eriksr on December 29th, 2006
It’s great when we manage to secure a TV or radio opportunity for our clients, isn’t it? And don’t you just love sharing
copies of said video or audio with them?
And doesn’t it just stink when you realize the file is too big for their Email inbox? Yes, in this day and age of high-speed Internet and huge files, most inboxes still have a very low capacity. IT does this for a very good reason… but who cares! It gets in the way of doing our job! So here’s a couple of ways to get around it.
- myfabrik lite: Visit site. Upload the file you want to share. Tell myfabrik the Email address of the recipient. Boof, you’re done. And it’s FREE! You’re limited to sharing up to 1GB of files, total
- Dropload: Like myfabrik, Dropload allows you to email your recipient a link they must click on in order to receive the file. You’re limited to 100MB in individual file size, but there’s no limit to the amount of files you can send. The catch — they are all deleted seven days later
eriksr on December 27th, 2006
Some analysts and businesses lately have been all atwitter about something called “The Consumerization of IT“. This is the MBA’s way of saying “People bringing their computers and gadgets to work because their equipment at work is vastly inferior”. It’s a little more complex than that — it also indicates a trend where us consumers are dictating how IT will spend its money and function in the coming years…but never mind that! The bottom line is that, if you’ve used your 
personal phone for work or brought a laptop to work (or a USB thumbdrive for transferring files, Treo for managing email and documents, etc.) you’re part of the trend. PR professionals who travel regularly have probably been doing this for years.
But you see, this stuff drives the IT department nuts. These poor guys and gals are up to their elbows every day dealing with crashes, coffee spills on laptops, virus infestations, hacker intrusions and more. The last thing they need to worry about is how to keep you from infecting the network by plugging your iPod into a work computer! But hey, don’t sweat it — over the next few days I’ll show you some ways you can get to your personal resources from work without the IT department going nuts.
Web-Based Desktops
Your computer’s desktop is the first thing you see when you turn on your computer in the morning. All your icons reside on top of your wallpaper, and you use them to access the programs and documents you want to use. Web-based desktops are the exact same thing, except you access them through a web browser.
Take eyeOS, for example. After quickly and easily creating an account, eyeOS presents you with a wide variety of programs you can run — word processing, spreadsheets, a calculator, calendar, and more. You can also upload files such as documents, photos, or even music to the webspace provided and retrieve (or listen to) them at any time. IT will love this because you aren’t storing your personal files on their hardware — they are hosted elsewhere.
If eyeOS doesn’t work for you, check out DesktopTwo and Groowy. They all do the same thing but have different features. We like eyeOS best because its word processor is fairly mature, but Groowy features a range of interesting “widgets” that let you monitor the weather, the most popular YouTube videos, and more.
Be sure to stop by again later for part two, where we’ll show you how to pack and run an entire computer from a USB memory stick!
eriksr on December 27th, 2006
We all compile weekly reports for our clients. Some of us find the work tedious. Well, read on — you’ll find some details on a web-based program from Google (Google Docs & Spreadsheets) that eases the pain. And stay tuned for future posts where I’ll provide details on programs that are much more comprehensive! 
The Situation and the Problem:
Most teams follow a process that goes kinda like this:
- Account coordinator starts the document and fills in their updates, forwards the document to another team member via Email
- That person adds their updates, forwards the document to the next person in line via email
- Ultimately the account lead will take the document, sanitize it for the client or push it back with edits
This process is fraught with potential for error and aggravation. For example:
- There’s the bottleneck that occurs when someone sits on the report for hours at a time
- There’s the possibility that more than one copy of a document can be created. This inevitably confuses the next person in line and generates unnecessary work for them as they look for the changes in the document and figure out what to merge
- The account manager has to spend their time managing the process to ensure it resolves on time
The Answer
Although Google Docs & Spreadsheets (GD&S) isn’t the be-all and end-all of programs to help a team collaborate — I’ll cover something more comprehensive in a later post! — it is one of the easiest to learn and use. Also, because the Google name also carries some comfort and familiarity with it — a lot of people use Google for their web searches and news reading, after all — it improves the odds that your teammates will actually try the program. Here’s how it works, step-by-step:
- Someone creates the document to share and adds their updates
- This person sends an invitation to the Email addresses of their teammates
- The teammates open the Web-link they receive and add their updates at any time. Any formatting and spelling problems are sanitized by other teammates while they work or by the person responsible for delivering the report to the client
Same number of steps, yes, but the potential for error — and the amount of shepherding everyone must do to ensure the report is complete on time — is practically gone. Even better, GD&S can be accessed anywhere you find an Internet connection, so you can provide your updates just about anywhere.
GD&S is a great program to use for sharing the odd document or spreadsheet. However, for more comprehensive applications that allow teams to manage and work on dozens of different types of documents — even keep a team calendar and contact list — stay tuned.
eriksr on December 25th, 2006
Welcome PR professionals and everyone else to Tech for PR. Come back regularly and you’ll learn about some great technology — hardware and software — that will make your life easier and help you better promote your clients. For example, for tech meant to help you:
- Reporting: It doesn’t matter if you’re an account coordinator managing four of these a week or a vice president with nothing better to do then nitpick those oft-ignored weekly status reports, you find yourself thinking there must be a better way to do these. There is.
- Billing: Don’t we all love that Monday morning rush of getting our timesheets locked in before accounting throws a fit? Do you find yourself struggling to remember how long something took to do, or even what you did last Friday morning? I’ll be bringing you some solutions to that.
- Research: We do a ton of research, don’t we? Competitive, market, new business, existing business…well, I’ll ease your pain with tools that will accelerate research and help you better mine results.
- Teamwork: When a team of eight is working on a presentation or other such document and tossing it around via email, things get crazy — too many cooks in the kitchen crazy. There are better ways to manage documents in a group. Of course, I’ll tell you all about ‘em.
That’s just a taste — I’ll touch upon a whole lot more than that. In the meantime…welcome one and all.
copies of said video or audio with them?
