Workamajig Tip: How To Use the Project Diary

Within Workamajig, the Project Diary is an important, but often misunderstood, functionality that provides you with the ability to quickly communicate brief, informal messages to other people, such as co-workers, clients, and vendors that have access to a given project. This tutorial will help you use the Project Diary more efficiently and correctly.

The Project Diary is your central place to capture communications for a project. This is useful to ensure that important data that needs to be associated with a project becomes part of the permanent record of a project. This correspondence tracking can be useful when you need to document client changes, particularly if you have to document changes in a budget, and relay communications to co-workers, clients, & vendors.

Project Diary notes are intended to be informal in nature, and should not be treated with the same formalities as email. If the content of your message needs to be formal, and requires a full To, CC, or Subject line, use should use email. If you do opt to use email, you can then use the method described in the next paragraph to get a copy of your email inserted into the Project Diary. This methodology helps keep your inbox tidy, and prevents the Diary from becoming cluttered and excessively long. It should also be noted that Diary notes are listed in chronological order, in other words, the newest notes are listed at the bottom.

Creating Notes From Email

You can use the Project Diary function to store email you send outside of Workamajig to the Project within Workamajig.  This is as simple as sending and email to or CC’ing the email address provided to you by your System Administrator that is setup to receive Diary notes. Within the body of the email you simply need to include the project number in double brackets “[[PROJECT Number]]“. You can also attach files that you would like appended to the Project Diary, however it is important to remember that these files are not stored in Digital Assets/Files and will not show up when searching for files.

You can also add Diary Notes directly from the Project Central screen. From Project Central you can enter a new note, browse all of the notes that you and others have posted, as well as reply to notes. When adding notes from Project Central you also have the option to email a copy of the notes to others who have access to the project.

Creating Notes From Project Central

To send a new note Click on the “New Note” button, enter the text of your note, choose whether or not this note should be allowed to be seen by Clients if they have access to the project, and select people that should receive a copy of your note in their email, and click “Save”. This will post your email to the diary and email copy of the note to those that you selected.

To reply to a note in the Diary, click on the link to the right of the original Sender’s name and Date of the original note labeled “(Reply)”. This will allow you to type and post a response to the original sender’s note. After hitting the “Save” button your note will now appear in the Diary indented below the original note.

Did Microsoft Miss The Boat On Windows 7 Pricing?

Microsoft announced the Windows 7 retail pricing structure for all of the various versions of the operating system today, and at first glance it looks at though they missed the boat. While Windows 7 looks very promising thus far, as seen in the betas and Release Candidates, it looks as though they are going to drive folks away from it by maintaining nearly identical pricing to Vista, which the world seems to agree was one of Microsoft’s worst efforts to date. However, as usual Microsoft has an ace in the hole.

Pricing is as follows:

Home Premium       $199.99 Full / $119.99 Upgrade / $49 Pre-order before July 11
Professional              $299.99 Full / $199.99 Upgrade /$99 Pre-order before July 11
Ultimate                     $399.99 Full / $219.99 Upgrade

Most Consumers Don’t Buy Windows

What Microsoft normally banks on is the fact that most people don’t buy individual copies of Windows and install them on their existing computers, they get Windows when they buy a new computer. Which in my mind is why Microsoft should lower the retail price significantly, so that they can fight the public perception that Windows is expensive, but they won’t because that would require them to undercut what they are selling the licenses to OEMs and businesses at. Doing so would cause an uproar with some of their biggest partners and clients.

Microsoft also knows that Windows 7 seems to run better than Vista on existing computers that are currently running Vista and XP. This has not traditionally been the case. In the past with every new Windows release, if you simply upgraded your existing computer there was a performance hit, your computer usually would run slower than under the old operating system. This does not seem to be the case under Windows 7, which seems to fly on older computers and lower powered systems like Netbooks. All of this means that the potential market for retail boxed copy licenses for Windows 7 is greater than previous versions of Windows. Also with the current economic conditions people are more likely to upgrade than spend money on a whole new computer.

Pre-Ordering Offers The Most Value

If you are one of the many that are actually planning on buying a retail boxed copy of Windows 7, I encourage you to pre-order it before July 11th, 2009, as this would entitle you to the lower pricing of $49 and $99 for Home Premium and Professional respectively.

8 Technology Investments to Help Small & Medium Sized Businesses Dominate the Recession

When the economy takes a turn for the worse most business try and make swift budget cuts to give themselves a better financial runway. Usually these cuts impact Marketing and IT with great severity, when ideally these are the two areas you should be at the very least maintaining budgets. With that in mind over the next couple weeks we will be highlighting 8 areas where you can make relatively minor investments in technology to help your business Small or Medium sized business dominate in the recession by doing more with less to gain competitive advantages.

The 8 Technology areas that we will be highlighting:

1. Communications
2. Data Deduplication
3. Cloud Computing
4. Learning how to use the tech that you already have
5. Electronic Document Storage
6. Virtualization
7. Hardware Upgrades
8. Going Mobile

Mac OS Tip: Change Screenshot Default File Format

Most Mac OS users are familiar with the Screen Shot functionality and its many options and key combinations, all of which is dependent on how nimble your fingers are (see the table of key combinations for screen shots at the end of this post), but did you know that you could change the default file format that they are saved as?

By default, since Mac OS 10.4 all screen shots are saved as PNG files, before that they were saved as PDF files. However there are many folks that still would like to save their files as a different format such as JPG or GIF. This is an easy change to make, but it requires you to fire up the Terminal to make the change.

1. Locate the Terminal App. /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app
2. Type the following:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type "file type"

Replace “file type” with the extension of the file type you wish to save as such as PDF, JPG, GIF, etc.

Screenshot Commands

Active Directory Tip: Access External Website With The Same Domain Name As Your Internal Domain

It is often the case that companies use their external domain (i.e. enirtia.com) for their internal Active Directory domain, and this is completely fine, except when you want to access your website which is hosted on an external server.

Active Directory automatically sets up an internal DNS server for use on your network, and assumes that it is the Authorative server for the domain you used, which in our case here is “example.com”. When clients on your internal network ask your Active Directory DNS server for a lookup on example.com it is going to direct them to one of your domain controllers. If you request”www.enirtia.com” and you happen to have IIS running on one of those domain controllers you will see whatever the default website that is running on that server.

To get around this we need to add a redirect to your IIS server, a Host record to your internal DNS server, and a delegation to your DNS server, all of which are simple to do. These changes are based on the assumption that your external website is setup on external DNS servers with an “A” record pointing”www.enirtia.com” to the IP address of the server that is hosting your website, and that example.com without the “www” is setup with a CNAME record pointing at”www.enirtia.com”. If it is setup in the opposite manner this will not work.

Host Record:

First find out what the IP address is of the external web server if you do not already know it. Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > DNS and locate example.com. Right-click and choose “New Host (A or AAAA)”. Type “www” into the name field, and the IP address of your external web server into the IP Address field. Click the “Add Host” button to save.

IIS Redirect:

To redirect “http://enirtia.com” to “http://www.enirtia.com we need to create a redirect in your IIS server. Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services and locate the Default Web Site. Right-Click on the default web site, and choose Properties. Go to the Directory tab and setup a redirect to point to”www.enirtia.com”.

DNS Delegation:

To create a DNS Delegation you must know the names of external name servers servicing your domain name. Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > DNS and locate example.com. Right-Click and choose “New Delegation”. Type www into the Delegated Domain field, click next and provide it with external authorative name servers for your domain name.

Why Sun Should Have Followed Apple’s Path

These days you don’t read or hear too much about companies deploying Sun Servers or workstations, you don’t read about the great advances in the Sparc Architecture, and you don’t read about how Solaris is powering the newest supercomputer. All of the things are what you would have routinely heard about ten years ago and through end of the dot com boom. Back then Sun was the platform of choice for enterprise computing and powering the latest web startups. Many a dotcom blew their VC funds on top of the line Sun servers to power their new next greatest thing. However, Sun has languished in light of cheap, but powerful, x86 and x64 hardware running Linux, which has virtually eliminated any advantages that Sun once had with their Sparc Servers and Workstations.

With their advantages dwindling Sun decided that they should jump on the mainstream bandwagon, by saying that they support Linux, building x64 servers, Open Sourcing Solaris, and buying MySQL. However all of these efforts seemed to be half-hearted measures to allow them to say they were doing these things, to get people in the door to talk to them about their Sparc closed source Solaris systems. They went so far as to start selling x64 workstations that ran, *GASP*, Windows.

Had Sun really supported these efforts they would have stopped selling a commercial version of Solaris and embraced a highly optimized, user friendly, custom version of Linux as their OS of choice that could run on any device they made. Furthermore, they would have limited their Sparc SKUs to the extremely high-end systems with everything else running x64. Finally, they would have embraced the consumer with gateway products to build their brand and suck new customers in, while building a hedge against market fluctuations. Does this strategy sound familiar? It should, its exactly what Apple did to not only maintain relevancy, but steal significant market share from Dell, HP, IBM, and Microsoft.

In Many ways Sun could have been bigger than Apple because they already had enterprise products, they just needed a consumer strategy, which albeit is much more difficult to create than an enterprise strategy. They could have accomplished this through an acquisition several years ago of a company like Suse, HTC, Creative Labs, or Macromedia. Anyone of these companies or any number of others could have vaulted Sun into the consumer space or have given them the tools to build really innovative consumer and enterprise level products.

Cisco, another dotcom high-flyer saw the writing on the wall about a dwindling enterprise market. This prompted them to make some strategic acquisitions to enter the consumer and small business space with Linksys and WebEx, among others. While not exactly the same, since Cisco does not make Workstations or Servers (at least until this week they did not), it is similar, they continued to serve their core market while bolstering their consumer offerings as a hedge against the separate market fluctuations.

But alas, they did not and in today’s news is that Sun is in talks to be acquired by IBM for nearly $7 Billion. However, I do not view this as bad news for either company because there are great synergies in products between the two companies. It is also not too late for IBM to still embrace a consumer strategy and get back into the workstation and laptop market that they should have never left.

Your Big IT Vendor Does Not Understand Your Business

Recently I have come to the conclusion that Big IT Services, Software, & hardware vendors do not understand small-medium sized companies. Most IT vendors seem to fall into one of two categories, the first is Big Enterprise Vendors that think you are or want you to be larger than you are, and fast. The second type is the Small Time Vendors that do not understand what business goals are and how they impact IT, and are quite fine fixing your desktop computer when it breaks, which is fine for the very small company, but they do not scale well. Rarely have I seen a company that can fit comfortably in the middle.

You may be asking yourself, “What constitutes a Big IT Vendor?” These are the companies that you would expect that make hardware or software such as Cisco, HP, and EMC. Big IT Vendors are also the “Value Added Resellers” such as Insight and CDW, as well as your local/regional “Enterprise Consultants/Vendors” that resell hardware & software, in addition to offering consulting services.

Next, you may be asking yourself  “What constitutes a small-medium sized organization?” This one is a little harder to pin down, as it is not always dependent on a headcount of staff. I know of several smaller companies that have only a few employees but require networks and systems on par with companies that have 60 employees, due to the nature of their businesses. In general I would say these are your non-tech based companies that have less than 150 employees, but more than 15. Most companies in this category are happy with their infrastructure as it stands, no matter how broken and inefficient it is, because they do not know any better. They do not have IT Goals, they usually have a loose idea of what they want or where they would like to be, but those ideas are always at the mercy of what else is going on in the organization.

Most Big IT Vendors are fundamentally sales organizations, or at least the departments that you will get to interface with. This is true even with companies that “make” hardware and software, you usually only get to deal with the sales dept. rarely get to talk to anyone that is technical in nature, or if they are they are a Sales Engineer. A Sales Engineer is essentially a sales person that has a better understanding of the technology, but is still fundamentally a sales person. This is bad because sales people are typically paid on commission, so they are usually more interested in pushing units than finding the best solution for your company.

Without sounding like Jeff Foxworthy, you can tell that you are dealing with a Big IT Vendor that does not understand small-medium sized businesses when you starting hearing them say things like:

• What is your annual IT budget? – What they are really asking is “how much money can I try and get from your company?” This is a way for sales people to size your organization up. Again this is something that most small-medium sized companies do not have formally established (but arguably should).

• What is your budget for this project? – This is essentially the same as the previous one. Most small-medium companies would answer this with “what is it going to cost us? If we like the number that is our budget”

• What projects are you working on that we may be able to assist with? – This is question that goes along with the IT Goals question; rarely does an organization in this category take on large long-term projects. Projects that would normally be considered a large undertaking for bigger companies, such as deploying a new IP Phone system or Exchange Server, are fairly short-term projects simply due to the size of the organization.

• We will get a quote put together for this. – This one is a pet peeve of mine. If these companies would just publish a standard price list and not sell their products as a million different components there would be no need for formal quotes. Personally, I am fine working with rough ballpark numbers until I am ready to commit to buying the products. This is a classic way for Sales people to maintain contact with you to try and push you into committing to buy the product or service.

Furthermore Big IT Vendors tend to push Microsoft & Cisco, with some RedHat or Novell Linux peppered in, centric solutions.  They believe that everyone needs a SAN, a web filtering system, a full Unified Communications Solution, and they look at you funny when you say you allow your users to use *GASP* Macs.
These Big IT Vendors have their place in the world, which is servicing large Enterprises. However, with the economy in the toilet shareholders pushing for ever larger market share these vendors have no choice but to try and convince small-medium sized companies that they need to have the latest and greatest enterprise-level technology to make their business run more efficiently. The fact is that most small-medium sized companies do not need an excessively complex IT Infrastructure to run their business, the need a simple, stable, inexpensive environment.

Unfortunately, without Big IT Vendors, that leaves many smaller companies to deal with the small-time IT Vendors previously mentioned, which is often not a better situation.

Goodbye GrandCentral, Hello Google Voice!

In a blog post late tonight on the official Google Blog is details of how Google is shaking off the dust that has settled on GrandCentral, the service they acquired way back in July 2007. GrandCentral provides users with voice features traditionally associated with business IP PBXs, such as a single virtual phone number that rings to multiple of your other phone numbers such as home, work, mobile, call screening, and web accessible voicemail. The free service is wildly popular with its existing users, but has languished since the Google acquisition and subsequent termination of new account signups.

According to the Blog post Google is planning a relaunch of the service under the Google Voice moniker. Along with the relaunch it looks like they will be adding some killer features, such as voicemail transcription, low-priced international calls, integration with Goog-411, and archival/indexing of all of your SMS messages. This all comes delivered on a new Google-ized user interface. The voicemail transcription is particularly interesting considering that there are existing services our there that charge a fee and use a human to transcribe your messages and send them to you.

Google has promised to roll out the service first to existing GrandCentral users in the next few days, and then to allow sign ups for new users. In fact if you point your web browser to http://voice.google.com you are greeted by a traditional Google looking login page, except it is branded for the new service. However, despite the fact that the homepage says Google Voice is open for GrandCentral, it is not, you are greeted by a Server Error after attempting to login, and the Learn More link at the bottom of the page takes you to non-existent Google Support pages.

As a current GrandCentral User, I am stoked about this news, as I was fearing that Google was going to let the service die much as it did with Dodgeball. I will update this blog post as I hear more.

Windows 7, Now With Less Internet Explorer

On the MSDN Windows 7 Engineering blog, Jack Mayo – Program Manager for Windows Docs & Printing group – has an interesting post about how the forthcoming Windows 7 Public Release Candidate will feature an “On-Off” switch for many Microsoft applications that have traditionally been bundled with previous Windows releases. One of these applications is Internet Explorer 8.

Unlike the traditional Add/Remove Windows Components functionality, the switches will not fully remove the applications do to internal Windows and developer dependencies on components of the applications. Instead it merely deletes the “.exe” and any shortcuts for the applications. Should the user decide that they actually need the applications they can flip the switch back and regain full functionality.

The other applications & services that can be switched off are: Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, Windows DVD Maker, Windows Search services, Handwriting recognition, Windows gadgets, fax and scan, and the XPS viewer and some other misc services.

This move is most likely to appease those examining Microsoft for Antitrust issues in the EU. Microsoft has long maintained that they are unable to extract the browser from the OS due to the way it is built, which was one of the sticking points in their US Antitrust case nearly a decade ago. While I do not agree with those that are claiming the bundling of IE with Windows is anti competitive, I do applaud Microsoft for giving users a choice, for a change. I think that it is their product and they should be able to do anything they want with it, short of putting technical roadblocks for 3rd parties developers to make their applications run on the OS. Users are fully capable of installing alternative products if they choose to do so.

Zimbra has 40 Million Paid Mailboxes

Venture Beat is reporting that Yahoo’s Zimbra has 40 Million Paid Email boxes, which is gives it more paid mailboxes than Google’s Free Gmail and it’s paying Apps (Gmail) For Your Domain customers, and puts it close behind AOL and Microsoft’s Hotmail services. While Zimbra’s users are not the same type of users as Gmail, AOL, and Hotmail’s users, in that Zimbra is not offering basic web mail services like the aforementioned services, they are offering something more significant in a full Groupware system with Calendaring, Email, Contacts, etc., and they are getting companies to pay for it, whereas the others, not so much. Much of Zimbra’s new found user base is due to the fact that Comcast has deployed Zimbra as it’s new email system for all of it’s broadband subscribers.

While Zimbra has made significant headway in aquiring new customers, they still have a lot to do to compete with Microsoft Exchange, with their biggest hurdle being acceptance by non-technical “office-type” users of using their own web mail interface over the traditional Outlook Interface. I ran into this head on when I replaced our existing Exchange 2003 Server with Zimbra. While the system was fairly stable, but less so than our Exchange server, their Desktop Connectors that linked with Outlook, Entourage, Apple Mail, and Apple iCal left much to be desired. These connectors were down right buggy and feature incomplete. With that said, if you can get your users to use their Zimbra Desktop Client or Web Client, the system was rock solid, and their Connector for Active Sync worked flawlessly.

I hope this milestone gets them noticed within the Yahoo corporate structure and gets them some more resources so that they do not get lost in the current Yahoo re org mess. I am still not convinced that Yahoo’s acquisition of Zimbra was a good move for either of the companies. As I have said before I still think that Apple should have bought Zimbra instead of creating their iCal Server.

It should be noted that I own stock in Yahoo.