Michael J. Stromberg – Tech Blog

Working with smartphones

Now more than ever we are getting requests for mobility solutions, this creates some interesting challanges from a support standpoint. Firstly we are not only talking about accessing your office network from home. We are talking about having all of your information everywhere! Yes everywhere, certainly there must be a magic piece of software that just works…

When a customer tells us they just got a new smartphone and want it connected to their email, calendars and contacts we have to hope they bought the right one. The problem is that there are hundreds of phones with hundreds of interfaces and they all work a little different. For example the day after the iphone was released we got one of those calls. In this instance we had already done our homework on the iphone and concluded there was no way to sync everything. We were able to setup a rudimentary email interface for the phone but no contacts or calendars. What were they thinking?

I personally use a Treo 700wx smartphone with direct push email from our Microsoft Exchange Server, this is probably the most common and reliable way to go mobile. In the next couple of years I suspect our clients to demand more and better mobility solutions, I just hope the hardware developers can keep up.

-mike

Whats your page rank?

I get asked by people all the time “why does my website come up on page 5 when i do a Google search”.  The answer is a simple one, you don’t have the right stuff.  But what is the right stuff?  Google uses several factors to determine your “page rank”, which basically is how important they think your page is. 

The Google Bot focuses on:

• Inbound links – Sites that link to your site, this can hurt you if they are a link farm so be careful
• Keywords - But not meta keywords they don’t do anything for Google
• Page title – The line in the upper left corner of your browser
• Image tags - When you hold your mouse over an image it should read something relevant

As there are probably a few other secrets on how Google determines their page rank we can take a step in improving placement with the above items.  Another key is to change your content frequently!  Anyway you look at it most end users don’t have the skills to get this done but hopefully their webmaster does.

-mike

Just install it already!

If you have never been asked to install the Google toolbar before then you have not spent much time on the web.  Just today I was asked by 5 different programs if I would like to install the Google toolbar.  Granted they have a nice way of asking with their little uncheck here box, but if I wanted it, I would of had it 300 installs ago…

Google is by far not the worst.  There are a lot of spy-ware toolbars that are hard to get rid of and install without your knowledge.  To better understand why we need toolbars just try disabling (right click on the toolbar and uncheck it by name) and see if your life is changed at all.  The truth is that FireFox, IE7 or any other respectable browser has a pop-up blocker and search field built in.  So if you want to get some of your valuable browser real-estate back disable or uninstall your toolbar.

-mike

World Wide What?

My wife and I had supper at a local restaurant tonight with a few Brainerd JC members, including past MN Jaycee President Tom Jay (fellow onion hater).  The night consisted of pop culture trivia combined with a conversation regarding the proper use of www.  As most of you know www stands for “World Wide Web”, but why do we use it?

When we speak about a website it is usually proceeded with a www dot something.  These are nothing more than wasted keystrokes for most websites.  In the past, the prefix www was affixed to a domain name to designate the location of a web-server in a desired network.  Today most (99.999%) websites are reachable without the sub-domain of www attached.  So can we get rid of www all together?  Yes!  In almost every case, the www sub-domain is added for more of a historical reason, if you don’t believe me just try it…

Back to the trivia.  As I spend most of my time in the office writing code and costing jobs, there is not much time to keep up on current events.  My buzzkill score tonight shows that!

-mike

Google positions itself…

Google said today that it was well positioned for a US economic slowdown.  I fear that my google stock may not be, down another 15+ points already today and I am wondering just where they are positioning themselves?

Things must be ok because every day Google is buying another billion dollar company and giving away their services.  I suppose they beleive it will bring in more ad revenue because of the new users, but wait a minute.  Everyone who knows how to change their homepage is already using Google…

What if Google already has all of the market share they are going to get?  Then spending all of that investor money is just going to…

Time for a stop loss!

-mike 

The negligence of a company

Last week I and a few others spent hours moving email hosting due to an unfortunate circumstance.  One of the local ISPs was having mail filtering trouble.  Spam was coming in and legit mail was going out days later and as far as I know the problem still persists. 

My issue here is that a few of our clients were using the ISP as a filtering agent for their exchange boxes.  This is normally an ok scenario when you are dealing with minute delays, but when mail starts disappearing you know there is trouble.  For a couple of brave clients, we moved their mx to our servers, the others are still waiting…

These things happen.  Servers go down and email gets lost.  This I understand.  Sure it could have been fixed very quickly if the ISP knew anything about mail servers, spam filtering or network routing, but even so, I understand.  What I don’t understand is the fact that they did not make any attempt to contact their customers and explain the problems.  Instead they denied they were having a problem at all.  Now a week later, business has been lost, friends have been snubbed and even a missed party or two. 

Customer service is not always easy.  In fact, it is probably the toughest part of our business.  However, if you explain the problem to the customer they will understand (at least 99% of the time).  I guess they thought nobody would notice…

-mike 

P.S. The majority of our clients were unaffected by the disruption becuase we do not use that ISP for mail hosting or filtering.

Bad day at the office!

Today was a little rough in my world, so what better day to start the blog I have been putting off for a few weeks now.  The day started with about 3 hours of sleep and 2 cups of coffee.  Then at 7 am the phone calls started coming in but not from clients.  Our vendors all decided it was a good time to see how we were doing and how we could improve their margins.  To make things worse A drive had failed the night before on one of our web servers and I was still dealing with that.

Later that day (9 am) things were getting back to normal and I was on to my scheduled work when I had a bazaar phone experience.  While on a 10 minute support call I received another 8 calls.  They were totally unrelated, but it just proves there is no such thing as a schedule in this business! 

 

-mike