Bob's Tech Talk

A new communication tool that Google is developing to use on your computer systems and mobile devices. It is not  expected to be available to the public for several months but has been put into the hands of developers now to see what they can do with it before it's public release. A very nice overview is available on YouTube and can be accessed from cnet news site.

Supports standard email functions as well as instant messaging. It treats the communication as an object so that it can be real time as well as providing standard email type access. It allows easy drag and drop capability to add people to the communication flow and to bring people in on the conversation at any point. You can easily put threads into the message, share the communication on a blog by adding the blog as a member of the conversation and withhold access to parts of the communication thread by making them private and assign the members to just that portion of the conversation thread. Also if you are added after the conversation thread had started you have the ability to replay the conversation as it progressed, piece by  piece.

They discussed how using this product you can use the editing function to collaborate on document creation. It again allows you to show the changes, but the most interesting thing is that it allows you to view the comments, and playback the order in which the document was worked on. It makes editing and revision control very well controlled. It promises “to become a very powerful document creation tool!”

A couple months ago I restarted my Netflix Subscription because of the ability to acquire instant availability of published TV shows and movies on my Xbox game system.  Unlike a lot of people the only use I have for my Xbox machine is the ability to deliver media from Home Network to our family room TV set.  Now with cable on-demand, cable DVR, DVD movies I also have the ability watch my Media Center video, music and TV recordings I'm adding what can be called Netflix on-demand as well.

To show you just how much Netflix is taking over the market share of the video industry there are so many ways of getting streaming video from Netflix you almost have no excuse not to subscribe to even their most basic subscription plan.  For $8.99 you get all you can eat streaming video plus single DVD Rental each month.  If they're a lot of old shows that you haven't watched you would like to RE watch this is a great vehicle that will allow you to accomplish this task.  So now I have Netflix available to me as a movie rental, which satisfies my need to watch newly released movies, and, instant streaming movies and TV shows instantly from my ex box to my TV or on my computer or from within by media center console.  Now all I need are more hours in the day.  Hey Netflix can you fix that also!

The Netflix Media Center interface has quite a few choices build into it.  Not only do you have Instant Queue, you can also you can add to your DVD Queue, take a look at what you have recently watched, view newly arrived movies and select them for either instant view if that's available or to be placed in your DVD queue, and they have categories that you can browse through and make selections as well. The search function works for movie and TV show titles only, this is something I would like to see changed to also allow you to search by actor and director as well.  I'm sure they'll get there.

So if you have Vista Home Premium or Ultimate this is another great addition to your Media Center application. Enjoy!

I don’t mean by the title that it is coming soon but that I plan blogging on this subject matter over the next couple of weeks. The term Cloud Computing has become a much tossed around term to describe almost anything that you use that is hosted on the web. It can be anything from a social network to desktop applications for word processing, spreadsheets, to-do lists, calendaring and more.  I am constantly amazed at the total volume of applications that are available. Over the next couple of weeks I plan on testing and writing evaluations on several that I have begun to find useful. I will also be documenting my experiences in trying to tie in some of the different social networking/communication sites to make the more interactive. I hate having to post the same info on multiple sites. Such a waste of time.

I have made several new additions to the solutions side of our website. I've added information about Aruba Networks that I think you will find very interesting. I have also updated the Announcement Page to reflect the accomplishments of Mark and Ken over the past couple months.

I've also added the new pointers for my tech notes pages so you can easily set up the RSS feed, or jump to the old site or to the new site. I have updated the site with several of the last months articles so we have some continuity.
Bob

I have updated the Solutions Center Web Page to include pointers to published articles, product pricing pages and more to help you find all of the information that we are putting in your disposal.

I hope this'll make it easier for you to find product that your looking for and evaluating and if you have any questions on any of items that I have placed here feel free to contact me at BobsTechTalk@live.com. I will be more than happy to either research something that you did not find on our site or respond with more detail.

Let me know what you think, I appreciate all of your comments.
Bob

I am a little worried about making a jump mid stream to a new URL for the blog site but with all of our changes in the past month internally with the implementation of the new service support program it is important that we try to make as many things consistent to ensure that we don't cause confusion in our support sites.We have so many projects going on at the same time that it is hard sometimes to keep them all straight.

I thought that I would go over some of the things that you'll be seeing on our website in the near future. I also talk about some of the projects that we are doing to help support our customers. 

Through our BNI connection I am now writing a bimonthly article for the Laurel Mountain Post which is a local publication promoting local news, events and memorabilia as well as businesses and individuals writing about their companies, ideas, memories and places in our area. There is a lot of local writing talent in the are and they tell great stories about what we have in history and local color. This is a free publication that is available in many outlets in our area and can also be accessed on their website located at: www.laurelmountainpost.com. You can also download this month’s copy in PDF format at: Download a PDF file. My column is called TECH TALK and this month’s article is about The right media player for Christmas.

The reason I changed the title of this blog is to match all the pointers I have running around for my personal information pages. So, bobstechtalk is now a common denominator for all of these functions. You can get to this site by typing in www.bobstechtalk.com, www.bobstechtalk.live.com and you can send e-mails to me at bobstechtalk@live.com, bobstechtalk@yahoo.com or bobstechtalk@Gmail.com. So I have opened many different avenues to be able to support the different avenues that we will use to communicate with you.

Soon we will be opening up our support portal that will give you the ability to enter your own service tickets to initiate service calls. He will also be able to view the current status of your support request and be able to update your service issue ticket as your situation changes. You'll also be able to use this to interact with the technician, communicating back and forth with the technician and having been conversation be placed on record. All these entries will be part of the system knowledgebase and can be referred to in the future if needed. The will be accessed by going to: http://connect.paconnect.com/service. You will be presented with your own login ID which is your e-mail address and a unique password which we will send to you once we have authorized our access. 

The interface is simple and easy-to-use. You will have three choices, the first is to enter a new service entry record. This allows you to initiate a service request in the system that will appear on our service board and we can very quickly react to this entry. The second option is to view the company entries that are in your service database. You can sort on multiple fields as well as limiting the view to just open records, close records or all records that meet the criteria that you set. The third option is to search the knowledge base. This option allows you to search your company records or any knowledgebase records that we have entered in and made public. This allows you to quickly review any past problems are problems that are similar to what you may be having with your systems that we have posted information and/or fixes on this site for you.

Look for this new customer support portal to open up sometime during the beginning of December. We will have support information on how to use the site posted here as well as videos showing you how to work with the different site capabilities. If you want to be part of the beta program please contact me and I will make sure that you are put on the list for the initial implementation.

Bob

We recently had the opportunity to build a system for one of our customers that gave us carte blanche on putting it together. The basics, a beautiful Samsung 26 inch screen, a quad-core Extreme processor, and Vista Ultimate tops the list. The only thing that we probably should have done was moved the customer to 64-bit and run up the memory. We were a little worried about driver availability so we hesitated on that one. Scott is going to put together a complete write up on this one on his site and I will update the pointers when he finishes. Scott’s site is: http://cid-c1df53b40a2f504d.spaces.live.com/?mkt=en-US&partner=Live.Spaces.

We put together a little movie on this as well that I will push up to the network when I get a chance as well.

We've been hard at work at setting up the new service tracking application that we are implementing. We are still working out the kinks, but we should be able to open up shortly for you our customers to access the system directly to manage your accounts.

I will be putting together a series of videos describing how to use this portal and how the system will decrease turnaround time on your service requests. It will open up knowledgebase information for you as well and give you hints and strategies on how to better utilize your systems. I'm hoping to have this opened up before the end of the month.

Keep watching for the announcement and your personal access information.

Bob

There are a lot of different products out there to help you manage your documents, and Paperport is one of the packages that have been out there for quite a while and is maturing quite well. I recently had a customer ask me how to scan multi-page documents and make sure that your pages stay in order. Here is a quick video showing you how to do it with Paperport 11 professional.

See video here.

If you are trying to keep up with the cloud computing onslaught, Microsoft has just release a new product updates that enhance your web interaction dramatically. If you are a media producer, photos, video, or written content, then you will love some of the new interaction within Microsoft’s Live programs. The new download is available for updating your current applications at: http://download.live.com/. I had originally heard about this new update on Windows Weekly, and finally this morning I decided to load it up and give it a little whirl.

They've added some functions for photos and movies in photo gallery and moviemaker. This new moviemaker program is not as extensive as the version that comes with Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate, but the one feature that I do like is its ability to post directly to Microsoft MSN’s Soapbox site. When you tell it to publish all of the information that you need to enter to publish it is presented for you to fill out in a nice dialog box and it very quickly and easily converts in uploads your video content to the site. Once it is there it is very easy to attach the video to your blog and voila! you have your presentation ready and available for all of your readers. Believe me, this is much simpler than the convoluted process you had to go through before. It also appears that if you are using Windows Live Writer, and you use the insert video function, this will also allow you to post the video up to Soapbox or YouTube. You can also connect directly to either your YouTube or Soapbox account to connect videos that you have already uploaded to the site's.

I use Windows Live Writer for creating and posting all of my blog entries no matter which site I'm currently posting to. We have added quite a few new features including an edit, preview, source tabs at the bottom of the screen too quickly change your view of the blog you are currently editing. You can turn on word count so that you can get a handle on how verbose you are as you are writing. There are quite a few more features included in the options tool that allows you to control your experience with the application as well.

There is a new toolbar add-on into Internet Explorer that gives you direct access to your Windows Live applications. This gives you direct access to your mail photos and calendar sites as well as quick search, mapping and translation buttons. There are new versions of Messenger and Mail which are quite interesting as well if you use these programs. It's worth a look, and these programs are all free. Can't beat the price!