Retirement projects update

General tidying up:

1. Using Google Calendar as my day to day diary (plus Google Contacts as my main address book, and Google mail for more and more purposes).

• This is finally working adequately.
• Calendar integration with Outlook was hard.
• I ended up having to use a free Outlook plugin called CalDav Synchronizer. Outlook's OOTB 'integration' allows you to subscribe to a Google calendar (one way sync from Google to Outlook) but does not support two-way sync (doh).
• I still haven't got category colours synchronising properly for mail or calendar.
• Outlook won't support category colours at all for Google mail because it's accessed via IMAP. That means that the UI has no 'categorisation' elements present at all unless you really dig for them.
• I had to implement another free 3rd party solution (GO Contact Sync Mod) to synchronise contacts; Outlook doesn't support this at all OOTB.
• Getting distribution lists to synchronise and using them effectively, for which I find you have to use hidden category colours and spurious meeting drafts, is basically a magic trick (I shall write a blog post on this). 
• Google mail's wacky lack of folders and realistic lack of any proper Archive function don't help at all. Why design it differently from every other email system on the planet? It's not as if it provided any fab new functionality (and Google's implementation of mail rules is a joke). Plus, Outlook hides Google mail items with no labels from view, presumably because IMAP can't see them.
• I have to say that the real problem with becoming more Google-centric is the support situation. When I think how much I have complained in the past about Microsoft Community, I am embarrassed. Google don't even pay lip service; their 'Help Communities' appear to be moribund and uncurated. (Having said which, Google Analytics does have a lively Discord channel with active and effective, if under-resourced, Google input, but I only found out about it by accident on Twitter.)

2. Regaining access to Teams.

• Done, by paying Microsoft an extra approx. £3 a month, but since I have used it a total of once I am not sure why I bothered.

3. Moving my cloud storage from Dropbox to OneDrive.

• Big success. Bye bye Dropbox, just too many annoyances.
• For less than my previous Dropbox subscription I can get Office 365 (including on the desktop), Teams (as above), and 1TB of OneDrive space.
• OneDrive integrates far better into Windows, e.g. you can set a folder to 'online only' automatically via PowerShell.
• It has effective support channels that don't assume you know nothing and/or that your question is daft.
• Plus, search in OneDrive is on another planet compared with Dropbox, which can't even see inside a .msg file, while OneDrive even indexes text on JPGs.
• And a shout out to the robocopy Low Disk Space Mode which allowed me to shift nearly 200GB of data from Dropbox to OneDrive fairly painlessly. 

4. Automation of mySQL backups.

• Done (for my locally hosted databases, anyway) via mysqldump.

5. Tidy up my cpanel hosting environment (deletion of loads of ancient experiments, etc.)

• Done.

6. Sort out non-mySQL backups for my hosting (I have never yet found a fully usable solution for this)

• Sync'd via winscp, which is slow but does a far better job than FTP.

i-Community:

7. Transferring the website across to Meridian to look after.

• Done.
• End of an era ... I had been involved in i-Community, and its predecessor the Catalyst/Notability/Logicalis IT Forum, ever since the summer of 2000. Lots of nice messages from members remembering IT Forum and i-Community Rochester trips.

www.notamos.co.uk:

8. Updating Google Analytics usage to use their new offering.

• Done. I shall be publishing a specific blogpost on this. (To say that Google don't make it easy is an understatement.)