Wednesday, October 04, 2006

I think Outlook 2007 is terrific.  There are some great new features and for the most part, you can tell that the developers put tons of effort into usability.  But I do have one complaint...

When I expand the Folder List, I would expect that I could drag one of the folders from my mail store to the little "shortcut bar" on the left (I don't know what it's really called, so I indicate it in the picture here).  My expectation based on some other functionality in Windows and Office and such is that it'd create a shortcut.  It doesn't.

Thursday, October 05, 2006 3:09:34 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Hmmm... this looks new... I've been waiting for this for a while.  This is an add-in that allows you to synchronize your business contacts and a subset of your communication history to your Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC.  Though it's beta, it might be worth a look.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006 2:55:24 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Monday, October 02, 2006

 I haven't had the time to confirm what magic makes this work, but I've got SharePoint and Adobe playing well with each other.  I'm using SharePoint 2003 and Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional. I can now:

  1. check out a PDF file
  2. Edit it in Acrobat (by choosing "Edit in Adobe Acrobat" from the drop down menu in the document library)
  3. Save it (back to the document library)
  4. check it back in

This is all just like the way it works in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

First, begin following the directions in KB article 837849, then when you're at step 2b, add the following text inside Mapping XML element: 

EditText="Adobe Acrobat" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"

so that the entire element looks like this:

<Mapping Key="pdf" Value="NameofIconFile.gif" EditText="Notepad" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>

Tuesday, October 03, 2006 1:59:12 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)  #     |  Comments [4]  | 

Small business people can drown in paper. We see it here in our office. Every day, we get paper from all directions and we're never sure what do do with some of it. Seems like the day after you throw something away or shred it, you find you needed it.

 Solutions to scan to PDF have existed for some time, but Fujitsu has done a great job of making it affordable for small businesses.The ScanSnap S500 sells for less than $500 bucks Canadian, and has terrific output. It's as easy as pushing one button and a text searchable ("OCR-ed") PDF document gets saved into a folder of your choice.

Weaknesses? At first glance, there's little control over this thing programmatically, or beyond the out-of-the-box "ScanSnap Organizer". For example, on our Small Business Server network, our SBS server has network fax enabled. Wouldn't it be nice if this thing could be used to scan directly to this service without having to open up the document and "Print to Fax"?

Furthermore, with Windows SharePoint Services, and a PDF iFilter installed, these searchable documents can live in a document library whose contents can be indexed... that piece of paper can now be found by anyone in the company using SharePoint search. It would sure be nice if this thing had support for WSS out of the box...

Tuesday, October 03, 2006 1:49:50 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)  #     |  Comments [2]  |