IEAS Apps FAQ

1. What is IEAS Apps?

A bridge between the Institute of English & American Studies and Google products. On one side, we have communication and collaboration needs for the Institute. On the other side, there are successful, innovative, online personal Google products. IEAS Apps, a service provided by Google Apps, allows us to embrace the strengths of both sides.

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

2. Why are we using IEAS Apps?

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 Institute, such as student relationships, and let Google leverage its extensive operational experience with security and privacy.

3. How do I get started?

Same as you normally do. Log in to our network at one of the IEAS Apps services with your username and password, and you’ll be authenticated for all IEAS and Google services as well.

If you want to visit Google services directly, bookmark the Start Page as your browser’s homepage.

4. What options do I have for accessing email?

The primary option is webmailhttp://mail.ieas-szeged.hu

It’s packed with exciting features and integrated with other Google services. You can access all other active services from the top toolbar of your email account. 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 (yourusername).

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 http://google.com/support/a/users/bin/answer.py?answer=12103.

Mobile
Connect to the web. Enter http://mail.google.com/a/ieas-szeged.hu, and select OK. Bookmark the location for later.

If you have a BlackBerry, an iPhone or an Android phone, 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 phone 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 IEAS Apps email.

5. I already have an email address – and I want to use it

No problem. You can integrate up to five existing email accounts into your shiny new IEAS Apps email. The one and only requirement is that your other email provider allows POP3 access to your email account – IEAS Apps mail, thanks to Gmail’s “mail fetcher” service, does the rest. (If you want to integrate an existing Gmail account, for instance, make sure you enable POP3 access on the Settings tab, and then proceed with setting up mail fetcher from your IEAS Apps account.)

Please read the short overview of the service and then proceed with the super easy setup process. (If you run into errors, please consult the list of common problems.)

Once you are ready, you can use your email accounts from one inbox. Tip: create filters for incoming mails to separate the different accounts – e.g. give all the incoming messages from your existing Gmail account the label “thru Gmail” (color it if you wish to make it more visible) to get more organized. When sending an email, just select the email account you wish to use for the particular message from the “From” dropdown menu on the top, and lo, the adressee will only see the chosen email in their incoming message.

It may also happen that you choose or already use mail forwarding from various email accounts. In this case you don’t need to set up the mail fetcher POP3 feature – all you need to do is to point the forwarding route to your new yourusername (if you are using an email provided by the University of Szeged, see the manual here), go to Settings, choose the Accounts tab, and in the “Send mail as” section (the first option) click on “Add another email address you own.” In the pop-up window enter the email address you wish to use, and which has already been set to forward messages to your yourusername account. IEAS Apps will send a verification email to the address, which will miraculously land in your yourusername inbox due to the forwarding feature – then either click on the activation link provided in the email, or copy the verification code into the pop-up window. You’re all set to use the other email from your inbox.

6. What do I need to know about documents, spreadsheets and presentation?

It’s a web-based word processing, spreadsheet and presentation 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.

7. How do I use the Calendar?

IEAS Apps Calendar offers a tool to organize your life in and out of the University. We have one default calendar that shows events for IEAS – faculty and students: public events (with RSVP options), deadlines, announcements, etc.; the faculty and the departments can have their own calendars shared among themselves, but students themselves can organize their social lives via the application, too.

Imagine you are organizing an event. You simply enter the time and venue into the shared calendar, and perhaps invite some people. Responses to invitation will be collected into a list, so you always know who to count on and who turned your invitation down.

By following the events announced in the IEAS Calendar, you’ll never miss an important deadline. All you need to do is to locate “Other Calendars” on the left sidebar of the IEAS Apps Calendar, then find the “Add a coworker’s calendar” form, type admin, and hit enter. Immediately, the IEAS Events calendar appears in your calendar fields, automatically updating every time something new is announced. What’s more, you can even request email or SMS notification for the events: first, go to Calendar settings, choose the Mobile tab, activate your phone by following the instructions. Then click on the downward arrow next to your IEAS Events calendar in the list on the sidebar, choose “Notifications” and tick the appropriate boxes to set the way you want to get notified (by email or SMS, or both).

Tip: you can set notifications to send a daily digest to your email or mobile phone – you’ll automatically get to to-do list for the particular day only. If there’s no event or deadline that day, the IEAS Apps Calendar won’t disturb you.

8. What is Wave? What is it good for?

Wave is Google’s next-generation communication platform. It is perhaps best to imagine an email-chat-file-sharing collaboration tool that shows messages and attachments in real time, so you don’t wait for answers, or refresh your inbox while waiting. You can drag-n-drop images, links, maps, videos or quotes, easily follow long discussions that are threaded to keep the flow of argumentation or questions-answers, and if needed, replay the whole conversation with the click of a button.

It’s best use is in real-time communication, when partners in a wave need to solve a problem quickly, or put together a document to meet an insanely approaching deadline.

9. How are the IEAS Apps services linked together?

You have one username for all services in the IEAS Apps 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.

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

10. I can chat in my email account. Why bother with the Google Talk client?

Free voice calls 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.

11. Can I use my IEAS Apps account as my online identity?

Absolutely. IEAS Apps supports federated login using OpenID, which means that it allows all our users to sign-in to 3rd party websites using their ieas-szeged.hu account, without giving away their credentials. In practice it means that if you wish to use a service on the web that supports Open ID registration and login, all you need to do is to choose the Open ID logo upon your login/registration attempt, and enter “ieas-szeged.hu” (without the quotation marks). Click on sign in, and you will be prompted to allow IEAS Apps to give the 3rd party website some information. If you agree, you’re done, IEAS Apps does the rest for you – you are immediately brought to the service you wanted to use.

The IEAS website is also soon going to support this feature, which will authenticate faculty members to use the Faculty Space, and students to register for thesis uploading forms. More coming soon.

More information on OpenID:

12. Where can I find more information?

We are continuously trying to update this FAQ to provide customized answers for IEAS users. If you do not find the answer to your question here, please visit the official Google Apps Help Center: www.google.com/support/a/users