Posted by eileenb on March 13, 2008
I’ve been having a look at Xobni since Viral told us about it a few weeks ago and I’m impressed. I hadn’t really thought about it as a social networking tool through email until I saw Bill talking about it.
The thing I like best is the Stay in Touch feature:
Or more like the guilt tasks feature 
Want to schedule some time with one of your contacts? Xobni looks at your calendar for your free times and pre populates a mail to the contact.
Hi Andrew,
Here is my availability for the next few days. (All times are GMT Standard Time, GMT+00:00.)
Fri 14 March, 09:00 to 14:30, 16:30 to 19:00
Sat 15 March, 09:00 to 13:30, 14:00 +
Sun 16 March, 09:00 to 12:00, 14:00 +
You can see who sends mails at certain times of the day. Here’s when James tends to mail me…
There are many more features than this – but don’t take my word for it – go on – get yourself an invitation to the trial and find out for yourself…
Posted in General musings, collaboration, web 2.0 | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on March 13, 2008
Steve, who reads my blog mailed me with a problem he’s got with Outlook Voice Access. It made me giggle…
We’re delighted with our in house Outlook Voice Access, but it’s caused great amounts of laughter in the office all at my expense! Sometimes we have meetings with the initials of attendees in the subject header, and sometimes we sign emails with our initials. This is great for most people and I already know James has blogged about the abbreviation ‘MS’ coming up as manuscript, but have you heard what my initials come up as?!! ‘SJ’ is converted kindly into ‘Society of Jesus’!!!
Stupid question that I’m hoping for a positive answer to, but is there any way you can customise the Voice Access files to tell it not to read certain abbreviations in a certain way? We don’t want to go the whole hog and change the voice to that of Ozzy Osbourne (although how cool would that be!), but we do want to stop the mickey taking!
Well I had no idea how to help. I know James has blogged about some strange responses in the past which I assumed was down to Exchange pre-SP1 oddness. So I asked the product team.
Who couldn’t reproduce the issue. The US language version of OVA reads the initials out “as is” and doesn’t give any bizarre alternatives, or assumes these letters are acronyms at all.
So now I’m intrigued. Does Australian English differ? or do the initials SJ mean something entirely different in Australia? – I don’t have the Australian language pack installed any more so I can’t test it at the moment Please let me know…
And is there a solution?
Unfortunately not apparently. The Text To Speech (TTS) module isn’t configurable in this version – so Steve will have to endure hilarity in his office for the foreseeable future – or select some different initials, perhaps putting in his middle initial.
Or – perhaps change his job role to something more evangelist like?…
Posted in Exchange, General musings, collaboration | Comments Off
