Disaster Recovery Tip #18

Be decisive.

Too often during interruptions, we see businesses take a wait-and-see approach to executing their established disaster recovery plan. If your plan calls for you to "pull the trigger" within the first 12 hours, but instead you second guess yourself and wait, you put your business at risk. Delays in executing your recovery plan can set in motion a cascading series of failures that are difficult to stop once they’ve begun. During a disaster, the domino effect is magnified.

We understand that putting your recovery plan in action is not an easy decision; the manpower, resources and expense can be intimidating. But that’s where the benefit of planning and testing shines. A detailed plan will help you make a solid rational decision in a very emotional time.

Trust your plan. It’ll save your business.

Send Free SMS via Gmail Accounts

Wednesday, December 10, 2008 4:32 PM

Posted by Leo Dirac, Product Manager

How often do you try to chat with somebody and they don't respond because they just walked away from their computer? Or maybe you're in the middle of chatting with them just as they need to leave. But you still need to tell them something -- something really important like you've moved where you're meeting...or ice cream! We need ice cream! This is why we built a way to chat with your friends even when they're away from their computers. Now you can keep the conversations going with a new Labs feature that lets you send SMS text messages right from Gmail. It combines the best parts of IM and texting: you chat from the comfort of your computer, and your friends can peck out replies on their little keyboards.

A few weeks back, we ran into a few snags when we first started rolling this out, but starting today you can turn on text messaging for chat. Just click on Settings, and go to the Labs tab. Scroll down until you see "Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat" and select Enable and Save Changes.

We're just trying it out for cell phones in the United States right now, but you can send texts to your friends with US phone numbers from anywhere in the world. You can start by just typing a phone number into the search box in the chat window on the left, then select "Send SMS." You can also select the contact you want to SMS first and then add their phone number.



Once you give us a name for that phone number, you'll be able to start chatting.



We'll save your friends' numbers in your Contacts, so next time you can just type their name in the chat box and select Send SMS.

On the receiving end, when you get a text message from Gmail on your phone, it will come from a number in the 406 area code. (The l33t folks in the crowd will note that this spells G0O.) You can reply to this text on your phone just like you'd reply to any other text. The reply gets routed back to our Gmail servers and shows up in your friend's Gmail chat window. Each of your friends' messages will come from a different 406 number so you can reply to any message and it will get back to the right person. Messages from the same person will always come from the same number, so you can even bookmark it in your phone.

If you get a message from somebody you don't want to chat with from your phone, just reply with the word BLOCK. If you don't want to get texts from anybody using Gmail, reply with the word STOP and we'll leave you alone. Keep in mind that all these text messages count as part of your regular mobile messaging plan and might incur fees. So unless you know your friends have unlimited text message plans, please be sensitive to their phone bills.

Credit Cardholder's Bill of Rights: What it means for you.

While the $700 billion bailout and presidential election have dominated the news, the U.S. House passed a major piece of credit card reform legislation. The Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights Act of 2008 passed the House on Sept. 23 by a vote of 312-112 (with nine members not voting). The bill, which still needs to pass the Senate before heading to the White House, would have a major impact on everything from how credit card issuers apply cardholder payments to outstanding debt to limits on interest rate increases.

(Click Here) for some of the more significant provisions of the act:

Firefox 3: 8 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do

The latest version of Mozilla's popular open-source browser enjoyed one of the most successful launches in software history, with a record-setting 8.2 million downloads the first day it was available. With the ability to drastically expand the browser's functions using plug-in extensions and Greasemonkey scripts, many of Firefox 3's built-in features are overlooked. Here are eight handy things you can do with Firefox, ranging from tiny tweaks to hugely powerful capabilities, all with nary an extension to install.

read more | digg story

Escape Voicemail Jail and Long hold Times

Everyone has experienced calling a major corporation and put through their seemingly never-ending voicemail prompt system. Once you finally do reach a human operator, you’re most likely in the wrong department anyway. Then, you get placed back on hold to wait in line for the next available agent.

This list helps solve the frustrating process of reaching a human operator. It doesn’t eliminate all of the button pressing, but it will guide you to the fastest route to a human operator. The sooner you reach an actual human operator instead of prerecorded greetings, the more likely you will be satisfied with the results of your call. Waiting on hold for what seems like an endless timeframe (five minutes can seems like a half hour), can really hurt the overall customer service experience.

This list provides at least 740 different major companies with instructions on how to reach a human operator. I tried a few of the numbers myself for companies that I normally call and have a good feel for their average hold times. The time from dial to speaking with the first human operator from the “gethuman list” compared to the usual button pressing was vastly quicker, noticeable after only a few calls.

For the corporations that are listed, the phone numbers to dial along with the instructions to follow once you are connected are listed in their respective columns. There is also a column for consumer rating: a rating for each company’s phone support system. It also provides you the option to leave feedback on any of the companies and your experiences with them (1 through 5 rating plus the option of written comments).

Save yourself some time the next time you need to dial any major company and check this list first.

www.gethuman.com

Webmail Service Tips

From time to time, I come across some helpful tips on a variety of topics, this one happens to be related to webmail services. The other day I ended up at a link from www.makeuseof.com explaining some very interesting features for Gmail accounts. Today, most people need to access there emails on the go from any location. Gmail is a great free web based email service that seems to have continuous upgrades and many new extensions to help make Gmail even easier to use. In this post, there are links to two websites. Both sites give links and explanations of over 80 tips and extensions. They include shortcut lists, scripts, additional web applications, and a series of how to’s. However, besides the over 80 tips, I found the article on how to use just one email address for multiple purposes, one for family, one for friends, one for those websites that require and email address to sign and how to separate them in your inbox the most interesting.

Over 80 Gmail Tips

One Surprising Gmail Tip