Questions about FiresideNet

A bridge between our organization and Google products. On one side, we have communication and collaboration needs for our group. On the other side, there are successful, innovative, online personal Google products. FiresideNet allows us to embrace the strengths of both sides.

Google quality, Google connectivity. Our school, our people. Powerful, easy-to-use tools. Communicate via email, instant messaging, and voice calls. Create and share calendar events, documents, and spreadsheets. Access it all from one place - the Start Page.

To bring together essential communication applications. To improve productivity and communication. We can focus on student needs and adding value to the experience while Google focuses on building excellent products, maintaining the feature set, and innovating our communication options for tomorrow.

Our goal is to offer you a reliable, practical, secure, feature-rich webmail environment. We think Google can help.

We can focus on the core values of our school, such as student relationships, and let Google leverage its extensive operational experience with security and privacy.

Our IT staff can utilize an administrative set of APIs to build on top of Google Apps rather than starting from ground zero.

Same as you normally do. Log in to our network by clicking the Sign-in button with your username and password, and you'll be authenticated for Google services as well.

If you want to visit Google services directly, bookmark the Start Page as your browser's homepage. On the Start Page, you can preview your latest email messages, calendar events, and documents. You can even chat with people on your Contacts list.

Start Page - http://partnerpage.google.com/firesideacademy.org
Email - http://mail.google.com/a/firesideacademy.org
Calendar - http://www.google.com/calendar/a/firesideacademy.org
Docs - http://docs.google.com/a/firesideacademy.org
Chat - You can chat in your email account, but you can also download the Google Talk client at http://dl.google.com/googletalk/googletalk-setup.exe

The primary option is webmail - http://mail.google.com/a/firesideacademy.org

It's packed with exciting features and integrated with other Google services. In your online email account, you can chat with your contacts, create filters to organize your inbox before new mail arrives, schedule calendar events, map addresses in your messages, and track postal packages.

Alternative access options include:

POP
Configuring instructions are very similar to Gmail. In your mail client, anytime you're asked for an email address, enter your full email address (bob@firesideacademy.org).

The incoming server is still pop.gmail.com and outgoing server is smtp.gmail.com. For more client-specific instructions, such as Outlook Express, visit hthttp://google.com/support/a/users/bin/answer.py?answer=12103.

Mobile
Connect to the web. Enter http://mail.google.com/a/firesideacademy.org, and select OK. Bookmark the location for later.

If you have a BlackBerry, you can download the mail application. Navigate to http://m.google.com/a. It has most of the webmail features - search and conversation view. With automatic syncing, actions taken on your Blackberry are reflected in your email account.

This is separate from the Gmail for mobile application. A red M icon will appear for Gmail and a blue M icon will appear for our Google Apps email.

You have one username for all services i in the FiresideNet package. Once you log in to one service, you can easily access all others.

Rely on the Start Page to provide access to the rest of the services. The Start Page is publicly available, but won't display personalized content until you log in. You can see a recent snapshot of new mail, calendar events, and updated documents.

Within your email account, you can chat with your contacts. You'll receive invitations for calendar events and to collaborate on documents and spreadsheets.

It's a web-based word processing and spreadsheet application. It can help us collaborate on projects from anywhere. Your documents are stored online. You and anyone you invite to collaborate can access the document from any internet-connected computer, and make changes simultaneously. Multiple people can make changes at once, and everyone's changes show in real-time.

You can get started right away by creating a new document or by uploading a file from your computer. Since the products are integrated, you can use your email account Contacts list to invite people to view or edit your documents.

More Tips
Revision history -- Individual edits are kept so you can see who made changes and revert back, if necessary.
Search -- Just like the rest of Google products, you can harness the power of Google search to look for a document you haven't edited in months.
Security and privacy -- You choose who sees your document. Other users can only access your document or spreadsheet if you add them to the list of collaborators or viewers, or if you decide to publish the document.

Free voice calls, voicemail for when your contacts are offline, and file transfers while chatting.

PC-to-PC voice calls (VoIP) are practical and offer great quality. The person on the other end can be anywhere in the world as long as he or she is connected to the Google Talk network.

Help Center: www.google.com/support/a/users

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