Kolz Blog

In the 1960s & 70s the idea of a home computer was unheard of outside of science fiction circles. Before the late 1980s home networks were unheard of. In 1975 Microsoft was founded with the vision of putting "A computer on every desk and in every home...". Microsoft led the charge in creating a world where a "home computer" something you expect to see in a home. By including great support for networking technologies (particularly TCP/IP) in Windows 3x and 95 Microsoft ensured ubiquitous networking in businesses and homes. Today there are over 100 million households with a "home network" and Microsoft led the world in making this happen. When we set about building Windows Home Server we knew we were going to be defining a new category of products and solutions for consumers. We thought long and hard about what we should call the product. As you would expect, there was no shortage of opinions. In fact some very, very senior executives at Microsoft were quite forceful in saying "whatever you do, don't call it a server". So we worked hard at trying to come up with another name. We tried other "descriptive" names such as "hub". We tried fanciful names (like "Poodle"). But at the end of the day we recognized that no matter what we called the product we would always be describing it as a home server, because that's what it is: A device on a home network that provides centralized services over the network to other devices – helping consumers protect, organize and share their digital content. In addition, as we did our research we discovered some very interesting things. First, we found that the only people who didn't like the term "server" were technical people who thought they understood consumers. Then we discovered that consumers in our target market (consumers who already have a home network and multiple PCs) understood what a server is, loved the name and the concept, and thought it was "the inevitable next step". In fact we heard loud and clear that many such consumers would feel proud to be able to say they had a server in their home. [Read more]

We have something called SQM data that tells us how many clicks each feature in Project gets and in my opinion Group By is one of the most underused features in Project. It only gets .1% of all clicks and is one of the most powerful features in Project (think you know the top 5 features, check the end of this article to see if you are correct) Why is Group By so powerful? It lets you analyze data based on pretty much any field in Project - want to see how much remaining critical work you have compared to noncritical work, which tasks are starting each week, completed tasks versus incomplete tasks - use group by. It's Project's version of pivotTables. How do you apply a group? This command is located on the Project menu - Group by flyout. It can also be found on the standard toolbar. What does it look like? Here is an ordinary project plan. Say you want to see how much critical work you have versus non-critical work. To do this just set Group By to Critical. Not only now are your tasks grouped by whether or not they are critical (I collapsed the critical:No group so both groups would fit in the picture), you can also analyze data. Looking at this you can see that there are 188 hours of critical work remaining. You could insert other fields depending on what you're interested in - Cost if you want to see the total cost of critical work... Say your plan is like this plan and subtasks have kind of ambiguous names. In that case you probably want to include summary tasks in the grouping. To do this, go to Project - Group By - More Groups. Select what you want to group on and click Edit or just click New to create a new one. Set the innermost line that isn't being used to Outline Number as picture below. Note that their is a checkbox at the bottom that says "Show summary tasks". This means that summary tasks will be in the group but that they will be grouped based on their values. For example, if you have Flag1 set to Yes for the summary task and No for it's subtasks. The subtasks will be in one group and the summary task will be in another. Adding Outline Number to your group is how you maintain hierarchy. [Read more]

Jungle Disk have just released the first public beta build of their online back up solution, which is powered by Amazon S3. The add-in came second in Microsoft’s Code2Fame competition, and pricing starts at $0.15 per gigabyte transferred in either direction.

Jungle Disk for Windows Home Server is a Windows Home Server add-in that lets you back up your Home Server securely to Amazon.com’s S3 ™ Storage Service. [Read more]

Many years ago I listened to an audio program by Brian Tracy where he said that everyone is essentially self-employed and that even if you’re an employee, you should think of yourself as the President of your own personal services corporation.  Call it Your Name, Inc. This mindset makes a lot of sense.  Even if you seemingly work for someone else, you still work primarily for yourself.  You have your own company with one employee — you — and you’re in the business of selling your employee’s labor for profit. I’m sometimes accused of writing too much from the entrepreneurial perspective when I cover career development, seemingly ignorant of the fact that most people are employees.  I intentionally favor this perspective because I know that you can be nothing but self-employed, regardless of how you generate income.  It’s not because I’m trying to push you to start your own business.  The more important issue is to help you avoid the mistake of giving away your responsibility for your personal career results. The only true boss of your work is you.  Any external boss is just a customer of your personal services business.  Maybe you’ll do a great deal of business with a single customer, but you’re always free to fire a customer you don’t like.  Saying “I quit” to your boss is essentially the same as saying to a customer, “I’m sorry, but apparently our business is unable to serve you.  Perhaps I can recommend a competitor who may be better equipped to meet your needs.” What if you fall prey to the illusion that you aren’t self-employed and you yield control of your career to your employer or boss?  A lot of people try to do this, but viewed through the entrepreneurial lens, it doesn’t seem to be a very sensible approach. Imagine a business saying to its biggest customer, “We’re going to drop all our other customers and serve only you.  Just tell us what you want done, and we’ll do it.  Pay us whatever you think is a fair price.  Invest in our growth however you see fit.  Tell us when we can go on vacation.  You command; we obey.”  While it wouldn’t be impossible to run a business this way, it would certainly be very risky and unstable compared to the alternatives.  Yet this is how many people choose to run their personal services businesses.  If I were an investor, I’d think twice about investing in such a business — I’d be more likely to invest in their competitors. [Read more]

Why slow your web server down by hosting media files? Craig Noeldner and AWS Evangelist Mike Culver show how to configure your domain provider to use Amazon S3 for simple, scalable media hosting.

Stop searching for new or special entries in Excel by telling the software to how to do the hunting and highlighting for you.

Use OneNote 2007 to collaborate and organize your work.

Learn the rich features of OneNote to collaborate with others and to support your research work.

Here's a useful (and pretty) template for tracking cards that you're planning to send or receive this holiday season. Actually, you can customize it to work for any year, track addresses, and record the dates on which you send or receive [Read more]

Filed under: OS Updates, Windows, Freeware

Love the look of Windows Vista, but don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on to "upgrade" your operating system and potentially slow down your computer's performance? Vista Transformation Pack 8 gives you most of Vista's visual candy without the operating system's security enhancements, user account control, or power management features. [Read more]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Commercial, Freeware

When we first heard about Vista Start Menu, we assumed it was a program that would give Windows XP users a Vista-like start menu. But while Vista Start Menu does have a search box and a Vista-black theme, that's where the similarities end. In fact, Vista Start Menu works on both Windows XP and Vista. So what exactly does this application do? It replaces your Xp or Vista start menu with an easy to use menu designed to show you pretty much everything. While Windows Vista hides away most of the programs you don't use every day and shows you those you use most often, Vista Start [Read more]

The bottom line is that good leadership doesn’t come from authority, it comes from persuasion. You can have the position you want in your organization if you can persuade people to perform because they are excited to participate in your vision. Here are key steps toward leading without a title: 1. Find common ground. [Read more]

Today's guest post is from Stephen Smith from Hidden Dragon Biz Blog. It is remarkable to me that I hear so many stories about people who are bound and determined to “get organized” and seem to fail so spectacularly. They will clean their house or office from top-to-bottom, without regard to where they are actually putting things, or how they use the “stuff” that was not put away in the first place. There is a fairly common-sense skill that every person would do well to develop, the skill of being ready to start over. Frequently the people that I have known that need to get organized are focused on the wrong things. These people are looking at the mess, the physical clutter, and not the processes that created the mess. These processes often look like the tangled cables of a collapsed suspension bridge, and are as effective as the same. As David Allen says, “Are you ready for ‘Ready’?“:

1. Where is your Focus - When some type of crisis grabs your attention, how long does it take you to get back on track?

2. Where is your Balance - Do you have a system in place for capturing what you are doing right now, so that you can easily come back to it? [Read more]

SyncToy 2.0 Beta for Windows is available as a free download from the Microsoft Download Center. The easy to use, customizable application helps you copy, move, rename, and delete files between folders and computers. You can use SyncToy to synchronize folders between your home computers and your Windows Home Server. I use SyncToy to synchronize my photos, music and recorded TV between my laptop and my home server, so that I always have local copies of my stuff when I take my laptop on the road. SyncToy enables you to create multiple folder pairs that you can keep synchronized. SyncToy enables you to setup multiple options for each folder pair (a "left" folder and a "right" folder), with the key options being the main SyncToy action:

• Synchronize - New and updated files are copied both ways. Renames and deletes on either side are repeated on the other.
• Echo - New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames and deletes on the left are repeated on the right. [Read more]

It's been a good year for good business books. I just finished Michael Stallard's Fired Up or Burned Out: How to Reignite Your Team's Passion, Creativity, and Productivity, and liked it very much. The concepts in this book are sound, but the reason I liked it so much is that it contains a lot of stories that help illustrate how the concepts work in real life. For example, one of the concepts discussed in this book is about how to establish and maintain "Connection" in the workplace. Great coaching Stallard goes on to tell the story of John Wooden, a basketball coach, and how Wooden fostered a sense of family and commitment within his basketball teams (it's a great story) and went on to become one of the great basketball coaches of the game. Wooden coached some truly great players like Bill Walton and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar during their college years, and made quite an impact. For example, Abdul-Jabbar wrote of Coach Wooden:

"[He] had a profound influence on me as an athlete, but even greater influence on me as a human being. He is responsible, in part, for the person I am today."

The foundation of Wooden's philosophy was to bring together Values, Vision, and Voice and the impact was extremely powerful. He fostered Connection in everyone on the team - not just the stars, and believed in dealing with issues, challenges, fears and disagreements out in the open. I can't do the story justice here, but it's an inspiring example of connecting individuals into a powerful team. Not-so-great coaching Stallard follows this with the story of Howell Raines of the New York Times, who had a disastrous reign due to politics, favoritism, and inconsistent application of policies and values. He fostered Connection in the stars of the organization, but alienated everyone else. When Raines began to have problems at the paper, he was quickly "thrown under the bus" by the people he'd alienated, and went down in a spectacular mess. You may have heard the story of Jayson Blair, the NY Times reporter who plagiarized and fabricated stories which were represented as fact in the paper. Blair, one of Raines' "stars," was able to get away with this because of the flawed culture Raines fostered. [Read more]

Brendan Grant’s keeping busy (and me busy!) with another WHS add-in release today. Tab Scroller allows you to scroll through your WHS Console Tab List with your mouse wheel, which makes life a lot more convenient for those users with many add-ins installed on their home server. [Read more]

Overachievers are not like other employees. You need to lead them differently if you want to take advantage of all they have to offer. Here's how to keep them happy and productive.

A bad career choice can serve up some major emotional consequences. First comes discontent and dissatisfaction. Next comes frustration and overwhelm. Then comes depression and learned helplessness. And finally you get numbness and apathy. This pattern normally plays out over a period of years, although the rate of progression is different for everyone. It’s sad to see people stuck in the numbness/apathy stage. This is especially common among people who’ve been on the wrong career path for 10 years or more. Apathy and denial become the primary coping mechanisms. When you see someone suffering from career apathy, you’ll almost always see lots of escapism. Their evenings and weekends — and even much of their work time – gets consumed by TV, computer games, internet addiction, idle chit chat, and so on. They may use a variety of methods to essentially check out from life. The person feels hopelessly trapped, but it’s too painful to deal with those feelings. When you look into the glazed-over eyes of someone suffering from career apathy, you can still see their soul peering out through a thick crust of denial, as if crying for help. It really gets to me when I see someone working as an office administrator, real estate agent, or paralegal, but I can see in their face that they have no love for what they do. However, if I talk to them about it, they’re going to feel worse, not better — at least initially — since the path out of apathy runs straight through the territory of negative emotions. Take a quick scan of the levels of consciousness scale, and you’ll see that in order to progress beyond apathy, you have to move through grief, fear, anger, etc. Basically you have to peel back the layers of soul-crushing negativity that you piled on in order to become apathetic in the first place, and as you do so, you’re going to experience those emotions again. [Read more]

Fourteen suggestions for winning people to your way of thinking from the Dale Carnegie book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

1. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
2. Show respect for the other person’s opinion. Never say, “You’re wrong”.
3. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
4. Begin in a friendly way.
5. Get the other person saying, “Yes, yes” immediately.
6. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
7. Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.
8. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view. [Read more]

Not loving the look of your PC? We've found some tweaks that allow you to change the look and feel of your Windows display. If you want to change what's displayed, tone down that pesky security setting, or add something to the desktop, here's a quick list of some easy settings to change.

Customize Your Start Menu Items [Read more]

Once you update your home server with the November update, there’s a few tasks you need to complete to get your homeserver.com domain rocking again, this time without any SSL Certificate issues. Fear not, though, as the WHS team have done a quick How To Guide on the team blog to ensure [Read more]

Gift cards are all the rage, but there's something special about getting a gift certificate with your name on it that feels so much more personal. Here are some newly published gift certificate templates for the holidays:

• Snowman design in Publisher 2007
• Poinsettia design in Word 2007
• Snow design in Outlook 2007 - yes, send a gift certificate in e-mail!
• Snowman design in Outlook 2007 [Read more]

Posted in Communication Tuesday Anxiety is a natural state that exists any time we are under stress. Giving a presentation normally causes stress. When this happens, the speaker experiences symptoms such as a nervous stomach, sweating, tremors in the hands and legs, accelerated breathing, and increased heart rate. Don’t worry. If you have any of these symptoms before or during a presentation, you are normal. If not, you are one in a million. Almost everyone experiences some stress before presentations, even when the speech is as simple as, “tell the group something about yourself.” The trick is to make the excess energy work for you. These tips will show you how to recycle your stress into a positive form that will help you become a better presenter. These tips won’t get rid of the butterflies in your stomach, but they will teach them to fly in formation! 1) Organize Lack of organization is one of the major causes of anxiety. Taking the time to be organized will give you more confidence, which in turn will allow you to focus energy into your presentation. 2) Visualize Imagine delivering your presentation with enthusiasm, fielding questions with confidence and leaving the room having given a great speech. Mentally rehearse this sequence with all the details of your presentation, and it will help you focus on what you need to do to be successful. 3) Practice In addition to mentally visualizing the process, you need to practice your presentation as you will give it. This includes using any visual supports and equipment. If possible, videotape your rehearsal, then watch the playback. Make any changes you feel are required before your final practice session. Your speech is prepared and you’re waiting to be introduced. Your anxiety level is quite high. Try some of the following exercises next time you’re waiting for your turn to stand up and speak: 4) Breathe When your muscles tighten and you feel nervous, you may not be breathing deeply enough. The first thing to do is to sit or stand straight, and take a number of deep breaths. This also relaxes your vocal chords and makes your voice sound deeper and fuller. 5) Relax mentally Don’t focus on your tension—focus on relaxing. As you breathe, say, “I am” as you inhale and, “relaxed” as you exhale. Don’t think about what is to come. Clear your mind of everything except the repetition of the relaxation statement and continue this exercise for a couple of minutes. [Read more]