Thursday, October 28, 2010

Entourage Incorrectly Flagging Email as Junk?

Entourage uses the 'Junk' category to help users move classes of email into the Junk folder.  Sometimes unwary users will decide to rename the Junk category and use it for some other purpose-- after all, who needs a 'Junk' category, right?  The result will be that anything identified with that renamed 'Junk' category will be treated as junk!

A client had done exactly that, and then made her own contact a member of the renamed category.  The result was that every email she sent was moved to the Junk folder rather than the Sent folder.  The emails were sent out from her computer okay, they just didn't go to the correct folder after sending.

The fix was to rename the category she had renamed back to 'Junk', then un-categorize everything she had identified with that category.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Two New Articles on Disaster Recovery & The Cloud!

Disaster recovery is thought by many IT Directors to be their most important responsibility to plan for.  I've just released a new article to the publisher on this very important topic.
       You can download a free PDF version of it by clicking here.

Few concepts have captured the imagination of those responsible for computer system like The Cloud.  I've just released another article to the publisher on The Cloud and my thoughts from the recent VMworld conference in San Francisco.
       You can download a free PDF version of it by clicking here

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

My Kindle Love/Hate Relationship

Stephen King may love his Kindle, but I'm beginning to have doubts.

I Love the Kindle!
I love being able to read books on my iPad and Droid smartphone.  The convenience is terrific, and the technology works well.  And with the ability to tell the devices what font size I want, it makes reading pretty comfy!

I Also Hate the Kindle!
My wife wants to read one of the books I just read, but I have no way of sharing it with her unless I change her device registration to my account.  If she has her own account, with her own settings and preferences, doing so will make her very unhappy.  Also, a friend just asked me if I have a good book she can read while traveling cross country later this week.  Same problem: there's no way to share a book!

Solutions
If Amazon wants this technology to become pervasive, rather than just a novelty, it's going to have to find a way to let people share a book among family members or give a book away.  Here a couple ways they might be able to accomplish that:
  • Let people identify family members by linking to those who have the same home address.
  • Let people transfer their book for a small fee, maybe half of the purchase with a maximum of $3.00
Those solutions seem pretty easy and sensible.  People share printed books all the time, so this isn't really a potential revenue loss if strategically managed.  And coming up with a reasonable solution can make this technology truly pervasive.