Claritech Solutions Corp.

We recently migrated one of our clients to Google Apps^TM for Business from in-house Microsoft® Exchange.  Everything went pretty smoothly until it came to distribution lists for their email newsletters and announcements.

Here’s the issue:  While Google does a great job of processing distribution lists through Google Groups, these lists cannot be managed (or accessed) via Microsoft Outlook®. My requirements were simple:  give me a distribution list that I can pull up in an address book and edit it or expand it as needed. For example, if I have a list of my extended family, I’d like to be able to bring up that list in Outlook, expand it, and then delete the family members I don’t want to send to, based on my own criteria.  Ideally, it would be nice to be able to maintain the list in Outlook as well, but that’s not a priority.

It’s a simple requirement, but it turns out it’s not as easy to accommodate as one would think.  I did finally arrive at success, however, with Sherweb, an independent Exchange provider based in Quebec, Canada.  In this post, I’ll go through the three platforms I tested and describe the problems with distribution lists that I encountered:

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I’ve been testing Google Apps Premier Edition for the last month and this note details my likes and dislikes about the service offering.   Overall, while I think Google Apps holds promise, its smartphone support is lacking and might not be the best choice for all companies.

Likes

1. Multiple calendars – while at first I thought the lack of category capability was a bit of a pain, I’ve started to warm up to the concept of multiple calendars for tracking different types of appointments/events. The best part about the multiple calendars is that you can view them all on the same calendar view.  Different calendars are represented by different colours on the same view.
2. Interesting calendars (sports teams, holidays, etc) – as part of my experimentation with multiple calendars, I noticed that there are numerous public interesting calendars available that can be easily integrated into Google Calendars.  Once you’ve subscribed to them, adding them to your calendar view is as easy as clicking a checkbox.
3. Easy to setup – the Google Apps Setup Guide is detailed and easy to follow.
4. Integration of your domain name – you can set it up with webmail.yourdomain.com, docs.yourdomain.com, calendar.yourdomain.com, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

As you may already know, I am a huge believer in two-factor authentication.  You should keep in mind that two-factor authentication is not the absolute answer to Internet security problems.  It is critical that you keep your computer patched with current antivirus software and that you browse and use email with care.

I won’t get too much into the technology other than to say it involves using two of the three factors:  a) something you know,  b) something you have, and c) something you are. The majority of Internet two-factor authentication implementations use the first two factors, since determining something you are (such as a fingerprint or retinal image) involves considerably more logistics than is reasonable for a remote service.  The something you know portion of the system is trivial and widely accepted as username/password combinations.  Of course, password complexity is extremely important and will be the topic of a future post. That leaves us with something you have as the simplest and most common second factor.

It is worth noting that a second username/password combination can never be considered a second factor.  Theoretically, an infinite number of passwords is still part of something you know.  The primary reason that this is important is malware, particularly key-logging software.  This is the reason I am disappointed in PayPal’s two-factor implementation, as described in my previous post on the subject.  If you do implement two-factor authentication with PayPal, you should make sure you never bypass it or you risk exposing your account.

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