The Paisano®
Renaissance 2.0

KiGoo allows you to integrate your Google Calendar and Contacts with Microsoft Outlook. So, if you install KiGoo and add your gmail account to Outlook via IMAP then you will have full Gmail googliciousness inside your Outlook client.

Key Benefits
Manage Exchange and Google Calendars in only one program
Check free/busy availability of all Google Contacts who shared their   information
See, Browse, Update, Email and invite your Google Contacts from   Microsoft Outlook
No synchronization needed
Real Time access
Supports Microsoft Outlook 2007 and MS Outlook 2003

If you’re an avid Google docs user as I am, then you’ll get to the point where you will want to be able to export all of your docs to your local computer. If nothing else as a backup.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a built-in easy way to do this. However, there is a way to do it thanks to Firefox and some greasemonkey scripts! I just gave it a shot and it works like a charm!

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Install Firefox if you’re still stuck in the 1990s (www.firefox.com)

2. Install Greasemonkey

3. Install the GoogleDocs Download Script

4. Install

5. Go to Google Docs and select the documents you want to export (to select all documents in a folder/tag remember to click the Select: All option at the bottom of the screen.

6. Click on the new Download Your Documents menu and select the format you want to use for your documents.

7. Your selects will appear in a new page like this

8. Right-click and select DownloadThemAll. Select the local folder you want to download/export your google docs to in the Save Files in: field. Click Start to download.

9. That’s all folks! You’ve just exported all of your Google Docs!

Conclusion
While this method works and isn’t that hideous, Google could make this process a whole lot easier if they got off their rumps and implemented an internal option to do this for us from within Google Docs itself! We also need an auto-sync option that will keep copies synchronized online and offline via Google Gears. Until then, we at least have a way to do this ourselves. Thanks to Peter Shafer for the excellent GoogleDocs Download script!

Enjoy and to quote Nick Burns your company’s computer guy, “uh, you’re welcome!”

Grouply strives to become the Friendfeed of online groups by aggregating all of the different groups you belong to on sites such Yahoo Groups and Google Groups. The concept is excellent because it saves a great deal of time and effort by allowing you to keep up with all of your messages and groups from a single centralized place. See image below.

The Grouply Smart Digest^tm delivers a daily personalized email summarizing new messages across all your groups. It highlights messages of interest and intelligently summarizes message conversations

Centralized Group Calendar

One of the best features is the way Grouply manages all of the different calendars and appointments that you have spread out across your different groups and services.

Global Search

Grouply provides fast, easy-to-use search of messages across all your groups. Quickly refine your results by group, message type, tags (topics), and rating. And you can save your search to create your own custom lists and trigger alerts. You can quickly search, browse, and bookmark messages across all your groups.

Final Thoughts

In our ever-increasing volume of data in the information age, an aggregator for groups is an excellent tool to have available to us. Hopefully Grouply will provide support for other group services out there and perhaps for message forums as well.

Google has finally added a much needed View Menu to Google docs. You can now view your documents with fixed width and margins much like desktop word processors! This is a step in the right direction for online web applications if they seriously want to challenge traditional desktop applications.

While this might not seem like a big deal at first glance, it really is more important that it appears. This gives Google docs a much improved look n’ feel that closely resembles Microsoft Word which means improved user acceptance. It will also attract more bloggers to use google docs for posting directly to their blogs. Here’s a screenshot of the publishing options:

Final Thoughts:
I applaud Google for adding this and other new features. I look forward to the battle between desktop apps and web apps!