This video made me giggle for 2 reasons:
The music is real – this is our audio conference software – with Muzak
The people are real – I checked on our Global address list and they both work in pre-sales in the Windows Client team – that’s their real names too as they both work in the same office in the mid west of the US on the windows client team.
Great dancing chaps – much better than ours in the UK which looks like your Dad dancing at a wedding….
I’m in Leicester today on the 2nd part of my blogging for business tour. I was fascinated by the questions from the small business community about blogging – questions that major corporates wouldn’t think of. The long tail aspect of how blogging (great video explanation here by the way) has become ubiquitous caused a bit of discussion. Why the heck would something as niche as blogs (compared to websites) become so powerful?
Good question.
Why do they produce washing machines with so many options – and then you use only 3 or 4 programs.
Why does word have all of those features when only 20% of us use even 80% of the application?
All questions designed to provoke debate – and noisy debate too!
Desire lines were an interesting idea tor discussion too.
I learned today that one college didn’t actually cement any paths at all when they designed a college campus – they just waited to see where the students wanted to walk – and then created the athways along the desire lines. What a brilliant idea. Have a look at how Peter Merholz’ blog for some great pictures on how desire lines form, and the attempts that are made to stifle the natural pathways
Doesn’t work though…
So what to talk about tomorrow at the Natural space centre in Leicester? Well for the space centre – its got to be Web 3.0 and the semantic web – my current favourite topic…
Aren’t conference hotels the same all over the world? You drive to a fabulous old house that once was owned by someone with a serious amount of money, sweep up the treelined drive to an amazing and beautiful entrance that must have seen its fair share of horse and carriages driving up to the entrance. You check in, go through reception, down a really long, too straight corridor – to something that looks like a stable block, or a set of army quarters, all identical, boxy, same. All clean and neat and waiting for you.
Well, I’m in yet another one of these places. I’m delivering a talk on blogging in business tomorrow at a place a few miles up the road. It’s very close to Althorp, where Princess Diana was laid to rest and it’s raining this evening. So where am I right now? In the bar with a nice glass of Merlot catching up on my mail and watching the world go by…
So what will i be talking about?
What’s a blog (for those who haven’t heard of a blog yet), how blogging has improved the conversation between the customers and the organisation. How the connection between people spreads the word out.
How to make your blog more discoverable, search engine organisation, RSS, relationships, my tips for blogging effectively and my 10 top rules (although I’m ignoring rule number 8 right now which is don’t blog when you’ve been drinking) Here they are again…
So basically all of the stuff I usually talk about, but delivered to a small business audience who already have the tools to get blogging and get the conversation going – but don’t actually know where to start.
So what are my top 10?
What’s your top tip so I can include it in my top 11 – just likes Bill Gates’ 11 rules (which he never even did…)
I’ve been quiet for a week – blog wise. I’ve been in Paris (well at Charles de Gaulle airport really) on a Management Excellence course. There’s been lots of time for self reflection, navel gazing and finding out all about my strengths and weaknesses. In order for us to get the best benefit possible we were asked not to go onto email etc., so true to my word, I triaged my mail on my smartphone a couple of times a day, didn’t connect to the cloud and I didn’t blog either – a new experience for me.
One of the key challenges for me though was the technology. Yes honestly. All of our group work was on OneNote. Ick! I really HATE OneNote. I don’t use a tablet PC so I just didn’t “get” it about OneNote- how good it was… But, in the spirit of the event, I started using the pre-populated workbook for the course.
Eureka! I’m a convert.
Even the guide to OneNote now makes sense.
And just how simple is it to send stuff to OneNote from Outlook? One button! Why the heck haven’t I “discovered” this before?
Well, all my RSS entries that have been flagged for looking at later in Outlook (and forgotten about) are now sitting nicely in my “stuff to blog about” section.
So I’ve now seen the light – and I’m evangelising about this accordingly. So if you fire up OneNote and don’t know what the heck to do with it – have a look at the OneNote guide for help, watch the demos or try find your way around.
And me? I’ll try really hard to give things a go a lot earlier. And that’s one skill I didn’t realise I was going to gain from a course on being a good manager…
TechNet Webcast: System Center Essentials 2007 Technical Overview (Level 300)
Monday, February 04, 2008 – 9:30 AM – 11:00 AM Pacific Time
John Baker, IT Pro Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032366178&Culture=en-US
TechNet Webcast: System Center Operations Manager 2007 Technical Overview (Level 200)
Friday, February 15, 2008 – 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM Pacific Time
John Weston, IT Pro Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032366285&Culture=en-US
TechNet Webcast: Exchange Server 2007 in Depth (Part 7 of 8): Key Scenarios, Examples, Demos, and How-to’s (Level 300)
Friday, February 01, 2008 – 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM Pacific Time
John Weston, TechNet Presenter, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032363579&Culture=en-US
TechNet Webcast: Exchange Server In Depth (Part 8 of 8): Master Concepts and Optimize Your Server Environment (Level 300)
Monday, February 04, 2008 – 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM Pacific Time
Chris Avis, TechNet Presenter, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032363581&Culture=en-US
Momentum Webcast: Simplifying Collaboration and Communication Using Microsoft Office, Exchange Server, and Communications Server (Level 100)
Thursday, February 07, 2008 – 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Pacific Time
Jennifer Kim, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation
Rachel Clay, Information Worker Solutions Specialist, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032365002&Culture=en-US
Ever since I attended the BETT show last week, I’ve been amazed by how few people know how to blog from Tafiti. Every parent should know how to do this and teach their kids this demo. Then all that research that your children do can be saved and published on Live Spaces. So, here’s my step by step guide on how to do it:
Go to your Windows Live space (or get one here if you don’t already have one). Sign in, click on Options – email publishing:
Select your secret word (not your passwords etc)
Make sure you remember whether you’ve decided to publish immediately or save the entry to draft – or else there’ll be a lot of head scratching when the post doesn’t appear
Go to Tafiti home page and sign in using your Windows Live ID
Search for something I’ve searched on my hobby which is Scuba Diving:
Scroll through the images, choose a couple of images you’d like and drag them onto the bar on the right hand side of the page. You can stack them one on top of another to make up a collection
News – select one of the icons under the search to change your search type,
Feeds, you can select as many RSS feeds as you want
Drag the selections you want over to the right hand side of the Tafiti search page and give your collection a label. Remember you need to be signed in to save your collection.
Now, click any where in the collection box *away* from the label and the blog it dialog box comes up
Put our blog name in, your secret word and the blog post title, then press post.
You need all 3 pieces of information for the post to actually appear in your blog
Otherwise there’ll be more head scratching!
Switch to your Live space and see the research in your blog
So parents, go and show your kids how easy this is, and get them to show their friends at school how to do this too. It’s really easy when you do the step by step results. Then bask in the glory of their excellent homework results 🙂
It’s a neat way of saving all those searches for those frequently asked questions at work too…
| Share this : | 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|  |
I’ve been meaning to blog about this for some time now but other techy things have got in the way recently. George has just send out the TechNet newsletter talking about ChampionIT. These are the unsung heroes of the IT world, working away on some amazing projects. Well we’ve announced the first set of finalists. Vote for who you think should be our first hero
And if you want to nominate one of your unsung heroes in your own IT department who does amazing work and doesn’t get the credit he deserves, then nominate him here:
Or if you think you’re totally awesome – nominate yourself instead 🙂
| Share this : | |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
One of my graduates last year, Steve, spent some time on machinima projects and put some of his videos onto YouTube. Here’s one about staying patched…
Well it’s nice to see other teams following the lead of the IT pro team :-). The visual studio team are using Machinima in their Defy all challenges site: watch the videos – Machinima. The snack video is really funny…
Oh – I forgot – The video that Steve created about mashups actually uses James’ voice
James still has all his own hair though…
| Share this post : |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
The last Windows Server 2003 machine at Microsoft.com has a following and has been blogged about by the Windows Server team on their blog.
Video: The Lone Server – extended version
This reminds me of a video of the decommissioning of the last 5.5 Exchange server in the organisation (when everything else was on Exchange 2003). I think the plan plan was to blow it up dramatically but the health and safety guys said it was far too dangerous. So the last 5.5 server in the org was comprehensively ran over several times by a steamroller. Fantastic.
Shame I can’t find it on YouTube or MSN Videos – it was such a great clip…
Eileen's Digital Technology 