You get an email or send one, then you forget all about it and find you have missed an opportunity or a deadline. A common enough problem.
Try using FollowUpThen to solve this problem. To remind the recipient, put a time interval in the CC field. For example, 2days@followupthen.com. To remind yourself, put the time interval in the BCC field. The time interval can be minutes, hours, days, weeks, or years.
As you progress in your quest for Web Worker status you need to accept the concept of Web-based collaboration tools.
The first such tool to adopt should be your Calendar. You may eventually have several, each with its own purpose. In this part of my little dissertation, you will learn how to manage both a shared and a private Calendar.
Sharing your Calendar and giving access to your office staff will solve a lot of scheduling problems. Your Calendar can have items from several calendars in it and you will never be lost or go AWOL ever again and you will know what other people are doing.
The first decision is who will have access to you Calendar.
If your office staff and others will have access to your calendar, then you may want to set-up another Google account for the calendar into which they enter events. This calendar is shared, which means its events will be visible in your main calendar. This is not entirely necessary but it divorces the shared calendar from your email archive. You can also share events that you place in your personal calendar with the one you office staff use to enter events for you.
The events entered by other people can then be Copied to your calendar as your own so that you receive notifications of your agenda and individual events entered by other people. You should look at your calendar every day for items added by other people.
It just sounds more complicated than it is. You just have to devote set times during the day to answering email and reviewing your calendar. I do this at 11am and at 4pm daily.
Cloud computing makes knowledge work easier. In large organisations, employees are using nothing more than dumb terminals with a browser interface and corporate e-mail is webmail, corporate documents are all on GoogleDocs, and specialized applications have a web interface, it’s easier to allow employees, partners, suppliers, and customers to access the company’s data.
Security is always a trade-off, and security decisions are often made for non-security reasons. In this case, the decision is usually to sacrifice security for convenience and flexibility. Corporations want their employees to be able to work from anywhere, and they loosen controls to get that. However, in Canada, a Private Investigator must consider how PIPEDA and the courts will look upon any breach at Google. The PI is not a member of some favoured elite. If a data breach happens at Google, the Canadian PI will almost certainly be held liable for using Google Docs.
The Canadian PI has several practical reasons to be cautious when using services like Google Docs. Continue reading ‘Google Docs & the Private Investigator’
The MailBrowser add-in puts a sidebar to the right of your Gmail screen in Internet Explorer or Firefox, showing information about the sender of an open e-mail or any contact you search for. You can see a list of unread e-mails from the person, e-mail threads and a chart of e-mail activity.
It also lets you search through attachments and shows thumbnails to make it easier to find what you’re looking for. It works on Windows and Mac, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome.
Gmail Drive works with IE 5 or better to turn your Gmail storage space into a virtual hard drive where you can keep any sort of file. Just like a local hard drive, you can move a file there by dragging and dropping and open it by double-clicking. When you save a file to Gmail Drive, it shows up as an e-mail with attachment in your inbox. If this could mean it gets sent to your smartphone, then this could be either a nuisance.
GSpace – an add-in for Firefox on Windows, Mac and Linux – adds interfaces for pictures and music. GSpace lets you manipulate files much as Gmail Drive does, but viewer to let you flip through photos, and a music mode that will play your tunes direct from Gmail. As with Gmail Drive, your files show up as attachments to e-mails in your inbox.
There are four common ways to transfer large files:
1. Middle-man approach
2. Direct file sharing
3. FTP
4. Multi user document repository
Most file transfer services use the middle-man approach. They require you to upload it first onto their server and then the recipient downloads it. Depending upon your security requirements, these may be very dangerous as you are uploading important data onto someone else’s server without understanding exactly how they treat my data. Furthermore, the server may not be secure from even the most inept hacker. These services usually limit file size to 2GB and they suffer from reliability problems due to dropped connections. Continue reading ‘Secure File Transfers’
This is part of a series of articles about using Web-based services to get through your work day no matter where you are working — in an office, on a back road in your car, or in an airport.
The current web infrastructure includes cloud computing which has started to change how we work and how we use the Internet.
IDC Research predicts that by 2013, 1.2 billion people (that’s about one-third of the existing global working population) will form the world’s mobile workforce.
You may have a smart phone or a Blackberry and many email addresses, but you still need one Web-accessible portal to manage your email. With a little patience and thought, you can make Google a safe haven for all your email even if you normally access it elsewhere.
We all know about Google as a search engine. We all know about Gmail. However, I am amazed at how many people fail to use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and the other features available from a Google account.
Let’s start with creating a Google and Gmail account and look at what it can do for you. This is the best place to start becoming a Web-Worker. This may seem simplistic to some and rocket science to others. Continue reading ‘On Becoming a Web Worker — Gmail’
This Message Will Self-Destruct offers the ability to send an encrypted email-like message to another person either with or without a password. As a reassurance that your message is secure, it’s never stored with TMWSD. The optional password salts the encryption key for even more security.
Once you have entered your message and clicked on SAVE THIS MESSAGE, you will be given a URL to pass on to the recipient. When the intended recipient reads your message (with or without the password you may have given them) the encrypted message is deleted forever. If you lose the password your message is also lost!
Dropbox allows you to work on and synchronise documents from many computers. However, it does have a significant security weakness. Continue reading ‘Dropbox’
Concealing one’s activities on the Web is something every Investigator should understand. You should understand this for your own use and to understand how these techniques may deny you needed information. Yet using these techniques may also target you as an undesirable in some circumstances.
The following are methods used to obscure Internet traffic and avoid IP blacklists and content filters.
Google introduced encrypted search which gives the user the option to use SSL (Secure Socket Layer) to prevent packet sniffing which in turn could reveal user’s searches on the site. The encrypted search service moved to https://encrypted.google.com.
Only Google web search is available over SSL. Other search products like Google Images and Google Maps are not currently available over SSL.