A long time ago I posted about PIFEM – its called Pay it forward because it will save your life, and after you learn how to use it, you need to tell someone else how to use it.
A massive part of my job is email, talking w/ engineers on many different campuses or dealing with our WW marketing teams; or 100% email when I work from Australia :)
The biggest email month I’ve had this year is February with 3800 out going emails.
Over at techmeme there is an interesting thread started by the New York Times article by Luis Suarez, I freed myself from e-mail’s grip.
Luis cut down the number of emails he sent by 80% in 1 week – if I tried this people would think I died or I’d have one hell of a next week.
When I was in Australia my wingman quit, leaving me cover the entire country for all enterprise SharePoint deals (for tech presales) I worked with a few colleagues in a similar situation and we invented PIFEM – read the docs over here.
I still get stuck in email holes like I had 450 untriaged on Friday afternoon and now i’m down to 268 – still a bad scene but much better than it could have been.
Download it here (btw – you need OneNote or a trial version to use it and Outlook 2007)
Thursday I’m off to the OAuth summit and Friday I’ll be kicking it in the bay area.
Ping me if anyone wants to catch up alogan @ microsoft.com or sms +1 425 753 7987 or http://twitter.com/anguslogan (direct msg)
thx
There been some chatter around about us upgrading the Silverlight Streaming service to be Silverlight 2 Beta 2 compatible.
We said we would, and we did:
My 3rd most favorite feature in SLS (after the smoking low latency download speed, and the direct video upload) is the XAP uploads so you can just package your app as an XAP – no repacking etc.
Check it out http://silverlight.live.com
You should head over here to check out the pilot episode of theSocialWebTv which has “an revolving cast of characters” – primarily social web personalities talking smack about a range of stuff.
This week’s episode had John McCrea, David Recordon & Joseph Smarr talking about the face off between Dave Morin & Kevin Marcs
The production quality is fairly high which is a plus but the content is what rocks – if you want to know what’s new in terms of the social web and can’t be make it to all the conferences/panels: check it out.
Several years ago I worked with Leon Bambrick (aka SecretGeek) and he asked for an invite to Live Mesh;
The easiest way to hook him up was to invite him to a folder, my Windows Live Platform Public Presentation folder – which contains every presentation which is done publicly on WL Platform.
The funny thing is, every time I go into that folder I see him in there (indicated by the orange box), either he loves Live Mesh or loves the content :)
Martin H Normark has written a post on how to use Windows Live ID Web Authentication – the post is an excellent tutorial:
In this blog post I'm going to cover how to authenticate users of an ASP.NET application against Windows Live, using the SDK for Windows Live ID. I'm going use the built-in ASP.NET Membership mechanism and go from there.
The one thing he didn’t mention is if you are using Windows Live ID for authentication, the primary goal should be authenticate people for Microsoft online services (as I mentioned in this Bangkok Post article) - if you implement Live ID Web Auth it gives you single-sign-on to other Windows Live Services such as the Messenger Library or Contact Control.
Check it out here
Another tidbit from Martin’s post is Scott Hanselman has a post on how to integrate Open ID into ASP.NET he says “The dotnetopenid source includes source for sample sites. It actually includes three samples, two WebForms and one ASP.NET MVC.“
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ps. with posts like these, Alex van Herwijnen (a Microsoft MVP) is still the guru of all things Windows Live ID
I'm really looking forward to PDC this year - some of the session outlines are up on the site already (cloud, building blocks, silverlight, Windows 7 etc.) . The last PDC I went to - 2005 was great - the first look at what SharePoint 2003 and MCMS would become ==> SharePoint 2007; I can't remember if Andrew Connell made it after he tried to blog his way to PDC 2005 (I think that was when he still worked for a bank and conferences weren’t classified as bizdev for him).
Lots of new experiences:
In fact September of 2005 was a crazy month, MVP summit, PDC, week with the SharePoint team and a week at BizTalk conference!
PDC this year will top 2005! Although instead of attending as a customer I'll be working on content so not as many festivities on the rooftop of The Standard as hard as last time (Light Beer in Australia means low alcohol not low calories and I met the Jai+Thom from Queer-Eye for the Straight guy – two separate stories not combined)
I got an email from a friend (from his email address) I hadn’t heard from for a long time – turns out it was most probably unsolicited email sending on behalf of my friend from a web site which used his Messenger contacts as a pre-qualified set of targets. I went digging to where this spam came from.
The end user value prop on this site is to tell you when your friends block you on Messenger – not sure if that is even possible.
But of course, because its a service they provide to you for free, to pay for the site they’ll occasionally send you some information you may care about (Ads!) to your inbox; Because that would mean only 1 user is being monetized they need to acquire more people – how do they do this? through by sending an email to all your friends telling them to check out the service and a nice big Ad based email (to be fair the recommend to a friend box is pre-ticked so you could untick it but no one would so I take that as default behavior).
This type of thing really irks me:
There is some pretty interesting Windows Live Platform stuff happening in South Korea and the local team asked me to come over and spend time with customers, partners and kick it with the local crew.
One really interesting thing is the broadband penetration in Korea – it is SUPER HIGH PENETRATION and SUPER FAST – they have a good size population and also a good Internet population ~34 million+ (I just did a quick search and found 2007 #’s)
If you want to meet up in Seoul send me an email – alogan@ remove this microsoft.com – I’ll be around from Monday to Thursday afternoon.
I’m hiring a technologist to be based in Seoul dedicated to Windows Live Platform. If you know someone great or are interested ping me and I’ll shoot over the job ad – perhaps we could meet up?
If you are creating Silverlight content using Expression Encoder – pushing this to the cloud and including it in your application couldn’t be easier – go to silverlight.live.com – it takes ~ 5 seconds to sign up for an account; you get 5 GB of free* storage and up to 5 Terabytes/month of outgoing bandwidth for free* at ~ 1.4 terabit aggregated throughput.
Getting the bits up there is a no brainer using these Expression Encoder bits announced below:
Silverlight Streaming Publishing Plugin for Expression Encoder 2 is out! I'm pleased to announced that we just pushed a preview of the SLS publishing plugin for Expression Encoder 2 live: http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/2/a/22a8da23-ffa7-4e5a-8fed-8239d3a7b322/SLSPlugin for Expression Encoder 2.msi This plugin makes it very easy to publish and manage your encoded Silverlight video experiences online via the Silverlight Streaming service from within the Expression Encoder application. As well as adding support for Expression Encoder 2, the plugin has a number of enhancements: File-by-file upload: Removes the zip step and improves uploaded reliability and performance. Better upload progress reporting. Quota display that shows available/remaining online storage space. Support for application republishing: you can replace or merge existing applications. UI enhancements (eg resizable preview window, application list sorted in inverse date order etc). Hope this helps, James
I'm pleased to announced that we just pushed a preview of the SLS publishing plugin for Expression Encoder 2 live:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/2/a/22a8da23-ffa7-4e5a-8fed-8239d3a7b322/SLSPlugin for Expression Encoder 2.msi
This plugin makes it very easy to publish and manage your encoded Silverlight video experiences online via the Silverlight Streaming service from within the Expression Encoder application.
As well as adding support for Expression Encoder 2, the plugin has a number of enhancements:
Hope this helps,
James