It’s done. I’ve decided. I’m going to climb the fence and see how green the grass really is on the other side. I’m ditching my iPhone, the iCloud, the whole Apple eco-sphere and moving to Android.

I’ve long had a love hate relationship with my iPhone. I’m addicted to it, it’s constantly in my hand, I’m always available, but how much of that is the iPhone and how much of that is just the need to keep in touch?

Dazzled by the shiny big-screen-loveliness of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S3 I’ve decided to place an order and move my life over to Google. We’re already using Google Apps for Business here at G2 Support, and as a passionate Google Reseller we’re not only advocates of the platform but lovers of the service.

My biggest concern is how to replace FaceTime. I use it constantly to keep in touch with my daughter and it really does just work. It’s been amazing to be able to call from my iPhone to her iPod and be able to see each other while we walk around the house. Will the alternative be as good?

Don’t know how you release email from your Postini anti-spam? Here’s how.

1) Login to your Postini service. This can be done by going to https://login.postini.com or by clicking the Message Centre link in your daily Quarantine Summary email. You will have received your logon details in your initial Postini Welcome email.

2) You will be presented with your Welcome Centre portal. Here you can see all the email that has been Quarantined.

3) You can then click the Deliver button next to each email that you want to allow through. If you want to deliver a number of emails at once then click the tick box next to each line and click the Deliver Selected link in the top right corner.

4) You will then be asked whether you want to allow these senders through each time you receive email from them. It’s good practise to do this as it improves the quality of the spam results and reduces future admin work. Tick the box next to each email address entry that you want to approve. Postini will then not scan email from those senders in the future. Click the Approve Selected Senders button to add those senders to your Approved list.

5) The emails you have selected will be queued for re-delivery to you by Postini. These may come through immediately or up to 30 minutes later depending on the number and size of the emails.

If you’re having problems connecting via your Watchguard SSL VPN client then you’ll need to get the debug logs, and here’s how.

1) Right click the W icon in the icon tray in Windows. Click the Properties option.

2) Set the Logging setting to Debug and click on OK.

3)  Try connecting again. If it errors view the logs by right clicking the  W icon again and choosing View Log.

4) You’ll see the log information. Highlight the text shown and press CTRL+C to copy the data. You can now paste it in to an email and send it to your IT support company.

Google today announced details of their new Google Apps Vault service which should be of interest to a great many people.

Currently Google offer enterprise email discovery solutions through it’s Postini and Google Message Discovery services. These are great tools but integration with Google Apps just isn’t there unless you use a third party (such as Backupify). With Google Apps Vault you can archive all of your Google data at the company level, including Chat and email – Google Docs support will be added over the next few months – and you can be sure it’s there as it now features an indefinite retention period.

The biggest issue faced with companies when investigation misconduct within the workplace is often finding information to show what happened, who did what, and who knew. With Google Apps Vault you’ll be able to search your Google Apps data company wide as well as be able to put a Legal Hold in place to retain information at the point of disclosure.

All this for just £5 per user per month. It’s great value and certainly something we’ll be posting more about over the next months.

More information and screenshots will be coming soon.

Even in these hardened times people need to do what they can to help others. It’s with this in mind, and a serious love of bikes, that our very own Paul Ware has decided to try to raise £1000 for charity by taking part in the London to Brighton cycle ride.

The London to Brighton cycle ride is organised each year by the British Heart Foundation to help raise money for their great work.

Give generously and help him reach his target (and sweat….alot).

Google has a great anti-spam service and really most users now take not-having-any-spam as the norm. However there are times that real email is accidentally marked as spam and you’ve probably asked yourself “Why?”. Emails from your mum about Sunday Lunch might be annoying…but spam? Not really.

From today Google will show you why an email was marked as spam. Unfortunately “under cooked chicken” isn’t one of the possibilities.

Find out more over at the original Google Blog post here

The first question I would most probably hear  is “ whats the point of a group?”. This is your equivalent to your distribution group in Exchange whereby email sent to one address is received by many people. Examples of this would be accounts@ or sales@.

In this blog we will see how to setup a basic distribution group in Google Apps for Business in 10 easy steps.

1) Sign into your Google mail as a Super Administrator or someone with privileges to create groups.

2) Once signed in, you will notice a cog symbol on the top right of your screen. Click on it and choose Manage this Domain.

3) Click on Groups on the top bar of your google page. This page will allow you to see and create any groups.

4) Just below the blue menu bar, you will see  Create a new group. Click on it.

5) You will now get the following screen. Fill in your group name, email address for that group and a description. Your access level will usually be set to team and click on the Create new group button.

6) If the email you entered already exists, you will get the following error. If this happens then change the email address assigned to your new group and click Create new group again.

7) You should now be taken to the Members screen where you can add users to your group. Enter the full email address of the people you want to put in the group in the  new members box and click Add.

8) Once your Group has been created you will need to allow external users, people not in your company, to send emails to this group. By default new groups are set up in such a way that only the people shown on the Members screen can send or receive emails to or from that group. You can do this by going in to the Access settings screen and choosing “Anyone can post”.

9) Once you have all radio buttons selected as above, click Save changes.

10) That is it.

Many users are facing have to transition to Googles new integrated Google Apps services. This brings access to all – or most – of the Google services for your Google Apps accounts. Your Google Apps administrator can then enable or disable features for users within the organisation.

Since we transitioned our accounts we’ve had problems logging in to several Google compatible apps such as the excellent Reeder for the iPhone or the Google Picasa uploader for iPhoto. Both of these worked fine before transition but not afterward.

We found that simply changing the passwords for the affected accounts let these services start working. Changing them back to the previous password caused the services to stop working again. Also deleting the account and recreating it also got things working, though this is less likely to be a realistic option.

Microsoft have just announced their purchase of Skype for a whopping $8 billion. Considering that Microsoft, until recently, haven’t had a great history of understanding the demands and swings of internet based services or cloud computing what is it that Microsoft plan for Skype?

There’s a few tempting possibilities for the Microsoft Skype service. Microsoft, as we all know, rule the corporate network space. They have great experience at integration. Their products are highly integrated and if you work the MS way then one password can get you on to your machine, access your data, show your presence to colleagues…you get the idea. They already have a desktop IM and VoIP tool in the form of Microsoft Live Messenger. The problem is that, while MSN is widely used, it’s not great at non-IM stuff, VoIP, video chat etc. It’s not that it’s not very capable it’s just that people don’t choose to use it. Skype is more widely considered the tool of choice and it’s also, rightly or wrongly, considered more secure than Messenger. So with the purchase of Skype MS now have access to a massive pool of interested VoIP users all using a marvellous package, all of which may be interested in other MS services.

The possibility that I’m really interested in however, as an avid Skype user, and working in a Skype based company, is a server based Skype management tool. Skype have a business management portal where you can assign credit, create users and disable users. However what I would love is the ability to log IM chats, record voice calls, block access to and from numbers and users. All the services that you expect from a current non-cloud based VoIP service.

Maybe….one day….perhaps.

A little while ago we sent an IBM server up to a client with the IMM card configured but we hadn’t made a note of the IP address. This meant we couldn’t easily access the interface and there wasn’t an onsite IT person to help with manually changing the IP address.

Here’s what you can do.

1) Firstly download the IBM Advanced Settings Utility from the IBM support site. This allows you to query a number of the settings of your IBM server.
2) Then unpack the ASU file to a folder. Open a command prompt and navigate to that folder.
3) Then type “asu64 show” (without the speech marks). This will show you a load of info starting with the IP address of your IMM card

You can also type “asu64 set imm.hostipaddress1 10.1.37.1″ to set the IP address of the IMM controller to the IP address specified