After Hours

Welcome to After Hours, the Rank + File weblog covering the consumerization of enterprise IT.

Rank + File offers essential intelligence for CIOs and IT leaders on the technology their users bring inside the organization, by hook or by crook.

  1. Without explicitly saying the word Hotmail, Google recently launched an Email Intervention campaign. Designed to help us get our friends off of old providers, and onto Gmail so we can gchat, call, and video chat with them, the video is aimed at hotmail users, and the people who love them.

    Days later (coincidence?), Microsoft releases Gmail Man, a friendly, creepy mailman who asks embarrassing, intrusive questions while he delivers your email.

    Never mind that Google Apps for Business (the closest analog to Office 365) doesn’t have ads in Gmail, and that Microsoft’s Hotmail is full of even blinkier, more garish ads (a better comparison for ad-laden consumer Gmail in the video).

  2. Wily correspondents: your days are numbered. Google Apps enables email receipts.

    Read receipts allow senders to monitor the status of the messages they send and allow recipients to acknowledge receipt of mail.

    Opinion has long been mixed on email receipts. Overt aggression on behalf the sender? A necessary evil for evasive recipients?

    Most use receipts only as last resort when communicating with poor correspondents or as pseudo-legal documentation tool. In any case, they are a staple of enterprise culture. Long enabled in Microsoft Exchange/Outlook environments, Google has brought them to Google Apps.

    Email read receipts must be enabled by an organization’s domain administrator before users can access the feature.

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