrators are able to restore the account for five days and transfer the documents that way.

1. Sign-in to the Google Admin console.
2. Go to Apps > Google Apps > Drive.
3. Click Transfer Ownership.

4. Complete the Document ownership transfer section:

5. In the Form field, enter the username of the current owner and select the user's domain.
6. In the To field, enter the username of the new owner and select the user's domain.
7. Click Transfer documents to save.

Once this is done, the newly transferred documents are automatically organized in a single new folder, titled with the previous owner's email address, in the new owner's Drive. The original owner will maintain editing privileges until their account is deleted or their edit permissions are revoked.

You can find additional details directly from Google's support page. If you need assistance, training, or support for you Google Apps, be sure to contact our InterlockIT team!

Google FTW! - Why you should go all cloud

One of the most important decisions a business needs to make when switching from a legacy email system to cloud-based email is whether or not to support the variety of different operating system and email client combinations that require unnecessary amounts of troubleshooting. These legacy clients can chew through cost savings from the initial changeover in a matter of weeks while IT staff work out syncing problems, broken updates, and other issues that crop up all too often.

With a true cloud-based solution like Google Apps, there's no need to worry about whether a new update to the platform will break compatibility for anyone since everything runs simply within a browser window. If you have a browser, which is pretty much anywhere on any device nowadays, you have your business at your fingertips. While Google Apps does offer support for traditional email clients such as Outlook, Mac Mail, and Thunderbird, use of these applications limits both the overall ability and feature set of the robust cloud system. It's unwise to overlook the versatility of using the entire Google ecosystem together, as doing this hinders productivity and restricts a business' potential.

If you're a Google Apps user, all your work is automatically saved in the cloud. You have access to your email, calendar, contacts, documents, sites, and are able to work securely, regardless of where you are in the world or what device you use, as long as you have an internet connection. There's offline integration as well so you can view and edit your files even without an internet connection. This empowers you and your organization to be productive from virtually anywhere on almost any device. You can attend a meeting from your kids soccer game, edit a spreadsheet on a flight, or respond to an email from your local library's public computer - Google Apps makes it easy to stay connected to projects you're working on and with the people you are working with.

Ask yourself if your current legacy system is working to your advantage? How can you improve your IT infrastructure? Google Apps let you work faster and smarter by making it easy to collaborate with employees, partners, vendors, and customers. For example, you can edit and share all your files including docs, sheets, and slides in real time, saving you from emailing multiple versions. Google Apps also saves you the costs you would pay to purchase, install, integrate, maintain, update, and troubleshoot legacy systems. When everything is in the cloud, it simply just works!

We at InterlockIT have certified Google Apps Deployment Specialists and thoroughly understand how to get your IT solutions to work for you! We provide deployment management, technical setup, data migration, user training, system integration, custom scripting, support, and best practices to make the Google experience work efficiently and effectively for you. Contact us today to book your ticket to the cloud!

Xero integrates Google mail - A Potent Mix

If you are a small-medium business owner, it's often difficult to get a clear picture of where you stand with a particular customer. Our favourite tool to keep track of this is Xero. With over half a million global subscribers and counting, Xero provides online accounting, bank reconciliation, invoicing services, and integrates with a wide range of powerful software solutions and add-ons. Now, with the integration of Google's Gmail, it's more powerful than ever.

Just before the end of 2015 Xero pushed their final major update of the year: Contacts were updated and Google's Gmail service was integrated into the contacts screens. Essentially, this gives Xero users complete visibility of the business they've done with their customers or suppliers, making it much easier to make decisions and develop opportunities. This vital update makes Contacts a hub for customer communication and demonstrates how cloud accounting has opened the doors of opportunity for innovation and efficiency.

Features in this update enable you to:

• Connect your Gmail account to view emails with contacts directly in Xero. This saves emails to a contacts activity tab, adds email to a new invoice, quote, or bill, and allows you to download attachments to the contact record.
• View emails between you and your customers in real time.
• View emails from the email account that you've connected to Xero while they remain invisible to other users in your organization.
• Share an email with other users in your organization by simply adding it to the contact's activity tab

You can see here email messages have been pulled from Blair's account using the contact's email address or emails including the words "GotoMeeting.com"

Connecting Xero to your Google account is simple, here's how:

1. From the Contacts menu, select All Contacts.
2. Select a contact.
3. Under the bar graph, click Email, then click Connect to Gmail.
   
4. Sign in to your Google account.
5. On the permissions screen, select Allow.

You can find further details on Xero's Business Help Centre page and Xero's blog.

If you're already using Google apps and are looking for a great accounting solution to bridge the gap between you and your customers, Xero with Gmail is a robust and ideal solution. We at InterlockIT are proud Xero and Google Apps advocates and are more than happy to help make your business's IT solutions a breeze. Be sure to contact us to learn how we can assist you.