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Google have recently brought out a new tool in which you can sync the items on your Microsoft Office Outlook Calendar with your Google Mail Calendar.  It is a great application which is ideal for anyone who is always on the go!  You can schedule the application to sync the calendars as often as you want.  This means that any changes you make in your Outlook Calendar will be synced to your Google Mail Calendar!  Check out the images below to compare the calendars (click on the image to make it larger)…

It is pretty easy to set up.  There is a great tutorial on the Google Website which is worth ready whilst setting up the program!  For those who knew it the application is very similar to the SBS 2003 Server Setup.

So far we’ve been really impressed!

Over the past week I’ve reviewed the top three Web Based Email Providers, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Live Mail/Hotmail. In my opinion they are all good providers have their pluses and minuses. For example; Hotmail/Live Mail is the most user friendly and has the most stylish layout, whereas Yahoo! Mail has unlimited storage space, although with a gmail account you can use loads of great features like Calender, Documents, Photos, Reader, Images, Maps, Books, Shopping and much much much more! In this last review I’m going to do a comparison between the three providers. To save all the confusion, I am only going to refer to the free editions unless I mention otherwise.

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We are now on the penultimate of the Web Based Email Review series. I’ve previously reviewed Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail/Live Mail, now its time for Gmail. Gmail is one of the many applications that you can have for free with a Google Account. Google Accounts are completely free and worth while!

There are many useful features you can get with your basic Gmail account. On their site they have made a list called ’10 Reasons To use Gmail’.

1. You don’t like spam. Neither do we
2. Search your mail instantly
3. Organize replies into conversations
4. Chat is built right in
5. Labels, Filters and Stars…oh my!
6. Get your mail on the go
7. Lots of space (and counting)
8. We have ads, but only the good kind
9. Save time
10. All this is free?

To find out more on these features and to see the details of the list click here.

Gmail have made some cool new features for all their users. Some new features include:

• Group chat
• Instant messaging
• 20MB attachment limit
• Emotions
• Contact Groups
• 6.732016 GB email storage per account and the amount it always increasing!

Click to see a list/information on all 35 updates/new features.

You can also upgrade to either Premier or Education Edition. An Education Edition is free to accredited not-for-profit K-12 Schools, Colleges and Universities which are described in the terms and conditions. It provides the same features as the standard edition but also includes:

• Conference room and resource scheduling
• APIs to integrate with your existing infrastructure
• Email routing controls for dual delivery (Coming November 08!)
• Email migration tools
• 24/7 assistance, including phone support for critical issues
• Third-party applications and services
• 6.732016 GB email storage per account and the amount it always increasing!

Click to find out more about Google for Educators or to Compare Packages.

The Premier Edition is by far the packages which supplies the most but it does come at a price! It costs £25 a year. With in the Premier package there are two versions, one geared more towards Enterprises and the other Small Businesses. The package provides all previously mentioned features from the Standard and Education Editions, plus:

• 99.9% up-time guarantee for email
• Policy management and message recovery by Postini (Coming in November)
• 25 GB email storage per account

Click to compare the package with the standard package.

Gmail has everything that most people need from their web based email account and you can also use so many great applications with an account. Although in my opinion it isn’t as user friendly as other providers.

Do you use Gmail? What do you think of it?

Google has created an incredibly easy way to share photos with people on the web. It’s called Picasa. Picasa is a great free download which helps you to organise photos on your computer, share photos via email and the web etc and to edit/add effect to your photos with just a couple of clicks. In this review we will tell you a little bit about Picasa and show you some basic features of the program.

Before you download Picasa for free you must you need to create a Google and Picasa account which will allow you to share your photos on the internet. Both Google and Picasa accounts are compltely free. If you already have a googlemail or gmail account then you don’t need to create a new Google account, just a Picasa one. Click here for a Google account. Then for a Picasa account click here. You need a Google account to use Picasa Web Album.

Once this is done you need to download Picasa for free and then install it.

Then you need to upload your pictures to Picasa by selecting where you wish for them to be uploaded from. If you have some pictures on a digital camera that you wish to upload to your computer follow the instructions on the pctoolbox.co.uk tutorial named ‘Downloading Pictures from Your Digital Camera On An XP Machine‘.

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