created on Thu, 2008-01-17 16:30

Ah yeah Netscape! What a nostalgia trip it is to discover that Netscape was discontinued on December 28, 2007 and support will end in February.

My first web browser was HotJava on my colleague's Sun OS workstation (Yes kids, Sun was cool back then! Hope they become cool again! Tim Bray and Jonathan Schwartz are certainly trying!) back in the 90s at Nortel New Southgate, London, England where I was working at the time.

I wasn't one of the cool kids with a Sun OS workstation, so I was happy when Netscape launched and there was a version for my corporate boring HP Unix workstation.

created on Fri, 2007-08-17 06:20

email2 is the tool for you if you are looking for a hosted, secure email solution that helps you to observe regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, etc. In addition, email2 also offers secure attachment management, private video messaging, and guaranteeable message tracking. And don't worry, it's fully compatible with regular email!

email2's public website, which is hosted on a Bryght Virtual Private Server on our Bryght Hosting Platform is a beautiful example of how Drupal can be a great system for more traditional static sites as well as community driven social sites.

Derek Houg, Patent & Technical Writer, of email2 says:

"The best thing about our site is the fact that our content can be quickly and easily entered into a unified theme. Users with absolutely no HTML and CSS experience can create necessary content that is compatible with our graphic layout. Using the Drupal themes feature, we were able to create a fantastic looking website and maintain it with minimal work.

created on Fri, 2006-07-21 10:37 Mark Wyner, Mark Wyner Design, gave a great and thorough talk on all the aspects to consider in building a better HTML email for you and your company.

• Your desktop is not a launch pad.
• Comic Sans is the devil.
• How do you deploy? Use an email-administration application. Create your own or use one of the many on the market. Mark uses Campaign Monitor and MailBuild.
• Techniques and best practices: The web-standards battle - standards-focused web designers use antiquated markup for design integrity
• Some benefits of web standards:
  1. Increased use of handheld/mobile devices, disparate support for presentation layer
  2. Accessibility
  3. Spam filters assess content-to-code ratios
• Embed your style sheets
• An email is a single document
• Account for all scenarios: build for progressive enhancement and create simple experience for lowest common denominator
• Image usage: display contextual images inline (products, people, etc) and display template images as CSS backgrounds
• Email clients offer image blocking
• Preserve format upon forwarding: forwarding-methods vary - as attachment, source code revealed, converted to plain text, converted to proprietary HTML
Tags:
• conference
• email
• html
• markwyner
• portland
• raincity
• raincitystudios
• Technology
• webvisions
• webvisions2006

created on Tue, 2006-03-28 08:51

This is a follow up to my post on Gmail for domains. We got accepted into the beta program a couple of weeks back, and now that everyone is back from conferences etc. we flipped the switch and started using Google's hosted Gmail solution.

So far, it's working great. There are a few little bugs in some of the admin tools (click twice instead of once to create a temporary password), but after switching MX records, we're up and running with a Bryght-branded login for Gmail. You can create user accounts (username@domain.com), nicknames (othername points to username@domain.com), and email lists (listname@domain.com delivers to user1@domain.com, user2@domain.com, etc.). Email lists can't include non domain addresses, so you'll still need Google Groups or similar if you want "real" mailing list functionality.

Best feature? Set a few more DNS records, and every single email account can also be a Jabber account, run through Google's talk.google.com server. Yes! Jabber world domination continues... (so add boris AT bryght.com to your Jabber buddy list)

That's about it, there isn't much more to tell. It's free for now (and looks to be free up until around a 1000 users, judging from the "Account Plan" link on the management dashboard), works well for basic email and chat account services, and has all the regular features of GMail.

But Google is not the only provider of hosted email (although the first to offer hosted chat using your own domain, I believe...). This Ars Technica article points out:

But lest I come off as a fawning Googlite, let's not pretend that Google is the first to do this. Yahoo already offers group rates for a co-brand of its email service, and MSN is currently beta testing its own "Windows Live Custom Domains" service, which aims to provide similar functionality. Feature sets, pricing, and options are all in flux right now. Competition is good, but Google is the last of the "big three" to head down this route.

Some more thoughts on what I want out of email after the jump. And yes, let's just assume Google Calendar is a given...I'm talking about actually dealing with/managing email in a more intelligent way across a company.

created on Tue, 2006-03-28 08:51

This is a follow up to my post on Gmail for domains. We got accepted into the beta program a couple of weeks back, and now that everyone is back from conferences etc. we flipped the switch and started using Google's hosted Gmail solution.

So far, it's working great. There are a few little bugs in some of the admin tools (click twice instead of once to create a temporary password), but after switching MX records, we're up and running with a Bryght-branded login for Gmail. You can create user accounts (username@domain.com), nicknames (othername points to username@domain.com), and email lists (listname@domain.com delivers to user1@domain.com, user2@domain.com, etc.). Email lists can't include non domain addresses, so you'll still need Google Groups or similar if you want "real" mailing list functionality.

Best feature? Set a few more DNS records, and every single email account can also be a Jabber account, run through Google's talk.google.com server. Yes! Jabber world domination continues... (so add boris AT bryght.com to your Jabber buddy list)

That's about it, there isn't much more to tell. It's free for now (and looks to be free up until around a 1000 users, judging from the "Account Plan" link on the management dashboard), works well for basic email and chat account services, and has all the regular features of GMail.

But Google is not the only provider of hosted email (although the first to offer hosted chat using your own domain, I believe...). This Ars Technica article points out:

But lest I come off as a fawning Googlite, let's not pretend that Google is the first to do this. Yahoo already offers group rates for a co-brand of its email service, and MSN is currently beta testing its own "Windows Live Custom Domains" service, which aims to provide similar functionality. Feature sets, pricing, and options are all in flux right now. Competition is good, but Google is the last of the "big three" to head down this route.

Some more thoughts on what I want out of email after the jump. And yes, let's just assume Google Calendar is a given...I'm talking about actually dealing with/managing email in a more intelligent way across a company.