Posted by Philippe Creytens at 10:22
If you are using WiFi (802.11a,b.g) public hotspots then you are sending and receiving all of your traffic in “the clear”. To make joining the network effortless many networks have been configured without WEP/WPA security. It is penetrating walls, it is zooming across the street, and it is all readable plain text. Many hotels have sniffable wireless networks for their customers and visitors. Keep Reading…
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 10:19
Throw all traditional word processing applications out of the window if you intend to collaborate!
Too bold a statement! Who knows. One thing is for sure: the current generation of tools were not made to collaboratively work on documents. The current Office tools, even OpenOffice for the open source aficionados, date back to the period of the first ‘personal computers’, almost the era of the Dinosaurs. Keep Reading…
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 10:27
About a decade ago I tried to convince my (then) boss that Lotus Notes was a great product with great potential. Large companies used it for different purposes: mail, workflow applications, team sites. You name it, it could be done on with Lotus Notes/Domino. Lots of companies asked us to do Notes projects then. Unfortunately at the time, nobody in the company had any experience with Lotus Notes development.
I placed a bet with my boss that I could get certified in Lotus Notes Administration and Development. Three months later, lots of late night studying and some ‘dummy’ development projects, I took the difficult certification tests and became a qualified Lotus Notes Admin/Developer for Release 4 (and later 5). Keep Reading…
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 10:24
All of us are bothered with spam getting into your mailbox. A couple of months ago I decided not to delete emails marked as spam and see how many spam messages I received per month. Four weeks later I ended up with more than 12,000 emails. (Strange that so many people are apparently interested in some of my bodily functions) Multiply that with a number of email users in your domain and it becomes clear that spam can simply choke your run-of-the-mill mail server.
So, time for action.
Google Apps Premier Edition includes Postini’s security and archiving functions. These services alone make up a good reason to upgrade from the free Standard Edition to the paying Premier Edition. But more on Postini, owned by Google, in a later post.
After some configuration –including changing the MX records or pointers where mails should be delivered– the system was all set to go. Emails addressed at my domain are now received by Postini, verified and then delivered to Google Mail.
Now the fun part: the number of emails per month marked as spam visible in Google Mail, was reduced from more than 12,000 to… 5!
Additionally , I regularly receive an overview of what was blocked by the service. To my amazement over that same period Postini also blocked 45 messages that it marked as being potential virus-infected emails. Not that these would be a gigantic threat to me, being a Mac-user, but better be safe than sorry.
So if you would like to know how you can get rid of spam in your organization, get in touch with us.
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 10:29
A couple of years ago we worked in Romania. Fun times…
