Office and Business Productivity

A few weeks ago I started (re)using Nozbe after my "Remember The Milk" pro- account was expired. This forced me to use Nozbe more intensive and I also engaged myself to the community to translate from English to Dutch.
I started actively and translated some chapters and received an E-mail from Delfina asking if I would like to be a moderator for my language. This would basically mean, I’d not only translate, but also "take care" of the translation in my language together with the Nozbe team. Hereunder I have posted an overview of the topics I’ve translated. Please note, that I started a few weeks ago, and I didn’t logged the topics I have translated in April. Now I started a project in Nozbe, shared it with Michael and we now keep track of (my) translation work. I must say, it is not always easy to translate, because sometime you see just a bunch of words, and you can’t always place it in the correct context. On the other hand, I would like to encourage more translators to translate! It I a huge job, and the sooner we get this done, the sooner we’ll see out beloved Nozbe in our own language.

Update : Since a few days the Dutch translations are finished. They are ready for production and I hope Michael will release them soon.

Today Michael Sliwinski  posted a new blog post on Nozbe.

For me the interesting part (at this moment) is the paragraph about the new iPhone. Nozbe has set up a partnership with Macoscope, a Polish software house that is specialized in development for the Apple platform.

The last modifications were done and the new Nozbe iPhone application is submitted to the Appstore. I can’t wait to start using it. It will be a paying App, and I hope it will not cost too much, but it will definitely add value to the Nozbe application. I’m currently using the version 1.0.2 which is a quite simple application that lacks lots of functionality. continue reading…

Yes, my ticket for Sunday to travel with the Eurostar from Brussels to London is booked. I called the Belgian call center this morning at 09:00 and they confirmed that there were no more places available to leave on Sunday. The operator I talked to yesterday confirmed me that at 10:00 Eurostar will announce extra trains, and they can book them as soon as they are announced. What I don’t understand is that the operator this morning didn’t provided/knew this information, even when I specifically asked for it.

Anyway, I called back at 10:00 and this operator was aware of the extra scheduled procedure and I managed to buy a ticket to leave tomorrow at 12:59. SharePoint Evolutions (and definitely a big SharePint with lots of travel stories) here I come. I hope other people will get there safely and on time.

Oh yes, my flight from Antwerp -> London city with Cityjet was cancelled yesterday, and I called there call center just a few minutes ago. They cancelled my flight back and will refund it to my credit card.

It was a stressful experience to arrange transport to London, but eventually I turned out pretty good for me.

Happy and save travels to all other #SPEVO attendees

I was so happy that I could go to the #SPEVO SharePoint Evolutions Conference next week. I reserved an airplane ticket from Antwerp to London, but due to volcanic ash my flight was cancelled. Like many other people in the SharePoint community I have an issue to get to London.

So today I’ll try to book one of the (hopefully) extra scheduled Eurostar trains from Brussels to London. The call center opens at 09:00, so I still have to wait about 20 minutes.

Some people start to do roadtrips like @zimmergren, @mariannerd or @billbither .

I wish al travelers to #SPEVO good luck and safe travels and hopefully we can SharePint together in London

Yesterday Jeff Teper announced on the SharePoint Team blog some great news

–quote–

Today we reached an exciting engineering milestone- the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) for Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010!

RTM is the final engineering milestone and a major achievement for all of the internal teams who worked so hard to get to this point. As tirelessly as our engineering teams worked, we would never have reached this milestone without incredibly active participation from our customers and partners. More than 5,000 organizations and partners have worked with us on rapid deployment and testing of the products, and the feedback that we’ve received from all these programs has shaped a fantastic set of products that I’m sure our customers will love.

Our Volume License customers with active Software Assurance (SA) on these products will be one of the first to receive the 2010 set of products. They will be able to download the product in English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Dutch via the Volume Licensing Service Center starting April 27. Other languages will be available on a rolling timeline. Customers without SA will be able to purchase the new products through Volume Licensing from Microsoft partners starting May 1.

–End Quote–

Full article can be read via this link

I started testing with a free account of NOZBE and Since i am an Iphone user, installed the application on my Iphone. After changing the password in the webinterface of Nozbe my Iphone didn’t sync anymore because of the password mismatch.

On my iphone I couldn’t find the screen where I could change of enter my username and or password, so I started googling for it. After somewhate more then 10 minutes the answer was clear. Currenlty you can’t change your password on the  Iphone.  It is documented in the forum.

The workaround is to de-instal NOZBE on your Iphone and reinstall it from the Appstore. Ofcourse no data is lost since everything is stored on the NOZBE servers.

Since a few weeks I have been following the #GTD hash on twitter and there are a lot of questions of which (web based) software to use.  Therefore I have taken some screenshots of my RememberTheMilk configuration so you can actually see the difference between the default RememberTheMilk and the customized one. The customization is done with some Greasemonkey scripts. Hence, they only work on a Firefox based browser.

In my RTM configuration I use 3 Greasemonkey scripts.

1. Remember The Milk – Tag Cloud Colorizer
2. Remember The Milk – Keep Cloud Visible
3. Remember The Milk – display keyboard shortcuts

Here is a screenshot (Figure1) of how my RememberTheMilk looks without any customization.  continue reading…

Microsoft®  has released a whitepaper on business productivity for SharePoint® and Office.

This paper shows how two products, Microsoft ® Office and Microsoft SharePoint ®, contribute to the powerful architectural design of the Microsoft Business Productivity Infrastructure (BPI). The BPI stack approach suggests that only by thinking at a capability level (for example, “What do users want to do?), and then adding the right aspects of capability in each place (client, server, and services), can we create desktop applications that also deliver rich server and services capabilities to information workers.

This paper describes how the 2010, 2007, and 2003 versions of Office work together with the 2010, 2007, and 2003 versions of SharePoint technologies. Although we provide an overview of Office and SharePoint features working together in past versions, this paper focuses on the integration features of the Microsoft Office 2010 experience with Microsoft SharePoint 2010.
The scenarios outlined in this paper show examples of how the power of SharePoint 2010 and related servers can be combined with capabilities of one or more Microsoft Office 2010 applications to deliver rich, intuitive, and easy-to-use capabilities directly into the hands of desktop users. The scenarios cover the following value areas:

• Collaboration Without Compromise
• Bring Ideas to Life
• Anywhere Access
• The Practical IT Platform

The paper concludes that to realize the best user experience with Office and SharePoint integration features, organizations should upgrade client programs to Office Professional Plus 2010 and server technologies to SharePoint 2010.

The whitepaper can be downloaded at http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9690494

A nice day today. 2 days earlier than expected the SharePoint 2010 beta is released. It is available on MSDN (for MSDN subscriptions only)

If you have a MSDN subscription you can download it from this location https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/subscriptions/securedownloads/default.aspx

SharePoint Designer 2010 BETA , SharePoint Foundations 2010 BETA (WSS 4.0) and Office 2010 BETA has also been released. Happy downloading and experimenting!

BUT… there are some issues. PLEASE read a http://bit.ly/2rNgl8 blog before you start installing

One of the base principles of Getting Things Done is to obtain a “Mind like water”. Your mind is good for having ideas, not for holding them. That’s why you need to capture everything out of your head, and into a trusted system.

But please pay attention. Its takes about 20 days before you really can trust your trusted system. You need to be able to change and to adapt these changes in your way of work.
Before you continue reading this article, please take a look at this one.

Hereunder you can find a way to perform your Mindsweep. It is based on a Mindsweep Twitter session @GTDCoachKelly  executed via @GTDSpecialEvent
Take pen and paper or some a new document on your computer. Get ready to capture what’s on your mind.

• This is a capture only. Don’t analyze , process or organize.. Just capture!
• The primary question you have to ask yourself is: What has my attention?
• Now start writing down
• Are there upcoming meetings, projects, ..
• Anything you have attention to regarding your spouse, partner, kids, family
• Don’t worry on what you are going to do about it. Just capture. The processing will be done later.
• Do you have concerns regarding your health, sport?
• Are there things you noted somewhere else (tasks, projects) write is down. You still have some attention on it
• Anything with your laptop, equipment, car you have attention on?
• Look around (real life or virtual) you. Anything you would like to see different in your environment? What’s not exactly how you want it?
• Write down as much as possible. Don’t be afraid of the possible workload this mindsweep might create. You can always park things
• What about your E-mail Inbox? Or the Sent Items? Any open issues there?
• Scan your calendar, some weeks in the past and some weeks in the future.
• Are there upcoming birthday presents to buy, or Christmas presents?
• It might be enough to write some keyword just to remind you, like “SharePoint Conference” . You should process it later
• Some longer term stuff might also have your attention, like your career, family , …
• Maybe some things you want to do like a parachute or bungee jump, learn a foreign language, …
• Go for a long, complete list, your mind will be grateful!
• Oh yeah, this list doesn’t have to be executed tomorrow

So now you have captured what’s on you mind. This is phase 1 of a 5 phased process. The next steps are processing and organizing the Mindsweep.
Good luck with it!