Making the Gmail Interface More User Friendly

I think most of my posts will end up being geared toward the IT crowd, but this may have some useful information for the end user as well.

Like many other public school districts, we eliminated our aging Exchange servers and moved our email accounts up to Google Apps a few years back.  From an education standpoint, this has many advantages:  zero cost, easy to manage, free archiving to comply with MA public records law, integration with collaboration tools for admins, teachers, and students, etc.

At the same time, we abandoned Outlook for most of our users.  A few still use it, but I try to discourage it.  So as not to be a hypocrite when I discourage using Outlook, I did away with it myself.  As with almost anything in the world of technology, GMail isn't ideal in its default state.  Fortunately, I was able to adjust settings or enable "lab" features to get it how I wanted it to be.  You'll need to go to settings to do anything mentioned below (from your inbox choose settings from the gear icon near the top right side).  So, without further ado:

Theme Change:  First thing's first, the default theme isn't great on the eyes.  I blame Apple for creating the trend of using an overwhelming amount of white (FYI, that'll likely be the first of many subtle jabs at Apple).  I don't like it because it's too bright to stare at all day.  There is a nice, dark theme though, and it's easy to change to it:

From settings, go to the themes tab.  Click "set theme."  Pick a theme of your choosing.  I use the dark one second from the left in the top row, here:

Preview Pane:  GMail doesn't have a preview pane enabled by default, but it's available as a lab feature:

From settings, go to the labs tab, find "Preview Pane" and enable it.  While we're at it, enable the "mark as read" button.  With the preview pane enabled, the amount of time it takes for a message to show as read is a little more annoying:


Speaking of time to mark messages as read, you can change this too.  Go to the general tab, and find this section.  Adjust accordingly:

Other Stuff From Labs:  There's lots of stuff here, try some out!  I also use the calendar gadget, which puts upcoming events on the left of your inbox, and the unread message icon, which is just a nice touch:

Undo Send:  Exchange allowed for recalling messages.  GMail does not, but I can't blame them.  Ten years ago, you had a good shot of someone not seeing a message quickly.  In the age of mobile computers that just so happen to have phone capabilities, though, that's much less likely.  You can, though, set a delay so that GMail won't send a message right away and you can "undo" it before it goes anywhere.  From the general tab in settings, just enable it and set a timeout:

Inbox View Preferences:  These are a personal preference, but I'm including them in case others' minds think the same way mine does.  Google's conversation view confuses me--I like everything on its own line, and I don't like things grouped.  To change this, turn off conversation view from the general tab.  There is also an option to keep all unread messages at the top of your inbox.  From the inbox tab, you can change this:

Rules:  These are very useful.  For example, I'm a member of a state PowerSchool admins group.  It's a great resource, but sometimes the amount of messages that come through in a day is overwhelming.  I don't want them cluttering my inbox, but I want to see when there are unread messages from this group so I can look at them when I have time.  There's lots of documentation on setting rules up so I won't go into detail here, but this is what one of mine looks like:

As for why I discourage using Outlook with Google Apps?

• The best integration is accomplished with Google Apps sync, which is setup individually, not for all users across the board.  
• Outlook can still save things locally if users don't make sure they are saving to a location that will sync up to their Google account.  Not so good if they are trying to find something on a mobile device or another PC, if their hard drive fails, etc.
• When users change their password, it's not totally seamless.  Most ignore the prompt to re-authorize the sync agent.
• It creates a bloated user profile because it downloads all mail/calendar/contact data.
• Outlook's search function is very bad.
• Some Outlook features no longer work because they're intended for Exchange (recall message, etc.)  Along the same lines, you can't take advantage of some GMail features with Outlook (delay send, for example).
• Users don't get the same experience at home as they do on their school computer.
• The big one:  Google hasn't released a new version of their app sync utility in over a year, so there's no telling when they will drop support or discontinue the product.

How to Make PowerSchool Exports Default to CSV Format

One of my qualms with PowerSchool is that it defaults to tab-delimited files with ".text" extensions for exports.  Natively, no programs are associated with ".text" files in Windows so users struggle to open them.  Also, most of the places that would require a manual import of data would want a .csv file anyway.  For our end users, .csv files just make more sense.

Fortunately, changing the default can be accomplished by making a small customization to the export pages.  I've attached my "exportteachers.html" and "exportstudents.html" files in case you'd like to do the same.  These work with version 10.2.1.2 (and probably many other versions as well):

exportteachers.html

exportstudents.html

Note:  When exporting student addresses, commas will split the address into two cells.  This happens if you have students with apartments.  We are a rural district so we have only a handful of students who live in apartments so it's quick to fix by hand.

End result:

Avoiding 5212 Errors in MDT Deployment

We use Microsoft Deployment Toolkit to deploy all of our Windows-based computers.  With how well it works, I'm surprised there's still much of a market for third party imaging software.  That said, in an initial MDT setup there are a few things that don't work so well out of the box.

When I was deploying images, the process would complete successfully but would throw a 5212 error at the end of the process:  FAILURE  ( 5212 ):  Welcome wizard failed or was cancelled.  Because it threw an error, it wouldn't skip the completion screen as my customsettings.ini file dictates.  That requires me to click "finish" on each PC, and I'd rather they complete the entire process on their own.

It's relatively innocuous, but the fact that I'd have any error at all bothered me.  It's difficult to find much information on this, and much of it points to the wrong culprit (an IE setting in your answer file) but I was able to piece together the following:

• It's caused by a leftover MININT folder in your WIM.
• It apparently wasn't an issue prior to MDT 2013.
• It doesn't cause problems with deployment, but did appear as an error at the end of the task sequence 100% of the time in my case.

So, I assume that the Microsoft approved way would be to use DISM to mount the image, remove the folder, commit changes, and unmount.  I don't like that process because it takes longer than it needs to, but for the sake of completeness, I'll include it here:

• Close MDT.
• Create an empty folder somewhere to mount the WIM to (I used "C:\MountWIM")
• From an elevated command prompt, run:
  

  Dism /Mount-Image
  /ImageFile:Capture.wim /index:1 /MountDir:C:\MountWIM

• Go to the mount folder and delete the "MININT" folder from the root.  You can do this via command line or Windows Explorer.
• From an elevated command prompt, run:
  

  Dism /Unmount-Image /MountDir:C:\MountWIM /commit

Now, as mentioned that's more work than it needs to be.  The easier process is:

• Close MDT.
• Open the WIM file with 7-Zip.
• Delete the "MININT" folder.
• Close 7-Zip.

At some point (time permitting), I may do a complete write-up on how I have MDT setup and how I capture/deploy images.  Many of the defaults aren't ideal.