For those of us who use OS X in an enterprise environment, it can be difficult to make our Exchange calendars sync with our iPhones. There is an excellent workaround, however. All of the updated versions of Office for Mac include a synchronization service that makes it easy as pie.
In Entourage, go to Entourage > Preferences > Sync Services.
There you have an option to sync your address book, calendar, or both with Apple’s built-in software. This works great for synching the iPhone.
For those of you who use Windows Mobile, you’re likely no stranger to battery life issues that sometimes come up, especially if you are a power user, spend a lot of time on the telephone during the day or connect to your Exchange email via ActiveSync for “push” email. A Microsoft employee who runs a blog on the subject has a great write-up to get you started on preserving your battery life and getting through the day on your Blackjack, Treo 750, Motorola Q, etc.
Computerworld’s Scot Finnie (a recent Mac convert) writes on the danger to Microsoft presented by Apple’s current “buzz”.
Finnie seems to think the perception that Apple’s product is hot, new and superior will drive new growth. He perceives the threat to Microsoft as being not from a market share point-of-view, but rather in terms of “mind share”. He calls the Apple story one of the “Top Ten” tech stories of the year.
He’s right. He touches on something that a lot of us in the tech industry seem to miss sometimes. It isn’t always the traditional drivers in a market that push a product towards success or extinction, but rather this intangible and not yet measurable sense of buzz. When people begin making a computer the topic of conversation at sports pubs, it’s time for us to listen up. From a business point-of-view we need to find a way to measure this “buzz”. As an IT Professional, I’m listening closely to that buzz, and plan to capitalize on it and move IT forward on newer, better technologies.
NetworkWorld has an interesting article about Apple’s prospects in corporate America. Recent architecture changes, virtualization, clustering, storage networks, interoperability hooks and the price of upgrading hardware for Windows Vista all put Macs under the microscope for careful consideration as replacements to existing Windows and Linux machines.
As has been the case in the past, Apple is not defining a clear course for going after corporate business (the article points this out). Apple’s rebellious, anti-corporate attitude continues in 2007. However, innovative new technologies like Parallels, which allows users to run Microsoft Windows from within Mac OS X on a Macintosh computer are likely to make corporate moves to Mac OS X more likely.
(1) Your IT department is fighting a never ending battle;
(2) Their main goal is to allow every legitimate email to pass through;
(3) And block as many spam messages as possible.
That said, some spam will always come through. Every now and then, a legitimate email will be blocked. The technology that blocks spam isn’t perfect — and the minute companies that fight spam figure it out, spammers find a way around their technology. Spamming is big business and the bad guys are willing to go to great lengths to get their Viagra ads to your mailbox. Be patient with your IT department. They’re fighting a never-ending battle. Oh, … and no amount of money will ever end it. Just because they spend $30,000 this year doesn’t mean they won’t need to spend $50,000 next year just to maintain the status quo.
There’s quite a bit of literature on the Internet about email etiquette. Angry email users fill blogs, discussion boards and chat rooms with rants about poor email manners and general rudeness. I’ve decided to do a series of blog entries on this issue from a point-of-view that is rarely used when discussing this subject: organizational politics.
Indeed, the position you and the person receiving your email are in directly relates to the mannerisms in the email. That isn’t to say that you should be rude to anyone, but that etiquette is just different depending on who is on the other end of the tubes (that’s a political joke, for those of you who don’t get it).
Subject Lines
Remember to use a subject line every time you send an email. Though indexing features in OS X and Vista make it easier than ever to search email content, most of us are forced to prioritize emails beforehand. Not only should you provide a short, descriptive summary of the email in your subject line but you should also avoid using names. For example, you might provoke entirely too much interest for wandering eyes on the other end if your HR-related email’s subject is the name of the person about whom you are communicating. Despite warnings from IT, most managers leave their email open and computers unlocked while they get coffee, go to lunch or go to a meeting.
If you’re in the middle of an email thread and the subject changes, change the subject as well. Your email software can still track the thread, in most cases.
Read Receipts
The ability to send read receipts requests is one of the rudest, most annoying features in Microsoft Outlook. Avoid them. If you’re a manager and you can’t trust your people to read the emails you send them, find new staff. Reading email is a basic task. If your people can’t keep up with them, they’re probably in over their heads.
If you’re a manager sending these receipt requests, it’s rude and condescending. If you’re sending them to your boss, it’s in extremely bad taste. Either way, it’s a no-no. I know there are a few exceptions, especially in help-desk situations… but in general, just think about all the ill-will you stand to create in your company.
Forwards
There are really two categories of forwards: legitimate emails and non-legitimate ones. Non-legitimate emails make up about 30-50% of the forwards that arrive in my Inbox. Most of them are inappropriate and could get the sender fired from their job. It’s very rude to forward emails around. If it requests that you forward it or promises riches for you or a dying cancer child in exchange for forwarding it to others, you should probably not forward it. If you want to help kids with cancer, get out your wallet and make a big contribution to the children’s charity of your choice. Volunteer. Don’t try to take the easy way out…. mainly because the easy way doesn’t work.
The other category is legitimate emails, and this is an entirely different story. Some people think that because it is a business email, I want to be CC’ed or forwarded every message. This isn’t always true. I get less email than lots of people, and I get between 30 and 60 personal emails per day (this doesn’t include auto generated messages, notifications, etc.) A lot of folks get more than me. Think carefully before hitting that forward button. Not every email is important enough to demand your entire department’s time.
More later…
With all this talk recently about Windows Vista, I thought it was time that someone finally came out with an article truly comparing the two operating systems. Microsoft took longer than expected, delivered less than expected, and now has the most annoying OS on the planet.
This article explains some of the differenes and why, as they put it, Mac OS X still “shines”.
I’ve been testing Windows Vista for the last few months, and soon I will have my own review.
A new year is upon us. In the world of IT, that might as well be a new decade. Industries that grow and change as quickly as tech are hard to predict. Here are a few of my predictions on important focuses and buzz-words for 2007.
If there’s one thing Hurricane Katrina taught us, it’s that you absolutely cannot predict when a natural disaster is going to make your day really bad. IT departments across the Gulf Coast scrambled to rebuild their businesses and recover their data after the hurricane. If 2006 was the year of disaster recovery and emergency failover, 2007 is the year of virtualization. After all, data can be replicated from New Orleans to Dallas and brought right back online with virtual servers. You can’t replicate a hardware dependent enterprise, however. At the same time, convergence (which was also a big buzz word in 2006) will move from the large enterprise to medium sized businesses. Relational databases allow us to take advantage of internal information hooks and IT departments are discovering the cost benefit of merging systems and data.
There’s a joke around the IT world that goes something like this: “How can you tell if an IT guy has good people skills?” … “If he looks at your shoes when he speaks to you instead of his own!” Funny, and true. IT types are traditionally not well-adjusted and therefore have trouble in the business world. IT professionals who understand business concerns, operational details and ROI/TCO are becoming increasingly important to companies. In 2007, those who land the big jobs/contracts will be the IT professionals who are businesses men first and foremost. We will see continued changes to the way people outsource, and I don’t expect this to settle in 2007. The lesson is clear: those who adapt will win.
Microsoft has gone out on a limb with its ridiculous DRM. Now that it is making life difficult on corporate IT departments, we might finally begin to see a shift away from Microsoft and towards a more distributed market share. I expect that Apple will be the main beneficiary of this, depending on how well the cards are played in Cupertino.
Finally, CIOs and IT Managers will be squeezed by boards due to shareholder resentment of stagnating corporate profits. Costs have continued to go up, but the strong economy kept naysayers at bay. Now, however, is the time for those in charge of technology to begin the process of cost-justification and return on investment planning. For entirely too long, IT has been the unwanted child of organizations because its leaders rarely bothered to provide an exact, concise discription of the real value of IT assets and services. IT is worth big money and provides invaluable services. It’s time to prove it.
I’ve been a Mac user at home for years, but professionally I’ve maintained some close ties to Microsoft. Windows Vista may very well break me of that habit. Though Windows XP’s activation scheme was ridiculous compared to Mac OS X (which does not require activation) I put up with the problems, understanding fully that Microsoft had a business interest in protecting its intellectual property. Windows Vista promises some cool new things for network administrators, IT Managers and users alike. However, the positives do not outweigh the negatives.
Microsoft is now obsessed with product activation/protection. Though I’ve always been against the techniques MS employs, I was shielded from a lot of these problems as my clients/employer used Microsoft Volume Licensing. Traditionally, MS trusted its big business IT partners enough to let us avoid all these issues. I still had to enter in a key, but after that I was done.
A blogger named Mark Wilson explains for us the complications of activating Vista. It’s maddening. It is no longer a prudent business decision, from a management and support/TCO standpoint, to operate Windows within a network. Whereas a case could be made previously in favor of Microsoft, their integration and their development partners, the thousands of hours required for an enterprise IT department to manage a licensing system this complicated far outweighs any possible benefits.
For the last decade, the big news in the tech industry has been search related – for good reason. There is an incredible amount of information on the Internet and on our computers. Searching for this information and finding only what we want to see is increasingly difficult. We are in a state of information overload.
Just as search engines have become better at finding information on the Internet, so too have our operating systems gained in effectiveness and made us more productive when searching for documents, e-mails and media files, among other things, on our own computers and private networks. In 2005, Apple made it simpler with Spotlight. Since then, Mac users have been able to search e-mails, documents and other files from the menu bar of the Mac OS. At the time, Microsoft Windows users were stuck with a terrible search utility, and often went for third party solutions. I found it quite useful to be able to search for, “point-of-sale rollout” and have every e-mail, document, spreadsheet, etc. associated with my project appear in the upper-right hand corner of my screen.
Finally in 2007, Windows users now have a similar option. From the Start menu, Windows Vista users can search for everything relating to a term or string. Of course, they didn’t exactly copy Spotlight from Apple. After all, Spotlight is activated from the upper-right hand corner of the screen. Windows Search is activated from the lower-left hand corner. It’s 2007 – and Apple is getting ready to release another version of its OS, codenamed Leopard. It promises more innovation and further distance between Apple and its rival, Microsoft. Mac users will soon be able to use Spotlight to search across private, local area networks for files, folders, documents, programs, et al.
Apple is once again on the march. Redmond, start your copiers!