I use Outlook 2013 to syn with Gmail and I’ve been faced with this annoying pop up every 15 minutes or so.
“Your IMAP server wants to alert you to the following: Message too large. http://support.google.com/bin/answer.py?answer=8770.”
This link takes me to some advice about adding and removing attachments which doesn’t help me to resolve the problem. I came to the conclusion that in my GMail account, I must have had an attachment larger than my Exchange server attachment size limit (which I think is the default 20MB).
I found that I can search GMail for files larger than a certain size, like this… size:20M
or size: 30M
Searching for above 20MB files gave me a long list, so I decided to search above 30MB and I found a single email with a large Word document attached (the attachment was a series of maps that I copied from the Internet to help teach Cub Scouts map reading).
Once I deleted this attachment, I fixed my problem. Now I just need to fix the “Outlook never completes it’s index of GMail” problem and I;ll be happy 🙂
According to the Danone website, “Baby & Me, created by BETC, shows a street full of people rediscovering their inner youth – and dance moves – as their reflections reveal the baby versions of their adult selves.” If you haven’t seen the advert, you should watch “Baby & Me” on YouTube, it’s fantastic; a perfect example of a viral marketing campaign with over 59 million YouTube views. This advert builds on the success of their “Roller Babies” campaign from a few years ago (69 million views). I’ve shown it to my children and my wife and everybody I’ve mentioned it to seems to have seen it. Evian is reaching a mass market with relatively little TV advertising spend.
To capitalise on the success of the advert, Evian has commissioned the production of a “Baby and Me” app for iOS and Android. On the face of it, this looks like a great idea. The application takes a picture of you as an adult and then uses pattern matching to identify over 70 facial features in a database of baby pictures. The application then creates a composite image of you as a baby. This has great potential for social sharing of images and it isn’t hard to see how this could help to ensure that even more people get the “Release the inner you” message from Evian.
There is no doubt that viral media is a great marketing tool and mobile apps are a great way to use peer interaction and socialisation to spread a message quickly. All good news so far from a marketing / PR perspective, but…….
…….There’s always a “BUT” isn’t there?
Evian Error screenshots
The Evian app is sadly disappointing. Anybody who downloads an app that doesn’t work first time is highly likely to delete it and never use it again. Negative publicity from colleagues and friends who can’t use the app will do a great deal to damage any positive marketing messages that the app was intended to create
It is highly likely that the application designers and developers have been forced to work to a difficult schedule to get this application to market. Whilst individual teams may have all tested their application components; it is highly likely that proper end-to-end testing, including testing over relatively slow 3G and Wifi networks has not been done. Performance testing is crucial for applications like this, a poor user experience will result in users abandoning the application and never downloading it again.
So what went wrong?
Whilst performance testing is a well-established profession……
…testers need to evolve.
15 years ago testers needed to understand thick clients and complex client-server apps.
10 years ago, web applications dominated the market and testers skills (and pay rates) started to fall.
5 years ago, Web 2.0 and mobile technologies started to develop and many testers failed to understand the complexity of more complex multi-tier web applications.
Now testers need the ability, skills and tools to test across multiple devices and multiple networks and need a deep understanding of application architecture to ensure application stability, scalability and performance under load.
Many testers don’t have the required skills or testing tools to test complex multi-tier applications across different devices and network topologies. Evian have used big-hitting media companies, BETC Digital and B-Reel, to develop their application…. I bet they’re wishing that they had the application tested properly by an independent testing specialist before this week!
Last year I was doing an OU computing course and one of the modules required the team to work on a virtual software development project. Each of us was assigned a different role in the team and we had to work collaboratively both on and offline.
I’ve always liked using MindMaps because like most humans I don’t think in a straight line. I like the fact that with a mind map I can throw disjointed ideas at a page and put them into some sort of order later on. It’s great for creating a sketchy/work-in-progress outline of a document or presentation allowing you to reorder the content. I’ve used Mindjet and FreeMind in the past but when I want to do collaborative work I tend to use MindMeister.
I’ve used this in the following different ways:
With clients when planning IT projects and creating task lists / high-level project plans.
With the local Cub Scout leader when organising the new “Sixes”.
