The Vista Explorer View Quirk

Earlier in the year Craig Bailey posted a tip on his blog for Fixing the annoying Vista Windows Explorer View quirk. [side note - Craig has a great blog which covers all things Microsoft. I also am lucky enough to say that I work with Craig at Elcom but unfortunately not for much longer he is leaving us to pursue some new challenges and I wish him all the best with his new endeavours.] Back to the quirk – everytime you open a folder in Vista it resets to either thumbnail, detailed or list view with no memory for set preferences. My fav is detail view which I reset many times throughout the day – I’m sure it only adds about 1 minute of wasted time to my day but that’s not the point – it’s annoying and it should just work.

Well I finally got around to fixing it using the information posted on Craig’s blog and it’s made me so happy that I felt compelled to pass on the tip. How Microsoft let such a simple feature slip past their testing not to mention the lack of a fix in SP1 is odd. Vista is a nice OS but it’s the small things which create negative perception. I’m often surprised by the number of people I know in a wide variety of industries that look at my PC and say “how did you get your PC to look like that?” and I respond “oh that’s Vista” and they reply “really? It looks pretty cool, is it as bad as they say?”.

It will probably take years for MS to fully recover from the not-so-great release of Vista and as a result the next version called Windows 7 will most likely be viewed with great skepticism. I think we may look back on Vista as the tipping point for the end of bloated operating systems as we’ve known them to date, but that’s a story for another post.

Intranet Manager

For some time at Elcom we’ve deployed our Content Management product, Community Manager, as an Intranet. It has excellent content management, document management, forms, corporate phone book, blogs, wikis, workflow and enterprise search features making it an ideal intranet software choice for a mid-sized to enterprise level businesses. In fact it’s capability as an intranet search engine alone would make it a great choice for an enterprise federated search solution.

We’ve recently taken a close look at the marketing of our product offerings and came to a conclusion that companies that were looking for intranet software or intranet search engines had no idea that Community Manager provided this functionality out of the box. So we’ve been promoting the not so obvious and decided to make it a little more obvious. So what did we do, we launched a new product, it’s called, wait for it….drum roll….Intranet Manager (tada).

I’m loving our new logos. Yes I know they’re a bit Adobe looking but that was not intentional. These are actually the 3d blocks from our logo.

This small change has led to significantly more interest and enquiries, especially via the web. We’ve always toyed with the idea of doing this but it somehow felt wrong to launch a product that was the same as another product. However the reality is that we’re now making a market that has a need for a product more aware that such a product exists. We’ve done a similar thing in the past with our Enterprise Search product and now it has it’s own logo as well. In fact we’ve now have 4 products in total with more on the way. They’re not all the same product rebadged, each has it’s own discreet features and functionality however it has been built on the Community Manager platform and reflects the significant functionality and investment that has been poured Community Manager over the last 12 years.

     

 

To celebrate the launch of Intranet Manager we’re running a free Intranet seminar at the offices of our good friends and supporters, DSRD. If you’re interested why not come along and hear from industry experts Derek Jardine and Stephen Collins as well as a case study from Orica Consumer Products which will give you a closer look at the product and it’s awesome functionality.

The details are….

When:

IntranetManager.NET Launch

Tuesday 18th November 2008
08:00am – 10:00am

Where:

Hamilton Room
NSW Trade and Investment Centre
Level 47, MLC Centre
19 Martin Place
Sydney, NSW

The Agenda:

08:00am
Registration & Coffee

08:10am
Welcome

08:20am
Industry Expert -
Derek Jardine
“Managing information in your organisation”

08:40am
Industry Expert -
Stephen Collins
“Web 2.0 and your intranet”

09:00am
Leading Case Study – “Orica’s Intranet”

09:20am
IntranetManager.NET Demonstration

09:40am
Breakfast & Networking with the Industry Experts

 

Hope to see you there.

Tilt Shifting

Sydney photographer Keith Loutit has been hard at work producing this awesome series of time lapsed tilt shifted photos. His work has slipped into the international WOWgeist care of the VIMEO sharing site and of couse the blogosphere. This stuff makes me so proud of our little city, I reckon Tourism Australia should jump on it.

Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

 

Bathtub II from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

 

Bathtub III from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

 

The North Wind Blew South from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.