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Google Applications Guide




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Getting Started with Gmail

Contacts List

Searching Tips

Advanced Signature Tool

Google Calendars


Landscape Ontario’s Guide to Google Applications

Check Out Google’s Gmail Tutorial

Google has recently opened up their web-based applications suite for use by anyone. In the interest of efficiency, conservation and productivity, Landscape Ontario’s accounts have been moved into Google’s hosted solution. This page exists to help staff quickly find answers to questions about migration to Google’s services. Most of those questions are already listed on Google’s help but this page serves to quickly guide you to the information you need. If there’s anything missing, email me and I’ll help you get the information that you need.

The problems

The motivation for switching to this service is not just because it’s there, there are various solutions that this package presents for LO staff which, once we’ve all adapted to it, will make life easier for all of us.

Reliability


  • Right now, your mail is on one server, which has a redundant hard disk. With Gmail (Google’s mail application) your email is stored in Google’s massive redundant server cluster. If they lose a server to hardware failure, you won’t lose any of your data. Sometimes it may cause a brief interruption in service until your computer connects to a different server at Google, but they are constantly improving their network to minimize those interruptions.

  • If your computer crashes right this second, you have to rely on your backups to get back to your email, contacts and calendar information. With your Google account, you can log into your email from any computer in the world with Internet access, so no matter what happens, you can get back up and running in minutes with no configuration to do, just log in and there’s your email.


Mobility and conservation

  • Currently we leave our computers on at the office so that we can access email/contacts/calendars using remote desktop. Energy saving features of your computer reduce the amount of power consumed. With Google, your computer can be off, saving huge amount of electricity and maximizing the life of your computer. You can log into multiple computers simultaneously as well to access any Google services.

  • Those with blackberries or newer cell phones can actually access their email from their mobile devices. You can either install the mobile application (http://m.google.com/a) or just access the web interface at http://gmail.com


Getting Started

You will receive your user name and password via email shortly. Log in and create your account as soon as possible at gmail.landscapeontario.com You will be prompted to agree to the user agreements, create your new password (feel free to use the same one as you do with epic to keep it simple) and then continue to your account.

In the interest of training, your new account is active, but your mail will be received at landscapeontario.ca for the time being. That way you can have a chance to learn how Gmail works by emailing yourself back and forth.


  1. From Outlook, send a message to yourname@landscapeontario.ca and you will receive your new conversation in Gmail. Gmail organizes mail in conversations instead of individual messages. Most people find this a little confusing at first but once you get use to it, you’re going to wonder how you ever lived without it.

  2. When you get your message, press reply at the top or the bottom of that message and then click “Add Cc” to add the Cc field. In the Cc field, type in ian@landscapeontario.ca and perhaps add something to the body of the message, then press Send.

  3. When I reply, you’ll see my message show up in that conversation and my name will be a different colour. This is a quick and easy way to navigate responses from different people in your conversations.

Now that you’ve got some mail coming and going, you may want to personalize your account a little more. At the top-right of the Gmail interface you’ll see a “Settings” link. From there, you can set up everything about your account.


  • General – From this tab, you can set up your signature and turn on and off your vacation auto-responder. (The one in epic will no longer function once the migration is complete.) * Note: at this time your signature cannot have any “rich” text, like fonts or graphics.

  • Accounts – If you prefer to set up firstname@landscapeontario.com instead of yourusername@landscapeontario.com this is where you do it. Click “Add another email address” and then put in the information in the form that pops up, click Next Step and then verify the email address. You can close that pop-up window at that time, and you’ll get an email with a link to confirm that address. You can then return to this settings tab and change that new email address to be the default to send from. Another useful feature on that page is to make your From address the one that they sent to, if it’s set up. So if I set up sports@landscapeontario.com and someone emails that address, when I click reply, it will automatically select that address instead of my default one.

  • Labels – Labels are like separate folders for mail. I use them for mail that I want to see, but I don’t want to see in my inbox.

  • Filters – Filters can be used for a variety of functions. You can use them to make your mailing list subscriptions automatically go into a folder instead of your inbox, or you can make it so that all new mail from someone is forwarded to another email account or whatever you need to do with mail. A good example is Wendy’s “communication” address. It gets tons of bounced mail replies, Wendy could easily create a filter to make them skip the inbox and go into a “bounced” folder and forward a copy to Angela who can do the same thing.

    • Those are the important ones, the other tabs are a little more advanced and can be covered one-on-one for those who are interested.

Now that you’re all set up with your Gmail account, you’ll find a few key programs will help you with your day-to-day access.

Mozilla Firefox is a web browser like Internet Explorer. Firefox is an open source program written by Mozilla and is available free for anyone online. You’ll find it’s tabbed browsing and extensions make it a valuable tool. Instead of having to minimize and switch windows, you’ll be able to quickly click on another tab or a link from the bookmarks toolbar to keep the message you’re working on open while you navigate to your inbox or another web site in the next one.

Google Talk is the instant messenger which accompanies your Gmail account. It will notify you when you’ve got a new message and you can use the option from the settings menu to make it so that when you click on an email link from any other program, it will open a new Gmail message for you. Also, with a microphone and speakers or a headset, you can use Google Talk to talk to anyone around the world over the internet.

If you’d like to move some of your mail from Outlook to your new Gmail Account, it is possible but…

It’s a tedious task which I will have to set up for you and you can only transfer one folder at a time.
It is for this reason that we’ll keep everyone’s Outlook intact on their computers in case they need to reference old information (you can even send your reply from Outlook and then your incoming mail will come to you in Gmail). I have been using Gmail for over a year now and I still go back to my Outlook to reference old data every once in a while. The easiest way to get established, if you can manage it, is to just forward yourself important messages that you need to work on. This will also help you start with a clean slate.

Where do I find an all staff list?

Once your Google Account is created, you can download this file (right click, save target as) and then in your Gmail account, click Contacts on the left then Import on the right. A window will pop up and prompt you to browse for that file, then you just have to click Import Contacts and everyone on staff will be in your contact list. To import your contacts from Outlook you can follow this guide from the Gmail Help. After you import any contacts you’ll have to log out of Gmail an log back in so that when you start typing people’s addresses in the To/Cc/Bcc fields they will show up from your contact list automatically. As soon as you email someone new with Gmail their name and email address will automatically be added to your contact list.

Tips for sorting and searching mail

All mail in your Gmail is searchable, that’s where the power of Google comes to your mailbox. I used to be a sorter, every new message I received, I would throw into a folder with that person’s name. When I got into Gmail to start, I started to continue that trend by using Gmail’s labels to label every message that came in. It became a tedious task, and because of the nature of Gmail, it was a pointless one. Now when I’m done with a message I just check it off and press the Archive button. This keeps the message in my All Mail list, but removes it from my inbox. If I need/want to get it back later on I just need to search for it. I can type “Tony” into the search box to see messages from, to or about anyone named Tony. I can search for “to:Tony” to find all messages that were to Tony, or “subject:Tony” to find all messages with the word Tony in the subject. You can also combine search fields to narrow down what you’re looking for. For example “from:Tony to:allstaff” would show me all messages which were from Tony to Allstaff, or if I wanted all messages from tony except those to allstaff, I could search for “from:Tony -to:allstaff”. The minus would remove those that match that next word from the list of matches. Read this for a complete list of Gmail search operators

Advanced Signature Tool

Paul came to me with a thought, when Gmail puts in your signature, it puts it at the end of the message, even if you’re replying or forwarding. As far as I knew, it wasn’t possible to make it appear at the top of the message. I found a plug-in for Firefox called Greasemonkey which allows programmers to amend web sites, so someone wrote a script to re-write Gmail so that when you send an email out, it moves your signature from the bottom of the message to the top. You can also omit the — that Gmail automatically inserts. To set this up, you have to be using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer as your web browser. So if you’re not already, download Firefox from www.getfirefox.com. Once that’s installed, come back to this page and click here to go to the Greasemonkey plug-in install page and click the install button. Once that‘s installed, click on this link and click on Install this script in the top right of the screen. Now that all that hard work is done, it’s time for your reward of getting what you want… Go to your LO Gmail account, sign in and from the Settings page, from there you’ll see under the signature box there’s new options which Greasemonkey has put there for you. You can now fiddle with your signature. I’ll work on getting some HTML signatures set up for those who are interested and that way you can send mail with links to LO (instead of just addresses) and Logos!

Big Fat NOTE: If you set up your vacation auto-responder, send mail from someone else’s computer, or from the Blackberry application the Greasemonkey plug-in is not available and your signature will be appended with all of the code instead of showing your normal signature.

Copy all of this text (click and press Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C), paste it into your signature box with HTML enabled:

To get this text:

Your Name

Your title

Landscape Ontario

7856 Fifth Line South, RR4, Milton ON, L9T 2X8

1.800.265.5656 or 905.875.1805 ext. 3XX

905.875.3942 (fax)

youremail@landscapeontario.com

www.landscapeontario.com

There are many more things that should be included in this section of this page, but I don’t know what they are until people ask me, so send your questions when you come up with them.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is a fantastic web-based calendar program. It lets you maintain multiple calendars and share them with whomever you wish. Other people can maintain those calendars too if you give them that permission. You also have the ability to let people see your free/busy information only. That will allow you to see what times people have available without giving them access to all of your calendar.

Start by importing your calendar from Outlook. Follow this guide from Google.

Google Talk

Now that you’ve got your Gmail account all set up, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to leave your email closed and then have a little indication on-screen when you get a new message? Surprise, surprise, they’ve already got it covered.

Download Google Talk and install it. Once installed you put in your username@landscapeontario.com and your Gmail password and it will run when you start up your computer.

Each time you receive a new message a small window will pop-up with the title, sender and a little clip of the message. You can customize all of the options through the settings link in the top right corner of Google Talk.

Google Talk also allows you to access the chat features which you may have already seen in Gmail. At the top of the window you’ll see a search box and then you can type in someone else’s email address and invite them to chat with you. “Chat” as Google calls it, is also referred to as instant messaging. It’s ideal for when people are online and you need to ask a quick question that doesn’t require an email. If you want to chat with someone outside of the office, they’ll have to have a Gmail account. You can instruct people to go to www.gmail.com to set up their own if they don’t already.

To hide Google Talk you just click the X in the top right corner of the screen and then the program and it will hide in your system tray. If you want to close it completely, right click on it in your system tray and click exit.

More to come soon…

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