Friday TechTips

Tip for August 21, 2009: Memiary

Today’s tip is all about remembering the things you’re working on and keeping a log to help you remember your daily activities. Such a list can come in handy when preparing for a meeting and especially during your annual evaluation! If you’re looking for a tool that requires zero setup, backup, or maintenance, then Memiary is for you! Memiary let’s you record five items (or memories) each day. It even auto-saves each item as you record it. It’s incredibly simple to get started. Just choose a login name and it will then prompt you for a password. Likewise, if you already have an account just enter your login name and it prompts you for your account password. Hit enter and you’re in! I personally use Memiary and highly recommend it. Tools like this are especially useful during the fall and spring semesters which tend to be our busiest times of the year. That’s when Memiary’s strengths really shine. It’s a no-muss, no fuss, no filing solution to help you track the most important things you worked on each day. Additional features include the following:

• Reminders via email or Twitter
• “Subscribe” to your entries via RSS or within a calendar app that supports iCal

Best of all Memiary is free!

Bonus Tip!

Speaking of fall and spring semesters, classes start at UR on Monday (oh summer, we hardly knew ye)! Here’s a post from the Professor’s Blog you’ll definitely want to share with your students and student employees. The authors provide 10 quick tips for success during the first week of the semester. Good luck!

Tip for August 14, 2009: Meeting Schedulers!

Meetings, we all have them. Some days it’s all we do. Fortunately we have Exchange / Outlook / Entourage to help manage our on-campus meetings. What about external meetings? How do you arrange a meeting time with a colleague from VCU or schedule time for a visit from a vendor? As the trendy new expression goes, there’s an app for that! There are two services that I’m highlighting today giving you the ability to schedule meetings online with external colleagues.

MeetingMade lets you create an account and then block out the times you aren’t available. You then invite other meeting attendees to do the same. This gives you a common point of reference within MeetingMade where you can decide on the times that work best for everyone. MeetingMade’s goal is to eliminate all of the back and forth E-mail and phone calls which happens especially when trying to organize an event with multiple attendees. MeetingMade offers a 30-day free trial, however since it is in beta status it’s free to use until they decide a pricing plan. My instincts tell me that a free option will remain.

ScheduleOnce offers to accomplish what MeetingMade performs, but utilizes Google Calendar to facilitate the process of choosing a common meeting time. ScheduleOnce is a free service and works by downloading a Google Calendar add-on for your browser which then connects you to the service and the people you are trying to meet with. The only disadvantage ScheduleOnce has when compared to MeetingMade is that you have to have your Outlook calendar synced with your Google Calander. Don’t dispair, there’s an app for that too! The Goolgle Calenendar Sync tool will sync your Outlook calendar data with your Google Calander. If you’re concerned with losing data in Outlook, you can set the tool to only update your Google Calender, not import data from Google into Outlook. I’ve been using this personally for quite a while now and have found it to work flawlessly.

Speaking of meetings, since they do tend to take up a lot of our time, its important they be productive and stay focused. Here’s a short list 7 Tips from Web Worker Daily to help you keep your meetings on-task.

Bonus Tip!

Forbidden City – For a while I was really excited about Second Life and the potential it brought to online learning, meetings, discussions, etc. In my opinion it has really jumped the shark. However in a related note, The Forbidden City project offers much more educational potential, at least if you’re interested in Chinese history. Through a collaboration between IBM and the Palace Museum, you can download a fully digitized virtual version of the Forbidden City and tour it in real-time. It’s available for PC/Mac/Linux and offers a great opportunity to tour an incredible facility that you would otherwise have to travel thousands of miles to see.

Tip for April 17, 2009: Rethinking Email

I find it amazing that email is still the “killer app” on the Internet despite a recent report from Microsoft stating that 97% of email traffic is spam. Fortunately most spam is filtered at the ISP level and never reaches your inbox. This still leaves a surprising amount that our email clients have to filter and may involve a brief visual scan to make sure we’re not missing a critical message. After all of this sorting we’re then left to prioritize the messages that make it through: email from your supervisor, message from a team member, meeting reminder, listserv messages, facebook notifications, and classmates.com letting you know someones wants to contact you and they’ll gladly tell you who after paying the membership fee. You get the picture. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with a never-ending stream of messages day after day. This issue was highlighted recently on one of the podcasts I regularly listen to. One of the better solutions I heard is to treat email messages as if they are text messages or twitter updates. SMS and twitter both limit the number of characters you can use to convey your message, choose your words wisely! Another solution is to change your personal philosophy regarding email. One podcast mentioned http://five.sentenc.es, where you’re urged to adopt the personal policy of capping all email at five sentences. If you need to say more, it may be more effective to pay a brief visit to the person you need to communicate with. Better yet, treat them to their choice of beverage at the coffee shop! You’re much more likely to see results that way. If you’re even more daring, five.sentenc.es challenges you to cut back to four.sentenc.es or even two.sentenc.es. Which ever you choose I think your email recipients will be appreciative of your succinct, targeted messages. Another suggested technique is to replace your email signature file with one of the following:

• Sent from my mobile phone

• Sent from my BlackBerry

• Sent from my iPhone

By using one of the above choices no one can fault you for short messages and responses. However you may want to be selective with this method so as not to expose your digital subterfuge!

Bonus Tip!

Earlier this week David Silverman from the blogs at Harvard Business Publishing posted 10 short tips to encourage your recipients actually read your messages. I encourage you to read them and possibly merge with your new personal five.sentece.es policy!

Sources this week:

BBC News | Five.sentence.es | http://twit.tv | Lifehacker.com | Harvard Business Publising

Tip for April 3, 2009: Xobni

Let’s face it, most of us spend each work day living in our email inbox, no matter if it’s through a locally installed application (Outlook, Entourage, Apple Mail), or web-based (Outlook web interface, Spidermail, GMail, Yahoo, etc.). Since we as modern workers need to be email ninjas, it’s critical that these applications be flexible and offer features to help cut out “the noise” created from thousands of messages and attachments. Xobni (pronounced zob-nee) offers to do just that. It’s an add-on which installs an additional panel in your Outlook client and offers the following features:

• Much improved searching for emails, contacts, and attachments compared to Outlook’s built-in search features.
• The ability to locate your contacts in your social networks (Linked In, Facebook).
• Threaded conversations (one of GMail’s best features) where you can see all of the emails you’ve exchanged with a contact in one place.
• A complete statistics package showing you have many messages you’ve sent to your contacts, what day you email the most, who responds to you the fastest (so you can treat them to lunch), etc.

If you download Xnobi be prepared for the installation process to take about 10 – 15 minutes. After installation Xnobi will launch Outlook and begin indexing your messages, attachments and contacts. After 10 minutes Xnobi will index in the background in order to allow you to get back to managing your inbox. If you want to know more before downloading visit the Xnobi Learn More page. There are tutorial videos for each feature.

Xnobi

Bonus Tip!

Speaking of email, let’s take a lesson from a drummer and learn some unique exercises to help prevent carpal tunnel syndrome and tendinitis! This video was featured earlier this week on several websites as a way to beat the arch-nemesis of technology and desk workers. Watch the video below, or head over to YouTube for the larger version. Start stretching! And one, and two, and three…

Tip for March 13, 2009: PDFs, Attachments, and Browsers, Oh My!

Good Friday afternoon! Today’s tip is going to have you slicing and dicing through work documents like a brand new set of Ginsu Knives. Our first tool is PDF to Word from NitroPDF. It’s a free service which converts your PDFs to either .DOC format or .RTF so they can be opened and edited in Microsoft Word. No muss, no fuss! Reviews on the web indicate that the conversions are fairly accurate but not flawless. Nevertheless having access to a Word version of a PDF is not an unusual occurrence for me. They don’t really indicate what’s happening behind the scenes (garden gnomes with scanners) but here’s their full set of features. I also reviewed their privacy policy due to the sometimes confidential nature of certain documents and was pleasantly surprised to find a very streamlined plan:

Your files

• The PDF files you upload for conversion are deleted straight after being converted.
• The DOC/RTF files we generate are deleted immediately after we email you them.
• At no stage are your files looked at or touched by the administrator of our PDF-to-Word service.

Your email address

• The email address you use to receive your converted files will never be used to send you unsolicited emails or sold off.

Along with PDF to Word, their site offers a number of other tools including:

• PrimoPDF – A free download allowing you to create PDFs on your desktop.
• PrimoOnline – An online version of the above.
• PDFHammer – An online PDF editor.

There are certainly a lot of PDF tools available elsewhere on the web, but I think you’ll find the simplicity of these services appealing.

Feature #2

Today’s second item is OutlookViewAttach, a nifty little application that scans all your mail in Outlook for messages with attachments. There are numerous ways to organize and arrange the results, batch download the attachments, and a search feature allowing you track down missing documents. If you plan to download OutlookViewAttach, here are a couple of tips:

• If you have a lot of mail stored in Outlook (let’s be real, we all do) expect the scan process to take several minutes. As a tip you can export the scan reults as an Excel file for quick review later.
• You may see a lot of “attachments” that are actually vCard files from yourself, people who have sent you mail, or mailing lists.
• Be prepared to organize and arrange the results in order to get the most out of this application!

Bonus Tip!

There has been a lot of web browser activity lately, especially with Google entering the market with Google Chrome. Internet Explorer 8 is also set to debut with Windows 7, and Safari 4 Beta for Mac was released last week. Mozilla is also planning to release the next version of Firefox: Firefox 3.1 which is now in beta 3 status (close to release). If you’re interested in being on the cutting edge of browser technology you may want to give it a try. 3.1 promises to handle complex websites and code much faster than previous versions. If you’re going to try Firefox 3.1 beta, I’ll reiterate what their site says:

This is pre-release software: you may encounter compatibility problems with some websites and add-ons.

With that word of caution, happy browsing and enjoy your weekend!

Tip for March 6, 2008: Foxmarks (soon to be Xmarks)!

Good Friday afternoon! In the Friday TechTip for January 16, 2009 we reviewed the benefits of Firefox and a few of the essential add-ons. One of my favorites which I automatically install on each computer I use is Foxmarks. Up until recently Foxmarks has been an exclusive add-on enjoyed by millions of rabid Firefox fans. New versions are now available for both Safari and Internet Explorer. They now cover all major browser platforms (sorry Opera). Installation for each is very simple and straightforward. If you’re new to Foxmarks, here are the basic steps:

• Visit http://download.foxmarks.com/download and click “Download Foxmarks for (your browser here).”
• Go through the normal install process for your platform (Mac or Windows).
• If you don’t already have one, you will be prompted to create an account with Foxmarks which will store your bookmarks for synchronization purposes.
• You will then be prompted to sync for the first time. The program will ask if you want to merge your bookmarks or overwrite them (both locally or on the server). If this is your first time, you will use the ones on your computer. Be careful at this point on future installs as you don’t want to accidentally overwrite any existing bookmarks!
• Once the install process is complete synchronization will occur behind the scenes and be a semi-invisible process.

I highly recommend Foxmarks, soon to be renamed Xmarks, especially if you use multiple computers to doy our work. You’ll soon start thinking that you’re always at the same computer, with your favorite tools and sites and always at your fingertips.

Bonus Tip: Daily Mugshot!

Do you have a webcam? Interested to see how your appearance changes over time on a daily basis? Then visit http://www.dailymugshot.com, create an account and start shooting. You can create a daily email reminder to prompt you to visit Mugshot each morning to take a photo, or download a very small reminder application which will pop up and remind you to take your daily photo. After taking a series of photos, you can create a Mugshow to share with friends and family, or maybe just use it to remind yourself to get a haircut… Enjoy!

Tip for Dec. 19, 2008 – Awayfind!

Good Friday Afternoon!

Today’s tip has dual purposes. It’s a tool to encourage you to focus less on email (by only checking it a few times a day) and more on goals and tasks. It also provides others the ability to reach you electronically with a true need versus the latest post over at http://icanhazcheeseburger.com (yes, guilty of that too). AwayFind has been highlighted on numerous tech blogs as well as two NPR stories. Here are the two most important things AwayFind can do for you:

• Let’s you create a short form for people to fill out if they really need to reach you. You can customize how their message is delivered to you so you don’t have to keep your email open, which is the service’s main goal. The message can be sent to your normal email address, a super-secret high-priority address, or most importantly, can be sent to you as an SMS text message to your cell phone.

• After you build your AwayFind form, you can put that URL in your email signature link OR into an out-of-office message (best usage I think) so that you can let others know that: you’re out of the office and have limited access to email but if they really need to reach you, fill out the form and it will get to you by SMS (or super-secret email address which is a lot more fun)!

The reason I’m highlighting this now is that starting next week many of us ARE going to be away from the office for a week or more. What a great time to test this out and give yourself a short break from email! Build yourself a form, add your cellphone number as an option for message delivery, and include your form’s URL in your Outlook away message. If the person that sent you the initial email truly needs to get you a message, then they can use the form URL which they’ll get in your out-of-office message.

Their site – http://awayfind.com

My test form – http://awayfind.com/acmorton

I hope this might be helpful for you! Happy Holidays! – Andy

Friday TechTip for November 7, 2008: Evernote

Good Friday afternoon everyone!

Today’s tip is Evernote from the fine team at http://evernote.com. Evernote is a VERY useful “web clipping” tool that is highly flexible and can be used in just about anyway you can creatively imagine. Using Evernote, you create “notes” to yourself to remind you of:

• work to-do items
• shopping lists
• capture a photo or image you want to remember
• leave yourself a voice note
• paste in a web site or text you want to remember later
• include a pdf in your notes for later review
• your idea here!

It’s very handy with so many different uses. Maybe the best way to describe it is that it’s an organizer for things you want to remember, now matter what format or media type. And instead of me yammering on about it why don’t you watch the introductory video at the evernote site!

Best of all, Evernote is free and has mobile versions for the iPhone & iPod Touch, and Windows Mobile Devices (sorry BlackBerry users, at least for now). Perhaps most importantly, there are desktop clients available for both Windows and Mac integrating all of your notes into your daily work without having to necessarily surf to their site in your browser. Give it a try and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. And don’t take my word for it, here are some real world examples:

Knitters using Evernote – http://spice.littlefeetbigsky.com/2008/10/01/iphone-knitting
Bloggers using Evernote – http://www.idano.net/new-blogging-tool-evernote-on-my-iphone-380.htm
20 Awesome Ways to User Evernote – http://www.inquisitr.com/2179/evernote-why-it-will-make-it-20-awesome-ways-to-use-it

Friday TechTip for July 11, 2008: PocketMod

Happy Friday (and iPhone Day) everyone! Today’s tip is a digital/analog hybrid. Do you find yourself caught in the grey area of managing your calendar in Outlook, but prefer pen and paper for your to-do lists and notes? Do you find interacting with a digital device cumbersome and annoying? Then PocketMod is the tool for you!

PocketMod lets you build a booklet and load it with various tools like daily/weekly/monthly calendars, multiple to-do lists, reference charts, emergency contact information, shopping lists, and so on. The customization options seem limitless! Here are the steps to create your own PocketMod:

Go to http://www.pocketmod.com
Click “Create a PocketMod” on the right side of the screen
Choose all of the options and where you want them to appear (hint: click the item first, it will then appear and you can drag it onto the page where you want it to appear)
Finally, print your PocketMod and fold it according to the instructions. There’s also an instruction video on the home page.

What you’ve just created is small and compact, easily fits in your pocket, wallet, or organizer and can be filed away later so you can have a record of your activities and completed objectives. Good luck and make sure you fold along straight lines!