Childrens Ministry Online

Multiple inboxes with gmail

Posted on10. Mar, 2010 by Kenny.

I think most of you know by now that I’m a big google fanboy, maybe as much as Sam Luce is an Apple fanboy.

So I’ve been using multiple inboxes for gmail for the past 6-8 months and I’ve not really thought a lot of it. Corey, my children’s pastor from our South Campus came to me today and said, “you gotta show me how you split your inbox up that way.” Again, I kind forgot that I was using multiple inboxes, so I had to remember how I did it. I found this post from lifehacker and it reminded me how I did it to begin with and gave me some ideas for some of the inbox panes.

Don’t know what I’m talking about? Basically, multiple inboxes is a google labs feature that you can “turn on” for your gmail account. Rather than just have your inbox take up all your screen real estate, you can divide your screen into multiple panes giving the appearance that you have multiple inboxes. Each pane shows specific email. You’re regular inbox will always be visible, but you might have a pane with just unread email, a pane for starred email, a pane for email with a specific label and all other kinds of stuff. Currently I have starred, unread, mail with a “gateway” label and any mail containing an attachment in my panes. If you use your gmail as a place where email from multiple accounts come, this might be a setup you really like. Create a filter that any email coming from “x” account gets label “x” and set up one of your panes to display emails with label “x.” Even though all your email will show up in your inbox, you can see all your email from “x” account in one little place. Cool, huh?

So, here’s how you create multiple inboxes.

Log into your gmail and click on “setting” at the top right.

Click on “Labs.” Scroll down until you see “multiple inoxes.” Click on “enable.” While you’re there, you can turn on other lab features that let you add all kinds of great functionality to your gmail page.

After you’ve enabled multiple inboxes, “multiple inboxes” will show up as a tab under your settings. Click on it.

Once in this setting tab, you can create up to 5 panes. Look at what I did as an example or the examples on lifehacker. Play around with the order and configuration until your happy.

Disclaimer: Multiple inboxes really only works if you have gmail open at full screen. If you don’t it looks all scrunched and crappy.

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The day I quit Entourage

Posted on13. Oct, 2009 by Kenny.

Yesterday I stopped using Entourage. Done. For good.

I switched to a Mac over a year ago. There was a lot of things to get used to. Some of them good, some of them bad. Email was one of the bad.

I’ve been an Outlook user for years and for the most part, it was a great product. It did most things I needed pretty well. The problem has always been syncing. Getting my calendar to sync with my wife’s calendar is MONUMENTAL. Almost two years ago, Google created a program that would sync my outlook calendar with my google calendar. It was an answer to prayer and all was happy in the Conley household. Then I switched to a Mac.

Entourage is just stupid. It’s a watered down version of Outlook that doesn’t have all the functionality. There are plenty of things that I hate about Entourage, but the one that hurt the most is that it won’t sync with my Google calendar. There are several other 3rd party apps that do (or claim to do this). Most of them involve you syncing your Entourage with your iCal account and then syncing your iCal with Google Calendar. I’ve been unsuccessful at doing this. The last time I attempted this, it broke Entourage completely.

So, I finally said “no more.” I emailed the IT department and asked them to forward my email to my Gmail account. I love Gmail. Now I can have the same experience with my work mail that I do with my personal mail. Best of all, my personal calendar and work calendar are now one. Now my wife can see what I’m up to at any time or add things to my calendar. No more calendar meetings. The only downside is that most of my co-workers are on Outlook/Entourage, so I can’t really see their availability unless I open up Entourage.

Gateway is talking about moving to Google Apps. I hope we do. If that happens, then calendar sharing and seeing co-worker availability will be so easy! So, if you hate your email, you might want to consider switching to Gmail too.

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Is your ministry in beta?

Posted on26. May, 2009 by Kenny.

I came across this interesting article last week. I’m a big fan of Google. I like the way they think. Interestingly, Sara and I had long discussion (we’ve agreed to disagree) on the whether Google is really an evil company or not in how they run their AdSense program. That’s another post.

So, Chrome came out of beta but Gmail remains beta-licious for who knows how long.

So, why is Chrome out of beta and Gmail not? Chrome is a downloadable application and Google wants market share. So far Chrome has a respectable user base that has mainly come as a result of word-of-mouth and advertising. However, Google want’s more users. Google wants Chrome to come pre-installed on machines along with internet explorer or firefox. In order to get this, they had to get out of beta. Enterprise markets need to trust that Chrome is going to work and with “beta” attached to the name, they’re not going to feel comfortable. This is why Chrome has dropped the beta tag.

So then, why is Gmail still beta? This video clearly explains the difference:

Gmail is server-side software that is still being developed. Improvements are added on a regular basis. The “beta” communicates to us that they’re not done creating.

So whether you believe this or not, Google has two standards of beta. On one side they dropped beta to communicate that their software (Chrome in this case) is dependable and secure. On the other side they’re keeping beta to communicate that they’re still being creative. If you like what you’ve seen so far, hang on and see what we cook up next.

So, let’s shift to our ministry.

What are we doing that that needs to come out of beta? Is it our policies and procedures? Is it the way we train volunteers? Is it our expectaitons we place on our volunteers? Maybe it’s the way we approach parents? Are these things communicating dependability, security and stability? If not, we probably need to see what needs to be done to pull them out of beta. Strengthen them, give them direction and make them what they need to be and proudly stand behind them. That’s what it means to drop the beta.

What are we dong that needs to be in beta? Maybe it’s a program that crusty, old and unrelatable. Is what we’re doing flexible? Is it evolving into something better? Does it have a framework to support change? If not, we probably need to see what needs to be done to pull it into beta. We need to create the culture among our volunteers and parents where they don’t expect things to always be the same becasue we’re willing to do whatever it takes to reach a generation that is constantly changing. That’s what it means to add the beta.

What do you think?

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Google Video Chat

Posted on18. Dec, 2008 by Kenny.

I remember visiting the Sharper Image store when I was a kid and playing around the video phone. I don’t know if it really was an actual product or just a gimmick. Well, the video phone never really caught on like it was envisioned in the 80’s, but video conferencing is alive and well. I first started dabbling in this five years ago using an external web cam and yahoo chat. In recent time I’ve used skype to video chat with my missionary friend in Burkina Faso, West Africa. Now that I have a Mac, I absolutely love iChat for the 2 or 3 people I use it with(except it’s only available for Mac users… come on Steve Jobs. I’m not drinking your cool aid and your closed and proprietary products don’t impress me, no matter how “great” they are. If Apple was bigger, they would rival Microsoft in evilness – rant done). Then a few weeks ago google launched Google chat. As long as you have a webcam, you can chat via video through gmail. I pretty much always have gmail open on my machine, so it is actually my preferred method of communication with Sara while at work. I get to look at her pretty face while I talk to her. I’ve had a few video chats with Matt McKee as well.

So, if you haven’t tried it yet, you really should.

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Creating a better Outlook experience

Posted on10. Jul, 2008 by Kenny.

A good friend passed this on to me last week. I finally installed it on my computer last night (it’s free). Now I wish I had done this earlier.

When I was between jobs, I stopped using Outlook. The only reason I used Outlook was because at church we usually had an exchange server and we could take advantage of email, calendar sharing, tasks and all the other things that come with Outlook. However, since I wasn’t a part of all of that, I just used my gmail account. As soon as I came on staff at Gateway, I started using Outlook again. I immediately missed using gmail as my primary email. The search function of gmail is so amazing and it absolutely puts Outlook to shame. If I’m looking for a particular email to a certain person, I could waste quite a bit of time scanning emails looking for the email in question. Then there was Xobni. Xobni brings Gmail type tools (and a lot more) to the Outlook environment.

Ultimately, it indexes your email and allows you to search email by the word (or even part of a word). Even if you don’t have any contacts loaded (I don’t yet) it will create contacts within Xobni. It will tell you how many times you’ve emailed them, how many times they’ve emailed you. I don’t know why it would matter, but it even charts when during the day you communicate the most. It will put your conversations in threads as well. Okay, here is the really cools stuff. It will search the context of your emails and look for phone numbers and if it finds a number, it will make it the contact’s phone. If in any of your emails you or that person copied someone, it puts them in that contact’s network all right there at your fingertips. Last of all, it creates a little bin at the very bottom of every attachment you and that contact have ever sent each other. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen something this cool. So, check out the video below and think about installing it. It’s super easy and very free!

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