It’s Saturday, 23 days after The News.
It’s another lazy Saturday. I should have been able to sleep in, but at 8 AM I was awakened, not by my alarm clock, but by all my iDevices notifying me I had an appointment. To “Buy Shoes”. Sigh.
Sharing Information with Office 365
On Friday evening JT and I got together to work out a shared calendar so she could easily see all my appointments. We also wanted to find a way to do collaborative document editing – we’re not exactly sure what documents we’ll be collaboratively editing but this does come in useful in our professional lives. So I might as well try to find something before I begin treatment and while I still have lots of energy. Secure file sharing is another item on my mind. We’ve been using Dropbox for file sharing but we also want one that works with real-time collaborative editing.
We started off trying Microsoft 365 Family, which you would think would would be perfect for this sort of thing. I wasn’t thrilled that it uses Outlook.com instead of Exchange for email and calendars, but I’d give it a try. Everything was looking up…until we noticed that the “shared” calendar wasn’t updating on JT’s iPhone, though it was on my iPad. After some digging it appears that Microsoft broke this late last year as part of an “upgrade” to Microsoft 365 Family. Apparently Microsoft doesn’t think families need to share their shared calendars, at least with mobile users. Go figure.
Not wanting to spend all night trying to find a workaround, I switched to Microsoft 365 Business Basic. I use this for my own company. It’s a little more pricey but it’s solid and worked like a charm. While testing it JT added an 8 AM appointment to “Buy Shoes”. To verify that JT could see appointments I added, I created an 8:30 AM appointment to “Return Shoes”. (JT said she’d like to at least take the shoes home first. I don’t see the point?)
I have no idea if JT actually bought (and returned) the shoes. I figured that if I’m returning them anyway I’d just skip the buying part.
You’re Spam!
While we were at it we managed to figure out why JT hadn’t been getting many of the emails I’d sent over the last week: Google had marked them all as spam.
Now its true that like any good Hawaiian transplant I’ve been evangelizing Spam, and Spam musubi in particular. JT and some of my friends even guiltily admitted they like it. The way they said it you’d think it was infinitely worse than telling someone they had cancer. But really Google, that’s no reason to stick all emails from me in the spam folder! (Google and I have a not-quite-hate relationship. Their headquarters is about a mile up the road and in a building I used to work in – back in my Silicon Graphics days – so they’re quite literally close to home and I do have a number of friends who work for The Evil Empire. But I’m not fond of the way they use their users as beta testers. Not to mention the haphazard approach to security and privacy.)