managing your technology environment northeast cluster fielding graduate university march 17, 2007 carol thomas and glen gatin

three environments your desktop environment your personal web environment your collaborative environment

desktop environment issues system capacity performance security space general management recovery disks backup of software performance: vary by operating system… I’m going to talk primarily about Windows based machines today, but certainly if you use a Mac you want to know the equivalent there these are the issues I usually hear about… are there others? system capacity (how do I know what’s on my system?)

tools to manage know your system safe computing practice 101 belarc advisor (belarc.com) safe computing practice 101 windows updates anti-virus protection anti-spyware http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/getstarted/5computinghabits.mspx backup, backup, backup know your vendor

things to do clear your cache clear your history uninstall programs you no longer use backup old files defrag your disk manage your system tray know your startup analysis bad things always seem to happen at the worst possible time, so make sure that you attend to these tasks on a regular basis… I set aside time about once a month to run analytics on all of my systems… running the analytics takes NO time from me as long as I start it up

your personal web environment browser IE, Firefox, portal page google, yahoo, aol integrate email, calendar, todo lists (PIM) blog wordpress, blogger/google audio/video blogging (hipcast) web based storage x-drive productivity tools google docs etc zoho our environments are ours alone… what works for me will not necessarily work for you… the best way to work with these is to just work with them… everything is customizable to you… that’s why it’s personal! one question I get frequently… how do you know what to use? well… I look around, I read the various blogs and forums, I look for recommendations and I trust that others who have gone before me have thought about what works and doesn’t work. if I’m early in the adoption cycle for a product (ie Twitter, Carmun and Zoho) I recognize that I might be making a decision that I will back out of. Over time things evolve and we need to evolve with them… so I’m always thinking about how I’ll be able to carry work forward with me. The best example I can give is my evolution in ISPs… started with CompuServe, went to AOL, then EarthLink… all carried an email system with me… I didn’t move the email with me as it wasn’t anything I needed permanently… decided to try web-based email systems, started with Yahoo, left that for an early EarthLink service, then moved everything to desktop based Thunderbird (because I had so many email accounts to manage – work, teaching at five different schools, personal, etc. Thunderbird is tied to a desktop… didn’t want that, so went to GMAIL. GMAIL is my primary email tool. I have two active accounts: one that is for school and one through all of my other email funnels (I have about a dozen email accounts I manage through that site). GMail does the management for me. How did I figure it out? I read the GMail blog… looked at what others were doing and then customized that to make it work for me. Took me a few weeks to get it right, but it works GREAT. And, because I travel a lot I needed both GMAIL and Google Calendar to sync to my PDA. That works great too… I had to buy one add on product to make it work, but I’ll show you my calendar and you’ll get to see why it’s so important to me to be able to do this. But… it isn’t about me… it’s about personalizing and my experience is just that… mine. Yours will be different.

collaborative web environment social networking rss feeds (geek speak) making and keeping relevant connections del.icio.us resource sharing skype conversation sharing application sharing