Visual Design underway

We finally found a suitable designer who is very talented and are looking forward to unveiling the results.

qmail to gmail

As part of the gmail migration we had some orphaned mail archives sitting in a qmail+sqwebmail system. The job of moving those to gmail was both much more easy and more difficult than I expected. The wonderful qmail provides a rock-solid conversion tool to convert the Mailbox formatted archives to mbox. Unfortunately it only seems to operate on the inbox, which involved a lot of juggling to convert everything. Once that was done it was simply a matter of renaming and pasteing them into a folder in an IMAP account in Thunderbird. I find IMAP support in Thunderbird a little "unfocused" and greatly look forward to future versions or even a decent competitor.

Google Apps Migration

We took a small break from content creation and the search for a suitable designer, to migrate the orlogix.com and keltec.info domains to Google Apps.
It went reasonably smoothly with just one account refusing to allow POP3 logins for several hours before automagically fixing itself.
A key thing to watch out for are "forwarding" accounts that are commonly used in email-workflow heavy offices like ours to forward all mail from a 'role' type address to the personal named addresses of the relevent employees. For these it is important to ensure no mail goes to spam before it's forwarded so that employees dont have to check the spam folders of multiple accounts that are operating in sequence.

The only dissapointment is the way the other highly usefull Google services such as Reader, Notes, Groups, Knol, Alerts, Blogger etc are impossible to login to using your Google Apps account. It would be nice to be able to use them, even if they were not given "shared domain" type functionality. Very nice.

As a workaround I keep this non-apps account and synchronise the email and calender. Using Firefox 2 (3.x seems problematic here) multiple profiles allows me to be logged into both at the same time so it's close to seamless.

more progress

The majority of the content pages are decided, laid out in at least rough format and hooked up to the database backend. We ready for a final sanity pass before we hand it to the designers to polish the layout and visual appearance.
Then its down to data migration and launching live!

Working on new website

With the production visual layout and graphic design reasonably finalised, we can start work on connecting the back end databases and business logic. Security and localisation are connected and passed testing. Next are catalogue and communications.