Archive for the 'Tips and Tricks' Category

Friday, August 15th, 2008

Review of Project Management Tools - Google Docs & Calendar, Zoho, Codebeamer, Dotproject, gForge

Project Management suites are, in my own words, absolutely essential for application development companies. They empower project teams to manage documentations, plan milestones, organize meetings and facilitate communications - and more importantly, involves our precious clients seamlessly so you don’t have to waste too much managing tedious, angsty, never-ending back & forth communications. I can now claim myself to be a real matter expert in this field because I have tried all of the above mentioned applications before settling for 1 for my purpose. I must say there is no 1 single perfect suite for my needs, as they certainly have different offerings and features. I certainly have my preferences though. While the above apps are not the only one, (there are others like 37signals’s basecamp which cost quite a tidy sum.. you try them and let me know how they fare), they are certainly free at least to a reasonable certain extent. Without further ado, there is the lowdown on them:

Codebeamer
This is the very 2nd project management tool I have ever used after Project-lifeline, a now defunct project management tool developed in house by SMU Students. Codebeamer, developed by Itland, does not come cheap for its commercial version. Its free version allow only up to 5 users, and with many functionalities disabled. When I contacted the salesperson to enquire about the cost, they give me the impression of being rather shady - they evaded a question I have regarding whether the free version had a certain feature (which he told me its only available on paid for version, but I later discovered myself that the free version had that feature), and quoted me quite an astronomical price - about USD$1,000 for about 100 users (though my company has obviously not grown that huge)

Service aside, Codebeamer has a subversion integration capability that allows administrators to set up SVN easily. Under documentations, ACL is nicely implemented. You can even plot sequence diagrams and other uml notations with text. CB has a very nice interface which is using to create your own wiki blog, and a nice integration workflow structure which allows linking of documents to everywhere else. Like Zoho, Codebeamer has a forum functionality and notification mechanism for new documents and forum post.

What I do not savor however is the lack of Calendar function. Codebeamer has a tasklist and milestone feature but for me that is insufficient. Codebeamer, which is being supported by JavaForge, may be well-liked by big software firms but for my purpose, I needed something that is easier to use and integrates well with word documents. One more thing; it looks horrible on Safari and Firefox 3.

Google Docs & Calendar
My pursuit of an integration tool with Calendar and Documents bring me towards exploring Google’s offering - Docs and Calendar. Now there is a huge problem 2 hrs into my experiment; Google Doc does not offer project management features at all. Instead of a many-users-to-1-portal-with-many-docs model, they use a many-users-to-many-docs model. Meaning, documents are being shared at a user level, instead of at a project level. Thus, it becomes difficult to manage these documentations. A solution would be everyone share a single Google account to log into the portal, but this opens a can of worm on audit trail issues. Without any doubt though, Google Doc is easily the best in the office suite in terms of usability.

On a separate issue, Google Calendar is just beautiful to bits. It is easy to move and drag events, and has a nice reminder feature (I heard if you are in States, you get SMS reminder service). Google Calendar allows users to share calendar and to publish their own. I will be looking closely at Google’s foray into project management aspects.

Dotproject
This is an open source project from the land of Mercedez (and CB). The best part of it? It is free, deployable on your own server (like Codebeamer), runs on PHP so you can just use some webhosting companies and has many plugin availables from the OS community. However, the userablity of Dotproject has a lot of room to improve; In an age where AJAX is so commonly used, Dotproject lags far behind in user interactivity.

gForge
To be honest, I only tried gForge, which is vastly similar to Codebeamer in its core features for a while before I give up. I cannot comment much except that it is free, and allows users to set up SVN and track bugs easily - just like Codebeamer. What stops me from proceeding further with it is in its lack of abilities to allow me to write documentations immediately without having the need to upload.

Zoho Projects
I love Zoho to bits. Ive told many friends about it, and even the forum moderators in Zoho. To me, Zoho projects is almost on the brink of perfection, except for some minor bugs and wishful features I really want; such as integration with Zoho Calendar (which is nice to drag and drop), and offline synchronisation of documents. Zoho projects is Google Docs in a project management suit. It has a wonderful multiple portals and projects management which allow users to change portals and projects easily. The calendar features is easy to use and Zoho Write (MS version of Ms word) and Zoho Sheet (MS version of excel) is very friendly (:

Another article about Zoho that gives you a better idea on the office applications:
http://www.twistermc.com/blog/2006/06/20/zoho-online-office-applications

I feel Zoho Projects has huge potential, with its killer low price and responsive replies response from its support. With its all round integration functionality, the value curve offering, imho, is a notch above others.

Thats all folks. Please leave me a comment if you disagree or if you like what you read (:

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

Doing it right the first time .. or does IT matter?

When releasing a product (especially innovative ones) in the IT domain, just how important is it to do it right the first time?

The experts are divided on this: Some would advocate the importance of showing others something that works and impresses, and emerge from your dark garage with a huge big impact that gets everybody’s jaw open - at the expense of time/effort and perhaps lost ground to competitors.

Others would tell you to build a community with a beta launch early, get their feedback and consistently improve. The latter situation helps you gain a first mover advantage, gain some sort of credibility as a company that delivers gradually, assures your VCs, but as you would have guessed, the wow effect would have been subsided. In terms of branding, your company is gauged accordingly to that buggy beta launch you have. In terms of marketing, you could miss out on the advantage of viral marketing (my reasoning is that if you potentially lose part of your community with a less than perfect application and miss out leveraging on their “word of mouth”)

I do not believe dude-my-solution-works-for-you-and-all exists. As usual, I listed down some guidelines that will help a startup determine its strategy, and end off with a possible solution startups can consider.

1) Can you foresee competitors that are already working on something similar?
If you do, you probably should release your application in iterations, even if it its less than perfect. First mover advantage has so much benefits that you simply can’t miss out in the fast moving IT world, and building a community with your beta can lock them into your application. Releasing early iterations also place pressure on competitors, forcing them to show their hands with less than perfect applications. You are better off than ignoring them and run the risk of competing with a even better application which the world saw earlier than yours.

2) Can you decide well enough what is good for the community? (Do you even know em?)
One of the best lesson I have learned in many years is from the trendsetting guru, Mr Steve Jobs, who quipped that focus groups are useless because most of the time, your customers does not know what they want. However, if you feel pretty inadequate in deciding what THEY want, you are better off releasing your early versions of your ugly application to them. Who knows, they may be more than happy with that! Also, if you are still unsure about your target market, an early release may help you decide. It is common in every business to evolve and adapt to the market pays you more.

3) Do you have enough engine and dolli?
The later you release, the less confidence your investors will show in your company, and so will you to your corporate bank statements. Slow release may also result in demotivated staffs who have been waiting to capitalize on their equity stakes. You run the risk of your best programmer quitting you for another company just because the work they do don’t seem to see daylight as the days dragged on with another of your “Oh I think it will be great to add this function!”. At the same time, releasing your application gives potential new talents a preview of what great idea you have, thus attracting them towards you.

In a nutshell, the 3 questions above in fact are point to the same rhetorical question: Just how important is your product coming in with a BIG BANG? (Kaboom and Cracklings)? If it is a matter of life and death (which is implied from your answers from above posers), and yet the disadvantages bother you all the time, you can consider what I call a ring-fence launch.

In a ring-fence launch, you ensure that competitors and general public are not able to access the application. Get only friends (preferably close ones) to see your application, as well as reiterate to them the importance of keeping to themselves. Explain to them your motive, and ensure that this is far from being the final product, and that their word-of-mouth help is critical to success when you eventually do the final launch. This is helpful because you do not want them to ignore your fiinal product due to boredom and lack of excitement.

Personally, I would chose to launch something that is 50% completed - with quite a different look to the final look and feel. I would even use a slightly diff name for this application in my url ,e.g. such as myproduct_beta such as as myproduct. This is to illustrate the key difference in both releases to the test community.

In my next post, I will discuss the different kind of beta launch and more strategies in doing so. Please feel free to comment on this post!

Monday, January 28th, 2008

Regret sending out that email?

Are the following scenarios familiar to you?

• Feeling angsty with a colleague, you immediately replied a rude email with equally hostile wordings
• A private joke that was supposed to be .. private until the “To” includes the butt of the joke
• Reply all conveniently and include the whole school community, and conveniently making yourself look stupid
• Emailing to your wife love letters that are well-too-loving-for-any-eyes that was NOT supposed to be for your wife.

I did discuss about email etiquettes and a way to handle this. I now actively advocate that one should try deferring emails by 1 minute. Of course, you can set to 5 minutes delay if you want. 1 minute is a “just nice” reaction time buffer for me to realise any mistakes, or any further details I would like to further add on to the email, and the bare minimum delay I can tolerate for sending emails.

One way you can do this in Outlook using the Rules and Alert method, like in the following.

Another method I formerly employ is in activating “Spell Check Before Sending”, though it really is “Are you sure you wanna send this”. This provides a brute force reminder, and again, if you use Outlook, you can change it under Tools->Options->Spelling in the following manner, and check the 2nd box.

There you go, 1 way to go back in time, and another way to ensure you live on in your time. (: Of course, a last ditch resort is to revoke that email, by going to the “Sent” folder, then under your toolbar choose “Action->Recall message”. However, this is normally an ineffective measure as the recipients often are able to still access the message content.

Saturday, October 13th, 2007

Good Industry Email Etiquettes and Practices

I am a self confessed EMAIL addict. Almost every time I have access to any PCs, I immediately log onto my web-based mails. And when I am using my IBM x41 at work, I frequently check my Outlook to make sure I do not miss out any mails. The first thing I do when I wake up, is not brushing my teeth - no prize for guessing correctly; is checking that darn mailbox(es). The anxiety and obsession associated when I do not check my mailboxes for 1 week include facing 100 unread mails, in which one of clients asked when that IT project finally is getting delivered, an announcement from the Professor, or a notification from Facebook.

 

Kind to think of it, there is no need to be panicking around even if I do not check my email regularly - it is just a natural habit, akin to not carrying your cell phone for 1 day. My life has become so intertwined with emails (& technology), and Im sure that is so with bulk of you too. The emails that you send out invariantly define and shape you, and so does the email that you do NOT send out when others anticipate your response. Clear, effective communications between parties too, has a prestigious place in modern emails. In this post, I will share some important email etiquettes and practices ensuring rightly that EMAIL, possiby one of the best inventions after Internet ever, does not screw your life.

 

 

 

1) Reply when expected.

 

This is a silly point to even bring up, but many people suffer from this basic dysfunction. When a simple email for availability for a meeting goes ignored by some, it frustrates the sender into doing extra work like calling them up. Even if you are unsure, the general expectations is to at least let everyone knows that you are NOT too sure, and you will inform earliest time possible (of course, this depends on whether you are able to find out promptly and if the email is urgent).

 

This is simple courtesy and manners. There is no rule of thumb when you should reply. You simply have to use your best judgment for different situations.

 

 

2) Let others know you arent checking that mailbox!

 

Again, this is common sense. If you are not going (or a chance where you are not going to exist) to visit your emails in 3 or more days, (a long time in the modern email standards for professionals!), it will do you good to inform your peers! For a start, an auto responder (e.g. out of office wizard) like what you see when you sent an email to complain to your favorite manufacturer, is appropriate explaining where you are, what you are doing, when you will back, and a disclaimer that you will try to reply where possible as soon as possible is the bare minimum.

 

Note however, this is insufficient in certain cases. If you expect someone to write to you anytime soon, or there is a party whom you have been liaising with for some time, remember to inform them before you go kaput, so they do not get a surprise door gift when they write to you expecting you to be around. It reeks of irresponsibility, especially when that party is a client of your company whom has been having some problems with a product you sold but urgently needs attention. Handover the case to a colleague, and inform your client about it if you are not going to be around for a week. That client would appreciate your thoughtfulness and considerate attitude.

 

 

3) Check, Double Confirm and Verify your To-List! ( i.e. check, check & check)

 

Reply-to-all appears to be a deadly invention. Many times, I have received emails that are supposed to be addressed to just one subject, but I end up getting it because the victim mistook Reply to All for Reply. Other times, fingers have lightning speed reflexes and hits Alt-S before the brain reacts. How deadly is this oversight when a Reply-to-All gets executed disastrously?

 

Remember not to tell Jason about …….
That client was a joker! LOL
Nice email. Now… when are we going to get that dinner sweetie?

 

Till today, I do not know of an email client or any technology at least in Outlook that prompts you to double check if you are going to send that email. Some ideas that emulate this though includes a Spell Check function that forces you to confirm sending the email or deferring sending all your email by 1 minute (allowing you to cancel sending if you have a bad feeling; silly but effective!).

 

Otherwise, it is good to cultivate a habit of making sure the email should reach the right people. On a side note, in the past, I often forget to attach attachments though I have not made the above mistakes before. It would too, reflects negatively, especially on my carelessness, and I have since decided to cultivate a habit to check my email contents too.

 

 

4) Is your content understood by your mum?

 

The above statement is an exaggeration, but it is crucial to be clear and explicit in your email nonetheless. And where possible, reply to all points in an email addressed to you. Imagine a chain of emails like the following about a web project

A (project manager): The interface .. something wrong. Cannot click somehow. The buttons on the top too.
B (designer): Interface? And buttons on the top too? Which page? All the time?
C (designer): Arent buttons part of the interface?
A (project manager) : I mean, there is something wrong with the interface. The buttons at the top. They cannot be clicked even after I tried clicking on it 10 times later.
B (designer): And what page is that at? Did you experience it all the time?
A (project manager): It is at the front page. Yes it happens all the time I tried for 10 times!
B (designer): I mean, even after you log in? or before you do?
C (designer): … lets just meet up.

 

The number of emails exchanged would have been reduced by half had the project manager been clearer and answered every question. The designer, B, too was guilty too but it is possible he was frustrated by the vague content provided by the project manager earlier too. Now, poor C has been copied in all these emails and has stepped in appropriately to stop the rot.

 

One final point: please do cache your emails on a personal folder where possible, if your mailbox has a defined amount of space. You will never know when you need to refer to these old forgotten emails!

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Creating Adobe PDF for Beginners

Its Friday and before I give a quick tip or two on creating PDF files, heres one of my fav strips from http://www.pbfcomics.com/ to end off a fine week. Its so BAD its funny

Anyway, back to topic. Many of us create PDF files for different reasons: For that extra niche touch to your resume, reports or quotations, or to prevent people from modifying, printing or copying contents from the file. Don’t ask me why people want to do the later, but generally, PDF files carry an aura of professionalism and is considered a real essential. I personally use CutePDF for this purpose. Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

Down to Basics - Part III: Best Practices for the Average Professional

This is the last of the “Down to Basics” series. The Average Professional is one whose life depends on IT literally - laptop or data loss counts among the worse tragedies, while personal friendster accounts being hacked into is something that I have experienced myself - reputations can be ruined to ashes when the friendly hacker becomes overly friendly with your female friends (or male friends if you are a lady). This post aims to describe some important practices that should be adopted in this world where social and technology factors interlinked closely with one another.

 

BACKUP, BACKUP & BACKUP
I cant help but emphasize how critical this underrated task is 3 times. If you have finished a seemingly-take-eternity-to-finish report, save it in multiple locations such as your thumbdrive instead of just at your laptop. Note, I am not asking you to back up the whole machine everyday, but at least, save new critical deliverables whenever possible into multiple places especially if the new version is worth more than 5 hours of changes. Your professor or your boss will not accept reasons like “My lBM was working just fine!” when it decided to hibernate forever. If you need a good free backup & restore tool, please see the previous post.

 

CHECK, CONFIRM AND CLEAR ON PUBLIC MACHINES!
Why risk your reputation and all the confidential email exchanges between you and your loved ones when using the library pc? Social Networks like Friendster may have saved your password by default whenever you log in, while key logger programs may track your activities. Ensure the machine is cleared entirely before you trust it. Otherwise, what is the hurry anyway? Wait till you get home then!

 

MSN VIRUS - WHATS THAT?
There is no harm is asking additional questions whenever friends on MSN or other messaging programs sends you some “nice photos”. Some bots may be smart enough to even reply you - in that case, allow your intuitions to decide - does the naming of the file seem unlikely of that party’s nature? is the reply even “normal”? Gullibility will punish you severely, and even your friends.

 

LEAVE THAT BATTERY IN (YOU TRUST YOUR POWER CABLE THAT MUCH?)
If you are using a laptop regularly in your office or school, take it from me - just leave it in and allow the laptop battery to depreciate and finally exchange it under warranty. Battery has a finite lifespan, with or without regular usage. By leaving it outside of your machine, you are exposing yourself to risk of power failures or someone tripping over your cables, and in some cases, others mistakenly taking out the wrong cords (blur cords). When these things happen, you may not just lose any work that was not saved, but also eventually your hdd. Most importantly, don’t take out it during presentations by just running on Power!

 

CACHE YOUR EMAILS
I redirect all my emails from all accounts (School, Business) to a common mail account which allows up to 2GB storage; you guessed it - GMAIL. It not only an amazingly smart search engine when you track emails a decade ago, it also allows you to label them appropriately. I use MS Outlook Exchange (Rules & Alert) to forward all my emails to this GMAIL account. In times where my web outlook fouls up, or I got locked up of the school’s account, the Exchange server would continue to redirect all mails to my GMAIL account. This also serves more advantages in allowing me an easy mind when I am deleting mails from that limited 100mb storage in my school account - well knowing that mail, if required, can always be retrieved somehow.

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

Down to Basics - Part II: Top 5 Applications for the Average Professional

There is often a software/web application produced for every useful feasible thing you can wish for - e.g. to rip off that youtube video for your presentation (google for it!), or a 3rd party to enable wonderful effects you see in Mac keynotes for your MS Powerpoint. Such is the power of Internet, where individuals all around the world share ideas and constantly innovate being aware of a potential huge global market.

 

It thus amazes me how poorly equipped is the average professional down the streets is when it comes to their machine. To most of them, a notebook is probably simply a tool to use MS Word, PPT. Hopefully, this post would be useful to professionals like yourself in determining the must-have applications you should have in your laptop in order to facilitate your projects and lifestyle. (DISCLAIMER: This post assumes users use Windows OS, and I am in no way affiliated to any of the following products or companies).

Note, on top of this list #0 would definitely be Mozilla for me - It is too good, too sacred to be even ranked on this list, and of course, deserves no mention since its akin to telling you water is necessary for you.

 

#1 - DriveImage XML : This software ranks number 1 in my list for very good reasons; It is free, easy to use, and saves lives (by preventing heart attacks and suicide attempts). Data Backup, at least on a fortnightly basis is good practice but few professionals religiously do it because they complain they have no time. This is a clear fallacy - you only need to leave your machine overnight after spending last than 30 seconds starting it. You should also use an external HDD to store your image in, so when your HDD crashes, your backup still survives on a separate element.

 

#2 - ScreenPrint : One of my favorite utilities on my laptop. This software is also free, and allow me to put together a presentation or report quickly by bypassing cropping, editing, resizing optimally any print screens. It is number 2 on my list, also because of its user friendliness and minimal resource requirement.

 

# 3 - AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition : Again, a freeware that is hugely popular. I do not have to elaborate how critical Anti-Virus softwares are: They are simply a necessity in modern systems. AVG is my alternative on machines that do no have bundled anti-virus solutions. The only downside is the occasional advertisements that that does not bother me. For added security, I recommend upgrades or Trendmicro’s online web scan - HouseCall

 

# 4 - CCleaner : This is one utility I use every week - to clean up the hundreds of megabytes that clog my temp folder after I unzip files or uninstall any obsolete applications, or the pile of chunks that resides in my Mozilla or IE repository. I also use CCleaner just before I do my defragmenting, just to save more time and to avoid processing negligible files.

 

# 5 - Microsoft Outlook : Not the most perfect application, but definitely the best in the trade for me. The fact that it supports Exchange, which is commonly used in many Organisation, alone justifies its no. 5 spot. I have minimal complaints about its Calendar, Notes and Task functions too - except that it should support a 7 days view in a way similar to 5 days view especially for wide-screen users (there may be 3rd party solutions, or is implemented in Outlook 2007). I frequently ‘abuse’ the spell check, the easy of attaching files via copy & paste, and the compatibility when sync-ing with many modern Smart Phones using Windows Mobile OS. There is also a handful of 3rd party software supporting syncing with Palm OS as well (I personally use Tungsten and is currently evaluating such solutions like Beyond Contacts and Keysuite - work like a charm!)

 

There you go, my interim top 5 applications for the average professionals - subject to changes. If you have anymore suggestions, or objections, share it right here!