Making Gmail more like Outlook

This has been a goal of mine for quite some time.  I found a great website here, that helped me finish up the details (circles “people widget” and the white space left behind when you remove the widget).

http://downhometechnology.com/dht/?p=88

The best way is to:

1. Use Chrome
2. Enable the Labs feature of Chrome and use:
   1. Preview pane — this lets you view the message by selecting it
   2. Right-side chat — moves the chat to the right, freeing up your Labels column

The problem here is you still have the “People/Circles” thing next to your preview pane.  Here’s a quick overview.  Visit the link for the full details.

Remove the Person Widget (http://downhometechnology.com/dht/?p=88)

1. Go to the Gmail Gear settings menu
2. Click the disable radio button under People Widget
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and Click Save

Remove the Person Widget White Space by Overriding Some CSS (http://downhometechnology.com/dht/?p=88)

The extension is Personalized Web.

1. Install Personalized Web
2. Go to your Chrome Settings (3 stacked bars icon  next to address bar) and then Tools–>Extensions
3. Find Personalized Web and click options
4. Now that it is in edit mode, add a new rule
   1. Name = Gmail
   2. URL = https://mail.google.com
   3. Add the following to the CSS field    

.Bu:nth-child(2) { display:none; }    

.Bu:nth-child(3) { display:none; }

5. Click Save

6. Refresh Gmail

Google Apps–big change for the free version

I received an email today from Google regarding the free version of Google Apps:

Hello,As of May 10, any organization that signs up for a new account will be required to use the paid Google Apps for Business product in order to create more than 10 users. We honor our commitment to all existing customers and will allow you to add more than 10 users to your account for smudj.com at no additional charge, based on the limit in place when you joined us.

We recently announced upcoming changes to the maximum number of users for Google Apps. We want to let you know that, as a current customer, the changes will not affect you.

 Sincerely,

The Google Apps Team

 —-

If you’re thinking of getting a free version of Google Apps, looks like you need to get it done before May 10

Google Apps for Enterprise? – Boo!

I was really excited to move to Google Apps from our old email provider.  The pilot went great, the email storage, 25GB from 125MB was a huge boon for all our users.  This was my project, global email migration for the company.  I researched it, I championed it, fought for it, and finally got it approved.  Awesome!

Then Google decides it doesn’t like Chinese politics.  Great, only 80%+ of my company works in China.  Now, email doesn’t work reliably, webmail is completely blocked, etc.

Google’s advice: use VPN and connect to someplace outside of China.  All the problems are “local DNS issues”, and not Google’s.  Thanks! 

Google’s newest announcement: Moving from Gears to HTML5, so no more offline Docs!!! https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=176376

Their take: “we’re temporarily removing support for offline access in Google Docs through Gears. We know offline access is important for some of you, and we’re working hard to bring a new and improved offline access option to Google Docs.” 

They know its important, but they’re still dropping it, no dates for resuming service…wow!

Thanks Google!  And, thank God the userbase almost revolted at the hint of replacing Microsoft Office so we didn’t roll out Google Docs! 

The biggest question about Google Apps from users: “I want to be able to access my stuff, email, docs, etc. if I am not connected to the Internet,” i.e. airplane, hotel, client site, etc.

Google Apps Sync for Outlook gsync.dll error on x64 system

Anyway, my company just moved to Google Apps Premier for their email solution, sorry MS.  I’d been using the IMAP client for quite a while, but now that we’re Premier we get access to this new tool to sync your Outlook info with Google, which I then sync to my phone.

But, after importing 1GB of email I closed Outlook to come home, upon restarting Outlook, I got a gsync.dll error.

 

Fortunately, the solution is simple.  I copied the “C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Google Apps Sync” folder to “C:\Program Files\Google\Google Apps Sync” and added this path, “C:\Program Files\Google\Google Apps Sync,” to the system environment variables.  Note that the path for the (x86) folder was in the path, apparently Google Sync just doesn’t like 64 bits.

Thanks to the Google forums for the pieces of info I needed for this.