Google Hangouts in a large conference room

Short post for posterity:

The Phoenix Spider MT505 USB/SIP speakerphone (with up to 15 extensions!) works great with the Chromebox for Meetings dedicated Google Hangouts device.

The PTZOptics 12X-USB also works great with the Chromebox for Meetings dedicated Google Hangouts device. This is a true 12x Pan/Tilt/Zoom conference-quality camera with USB3 output.

Both work as pure driverless USB devices that a Chromebox for Meetings expects and neither requires any additional software to be installed - they "just work" when you plug them into the Chromebox for Meetings (or a regular Chromebox or a PC).

Now we can finally replace our old Lifesize Room 200 conference room video system and do pure Google Hangout video meetings in our 40 foot long conference room. Phew!

Thanks so much to Levi Davis @ ConferenceRoomSystems.com for working with us on this!

Google Assassinates Reader, Shoots Google Apps in the Foot

As I am currently in the middle of evaluating Google Apps, today's news of the assassination of Google Reader comes as a horrible shock.

My evaluation was going very well, I even found out that my Email Security/Archive Vendor Mimecast seems to now support Google Apps to a certain extent, at least enough to make me finally feel comfortable enough to seriously consider switching everyone into Google's cloud and retire our aging MS Exchange server.

But then Google reminds me that they no longer claim to do no evil.  They deftly put a bullet in my favorite Google product, Reader.  Reader allows me to try to follow the several hundred blogs, vendors, and other pages that I would absolutely never have the time to actually visit daily.  It is my single go-to place to see everything at once.  It's not like Twitter or Facebook because it's not totally overrun by garbage.

For Google to simply announce the death of one of their flagship offerings without any exception made for current users is reprehensible.  Why in the world would I base my organization's entire infrastructure on Google Apps when Google will simply suddenly kill parts without any warning, without any sunset plan?  (3 months is not a sunset plan, especially when there are no alternatives provided)

Google may have aimed for Google Reader's head, but the bullet also struck Google Apps.

Tabbloid + G-Reader + Evernote = Bliss

Total Recall isn't just an old Governator movie, it's also a goal for anyone that's ever forgotten anything.  Evernote goes a long way to making that possible, but you still have to remember to save or send items to it before it can "Remember Everything".

One thing missing from that equation for me is RSS feeds - I subscribe to several hundred feeds (of which I actively follow around 50).  But then later in the week when something I know that I read earlier might be useful, I have trouble finding it - often spending an hour searching my web history.

Enter Tabbloid (yes, that's how they spell it), a free service from HP which converts an RSS feed into a PDF "magazine" file mailed to you on a daily or weekly basis.  Twist that around a little bit, mix in Google Reader and Evernote, and you're one step closer to the Holy Grail, Total Recall.

The steps:

In Google Reader,

1. Go to Settings -> Folders and Tags
2. Determine how you want to mark the posts you want to remember forever - you can Share, Star, or Tag items.
   
3. If you're Sharing your items to remember them forever, skip this step.  If you're Starring or Tagging, you'll need to enable "sharing" for that category in the Folders and Tags tab.
   
4. Now click on "view public page" for that category. 
   
5. Inside this new window, right-click and copy the Atom Feed URL.

Now visit http://www.tabbloid.com:

1. Click the big "Get Started" button
   
2. Paste the Atom Feed URL you just saved into the box labeled "Add a Feed URL".
3. Enter your Evernote e-mail address into the "Email to" box.  (It's in https://www.evernote.com/User.action under "Incoming email settings".)
   
4. Set your Frequency and Time fields appropriately.
5. Save delivery options

Visit your Evernote default notebook:

1. You should now have a Tabbloid Activation e-mail, click the URL to activate the Tabbloid account for that address.
2. Wait a few minutes, Tabbloid will now format your Shared/Starred/Tagged Google Reader messages as a PDF magazine and send it to Evernote, which will fully index it for you.

Now if only I could get Google Desktop Search to index Evernote correctly...

My iPhone experience

First off, I loved my PalmOS Treo 650 - it very capably contained my life. It held my calendar, my contacts, and my to-do list for many years. The base system filled most of my needs, but of course I couldn't leave well enough alone. I added more applications. They made it unstable, but I felt I couldn't live without their added functionality.

Then it died back in June. It refused to power on and I didn't have cell phone insurance on it - even if I did, it was obsolete. What should I do? I toyed with the idea of getting a Sprint Centro, but after playing with one at Best Buy, the keyboard was just unusable to me. So then it was a choice between the latest Treo 755p or something new. I tried out a Blackberry and absolutely hated it. I decided to get the iPhone mainly because the PalmOS platform is a technological dead end.

What I miss:

• DateBk5 calendar - the PalmOS third-party calendar/to-do list program added so much to my calendar. The iPhone doesn't even have a to-do list!!
• ChatterEmail - an amazing third-party mail application that allowed me to read (and FLAG!) my mail messages in all my different mail accounts.
  

What I love about the iPhone:

• The web browser is amazing.

What I hate about the iPhone:

• Battery life is atrocious
• Apps are buggy
• Poor Outlook/Exchange integration -- NO TASKS??
  
• Poor email handling - how do I flag a message for later action?
  

So far I'm just syncing with Outlook and downloading my gmail. I haven't gotten it to talk to our Exchange server yet. It just says "failed" with absolutely no reason why. I'll have to check the logs on Monday, I just don't feel like doing that from home - too many other things to do on a weekend.

All in all, it's a neat device, fun to use, and can probably satisfy most people that aren't coming over from an environment they've used and enhanced for 5+ years.

Me? I'm hoping to find a lot of third-party apps to give me back the functionality I've lost.

Can anyone recommend a task list program that can handle outlines?

More web design

I've been spending quite a lot of time on my organization's web presence, it's definitely been interesting. We have 4+ different sites, using 4 different custom-designed technologies. I've got one that was built in Dreamweaver, one in .ASP, one in PHP, and a couple of static sites I haven't had enough time to investigate yet. Not one is a true CMS, and all have plenty of "issues", mainly on the back-end.

So the plan is to standardize and consolidate. After a lot of investigation, I narrowed the possibilities down to Drupal, Joomla, and Typo3. Of these, Typo3 is possibly the most powerful, but my previous experience with it showed me that the user community just wasn't as willing to help as with other systems. Plus, the back-end interface is a bit more complex than I would like it to be for my target content-producing audience. So it was down to Drupal and Joomla. I finally chose Drupal as our CMS technology because of the power and helpfulness of the user community, its powerful customizability, and the wealth of existing modules.

Since I didn't want to start a 6-12 month "web redesign" by committee process (my organization is heavily into the democratic process), I chose to commission someone to build a theme to mirror our existing theme. This way there wouldn't be quite as much time spent on details already decided long ago, and most future effort would go to content.

It took about a month to make the decision to use Drupal, including test installations and web research. It took only three more weeks to build a proof-of-concept site mirroring our existing organization's website design.

Not bad, I think! Drupal rocks! Oh, and so does browsershots.org!