Windows 7 networking controls video screencast

This week I begin a new series of video screencasts for Dell’s IT Expert Voice Web site. The site has all sorts of useful information for corporate IT folks that are interested in migrating and using Windows 7, and my humble part will be to produce a regular series of videos similar to what I have been doing on my own over at WebInformant.tv. Do check out this video which talks about the differences between Windows 7 and earlier versions when it comes to networking controls.

Windows 7 networking controls

This week I begin a new series of video screencasts for Dell’s IT Expert Voice Web site. The site has all sorts of useful information for corporate IT folks that are interested in migrating and using Windows 7, and my humble part will be to produce a regular series of videos similar to what I have been doing on my own here. Do check out this video which talks about the differences between Windows 7 and earlier versions when it comes to networking controls.

25 Years of PC Week

The scene is a deserted office park in Los Angeles after hours. I am driving around, trying to find the spot that my IT manager friend left an envelope for me. Inside the envelope is a disc with a secret IBM software program that is about to give me one heck of a scoop for PC Week, c. 1987.

It has been a week of memories. Last week was the 40th anniversary of the real beginning of the Internet, and this week is the 25 years that PC Week (regrettably now called eWeek) began publishing its weekly commentary on our industry.

While I didn’t start writing for the publication until 1987, I remember those times very well: back in the early 1980s I was working for a private software developer and we were porting our programs from the Apple to the new fangled IBM PC, and trying to make them work. Given that we were charging several thousand dollars to electric utilities for these products, it was my job to do the quality control and make sure that the code was written properly.

I eventually went on to work in various end-user computing departments for government and private industry before getting the job at PC Week as a writer and analyst. I went on to work there for more than three years when the PC industry was rapidly expanding and corporations were buying truckloads of PCs. Back then we didn’t have networks other than the ones that connected our PCs to our IBM mainframes, and I began to specialize in networking and installed the first one in our company before I became a tech journalist.

Wayne Rash called me last month to catch up and get some input on a story that he has written for the publication about those early days. It made me go back and actually find some of the articles that I wrote and recall some fond memories.

For those of you that were born after this year and don’t remember a world without computers, it is worth taking a moment to remind you that we had 80386 computers that had barely more than a megabyte of RAM and ran at 10 MHz clock speeds. Most of the machines back then had character-mode displays (except for Macs, which were rare on corporate desktops) and Windows and Linux hadn’t yet been invented. IBM and Microsoft were working together on OS/2 and Novell’s Netware was the most popular networking operating system because it could run on 80286s and use all of the entire memory of the machine. Hard disks were rarely larger than 20 MB, and floppies had just increased to store 1 MB of data. Mostly academic researchers were using the Internet and few corporations had email, let alone email connections to the outside.

In a story that I wrote in May 1990, I talk about what corporate IT folks need to think about when upgrading to the latest OS – which at the time was Windows 3 or OS/2 1.2. Some of those issues are still with us as we wrestle with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard.

Here are a few memories from that era. You can see scans of various magazine covers and articles that I mentioned from that era here.

My first story for PC Week (Jan 1987) was about a little-known company in the PC-to-mainframe market called Attachmate and how they planned on unseating the then-champion Digital Communications Associates, makers of the popular Irma boards. Attachmate went on years later to purchase DCA, and is still around in the terminal emulation space, also having bought network analysis company NetIQ.

What really got the IBM PC started in corporate computing circles was a spreadsheet called 1-2-3 from upstart Lotus Development Corporation. For some people, it was the only application that they ran on their desktops. Lotus 1-2-3 wasn’t the first spreadsheet and indeed, here is a brief post on the original spreadsheet called Visicalc.

Years before IBM ironically purchased Lotus, they started a skunk works project to use spreadsheets as a front-end to their mainframe databases, something that was very sophisticated at the time. The sole programmer behind the project was Oleg Vishnepolsky who spent about 18 months writing the software simply called S2. The code was used for internal purposes. I spoke to Vishnepolsky last week and rather than be mad at me for blowing his cover he was reminded that when my article ran his status as a lowly programmer was immediately elevated and he got to talk to the big brass about his project. “I got to rub shoulders with people at the top layers of management, and remember this is when IBM had about ten or 12 managers between me and the CEO.” Still, the S2 project was one of the best ones of his career and the code was used by tens of thousands of IBMers.

At the time this was being developed – say 1987 or so – there were a variety of people who were trying to clone 1-2-3 using the exact same command syntax, most notably Adam Osborne. There were legal challenges going back and forth about intellectual property and Osborne, being the roué that he was, only brought more attention to the whole thing.

Somehow, I got a hold of a copy of S2 from one of IBM’s customers, the setting for my cloak and dagger black ops mission at the top of this essay. I wrote the story about S2 and saw Osborne coincidentally a few weeks later at an industry event. Much as I wanted to give him a copy, I didn’t. But you can see the screen caps of S2 that I found in my archives.

Back then, IBM was very secretive about their new products and had all sorts of established protocols for dealing with the press. One place where they gave out advance information about their plans was at their user group meetings. Since I had come from IT, I knew how easy it was to attend these meetings under somewhat false pretenses. I called up the IT manager for Ziff Davis and found out that we indeed had an IBM mainframe squirreled away in New Jersey. I asked the manager if he could give me their customer number, which is pretty much all you needed to register for the IBM user conference. When I reassured him that it wasn’t going to come out of his budget (some things never change), I signed up and brought home several scoops from the meeting, much to the dismay of my fellow PC Week news hounds. But they were quick learners and when it came time for the next meeting, several of us attended as “Ziff Davis IT managers.” When we came back from the third meeting with even more scoops, Infoworld – which at the time was our main competitor — starting putting together the pieces and called up the president of the user group and got us banned from further meetings. But it was fun while it lasted.

Speaking of fun scoops, one of our younger and more eager reporters was Gina Smith. Gina was out to dinner with her boyfriend (who later married her) at a Cambridge, Mass. Restaurant. Sitting at the next table were two Germans speaking quickly. Little did they know that Smith was fluent in German and as she listened it turned out they were from Lotus’ German office telling each other what the future product plans were for the company. Lotus never knew how we got that story, and Smith went on to write a few books and run a couple of companies in Silicon Valley.

One of my early columns (July 1987) was about how hard it was to use a laptop in a hotel room. Back then modems were the main remote access devices, and they were running at 2400 bps, which was slow enough that you could read the text as it was being transmitted. Most hotels had hard-wired their phones so you couldn’t attach a modem easily, without having to unscrew the wall plates and take out the two wires that you needed to attach the modem to the phone system. How far have we come now with universal wireless everywhere.

Another of my favorite columns (March 1988) was written as if I was Judith Martin, answering questions of network etiquette. I considered it a successful parody when I got a cease and desist letter from Miss Manner’s law firm!

In October 1988, I was promoted to run a major portion of the PC Week. That same week, I was visiting one of my friends, Cheryl Currid, who ran the IT organization of Coke Foods (Minute Maid et al.) in Dallas. One of Cheryl’s staffers had baked a cake in my honor, iced with a simulated cover of PC Week’s front page with various “stories” in icing. Currid went on to write many columns for me at various publications, and is still consulting in the industry.

Yes, those were interesting and fun times. I hope you enjoyed some of these memories too.

A new medical journal search tool from DeepDyve

A new search site is in beta called DeepDyve that has some promise. First, they claim that they index millions of medical papers from paid journals and free sites. The problem in the past is that this content wasn’t too readily available. Yes, there is Medline, but not a very user-friendly tool. Second, getting copies of the papers to read has never been easy, particularly for those of us in the lay community that don’t have medical center accounts or access to medical libraries.

This is where DeepDyve comes in. They charge a buck to rent the paper for 24 hours. You can get other “plans” that allow unlimited access for more money. Does this sound familiar, like renting movies? Got it. Their search engine is very simplistic — you can’t sort by date for example. But you can enter an entire abstract into the search query to narrow things down.

Learning branding lessons from chess champions

Chess may be one of the ultimate strategy games, but marketeers can learn a lot from the game, and they don’t even have to know the moves of the pieces.

A few weeks ago we had the Women’s US Chess Championship matches here. They took place a few blocks away from my office at the St. Louis Chess Club, a dandy new spot in the ‘hood that also was the scene of the US Open earlier this year. As part of the festivities welcoming all the chess nerds was an event that I attended at my favorite local art museum, the Kemper on the Washington University campus, where the women chess champs were going to play roulette chess. It was a great evening, a combination of smart women and interesting ideas. What more could this geek want?

At the museum, I got to meet the current, three-time women’s champion, Anna Zatonskih and the woman who invented roulette chess, Jen Shahade. Both are babes, to say the least. This year’s tournament netted Zatonskih a cool $15 grand, the largest purse of a women’s tournament ever. Granted, this isn’t big money for other kinds of contests, but in the world of chess, it is a lot.

I am not a very good chess player, although I learned when I was much younger only to get routinely trounced by my younger brother, who continues to play and even doesn’t need a chess board to keep track of his moves.

While it certainly was fun to meet the women champions, I was more interested in seeing how Shahade has done such a great job branding herself online. Here are just a few links to get your juices flowing:

First off, she wrote a book entitled, Chess Bitch, about the current crop of women chess players. Apart from the brilliant title, it is a great idea for a book. In chess, many players refer to the all-powerful Queen with that moniker, something that I wasn’t aware of. (For those of you that don’t play, while the object of the game is to capture your opponent’s King, the Queen has the most allowed moves on the board.)

Second, she has all these wonderful ideas about how to invigorate chess by making it more like a sport or like poker, ideas that I have to say I find interesting (and play off my earlier column about making science a spectator sport here).

She even wrote a column for the New York Times a few years ago about it (now that is great branding just right there).

Third, she understands that sex sells, and apart from being a very attractive woman, she does things like play chess while spinning a hula hoop and against a naked (sadly) male opponent. These are two separate activities, but all in the interest of getting more attention to the game. She claims the naked chess is better for her to hone her concentration, as well as to ensure the opponent isn’t hiding any assistive electronic devices. Yeah, right. In any event, you can check out her video on her Web site here:
http://www.jennifershahade.com/

Finally, she does a lot of different events, both demonstrating unusual ways to play chess as well as getting inner-city girls excited about the game. Thus, she combines her passion with some solid volunteerism, which as you should know is a great way to spread the word on your brand.

So those of you that are looking for some new ideas, check out some of these links. The combination of video, catchy titles, and stimulating ideas is enough to give you your own ideas on how to brand and market yourself online. Even if you don’t play chess.

Is Email dying?

Have we reached the point where email’s influence over our electronic lives is waning? It is hard to imagine, especially for those of us who grew up in the minicomputer/PC era. For two generations,  email was the killer application. It delivered information reliably and within a few minutes.

But today the properties that made email so attractive for so long are now a liabiliity. “A few minutes” for a response is so last year, driven in no small part by texting and cell phone ubiquity. At the same time this was happening, wikis, blogs and social networks have begun to erode email’s document exchange role. The notion of sharing photos or a slide presentation using email attachments is becoming quaint.

Now, the Internets have gotten faster, and seconds matter. Amazon offers same-day deliveries in a few cities. Motorola’s new Cliq Android phone aggregates all your messages together. And email just can’t keep up.

Jessica Vascellaro’s WSJ article about “Why Email No Longer Rules” cites that more people are on Facebook and other social networking sites than use email (it is a questionable statistic, to be sure). She claims that email is losing out to the immediacy of the real-time nature of social networks feeds and presence-aware apps like Twitter. Even Instant Messaging isn’t instant or capable enough, since it was designed for one-to-one chats. Today, the real-time Internet means that conversations need to happen with multiple people and happen quickly. The fact that this constant stream of presence information is being collected and sold, eroding one of the few aspects of privacy we control is lost on this generation, apparently.

I asked my friend Dave Piscitello to help collaborate on this article, and we agreed to share our thoughts and come up with the overall piece.

We have begun to notice in the past month or so more of our network is responding to our respective publications – weekly email Web Informants and the SecuritySkeptic.com blog – via Facebook and not via email. Adapting to the needs of our audience, we have both begun “pushing” our publications using email, Friendfeed, Facebook, and occasionally Twitter. We’ve experimented with podcasting, webcasting, and video too.

This is admittedly a shotgun approach to publishing, and begs the question of which of these communications tools, if any, are the right one for publishing? It also begs whether any of these alone are sufficient, and if not, what combinations can be used effectively? More importantly, how do we measure influence and reach, given that people can reach our blogs, Tweetstreams and FaceLinkedNingSpace networks, text or IM us, or heaven forbid, actually speak to us using a phone!

We honestly don’t know for sure, but we asked ourselves some questions and share them here for you to consider for your situation:

If you send out a weekly email newsletter, is it better to have the CEO as a subscriber or have four or five direct reports on a subscriber list who will send the same email to the CEO to act on when we touch a topic near and dear? The former puts your name on the CEO’s radar *if* he makes time to read enough of your messages, while the latter puts the decision of what is near and dear in the hands of a (presumably trusted) underling.

Is it better to post something to our FaceLinkedNingSpace pages, because that post provides personal context, starts conversation that the rest of our friends can follow along and helps you steadily build an audience over time; to blog amid a topic-based community, where a your post may “go viral” on the blogosphere and get thousands of “one time” hits and trackbacks; or is it worth the effort to use blogging and social networks in combination by drawing the attention of your friends and followers to your blog via a post and URL from your social network pages?

Is the link you embed in a Tweet going to pull audiences to your content? If you get 10% clickthrough when the industry average is a couple of percent, what can you learn and leverage from that Tweet or all Tweeted content? Is the viral effect of reTweeting or Tweetstreaming useful in growing your audience or will you disenfranchise long time followers who have become accustomed to receiving email responses “in a few minutes”?

We have a lot more questions than these, and are still searching for ways to meet our individual needs and aspirations. We both agree on how to answer the question at the top of this post: we don’t think email is dying, it’s merely settling into the roles it was always best suited to play. Email is not being replaced entirely for notification, messaging, and collaboration by these other technologies, nor will any of the newcomer applications succeed email as the single killer application. For the moment, there *is* no killer application. We need to experiment more with the existing and emergent set of applications going forward to get a better handle how we all interact online.

In the meantime, please share your thoughts with us both, using whatever technology is appropriate.

Forget the new Pepsi Amp Up iPhone App

There has been a lot of press in the past week or so about a new iPhone App from Pepsi and energy drink Amp, called the Pepsi Amp Up Before Your Score. I tried it out, in the interests of reporting, and can’t see what the fuss is all about. The use case is a single guy on the prowl at a bar, and you pick one of several icons of the woman that you are trying to hit on, to gain insightful conversational banter and nearby destinations. Yes, it is sexist. Yes, it is smarmy. Yes, it doesn’t work well on giving you real-time destination results — searching for nearby ice cream stores in my ‘hood came up with a Ben and Jerry’s franchise that hasn’t been there for years. Is it better than the 9,000 fart apps on the iPhone? Marginally.

Save yourself the trouble of downloading and wasting time with the app. Instead, try these responses to lousy pickup lines from the Car Talk guys here.

CTOedge: Better Collaboration Tools Than Google

Google has certainly been busy building a lot of different software tools that can be used for collaboration, including Google Docs, Google Voice, Google Sites (formerly Jotspot), and Google Calendar. But there are a number of specialized tools that are more useful than these Google services for particular circumstances. These can be big productivity boosts for enterprises. Before we take a closer look, let’s explore three simple reasons why it is worthwhile to bother with any of these technologies:

  • First, they can help cut down on email back-and-forth. While we all love and use email, sometimes we don’t use it to our best advantage. How many emails does it take to schedule a meeting? Approve a document? Work on a presentation for a client? These collaboration technologies can move these and other common tasks into the fast lane and prevent inbox build up.
  • Second, they help build connections to remote workers. As organizations become more geographically distributed, you need better ways to tie workers together. Yes, Instant Messaging was a good first step, but that is just useful for finding out if someone is near his or her computer. These tools take things to the next level and actual make it easier for two or three people to work together in real time, no matter where they might be sitting.
  • Finally, save money. It doesn’t hurt that many of these technologies are cheap or free to implement and don’t require months of IT staff time, requirements documents, and training. Many of them are easy to use, running inside a Web browser with little else required, and can be quickly deployed. None of these require special skills and even the more complex features can be learned on the fly as interest increases in the service. Think instant ROI and paybacks measured in hours or days.

Let’s look at six common tasks and the difference between the Google technology and one that might be better suited for that particular purpose:

  • One of the Google services that is getting a lot of coverage is Google Wave, which is a combination of wiki, real-time messaging and real-time shared typing so several people can collaborate on a document. You can “playback” the conversation to see what happened in the past. This is Mashable’s analysis and perhaps a good place to start. Here is another article by Frank Olhorst. Given that Wave is free but in limited release, by invitation only for the moment, a better alternative might be SocialText, which offers a similar collection of services for $15 per user per month.
  • Schedule a common meeting. Google Calendar is a great tool if you and your spouse want to share a common family calendar, or if you still have an assistant that can schedule your meetings for you. But if you are trying to converge on a particular time in the near future to hold a meeting, then it really doesn’t work. There are a number of tools that can do this more easily, and the one that I like is Setmeeting.com. The meeting organizer sets up a few basic parameters and the service sends out an initial invite email and keeps things organized, without clogging your inbox with a lot of back-and-forth.
  • Work on a document in real-time. Google Docs makes it easy to create and upload a Word-compatible document with a decent amount of fonts and frippery if you must. But what if several colleagues have to co-author the document? Then it is less useful. A free service called Etherpad.com allows you to see real-time edits to the same document, with each author’s contribution highlighted in a different color, and an IM-like messaging window off to the side if you want to communicate quick thoughts. I used this to create a document from scratch within an hour with a group of people that would have taken us days at best without it. There are paid versions that operate behind corporate firewalls too.
  • Create presentation slides. Yes, Google Docs has the ability to upload and share a series of PowerPoint slides. But if you want to collect several presentations together, share comments on them, and add an audio track, then take a look at Slideshare.net which has these features and is free, too.
  • Post to a discussion forum. Google Groups has been around for some time. It allows ad-hoc creation of discussion groups and many people have used them for creating their own communities. The popularity of Twitter has brought several new players into the field, including most notably Yammer.com, which sets up private discussion forums behind corporate firewalls using the same 140-character style interface. The cost is a mere $1 per person per month. There are more than a dozen different such services, and Laura Fitton has a great comparison guide here.
  • Share a spreadsheet. Again, Google Docs allows you to upload your spreadsheets quite easily, but how about when more than one person wants to work on your formulas or create different reports from the data? That is where SmartSheet comes into play. And at $10/month for sharing up to ten spreadsheets, it is a very reasonable application to build simple databases that don’t require a lot of programming support. You can even attach specific files to particular cells in the sheet and there are pre-made templates for project tracking and surveys too.