peterdehaas.net

New Information Worker Toolkit

This is certainly my week when it comes to the replacement of my toolkit at work.

First I exchanged my smartphone (HTC S730) for the new and o so beautiful Palm Treo Pro . This is really an awesome and very easy to use device. I like it more than the HTC Diamond; all the fancy things don’t work for me somehow … (must be my age)

This is the first Smartphone with PPC I’ve had in a long time, so having a touchscreen again takes some getting used to.

I really like the fact that this phone has it all : 3G, Wifi, GPS you name it.

Palm in The Netherlands is now represented by NOW-Mobile.

 

The second üpgrade I received yesterday was my new Tablet PC, the Lenovo X61T. “Who says Windows Vista doesn’t perform ..? “:-)

It is a small formfactor relative to the 15,4 or 17” laptop but its just the right device for me. Small and super super fast.

Also I’m sticking to the TabletPC formfactor. I’m using a TabletPC formfactor for almost 5 years now I have gone very used to writing on my PC and avoiding printing in almost every situation.

I can’t wait to start dogfooding Windows 7 …

Running Office 2007 Enterprise RTM and Windows Vista Ultimate RTM

I upgraded my machine this weekend to the latest RTM releases of Office and Vista this weekend.

To be honoust, the backup and restore of my data took longer than the whole format / install alltogether. As I was running release candidate versions allready, there is not much / no difference functionality wise. As far as stability goes I didn't have much problems anyway.

I've been running Office 2007 since beginning of this year and started using Windows Vista when I received my new Tablet PC, the Toshiba M250, in June. I immediately got hooked on both products because of the new functionality and ease of use. Simple things such as the integrated search functionality in Vista and the authoring and graphocal functions in Office are just awesome. As far as the learnongcurve is considered; a walk in the parc for anyone who is used to using a PC with industry standard software ...

I will be upgrading my Windows Media Center next weekend to t Windows Vista Ultimate (Dutch). I just need to check some drivers and upgrade my graphics adapter.

Keep you posted.

Stop Unread RSS feeds from showing up in your Unread Mail Search Folder

Now how is that for a title :- )    

Alan asked a good question earlier today about the Unread Mail Search Folder and the fact that standard also the unread RSS Feeds show up here :

“… is there a way to have the unread count in the Outlook inbox not include the RSS feeds? I have hundreds of RSS feeds that I can't look at each day, and it drives the unread count for the inbox up, which is not what I think the feature should do.”

My response was not the right one (I am getting old …) so I dug a little deeper.

As you can see in the picture below, there are 2 different Unread Mail counts for my Mailbox :

1. There’s Unread Mail in my Inbox (15)
2. There’s Unread Mail in my Mailbox (3203), which includes the RSS Feeds folder

The Unread Mail for the Mailbox is handled by something called a Search Folder, which is a fully customisable feature; you can change the current one and can create new ones …

If you right-click the Unread Mail Search Folder (in the Favorite Folders list on top) you see the different options for this Folder :

If you then choose 'Customize This Search Folder' you get all of the customisation options (this seems obvious huh)

In the screenshot above you see that the tickbox in front of 'Mailbox - Peter de Haas' is ticked; meaning that all unread mail in this Mailbox (Inbox, RSS Feeds and potentially other Inboxes) is counted and shown in the Search results.

So when I only want to show Unread Mail for my Inbox, this should be the only box ticked :

The endresult is as expected; the Unread Mail Search Folder now only shows the 15 unread mails in my inbox :

Which reminds me, I have 3203 unread RSS Feeds :- )

Working with RSS feeds in Microsoft Office 2007

Microsoft Office Outlook has a build-in RSS Feed Reader.

Basically you have an extra folder in your mail file for RSS feeds. Up ‘till now I’ve been a very satisfied user of RSS Bandit, but now I have the new machine I am going all the way ; -).

What I really likes about RSS Bandit by the way was the integration with WBloggar as the editor; you’d just right-click a post in RSS Bandit and it would provide option to ‘reply’ to the post in WBloggar. I miss that in the current setup to be honest, so it’s a bit more cut and paste …

Another thing which I don’t like about the current implementation of RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007 is that the import functions of OMPL seems to be missing the categorization of my feeds. This means I am still in the process of reorganizing and moving my feeds. The upside of this is that I have the chance to clean the up as well.

What I do like is using Word 2007. The ease of use, basically because I've worked with it for many years, is great. The blogging view now suports the basic features, nothing fancy but it serves my needs. The only thing missing is categories, so I still have to do an extra step in the Typepad native editor to do that. I hope this feature will be put in once Office 2007 goes RTM ...

Anyway RSS Feeds in Outlook ..

This screenshot shows you my Outlook and you can see the RSS Feeds folder :

Reading feeds is just like reading email, from the same application in which a spend quite some time every day. With the preview screen (introduced already in Outlook 2003) I can read the post and if I wish, I can also click the option to view the post in my default browser :

When I double-click the post it opens a new view in which I have all the options to for example categorise, flag (turn it into an action), or email the post :

Another nice option is the “Share This Feed” option which allows the receiver of the mail to subscribe directly to the feed :

Through this I noticed something is still wrong with my blog setup. I always thought my Feedburner was the only option to subscribe (and the desired one). Now it seems that also my native (atom.xml) feed is active. So when people subscribe through a reader that ‘fetches’ the feed from my main page than it ignores the Feedburner one.

Reason why I don’t like it is that it screws up my statistics …

One Windows Vista feature I have to show you

You’ve probably heard more than enough about “glass” as one of the features in Windows Vista.

The display driver was in fact the only update I needed to do on my machine to allow this feature to work. And it looks pretty cool :- )

The first post from the new machine

In between other activities (not so many) I installed my new machine today.

I did not use a standard image, so I needed to build my machine from scratch as far as the corporate tools go and stuff, This all worked just fine, so I should be able to also connect through the VPN in the weekend.

So everything seems to work and I still have some things I need to figure out. I will prepare that list later today / tomorrow : - )

For now I am trying to get how through all of the traffic jams : - (

 

This will be a very nice weekend : New Tablet, Windows Vista, Office 2007 ...

The IT dept emailed me this morning that my new Toshiba Portege M400 Tablet PC has arrived and if I would like to pick it up ..."hmmm let me think about it" ... "YES !"

I've been waiting for the new machine to start working with a totally new configuartion :

The new Tablet + Windows Vista Beta2 + Office 2007 Professional Beta2.

We call this process dogfooding (which we get to do all the time :-) ) and although there may be bumps in the road I am very confident the new setup will bring far more benefits than downside.

After working with Office 2007 Beta's for quite some time I am very impressed by the Beta2 version which I use in production now since the internal release ..owsome ...

Windows Vista will be new to be honoust so much of the weekend will be spend on that learningcurve (if the family will allow me ...

No matter how sceptical you might be about Microsoft software (part of my blogvisitors are ;-) ) if you have some IT spirit in you, you may be able to understand the excitement.

From now on you can expect a "field trip" report frequently ...