oogle to the rescue again after the great help and success of their Person Finder and Crisis Response applications during the Christchurch, New Zealand Earthquake. Businesses rely heavily on email communication these days and if you are running an in-house mail server or simply downloading your emails directly to your individual workstations; due to the power outages, police cordons or your building being damaged this may no longer be an option. In fact I have a client that had this EXACT setup which we switched over to Google Apps for them post the Sept 4th quake who are now in this situation with the recent earthquake but are able to still access this vital communication tool. Google Apps is a great email infrastructure not to mention it gives you shared calendars and also wordprocessing and spreadsheet tools via their Google Docs application all available 24/7. It is very simple to setup and transition over to, at this point I will however point out that you will need access to the following:
What can I say, the Christchurch earthquake has been an extreme tradgedy and totally devistating to the Canterbury region and New Zealand as a nation. Having been in Christchurch on business for the September 4th quake last year and experienced the original quake that started this all we were very lucky, no loss of life and business re-opened in the CBD in a relatively short space of time... this time however it is a beast of a different nature. Being stuck here in Wellington while many of my family, friends and clients are roughing it out in the shaken city I thought I could help just a little through my skills of consulting, technology advice and blogging by offering some how-to's and advice for businesses needing to get back up and some-what operational as they start to work out "where to from here?" and start to rebuild and re-open for business. One thing is for sure, this time the CBD will not be business as usual for a very long time.
Welcome back to 2010, it has been a while since I last posted anything Techy or Samurai related it reminds me how quickly we can go from leadership thinking to management thinking when one gets very busy (My company re-launched our flagship Guitar learning product Jamorama at the end of 2009 which didn't leave me much time for blogging, a poor excuse I know!).
As it happens it looks like Julia (my partner) and myself are moving to Wellington! (NZ's Captial City) for a change of lifestyle and a lot more Film and Television work for Julia. So I am putting together a proposal to keep working at Rock Star Recipes but remotely!
Remote work and more interesting, remote or distance leadership is something I have become very interested in, how can we in 2010 with all the technology easily available to most businesses lead from a distance? What are the challenges? How does communication, face to face time, company culture and atmosphere differ? I suspect a culture of great communication, trust and respect is key.
I'm hoping to document as much as I can while I learn more about this and also put my proposal forward to actually experience and work as a remote staff member and remote leader...
Perhaps we are coming to a point where there is no real difference whether someone is in the office or not as long at the end results are met and accountability is key. In the 80's they called it "Tele-Communting" more recently it was dubbed "Tele-Work" (Perhaps to make it sound more like working for those managers who could not let micro-management go?) but I think going forward it will just be "work" as the technology and easy constant contact and communication from anywhere in the world becomes the norm.
More to come...
Oh, and for those who need their Technology and Ninja fix... check out the new Nexus One powered by Google Android.
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So for a "Samuari Tech Geek" i haven't really put up anything on the tech tip yet so I thought I would talk about a couple of useful little tools I have been using.
I just spotted an interesting article on Read Write Web (a great tech blog I read) about a backup tool for Google Docs.
I had a quick read and installed the software only to find it is only for the Enterprise Version of Google Apps (And for those of you out there using Google Apps it looks like a good tool). Myself being a big cloud computing advocate (I live in gmail and Google Docs nowadays and haven't even opened Outlook since the start of the year!) I wanted something that would work with my personal GDocs to have a backup of everything sitting in the Cloud. A quick search turned up a tool called GDocBackup which does exacly what I want. Within a few mouse clicks I had all my documents and spreadsheets saved to a USB drive!
On to useful tool number 2!
The most annoying thing I think about windows is that as time goes on and you are constantly installing new applications and removing old ones Windows just seems to collect fat in its arteries and slow down. I think I experieced this on every windows machine I've ever used. Rather than having to do a fresh install of windows everytime I came across this tool called Registry Fix (Which I now run on every windows machine I work on and even installed it on my parent's computer to keep them from having a techno freakout). I usually run this tool every month or just whenever I feel my machine has become a bit slow of the mark. It takes only a few minutes to zip through and cleans everything up in your windows registry and gains back that bit of lost performance and productivity while not breaking the bank.
SO thats all from me on the tech tip today, I hope to post more useful tools, websites and write some articles on getting the most out of todays technology and looking forward to tomorrow's.
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Businesses rely heavily on email communication these days and if you are running an in-house mail server or simply downloading your emails directly to your individual workstations; due to the power outages, police cordons or your building being damaged this may no longer be an option. In fact I have a client that had this EXACT setup which we switched over to Google Apps for them post the Sept 4th quake who are now in this situation with the recent earthquake but are able to still access this vital communication tool. Google Apps is a great email infrastructure not to mention it gives you shared calendars and also wordprocessing and spreadsheet tools via their Google Docs application all available 24/7. It is very simple to setup and transition over to, at this point I will however point out that you will need access to the following:
What can I say, the Christchurch earthquake has been an extreme tradgedy and totally devistating to the Canterbury region and New Zealand as a nation. Having been in Christchurch on business for the September 4th quake last year and experienced the original quake that started this all we were very lucky, no loss of life and business re-opened in the CBD in a relatively short space of time... this time however it is a beast of a different nature. Being stuck here in Wellington while many of my family, friends and clients are roughing it out in the shaken city I thought I could help just a little through my skills of consulting, technology advice and blogging by offering some how-to's and advice for businesses needing to get back up and some-what operational as they start to work out "where to from here?" and start to rebuild and re-open for business. One thing is for sure, this time the CBD will not be business as usual for a very long time.
