b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Zimbra PIM: The Chandler Killer?
Find A Human
RSS Feed Format Updated
Thursday, September 15, 2005
RSS 2.0 Validation With Enclosures
I had some errors in my RSS template, but after futzing around with it a bit I got it to validate at FeedValidator. The enclosures aren't showing up in FeedDemon, but this might be some kind of caching issue, since I retrieved the entries before I fixed the invalid enclosure tags. I don't feel like playing with it any more right now so if you see the enclosures in your RSS reader please let me know.Zimbra PIM: The Chandler Killer?
The Flash demo of Zimbra is quite interesting, but then demos always are. After years of hype the Chandler project of the Open Source Applications Foundation still languishes at release 0.5. Can AJAX, eXtreme Programming, and other techno buzztrends overtake the open source uber-PIM and deliver a challenger to Outlook in our lifetime?
Calendaring seems to be the barrier. E-mail and search are pretty standard. But calendaring, and sharing calendars, is a real bear when the Outlook-driven corporate world is involved. Im not at all sure iCal is up to the challenge, but we have yet to see a truly robust iCal app. [Link via Judith Meskill]
Zimbra is open source, AJAX-enabled email, calendaring, and collaboration
What I like about Zimbra is its open sourceness (natch) and its intelligent approach to information presentation as applied to email and calendaring. Think Gmail but with tight integration with a web-based calendar, and with a lot of neat little information integration bells and whistles â like generating a contextual menu from a phone number in an email with an option to place a VoIP call. AJAX is no mere hot buzzword here but is well applied such that mousing over bits of data can generate tooltip-style boxes with related information, such that rolling over a date will pop up any items on your calendar for that day, e.g. Also slick, it understands relative terms like tomorrow or next Tuesday and will popover relevant calendar details for those terms. Whats exciting about this is that it eliminates a sizeable portion of the need to keep switching back and forth between panes, interfaces or applications to access information youve always felt should be available to you from right where you are.
Terry Frazier at 9:37 AM
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Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Find A Human
Zip past those annoying Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems using the Find-A-Human Quickbase by Paul English.What does this mean? IVR is the insidious way big companies avoid talking to you. Hire some woman with a robo-voice and get her to record layer after layer of idiotic droning that changes depending on which button you push. Of course, it's always prefaced by "Please listen to this entire message as our menus have changed." The menus have never actually changed, they just want you to wait on the phone until you get frustrated and go away.
Paul's Quickbase has direct bypass sequences for more than 75 companies. Better, if you discover the bypass sequence for a new company you can add it. Here are a few samples:
- Delta Airlines (utterly clueless) - Say "agent" four times - every time it asks for a response from you
- Dell Customer Service (an oxymoron) - option 1, xt 7266966, option 1, option 4, option 4
- DISH Network (clueful) - press "0" during menu
- Comcast (unnaturally clueful) - Customer service, but an IVR wants your number first.
Terry Frazier at 2:02 PM
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Sunday, September 11, 2005
RSS Feed Format Updated
A query from Matt Mower has prompted me to correct some problems with my RSS feed. In the process I updated the format to RSS 2.0, adding support for pubDate, author, and categories. I also made some changes to the guid format that may cause your newsreader to forget which items have been read. My apologies for any inconvenience this causes.
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