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Shit I Use Every Day (SIUED) : Dropbox

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I often get asked by people what software I utilize a lot, so I thought that I would start writing articles letting people know the software I find useful and use nearly every day. The first installment is Dropbox.

Dropbox is a nifty little utility that does one thing, and one thing perfectly. It synchronizes your files between computers, the web and mobile devices. You install a small piece of software wherever you want access to your files, and anytime you add a new file to your Dropbox folder, it get’s synchronized to all of your other devices.

For example, I have Dropbox installed on the following:

  • my work desktop (Windows XP)
  • my work laptop (Mac OSX)
  • the home family iMac (Mac OSX)
  • the home server/biz machine (Windows 7)
  • my iPad (iOS)
  • my iPhone (iOS)

So, each one of those devices has Dropbox installed and they all talk to the Dropbox website. If I change or add a file on ANY of those devices, the change gets replicated to ALL of the devices. It’s great for making things available everywhere, and even as a cheater backup solution. I also utilize several Dropbox ‘aware’ programs that store their data IN Dropbox, so you can utilize those programs on multiple devices as well. I’ll get into that more in a future installment of SIUED. In addition, you can use the service to share files with others. So load them up in your Dropbox, and then invite others to share that folder.

So if you are interested in Dropbox, you can sign up for the free service here. It’s become indispensable in my day-to-day routine.

IBM LotusLive wants to Vondle and Tungle you

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Please excuse the sex-ay title, but the 13 year old me had to chuckle at it, and with the all the other “LotusLive” posts you are going to see letting us know about the new feature announcements, I figured I’d have some fun with my post.

Yesterday I had the privilege of joining a blogger conference call in which Sean Poulley, Brendan Crotty and Ed Brill went over some new announcements for LotusLive. First off if you couldn’t tell by my rapier wit with the title, LotusLive announced support for Tungle calendaring integration, as well as integration with Vondle Live. Vondle is an online doc viewer that supports over 70 formats and allows you to annotate them from within the browser. So those two integration points were very nice, all configurable from within the admin side of things, and I think will add a lot to the experience.

For those unaware, LotusLive Notes can be had for $5 a month, and can be accessed via the web client, or a Lotus Notes client itself. It allows for a 25GB mailbox as well. In addition, if you want Traveler mobile email support, that will be an additional $2 a user per month. So for a total of $7 a month, you can have a pretty kick ass email solution you can access via web, mobile device or Notes client. Right now the Traveler support only is for iOS devices, Windows Mobile and Symbian. Blackberry support is supposedly coming soon, and I don’t see any mention of Android support yet. I imagine that once the beta of Android is done on the Domino side, that it will make it’s way into LotusLive.

Lotus also announced a new $10 a month offering called the LotusLive Collaboration Suite that includes the LotusLive Notes above as well as IM, file sharing, social networking and web conferencing. It’s a pretty full offering for only $10 a month.

As for the social networking aspect, Lotus added Communities as a feature within LotusLive Engage and LotusLive Connections. So now you can create community areas to share activities, bookmarks, discussion areas and tags. Which means you’ll see that in the collaboration suite as well. Lastly, LotusLive Notes added 21 additional languages, Engage and Connections added 5 languages and Meetings and iNotes added 7 new languages, while Meetings also added app sharing support for the Mac OS.

So in all, LotusLive continues to grow, expand and integrate. They are being pretty nimble in this space, so I’m excited to see how it is received in the marketplace, and to see how much more they’ll unveil in the months to come. Lotusphere should be very interesting.

LotusLive Notes is Live… and it's Notes!

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Ed Brill announced this morning that LotusLive Notes will be available on August 24th. In addition, Lotus Notes 8.5.2 will eGA the same day. So some really good stuff coming to the table for Lotus in the typically quiet late summer months.

For those that don’t know, LotusLive Notes is a cloud based version of your Lotus Notes email. It includes calendaring, contacts, instant messaging, a 25GB mailbox quota, antispam & antivirus, and is hosted in IBM’s data centers. You can hit it via a web browser, OR you can use the full featured Lotus Notes client. And the kicker? It’s only $5 per user, per month. If you include LotusLive Engage (which has activities, file sharing, online meetings, forms and surveys, shared contacts etc.) then the price jumps to $10 per user, per month.

So that brings it in line with other cloud offerings that you can find today, but gives you the power of the Lotus Notes client. A client that can work offline, in Windows, Mac, SUSE or Red Hat Linux. To me, that’s pretty huge.

Now there are caveats. The LotusLive licensing only doesn’t allow you to hit apps on local app servers, you still need an Enterprise CAL for that. Also, Traveler support is not yet there, and when it does arrive it will cost some additional money per user. At the same time, there still is no BES solution either. RIM and IBM are hard at work on making that happen however.

What IBM sees happening (and as an IT Director of an SMB, I do too) is that if companies do go to the cloud, they will end up using a “hybrid” model of computing. Basically certain tasks or people will be relegated to the cloud while others remain on premises. What IBM is trying to do is tie it all together and make it work seamlessly. I haven’t really seen the hard core details of how they are doing it, but I can’t wait to see how it plays out.

There are going to be two additional offerings that bundle “Enterprise” support which means the ability to run apps will be included (off your local servers.) So it will be like an Enterprise CAL, and it’s only going to cost an additional dollar per user per month. So if you go LotusLive Notes, it becomes $6 per user, per month, and if you add Engage, then $11 per user, per month. Lotus will even work with you during your renewals to renew via this method instead of an Enterprise CAL. All the details aren’t finalized yet, but that’s the plan. And the fact that they spelled out the pricing in today’s blogger call was pretty cool to me.

The first feature upgrade is to take place in early October, and that should include Traveler support, and tools to help you convert users from on-prem to the cloud.

I think this is definitely a place that IBM HAS to be in order to compete with Google and Microsoft, and I think they’ve got a very good offering. Now we just need to see if the market agrees. Let’s hope so!

Why Twitter Rules, a Rebuttal

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My friend and respected colleague Rob McDonagh just posted a rant on Why Twitter Sucks, and to me it seemed very much like the old codger saying “Get off my lawn” so I figured I would write why I think Twitter rules in a rebuttal to the fair Captain. So read his rant first, and then you can come back here. Ready? Good, lets begin:

  • There are No Unread Marks – Actually I agree with this, I would like it myself. But my guess is that there is a programmer somewhere who can work this out. It can’t be that hard. Also, follow your twitter stream in an RSS reader and you’ve got yourself unread marks.
  • People use twitter to say the Most Inane things – Very true, but many times I actually love these little details. It helps me keep in context the fact that people have a life outside the technology. Seeing that someone watches a certain TV show might make me take a look at that show myself. And more than once, seeing what someone was about to eat gave me a craving for the same thing. I like it. I guess if you don’t like people that post those things, you can always stop following them.
  • Conversations are disjointed – This is true too, but like Rob pointed out, if people used the proper conventions it’s much easier. And there are tools like Quotably that help in this regard.
  • 140 characters? – Yes, 140 characters. Deal. If you can’t then send an email or an IM. I find that having to condense what I’m going to tweet about into 140 characters makes things more concise and easier to handle. It’s a texting world, 140 characters is practically a novel to the kids these days.
  • No concept of stopping and starting a day – Okay, and this is a problem why? See, I think you have to view twitter in a certain perspective. If you consider Twitter to be a bar or a party, you can come and go as you want, and when you are there you are part of conversations, you might go to the bathroom and miss a conversation but that doesn’t mean you grill everyone on what you missed, you contribute to the people you are around at the time. Think of it as hanging out with a group of friends, and it becomes much easier to handle…
  • Twitter auto updating Facebook – Seriously, you are complaing about THIS? Both statuses (along with every other site with a status) is meant for you to post your current status. To me they are one and the same. Friends who are only on Facebook see the same thing as people who are only on Twitter. Everyone is updated equally. The fact that things like ping.fm can update statuses all over the place allows ease of use for the poster and allows users at ANY of the services to get the same information.
  • Responses that don’t make sense to people we don’t follow – I actually kinda LIKE this. You know why? Because on more than one occassion reading the reply lead me to read the original person’s tweet, and then in turn I started to follow them because they were interesting. I ignore the ones that don’t make sense or aren’t interesting to me. You need to be less obsessive compulsive about reading every little thing. Once again, think of it as a party where people are chatting. Think of the “don’t make sense” tweets as times when you walk up to a friend talking to a stranger and hear the tail end of a conversation. Maybe you jump in and meet someone new, or maybe you walk on by.
  • Spam in twitter – You’re getting nitpicky now. Of course, some people that can follow you are spammers, but if you don’t follow them, you don’t get spam IN Twitter. If you are talking about follow requests, you are diving too deep here.
  • People tweet instead of blogging – Yup, and it’s absolutely wonderful. There are many times I have a thought that I want to keep track of, but I don’t really have enough to base a full blog post on, so I tweet it. Sometimes the conversation in Twitter gets big enough to finally warrant a blog post, sometimes not. I find it increasingly harder to find time to fully blog, so being able to micro-blog on occassion is beneficial to me, and probably to many others. In fact, I bet there are some people for whom Twitter is a much better medium for them to share thoughts than a full-on blog.

Another reason I like twitter is because of my two best friends, Mike and Tim. They live several hours away, and I only get to see them a couple times a year (kinda like certain Lotusphere buddies.) Anyway, we can email and chat (and we do) but Twitter feels more like we are hanging out. One of us will say something, and we’ll respond to each other and rip on each other and stuff like that. I like knowing the details of what they guys are doing at work too. It really seems more like we are hanging out and chatting over a beer than anything else. To me, twitter has a more personal feel to it than pretty much any of the other “social” mechanisms out there.

Now take TwitNotes. Having that open in my sidebar simply rules. Much love to Mikkel for doing it for us. While I’m at work I live in the Notes client. Having to flip back and forth to a twitter client or the website gets annoying. Having it pop up in the Notes 8 sidebar is easy, and at a glance I can see the latest information. If I want to jump in, I can. 140 characters here and there is easy to do and not really a drain on productivity.

The other thing about Twitter is that I learn things I never would have by traditional means. Late last year, a tweet I responded to saved me about $500 in an electonics purchase. I know that Rob probably falls in that same boat there, and because of Twitter, he has $500 more in his pocket. To me, that’s enough to keep on using it right there.

So, in essence, I think Twitter rules. And I’ve thought so for awhile, but I couldn’t really explain it well until now. So thanks for that Captain, you’ve inspired me to put into words what I’ve been thinking for awhile! Twitter is like a large party where you are hanging out with friends, and if you treat it that way, it makes a lot more sense, and becomes a lot easier to manage in your head.

So what do you think? Does Twitter suck, or does Twitter rule?

Jeremy Zawodny: Using Gmail to read those damned winmail.dat files!

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Seems Jeremy hates winmail.dat files too:

The are various “free” winmail.dat readers around, but this is 2008 not 1998. I shouldn’t have to install the email equivalent of a “helper application” to read a fucking word doc that crappy email software couldn’t encode in a sane format.

Amen brother! Although many times it’s stupid Exchange administrators. In Exchange you CAN force anything in Outlook Rich Text format to convert to HTML before sending, but I see that winmail.dat file so much that it leads me to believe that many Exchange admins are a rare breed of stupid. And I WAS an Exchange admin… saddest time of my life!

FeedDemon and NetNewsWire are now free!!!

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Wow. Newsgator has now made all of their consumer RSS Readers free. Nick Bradbury gives you the scoop here. They also have a FAQ concerning any questions you might have.

Looks like they will be collecting anonymous usage data, but you’ll be able to turn that off and work in a standalone mode if you want to.

I love NetNewsWire on the Mac and was a huge proponent of FeedDemon on Windows before I switched over to the Mac platform. I think they are simply the best two RSS readers on the market. And the nice thing is, they have an online service that you can hit via a browser to get your feeds and it synchronizes everywhere. So, if I open NetNewsWIre at work and read stuff, then read some stuff on my Blackberry, then read some stuff on my iPhone, then go home and work on a windows machine with FeedDemon, the feeds and unread/read statuses sync between them all.

I’ve been using this for awhile and can wholeheartedly recommend it. This is certainly a kick in the teeth to google reader in my opinion.

For all you folks that didn’t want to pay for a good client before, you can now grab one (or many) for free. I highly recommend that you do!!!

I’m now tweeting up a storm

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Sorry for the silence for the last couple of weeks. I’ve had a lot of stuff going on getting ready for Lotusphere and the holidays. Some really cool stuff that I should be able to talk about soon.

In the meantime, I’ve also finally signed up for Twitter. I always thought that the microblogging of every little thing you do is kinda unnecessary, but the more I’ve played with Twitter, the more I’ve liked it. It’s nice to see quick updates from friends (and people in the industry.) Some things just aren’t full blog post worthy, so being able to read and post those type of things is really cool. In fact, Twitter played an important role in me getting a new toy for Christmas. In that sense, it’s already been worth the price of admission!

I’ll post a Twitter badge here soon, but if you want to follow me, you can do so here. Also, if you are Twittering too, let me know in the comments. Maybe I’ll start stalking following you too.

X1 Desktop Search with Lotus Notes

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Hello all. My latest article for DominoPower is out now. It’s a review of X1 Desktop Search with Lotus Notes support. It is a very cool product, and better in pretty much every way over Google Enterprise Desktop, and it doesn’t hose my machine. X1’s only drawback is the $99 cost of the software.

If you are REALLY serious about desktop search, and you can afford the premium, I recommend picking up X1.

Spam Prevention for your POP3 world

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Recently I started a crusade to find some good anti-spam protection for my POP3 email accounts. Basically, I use my Notes client as a POP3 email client where I download POP3 email into a local (read NOT server based) NSF file. I’ve done this basically for security, and for the fact that I live in the Notes client and Designer quite a bit.

What I found was that there are not a lot of options for this type of thing, at least for Lotus Notes as a standalone client. There are lots of great tools for you if you have a server based NSF file, but when it becomes local, then all bets are off. There are also a lot of POP3 tools that will download all of your email to a local server on your machine and then sort them, but since they are no longer on the server, you don’t have access via a webmail interface. Because I’m out and about a lot, or I’m sometimes using the laptop via WiFi upstairs, I wanted the ability to check mail via the web when I needed to.

I found a company called ActivatorMail which at first seemed promising. Unfortunately, they initially didn’t have a spam folder because they told me that “they had virtually no false positives.” Being an email admin for as long as I have, I KNOW that there will be an occasional false positive in ANY system. I asked for one and they finally obliged. Within the first week I found at least five false positives which is slightly more than “no false positives.” Also, their webmail was fairly sub-par. There was no button to mark something as spam, or rescue something that wasn’t spam. When I asked about those features, I was told they were creating a plug-in for Outlook, but no features were planned for the webmail since that wasn’t supposed to be a primary interface for email. *sigh*

Then it struck me. What I was trying to do was make ActivatorMail into everything that YahooMail already had. I looked into a Yahoo MailPlus account that had everything I was looking for. It even allows me to create throwaway email addresses for one-time web site registrations, has 25MB of space, and can access my other POP3 accounts. So now I forward all of my personal email from my accounts to the Yahoo account, and then download it from Yahoo via POP3. Works like a champ.

In addition, my web host has SpamAssassin running on my POP3 server, so it flags anything it sees as spam with a JUNK tag in the subject line. I’ve set up a filter in Yahoo to delete those on sight. My spam issues are finally going away. Since I’ve been getting upwards of 400 spam messages a day, this is a good thing!

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