Cause to Pause

If you are an MS Word or Powerpoint user and/or don’t mind the occasional foray in to IE, there is what could prove to be a very handy new feature in MS OneNote 2010.

By docking OneNote to the side of the desktop, any MS Office Word/PPT or IE web page that you are taking notes related to will automatically be linked in your OneNote text.

This can prove to be quite handy when doing research:

Notice the small IE icon next to the text “Articles from Christianity Today“. When you roll over the icon, you will get a popup preview window which links to the referenced page. This prevents you from having to do the “highlight-copy-hyperlink-paste” dance to get a reference in OneNote to a web page. Plus the added bonus of linking to Word or PPT docs. Often a thumbnail image is all it takes to refresh your memory.
Also applies to OneNotes in other notebooks. Email linkage is still performed the same way as it was in 2007.

I use OneNote extensively for Bible Study and small group prep. Having an easy reference library of notes from all the curriculum and books we have studied over the last couple of years, plus my own study has been invaluable. Automatic linkage to web sites such as Bible Gateway and Blue Letter Bible will just add to the resource.
The new side doc feature and linking may increase some of the functionality in the work environment for me as well. Especially in those situations where I am using it as a “clearing house” to manage multiple documents.

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• Microsoft debuts second Office 2010 beta (infoworld.com)

A few months back I wrote this post on the ACS/Outlook plugin that pulls your member data and calendar events into Outlook. There’s also this video on how an event goes from inception in AccessACS to someone’s Outlook calendar and phone.

If you were wondering if the plugin works with Outlook 2010 (beta), the answer is “yes”. (I know, it’s just a series of API calls, it should continue to work.) The only hitch in the git-a-long so far is Outlook does not seem to maintain login id creds. when you close it. Next time you open Outlook, you will need to enter your username and password into the add-in section.

Too bad Google‘s calendar synch returns the “only works with Outlook 2003 or 2007″ error.  Totally kills the last step in the process for me…

The hot topic of discussion was “help desk monitoring: do you do it and if so…how”.

Some of the first suggestions made were:
Gmail – using labels works, but no reporting
SharePoint
SysAid – First 100 “devices” are free
ZenDesk
Help Desk Pilot
Trackit – integrates with Logmein

Another key point in the discussion was to assign and track issues via a 2×2 grid:

However, when all was said and done, what the end user really wants is just a status update. “Am I on your radar screen?” “Are you even concerned about my problem?” Users like regular updates, even when there is nothing to report. “Still working on it. Haven’t found the solution yet, but we are working on it.” A simple thing that fosters communication and prevents users from just “living with their little issues” until they become big ones.

If your tracking software doesn’t help you do that, it is falling short.