Pacific Northwest UC Doers User Group Meeting – 4/29

Wednesday April 29, 2009 from 5:00pm – 7:00pm

Microsoft Campus

Building 41 – Townsend Room

(Corner of 156th Ave. NE and NE 31st St.)
Redmond, Washington

The Pacific Northwest UC Doers group is still going strong!! Fourth Quarter in a row and we are going to move to the Microsoft Campus for a little while. We have had the last few over at the gracious McKinstry offices (Thanks you so much, we hope to return to your offices soon!!).

This meeting will be held on the heals of the INTERACT 2009 conference so there will be loads of great people to meet and things to talk about. More info to come soon!

If you have something to discuss, have a presentation you’d like to give, or have things you’d like to see on this quarter or a future quarter’s agenda – drop me a note and let me know! I could talk all day, but I’m sure the rest of you have more interesting things to talk about!

Please rsvp via email to info@ucdoers.org or on Upcoming

ok, now time to grab the kids and head to Oahu – see you all in a week :)

It’s the Full YouTube

I found this over on Loke’s blog…..

Upgrade to Windows Mobile 6?

I finally had a few cycles to upgrade to Windows Mobile 6 this weekend….and yes Jason, it Rocks!!

Downloading the upgrade was a pain in the butt, I had to turn off my firewall & pop-up blocker (i’m not sure what T-mobile was doing and I didn’t have the time to worry about it). But after I had it downloaded the install went fairly well although it was a bit annoying that there is no backup/restore feature in active sync! Had this been my FAVORITE mobile email platform…..I could have backed up all my settings and upgraded the device with ZERO re-configuration. Another huge annoyance is that the feature to delete emails for things like hotmail is gone. I can mark them as read now, but there is no feature to delete them. Of course the key lock is gone (which I used all the time), the vibrate before ring feature is gone (which I used all the time)…There are a lot of things missing so far :( I did use the GAL lookup feature, but that is a rarity that I used it even with my BB device so it’s not an amazing feature to have and I don’t think the voice command is useful on a regular basis (neat technology, but how does it make things better)?. I guess Microsoft has a few more tricks to learn then how to manage email on a mobile device.

Overall though, I still think my WM6 upgrade experience is better then WM5….with the live services integrated…they are much more useful!! For my purposes (more then email) it’s still the best music player/podcaster/video recorder/phone/email/blah/blah/blah device to own….sorry RIM :(

RIM Outage

Despite Jason’s jokes about the outage……. I am certainly glad I am not on a NOC based system today. Having technically owned this sort of system and been a user of it for YEARS…..I can safely say that this and every other NOC outage is severely impacting to the business.

I don’t have to tell those of you who have experienced being the technical person on the hook for the service…..but for the rest of you, the entire company starts to think that you and your team are the problem and that they should be the ones to discuss the outage with the vendor (um, the entire continent doesn’t have service……why does the CEO think they have more pull then the entire US Government?)

 The interesting thing Jason and the rest of the competition is missing is that if you’re just talking email, these little outages are worth it for most users in the world, if it means that the email on the device is easy to use and naturally addictive…..(sorry there is still nothing better at mobile email then a blackberry device)!!

Can RIM Compete?

There are a lot of conversations about mobile strategies and changes. Fabrizio has a nice roundup of a slice of last week’s activities. Although there doesn’t seem to be a comment on the new player in his space….

The NYT has a write up on Nicholas Fodor‘s free push email service to compete with everyone else (isode, funambol, Synchronica, Microsoft, RIM, etc, etc)….

The interesting thing is that on the same day Microsoft is getting their Live mobile search on RIM‘s device (after using both Google’s app on a BB and the Live app on my dash, the Live app is WAY better, so it’s about time!)….and a VPN client from WickSoft was announced on RIM’s device…

Now, don’t get me wrong, I know RIM’s stock isn’t up…..but it looks like RIM is making some solid moves to stay ahead in the enterprise….something the free or provider oriented services will have a very difficult time doing (considering MS can barely break the market with their integrated offering)….