Discovering the LinkedIn Toolbar for Microsoft Outlook!

LinkedIn is a highly interesting & established business networking online social network which has been around for some time. In a couple of years LinkedIn has been able to attract over 45 million business professionals from a variety of industries to this modern way of online networking and relationship building activities. Whether used for business development, advice from experts in the field, keeping in contact with old colleagues or just part of a due diligence project for a company; LinkedIn is a source of tools which enables professionals to locate the right individuals to whom to ask the right questions.

It is really interesting to meet more and more people who are adopting LinkedIn as a way to extend their personal/company business card. I personally found LinkedIn to be great for keeping in contact with people I worked with; went to school & university with as well as other people I met professionally.

Over the past years, LinkedIn has also proven to be a ‘stop of choice’ when I am looking for opinions from experts in particular fields. Of course searches via Google and Bing as well as other sources remain a prime spot; but I noticed myself using LinkedIn more often as a ‘go to’ location from where to get opinions of people directly involved in the same research field.

As many, I live in the world of Microsoft Outlook where all of my contact management, communication, calendaring and more take place. Browsing the LinkedIn site I came across a great tool through which brings the LinkedIn power to my Microsoft Outlook environment enabling me to manage my LinkedIn network without needing to leave my Microsoft Outlook world! Great! – enter the LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar.

Once the toolbar is installed, a LinkedIn icon is added to your Outlook which not only enables you to learn more about your contact via a mini profile summary of the person who contacted you (including LinkedIn profile picture, job title, position in your network etc etc), but also enables you to easily invite people who are not already in your network with a single button click!.

Key advantages of using the LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar:

• Integrated Contact management (Create outlook contacts from your LinkedIn network as well as select which Outlook contacts to invite to your LinkedIn network.)
• Fastest and easiest way to send invitations to any contact you have not sent an invitation to connect with.
  Goes through all of your existing contacts in Microsoft Outlook and enables easy viewing of which contacts you are not yet connected to, and would care to consider for connection based on frequency of email communications with these contacts.
• Dashboard view for easy notification when anyone in your network updates their profile.
• Continued tracking of email sending frequency as to recommend when to contact someone to add to your network.
• Contact Reminder Service: Shows you which contacts in your network you have not been in contact/communication in a while – very helpful to keep in touch with your network, emails that potentially need a reply as well as follow-up reminders.
• Grab functionality: Easy contact information updating by simply highlighting the contact information in the email body, and have it added to your outlook contact profile automatically!
• Easy access to the LinkedIn home page without leaving Microsoft Outlook.
• Free.

 Key disadvantages of the LinkedIn Toolbar:

• For people with large amounts of email in their Outlook, the LinkedIn Toolbar searches for updates every time it builds the dashboard view. This performance hit in itself can be very annoying as it can take a good 5+ minutes to re-index the email, and if you are used to speedy results this is not one of those. Hopefully it will be updated in future versions as I do not see the need of rebuilding from scratch every time (or so the impression given is).

A demo of the LinkedIn Outlook toolbar in action is available here:

 

In this post  – Part 1 – I touched base on the value propositions of using the LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar. In Part 2 I will focus on providing a visual step by step guide on how to locate, download and install the LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar.

 

Brilliant marketing from Symantec…

You must love the modern software promotions coming out from marketing departments…really entertaining…

Sneak peak of Office Web Apps, Bing 2.0, PowerPoint 2010…and more…

Lots of things happening on Microsoft side with a number of security fixes released this week as part of the September 2009 security bulletin as well as myriad of product releases in the coming months. Couple of previews and videos I recommend you are aware of.

• September 2009 Security Bulletin Release
  http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2009/09/08/september-2009-security-bulletin-release.aspx

  
  

• Bing 2.0 could be around the corner
  http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10350868-265.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&asid=3e7bba47
• Latest sneak peek of Office Web Apps from TechEd AU
  http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090912/sneak-peek-office-web-apps-teched-australia/
• AutoPlay Windows 7 behavior backported
  http://blogs.technet.com/srd/archive/2009/09/11/autoplay-windows-7-behavior-backported.aspx
• New Tools for IT Professionals & Developers Transitioning to Windows 7
  http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/09/10/announcing-new-tools-for-it-professionals-amp-developers-transitioning-to-windows-7.aspx
• PowerPoint 2010 – Enabling windows users to create Apple like presentations…
  
  

Upgrading your PC to Windows 7….and more

As web research continues, I come across a miriad of articles, concepts and updates. A couple worth of notice this week are the following:

• Live Mesh to be named Windows Live Devices
  http://liveside.net/main/archive/2009/08/08/two-new-windows-live-services-coming-soon-documents-and-devices.aspx
• Top 10 Tips Working Developers Should Know about Windows 7
  http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Top10TipsWorkingDevelopersShouldKnowAboutWindows7.aspx
• Using SketchFlow to Create Better UI Prototypes
  http://www.infoq.com/articles/guest-simon-sketchflow
• Upgrading your PC to Windows 7 – Chart
  http://mossblog.allthingsd.com/files/2009/08/windows-upgrade-chart.png

Windows 7 Upgrade Chart

• Sony Takes Aim At Amazon’s Kindle
  http://hothardware.com/News/Sony-Takes-Aim-At-Amazons-Kindle/
• Two terabyte desktop drive arrives from Hitachi
  http://www.itwire.com/content/view/26809/1231/
• 13 Terrific Tools For Twitter Lovers
  http://www.smashingapps.com/2009/08/04/13-terrific-twitter-tools-for-twitter-lovers.html
• Microsoft is now the proud new owner of Office.com
  http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090806/microsoft-now-the-proud-owner-of-office-com/

Mapping out the iPhone feature set…mindmap!

My first post on this blog was about the release of the iPhone 3G S, and whether it would be my next travel companion.

While apple seem to have done some really worthy updates to it including increasing battery life; ironically people who I know who use it daily are still telling me that they need to re-charge the unit on a daily basis. So my internal debate continues and my leaning remains towards the upcoming E72 for its super strength in the battery arena. Who knows;

I am not in a particular hurry to replace my E71 in any form of way, however I am still internally waiting for that edition of iPhone which makes me say “Yes…this is it, this is the iPhone model which I am going to get…”.

In the mean time I came across the following mindmap on the MindJet Blog (Developers of MindManager) covering the main differences between the different iPhone editions available to customers explained in a really simple, graphical and understandable form. Check it out:

iPhone Editions - Mindjet

…Andre’

Wii fit / Microsoft Surface parodies…

Sometimes, products become so over hyped/successful that they are bound to get criticized in all myriad of ways…ranging from the outright offensive to the being really entertaining and funny. I have come across these two parodies which I am sure will make you smile:

Wii Fit

Microsoft Surface

…Enjoy

Exploring Svchost.exe with Powershell…

The company I work for recently launched its own blog; providing the opportunity to itself – as well as us who work for it – to get closer to our customers and product followers. The company blog further enables the opportunity to share our experiences, thoughts and opinions based on what we do on a daily basis i.e. work with really cool technology, and finding ways to apply that technology and knowledge to our product sets.

During the weekend of 29th June, I was hacking at some work at home and noticed a number of svchost.exe processes running on my machine…and wanted to investigate more their origins, usage and exploitation method possibilities by malware.

As part of the investigation, I put together a three part article for the company blog which I am posting links to here too.

• In part 1, I introduce the topic; its usage and why it is something that we should understand more about.
• In part 2, I go into more depth about how the operating system makes use of this Host Process for its needs.
• In part 3, I show you how to create a Powershell script which can be used to investigate and discover potential malware which can be hiding behind this innocent-looking process on your own machines.

As always, feedback welcome…

…Andre’

Sad: Microsoft Money bye bye….

Today www.bink.nu posted news that Microsoft are pulling the plug on Microsoft Money – a software product which helps small businesses and individuals manage their finances!!…….and I was one of those individuals who really makes use of this software. Of course this is a sad post to be writing, as I grew to depend on the abilities of this software, and was really looking forward to future developments on it.

I really loved the way it allowed me to gain visibility into my expenses – past/present and allowed me to gain visibility to how my future plans (e.g. travels, holidays, gadgets and whatever you can think of……) would affect my overall cash flow…..

So this throws me into the world of deciding what to use way forward. I can actually stick to my existing installation but I know that I will be re-installaling my systems several times more as I test several platforms, and this product is activation based. The problem is that Microsoft also made clear that all installations have to be activated by January 2011, so time to start evaluationg my optoins again………..

I spent over 5 hours going through sites, options, solutions with various value propositions and hands on evaluated as many as I could. To my amazement, NONE managed to meet or beat at least one fifth of the ease of configuration of the scheduled transactions and forecasting abilities which Microsoft Money had. I am really ticked off:

• Intuit: This is the main competitor. Unfortunately visual forecasting abilities are so simple, that it does not give anything meaningful for e.g. the ability to see the history of transactions which are leading to that graph to be forecasted, and I also found the management of scheduled transactions to be clunky after their creation…..either this is the next best option, but with serious caveats and limitations.
• Mint.com : could not even evaluate as it is 100% driven by connecting to online bank services. It is only aimed for the American market and from what I saw from their sites, their forecasting abilities are weak too. Gee wiz……so now it just has to be fully automated, what if I want to monitor cash flow….no way that can be automated……
• Mvelopes.com : This was the strongest of all options, but still their visual forecasting is bad/non-existent.
• YouNeedABudget.com – no forecasting which I could make use of.
• Wesabe.com – similar disappointment.
• Rudder.com – similar disappointment.
• Various other too small products – similar disappointment.

This is the greatest weakness of these products. They all do a pretty good job of keeping track of the NOW and the PAST, but all really do a poor job at the projecting the future in a graphical manner based on what they know (i.e. scheduled recurring payments) .

End to end, seems I have no real alternative……….The forecasting approach of Microsoft Money got it right…………..really right and I have no real alternative yet.

To the development team : whoever you are : Thank you!. Your software was really useful to me. If anyone can forward me, or get me in contact with anyone of that development team, please do email me on andre@andremuscat.com.

To Microsoft, at least leave the activation on your side so that anyone who wants to re-install does not have any troubles…………just put it to infinite activations………or always return ok…………or issue a patch for us!

My future travel buddy ??

Whoever knows me would eventually realize that I have two particular indulgences:

• IT Gadgets
• Travel bags

While the first one is very true to my inner geek, I find myself very picky on the type of bags I use for travel too. I travel pretty often due to the nature of my work, and also take the occasional vacation with my family. Having experienced the corridors of various airports and planes, my IT gadgets have come to my rescue helping me retain sanity quite a number of times. Of course nothing should surprise if the iPod touch is a main proponent of these IT gadgets…..

This week, Apple released the announcement of their latest edition of their iPhone line: iPhone 3G S. Rather than go into a rant on the pros and cons of this device (or how lame I find the name of this device), I am just going to post the best reviews I come along here for your reference…..

• Apple: Product Home Page
• CNET: Apple iPhone 3G S – 32GB – black
• GSM Arena: Technical Specifications

If you pass by some really cool reviews or news related to this please email me on andre@andremuscat.com

…Andre’

Welcome…and who is this guy??

Welcome to my test blog.

I am experimenting with blogging software available to use for my blog. I work in an IT environment which produces specialised software for Small to Medium businesses (1 – 500 users) and in my journey I get to meet some really cool technologies, as well as tools developed by a miriad of cool people out there which may not be talked about enough.

I target to share my experiences and knowledge with all…………once I settle down on which backend system to use…….