Roger Collins, Managing Director of The CRM Business recently attended the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. The below article details how he utilised Microsoft technologies to get the most out of his visit whilst staying in touch with the rest of the team in the UK:
Making the WPC Trip More Effective & Saving Time!
If you dread writing up manually written notes or find it hard to have access to the right information wherever you are you are you may be interested in my experience in using some Microsoft technologies to help me get more out of my recent visit to the Microsoft Conference (and how they saved me a lot of time!)
I recently attended the Microsoft Partner Conference in New Orleans before staying on for a family holiday in the US. While I was away I needed to be able to:
· Keep in touch with everyone in the office
· Update colleagues on important items from the Partner Conference
· Synchronise current work between 2 computers
· Prepare a complex proposal that required access to all my Documents
Here is how Live Mesh, a Sony Vaio, Windows 7, Microsoft OneNote and a USB stick made the trip more productive………………………………..
I didn’t want to take my normal laptop as its a 17” screen & very heavy – not great for holidays… so I took with me a Sony Vaio xxxx. Geat for portability but restricted disk space. However it runs Windows 7 a treat - which meant I could use BitLocker to go to encrypt a 32Gb memory stick and store all my documents on it.
Next there was immediate work that I had in hand consisting of a proposal I was working on and various web sites to check out. On my main notebook I put all of these into one folder and Synchronised it with Live Mesh. Ialso then synchronised the Sony Vaio to the Live Mesh folder, meaning that all the documents are automatically up-to-date on both machines all the time, and I can access them via a web browser from anywhere with a web connection. On the plane trip over I was able to work on the Proposal document that was in my Mesh Folder – but to complete it I could also pull in other documents direct from the USB Memory Stick. Once I had the document completed I knew it would automatically synchronise back to my main notebook next time I connected.
My next challenge was that I hate typing up notes…. so I used OneNote on the Sony Vaio to make notes directly during the WPC sessions. OneNote was set up to sync the notebook back to our SharePoint site provided via BPOS (Microsoft Online Services) so that my colleagues in the office could see the notes from each day of the conference as I took them and I could use OneNote to create tasks and follow-up items directly – so no more manually typing up scribbled notes after the event.
