Tool Suggestion : TeamLab

Link : TeamLab

Project Management
Build teams and assign tasks. Schedule project milestones, track project activity and generate reports.

Business Collaboration
View employee details, create posts in blogs and forums. Share photos, bookmarks and Wiki pages.

Instant Messaging
Chat with colleagues in real time. Get contact list automatically updated. Receive “what’s new” notifications.

• Document Editing
• E-Mail Management
• HR Administration

Basecamp Import
Import your Basecamp projects into TeamLab. Make a seamless move to free project management and collaboration software.

Data Backup & Restore
Create data backup directly from your portal. Deploy TeamLab on your own server and restore data from backup in one click.

An office day being a concatenation of work breaks?

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Jason Fried has a radical theory of working: that the office isn’t a good place to do it. At TEDxMidwest, he lays out the main problems (call them the M&Ms) and offers three suggestions to make work work.

Technical insight into NTFS

Check out OSnews’s article “NTFS: A File System with Integrity and Complexity“.

The topics handled in this article:

• Glossary of NTFS Terms
• A File System of Files
• Fill Your Quota
• Better Backups with Shadow Copy
• File Compression Made Easy
• Alternate Data Streams
• File Screening
• Volume Mount Points
• Hard Links, Soft Links, and Junction Points
• Fun With Logs
• Encrypting File System – EFS
• Advanced Format Drives
• Interview: Dr Gary Kimura

It showed me some interesting insights into the technical possibilities I wasn’t aware off. Nice examples are that “symlinks” is possible since Windows Vista and the concept of “streams!

Succes is doing the best you can

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

With profound simplicity, Coach John Wooden redefines success and urges us all to pursue the best in ourselves. In this inspiring talk he shares the advice he gave his players at UCLA, quotes poetry and remembers his father’s wisdom.

Hyperthreading explained!

There are a lot of nice technology names that sound cool, but where the actual specifics are a bit unclear. Hyperthreading is one of them for a lot of people. So check out the following arcticle “What Is Hyper-Threading?” @ makeuseof.com!

Excerpt

I’ve even spoken with one poor fellow who thought he’d purchased a eight-core processor because he saw eight graphs in Windows Task Manager. That’s what the sales rep told him, so when he went home and saw eight graphs, he was hooked. Seeing was believing. Two graphs appear in Windows for each core on a Hyper-Threading processor because Windows is detecting two logical processors for each core. The term “logical processor” sounds fancy, but a logical processor is by definition a processor that has no physical existence. Windows can send threads to each logical processor, but there is still just one core doing the actual execution, so a single core with Hyper-Threading is dramatically different from two seperate physical cores.

Managing Team Changes within a Project

Source : Tips for Managing Your Ever-Changing Project Team

“Make Newcomers Welcome”
Some basic points we tend to forget, yet they are truly important!

• Assigning a peer as a mentor to each new team member to help them with acculturation
• Providing basic educational materials about how your project management process works
• Taking time to explain core concepts in meetings instead of assuming everyone is up to speed already
• Encouraging new members to ask clarifying questions either during or after each meeting if they don’t understand something

Address Conflicts Immediately
Sadly enough, seen this one “live” too many times before…

If a team member comes to you with a complaint about a coworker, take it seriously. Often, employees will wait until they are really fed up before they go to management to ask for help with resolving a conflict. When their concerns are dismissed instead of being addressed, they will transfer some of their anger and resentment at their coworker onto the manager who ignored their request for help. You don’t want to become the enemy.

As with everything, don’t let things wait, and get them addressed quickly. And hope you are in a position to manage the situation or to get the escalation right on!

Tucker!
Don’t forget the “Forming, storming, norming & performing“-phases! This cycle restarts every time a new team member joins a team.

REPOST : Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture

This “lecture” remains one of my all-time favorites. The quotes from Randy Pausch are truly inspriational!

Repost of Stay hungry, stay foolish!

Put some PUNCH into your presentations!

The basic PUNCH recipe for each presentation…

• PERSONAL : Make it Personal.
• UNEXPECTED : Reveal something unexpected.
• NOVEL : Show or tell of something novel.
• CHALLENGING : Challenge conventional wisdom or challenge the audience’s assumptions
• HUMOROUS : Use humor to engage the audience emotionally with a shared laugh.

Read up the full story at Presentation Zen, it’s worth your time!

Restyled!

The last theme was getting a bit old. So the time was right to update it! Most of you have probably already noticed it, so this is merely a shoutout to the RSS-only readers!

Anonymizing google searches with Firefox

GoogleSharing is a special kind of anonymizing proxy service, designed for a very specific threat. It ultimately aims to provide a level of anonymity that will prevent Google from tracking your searches, movements, and what websites you visit. GoogleSharing is not a full proxy service designed to anonymize all your traffic, but rather something designed exclusively for your communication with Google. Our system is totally transparent, with no special “alternative” websites to visit. Your normal work flow should be exactly the same.

Check out GoogleSharing! or more info for the geeks … /. comments!

Locale… the downside
A disadvantage is that it only works with google.com. As a firefox user you probably know that Firefox uses your locale to match your “local google”. (f.e. google.be).
So you have to change the search engine xml to use google.com instead… How to do this? Check this article at “Random Nothings”.