I get questions all the time from clients about RSS… I am often asked to give them a newsroom area to posts current news and events, but then I am asked to simply turn off the RSS icon. I think that a lot of people must not understand the beauty of what RSS can do.

You can checkout my post titled What is RSS and Why Should I Care?

Don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed at the right.

For CopierCatalog.com, I needed to get a good live chat software. I wanted to make sure that I was available to talk with clients that needed immediate assistance. Both from a sales perspective as well as a support perspective. I started some research.

I first thought about using Skype as my software because I am in Skype all the time. But the problem with that is that in order for someone to chat with me via Skype, they need to have Skype loaded with an account. I wanted this to be easy for them so I didn’t want them to have to load anything. Skype should consider making an anonymous web client.

I looked at few services. One of the most common (at least that I see) is LivePerson. They have some pretty cool features, but it was more than I needed. They have tracking and analysis and the whole nine yards. But, the cost is $99 per month. Even then, I had to contact them to get the price.

I wanted something free. I wanted something reliable.

I ran across Volusion. They have exactly what I need. I downloaded and installed their free version of the chat software. I get pop-ups (configurable) when someone wants to chat. I can change the appearance with an easy to use interface. It is really easy to use.

The only catch is, I have to have a link back to their site… after all, they want to sell the service. That’s a fair trade off.

If you would like to see how the software works from a customer perspective, here is my chat. if I am online, you can chat… if not, it will just send me an email.

If you only have a couple of people that need the service, it will cost less than LivePerson at only $30 per user. When you are ready for your fourth user, you may consider looking at LivePerson, but I think this is a great service and offers a lot for the price.

I had to create a new document today for a number of people to manage. I had a suggestion from a few people to put it on Google Docs. I am not a huge fan of Google Docs… it is not quite as responsive as I like and I really like local documents so that I can work offline whenever I want. Not too mention, it is not as fully featured as MS  Office Applications or OpenOffice.org Applications.

Nevertheless, it really did make most sense for me to have this particular document online so that I don’t have to continue to email the document when I make an update.

So, I got to thinking… how great would it be for there to be a way to synchronize Google Spreadsheet with a Microsoft Spreadsheet? If I could find a way to mirror the two documents… one online and one on my desktop, it could give me the best of both worlds. I figured if I could synchronize my Google Calendar with my Outlook Calendar, surely I could do it with my documents, also.

Evidentially, I am not the only person thinking the same thing.

In my search, I found DocSyncer. You have the ability to have all the supported documents automatically sync for you. It is a little slow in the sync (i.e. you can’t make a change and force it to sync right away), but it really does seem to work well.

Setting DocSyncer up is a breeze. In about 15 seconds, you have your account set up. You simply add your Google Apps login information, install the software and it will start to sync. It takes a little time for it to get the sync done the first time (so be patient), but it work great.

Try it out. Let me know what you think.

I mentioned last week that communication management tends to be the hardest part about project management. I have also mentioned in the past that I am a big fan of Mac… but I use a PC as my primary computer for various reasons. One of those reasons is the productivity of Outlook.

Communication management is a bear, so there are companies that have added efficiency tools for Outlook. TechHit.com contacted me and asked me to do a review of their product… they gave me a free license on three of their products so that I can put them through the paces. I told them to be aware that I will give an honest review… even if it is bad. I’ll talk about the first tool today.

SimplyFile is the first Outlook plug-in I have tried from TechHit. Installation is pretty straight forward. When you restart Outlook, you get a new toolbar that appears:

First, I need to tell you the basic premise of the application. The idea is that you spend a lot of time filing away your emails into separate folders or scheduling appointments and tasks from an email message.

For example, I know that when I want to file away messages into various folders, I have to first find the folder and then drag and drop. Or, if I want to schedule an appointment, I  will copy the body of the email and then paste into a new appointment.

This toolbar adds some pretty cool functionality to Outlook. It took a little for me to figure out the best approach since I am averse to reading instructions (just ask my wife). But, the first thing you do is click the SimplyFile button on the far right and click "Train SimplyFile…" It will pop up the window on the right here.

When you click "Start Training" it will look at all the messages in your inbox and all your folders and start to figure out how you file messages. If you have a lot of messages, be patient, it will take some time.

After you have trained SimplyFile, you will have a lot of options available in your toolbar to file those messages away. You will notice that when you click on a message in your inbox, the tool bar drop down message will change to indicate where SimplyFile thinks you want to file that message to.  SimplyFile does a pretty good job getting the location right, but you have the option to change the folder location. As you change the locations, SimplyFile will learn your habits and become more proactive at suggesting the right one.

If you get an email that you just want to file away quickly that SimplyFile doesn’t know what to do with, you can click the QuickPick button. What I like about this is that you can refresh the folder list and see the current folders. It shows the full path of the folders, so it takes a little to get used to it, but it does make it easier in the long run.

Of course, there are the "Task It" and "Schedule It" Buttons. I don’t set many tasks from an email (although I probably should - I am still on a pad of paper for my tasks - I know what you are thinking, "That dumb web developer and blogger uses paper for tasks?!?"). But, I do set a lot of appointments from an email. This saves a lot of copying and pasting time. This is a great feature.

My favorite feature, though, is what you can do with sent items. Typically, you have all of your sent items go to one Sent Items folder. Many times, you want to save a sent item for a certain client saved in a different place (some people I know save them in the same folder for one client - all messages for one clients in one folder whether sent or received.)

You can turn this feature off, but I have kept it on. There are many times that I don’t want to save a message when sent. But, it gives you a lot of options that you didn’t have before.

So, my overall thoughts? If you are accustomed to filing messages manually, without Inbox rules, this may be a good product for you. If you use Inbox rules and are happy with them, this probably won’t work for you because this doesn’t route messages automatically, as far as I can tell but you may find that changing some habits can actually increase your efficiency.

The other con: it doesn’t help you with email management if you don’t really have a good strategy for what you want to do or don’t want to take the time to put one in place. If you are happy with keeping your messages in one location or don’t have the discipline to click a button and have it automatically file for you, then it may not be right for you. That is the biggest problem I have. I move on to the next message so quickly, that I forget to file it away.

In my opinion the only real con is the price. It costs $39.95 per user. That seems like a hefty cost. I like some of the features, but I don’t know that I personally would gain enough to cover the cost.

The pitch is that you don’t have to change your filing habits but just make them better. I have to change my habits to make this worthwhile because I am so inefficient in the way I handle email. I am going to use this as the impetus to become more efficient, so later I may think it worth $40… but not right now.

My recommendation to TechHit? Give away a lite version of the app. Strip it down to one or two features that people would like and then sell the rest of the features. Or even sell the stripped down version for $10 with a $30 upgrade. $40 is a lot to bite off when you will likely need to change the way you do things to become more efficient. After all, that is what they are asking their clients to do… change habits to become more efficient.

Try it out on their 30 day free trial and let me know what you think.

Keep the data on your screen invisible to roving eyes. Not bad if it gets a little to bright to see your display either.

Thanks to Bekathwia for the pic.

So, I just bought a new laptop.

Given the nature of what I do, I had to get a Windows Vista machine. I wish more of my clients used a Mac so that I could do more development on my Mac. Maybe one day.

I had it installed with Vista Ultimate because it doesn’t make sense to me to intentionally get a version of an operating system that is missing features.

I have spent about seven (7) hours getting it all set up. I had to turn off various security features (like User Account Control and prevention of non-digitally signed drivers) and work through installation problems just to get it all to finally work for me.

I then needed to set up my Exchange account and Google IMAP accounts. For those of you who have ever set up Outlook, you know that you can’t set up Exchange from within Outlook. If you try, you get this error:

Notice that it indicates that you should go to the Control Panel and open the Mail icon.

So, here are the icons that are around what should be the Mail icon.

Do you notice something missing? Yes, the Mail icon is conspicuously absent.

So, I did some checking on Google. I tried everything that I could think of. I went to Microsoft’s site. I found some people that had a similar problem in XP and the recommendation was varied from reinstalling Windows Mail and Internet Explorer to reinstalling the entire system.

I spent a couple of hours on this problem alone. Not having the Mail icon in the control panel really caused a problem.

Finally, I broke down. I contacted technical support for my new laptop. The response was, “Microsoft has removed that feature from the Control Panel in Vista.”

Huh? How does that make sense? How do I manage email accounts and email data files if the icon they say to use simply does not exist.

Oh, the idiots over at Microsoft must have had a few meetings to discuss how much more complicated can they can make this for their customers.

And they wonder why Vista has met with such adoption problems.

As I indicated to tech support that I need to manage my email accounts through this control panel, the tech support guy decided to start doing some research for me.

I waited for about 15 minutes.

He was still researching… now with his supervisor.

No luck.

Then, I remembered that when I was running Windows 2000 in 1999, in order to manage the email accounts, I had to right-click on the Outlook Icon. I thought I should give it a try.

Viola… it worked.

So, Microsoft… not so smart. Corey Smith… only slightly smarter for taking two hours to figure it out. But, I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad when every forum I went to didn’t know the answer either.

At least you now know and don’t have to waste your evening like I did.

Corey Smith is the Chief Web Architect for Dealer Marketing Systems.

A few weeks ago, I moved my email services to Google Apps. My main motivation was I wanted to find a good alternative to an Exchange Server. Since I left corporate America a few months ago, I have missed the synchronization that an Exchange Server provides. I can’t justify the costs of one, so I needed an alternative.

Google Apps provides free email hosting for up to 100 email accounts on your domain. You can petition for more without paying extra. The shared calendars are pretty cool, too. Recently, they added IMAP support which allows the users to have their email in their favorite email desktop client sync with the Google Gmail interface… so you can have the best of both.

If you are used to the way that your client handles email in a POP3 or Exchange environment, it takes a little getting used to (for example, you can’t hit delete in Outlook, you have to drag and drop to the trash and identifying something as spam or not as spam is a little more complicated). But, once you get used to it, it works really well.

One of the things that I really didn’t like very much was that I couldn’t synchronize my calendar. I still prefer to use Outlook for my email. I do because it is so well used. But, I really like the idea of having a web interface to modify my calendar.

Yesterday, Google released a little app for windows that allows the synchronization to work. It is pretty cool. I set it up and, in no time, my Outlook calendar was in sync with my Google Calendar.

I think that Google has a long way to go to replace Exchange. There are still many services that Exchange can do that Google can’t. However, having worked in Corporate America, I tend to think that for the features that the majority of users utilize Exchange for, Google is a better choice for a better price.

Now, you might be interested in how to set up your Google Calendar to share with Outlook. So, here are some instructions:

If you don’t have a Google account, you need to set one up first from here. Or, better yet, just move your email to their service from Google Apps.

1. First, you download Google Calendar Sync from: http://dl.google.com/googlecalendarsync/GoogleCalendarSync_Installer.exe

2. Simply save the file to your desktop so that you can find it later.

3. You’ll have to agree to the terms and conditions.

4. Read through the Google Calendar Sync Terms of Service, and click “I Agree.”

5. Continue to follow through the Installation Options and click “Install” to finish the set-up process.

When you have Google Calendar Sync is installed on your computer, the Google Calendar Sync Settings window will appear:

Simply enter your settings and hit save. It should take care of the rest for you.

Now, I haven’t tried every permutation of how your calendar can be set up, but I didn’t have one problem.

Here’s the best part. I can manage my calendar in Outlook, but share it via Google to other’s on the web. Microsoft, eat your heart out.

Corey Smith
Co-founder of Resumango where you can build a better resume for free

If you are like me, you spend a lot of time on your computer. I like change quite a bit, so I like to change my desktop background on regular basis… I find that it helps to refocus.

The problem with desktop backgrounds on a PC with multiple monitors is that you have to have the same image on each of your monitors. On my Mac, I can set the monitors to separate backgrounds.

I found a cool little piece of software called Display Fusion that allows a PC running Win 2000, XP or Vista to have different images on your monitors or even have one image span across all your monitors.

Try it out. Let me know what you think.

Corey Smith
Co-founder of Resumango where you can build a better resume for free.