Posted by Randy on 9th June 2010
“This is a point of confusion for many of our customers.” So began a tech support response that was the latest in a string of messages. The good news is that this was the message that actually helped me solve the problem. The bad news is that came at the end of almost a day and a half of frustration and confusion on my part. I searched the help system. I consulted knowledgeable colleagues (and got them confused and frustrated too.) This was for an initial setup of a new system, so I expected there to be some annoying setup issues. But I’m left wondering “If so many customers have the same issues, how about altering things so we don’t all experience this problem.”
We in technology often fall into this trap — this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this type of response to an issue. Why do we do this? Because for the most part we’re focused on the technology. Which isn’t a bad thing. But how about a focus on the customer and what they need? Which is easy to use, quick to implement technology. Some thoughts:
- Find the shortest way to accomplish standard customer tasks. Then invest time in making them even shorter and easier. Time is money for your customer and every second counts.
- Make furniture and fixtures fade into the background. For instance they don’t need to be able to change colors and layout on their control panel interface — that’s furniture. What they need is an easy streamlined way to add and edit content.
- The customer is not always right. Listen to what the customer asks and solve their problem, don’t just answer their questions. In my tech support issue mentioned above I received a solution which involved accessing another control panel with its own different login and a whole different toolset. While it did answer my questions, upon pondering the situation anew I realized my whole approach was incorrect, and there is actually an easier, more direct way to accomplish the task. The answer I receive stated essential “If you want to do it that way you’ll need to log into this other tool and do this other setup task.” What they should have said is “Why are you doing it that way? (Customer is not always right) And “we normally see people have better success doing it this way.”
A customer focused approach in tech support, application design, and other technology implementation creates value and will be seen as an asset. Too much of a technology focus creates hassle and a perception of technology as a cost — and these days we’re all trying to cut costs. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather been seen as an asset.
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Posted by Randy on 27th October 2009
I am finding the open source NetBeans development tool really great for my PHP programming work. It really saves time by catching the simple typo and syntax mistakes I commonly make. Please to code suggestions and other elements are helpful too. Part of what makes it so great is the connection that the project developers have with the programming community — as an example of that read this post. It is exactly this type of close connection to a user community that makes open source so powerful.
NetBeans for PHP : weblog
I spent talking about PHP development in NetBeans almost whole session. After the session there was a long discussion (more than 1 hour) and some people complained about formatting…As a result I have decided to look at this and to try to fix as many bugs as possible. Because there is not much time for NetBeans 6.8, I would like to ask you for help.
NetBeans 6.8 Beta Coming; Does Oracle Care? | NetBeans Zone
PHP
* PHP 5.3 support including syntax highlighting, code completion, code folding, and navigator
* Symfony Framework support
* FTP/SFTP improvements
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Posted by Randy on 19th October 2009
A great post by Jim Groom at UMW on the use of WordPress multi-user to aggregate content via technologies like RSS. Places like universities are complex places with many affiliates who all have needs for their own web identifies, and control over these identities. These can range from grant-funded projects to various centers to faculty research sites. But there is also a need to be able to pull this content and re-mix it in various ways for various audiences. For instance faculty research sites that feed content to a department site that highlights the latest doings by their faculty. Jim describes this all better than I’m doing here so go read his post. We have something similar running with MU here, although we haven’t really started to employ it in a production way yet (too much beginning of the year stuff to work through!) But the bottom line is what sounds really complex is actually pretty easy to set up from a technical standpoint, and pretty cheap from a hardware/software cost perspective, when you use a tool like WordPress MU.
The Future of WPMu at bavatuesdays
So you offer a Bluehost like setup for faculty, and if that is too much, allow them to map a domain, take control of their own course work, and encourage an aggregated course management model that pushes students to take control of their digital identity and spaces by extension.
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Posted by Reverend on 28th September 2009
George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media has a new resource site on the use of mobile technologies in reaching museum visitors. The site itself is well done, and a great starting place for any cultural organization. As with many of the CHNM projects, their program examples are all open source, based on their wonderful Omeka project. They stress the importance of cross-platform solutions, and the reuse of content in multiple delivery formats (traditional web, mobile, etc.). And lest we forget the audiences, they stress the importance of meaningful engagement. The site encourages museums to experiment with mobile, and provides resources to help them get started.
Center for History and New Media » Mobile for Museums
- This site addresses those needs by proving a brief overview of what is being done in the mobile museum world and offers suggestions based on this research on how to economically provide mobile users with a positive experience with your museum…
- A primary focus of our implementations has been to extend and utilize pre-existing software frameworks and standards. This approach to mobile development avoids having to start from scratch every time an institution wishes to launch content for mobile, saving valuable resources…
- To offer a mobile site that rendered similar results in all major mobile browser, we modified a pre-existing Omeka theme, Emiglio…
- our goal was to create a single development solution that works across three major platforms: Android, Blackberry, and iPhone. We hope to encourage further cross-platform development, which is why we are releasing this open-source code to our prototypes.
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Posted by Reverend on 21st September 2009
Need to distribute a document? Whether you are emailing it, adding it to a course site, or putting it on a web page, you should be using the Adobe Acrobat PDF (portable document format) file type. Adobe gives their version of the viewer program for free, but charges for the full, professional version of Adobe Acrobat which allows the conversion of a document to the PDF format. This professional version has a lot of powerful features, but if all you want to do is convert Word, Excel and other documents to the PDF format, the purchase cost is a little much. One of these free alternatives may be just what you need:
PDFCreator | Get PDFCreator at SourceForge.net
PDFCreator easily creates PDFs from any Windows program.Use it like a printer in Word, StarCalc or any other Windows application.
CutePDF – Create PDF for free, Free PDF Utilities, Edit PDF easily;.
CutePDF Writer (formerly CutePDF Printer) is the free version of commercial PDF creation software. CutePDF Writer installs itself as a “printer subsystem”. This enables virtually any Windows applications (must be able to print) to create professional quality PDF documents – with just a push of a button!
Download details: 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF
This download allows you to export and save to the PDF format in eight 2007 Microsoft Office programs. It also allows you to send files as e-mail attachments in the PDF format in a subset of these programs.
File Conversion Web Service Zamzar
Zamzar supports conversion between a wide variety of different file formats. We’re adding support for new formats all the time – if there’s a format that you’d like us to support why not contact us and we’ll do our best to add it.
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