The Fubra Blog
Moving to Google Apps
This week we decided to take the plunge and finally migrate our internal e-mail system to Google Apps. I’ve been using Gmail personally since it launched, and I’ve always been impressed with its amazing spam fighting abilities and the general level of innovation throughout the system.
Up until now we’ve hosted our own e-mail servers in-house, and whilst that has given us a high degree of flexibility, it’s also been a pain to configure, maintain and keep spam free!
We’re particularly happy with gmail’s filters – previously we had to edit a maildrop filter file on our server in order to set up new rules. Not only does Google provide a simple interface to configure them, it also gives us the ability to choose whether they are marked as read when they come in. I know it’s possible to replicate this in a desktop mail client, but it’s much better to do it on the server – that way if you access your e-mails from multiple devices, they will be organised the same way on each one. This is particularly handy for us as we receive a fair amount of auto-generated notification e-mails from our various web sites which we don’t need to read as they come in but we do like to keep to refer back to.
So the key benefits to us are:
- Simplified and improved filter configuration
- Improved spam detection
- Excellent web mail platform
- Shared calendars
- Easier Administration for setting up new users and groups.
- Takes less time to maintain.
We also plan to become a Google App’s Authorised Reseller over the next few months, so that we can resell these services via hoston.it
Google PHP API Documentation
In case anyone didn’t know, there is actually now an open source library for PHP to interact with Google Adwords API. So, to save you reinventing the wheel check out this google php api.
The birth of a map revolution
Since Google launched their maps website at the beginning of this year, developers all over the world have been “hacking” together their own interpretation of the map system, plotting everything from chicago crime scenes to farnborough hotels on top of the google map interface. At the time there was a bit of mystery as to how google would react to hundreds of third parties using their system for free.
However, as of the end of June, Google announced a Google Maps API, which effectively means that they are officially endorsing the use of their maps by third parties.
Strategically, this is an utterly brilliant move by Google. By embracing the developer community, and making their map system both free and extremely easy to implement into other sites, they will soon be the most widely used map service on the web. They will go from not having a map service, to become the world’s leading online map service in less than a year. If that isn’t a smart move, I don’t know what is!
Google Adwords Professional
Wow I did it, I passed the test and now that makes me a Google Adwords Qualified Professional. Technically that means we know lots about adwords and how to use it effectively. It was actually quite good because I learned a few new things I didn’t already know like how adrank works (Max CPC * CTR * Relevance?).
Google page creator
Posted Sunday 26th February 2006 by paul
Google have launched a new service called Google page creator which allows you to build a website with their WYSIWYG editor. This was originally built by some Google engineers in their 20% time, but now it is a full Google service which they will support.
It’s currently in a BETA release, but I tested it out by creating a tutorial and it worked without any major problems. This took me a little over an hour, which is a lot quicker than if I had coded it by hand.
The tool will be most useful for any web users, who lack HTML skills, but want to create their own web page… and just like Google’s other services, it is free to the end user.
You get 100mb of storage which should be enough for around 1000 web-sized (640×480) photos. I expect to see Google tie this service in with picasa in the near future to allow seamless publishing of photo albums on to the web.
Tags: Google
Posted in Comment, Technology | No Comments »