My Workspace
Tuesday 26th, June 2007
Blackberry 4 days on.26/06/2007 05:30 PMLocation : Office
Well I can't say it has been easy but I am very happy with the Blackberry device. Installation of the Blackberry Enterprise Server was fairly easy and configuring it and testing was pretty straight forward as well.
The catch came when I came to activate my Blackberry Pearl! Basically I spent between last Friday until early today trying and trying.........with no luck. The main problem (that I now know) was the fact that when I got the phone from Telstra they enabled the Blackberry Internet Services for my phone number. Alas what I actually needed was Blackberry Enterprise Services. They did not think I was going to use a Blackberry Enterprise Server and hence they enabled BIS which I now understand to be more for a consumer type service that people want to connect to a pop or imap type email account. After a weekend of frustration I finally called them this morning and asked if they had enabled the phone correctly to use BES and off course they hadn't. They then said they would change my account to use BES and within 2 minutes my phone was talking directly to our Blackberry Enterprise Server and pulling down my email, calendar, tasks, and address book. So lesson is if you want to use Blackberry Enterprise Server make sure your provider enables your phone account correctly and you will save a whole lot of hassle.
Other lesson learnt was that initially I have Notes 8 Beta 3 installed and it seems as thought the Blackberry Desktop Software does not like it. I had to re-install Notes 7.0.2 to get it working and once I had activated the phone I was able to go back to Notes 8.
Things I like:
- It is just seemless. Emails & Address book synching without having to even think about it.
- You can do live Address book look ups over the air to your Domino Directory. (I am going to try and see if I can get this connected to our CRM BusinessWorks.
- The calendar is very intuitive. On most smart phones I have never liked the calendars but using the scrolling capabilities of the Pearl is very easy particularly on the 1 week view of the calendar.
- The battery life seems to be great. I connected a bluetooth headset on friday and ran it for 4 days (with fairly heavy use as I was still trying to get it connected) and it didn't need a recharge. On my old phone (O2 Atom) Bluetooth would drain the battery within a day.
Things I am not sure about:
- I am not convinced that I like the 2 letters to a key qwerty keyboard. While it does work well and I would have been happy with it in the past, now that I see how great the email etc is I am sure I will be using it heaps more. So I am going to try out the Blackberry 8800 tomorrow to see if the full qwerty keyboard is worth having a slightly larger device for.
Next up I want to see if I can get Sametime going via the BES server and then I need to figure out what is involved with Synching other Notes databases.
In summary if the ph account had been enabled for BES correctly in the first place I think this would have been a very easy process. For a new Blackberry user I can now understand why people rave. While products like Commontime are excellent as well I think the intuitiveness and seemless synching of the Blackberry is hard to beat. A few years ago the cost was just prohibitive for our business but now it is very reasonable. Already I have a couple of other ISW'ers suggesting they might get one too!
Technorati: Blackberry Pearl Lotus Domino
(10)
The catch came when I came to activate my Blackberry Pearl! Basically I spent between last Friday until early today trying and trying.........with no luck. The main problem (that I now know) was the fact that when I got the phone from Telstra they enabled the Blackberry Internet Services for my phone number. Alas what I actually needed was Blackberry Enterprise Services. They did not think I was going to use a Blackberry Enterprise Server and hence they enabled BIS which I now understand to be more for a consumer type service that people want to connect to a pop or imap type email account. After a weekend of frustration I finally called them this morning and asked if they had enabled the phone correctly to use BES and off course they hadn't. They then said they would change my account to use BES and within 2 minutes my phone was talking directly to our Blackberry Enterprise Server and pulling down my email, calendar, tasks, and address book. So lesson is if you want to use Blackberry Enterprise Server make sure your provider enables your phone account correctly and you will save a whole lot of hassle.
Other lesson learnt was that initially I have Notes 8 Beta 3 installed and it seems as thought the Blackberry Desktop Software does not like it. I had to re-install Notes 7.0.2 to get it working and once I had activated the phone I was able to go back to Notes 8.
Things I like:
- It is just seemless. Emails & Address book synching without having to even think about it.
- You can do live Address book look ups over the air to your Domino Directory. (I am going to try and see if I can get this connected to our CRM BusinessWorks.
- The calendar is very intuitive. On most smart phones I have never liked the calendars but using the scrolling capabilities of the Pearl is very easy particularly on the 1 week view of the calendar.
- The battery life seems to be great. I connected a bluetooth headset on friday and ran it for 4 days (with fairly heavy use as I was still trying to get it connected) and it didn't need a recharge. On my old phone (O2 Atom) Bluetooth would drain the battery within a day.
Things I am not sure about:
- I am not convinced that I like the 2 letters to a key qwerty keyboard. While it does work well and I would have been happy with it in the past, now that I see how great the email etc is I am sure I will be using it heaps more. So I am going to try out the Blackberry 8800 tomorrow to see if the full qwerty keyboard is worth having a slightly larger device for.
Next up I want to see if I can get Sametime going via the BES server and then I need to figure out what is involved with Synching other Notes databases.
In summary if the ph account had been enabled for BES correctly in the first place I think this would have been a very easy process. For a new Blackberry user I can now understand why people rave. While products like Commontime are excellent as well I think the intuitiveness and seemless synching of the Blackberry is hard to beat. A few years ago the cost was just prohibitive for our business but now it is very reasonable. Already I have a couple of other ISW'ers suggesting they might get one too!
Technorati: Blackberry Pearl Lotus Domino
(10)
Monday 5th, February 2007
You have to love that out of the box experience!05/02/2007 04:52 PMLocation : Office
Well I received a brand new IBM/Lenovo R61p laptop the other day and it is just great.
2 Ghz Core 2 Duo Processor with 2 GB of RAM (upgradable to 4GB), 100 GB, 15.4 Inch wide screen etc etc. All up it is a very nice machine. The out of the box experience has been very smooth. Rather than clutter the machine with software that isn't required IBM/Lenovo are really good at keeping it to a limited number of useful applications within the ThinkVantage range of tools. As a result there was no need to reformat the machine and rebuild it without the rubbish. The only item that isn't really essential that came installed is Google Desktop. I havn't used it before but I am going to leave it and see if it is useful. The other item that seems handy is DiskKeeper lite which seems to work well for defragging the machine however to be really useful I may purchase the upgrade to the Pro version so it can run on a schedule in the background.
I spent a day or so migrating across all of my applications which I have listed here:
I think that is about it. All up the new machine is great and I am very pleased with the performance etc. The main application that I noticed a difference with was Groove. I had all but given up on Groove because it seemed to hog a lot of resources however I thought I would try again. I was pleased to see that i hardly noticed when it started and it happily runs in the background. So I guess the extra processing power makes all the difference!
Technorati: IBM
(99)
2 Ghz Core 2 Duo Processor with 2 GB of RAM (upgradable to 4GB), 100 GB, 15.4 Inch wide screen etc etc. All up it is a very nice machine. The out of the box experience has been very smooth. Rather than clutter the machine with software that isn't required IBM/Lenovo are really good at keeping it to a limited number of useful applications within the ThinkVantage range of tools. As a result there was no need to reformat the machine and rebuild it without the rubbish. The only item that isn't really essential that came installed is Google Desktop. I havn't used it before but I am going to leave it and see if it is useful. The other item that seems handy is DiskKeeper lite which seems to work well for defragging the machine however to be really useful I may purchase the upgrade to the Pro version so it can run on a schedule in the background.
I spent a day or so migrating across all of my applications which I have listed here:
| Applications | Utilities | Others |
| IBM Lotus Notes 7.0.2 | mNotes | Snood (For my additive gaming) |
| MindJet MindManager | Tivoli CDP (for backup) | Bejewelled (for more addictive gaming) |
| IBM Sametime 7.5.1 | 5 Clicks (neat screen capture tool) | |
| Firefox | Cisco VPN | |
| MS Office 2003 | Ultimate Zip | |
| MS Project | Telstra NextG PCMCIA Card Software (for mobile internet) | |
| MS Visio | Logitech Media Centre | |
| Quickbooks Premier | PDF Creator | |
| VMWare Server Console | UltraEdit | |
| Google Earth | UltraVNC | |
| Workplace Forms Viewer 2.6 | Citrix Client | |
| Workplace Forms Designer 2.6 | Ultramon (used to manage multiple screens) | |
| Microsoft Groove Virtual Office | ||
| iTunes | ||
| Adobe CS2 | ||
| Skype | ||
| Address-IT | ||
| IVR-Xpress Visual Builder | ||
| Microsoft IE 7 |
I think that is about it. All up the new machine is great and I am very pleased with the performance etc. The main application that I noticed a difference with was Groove. I had all but given up on Groove because it seemed to hog a lot of resources however I thought I would try again. I was pleased to see that i hardly noticed when it started and it happily runs in the background. So I guess the extra processing power makes all the difference!
Technorati: IBM
(99)
Thursday 18th, May 2006
Home Working18/05/2006 09:19 PMLocation : Home Office
I try to work at home at least 1 or 2 days a week. I find that I have a real productivity boost when working at home in particular when doing tasks that need concentrated effort. Even though I normally divert my office phone to home, I seem to find that I get less distracted or if I do receive a call I get back to what I was doing quicker. When I am in the office (which I do need to at least a few days a week) I find that I have many more interuptions. I guess these interuptions are an important part of what I do as well though so its not that I mind. I tend to try and spend at least 5-10 minutes talking with each member of the team just catching up with where they are at and providing input where I see it is necessary. I am a bit of a believer in the One Minute Manager management book and take a lot of my approach for management of the team from this.
As far as working from home though I see there being many advantages:
1) You can skip out on that drive to work. It isn't like it is long (20 mins each way) but by the time you have parked the car etc and got the laptop fired up in the office I have probably wasted an hr. This hr can either be more time for work or more time for me.
2) Ability to focus without distraction. It seems to be way to easy to get distracted in the office.
3) I can spread my day out better. The commute to my home office is obviously less than a minute to walk from say the kitchen to my office. I can also fit in a few personal tasks throughout the day when I feel like a break. Then when I want to get back into it I just start working again. I can easily get 8-12 hours of work out of a solid day at home.
4) My dog Jess just loves it when I work at home. She mainly sleeps at my feet. I also think this is good for my state of mind.
5) I am more relaxed.
One of the key things when you do work at home though is making sure you don't let the work invade on your home time. It is so easy just to keep working. I tend to manage this by keeping it to my office. When I am there I am working, when I am upstairs I am relaxing (although I tend to slip on this sometimes like right now. Doing this in front of the TV).
As far as clients are concerned it really has no effect where I am. They ring(Skype or Phone), I answer. They email, I answer. Office or home is pretty irrelevant. Of course when I have face to face meetings I normally go to the office that day or just meet at the clients office.
All up I would encourage anyone to give it a go. If you do the type of work that where you are doesn't really matter then why not work from home a bit. I know I think it is great.
Technorati: Home Office, One Minute Manager
(1)
As far as working from home though I see there being many advantages:
1) You can skip out on that drive to work. It isn't like it is long (20 mins each way) but by the time you have parked the car etc and got the laptop fired up in the office I have probably wasted an hr. This hr can either be more time for work or more time for me.
2) Ability to focus without distraction. It seems to be way to easy to get distracted in the office.
3) I can spread my day out better. The commute to my home office is obviously less than a minute to walk from say the kitchen to my office. I can also fit in a few personal tasks throughout the day when I feel like a break. Then when I want to get back into it I just start working again. I can easily get 8-12 hours of work out of a solid day at home.
4) My dog Jess just loves it when I work at home. She mainly sleeps at my feet. I also think this is good for my state of mind.
5) I am more relaxed.
One of the key things when you do work at home though is making sure you don't let the work invade on your home time. It is so easy just to keep working. I tend to manage this by keeping it to my office. When I am there I am working, when I am upstairs I am relaxing (although I tend to slip on this sometimes like right now. Doing this in front of the TV).
As far as clients are concerned it really has no effect where I am. They ring(Skype or Phone), I answer. They email, I answer. Office or home is pretty irrelevant. Of course when I have face to face meetings I normally go to the office that day or just meet at the clients office.
All up I would encourage anyone to give it a go. If you do the type of work that where you are doesn't really matter then why not work from home a bit. I know I think it is great.
Technorati: Home Office, One Minute Manager
(1)
Monday 1st, May 2006
SkypeIn now available in Australia01/05/2006 03:07 PMLocation : Home Office
After many months of waiting SkypeIn is now available in Australia. At a cost of approx $AUD50 (€30) per year or $AUD16 (€10) for a 3 month trial you can now get you very own Australian phone number that will connect thru to your Skype softphone.
I am a big user of Skype. Between our offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, (and I guess my home office), skype is always my first means of calling someone. If I can't get them then I resort back to a normal call. This has resulted in about 80-90% of my intercompany phone calls becoming Skype calls. 3-4 others in the business are also heavy users of Skype and as a result we have noticed about a 50% drop in our monthly phone bill which is a whole lot of beer money!! I also use it extensively for those clients that are also on Skype. The awareness capability of knowing if they are available for a call is a great feature. The fact that you can see them online also seems to help develop a closer working relationship.
This ability to have a SkypeIn number means that our clients can also have a local number to call me on. I will need to test it out and see what sort of quality the calls are but if it works well then I may as well have a local number in each State rather than clients calling a number that is diverted to my mobile when I am out of the office. For that matter I probably should consider a number in the UK for all of our IVR-Xpress Visual Builder clients to call me on rather than international calls. Again I will need to test the quality of audio to make sure it is up to scratch.
Technorati: Skype, Australia, VOIP, VXML
I am a big user of Skype. Between our offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, (and I guess my home office), skype is always my first means of calling someone. If I can't get them then I resort back to a normal call. This has resulted in about 80-90% of my intercompany phone calls becoming Skype calls. 3-4 others in the business are also heavy users of Skype and as a result we have noticed about a 50% drop in our monthly phone bill which is a whole lot of beer money!! I also use it extensively for those clients that are also on Skype. The awareness capability of knowing if they are available for a call is a great feature. The fact that you can see them online also seems to help develop a closer working relationship.
This ability to have a SkypeIn number means that our clients can also have a local number to call me on. I will need to test it out and see what sort of quality the calls are but if it works well then I may as well have a local number in each State rather than clients calling a number that is diverted to my mobile when I am out of the office. For that matter I probably should consider a number in the UK for all of our IVR-Xpress Visual Builder clients to call me on rather than international calls. Again I will need to test the quality of audio to make sure it is up to scratch.
Technorati: Skype, Australia, VOIP, VXML
Thursday 27th, April 2006
Two Heads are better than one, Three is even better!!27/04/2006 01:16 PMLocation : Office
Steve Richards posted about his setup with 3 monitors. 3 x 19 Inch monitors that is. Here I am working on my one screen makes me very jealous. I have been thinking about spending some time and money on my home office setup and this is probably a part of that.....at least 2 screens anyway. I can understand the productivity gains. For me when I am coding it would be great to have the development tool on one screen and then run the applicaiton on the other screen. Or have the tech doco (MSDN, Domino Designer Help etc) open on the second screen while I code.
The idea of having the distractions on one screen, ie Instant Messaging, is also attractive. I often do web demos and the problem them is always that when I share part of my screen or an application I don't have enough screen real estate to then make notes as well as I go. Two screens would fix this.
Microsoft Research also have an interesting article on using more than 1 screen.
I wonder if there is a point where more screens is too many. Would 4 just get out of hand?
Technorati: None
(0)
The idea of having the distractions on one screen, ie Instant Messaging, is also attractive. I often do web demos and the problem them is always that when I share part of my screen or an application I don't have enough screen real estate to then make notes as well as I go. Two screens would fix this.
Microsoft Research also have an interesting article on using more than 1 screen.
I wonder if there is a point where more screens is too many. Would 4 just get out of hand?
Technorati: None
(0)
Thursday 20th, April 2006
My Machine20/04/2006 12:17 PMLocation : Office
Every now and then I think most IT types decide it is time to rebuild their PC's/Laptops. I find that this comes for me about every 18 months or so. When I first do it I am always very disciplined as to what goes where, organising it all, etc. Then over time I end up installing, uninstalling, reinstalling, various different products for testing and evaluation. I might need a certain version of a certain product etc or I might just want to evaluate something new. I try and make sure I use VMWare Workstation for stuff that I am just playing with so that I can just dump it later without it effecting my primary install. However sometimes I get slack and just install software to play with it. Over time my nice tidy setup becomes cluttered and messy, and eventually I come to the point of saying bugger it, I will rebuild.
Well that time is getting close for me again. I always start by documenting what I have installed. This time I thought why not bang out a MindMap listing all of the key bits of software. I am sure I have missed a couple of minor things as I always do. Those little things that you only think of on the off chance you need them. The map pretty much shows my setup though.
The other thing I always forget is to copy my bookmarks!! Always need to get these off the backup.
Technorati: MindJet MindManager
(0)
Well that time is getting close for me again. I always start by documenting what I have installed. This time I thought why not bang out a MindMap listing all of the key bits of software. I am sure I have missed a couple of minor things as I always do. Those little things that you only think of on the off chance you need them. The map pretty much shows my setup though.
The other thing I always forget is to copy my bookmarks!! Always need to get these off the backup.
Technorati: MindJet MindManager
(0)
Friday 7th, April 2006
Mind Mapping07/04/2006 10:52 AMLocation : Office
I regularly use a product called
MindJet MindManager. I think this tool is simply awesome. My typical use is for writing proposals and performing requirements analysis but it can equally be used for brain storming and strategic planning etc. The tool enables you to very quickly flesh out a framework for the document you are creating and then you basically fill in the gaps.
I was using it this morning with a colleague to prepare a proposal for a Lotus Notes development. Tim basically drafted the MindMap up with his thoughts on the project. You basically create blobs of information and then link them together into some structure. How often when writing a document do you think of another area that you need to document but then forget to add it later. With a mind map you just create the blob, give it a title, and then later on you drag it into the appropriate place in the document.
Here is an example of what I mean:
Each blob (node might be a better term I guess) represents a heading in the document. You then add Notes to each node and your document takes shape. If you want to change the structure you just drag the nodes around the screen. Once you are happy you just export it as a Word document and you are done.
You can use MindMaps for far more than just what I use it for. Steve Richards (which is where I first came across the product) uses it for book reviews amongst other things.
Now the ultimate feature for this product would be to enable 2 or more users to update the MindMap in real time over a network or the net. We typically send the map back and forth in an asynchronous manner. We use Groove Virtual office to do this which is probably another discussion on another day.
Technorati: MindMap, MindJet MindManager
I was using it this morning with a colleague to prepare a proposal for a Lotus Notes development. Tim basically drafted the MindMap up with his thoughts on the project. You basically create blobs of information and then link them together into some structure. How often when writing a document do you think of another area that you need to document but then forget to add it later. With a mind map you just create the blob, give it a title, and then later on you drag it into the appropriate place in the document.
Here is an example of what I mean:
Each blob (node might be a better term I guess) represents a heading in the document. You then add Notes to each node and your document takes shape. If you want to change the structure you just drag the nodes around the screen. Once you are happy you just export it as a Word document and you are done.
You can use MindMaps for far more than just what I use it for. Steve Richards (which is where I first came across the product) uses it for book reviews amongst other things.
Now the ultimate feature for this product would be to enable 2 or more users to update the MindMap in real time over a network or the net. We typically send the map back and forth in an asynchronous manner. We use Groove Virtual office to do this which is probably another discussion on another day.
Technorati: MindMap, MindJet MindManager
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