Online Webinar
Date/Time: Thursday November 17^th, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time. (1 Hour presentation) (click here to find out about the correct time in your local time zone)

Next week, I'll give an introduction on how businesses can benefit from SharePoint Online. Attend my session if your organization is using Office 365 or planning to use it, and if you want to find out more about the capabilities of SharePoint Online and how businesses can leverage them.

I will guide you through the various functionalities and benefits of SharePoint Online and will demonstrate them on the basis of a sample company team site. You will get to see

• how information can be captured and shared
• how Microsoft Office integrates with SharePoint Online
• how your employees can collaborate easily
• how you can create your own custom solutions that suit your needs

No previous knowledge of SharePoint is required for this session.

Visit the official information page for more details, as well as the registration page to sign up for this online webinar.

Hope to see you there!

One of the smaller "issues" with having my own domain on a normal (nothing fancy) web server (in fact, just some web space, it's not the whole server) is that the webmail interface I'm using (provided by the hoster) is extremely simple. Searching through mails is inconvenient, I can only write plaintext emails (no images, no formatting....), etc.  That's why I've been using Outlook to grab my emails via POP3.
Drawback of this approach is, of course, that once they were downloaded, I could only access them from my notebook (which was not always with me).
I was deliberating whether I should get the emails via IMAP instead, but I was still not happy with the web interface, which I need to use whenever I don't have my notebook with me (e.g. at work, sometimes when I travel, etc.).

In the end, I decided to try a different approach:
I pull the emails from my own domain to my Gmail account, which I access via IMAP from both Outlook (well, not yet right now, as my current notebook is unused as it freezes regularly; new laptop coming in the next few weeks) and the iPhone. Through the Gmail web interface, I also have a very convenient and feature-rich way of accessing them as well as sending out emails. In order to make this work, however, I had to make some smaller changes to the way the iPhone accesses the emails and sends them (incoming emails through Gmail, outgoing emails through my own domain). Once I have my new laptop and Outlook installed on it, I will configured it similar (e.g. as in here http://products.secureserver.net/email/email_outlook.htm)
Below are the steps how I set everything up.

This was my initial setup:

I pulled the emails from my own domain from my Outlook, whereas I also accessed them (as long as they were on the server) from my iPhone (which also got my Gmail emails, which were only a handful each month anyway; my domain email address is my major email).

This is the new setup with my Gmail account being the centre of the setup:

My Gmail account pulls the emails from my own domain email address. I access these then through Gmail via IMAP from both the iPhone and Outlook

Setting up Gmail

First of all, I configured Gmail to get the emails from my own down account. Under Settings and the Accounts and Import tab, I selected Add POP3 email account in the Check mail using POP3 section:

In the next screen, I added my account information from my domain account. Furthermore, I kept Leave a copy of the retrieved message on the server unchecked so that there are no duplicate emails anywhere.

After confirming, I selected my newly added account as the default account for sending emails, and chose Always reply from default address so that any emails will be sent directly through my own email account (note: the outgoing SMTP server has to be configured for this as well).

That's it already, Gmail now fetches all emails from my @modery.net account, and additionally any emails sent through Gmail (or rather, the Gmail web interface) will be sent from it as well.

Setting up iPhone
On my iPhone, I needed to set up a connection to Gmail, however not through the default Gmail option, but through Other. The reason for this is that this way it is possible to set a different outgoing server than the incoming server. This is necessary as you would otherwise send/reply from your Gmail email address, not your own domain email address!

Next step, I selected Add Mail Account

I entered the relevant information for my own domain email account, and confirmed. In the next screen, I kept IMAP

Now comes the crucial part: In this screen, I added my Gmail account information (imap.gmail.com as host name, and the correct user name and password) for the Incoming Mail Server. For the Outgoing Mail Server, I added the correct SMTP server for my own domain and the relevant login information.

For the next step, I kept Mail, but did not select Notes (didn't test if it works as I don't need it).

The last thing to do is to set up the corresponding Drafts/Sent/Deleted Mailboxes. For the just set up account, I went to the Advanced settings

And selected the three options above.

so that it looks like this:

That's it!
What happens now is that on my iPhone my email is fetched from the Gmail account (which, as outlined above, collects the email from my own domain account). If I send an email through this account (either create a new one or reply to an email), the server of my own domain account is used instead of the Gmail account, and thus any replies come from @modery.net

There's no need to mention the importance of a good network of contacts when it comes to looking for job opportunities. One of my student jobs I got through a friend (for his father's company), as he knew a bit about what I was doing as a part time job then, and they required someone to help them in that area.

Another job at SAP I got through my former flatmate. He did some Java programming there, and as he was going to Australia for an internship for a few months, they needed a replacement. I just came back from my internship in Singapore and was looking for a new student job, thus it was a perfect timing, and I took over from him.

These are cases where a network of people that I had close contact with in "real life" helped me. However, I also have two examples (my two most recent jobs) that show that it's also possible to find a job through one of the social networking websites. I'm sure that there are people who found a job through, for example, facebook or studiVZ, but the more important networks for these 'business-related' activities are LinkedIn and XING. LinkedIn has a lot more people on it, whereas the XING interface is a lot more usable in my opinion.

As for the job before my current one, I got it through XING. I contacted some people in Singapore through it, as I wanted to find an internship/thesis job here. One of the people I messaged replied saying that there might be an opportunity for me. As it turned out, I asked just at the right time, as they were looking for someone to help them with an IT project, and were considering hiring an intern for it.

As for my current job, which I started recently,  I was contacted by a headhunter through LinkedIn. As I always keep my profiles as much up-to-date as possible, the headhunter saw my SharePoint experience, and as it matched the requirements nearly 100%, he contacted me and asked if I was looking for a job (which I actually also was at that time).

For a few days now, I'm using Dropbox. It's a service that lets you store your files online, but with a really great integration into your operating system (they support Windows, Linux, and MacOS!), so that you can access them nearly everywhere very comfortably.

I'm using it so that I can now easily access some shared files on my netbook, my laptop, my office laptop, and even my iPhone without having multiple copies floating around! Before that, I always had to copy a document on my thumbdrive and carry it with me (and no, I did not always have the latest version with me, and yes, I sometimes had a few copies of a document....)

The 2GB version is free (which can be slightly expanded, please see the end of this posting for more info), if you need more space they offer a 50GB and a 100GB version for a monthly fee.

Their Features page gives a good overview of their service:

File Sync
Dropbox allows you to sync your files online and across your computers automatically.

File Sharing
Sharing files is simple and can be done with only a few clicks.

Online Backup
Dropbox backs up your files online without you having to think about it. 

Web Access
A copy of your files are stored on Dropbox's secure servers. This lets you access them from any computer or mobile device.

Security & Privacy
Dropbox takes the security and privacy of your files very seriously.

Mobile Device Access
Free Dropbox iPhone app

Also, if you edit or delete a file, a history of the change is kept and you can go back to a previous state within 30 days:

You can also see what was changed when in a nice overview tab (web version):

Files can be stored within folders (web version):

Here's the menu for a file as seen on the web version:

As I said, Dropbox can also be tightly integrated into your operating system. As I'm using Windows, I'll show some examples of the Dropbox Window 'client' here.

During installation, you can specify where Dropbox should store the documents. Yes, that means a local version of the documents inside your Dropbox will be available!
After the installation, you can find the Dropbox symbol in the taskbar:

A single click opens the settings for it:

Double-clicking opens the location that you specified during the installation (of course you can also simply navigate there through Explorer):

Additionally, for the folders within your Dropbox, you get the following menu for viewing deleted files and sharing the folder when you right-click:

This is how the contents of the folder look like. Not much difference to a regular folder in Windows, but the difference is that any changes made here (e.g. copy&pasting a document into here, or editing a doc) will be synchronised to the Dropbox server, and from there then to all other locations that you set up. For example, if I upload a document via the web interface from my office laptop, I can later on access that document on my laptop, netbook, AND iPhone.

The difference between the Windows version and the iPhone version is that the documents in the iPhone version do not get synchronised immediately, but only when you access them. But you have the option to set favourites, which are documents that get downloaded immediately and are available for 'offline access'

Startscreen for the iPhone application

Overview of all folders inside my Dropbox:

Inside the 'SharePoint' folder:

Viewing the document list:

My favourites (documents that are stored directly on the iPhone):

Here's how an Excel spreadsheet looks like on the iPhone (in landscape mode):

And this is the internal PDF viewer (portrait mode)

 

As I said before, the service is free for the 2GB version. Additionally, if you refer a friend or sign up through a referral, you get an additional 250MB:

So if you're interested in testing or even using it, here's my referral link: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTI4MzQ1ODQ5

PS: If you complete the first 5 steps on the Getting Started page, you'll get an additional 250MB:

Nine years ago, my English teacher (I "majored" in English & French in my last 2 years in school, which means that those 2 classes had a bigger weight than the others on my final grade) asked me to give a short summary of a TIME magazine article about Napster in class. I still remember how fascinated I was with this story at that time, as it provided a good view into the background story of the initial development of Napster.

In a way, Napster changed the world. Peer-to-Peer networks are more than common nowadays, filesharing is an issue more than ever before. That's why reading this article again made me see it in a different light, at that time I did not fully understand the impact that one teenager would have on the content industry.

The article from October 2000 can be found for free on the TIME magazine website under Meet the Napster.