Archive for November, 2006

Blogging for PR

November 12, 2006 at 8:42 pm · Filed under Soft skills

My former company InfoSupport allowed her employees to have their own weblog at the company blogsite. For everyone who wanted to start blogging an account was set up enabling the employee to share theire knowledge with the world.

Some employees were unable to produce more than a couple of entries, but others produced a continous stream of information. The counters on the pages indicated that the information was interesting for readers worldwide. I believe that writing a blog is a way to establish yourself as a “thought leader“. A blog will help you become thought of as an expert in your field.
At InfoSupport, we discovered that people reading the posts became interested in joining the company, and clients became interested in working with the company. To my belief, that’s good P.R.

My current company, Getronics, does not yet have a company weblog, so I’m using my personal weblog at WordPress now.

Rich Ord wrote an interesting post on Blogging for PR which I will quote here:

Why Blog For PR?

According to a report at the Web 2.0 conference there are now over “4.1 million blogs around the world with a new blog created every 7.4 seconds”. However, there are only about 5000 company blogs. That leaves a lot of room for you to stake your niche and gain valuable exposure.

An article in BusinessWeek highlighting blogs new importance to companies states, “Blogs or websites with content management systems are changing the model for companies, we really now have to engage customers on a one on one level”. With Microsoft leading the way, corporations have accepted blogging as an integral part of public relations. Companies now recognize the need to talk to their clients and potential clients in a more intelligent and unbiased way.

Business blog expert Wayne Hurlbert sums up the reason to blog for PR, “A rapidly growing number of journalists and editors are reading blogs on a daily basis. It’s becoming imperative that a company start a blog to keep up with that trend”.

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Some additions to a complete list …

November 12, 2006 at 8:03 pm · Filed under RUP, Software engineering

Miguel Carrasco published The Complete List of Software Development Frameworks, Process’s, Methods, or Philosophies.

As with all complete lists, being complete is hard.

Some commonly used alternatives are the Enterprise Unified Process and the Microsoft Solution Framework.

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MomPC – Creating a parent safe PC

November 5, 2006 at 11:21 pm · Filed under Other

Roy is the primary technician and support personnel for his parents – and I know lots of my readers are the primary support personnel for a whole bunch of relatives, neighbours, collegues and others.

Not a high tech story, but nice to find out you’re not the only one.

ISerializable – Roy Osherove’s Blog : MomPC – Creating a parent safe PC

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RUP related

November 4, 2006 at 11:51 pm · Filed under Program management, Project management, Requirements, RUP

To catch up with newer posts, here are some subjects that were on my to do list, all having to do with RUP:

Project Management with the IBM Rational Unified Process – Lessons from the Trenches by R. Dennis Gibbs.  Should be especially interesting if you are involved in managing an outsourced project with RUP.

Extending RUP with the Portfolio Management Discipline by Scott W. Ambler, John Nalbone, and Michael Vizdos (the guys from EUP).

Integrating the Rational Unified Process with Managing Successful Programmes, by Russel Norlund.

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Storyboarding RIA

November 4, 2006 at 11:34 pm · Filed under Requirements, Useability

Some time ago I blogged on wireframing or prototyping.

Bill Scott blogged on doing storyboards for his applications with Visio. Specifically he talks about a new challenge: how do we document Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), where users interact directly within the page and feedback is immediat, as opposed to the “traditional” Paged Internet Applications (PIAs), where users enter information and link to another page.

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Bad capacitors reason for not blogging

November 4, 2006 at 11:13 pm · Filed under Other

Bad capacitorsLast months I experienced lots of unexplainable problems with my computer.

Programs crashed, data got lost, the computer went slower and slower and at the end also frequent BSOD’s (Blue Screen Of Death) and reboots.

With three upgrowing daughters being very active on MSN and Hives, I spent lots of evenings trying to solve the problem.

I installed, deinstalled and reinstalled all suspicious programs, updated drivers, installed extra virus scanners, tested and changed memory, you name it.

All this problem solving took all of my free time and prevented me from blogging for a while.

At last, the problem was pinpointed as a bad capacitors problem with my Dell GX270.

This is the only Dell model having thes faulty capacitors, and consequently having this problem. The capacitors get overheated and leak this orange fluid from the top. Knowing this really helps googling and finding out thousands of people are having the same problem.

As the computer was still under support, and the problem was obvious, the solution was simple. Within 15 minutes, a service technision from Dell (actually Dell hired a collegue of mine from Getronics) replaced the motherboard. He said he had eight more of these motherboards to go that day.

As the bad motherboard resulted in some bad files and other problems on disk, I installed a new disk and reinstalled all my programs.

Now I’m back, up and running, so lets continue blogging!

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