Dito's AnnouncementsA place where Dito-mites (people who work at Dito) can share interesting and useful information about Google Apps and other related applications and technologies. Let us know if you want to read about a particular topic. |
posted Sep 19, 2011 2:00 PM by Jim McNelis
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updated Sep 19, 2011 2:01 PM
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This post was written by Andrew Debnar, Office Technology Manager at Customink. Thanks Andrew! We would also like to mention that Dito is a repeat customer at Customink. We design and order all our custom T-shirts right on their website. It’s cool to work with cool companies, ya know?About CustominkThe CustomInk story began in 1999 when three former college classmates got the bug to start a business about a year after graduating. Co-founder and President Marc Katz was hard at work in a Wall Street job that he says "didn't have a lot of heart" and was itching to do something entrepreneurial and meaningful. Meanwhile, Marc's former roommate Mike Driscoll (acting on his mom's suggestion!) had spent the previous summer building the very first version of CustomInk.com, which let people upload graphics onto t-shirts and buy them... at least in theory. Mike was headed back to grad school, had a handful of customers, and talked with Marc about taking over the web site and making a real business of it. The idea of helping people create something online and then receive it as a physical product they could touch and wear fit the bill for Marc. He contacted another former classmate (this one a computer whiz) Dave Christensen and together they set about launching the company.ProblemFor years CustomInk was plagued with problems from other mail servers that we managed in-house. Some did not have calendar integration, while others did have a calendar integration, but were slow. Backups and upgrades were a risk; sometimes they worked and sometimes they did not. We spent countless hours administering these servers and never got ahead. Our customers (internal) had issues. Some of these issues were malfunctioning mail client (e.g. Outlook), corrupt mailboxes, and inability to see other users’ calendars.SolutionWe needed to find a solution that would let us use our technology staff more efficiently and keep our customers productive and happy. We had to find a reliable mail platform that integrated calendar, contacts and documents. It also need to be inexpensive. Google apps fit this need.We started off using email, contacts and calendars as many users also continued to use Outlook. We have been using Google Apps for about three years now and the majority of our customers use the web for all of their needs. They also use Google Docs to collaborate with one another. This was a project that we did not want to manage internally as we had over 250 accounts that needed to be migrated. We worked with Dito to implement Google Apps. Dan and Jim from Dito were available during the transition and made us feel comfortable with the migration. They are still available to us and are always willing to help.ResultsBy using Google Apps we are able to focus our technical staffs resources on other projects that allow our business to progress. This has saved us countless man hours managing an internal email system. We also have been able to reduce the number of Microsoft Office licenses by using Google Docs saving money.Marc Katz, our CEO has the following to say about Google Apps. "After years of headaches to maintain our own email system, we're very happy to count on Google for email and better focus our IT efforts on driving value in our business. Google Apps makes it a complete package, and of course we're happy to save money by avoiding unnecessary MS Office installations." |
posted Sep 19, 2011 1:59 PM by Jim McNelis
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updated Sep 19, 2011 2:21 PM
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About Commerce CorporationCommerce Corporation, just like most of the independent garden centers it serves, is a family business spanning over 80 years and three generations. Commerce CEO Richard Lessans sees this as an important bond his company shares with its family of customers.Many things have changed at Commerce Corporation since 1923, but one thing has remained the same: their dedication to the independent garden center. They are now a company with 455 team members, 145 dedicated sales consultants, 5 state-of-the-art distribution centers, a fleet of trucks, and a will to provide the best service in lawn & garden.ProblemsCommerce’s aging Microsoft Exchange 200 Server offered a measly 100mb mailbox size, and limited mobility options. Additionally, accessing email remotely was a challenge with VPN requirements. Commerce was also aware that changing email systems required change management, and they wanted to ensure a smooth transition. “Commerce spent months weighing the pros and cons of an in-house Exchange upgrade vs. a hosted Exchange solution, as well as alternate E-Mail solutions like Zimbra and Google Apps.”, says Stephen Payer, Commerce’s Director of Information Services.SolutionGoogle Apps for Business offers 250 times the email storage of their legacy environment at 25gb. Users get secure access to Google Apps on any modern web browser on any device, including mobile phones, removing the need for a VPN. By choosing Dito as their Google Apps Premier Reseller, Commerce felt confident their change management needs would be met, since Dito is the only Google Referred Training Partner in North America that also provides Google Apps deployment services.“When you consider how well Google’s web interface brings together E-Mail, Calendaring, Documents, Video and Text Chatting, at an incredibly reasonable cost, our direction became apparent. After discussing with other, larger companies on their successful migration to Google Apps, Commerce was more certain that we were on the correct path.”, says Stephen.“Certainty came after Commerce partnered with Dito and their extraordinary team of executives, engineers and trainers. Even after Commerce’s successful migration to Google Apps, Dito continues to offer Commerce unparalleled levels of service and support.”ImpactJust months after switching to Google Apps, Commerce is seeing increased user productivity & happiness! Two areas that most users have seen a direct impact are (1) the ability to keep and search their entire email archive and (2) enabling their mobile workforce; employees now have the access they need when they need it via their mobile devices. Stephen says, “I marvel when I look back at what Dito, Google and Commerce created. What started out as a project to simply replace our aging E-Mail server resulted in a revolutionary new way for Commerce to efficiently, and cost effectively communicate with its customers.” |
posted Sep 19, 2011 1:46 PM by Jim McNelis
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updated Sep 19, 2011 2:23 PM
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About ArvigEstablished in 1950, Arvig Communication Systems is family-owned businesses in Minnesota, with an entrepreneurial spirit that has driven the growth of the company to become one of the largest independent telecommunications providers in the nation. Over the past 60 years, the company’s leaders have been progressive risk-takers, delivering cutting-edge technology to residential and business customers in a growing number of rural communities in Minnesota.As a community-based provider, Arvig takes pride in offering advanced communications services to customers of Arvig that often exceed communications services available to metro area customers. They proudly proclaim there is no digital divide in the Arvig service area! Arvig consistently reinvests in technology and network operations to continue to deliver next generation communications services. They value and appreciate the customers and communities they serve, and demonstrate that by continued financial and human commitment to the communities in which they live and do business.ChallengeArvig’s legacy email system (Novell Groupwise) taxed IT resources, required backups to run 13 hours per day, and users were challenged to access their data outside of the local LAN. Additionally, Arvig did not have an easy way to discover and hold emails for legal and e-discovery purposes.Arvig needed to identify a highly reliable and secure cloud platform along with a professional services partner to help move data into the cloud and handle end-user change management to ensure a low-risk path to the cloud.SolutionArvig chose Google Apps for their cloud platform and Dito as their Google Apps Partner. Google Apps provides an easy to manage, always backed up email and communications platform that was built for remote and mobile access. Google Message Discovery provides archiving and discovery for legal purposes.With Dito’s assistance, Arvig migrated their existing email, contacts, and calendars from Groupwise and deployed Google Apps for Business and Google Message Archiving & Discovery across the whole enterprise, 600 users, in about 7 days! “Google Apps helped Arvig quickly realize our goal of allowing all of our employees to communicate easily no matter where they are located.” says Stacie White, the Network Administrator and Project Manager at Arvig who was responsible for the transition. ResultGoogle Apps & Google Archiving & Discovery has freed up Arvig’s IT resources, by providing automatic, real-time backups of all email communications. The IT department no longer has to spend countless cycles managing servers, backups, outages, and interruptions with their email system. This is all in addition of Arvig’s $15,000 in savings for avoiding required upgrades to their legacy servers and storage solution.“Dito continues to support us as we continue to deliver cutting-edge solutions to our employees through Google Apps.”, says Stacie White, “Their advisement and professional services have been an valuable asset during our adoption and continued use of the email platform”. |
posted Jun 8, 2011 3:36 PM by Jim McNelis
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updated Jun 8, 2011 4:01 PM
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Editor’s note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from Patti Sprague, Managing Director of Premier Guitar in Iowa. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator. Premier Guitar is for true guitar enthusiasts, a magazine focused on guitar gear and the musicians who use it. All of our employees are passionate about music, and many play guitar or other instruments. Working with a bunch of musicians creates a fun, creative workplace, but not always a very structured environment. We needed an email system that didn’t tie our team to the office, but allowed us to work together and stay connected wherever we may be. Google Apps was the perfect solution. In our business we have very tight deadlines. We do things a little differently than other traditional magazines. We not only publish a print version of our magazine, we make all of our content, current and archival, freely accessible over 5 different platforms. We’re able to successfully compete with some of the older print centric publications out there because we’re lean and we can get stories up quickly. That requires a lot of team work. Google Docs allows us to work on a story from wherever we are and get it published quickly. It would never be possible to work as efficiently or collectively if we had to wait for a new version of a document to be sent to us before we could publish. Often our writers and photographers will need to drop everything to hop on a plane for a last minute factory tour, or an interview with an artist. One of the reasons we started using Google Apps is the ability to access our email and calendars on our mobile phones or anywhere with an internet connection. With Google Apps, we know where the team is and what’s due based on our shared calendars. Our company calendar and editorial calendars are kept up to date so we can get our stories out quickly. Plus, we can always just hop on Chat to ask each other questions or find out the status of a shoot or a photo shoot or piece. Being able to just ask a co-worker a quick question instead of sending them an email and waiting for a response has really helped keep projects moving along.
One of Google's top partners, Dito, assisted Premier Guitar's move to Google Apps by providing deployment, training, and supporting services during and after their transition to Google Apps. Today, Dito continues to support us while we enjoy all the benefits of email and collaboration in the cloud.
Apps helps us stay connected and work together, while still having fun doing what we love. For a lean team that wants to meet deadlines while writing about their passion, Google Apps was the perfect choice. |
posted Mar 15, 2011 11:29 AM by Jim McNelis
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updated Mar 15, 2011 11:33 AM
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Google is all about openness!One of part of such openness is xmpp/jabber implementation of Google Apps integrated chat.XMPP/Jabber is a standard, open source implementation for chat services. Having this standard makes different jabber networks inter-compatible so that users on one network can communicate with users on other network. Google Talk uses customised implementation of xmpp/jabber. Advantage - All users on Google Apps chat can communicate with other open jabber networks like jabber.org (and lot more!). Apart from that, this enables users to use their Google Apps account just like a jabber account in any instant messenger which supports jabber protocol. This kind of support is already there in all @gmail accounts, and available in Google Apps accounts, given one creates required set of SRV records.Just like we have mx records in DNS, which tell “where is email server for that domain”, similarly we have SRV records which define “location of services”. By creating SRV records pointing to Google talk servers, you can “announce/define” that Google is running jabber chat server for your domain. To create SRV records, simply login to your DNS management panel, and start adding records as given below.| Hostname | Priority | Weight | Port | Record Value | | _xmpp-server._tcp.domain.com. | 5 | 0 | 5269 | xmpp-server.l.google.com. | | _xmpp-server._tcp.domain.com. | 20 | 0 | 5269 | xmpp-server1.l.google.com. | | _xmpp-server._tcp.domain.com. | 20 | 0 | 5269 | xmpp-server2.l.google.com. | | _xmpp-server._tcp.domain.com. | 20 | 0 | 5269 | xmpp-server3.l.google.com. | | _xmpp-server._tcp.domain.com. | 20 | 0 | 5269 | xmpp-server4.l.google.com. | | | | | | | _jabber._tcp.domain.com. | 5 | 0 | 5269 | xmpp-server.l.google.com. | | _jabber._tcp.domain.com. | 20 | 0 | 5269 | xmpp-server1.l.google.com. | | _jabber._tcp.domain.com. | 20 | 0 | 5269 | xmpp-server2.l.google.com. | | _jabber._tcp.domain.com. | 20 | 0 | 5269 | xmpp-server3.l.google.com. | | _jabber._tcp.domain.com. | 20 | 0 | 5269 | xmpp-server4.l.google.com. | | | | | | | _xmpp-client._tcp.domain.com. | 5 | 0 | 5222 | talk.l.google.com. | | _xmpp-client._tcp.domain.com. | 20 | 0 | 5222 | talk1.l.google.com. | | _xmpp-client._tcp.domain.com. | 20 | 0 | 5222 | talk2.l.google.com. | | _xmpp-client._tcp.domain.com. | 20 | 0 | 5222 | talk3.l.google.com. | | _xmpp-client._tcp.domain.com. | 20 | 0 | 5222 | talk4.l.google.com. |
Please Note:- Make sure you replace domain.com in above records with your own domain name! :)
- Last block _xmpp-client._tcp.domain.com has port 5222, while others have 5269.
- Weight can be any value but should be same across all records. Incase your DNS provider isn’t allowing to use 0 in weight, you can use 1.
Once completed, it will take 4-8hrs, and after that you will be able to add other network users directly in your chat list.Written by Anurag Bhatia (Network Administrator, Dito) |
posted Mar 4, 2011 5:02 AM by Jim McNelis
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updated Mar 4, 2011 5:08 AM
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Dito is pleased to announce that we have 5 of the first Google Apps Certified Deployment Specialists on staff. On February 23, 2011, Google announced the Google Apps Certification Program, with the first accreditation awarded to Google Apps Certified Deployment Specialist. Dito is proud to announce that we have five Google Apps Deployment Specialists on staff. “We believe that we have the highest ratio of Certified Deployment Specialists among the top Google Apps Partners,“ said Jim McNelis, founder and Principal at Dito, “roughly 1 out of every 3 employees are certified.” This new certification from Google is an exciting development that allows us to rise above the 2000+ resellers. These certified Dito-mites (persons who work at Dito) represent an elite group of individuals dedicated to providing you the best Google Apps deployment services in the world. “Now that Dito also has a significant portion of our staff certified by Google for deployments, coupled with our training abilities, we are the most qualified Google Apps partner for any Google Apps deployment.”, claims Dan McNelis, co-founder and Principal at Dito. Dito is leading the way in providing services focused on delivering Google Apps to businesses and government agencies throughout North America. Evidenced by the fact that Google hired Dito to train Los Angeles’ 17,000 city workers, and is among only 4 Google Referred Training Partner for Google Apps, worldwide. “Being able to separate ourselves from the competition gives us an edge when clients are evaluating Google Apps Partners to use for their deployments. I am proud knowing that the members of our deployment team are not only certified, they were also one of the first 100 people in the world to receive their certification. Our trainers, sales associates, and developers are looking forward to the upcoming certifications covering their respective areas of expertise.” said Jason Taylor, Director of Technology for Dito. |
posted Feb 18, 2011 7:43 AM by Jim McNelis
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updated Feb 18, 2011 8:23 AM
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Last year, Dito's training team spent considerable time in the City of LA training the City's users. Dito worked side-by-side with Google, CSC, & LA's employees to develop and deliver training to their 17,000 employees in-person and via webinar. This was a challenging and exciting project. After visiting City Hall yesterday, I was reminded of this email that a city employee forwarded to Google during our training. I want to share that with you here. Dito is the leading Google Referred Training Partner, and the letter below should give you an idea as to why that is the case.
Hello
My name is Tonja Payne and I work for the City of Los Angeles. Last week our email switched over to Gmail and it was a total nightmare for everyone in our office. There are about 20 of us here, and most of us did not have a chance to attend the training offered by our employer prior to the switch.
Somehow, after I called with complaints about our inability to access information, Jim McNelis was sent to our office. He was friendly and patient and answered all our questions. He came back several times, provided us with his email and phone contact information, and has provided us with MUCH needed support during this transition. I am happy to report that everyone in our office is now more than satisfied with our Gmail experience, and we're all learning and sharing new things that we're discovered in Gmail.
If not for Jim's assistance, we would have been in huge trouble. Many of us had folders in our old email system that did not transfer over properly, our contacts were not available, the email was difficult to navigate in Internet Explorer, no one knew how to use our calendars, we didn't know about labs, no one knew how to navigate a mail item with all the different ways to view. forward, delete, etc., the labels were a mystery to us, we didn't know about Google docs and invitations, we couldn't find/open attachments, and the list just goes on and on and on. Jim came in and provided group training in our office, and he came back several times to help individuals with issues. We've learned so much from him.
I know you don't have the staff to do this for everyone, but we really appreciated that Jim recognized how handicapped our office was with the new system, and he made himself MORE than readily available to pop in and help. I know he doesn't work directly for Google, but he is an excellent representative of quality customer service for whatever his parent company is. He gets it!! He is patient and doesn't just speak "computer people" talk. He took the time to explain things to us in a way that we could understand, and made us less afraid to jump in and test the Gmail waters. Now that took some skills!!
So thank you for sending him our way, and give him a commendation, a raise, a promotion, something  He's definitely earned it. We'll all be pros by the time he comes back in May! Take care.
I want to add that is was my pleasure training Tonja, her department, and the rest of the employees in the City of LA. At Dito, we love what we do. We're passionate about Google Apps. We adore our customers. We strive to be the best, everyday. When you choose Dito to be your Google Apps Trainer, you know you're getting the best.
-Jim McNelis, Principal |
posted Feb 7, 2011 9:12 AM by Jim McNelis
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updated Feb 7, 2011 9:18 AM
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In the last post, Jim shared experience of how we moved to Google sites, which is a part of the Google Apps for Business suite. Now we have a website “in the cloud”, which is a part of our 100% web strategy. I am sure you must be familiar with cloud, but what does “website in the cloud” really mean? Well, in earlier setup we had a dedicated server which was hosting ditoweb.com. It was a single server, placed in a data center in the US, with good connectivity in US, decent across Europe, while “not so good” across Asia. Site was coded in PHP, and was using MySQL in the back-end for the database. As we are expanding, we are getting a fair amount of traffic from clients located outside US. Our old servers used to perform decent for Europe, but when it comes to Asia - performance was certainly not very good. We used to see very high ping times of like ~500ms from countries like Singapore, Japan, India. Same was the problem with Australia & New Zealand also. I was certainly aware of the problem and it was all kind of “obvious” considering fact that geographical location of Asia, Australia, Africa makes data to travel really long distance (which is many times via congested route). This increases latency, thus degrading the end user experience. How do we improve site performance around the globe?The traditional way to fix this problem was to have different servers (call them “mirrors”) across Asian continent. If you are aware, in Asia hosting is really expensive (in fact a few times more expensive then we have in US). Apart from expense of new mirrors, other challenge we had to manage was the software part of syncing of data between all 3-4 mirrors located across the world. We need to had syncing of files, and MySQL database across all mirrors, apart from managing all mirrors for security updates & patches. At current level, it essentially was not something which we could afford in terms of human and money resources for setting and managing it.The 100% Web Solution
We eventually went other way - we developed the website using Google sites. “Moving to Google sites” isn’t just about using Google sites, and Google Apps integration, it’s about using Google’s massive hosting infrastructure. Our site is no longer located on a single server in US - connected to a single network; it is now being hosted by many servers located across data centers in US, Europe, Asia and Australia. At our end, we don’t really have to manage syncing of files and databases across all of these multiple mirrors, we don’t have to manage security patches, and backup of server just for out site. Google does it for us. All of this at a fraction of the cost of our traditional hosting.
I would say - if it’s possible for you to have your website on Google sites, I would encourage you to do that considering the performance and ease of maintenance of site hosted in cloud.
Written by Anurag Bhatia (Network Administrator, Dito) |
posted Jan 19, 2011 9:27 PM by Jim McNelis
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updated Feb 7, 2011 9:23 AM
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Websites really are very time-consuming. The more complete one wants the site, the more effort involved. Creating content is down right difficult. You know what though...designing the site was pretty easy, comparatively speaking. The look and feel of this website evolved over the months of time it took to put all the pieces in place.
Dito started out as a web design firm, and we always ended up designing websites with only a fraction of the content from the customer, in an effort to move the projects along. It made sense at the time, but it was never ideal. Now, with Google Sites, we are able to create the site structure and content first, and worry about the design later. This allows the design to be more in sync with the content than a lot of other websites I have seen.
Do we have the prettiest and most cutting edge website on the web? No...well not the prettiest, but I'd introduce her to mom. What we do have is a website that is hosted in the cloud, in data centers around the world, that can be edited by specific team members from any computer connected to the internet, from anywhere. No special software required. Just your web browser. I think that qualifies as cutting edge.
After I churned out the bulk of the content and nailed down the site architecture, I called in the team to aid me in the completion of our billboard on the web. Up to that point, I thought the site was almost done. Luckily, we have a pretty sharp bunch here at Dito, and they proved me wrong in no time flat.
...Weeks later, after countless hours of adding, removing, & tweaking site content and design, we are finally ready to reveal our masterpiece to the web. No doubt, we will continue to iterate on it, as our business and the market evolve, just like we do with our entire business. But for now, it is done. Complete. Finito.
So thank you fellow Dito-mites! Thank you for all of your efforts. It has been a great ride so far, and this website represents our current business solutions very well after all of the dedication you have shown on this project. I am proud to be working with each and every one of you on this noble endeavor to provide the best email and collaboration solutions available on the market!
I am also very excited to be finished with this website! Thank you Google Apps for making this very difficult task relatively painless for me and my team. On to the next!
-Jim McNelis |
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