Not every Web service has to be completely an online operation. Take as an example Netflix – when they started it wasn't really possible to stream an entire DVD across the Internets and they developed a system to mail DVDs to their customers. Now, of course, they have some very innovative ways to "watch instantly" your videos, including to Ethernet-connected Blu-Ray and Xbox players.
But the combination of on and offline components isn't widely exploited by many businesses, either because they are so enamored by Web 2.0 (or whatever we are calling it this week), or because they lack the offline skill sets or institutional memories to be effective in both camps.
Let's take a look at one service that does a great job in both worlds, called MagCloud.com, which is sponsored by HP. As someone who once ran the editorial operations of several computer magazines that have gone by the wayside (no fault of my own in particular, at least so I like to think), I welcome the effort.
It works this way. Let's say you want to produce a small number of copies of a custom published magazine – say something more than a sales brochure that has actual editorial content. You want to approach this project with the same kind of quality that a regular printed magazine would entail – full color printing, nice graphics and layout, and mailed to potential readers. This is the idea behind their service. You create your magazine just as you would with the usual Adobe tools, upload the digital files to their service, along with the mailing addresses of your readers. HP takes care of printing, proofing, binding, polybagging and postage.
You can get an idea of what is involved by browsing their Web site and seeing some of the magazines that are offered for sale there. I got a copy of "Georgia Speaker" – a magazine that is published by the Atlanta chapter of the National Speakers Association (an organization that I am a member). It was well put together and arrived in the mail in a few days and cost about $5 all told.
What I like about MagCloud is that it combines the best attributes of print-on-demand with online access for searchability, marketing and awareness. The price is reasonable and you can set up any number of custom-published pieces. Obviously, HP Is doing this to tout its printing business, but why not?
When I first heard of MagCloud, I thought the service would email me the PDF that I would then print myself. And I was pleasantly surprised when the magazine arrived in my snail mail a few days later. Then I realized the genius of this service. How much stuff do you get in the mail that you actually look forward to these days? Other than paychecks from my clients and my Netflix DVDs, not a heckuva lot. This can be high impact just because it is something so retro that it stands out.
Now, I don't know if MagCloud has a future, but certainly it can bring some bright spots of hope to some of the 11,000 journalists who lost their jobs last year (according to the Columbia Journalism Review). While that is small change compared to the number of idled GM or US Steel workers, it still means that there is a large talent pool to produce custom-published zines. And if any of you do produce your own custom magazines using the service, please let me know and I will post links to them on my blog.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Four better ways to collaborate than Google Docs
If you are looking for something better than Google Docs to work on a document or a presentation with a colleague, this column is for you. I will touch on four alternatives that are all better solutions and can give you ways to create your work product faster.
I have tried Google Docs in a few different situations, and they have been abject failures for different reasons: either the group of potential collaborators has never worked together before, or is too widely distributed geographically or organizationally to have developed any common work habits. As someone who has written two books with co-authors (along with countless magazine articles that get edited along the way), I can tell you the hardest part about collaboration isn't the technical aspects -- it is the human interactions and developing the various trusted relationships with your co-workers.
The other downside to using Google is that at its heart it still is serial workflow – I write my document and email a link so that you can continue. What we need are tools that can combine the immediacy of Instant Messaging with the viral power of social networks to help a group of content creators to get started to work together.
If your ultimate product is a document, start with the service Etherpad.com. You can bring up a common shared workspace inside your browser and multiple authors can add their comments in a chat window off to the side and compose on screen in real-time. Each author is given their own colored font to keep track of changes, and you can go back to particular versions quite easily. This service is great if you want to work with a writing partner on a proposal, say. Or if you have to assemble a final report from several sources and want all the authors to quickly converge on a series of recommendations.
But that solution is just for text. What about that bane of corporate life, PowerPoint slide decks? Here a service called SlideShare.net has a nifty solution. It goes beyond just sharing your slides by having a layer of social networking on top of things. You can add comments to individual slides, group a series of presentations together (such as all the sessions at a particular conference), add a voice narration track that can be synchronized to the slides, and more. All of this is of course available inside a Web browser. The speaker's notes that accompany each slide is also displayed and indexed by the search engines, which can be a good or bad thing depending on how you use this feature. And you can embed your slides in your blog or broadcast them to your friends on various social networks. The downside is that your builds and transition effects are lost, so if your slides have a lot of these effects, you aren't going to be too happy with the service. It also takes several hours after you have uploaded your files before they are posted to the service.
Moving on beyond slide decks is the service called drop.io for real-time collaboration that is based on an IM-style chat service. You bring up a browser and point to a common URL and off you go. You can drag and drop photos, documents, whatever and they show up in the common workspace, which you can view as a chat stream or a file directory. You can add comments, voice messages, even faxes (remember them?) to your shared workspace. When you have reached a point where you want others to review your work, you can send out a broadcast message to your Facebook or Twitter friends or gather everything up in a Zip file. For collections of files less than 100MB, the service is free.
Speaking of Twitter (isn't everyone these days?), one final service that I will mention here is Yammer.com. If you think of this as a private social network discussion board that combines some of the notification and flexibility of Twitter with that of the traditional BBS's, you got it. You can share files, have a tag cloud and a layer of search on top of everything too.
There are lots of other specialized collaboration tools – Collab.net's free Subversion is useful for tracking software development projects, and Clarizen.com's fee-based project management tool is another one that I haven't tried but seems useful in that area.
The nice thing about all of the services that I mention is that they all have free versions. With drop.io, if you want more room, you can get upgraded for $10 a gigabyte per year or if you want more management for $20 a month plan for 20 GB of storage. Yammer has a paid version if you want a managed private shared space that starts at $1 per person per month. Isn't the Internet a grand experiment in free data processing? Nevertheless, it is great to be able to try something out risk-free. Do let me know of your own suggestions and what has worked and hasn't for your collaborations. And if you want me to come speak to your company about these and other technologies, you can download my slide deck here (it is very much a work in progress) and see if it would be appropriate.
I have tried Google Docs in a few different situations, and they have been abject failures for different reasons: either the group of potential collaborators has never worked together before, or is too widely distributed geographically or organizationally to have developed any common work habits. As someone who has written two books with co-authors (along with countless magazine articles that get edited along the way), I can tell you the hardest part about collaboration isn't the technical aspects -- it is the human interactions and developing the various trusted relationships with your co-workers.
The other downside to using Google is that at its heart it still is serial workflow – I write my document and email a link so that you can continue. What we need are tools that can combine the immediacy of Instant Messaging with the viral power of social networks to help a group of content creators to get started to work together.
If your ultimate product is a document, start with the service Etherpad.com. You can bring up a common shared workspace inside your browser and multiple authors can add their comments in a chat window off to the side and compose on screen in real-time. Each author is given their own colored font to keep track of changes, and you can go back to particular versions quite easily. This service is great if you want to work with a writing partner on a proposal, say. Or if you have to assemble a final report from several sources and want all the authors to quickly converge on a series of recommendations.
But that solution is just for text. What about that bane of corporate life, PowerPoint slide decks? Here a service called SlideShare.net has a nifty solution. It goes beyond just sharing your slides by having a layer of social networking on top of things. You can add comments to individual slides, group a series of presentations together (such as all the sessions at a particular conference), add a voice narration track that can be synchronized to the slides, and more. All of this is of course available inside a Web browser. The speaker's notes that accompany each slide is also displayed and indexed by the search engines, which can be a good or bad thing depending on how you use this feature. And you can embed your slides in your blog or broadcast them to your friends on various social networks. The downside is that your builds and transition effects are lost, so if your slides have a lot of these effects, you aren't going to be too happy with the service. It also takes several hours after you have uploaded your files before they are posted to the service.
Moving on beyond slide decks is the service called drop.io for real-time collaboration that is based on an IM-style chat service. You bring up a browser and point to a common URL and off you go. You can drag and drop photos, documents, whatever and they show up in the common workspace, which you can view as a chat stream or a file directory. You can add comments, voice messages, even faxes (remember them?) to your shared workspace. When you have reached a point where you want others to review your work, you can send out a broadcast message to your Facebook or Twitter friends or gather everything up in a Zip file. For collections of files less than 100MB, the service is free.
Speaking of Twitter (isn't everyone these days?), one final service that I will mention here is Yammer.com. If you think of this as a private social network discussion board that combines some of the notification and flexibility of Twitter with that of the traditional BBS's, you got it. You can share files, have a tag cloud and a layer of search on top of everything too.
There are lots of other specialized collaboration tools – Collab.net's free Subversion is useful for tracking software development projects, and Clarizen.com's fee-based project management tool is another one that I haven't tried but seems useful in that area.
The nice thing about all of the services that I mention is that they all have free versions. With drop.io, if you want more room, you can get upgraded for $10 a gigabyte per year or if you want more management for $20 a month plan for 20 GB of storage. Yammer has a paid version if you want a managed private shared space that starts at $1 per person per month. Isn't the Internet a grand experiment in free data processing? Nevertheless, it is great to be able to try something out risk-free. Do let me know of your own suggestions and what has worked and hasn't for your collaborations. And if you want me to come speak to your company about these and other technologies, you can download my slide deck here (it is very much a work in progress) and see if it would be appropriate.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Slow and steady wins online
While many of us marvel at those Web sites and "viral videos" that take the Internets by storm and quickly gain viewership, I think the sign of truly successful sites are those that more slowly and incrementally gain their fans. The motto for today's essay is that slow and steady will win the online video race. And those sites that are quick to gain attention are also quick to lose it: the longer it takes you to build your followers, the better a chance you've have at keeping them.
Too often we get consumed by playing the numbers game: is traffic for our Web site up from last month? What were the big ticket articles or pages that brought in the most visitors? Did we get anything posted on Slashdot (which has a huge following, and can often spike traffic if articles get the right position)? These aren't the right questions to be asking.
Instead, lengthen your time horizon to the next quarter, and look for efforts that will build interest for more than just the quick hit. Is your site truly useful as a resource and will bring back returning visitors several times over the course of the year? Do you regularly post new content? Are your most popular pages easily accessible from your home page or clearly labeled at the top menu bar? Do you tie in your Web site with social network group postings and with regular (weekly or twice monthly) email blasts that have something of value in them? Do you look at your site logs and understand what they are telling you?
I realize that there are a lot of questions here, more than answers. Too often, Web site operators are easily swayed by the latest trend-let or Search Engine Optimization seminar come-on. It doesn't have to be that way. Here are a couple of examples from my own efforts that you can use to guide your own strategies.
People talk about the power of LinkedIn and other social networks. I have built my own into several hundred people gradually, by adding a few people at a time. Now the whole thing is self-sustaining. And while it seems impressive now when you look at the total members that I can reach, I think it is a much better list because I built them up gradually. I use LinkedIn to find sources for stories that I am working on, or to try to discover new clients from my installed base. After all, these are the people that are most familiar with my work. I also use it as an online resume/reference source, so potential clients can check out what my previous clients have said about me.
The same goes for you, the Web Informant reader. These weekly emails are a great way for me to continue to engage you, because I hopefully send something out of value rather than a marketing blast that is content-free. I hear from many of you that save these missives, or that reply to ones that I wrote months ago, and that is a very potent connection and a great motivation for me to continue to write them.
As many of you know, I began creating my own series of sponsored video screencast product reviews over on WebInformant.tv. So far I have posted 15 videos, and they are slowly gaining viewership on more than a dozen different video sharing and how-to Web sites. While none of them are at the level of the Coke-and-Mentos guys, I am glad to see that day after day and week after week they are getting watched and more importantly, serve as a great resource for enterprise IT managers that are trying to figure out whether they can buy these products.
Another thought: always freely offer something of value on your Web site, even if you are tempted to charge for it. The more people can stop and smell and taste what you have, the more they are going to want to stick around and eventually dive in deeper. Some people suggest that you offer almost everything for free, and then charge them to customize your content. I can't tell you how many Web sites that I visit that still don't do this, and insist on registering you or tracking you or verifying you before you can get inside the front door. You can make money by giving things away for free.
And if you feel like sharing your own thoughts with my audience, please post your comments on my Strominator.com blog.
Too often we get consumed by playing the numbers game: is traffic for our Web site up from last month? What were the big ticket articles or pages that brought in the most visitors? Did we get anything posted on Slashdot (which has a huge following, and can often spike traffic if articles get the right position)? These aren't the right questions to be asking.
Instead, lengthen your time horizon to the next quarter, and look for efforts that will build interest for more than just the quick hit. Is your site truly useful as a resource and will bring back returning visitors several times over the course of the year? Do you regularly post new content? Are your most popular pages easily accessible from your home page or clearly labeled at the top menu bar? Do you tie in your Web site with social network group postings and with regular (weekly or twice monthly) email blasts that have something of value in them? Do you look at your site logs and understand what they are telling you?
I realize that there are a lot of questions here, more than answers. Too often, Web site operators are easily swayed by the latest trend-let or Search Engine Optimization seminar come-on. It doesn't have to be that way. Here are a couple of examples from my own efforts that you can use to guide your own strategies.
People talk about the power of LinkedIn and other social networks. I have built my own into several hundred people gradually, by adding a few people at a time. Now the whole thing is self-sustaining. And while it seems impressive now when you look at the total members that I can reach, I think it is a much better list because I built them up gradually. I use LinkedIn to find sources for stories that I am working on, or to try to discover new clients from my installed base. After all, these are the people that are most familiar with my work. I also use it as an online resume/reference source, so potential clients can check out what my previous clients have said about me.
The same goes for you, the Web Informant reader. These weekly emails are a great way for me to continue to engage you, because I hopefully send something out of value rather than a marketing blast that is content-free. I hear from many of you that save these missives, or that reply to ones that I wrote months ago, and that is a very potent connection and a great motivation for me to continue to write them.
As many of you know, I began creating my own series of sponsored video screencast product reviews over on WebInformant.tv. So far I have posted 15 videos, and they are slowly gaining viewership on more than a dozen different video sharing and how-to Web sites. While none of them are at the level of the Coke-and-Mentos guys, I am glad to see that day after day and week after week they are getting watched and more importantly, serve as a great resource for enterprise IT managers that are trying to figure out whether they can buy these products.
Another thought: always freely offer something of value on your Web site, even if you are tempted to charge for it. The more people can stop and smell and taste what you have, the more they are going to want to stick around and eventually dive in deeper. Some people suggest that you offer almost everything for free, and then charge them to customize your content. I can't tell you how many Web sites that I visit that still don't do this, and insist on registering you or tracking you or verifying you before you can get inside the front door. You can make money by giving things away for free.
And if you feel like sharing your own thoughts with my audience, please post your comments on my Strominator.com blog.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Sidebar conversations are here to stay
My question for you today is this: when is it appropriate to have a sidebar conversation during a conference call or in-person meeting? By sidebar, I meet a parallel Instant Messenger chat session or texting someone or posting something to your Twitter feed. Whatever your tool of choice, you are sharing your thoughts about what is going on in the meeting to other co-workers who are bored/distracted/uninterested with the current speaker.
I am as guilty of this behavior as the next person: back in the day when I had weekly staff meetings, we had various ways to amuse ourselves over IM chats. I remember when the precursor to the Blackberry first arrived on the scene and we would hide them under the table and check our emails – now they are so much smaller and easier to pull out and use. So much easier, that even our elected members of Congress are sending out Tweets and texts from the House floor this week during Obama's address. Color commentary at 140 characters at a time, coming to you from those folks that pass bills that most never read. There is some irony in this situation, somewhere.
And this week, the Billerica Massachusetts selectmen passed a law that prohibits people from texting and emailing during town meetings. I am sure more will follow, maybe even our Congress.
There are professors that prohibit Internet-connected laptops (or at least try to) during their classes. Back when I taught a bunch of high school boys computer networking in a PC-laden classroom lab, I had to routinely unplug their machines' Ethernet cables when their attention wandered to the Internet and the call of more important things, like checking and updating their overnight gaming standings. At least I had a cable to unplug: this was in the era just before universal Wifi coverage.
Call it ADD. Call it multi-tasking. Call it sophomoric or just plain rude. But this behavior is definitely here to stay. And as someone who makes part of my living as a professional speaker, I find this trendlet both disconcerting and yet fascinating. Indeed, at a speech that I gave this week, one of the participants suggested that I should show a live Web link to a Twitter feed so the audience could post their comments on screen, for all in the audience to examine. (This was done last at last year's South By Southwest conference, to mixed results, as I recall.) First I thought it was a good idea. Now I am not so sure.
Remember how when we watched TV back in the olden times there wasn't anything on the screen besides the program? Now we have the ever-present logo, sometimes spinning around with the time and temperature. We have little people that pop up at the bottom of the screen announcing some more "must see TV" that will be broadcast later in the week. We have the "crawl" which used to be used to announce snow or other extreme weather conditions but is its own sidebar conversation for many news shows. And Bloomberg TV has so much going on that I get dizzy when I tune in there trying to track all the various windows of data scrolling by. Even "24" shows multiple windows where each character is doing something to get across its real-time effect. (At least Chloe is back in the current season's episode's to save the day, we can all be thankful even if the underlying technology isn't quite realistic.)
I am not sure where this is going, but it definitely is the brave new world of communications. Tweeting and texting during meetings is probably here to stay, regardless of what rules are put in place to stop them. And we as professional speakers will have a harder time unless we learn to incorporate these things and collaborate with our audiences, rather than competing with them. Of course, if we were more engaging perhaps all the sidebar chatter would come to a stop because people would actually want to listen to our speeches.
I am as guilty of this behavior as the next person: back in the day when I had weekly staff meetings, we had various ways to amuse ourselves over IM chats. I remember when the precursor to the Blackberry first arrived on the scene and we would hide them under the table and check our emails – now they are so much smaller and easier to pull out and use. So much easier, that even our elected members of Congress are sending out Tweets and texts from the House floor this week during Obama's address. Color commentary at 140 characters at a time, coming to you from those folks that pass bills that most never read. There is some irony in this situation, somewhere.
And this week, the Billerica Massachusetts selectmen passed a law that prohibits people from texting and emailing during town meetings. I am sure more will follow, maybe even our Congress.
There are professors that prohibit Internet-connected laptops (or at least try to) during their classes. Back when I taught a bunch of high school boys computer networking in a PC-laden classroom lab, I had to routinely unplug their machines' Ethernet cables when their attention wandered to the Internet and the call of more important things, like checking and updating their overnight gaming standings. At least I had a cable to unplug: this was in the era just before universal Wifi coverage.
Call it ADD. Call it multi-tasking. Call it sophomoric or just plain rude. But this behavior is definitely here to stay. And as someone who makes part of my living as a professional speaker, I find this trendlet both disconcerting and yet fascinating. Indeed, at a speech that I gave this week, one of the participants suggested that I should show a live Web link to a Twitter feed so the audience could post their comments on screen, for all in the audience to examine. (This was done last at last year's South By Southwest conference, to mixed results, as I recall.) First I thought it was a good idea. Now I am not so sure.
Remember how when we watched TV back in the olden times there wasn't anything on the screen besides the program? Now we have the ever-present logo, sometimes spinning around with the time and temperature. We have little people that pop up at the bottom of the screen announcing some more "must see TV" that will be broadcast later in the week. We have the "crawl" which used to be used to announce snow or other extreme weather conditions but is its own sidebar conversation for many news shows. And Bloomberg TV has so much going on that I get dizzy when I tune in there trying to track all the various windows of data scrolling by. Even "24" shows multiple windows where each character is doing something to get across its real-time effect. (At least Chloe is back in the current season's episode's to save the day, we can all be thankful even if the underlying technology isn't quite realistic.)
I am not sure where this is going, but it definitely is the brave new world of communications. Tweeting and texting during meetings is probably here to stay, regardless of what rules are put in place to stop them. And we as professional speakers will have a harder time unless we learn to incorporate these things and collaborate with our audiences, rather than competing with them. Of course, if we were more engaging perhaps all the sidebar chatter would come to a stop because people would actually want to listen to our speeches.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Can collaboration save our economy?
Web Informant TK February 2009: Can collaboration save our economy?
The economic news is depressing, and yet I want to see opportunity where others see looming disaster. And I think one way we can try to make things better is become more productive and do a better job collaborating with each other. Think of it as a no-cost stimulus package that even the Republicans can love.
Remember when the PC was first introduced, everyone thought it was such a great personal productivity tool? Sadly, the more powerful that PCs have become, the harder it is to use them to collaborate. This is because we get used to using them as our personal machines, and most of us don't like sharing our computers, let alone our work products from them.
The primary collaboration tool today is still what it was ten years ago: I send you an email attachment with a Word or Excel file. You make changes and then email the file back for me to look at. This is really serial collaboration, because we alternate working on the same file. While this model is okay for two people, when you have a whole group that is trying to add their thoughts it gets very messy, to say the least. Also, one person can hold up the entire process and then the rest of the group has to wait until that person has finished their revisions. And if we don't agree, we pretty much have to start the process from scratch. A friend of mine is ghost writing a book for two of his bosses. I can't imagine what his editing cycle is going to be like under this model.
It is time to realize that serial email-style collaboration is so last year. Consider these trends:
First, the Internet is now ubiquitous and most of us are comfortable using it to connect to our partners, supplies, customers, and colleagues. It has also made email more powerful, and most of us have become addicted to checking our email several times a day and even during off hours too. Some of us have to check email so frequently that we start to get a bit jittery when we are offline for a few hours, let alone when we want to take a week off on some deserted beach where there isn't any connectivity.
Contrast this with Lotus Notes, which has been around for about 20 years and supposed to be the be-all and end-all collaborative tool, or Microsoft's SharePoint, which is more recent. Both Notes and Sharepoint require everyone to run it, and develop to its own programming interfaces. That seems so quaint and outmoded now. And both are very quirky to install and deploy, which makes them less desirable too.
Second, email is a great notification system and a great way to organize your to-do list. You don't have to use it as the transportation system for sending documents around, though. As an example, you can set up a blog to automatically notify via email when someone posts a comment to a particular page, so people can participate in a discussion thread but don't have to continually return to that page to find out what has been posted.
Third, free or low-cost Internet applications have come of age, such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Trackvia, Tripit, Timedriver, Hourtown and Setmeeting. All of these don't require any software to download, don't have a lot of upfront training or even any dough to use, which means that people can experiment with them and see if they will be suitable for their needs. All of these products can offload some of the tasks that we are used to doing on email and make us more productive in scheduling meetings, sharing work product, and arranging our time. Look for a story from me in the New York Times next month on this topic.
Fourth, instant messaging has become more useful for connecting remote work teams together and can be used as another notification system that is more immediate and more potent in terms of bringing people together. Some firms are beginning to use the built-in IM features of Facebook and Twitter for this purpose too. Again, this takes some load away from looking at your inbox for starting a particular task or trying to get a colleague's attention.
Finally, there are other tools for two-person collaboration that will work better in real time, such as LogMeIn or GoToMyPC, that allow two people to actually see each other's computer screen while they are talking on the phone. My podcasting partner Paul Gillin likes Yuuguu.com, which allows teams of 25 to share the same desktop, no matter if they are on Linux, Mac or Windows.
We still have a long way to go when it comes to collaborating effectively, and I since we are talking about sharing do share your own stories with my audience and post to this entry on strominator.com. I will have more to say on this topic for a keynote speech that I am giving in Philadelphia in April for the American Hardware Manufacturer's Association. If you want me to come talk to your organization, you can send me email, or better yet, just call me on the phone.
The economic news is depressing, and yet I want to see opportunity where others see looming disaster. And I think one way we can try to make things better is become more productive and do a better job collaborating with each other. Think of it as a no-cost stimulus package that even the Republicans can love.
Remember when the PC was first introduced, everyone thought it was such a great personal productivity tool? Sadly, the more powerful that PCs have become, the harder it is to use them to collaborate. This is because we get used to using them as our personal machines, and most of us don't like sharing our computers, let alone our work products from them.
The primary collaboration tool today is still what it was ten years ago: I send you an email attachment with a Word or Excel file. You make changes and then email the file back for me to look at. This is really serial collaboration, because we alternate working on the same file. While this model is okay for two people, when you have a whole group that is trying to add their thoughts it gets very messy, to say the least. Also, one person can hold up the entire process and then the rest of the group has to wait until that person has finished their revisions. And if we don't agree, we pretty much have to start the process from scratch. A friend of mine is ghost writing a book for two of his bosses. I can't imagine what his editing cycle is going to be like under this model.
It is time to realize that serial email-style collaboration is so last year. Consider these trends:
First, the Internet is now ubiquitous and most of us are comfortable using it to connect to our partners, supplies, customers, and colleagues. It has also made email more powerful, and most of us have become addicted to checking our email several times a day and even during off hours too. Some of us have to check email so frequently that we start to get a bit jittery when we are offline for a few hours, let alone when we want to take a week off on some deserted beach where there isn't any connectivity.
Contrast this with Lotus Notes, which has been around for about 20 years and supposed to be the be-all and end-all collaborative tool, or Microsoft's SharePoint, which is more recent. Both Notes and Sharepoint require everyone to run it, and develop to its own programming interfaces. That seems so quaint and outmoded now. And both are very quirky to install and deploy, which makes them less desirable too.
Second, email is a great notification system and a great way to organize your to-do list. You don't have to use it as the transportation system for sending documents around, though. As an example, you can set up a blog to automatically notify via email when someone posts a comment to a particular page, so people can participate in a discussion thread but don't have to continually return to that page to find out what has been posted.
Third, free or low-cost Internet applications have come of age, such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Trackvia, Tripit, Timedriver, Hourtown and Setmeeting. All of these don't require any software to download, don't have a lot of upfront training or even any dough to use, which means that people can experiment with them and see if they will be suitable for their needs. All of these products can offload some of the tasks that we are used to doing on email and make us more productive in scheduling meetings, sharing work product, and arranging our time. Look for a story from me in the New York Times next month on this topic.
Fourth, instant messaging has become more useful for connecting remote work teams together and can be used as another notification system that is more immediate and more potent in terms of bringing people together. Some firms are beginning to use the built-in IM features of Facebook and Twitter for this purpose too. Again, this takes some load away from looking at your inbox for starting a particular task or trying to get a colleague's attention.
Finally, there are other tools for two-person collaboration that will work better in real time, such as LogMeIn or GoToMyPC, that allow two people to actually see each other's computer screen while they are talking on the phone. My podcasting partner Paul Gillin likes Yuuguu.com, which allows teams of 25 to share the same desktop, no matter if they are on Linux, Mac or Windows.
We still have a long way to go when it comes to collaborating effectively, and I since we are talking about sharing do share your own stories with my audience and post to this entry on strominator.com. I will have more to say on this topic for a keynote speech that I am giving in Philadelphia in April for the American Hardware Manufacturer's Association. If you want me to come talk to your organization, you can send me email, or better yet, just call me on the phone.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
The shoemaker's children
This week I seem to be surrounded by dysfunctional electronics, and I
am not a happy camper. Or maybe they just are attracted to me, or I to
them.
My oven is on its third electronic control panel in as many months. It
has very fancy touch-pad controls, and when we first got it everything
on the panel worked with the sole exception of the on/off switch. And
the fact that it couldn't get beyond 290 degrees — it was a very
expensive crock pot. Cooking the turkey for Thanksgiving took the
better part of the day. But perhaps the third time will be the charm.
Then my stepson needed help with getting his Xbox connected on his
wireless network. I had done him no favors by setting up his wireless
router to use WPA2, which is the one security protocol that doesn't
work with the Xbox wireless adapter. That was luckily quick work to
downgrade him to just regular WPA. Why can't Microsoft support a
protocol that is several years old on its equipment is a mystery to
me.
How about my home laptop, which for some odd reason won't keep its
batteries charged? I guess it is a flaky motherboard power connection,
so the laptop needs to be plugged into the wall all the time. That is
annoying to say the least, but then it is a aging Dell that is due for
replacement, so maybe this a sign. Of course, finding something that
runs XP is an exercise in patience these days.
Speaking of Dell, I was looking for an inexpensive machine that I
could stuff with oodles of RAM to run in my lab. You would think with
all of the machines that they sell that it would be easy to find out
what the maximum amount of memory you could install in one of the
desktops would be. Not so easy to do on their Web site. So I took the
unusual step of calling them and that wasn't much better. I could
order a PC with a 64-bit Windows OS and that was the trick to boost
the RAM on the order, but a 64-bit OS is almost as much trouble as
Vista. I want a machine that will actually run my applications, thank
you very much. When I went into the Dell Outlet store to search for
used PCs, there was one yesterday that had 8GB for sale.
And I was excited to hear about the latest crop of devices that will
accept streaming video from Netflix, including a Samsung Blu-Ray video
player. A friend has been having a lot of fun using his Xbox and
streaming videos to it (you need to have both subscriptions to Netflix
and Xbox Live services though to do this). Trouble is, I bought the
cheaper model Samsung that doesn't do the streaming, even though it
has an Ethernet jack and runs Windows CE and can be upgraded across
the Internet. Another friend has the right model and was singing all
of its virtues and how wonderful his streaming videos were. Too bad
for me. Now I have one more computing device that can get infected,
require periodic care and feeding, and is already obsolete within a
few months of its purchase. I sure know how to pick 'em. At least I
haven't had to replace the front panel and the on/off switch is still
working. But it sure throws off a lot of heat, I guess from all the
graphics processing firepower inside.
At least my iPhone is running without any troubles, knock on formica.
I think I only have had to reboot it maybe 3 times in the past six
months. The fact that I used "only" in that sentence is a sad
testimonial to the state of my electronic life. They say the
shoemakers' children go barefoot. I would settle for a device that
would just operate as intended.
am not a happy camper. Or maybe they just are attracted to me, or I to
them.
My oven is on its third electronic control panel in as many months. It
has very fancy touch-pad controls, and when we first got it everything
on the panel worked with the sole exception of the on/off switch. And
the fact that it couldn't get beyond 290 degrees — it was a very
expensive crock pot. Cooking the turkey for Thanksgiving took the
better part of the day. But perhaps the third time will be the charm.
Then my stepson needed help with getting his Xbox connected on his
wireless network. I had done him no favors by setting up his wireless
router to use WPA2, which is the one security protocol that doesn't
work with the Xbox wireless adapter. That was luckily quick work to
downgrade him to just regular WPA. Why can't Microsoft support a
protocol that is several years old on its equipment is a mystery to
me.
How about my home laptop, which for some odd reason won't keep its
batteries charged? I guess it is a flaky motherboard power connection,
so the laptop needs to be plugged into the wall all the time. That is
annoying to say the least, but then it is a aging Dell that is due for
replacement, so maybe this a sign. Of course, finding something that
runs XP is an exercise in patience these days.
Speaking of Dell, I was looking for an inexpensive machine that I
could stuff with oodles of RAM to run in my lab. You would think with
all of the machines that they sell that it would be easy to find out
what the maximum amount of memory you could install in one of the
desktops would be. Not so easy to do on their Web site. So I took the
unusual step of calling them and that wasn't much better. I could
order a PC with a 64-bit Windows OS and that was the trick to boost
the RAM on the order, but a 64-bit OS is almost as much trouble as
Vista. I want a machine that will actually run my applications, thank
you very much. When I went into the Dell Outlet store to search for
used PCs, there was one yesterday that had 8GB for sale.
And I was excited to hear about the latest crop of devices that will
accept streaming video from Netflix, including a Samsung Blu-Ray video
player. A friend has been having a lot of fun using his Xbox and
streaming videos to it (you need to have both subscriptions to Netflix
and Xbox Live services though to do this). Trouble is, I bought the
cheaper model Samsung that doesn't do the streaming, even though it
has an Ethernet jack and runs Windows CE and can be upgraded across
the Internet. Another friend has the right model and was singing all
of its virtues and how wonderful his streaming videos were. Too bad
for me. Now I have one more computing device that can get infected,
require periodic care and feeding, and is already obsolete within a
few months of its purchase. I sure know how to pick 'em. At least I
haven't had to replace the front panel and the on/off switch is still
working. But it sure throws off a lot of heat, I guess from all the
graphics processing firepower inside.
At least my iPhone is running without any troubles, knock on formica.
I think I only have had to reboot it maybe 3 times in the past six
months. The fact that I used "only" in that sentence is a sad
testimonial to the state of my electronic life. They say the
shoemakers' children go barefoot. I would settle for a device that
would just operate as intended.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
My network stimulus package
With all the talk of billions for this program or that in Washington, I thought I would put together my own stimulus package that can help your network run smoother. I don't know whether $10 billion to buy steel (domestic preferred) for new bridges or $9 billion to put up new rural DSL lines will really be effective (my initial reaction is dubious), but the idea of spending lots of money quickly by our Congress is a scary one. And despite serving on my local school board several years, I am not qualified to run any cabinet department or national office (I have dutifully and fully paid my income taxes and don't have any dark family embarrassments). But I think I can offer a few ideas for you. So here are a few suggestions that won't cost (much) dough and could save your own bacon if you are trying to impress the boss that your name doesn't belong on the cut list quite yet.
First off, do you actually know what kind of traffic is running on your network? Have you looked at your top applications? You would be surprised. At an event that I attended yesterday sponsored by Blue Coat, they talked about how when they did these assessments they always found ten times the number of applications that most IT admins thought they were supporting. That is a factor of ten. The best story was a company that found out that one of its most popular mission critical apps was a home-grown one running on a box under someone's desk. I am sure this isn't unique, or even rare. It doesn't matter what fancy tool you use to do this apps census, and there are many vendors besides Blue Coat who would gladly come in and do one for you (in the hopes that you will eventually buy their gear). But the more that you know, the more you fine tune your network and reduce the traffic from the apps that aren't business-related.
Second, have you looked at your latency lately? Has someone along the way added a few new router hops somewhere that you didn't know about? I am amazed that we are still talking about a concept that is decades old and should be better understood. Latency improvements are the best bang for your buck short of hiring a DC lobbyist to get some of that earmark money. And you don't have to wait for any Congressional action either.
Third, how many people still have admin rights to their own desktop PCs? This makes it impossible to manage these machines, and allows users to install their own apps. Granted, it may be politically difficult to change this policy now, but hey, change is in the air and you might as well start somewhere.
Next, have you looked at your user accounts lately and seen if anyone that you have laid off is still using your network? You would be surprised at how often this happens. At one hospital that I visited, the IT manager told me that an employee who was laid off went home and started using his girlfriend's login credentials at night. They caught it because the girlfriend was still logged in at the same time at work. And the number of people that I talk to that don't have regular password change policies, or have the same password for all of their critical servers, is amazingly high. Take the time to get this set up properly. Given the number of layoffs these days, this is probably the biggest thing that you can do to fix your security loopholes that doesn't even cost you a dime.
I will have lots of other suggestions, if you are interested; check out my article in next week's Information Security magazine. I will post a link to it on my Strominator.com blog when it goes live. In the meantime, you can post your own network stimulus ideas on my blog if you are feeling a need to share them.
First off, do you actually know what kind of traffic is running on your network? Have you looked at your top applications? You would be surprised. At an event that I attended yesterday sponsored by Blue Coat, they talked about how when they did these assessments they always found ten times the number of applications that most IT admins thought they were supporting. That is a factor of ten. The best story was a company that found out that one of its most popular mission critical apps was a home-grown one running on a box under someone's desk. I am sure this isn't unique, or even rare. It doesn't matter what fancy tool you use to do this apps census, and there are many vendors besides Blue Coat who would gladly come in and do one for you (in the hopes that you will eventually buy their gear). But the more that you know, the more you fine tune your network and reduce the traffic from the apps that aren't business-related.
Second, have you looked at your latency lately? Has someone along the way added a few new router hops somewhere that you didn't know about? I am amazed that we are still talking about a concept that is decades old and should be better understood. Latency improvements are the best bang for your buck short of hiring a DC lobbyist to get some of that earmark money. And you don't have to wait for any Congressional action either.
Third, how many people still have admin rights to their own desktop PCs? This makes it impossible to manage these machines, and allows users to install their own apps. Granted, it may be politically difficult to change this policy now, but hey, change is in the air and you might as well start somewhere.
Next, have you looked at your user accounts lately and seen if anyone that you have laid off is still using your network? You would be surprised at how often this happens. At one hospital that I visited, the IT manager told me that an employee who was laid off went home and started using his girlfriend's login credentials at night. They caught it because the girlfriend was still logged in at the same time at work. And the number of people that I talk to that don't have regular password change policies, or have the same password for all of their critical servers, is amazingly high. Take the time to get this set up properly. Given the number of layoffs these days, this is probably the biggest thing that you can do to fix your security loopholes that doesn't even cost you a dime.
I will have lots of other suggestions, if you are interested; check out my article in next week's Information Security magazine. I will post a link to it on my Strominator.com blog when it goes live. In the meantime, you can post your own network stimulus ideas on my blog if you are feeling a need to share them.
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About Me
- David Strom
- David Strom has looked at hundreds of computer products over a more than 20 year career in IT and computer journalism. He was the founding editor-in-chief of Network Computing magazine, and now writes for Baseline, Information Security, Tom's Hardware, and the New York Times.