Apple AirPlay & Intel WiDi: Reshaping Presentations & Networks

Remember when LCD projectors came out and replaced transparencies and overhead projectors?  Presentations were reshaped in awesome ways.  These days almost anyone can afford an projector for their computer.  And when designing conference rooms and classrooms, building them into the design is becoming more and more common.  Up until recently, computers had to have a VGA, HDMI, or other cable connecting the computer to the projector.  But with wireless technology progressing, there are many solutions now that are easily implemented to avoid having to run cable.  Apple AirPlay and Intel WiDi are two of these technologies, but each is not without it's pitfalls...

Customer Service, Part 3: Delivering Help

Helping someone with a problem can be very rewarding.  That's why some people love teaching.  In an IT department, we have to help people all the time.  It's what we do.  Whether you're interacting directly with the customer, or working on a system the customer uses, you're helping someone.  In this final part of my "Customer Service Trilogy", I'm going to focus on the person interacting directly with the customer / end-user.

Customer Service, Part 2: Asking For Help

We (IT professionals) don't know everything.  There is just too much to know. The typical IT person is the "jack of many trades, master of none".  There are specialists out there though that are masters.  These are typically the people that have one job to do and one thing to take care of.  For example, the Microsoft Exchange Administrator.  You probably wouldn't want them working on the SQL database, but if there's a corrupt mailbox on the Exchange store, that's the person to talk to.  The point is, there are ways to go about asking for help, and points when you should and shouldn't ask for help.  This all sounds obvious, but a lot of us forget, get rusty, or just plain lazy with this skill...myself included.

Customer Service, Part 1: Know Your Role

This is the first in a 3 article series titled simply "Customer Service".  I know I said that the next article would be more IT related.  While this is not a technical post, it IS IT related.  And it is a key topic for those of us in the IT field.  This first part, "Know Your Role", is a sanity check for all IT professionals.  It may sound like I repeat myself by saying the same thing multiple times the same way in this article.  That's because so many people do not get this topic, and I want to make sure I drive the point home.  My point: despite what many people think, the IT department/staff is not needed at any company or organization.

Technology, For Better or For Worse...

So it's taken a while, but I'm going to start posting.  And I've decided to start off on a non-technical topic for this, a technical blog.  Before going into making posts on how to use technology, I'd like to try to get people to THINK about technology.  More specifically...what technology means for society...past and present.  Good and bad.  For better or for worse...