Sometimes what a new idea needs is catchy terminology.

GenOps: An Information Technology philosophy that stresses collaboration between creative departments or design teams and Information Technology (IT) professionals.

The name is derived from “gen”, a Greek root meaning “born” or “to become” and “Ops”, from “Operations”. A mindset that fully supports the birth of ideas.

An IT Department following the GenOps philosophy works with and is empowered by a management team which fully understands that creative output is the primary currency of the business. The IT Department fully supports and enables creativity from an operational standpoint, then determines how to meet criteria for compliance, security, and a dependable infrastructure.

GenOps is contrasted with siloed IT operations, which primarily exist to make their own operations easier, having lost touch with the mission of IT within a creative or innovative business.

The goal of this series is to prevent – once and for all – e-mail misery and woe. Your e-mail experience will be vastly better when you understand of the type of e-mail server you have (“POP” or “IMAP”) and how it is designed to behave.

In “A Simplified Overview of POP and IMAP, Part I” we covered IN BOXES for each type of e-mail server and explained various e-mail activities in POP. We then realized that with more than one device, POP e-mail is about as fun as road rash. In this post, we’ll find out why IMAP makes most things better.

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In IMAP, all your e-mail activity takes place on your e-mail server. Receiving, composing, replying, sending, deleting, and managing e-mail – it all happens there. This is your HUB. Multiple devices? No problem. Each device connects to this hub and remotely interacts with it.

ANOTHER MAJOR CONCEPT – INTELLIGENT, TWO-WAY COMMUNICATION
IMAP’s remote interaction is made possible by continuous, intelligent communication between your devices and the IMAP server. It’s not entirely fair to say that POP is stupid. It simply has a bad job at a notoriously cheap company. POP does at little as possible.

With POP, gruel gets slopped on your tray, and God forbid, you look that fellow prisoner/cafeteria worker in the eye or ask for anything else.

With IMAP, you are in a fancy-pants restaurant, with a server just outside your private dining room, always there to do your bidding. Except without all the shameless “suggestive selling”.

(No, I haven’t done time. Unless you count the time I was detained at the East German border. But I digress…)

COMPOSING OR REPLYING, THEN SENDING e-mail WITH IMAP
When you compose or reply to an e-mail in IMAP, you create a “Draft”, which is saved to your DRAFTS folder (on the server). When you send the e-mail, the draft e-mail, now final, is moved to your SENT folder (on the server). The beauty of IMAP is that this happens across multiple devices. Unable to finish composing a reply on your smartphone? Just save it, then finish it on your computer later. Do you need to look at an e-mail you sent? In POP, you can only do this on the device from which you sent it. You can read “Sent” e-mail from any device in IMAP. (Some more lightbulbs may be illuminating at this point.)

METADATA – ANOTHER BRILLIANT FEATURE OF IMAP
An important aspect of IMAP’s intelligence is its support for metadata (called “flags”); data about your e-mail. Has your e-mail has been read yet? Has it been replied to or forwarded yet? We rely on this information constantly. In addition, IMAP flags allow us to mark e-mail as “Urgent”, and to set different colors for the flags. As with everything IMAP, this information carries across multiple devices. (POP users, are you feeling left behind yet?)

DELETING AND MAINTAINING ORDER WITH IMAP
If you want to maintain some order, you have many choices with IMAP. You can “delete”, which moves an e-mail message to a TRASH folder (which may or may not be on the server – your choice). You can create a new folder on your computer and then move e-mail from your IN BOX to that FOLDER. You can also create a new folder on your IMAP server and then move e-mail from your IN BOX to that FOLDER. This can be handy if you need to store an e-mail and have it available on your smartphone. (Especially if you are an Inbox Zero person.) Boarding passes, movie tickets, event admissions, directions, lists and important receipts are all items I’ve needed in various situations, and for which I’ve been prepared.

Question: What happens if I am offline and cannot connect to my IMAP server?

Answer: Just like with POP, you will be unable to get new e-mail.

Question: What happens with my existing In Box, Sent, Drafts, etc. if I am offline and cannot connect to my IMAP server?

Answer: Excellent question! Your e-mail application keeps copies of all of these in a “cache”. Smart, huh?

Question: Did you answer a question with a question again?

Answer: Yes, but it’s a rhetorical question. Again.

Question: Why did you say IMAP makes most things better, and not everything?

Answer: As a consultant, it is my job to help folks make smart choices, and to do that, I must point out the pros and cons. I mentioned earlier in this post that IMAP offers continuous, intelligent communication between your devices and the server. Well, this requires some care and feeding – which we’ll cover in a future blog post.

The goal of this series is to prevent – once and for all – e-mail misery and woe. Your e-mail experience will be vastly better when you understand of the type of e-mail server you have (“POP” or “IMAP”) and how it is designed to behave.

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E-mail messages are not sent from computer to computer. They are sent from one person’s computer to an e-mail server. That e-mail server sends the message to the recipient’s e-mail server. Then the recipient receives the e-mail.

So all of your e-mail is first sent to your e-mail provider’s server, which you can think of as your e-mail server.

E-MAIL SERVER AND IN BOXES
E-mail servers come in two flavors. The first is “POP”. The second is “IMAP”.

(Want to know what “POP” and “IMAP” stand for? Who cares? It doesn’t matter. Seriously.)

A POP e-mail server is a temporary place for e-mail to be stored. When you are at your computer and receive a new e-mail message, that message downloads to your computer’s IN BOX, which is it’s permanent storage place.

In contrast, an IMAP e-mail server itself is designed to be the permanent place to keep all of your e-mail. Your IN BOX is on the e-mail server. When you are at your computer and get a new e-mail message, you are merely looking at your IN BOX (which is on your e-mail server).

So to review the differences,

• with POP, your e-mail server is a temporary place for e-mail
• with IMAP, your e-mail server is the permanent place for your e-mail
• with POP, your IN BOX is on your computer
• with IMAP, your IN BOX is on your e-mail server (aka in the cloud)

THE CONCEPT OF A HUB
Before we continue, let’s think for a moment about all of our e-mail activities; receiving, composing, replying, sending, deleting, and managing.

In POP, the hub of all these activities is your computer. In IMAP, the hub of all these activities is your e-mail server. (Some lightbulbs may be illuminating at this point.)

So let’s review these activities for POP.

COMPOSING OR REPLYING, THEN SENDING E-MAIL WITH POP.
When you compose or reply to an e-mail in POP, you create a “Draft”, which is saved to your DRAFTS folder. When you send the e-mail, the draft e-mail, now final, is moved to your SENT folder.

DELETING AND MAINTAINING ORDER WITH POP.
If you are like most people, you have hundreds or thousands of e-mails in your IN BOX. If you want to maintain some order, you have two choices. You can “delete”, which moves an e-mail message to a TRASH folder. You can also create a new folder and then move e-mail from your IN BOX to a FOLDER.

Question: Wait – so deleted mail doesn’t actually delete? It merely moves to the TRASH?

Answer: YES.

Question: Then what?

Answer: It stays in the TRASH for an amount of time determined by your settings. It can stay there permanently, or you can have it delete permanently after an amount of time you determine. This permanent deletion is sometimes called “purging” or “emptying the TRASH”.

OK, that pretty much covers things. Check back later when we explain composing, sending and  organizing with IMAP.

Question: Wait! What if I have POP with two computers? Or a smartphone? And/or a tablet?

Answer: Well, now you have multiple hubs. And each one is completely independent of the others.

Stop. Re-read that. Make sure it sinks in.

If your e-mail is a mess, this is the most likely reason that your e-mail is a mess.

With multiple hubs, you have downloaded mail from your e-mail server to multiple IN BOXES on multiple devices. You now have multiple SENT folders; one on each device. You now have multiple DRAFTS folders; again, one on each device. You now have multiple TRASH folders; one on each device. And if you created a folder on your computer to organize your mail, that folder is only on that computer and cannot be accessed by other devices.

Question: Umm… So why does POP even exist?

Answer: So service providers such as Verizon, Comcast, godaddy, and Network Solutions can say that they offer “free” e-mail hosting. It’s cheap and most people don’t know any better. Isn’t that thoughtful of them?

Question: Did you just answer a question with a question?

Answer: Yes, but it’s a snarky, rhetorical question.

We’ll cover IMAP in a future blog post. Spoiler alert: IMAP is MUCH better.

[Click HERE for A Simplified Overview of POP and IMAP, Part II]

Gravity is simply part of life on this planet. There’s no point in fighting it. Efforts to eliminate it are wasteful and create side effects worse than the “problem” of gravity itself. So rather than fighting it, we simply design for it. Furniture, clothing, coffee mugs, elevators, writing utensils – all account for gravity. In fact, they do such a great job that we forget about gravity until something (such as this blog post) brings it to the foreground.

Businesses too, have forces that closely parallel with the forces of gravity. For the sake of discussion, we’ll call them “resistance”.

Resistance in business has many forms. It could be financial, such as taxes and regulations. It could be human, such as gossip or a tendency for self-destructive behavior. It could be physical, such as wear and tear on furniture and equipment. It could be the pace of new knowledge and new technology, making recent purchases and skills obsolete.

Resistance must be managed and counteracted every day, or like a jet aircraft without fuel, a business will crash. Copious amounts of energy and attention must be continuously added, or a downward spiral will occur.

Just this morning, Seth Godin wrote a great post, explaining the danger of downward spirals and our tendency to dismiss them as part of life. His advice?

The answer isn’t to look for the swift and certain solution to the long-term problem. The solution is to replace the down cycle with the up cycle. …to become aware of the down cycle… (then) …understand what triggers it and then learn to use that trigger to initiate a different cycle.

(Emphasis mine.)

Replacing a downward cycle with an “Up” or virtuous cycle is not a simple matter; yet it is a necessary part of business success. Making such a transition often involves counter-intuitive thinking. Seth Godin offers these examples:

The fish restaurant that, as sales go down, borrows money to buy ever fresher fish instead of cutting corners that will lead nowhere good. Or the ad agency that follows a client loss not with layoffs, but with hiring of even better creative staff.

Like gravity, resistance is simply part of running a business. We must design for it, counteract it, and be in a state constant readiness as grenades are hurled our way.

The most hideous danger of resistance is the numbing effect of its constant presence.

This story from DesignTaxi tragically exemplifies the differences between a pro and an amateur.

A woman, who I am sure had only the best intentions, took it upon herself to restore a deteriorated painting in a nearby Spanish church. Here is the result:

Before and after. It takes a trained eye to notice the subtle differences.

With only a slight exaggeration, this parallels some of the DIY technology I’ve seen at many Small Businesses. It’s a classic case of a helpful team member not knowing how little he knows and passing that off as “working” to a business owner who knows even less.

Setting something up and hoping that it’s right isn’t good enough. Technology that “works” isn’t  good enough. When business is at stake, we need higher standards and expert insight. There is a world of difference between familiarity and mastery.

Our re-brand as ka-POW-er! is about as final as it can get, now that we’ve closed out our old business checking account. We’d like to notify everyone on a few updates since our original re-brand post from last February.

You may have already noticed that website traffic and e-Mail sent to fusion-it.biz are now re-directed to ka-pow-er.com. We kindly ask that you update your address book if you haven’t yet.

We now accept Debit (or Credit) Cards via Square. This is important as some of our new services are either pre-paid or COD.

We continue to migrate away from hourly pricing, a practice, we feel, undermines trust and collaboration. In addition to bidding projects with flat, all-inclusive fees, we introduced Effective Creativity Coaching  and Creative Actualization Programs. Both are designed to focus IT spending toward making your business more effective. This way, I.T. is truly an investment.

We are finally getting serious about e-Mail Newsletters, which are a great way to send timely information about technology, events, inspirational links and new service offerings. Use the orange sign-up in the sidebar to receive our “Monthly BOOST!” Newsletter.

We continue to be excited about our new direction, yet we are even more excited about making your creative businesses more effective.

In an earlier post today, The Future of the Mac Pro (and Does Apple Still Care?), I refrained from including a supposed e-mail from Tim Cook, which was posted to a Mac rumor site (which will not be named on the pages of my Blog).

Apple has in the meantime confirmed to Macworld that the e-mail, a reply to a man named Franz, is indeed from Tim Cook. This is awesome news.

Macworld has also posted the e-mail in its entirety. It reads:

Franz,

Thanks for your email. Our Pro customers like you are really important to us. Although we didn’t have a chance to talk about a new Mac Pro at today’s event, don’t worry as we’re working on something really great for later next year. We also updated the current model today.

We’ve been continuing to update Final Cut Pro X with revolutionary pro features like industry leading multi-cam support and we just updated Aperture with incredible new image adjustment features.

We also announced a MacBook Pro with a Retina Display that is a great solution for many pros.

Tim

So a new Mac, designed for professionals, is indeed in the works for 2013. Cook seems to be implying that it will not be a Mac Pro – at least in the same form factor we’ve seen for the past ten years. But honestly, who cares what form it takes as long as Apple still values the needs of professional users.

…And Does Apple Still Care?

While I’ve heard stories of people running Final Cut Pro on MacBook Pros and iMacs (and horror stories of people running it on Mac Minis), the true professional choice is the Mac Pro tower. Even “Early 2008″ Mac Pros perform as well as the fastest iMacs and MacBook Pros (as of May 2012) and no other Mac offers so many configuration or upgrade options.

Until yesterday, the Mac Pro hadn’t seen an update since 2010. And that update was a huge disappointment.

The two-year wait had led many to claim that the Mac Pro was going to be discontinued. Others have further claimed that Apple no longer cares about the Professional market. Was yesterday’s “half-assed” update definitive proof that Apple is going to kill the Mac Pro?

I can usually see Apple’s reasoning behind its most controversial decisions; still, even I had serious concerns.

Now that we’ve all had the benefit of a night’s rest let’s unpack this a bit. The three primary issues regarding the updates are:

• The lack of Thunderbolt, ”the fastest, most versatile I/O ever“.
• The lack of USB 3.0
• The lack of Intel’s Xeon E5 processor

Thunderbolt
Apple’s MacBook Pro laptops have had Thunderbolt connectivity since February 2011 and in the meantime, Thunderbolt has found its way to Apple’s consumer-oriented iMacs and Mac Minis. So how could Apple’s only Professional desktop workstation lack these features?

Seth’s Blog is prolific and consistently good, though every once in a while a post resonates with me so much, I feel chills up my neck. Today’s post, Organized Bravery, is one of those. (Go read it. It’s short.)

The part that resonates with me most is this:

During times of change, the only organizations that thrive are those that are eager to interact and change as well.

The ones who take risks, thrive. This means allowing employees to take risks. Being human. Allowing mistakes. Cleaning up & making things right. And above all, making an impact in the lives of our team members, clients, and vendors. Not merely surviving. Thriving.

That’s what I want my business to do. You too?

It took a moment for the meaning of that phrase to sink in when I first heard it. I must have had a puzzled look on my face. “Ain’t no better than ‘works’”, he repeated. “Robert” explained that it was an expression from his home state, Mississippi.

I’m sure his words were meant to be proverbial – a truth made simple – yet every cell in my body resisted his “wisdom”. The context was that given the minimum system requirements, professional editing software would work; and it doesn’t get any better than that. I immediately thought, “of course it gets better than that!”

To be fair, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of teenagers in the rural South. We are rebuilding an old clunker with our friends - our sole chance to see the Saturday matinee – and the thing actual starts. We’d be proud of ourselves and pretty darn excited to say the least.

It seems many entrepreneurs approach technology in this same manner. In the exuberance of starting a new business, they run to the Apple Store or Best Buy, and purchase whatever the sales personnel recommend. And it “works” (as far as they can tell). “Don’t fix what ain’t broke!”

Yes, admittedly, a clunker will get you from point “A” to point “B” (much of the time). But you would risk your life if you were to take it on the highway and you certainly could not depend on it to get you to a job every day.

In a business setting, “Ain’t no better than ‘works’” is a dangerous LIE.

We are professionals; we have higher standards. Our teams depend on us. Our clients depend on us. Our loved ones depend on us to do a great job for our clients. We need to have higher expectations for our technology, too.

Technology that “works” isn’t  good enough. We need “dependable”. We need “robust”. We need “high-performance”. We need “agile”. We need “secure”. We shouldn’t stake our businesses on “works”.

Our teams, and ultimately our clients, deserve better than a jalopy. They need a high-performance, well-maintained SUV, with a spare tire, a jack, an emergency kit and AAA road service.

Business isn’t a joy ride. It’s a race where only finishers win.