Mail delegation and Groups in Google Apps

Google Apps has really thought through some specific scenarios in real life emailing. For example, your company may have a generic sales@yourdomain.com email address, and you would like everyone on your sales team to be able to access it (receiving emails sent to sales@yourdomain.com). Another example, the CEO of the company may wish to delegate the authority over email administration of his/her account to his/her PA.

These seem to be quite sensible and straight forward emailing features, however, I doubt that you would be able to expect to have these features in basic emailing applications. If you haven’t known already, Google Apps supports both functions that are quite critical to daily email administration.

Google Apps uses the concept of Groups for group access to a generic email account. I admit it is quite a self descriptive name for such a function. Basically, you can set up an group account as sales@yourdomain.com, and then add all your sales team members to the group. Upon specific settings, you may allow every member in the group to receive a copy of the emails sent to sales@yourdomain.com. Through the common “account” feature which is also available for the free gmail service (as well as most of the major email service providers), you can also add sales@yourdomain.com to every member account, so that they could also send emails using the sales account (i.e., the outbound email will have a sender id of sales@yourdomain.com).

Google Apps Premier edition has also recently added the delegation feature to account users. If delegation is set to allowed in the domain global setting, an account user in your domain may login and set up to whom he/she wish to delegate his/her email administration authority. This is fairly easy and straight forward.

Interested in trying Google Apps? Before the end of 2010, we setup Google Apps for you for free, if you choose the premier edition!

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How to set up Google Apps on HTC desire

I couldn’t wait to tell you how easy it is to set up Google Apps on HTC Desire, which I just got for myself yesterday. Actually it is quite simple and straight forward to set up Google Apps on any Android phones that support Exchange Active Sync.

When you start up the phone for the first time, you should be popped a setup wizard that quickly guides you through a few fundamental settings, such as date and time, language, location and of course, your Mail setting. If you have missed that, you can always open your phone menu, and click the “setup” app. The icon looked like a hat of a magician, which makes me confident that you will find it easily.

Once you are in the setup screen of Exchange Active Sync, you are asked to enter a user name and a password. This should be your login details to your Google Apps account. After entering these details, click on manual setup.

There are a few more details to complete on the next screen. In the “Server address” field, please enter “m.google.com” without the quote of course. for the username, please enter the full address of your google Apps email account (i.e. name@yourdomain.com), and then enter your password. You may ignore the domain field. Click next

If you have done exactly as above, you should be taken to the next screen where you can choose whether to sync your mail, calendar and contacts. These are for you to decide. Tick the ones you want to sync, and click next, and you are all set.

To config the settings for your Exchange Active Sync, please go to menu, then setting, then Accounts & Sync, then tap on Exchange ActiveSync. You should then be able to schedule your sync activities.

If you encounter any difficulties in setting up your phone, or your Google Apps account altogether, please do not hesitate to contact us.

BTW, I love the new HTC Desire, it is truly desirable.

Haven’t got a Google Apps account? We can help you set up Google Apps for free!

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Top 3 Joomla extensions worth having

Joomla CMS platform is such a flexible and powerful website development tool that once you learned how to use it, you would want to build every one of your websites based on it. It is free, quick and easy to install, and most of all, it has support from such a huge community and extension resources. If your site needs a certain function, go and search for an extension – the extension directory would most likely have had one on the shelf that just does what you wanted it to do. Even better, it might be free to use if you are lucky.

As an extensive Joomla user, I would recommend the following extensions for your website, in terms of website promotion and search engine optimisation.

SH404SEF

Although the built in Joomla core SEF would probably suffice, you may want to install a copy of SH404SEF once your site is up. Generally speaking, these SEF extensions rewrites your site URL from dynamically generated non-sense to something both user and search engine friendly. For example, instead of having a URL that looks like this: www.domain.com/index.php?option=content&id=4&ItemId=256&lang=en, you would have something like this: www.domain.com/this-is-what-this-page-is-about. Compared to Joomla core SEF, SH404SEF offers far more flexibility in terms of configuration. You can choose the structure of your URL, file suffix type, and configure specifically for certain extensions and Joomla components.

It is also good to know that the 1.0 beta version of SH404SEF is free, although you may have to google a bit to find it somewhere since the latest 1.5 version is no longer free. It is by all means still worth the money.

Wordpress extension for Joomla

Blogging has been widely adopted by businesses and individuals as a means for promotion. If you have already built a Joomla site that displays your strong branding image, you probably would not want to set up a wordpress blog that uses a standard template. Building a wordpress template based on your Joomla site template can be time consuming and costly.

Wordpress extension for Joomla developed by core php would be just what you are looking for. With simple installation, your wordpress blog uses your Joomla site template and it would just look like a natural part of your site. The backend admin is just the same as wordpress, and you can start blogging straightaway. Now you can combine the two most renowned CMS systems and take advantages of their extensive number of extensions and plugins. Your website will indeed be only limited by your imagination.

Virtuemart

I would not say that this is a must have extension. But if you ever need to build an ecommerce website, or add a shopping cart to your site, then this might be something worth checking. It is such a capable shopping cart extension that you can build your entire online shop based on it. It offers products management, accounts maintenance, payment and shipping management, and supplier customer communication. It handles a wide range of currency and tax situations. In addition, a large number of extensions have been developed around Virtuemart. It is definitely more cost effective than reinventing your own PHP based shopping cart.

If you only have several products, and require very simple payment and shipping management, you may feel that with Virtuemart you have equipped yourself a train where you only needed a car. There are some techniques in terms of how to fit virtuemart into your existing site, which I shall discuss in more detail in another post.

Do you have a Joomla site? Do you have some nice extensions that you would love to share?

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How to build a Joomla split level menu

If you are using Joomla CMS for your website, have you come across occasions when you want to build split level menu navigation? For example, you have a top level menu, and when one of the buttons on the top level menu is clicked, a submenu is displayed on the left or the right of the main body. Then, logically, you may want to click on one of the buttons on submenu to view some details. The button on the submenu is highlighted, but probably the parent button on the top menu is not. What you really wanted is probably this (notice that both the service button on the top menu and the website service button on the submenu are highlighted).

That’s great! How did you do this?

For the menus displayed on this site, you probably think that the top menu and the right menu are two different menus. If you look at the backend, they are actually one menu structure. The submenu items are listed under one button on the top menu as parent. See the image below:

Step 1. Set up a logical menu structure

You probably want to set up one menu structure as the following:

  • Item 1
    • Sub item 1
    • Sub item 2
    • Sub item 3
    • Sub item 4
  • Item 2
  • Item 3
  • Item 4
  • Item 5

Step 2. Create a menu module that points to the parent level of the above menu

  1. Go to module manager, click on New
  2. Choose menu module and click next
  3. Give it a Title: you may call it Top Menu
  4. Under parameters, for Menu Name, choose from the drop down list the above menu you just created
  5. Here is the most important part: in the Start Level and End Level, enter 0 and -1. This tells the system that you only want to display the first level of the menu
  6. Publish it on the correct position.

Step 3. Create a menu module that points to the sub level of the above menu

  1. Go to module manager again, click on new
  2. Choose menu module and click next
  3. Give it a Title: you may call it Right Menu
  4. Under parameters, for Menu Name, choose from the drop down list the above menu you just created
  5. Instead of 0 and -1, enter 1 and 3 for the Start Level and End Level value.
  6. Publish it on the correct position.

Now, your menu structure is created. If you preview the site, and click on Item 1, you will see the sub menu displayed; then click on Sub item 1 (provided that all these menu buttons link to valid pages), you will see that both Item 1 and Sub item 1 buttons are highlighted.

Isn’t this great? Do you have any brilliant practical tips that you want to share? Let us know.

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What can you expect to read at Sefari’s blog?

Sefari was set up with the aim to provide a broad range of IT services to small and medium businesses so that they will only need to speak to one IT expert. As a result, Sefari employs a team with a wide spectrum of IT expertise, including Joomla CMS, Zimbra Collaboration Suite, search engine marketing and optimisation, and language localisation.

You may expect to read the following articles at Sefari’s blog:

  • Joomla CMS news and development
  • Zimbra Collaboration Suite news and developments
  • Search engine marketing and optimisation news and techniques
  • SME’s and online business opportunities
  • IT and its business application

We intend to include anything IT that we believe would interest you. So sit back and enjoy.

We expect to include here everything we know about IT that we believe you will be able to benefit from. So sit back and enjoy.

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