HOWTO: View RSS Feeds in Gmail

Have you ever had this experience?  You want to keep up on various RSS feeds that are of interest, such as the Google App Engine Status Alerts feed.  At the same time, you don't want to have to load a separate page just to get a quick read of the feed.  I'll show you how to do this directly from your Google Mail / Gmail using free tools and Zero programming!

13 Google Groups Tips for 2013: Part 3 of 3

Google Groups is a powerful, flexible tool that can be used to amplify your organization's ability to communicate both internally and externally.

This is Part 3 of 3 covering 13 tips for getting the most out of Google Groups.

Part 1 covered Google Groups basics, Google Groups membership concepts, using group roles and permissions, archiving messages that are sent to the group, and moderating messages.

Part 2 covered organizing messages using topics, categories, category groups, and tags; customizing email options; and using the Google Apps Directory Sync (GADS) tool to create Google Groups, synchronizing their membership with an organization's local directory system, and watching a group's bouncing email addresses.

13 Google Groups Tips for 2013: Part 2 of 3

Google Groups is a powerful, flexible tool that can be used to amplify your organization's ability to communicate both internally and externally.  This is Part 2 of 3 covering 13 tips for getting the most out of Google Groups.

Part 1 covered Google Groups basics, Google Groups membership concepts, using group roles and permissions, archiving messages that are sent to the group, and moderating messages sent to a group.

13 Google Groups Tips for 2013: Part 1 of 3

Google Groups is a powerful, flexible tool that your organization can use for a variety of interesting purposes.  Google Groups is often under-utilized because there are many different ways to use this tool.  Unless you take a step back to learn about Google Groups, you might miss out on functionality that can save you time, effort, and ultimately money.

This series of articles will cover 13 tips for getting the most out of Google Groups so you can start off 2013 by maximizing it's potential.

Chrome Remote Desktop

Have you ever needed to access your own computer remotely?  I'm talking about actually using your computer from another computer, as if you were sitting at the keyboard. Well, you can!  Google provides a free extension to the Google Chrome web browser called Chrome Remote Desktop that allows you to use your computer from just about anywhere.

Chrome Remote Desktop is a nifty tool with positive implications on the user level as well as the organizational level.  That is, users can get more done and are able to use computing and information resources with improved flexibility.  Organizations can benefit by concentrating their efforts and their resources more efficiently than was ever possible before.  This can lead to significant cost savings.

Using PHP with MySQL on Google App Engine and Google Cloud SQL with file and database support

There was a post on the Caucho blog on the 12th of December about using their open source Quercus project to run PHP code on Google App Engine (GAE):

http://blog.caucho.com/2012/12/06/quercus-on-google-app-engine-20/#more-1100

This post lists several new tools that Quercus now provides, including:

• reading from and writing to files using Google's files-like API to store data on Google Cloud Storage using native file operations (i.e. the application doesn't know that what it's writing to "disk" isn't a disk at all)
• run SQL code on Google Cloud SQL with pdo_ and mysql_ functions mapped to Google Cloud SQL functions

These are very exciting new tools available to the PHP community to run PHP applications on Google App Engine with database support provided by Google Cloud SQL.  

Finally, as a proof of concept, the article demonstrates how to run the latest version of Wordpress on Google App Engine.

Quercus is provided by Caucho as Free / Open-Source Software solution; the package and examples can be downloaded from: https://github.com/diablonhn/quercus_on_gae_2

-- Wes Dean, a Google Apps Certified Deployment Specialist and a Google Apps Trusted Tester, is Principal of KDA Web Technologies, a Google Apps Authorized Reseller. To learn how Wes and KDA Web Technologies can help you, go to http://www.kdaweb.com/.

Structured Network Cabling Primer (Part 3 of 3)

Structured Network Cabling Primer

Part 3 of 3

As mentioned earlier in this series, when working with cloud-based applications, such as Google products, its helpful to know networking basics to communicate effectively with technicians who provide the structure that make cloud use possible. After exploring the office environment in Part 1, Part 2 covered and the wiring closet environment, including patch cables, horizontal runs, vertical risers, and the communications equipment that allow devices on the same network segment to communicate with each-other. This edition, the last in the series, focused on the equipment room and how it all ties together.

The equipment room, or server room, is like a wiring closet, but bigger and usually more complicated.