Zune, 'Z2K9', and Twitter

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Chris Toohey

Blogger, podcaster, writer, and geek Chris Toohey covers topics from application development to the latest must-have-gadgets.

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Products & Applications

Showtime
My Blackberry Enterprise Server Push Utility for the Lotus Notes Client, allows you to create Jobs for individual Channel, Message, and Browser Content Pushes, as well as allows you to delete Pushed Channel Icons from defined recipient devices.

Time Tracker
The idea is simple. At the start of your day - upon completion of your first task - create an entry highlighting what you did and whether you feel it was an efficient or inefficient use of your time. Based on several requests, you can also select the priority, apply categories, or even align your time against a project.

For Lotus Notes Client v8.0 and above, you can use the Time Tracker Widget to make this process even easier!

Zephyr
My Configuration-based Rich Text Mail Merge and Emailing Utility, Zephyr allows you to create rich, data-driven emails to support automated workflow - all via Microsoft Word Mail Merge-like architecture. Dear <firstname> allows you to personalize each email message not only to the individual recipient, but also to the individual application workflow event!

xCopy
xCopy is a simple configurable xCopy client for the Lotus Notes client. By creating and defining�xCopy Profiles, you can batch process your file backup or remote upload jobs. With the addition of the xCopy sidebar widget, you can easily kick-off these jobs, and modify both the xCopy Profiles and xCopy itself.

Community & Resources

Lotus Technical Information & Education Community

The Lotus Technical Information & Education community is comprised of IBM, business partner, and customer subject matter experts who use product wikis, published articles, white papers, community blogs and the latest in social media to build and share high quality technical content.

OpenNTF.org - Open Source Community for Lotus Notes Domino

OpenNTF is devoted to enabling groups of individuals all over the world to collaborate on IBM Lotus Notes/Domino applications and release them as open source.

developerWorks Lotus : Wikis

Share your deployment experiences and best practices in our wikis and help IBM to create scenarios for successful deployments. Contribute to the community by collaborating on shared content and leverage the shared knowledge from that community.

01/02/2009 09:27:21 AM by Chris Toohey

Alan had mentioned the other day how more and more businesses are leveraging social networks -- specificallyTwitter -- to stay in touch with their customers as well as finding potential customers and new opportunities in the cloud.

On New Year's Eve, I'm watching the 11PM news with my family (which cut into Dick Clark's show), when we see a report of Zune owners complaining that their devices locked up/froze from ~2AM that morning. Being a Zune owner, you can imagine my dismay. See... I literally use my Zune every day - when I'd doing the dishes, washing the dog, coding like a madman, etc. for both music but mostly for podcasts. I was thus shocked when my Zune 30 (the 30GB Zune, to which I'm only using ~4GB to this day) attempted to boot but froze at 100%.

Thinking to myself "Meh - MS will without a doubt fix this, I'm getting back to my family to ring in the new year!", I decided to take another 2 seconds and tweet the news that I, too, had joined the Z2K9 social.

Immediately, I had received the following response from microsoft_cares:

@Microsft_Cares, caring for my fallen Zune

... and it worked. I didn't have to think about having to listen to my podcasts and music library from my laptop or having to go out and buy a Zune 8. I was able to relax, knowing that everything was going to be just fine, and my Zune would be back to work for me the next time I would use it.

And, for the record, it was actually pretty cool being a part of such a worldwide event. Sounds stupid, I know, but as luck would have it (and the reason I didn't know this until 11-something PM that evening), I didn't touch the Zune over either of the holidays, so it was an uneventful outage for me, and something that I could sit back and smile about now.

I did wonder however, while checking out a picture of my younger brother on Facebook today, if I was alone in that regard. In the picture, you can clearly see one of his friends using her iPod for the background soundtrack to the party. For the more social Zune users out there who had the same plans, that must have sucked...