When upgrading to iMIS 15, the licensing conversion really involves switching from a concurrent licensing model to a named user licensing model as well as a change from unlimited logins to the website to a restricted number of 'public users'. 

The following queries will help determine if the conversion works for your organization or if you will need to obtain additional licenses:

• How many staff users do you currently have in iMIS? 
  
  SELECT count(*) FROM users WHERE disabled = 0
  
  
• How many staff members have logged into iMIS in the past year?
  
  

  SELECT Count(*) FROM users WHERE disabled = 0 AND DateDiff(m,LastLogin,GetDate()) < 12

  
  
• How many people have logged into the website ever: 
  
  SELECT Count(*) from Name_Security WHERE Last_Login > ''
  
  
  
• How many people have logged into the website in the past 2 years: 
  
  SELECT Count(*) from Name_Security WHERE Last_Login > ''
  AND 
  DateDiff(y,Last_Login,GetDate()) >= 2
  
  
  
• How many members have logged into the website:
  
  SELECT Count(*) from Name_Security WHERE WHERE Last_Login > ''

Mashups and virtual worlds are more and more a part of Web 2.0, and perhaps as an extension, part of social media. An example of a mashup that is social is on Nikeplus.com, where I can map out running routes using Google maps. The “mashing” is defined by me, a user, using Google maps [...]

An interesting comparison and contrast with two recently added time-sink temptations while online. As of a few weeks ago, you can submit news stories to the new WriterRiver.com, a digg clone site with the clever Sink or Float capability on news stories, built by Tom Johnson who writes the IdRatherBeWriting blog. A few months ago, Scott [...]

Here’s my interview for GirlStart, highlighting a technical communication career for the “Check her out!” section of their website. The toughest question for me was the last one! GirlStart is a non-profit based in Austin that empowers girls in math, science, and technology. I was pleased to be able to say what a great career [...]

As a graduate student in scientific and technical communication, I was fortunate to have been introduced to many texts for learning technical writing at Miami University in Ohio. I have kept those books, keeping them on my bookshelf wherever I work, and have added to that bookshelf ever since. Perhaps this list could be considered [...]

The iMIS 15.0.3.2017 e-Series Maintenance Release is now available and has been posted to the web.

Resolved issues in this release are:

• 167488: Blank Community Emails Persists
• 168014: Fees not showing on the website
• 170225: Special characters cause blank community email

Upon reading my recent request to hear from Gen Next in tech comm, Julian Ramirez answered my call and wrote an excellent essay reflecting up on his experiences. He’s in his first technical communication job, working for Dee Elling, whom I interviewed about wikis and tech pubs. Thanks Julian, for offering your perspective. You may [...]

I had a great time in Philly for the STC Summit, and here are some of my takeaways. Collaboration is a huge part of our jobs, whether it’s finding others in your company to collaborate with as the two technical writers from Sun have done while creating screencasts with a “rock start developer” or the collaboration [...]

I’m quite flattered and humbled (and more than a little bit intimidated) to serve as leader on the STC Intercom advisory panel for this coming editorial year. We’re five people from different backgrounds and perspectives, tasked with preparing 10 themes for issues by August 2008. We’ve got academia, consulting, work-aday, future thinkers, and the only [...]

Here are my notes from the International Collaboration panel at the Society for Technical Communication conference. Moderator Alan Houser - He’s had one day of calls with people in four different countries. Asked questions of the four panelists: Rahul Prabhakar - Samsung currently, PC/Mac US edition, has a global mailing list, knows Korean language Bogo Vatovec - from [...]

After working with Kentico for some time, I’ve slowly developed a few little tools to help migrate information from our old site to the new Kentico framework. 

One of the things that’s a little time consuming in Kentico is creating documents.  I’ve decided to use a custom document type for a particular type of content on our new site.  The data for this new document type is in a bunch of different tables in the old website and I needed a way to get all that information into the Kentico content tree, and fast.

So… I created a module to do this.  It’s kind of simple and doesn’t look too flash but it works (if you follow the rules).

It takes a spreadsheet, uploads it to a temp folder and then creates documents at the specified path in the tree.  If you need it, it’s yours to do with as you see fit.

BTW: No warranty provided on this of course.

Download

The code is pretty simple:

1: While dsImport.Read 2: ListBox1.Items.Add(dsImport.Item(0).ToString) 3: ‘add documents 4: 5: nodTemp = New CMS.TreeEngine.TreeNode(“NAS.Card”) 6: nodTemp.NodeName = dsImport.Item(“NodeName”).ToString 7: nodTemp.NodeAlias = dsImport.Item(“NodeName”).ToString 8:   9: For i = 0 To strCols.Length - 1 10: nodTemp.SetValue(strCols(I), dsImport.Item(strCols(I))) 11: Next 12: 13: nodTemp.DocumentCulture = “en-au” 14: nodTemp.Insert(parent.NodeID) 15: End While .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

The form collects a few things like the document type to create and the name of the columns in the spreadsheet to map to fields in the kentico document.  Looking at this at the moment I have left the document type hard coded, but you could easily change this to be driven from the form.

Additionally you’ll see at line 9 I loop through an array, this is derived from a comma separated list of column names to get from the excel sheet.  Let me know if you use it, just out of interest.

Google Docs have recently started working with offline functions through the use of Google Gears.  Gears is their engine that allows for you to perform some functions while not connected to the Internet and then synchronises when you get a connection again.

I’ve been waiting for this for Gmail for a while.  I love the interface for Gmail, but get a little frustrated when I don’t have a connection, an offline version would be great.

Check this out, this must just appeal to a specific generation.

http://tinyurl.com/68sbm5

Just a short post, I’ve been using Stock Exchange for ages to get images for presentations and the like.  They have a great collection, free (with some conditions) and a nice search engine.

I tend to use this to find symbolic images for PowerPoint presentations I’m preparing.  I must admit as a general trend I find myself moving away from bullet slides to great imagery.

I’ve been watching a lot of TED videos recently in an effort to pickup a few things about doing better presentations.  While I have picked up a few things (which I’ll talk about here at some stage) I find myself getting caught up in the content of these talks also.

Last night I watched a talk by designer Stefan Sagmeister and his search for what makes him happy.  He talked about his life lessons also, which are below:

What a great list!

I need one of these and have decided that I’ll work on this more now.

Have just been playing with a tool called TimeBridge, it’s a meeting planner type application that integrates into Outlook and allows you to setup of a meeting. Sounds simple, but as soon as you add people from multiple companies in multiple time zones it get complex and a down-right waste of time.

Timebridge solves the typical back and forth issue by allowing you to suggest up to 5 time slots from your own outlook calendar and then sending invitations off to the attendees. The attendees then choose the best time slot for them (no registration required) and then once a consensus is agreed the meeting is booked and everyone notified.

It’s a nice solution to a complex problem, and just seems to work. The only thin I’m a little unhappy about is the upsell that happens. “Did you want to book a web conference?” but hey? What did you expect for free?

If you haven’t heard about mahalo.com, go have a look.  I personally don’t think much of it but I’m sure it has an audience.  Primarily it’s marketed as a human powered search engine.  So where Google relies on computations to rank web page search results mahalo gets people to make the same decisions.  i can see value in that as long as they have lots of humans (and I think they do).

What interested me tonight though was a search for ‘open office’ at Google, screen shot below.

What surprised me was the mahalo item at the top of the search results, and for a number of reasons:

• I see mahalo as a business venture.  It’s one organisations view on the what should be ranked, how and when.   It doesn’t represent the consensus at all.
• The mahalo block seemed to appear a second or two AFTER the actually search results.  I’m not sure if this is by design or something weird with FireFox 3 Bet 5, but it caught my attention too much.
• This to me is also an advertisement, although it doesn’t clearly state as much.
• They get a cool little flower icon appear next to their results.

Now it should be said that I’m not in competition with mahalo in any way, so I have nothing to gain from having a rant except to say that there must be some incredible deal between mahalo and Google to make this actually happen.

Normally Wikipedia appears at the top of these search results, a community driven non-profit, and as much as I don’t think much of the Wikipedia content at times I do recognise that that content is written by the people, you and I.

So how did mahalo get there?

Update: Just realised that this appears in my google search results only because I have installed a sharing addon for firefox… there’s an option for showing the mahalo top 7 in the results. Why didn’t I see it before now I wonder.

I plan on writing a few posts over the next couple of weeks around Google docs, Google’s online document system, but to get started wanted to talk briefly about what the application is attempting to do.

If you think about the average document what normally springs to mind is something like a letter or a proposal and typically you would use a word processor to write it up.  Something like Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer are the normal tools you think of too.  If you think a little harder though about the actual process you use for assembling a document you may be in a position where you need to move the document around your organisation/friends/family to finalise it… everybody needs to put their 2c in.  The problem this presents is that you need to manage this process, you need to send it to each person and then get their responses back into the document.  If your organisation is anything like ours then everyone does it in their own way too, some people just change the document, other’s might ‘mark up’ the changes for approval.  Some people might add comments inside the document and finally others might just respond in an email with the changes they want made, ahhhhhhhh!

Google docs is designed to make this process of collaboration easier.  When you are in a situation where more than one person is building the document then you can open up or share your document with other people and all work on it at the same time.  Thankfully Google takes care of knowing who changed what and allowing you to track back through the changes.

It does by providing a web based interface to these tools, so using only a web browser you can open up a document, make changes, save and close.

Right now Google offer three different document types:

• Documents
• Spreadsheets
• Presentations

So your basics are covered.

Now some people talk about this being a replacement for Microsoft Office, I just don’t think that’s the case.  The functionality in these applications is just not rich enough yet to compete with the offline tools.  You get the ability to do a lot of what you can do in things like Word, but not enough to through away Word altogether.  I think it’s a matter of the right tool for the right job.

If you don’t already have a Google account, you can get one right now and it’s free, and then you can start working online and sharing your documents.