A One-Eyed Man is King

I was at a local Chamber of Commerce event today where they had a Q&A session with a panel of IT folks from different areas of the industry.  I was just there as an observer, I was not part of the panel….(I know it’s shocking, but they didn’t ask…).  The question was posed to the group, How can I work and share information with employees and vendors in a purely virtual way, or can I only do that with servers and such?

I thought, this is a great question.  Not only is it more common for small business to have distributed employees, it makes a lot of sense to want to minimize hardware/software needed to make that whole concept go.  In the current economic conditions, it REALLY makes sense to have people work from wherever they are rather than spending on the overhead of an office and all that entails.  I was really looking forward to hearing what the panel said to this, as I have been messing around with different collaboration methods, software packages and online services for a couple of years now.  I admit to being a little disappointed by the answer that was given. 

I try not to be the guy who’s always negative or cutting on other people’s solutions or ideas.  I think there is far too much of that type of thing in my industry already, so I won’t go into the answer or why I was disappointed with it.  I’m a little disappointed with myself because I didn’t go right up to the gentleman afterward and share some of my experiences in that area with him.  (I didn’t think of that until I was driving back to the office.  I’m a little slow sometimes.)

So!  I thought I’d rectify my faux pas by passing some options along here.

1.  Microsoft Groove 2007 -  This was one of the first programs I worked with and I liked quite a few things about it.  It lets you create “Workspaces” and then invite other people who have Groove to join those workspaces.  You can create custom tools like discussion boards, photo galleries, and forms that can be used by anyone that you’ve invited.  It has built in chat, file sharing, and some other nifty tools.  The downside is that it requires one computer with Groove on it to be turned on and connected to the Internet pretty much all of the time.  For example, if you update a document on your laptop, that change will only update your co-worker’s Groove if they’re online at the time.  If you shutdown before they get the changes, they will be working on the old version.  It can be a pain to keep track of that kind of thing.  Also, Microsoft Office ain’t exactly cheap and everyone you work with would have to have a copy.

2.  Google Docs – I’ve talked about Google Docs before and I like a lot about it.  You can get yourself started very quickly without spending a dime and without installing anything on your computer.  You can create files that are very compatible with Microsoft Office (as well as other formats) and can share them with as many collaborators as you might need.  It has calendar and photos and RSS reader all for the low low price of…nothing.  Drawbacks are the need to be online at all times (a small one, granted) and you can’t share whole folders at a time.  Instead you have to do invites on a file by file basis.

3.  Live Mesh – This is the one I’ve been using most recently.  I use it more to keep my laptop and desktop with the most up-to-date versions of files than anything else, but you can certainly use it to work with others also.  Live Mesh is free, you get 5GB of storage and as far as I can tell you can work with as many people as you need to with it.  You do have to download and install a small software package, but it’s very painless.  Once you get it set up, you simply right click on any folder or file on your computer and click “Add to Live Mesh”.  The folder turns blue (mine do anyway) and away you go.  You can invite and manage members of the Mesh and unlike Groove, it doesn’t matter if anyone else is connected when you make changes because it will all sync to that 5 GB of storage that Microsoft was nice enough to give you.  So far I haven’t found any big drawbacks to this system and I use it everyday.

So Mr. Unanswered Question, I hope this helps in your quest for remote collaboration and next time, I’ll try harder to get on that panel in the first place.

I’ve extolled the virtues of WHS in the past.  Now it’s time to show and tell.  This will show you how to take an old computer and turn it into a Windows Home Server of your very own. 

Prerequisites:

A computer with at least 1 GB RAM (…a functional one, I’m not a magician)

A copy of WHS

A couple of big hard drives

A basic understanding of how to connect things inside the computer (don’t worry, there will be pictures…)

1.  We’ll start by adding the drives to the old computer.  Keep in mind that there are as many different kinds of cases out there in the world as there are annoying kid shows on Nickelodeon.  I’ll just show you how to connect them, you’ll have to figure out how to mount them yourself….

This is the back of a SATA drive.  It has two connectors that we need to be concerned with.  The longer flat black connector (circled in red) is the power connector.  This connector will usually have a couple of different colored wires and you can trace it back to the power supply.  The other is the data connector (circled in blue).  This connector is usually a single wire and needs to connect to the motherboard.  These connectors only go on one way (the right way) and shouldn’t need to be forced at all.  It should look something like this when you’re done.

The data connector on the motherboard side should also go on only one way and should connect easily.

2.  Ok, now we need to set the PC to boot to the CDROM drive.  Once again, every PC is different in how you set this.  Right when you power the machine on, it will tell you how to get into the “BIOS” or Setup.  Try the delete key, F2, F9, F12, Escape it could be almost anything.  Once you get into the setup screen look for Boot or Boot Device or Boot Order, then set it to your cdrom.

3.  Put the WHS disc into the drive and away we go.  It will boot and go through some things and you will finally see a screen like this:

Click Next and you’ll see:

Next again.

Next.  (Seeing a pattern?)

Next.  (Isn’t IT work fun…no wonder tech support guys are always grumpy.)

Click “I accept the agreement” and then Next.  (Ahhh sweet variety)

Now you get to do some actual typing!!  Enter your product key, then click Next.

On this step you must tap into your creative mind.  Name your server whatever you’d like.  DaffyDuck, TheMatrix, Mordor, I’ve seen them all.  Don’t use spaces though…

Click “I acknowledge that all data on these drives will be lost” and then next.  (All data really will be lost.  This is the point of no return.  Any information from your PC’s former life will be completely gone after you click Next and then Yes).

Of course we’re sure….

Now click Start and then go have a sandwich or something, because it’s going to be a while.  It will reboot about a million times, go through various stages of set up and then will finish.  You shouldn’t need to do anything until your screen looks like this:

3.  So the last bit here is to configure the password and answer some questions.

Choose a strong password with upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.  As it tells you in this screen, it’s very important to remember this password.  You’ll be using it every time you connect to the server.

This screen asks you if you want to do Automatic Updates, probably a good idea.  Click “On” then the forward arrow.

This one’s up to you….

As is this one.  (Although this will suppress those annoying Send/Don’t Send messages when something goes wrong…)

This is the FINAL screen!  It’s telling you to use the “Windows Home Server Connector” CD to connect one of your other computers to your spiffy new home server.  We’ll go over that and more in PART TWO of this fabulously long post.  Stay tuned….

Google bought this company a while back and has done some great things with it.  They recently released version 3 and I am very impressed.  It very quickly indexed all of my pictures that it could find and organized them in a variety of ways.  It lets you tag photos, create movies or collages, and the best feature of all…it automagically finds red-eye and fixes it!! 

Did I mention it’s free?

I’ve been using WHS at home for a few months now and I REALLY like it.  It’s been out for a while now, but it hasn’t really made a big splash.  Basically it’s a server for your home.  Duh.  Why do I need a server for my home?  Here are a few questions that will help you determine if you do:

1.  Do you have more than 1 computer or laptop?

2. Do you have files (pictures, songs, movies, documents) that you would cry over if your hard drive died?  (C’mon, we all know you’re not doing backups…)

3.  Do you have an Xbox 360 you’d like to watch movies on?

If you answered yes to any of these, you should think about getting a Windows Home Server.   A real world illustration:  My wife mentioned that she thought she had a virus on her PC.  Being the competent technology widow that she is, she booted into safe mode and started an online virus scan.  It kept acting stupid, so when I got home, I popped in the WHS restore cd and booted to it.  30 minutes later we had done a full restore to the previous day’s backup, sans virus.  Sweet.

There are lots of advantages to using it for your home, but I really think it’s a viable solution for very small businesses also.  It has a hard limit of 10 users (and no upgrade path), but it brings a lot of functionality to the party for very little investment. 

Look for a Do It Yourself piece in the next few days that will show you how to take an old PC and turn it into a Windows Homes Server.  If you’re not into rolling your own, check this HP out for about 500 bucks. 

So a friend of mine saw my Xobni plugin in Outlook today and the following conversation ensued:

Tactless Friend:  What’s that in your Outlook?

Me:  It’s Xobni….wait didn’t you read my blog?

TF:  Uhhh, errr, everyone blogs these days…err, no.

Me:  Man, damn.

TF:  I’ll be sure to read it now….it’s funny right?

Me:  Uhh, errr, not funny per se….no.

TF:  Informative is good…but I like funny.

Me:  [in desperate justification] I wasn’t really going for funny.  I want to help people out with technology issues.  I can be funny.

TF:  Sure you can.

Me:  [pathetically] Really, you know I’m funny.  You laugh all the time.

TF:  Right.

Being funny in person is different than being funny in writing.  I get a good amount of laughs in meetings or over dinner, but as I read back over these posts, I’m not really even making myself laugh (which isn’t hard to do).  My wife manages to be funny in writing without even trying.  I’m going to have to look for some cartoons or something to liven the place up.

Lesson learned:  be funny or you suck. 

A co-worker pointed me at this one and in spite of being a little skeptical, I really like it.  The reason I was skeptical is the web site says that it’s a way to quickly search in Outlook.  Well, I hate to say it but Microsoft really knocked it out of the park with the built-in search in Outlook 2007.  I REALLY thought that was a great feature.  So why would I need a third party tool to help me with something that works great out of the box? 

Turns out that it’s a whole lot more (note to Xobni: you’re selling yourself way short…) to it than just search.  The first thing it does is index the contents of your inbox and generate a bunch of statistics (like a particular contact’s speed at responding or who sends you the most email) and it asks if you want to integrate with social networking sites like Facebook and Linkedin and if you want to use Skype (which I’m a big fan of) with the plug in. 

Once I started using it, I really liked how it shows a bunch of information based on the email you have selected in the inbox.  You can email them right from there, you can schedule a meeting, Skype them, look them up on Linked in, and see all of the files they have sent you.

For a free add-in, I think they really got it right.  (I also think the “Share Email Happiness” button is a great viral marketing tool.)