Create a Meeting Solution in Almost Any Room

We ITS techies recently made a meeting cart — a mobile unit with a computer, large screen, wireless keyboard and mouse, and webcam, to make it easy for a group to use AnyMeeting to include off-site folks. While putting some finishing touches on the meeting cart in Pickett and Eliot House’s Rice Room, one of the guests asked how to make such a thing. It’s not terribly difficult, but it will take about $2000 and an afternoon to put together. Here is a quick parts list and some thoughts on building a meeting cart. (more…)

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Telecommuting, Tutorials

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Switching to a Mac?

I’ve been forced to use a Mac for a few weeks, and as a diehard Windows user, the Mac has been driving me crazy. “Where did my window go?”  ”Why can’t I get the Finder to act like Windows Explorer?”  ”What programs are running?”  (Macs are sooooo intuitive, my eye!)

I just discovered that Lynda.com has a series of videos for Windows users who are learning to use a Mac. Log into Lynda.com with your UUA account and search for “switching from Windows to Mac.” There are also training videos for Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac (search for “office for mac”). Finally, I found a list of keyboard shortcuts, which make the Mac more PC-like.

I’m starting to get the hang of it!

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Mac, Productivity

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HipChat and Other IM Clients

If you are anything like me chances are you have several IM networks you need to juggle: AIM , GTalk, Facebook Messages, etc. if that is the case HipChat is yet another program you need to contend with. To keep the number of IM programs on my computer to a minimum I started using third party chat clients such as Pidgin or Trillian to connect to all these networks from a single program. Fortunately for me (and you) HipChat plays pretty well with these programs. (more…)

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Apps

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Alternate Jefferson Program for Mac

Sometimes the mac program Remote Desktop Connection used to connect to Jefferson decides to do something other than connect to Jefferson. Often when that happens I turn to CoRD a free Remote Desktop Connection replacement. There are several things I like about it besides seeming generally less buggy it feels much more like a “mac” program and generally connects to Jefferson without popups. (more…)

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Mac, Telecommuting

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View Public Folders in Outlook 2010

One thing that can be hard to find in Outlook – public folders (usually shared calendars like the OPS room calendar). That’s because they hide in the “Folder List” rather than the default Mail view. Fortunately they live just a couple clicks away. Here’s how to view them: Open Outlook, and click on “Folder List” (alternatively you can hold down Ctrl key and press 6). Once you do that Public folders should appear near the bottom of the pane on the left of Outlook.

That’s it you should have access to the various shared calendars and folders floating around the UUA.

Note: If you’re using Office for Mac you’ll need to Subscribe to Public Folders for this functionality

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Microsoft Office, Outlook

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Automatically Sync Your Desktop and Jefferson

For folks who work in Boston:

Not too long ago I wrote an article explaining how to automatically backup your Desktop and Documents folders to your U:\ folder, which is pretty cool. Where it turns awesome is when you use the same trick on Jefferson. Here is how it works: tell your UUA computer to use U:\ as the place to store all your Documents, and then tell Jefferson to use the same place (U:\). The end result is anything you save on your computer shows up on Jefferson and anything you save on Jefferson shows up on your computer automagically. Read on for all the details. (more…)

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Telecommuting, Tutorials

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Zoom in on Shared Screen in AnyMeeting

When someone is sharing their screen with you in AnyMeeting you can control the appearance of the shared image by hovering the cursor over the image. A toolbar appears, as shown below. The magnifying glass toggles between “Actual Size” and “Fit to Screen”; usually Actual Size is a good fit. The other tool toggles between “Maximized” and “Minimized.” Often, Maximized is your best bet as other combinations will truncate the bottom of the image or render it too small to be useful.

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Telecommuting, Tutorials

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