Human digitizer

When you do a lot of research like I do on the Internet sooner or later you end up at Google Books. The idea is that Google wants to digitize every book ever printed and place it on the Internet so it can be searchable. Now this has lead to some controversy around copyright but generally seems to be proceeding.

The question is how can you actually go about digitizing every book. You have to scan in every page and then convert that page to text so it can be searched. As anyone who has ever used a scanner (or a fax for that matter) knows scanning something into a computer can sometimes mean illegible results. Generally, the only way to overcome this is for a real live human being to decide what the scanned text actually says. That could take years I hear you say, ah ha but you didn’t figure on the power of the Internet did you?

A huge issue on the Internet are programs (known as bots) that scan through web sites looking for emails. The bots report these emails back to spammers who add them to their list so they can send you more junk. Bots can also be used to automate the creation of web based emails and reply to forms – ah what a pain! To overcome this many sites use something called Captcha. This means that prior to any confirmation you are presented with some text that is difficult for a machine to recognize but hopefully not for a human. In this way the web page knows that the entry most probably came from a real human (assuming it was entered in correctly).

So what has bots got to do with Google Books and text recognition? You can imagine that there are many pieces of scanned text from books that needs to be viewed by a human being to determine what they are. So now it’s time for the Internet and Captcha to come to the rescue.

As you can see, a site I recently visited needed to verify I was a real person so it threw up this Captcha. However, note that down the bottom it says the words come from scanned books. So by typing in the text you are help to digitize scanned books.

So how does the Captcha know the correct word when the scanned word can’t be read you may ask? On the reCaptcha site you’ll find the answer:

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

If you a more in depth explanation then check out the reCaptcha site where you’ll the answers in much more detail.

A good example of how the power of the Internet is being put to good use. Pretty clever eh?

All about attention

Just been reading a nice article,”Taking control of e-mail”, that provides a good summary of the issues around information overload. What I liked was the following quote:

“Attention is the bedrock to learning, memory, social connection and happiness”

So if you are allowing yourself to be constantly distracted by incoming emails then your attention is very low and chances are it is affecting more than just your productivity.

The article covers some of the basic steps to help remove the distractions of email and is therefore well worth a read. I’d also recommend you take a look at www.doemailless.com where you find additional resources if you are looking to improve your productivity.

At the very least I’d commend you to try some of the steps mentioned in the article and see whether it does help. I’m confident that after a few day you’d agree that even a small change can reap significant benefits.

One of the few?

Just read “Self-employed go back to the boss” in the paper today and found some of the issues highlighted interesting. Here are some choice quotes:

“For seven years, he battled to keep his … afloat. It was an around-the-clock effort.”

“He was struggling to make ends meet, to find reliable workers, and to strike any sort of work-life balance.”

“I’d been trying to do everything myself.”

“said he would never again try to set up his own business.”

“He was turned off by “having to chase work, being able to deliver quality work but having people call you up and say ‘I’ve got a quote from some cowboy across the road for half that price — how come?””

Sound familiar? If it does you’d be interested to know that the guy in the article ran a windscreen business but I have heard almost exactly the same quotes from people in IT. In good times it is certainly much easier to run a business but when things turn tough then you’ll soon find out whether you are running a business or simply enjoying a lifestyle.

When I talk to people and say that I work in my own business they automatically assume you make oodles of money (which you don’t) and you don’t do much work (which isn’t right either). It is only those who have run their own business that understand that it comes down to hard work. However, you gotta enjoy working hard or else being in business for yourself just doesn’t make sense.

Most people who run a business probably never should. They simply believe that because they are good at something that will automatically translate into self-employment. Generally this is far from the truth since running a business is about so much more that just being good at one thing. You usually have to do EVERYTHING even if you don’t like doing it, which unless you are disciplined will mean you are going to struggle like the person in the article.

My advice would be to start by reading something like the E-Myth by Michael Gerber. This book is a MUST READ for anyone who is self–employed. Next, I would suggest that you start looking for people with whom you can talk and discuss ideas, including issues you are struggling with on a regular basis. To be a success in business you need to build a network of people whom you can turn to for advice, work or simply to lend an ear. Finally, you need to run your business like a business and not simply as a hobby because in the end, if you want to make a living from it your business will have compete with every other business out there.

These are just the first steps you need to take if you want to run a successful business in my experience. Failing to do so is not going to guarantee you’ll fail but is going to make it much harder than it could be. So seek out information from successful business owners and thinkers. Don’t be afraid to ask them for advice because you’ll be surprised at how many are willing to help.

Only the businesses who are working on their business rather than in their business these days are generally going to come out the other side of these recessionary times. Ask yourself if you really want to run a business and if the answer is yes, then run it like a business!

Microsoft Online Services

I’m beginning to get up to speed what will be offered via Microsoft Online Services here in Australia.

Microsoft has created a site www.discoveronlineservices.com which has a huge amount of information and resources about the offerings. If you are a Microsoft partner and you are considering offering online services then you should take a look. Even if you aren’t then I still recommend you take a look to understand the huge investment that Microsoft is making in this area.

Microsoft Online Services will be offered here through Telstra (Why? Not a good idea I reckon but that’s the way it is) and you can find more information of this via the Telstra T-Suite site. Interestingly, I can’t find any links to actual pricing here (early days perhaps?) Given that T-Suite has been around for a while you will find the pricing elsewhere in the T-Suite store site.

Microsoft Online Services is still in its infancy here but can only be expected to grow once the dual marketing monoliths of Telstra and Microsoft get going. A recent webinar I attended certainly indicated that Microsoft expected the greatest uptake of the service to be in the 5-50 user seat arena, in other words prime SBS territory. We are also starting to see documents like “Integrating Windows Small Business Server 2008 with Exchange Online”, which confirm the push for online services in the SMB space.

As I have said before (almost 12 months ago now), SBS 2008, I believe, will be the very last version of Small Business Server. Why? I simply believe that online services in some shape or form is going to gobble up the SMB market and the primary reason doesn’t have anything to do with technology or security. In fact it is all about price. Mainly around the ability to pay per month, per user.

Like it or lump it online services are going to have an impact on the SMB market and I reckon now is the time to get in early and be ahead of the pack.

Coming in May

May is a big month for my Windows SharePoint Operations Guide, simply because it is now 12 months old! I’m amazed at how its grown and how many people have subscribed. So, I’m planning a number of things:

For existing subscribers

– There will the normal May update which will include additional sections on prep’ing a Windows 2008 Server for SharePoint, embedding an updating Microsoft Excel chart into SharePoint as well some additional troubleshooting tips.

– There will be an updated DVD containing a whole swag of additional videos, documents and programs including 64 bit editions of the installation files and SharePoint Designer.

– I’ll also be throwing in a few thank you surprises for subscribers only, but I don’t want to give away the surprises just yet!

– and more

For non-subscribers

– I’m going to be offering a never to be repeated special on the Guide in celebration of how far it’s come. This offer will only be available for May 2009 and after that it’ll be gone for good. So if you were umming and arring about whether to subscribe can I say that next month is going to be your best opportunity.

– As part of the special offer I’ll be offering the second chapter of my Guide FREE to those who register and only those that have registered will be eligible for the May special offer.

I’ll announce more details for both subscribers and non subscribers in May so stay tuned.

OneNote – redux

I’ve had instance to talk to a few people recently about some productivity and collaboration solutions, obviously based around SharePoint. One thing I always try and mention is OneNote and sadly, I find that most people have consigned it to the “seen it once, never used it” bin which is really unfortunate.

I will readily admit that for a long time I too considered OneNote in a similar way. That was until I attended a session given by Todd Colbeck at SMBNation 2008. Todd was able to readily demonstrate how effective and powerful OneNote can be. He also demonstrated what a great solution it was on which to build some revenue. This was probably the biggest eye opener of the conference and I went away with the goal to do more with OneNote.

Now days, I find OneNote an indispensible tool to the way that I do business. Because OneNote appears so simple to use many people get fooled into believing that it somehow just a “optional extra” for Microsoft Office.

So what can you use OneNote for? Well I find it is great for all that ad-hoc material you always have floating around that never really seems to want to live anywhere. Personally, I use a simply paper notebook to keep track of things (in the good GTD way), because it is the fastest and most convenient method of documentation. However, I regularly transfer information from this notebook into OneNote so I have an electronic copy. No matter what the information is I can always create new sections and pages within OneNote to store it.

When you start looking around you’ll actually find many of the existing applications on your computer are already OneNote enabled. Both Internet Explorer (above left) and Outlook (above right) are just two examples. If you find something interesting on a web page simply highlight it and click the Send to OneNote button. The same applies with emails and Outlook.

The power of OneNote becomes more obvious when you share notebooks via a network or SharePoint. This means that whenever you open a shared OneNote notebook all the information is sync’ed with your local copy. When you are working online anything you enter is also automatically updated for everyone else sharing the notebook to see. When you are ready you can disconnect and still retain a local copy of the notebook which you can continue to work with and then sync again next time you connect.

Even better, if you have SharePoint available via the Internet then your OneNote notebooks become available anywhere you have Internet access. You could, for example, create a notebook for each client and share that directly with the client. I find this solution great when designing SharePoint sites for a client because they can add information as well as keep up to date with the design progress. It is an excellent collaboration tool that once customers actually start to utilize appreciate its power and actually start rolling it out throughout their business.

OneNote has so many features including full search, tagging, freehand annotations and so on. Even better, if it is not already on your desktop via Microsoft Office then it is very cheap to purchase (a free 60 day trial is available). If you haven’t looked at OneNote in a while I recommend you take a look and I’m sure you’ll find how valuable it can be. Even better, consider combining it with an online SharePoint solution for true collaboration.

Mobile SharePoint

One of the great new features of SharePoint is that it has support for mobile devices built right in. You don’t need to do any special configuration.

So here’s what you see when you visit this blog with a web browser using the URL http://supportweb.ciaops.net.au/blog.

However, if you are using a mobile device to access the information you probably want something more stripped down to reduce the download time. If you do, then simply add /m to end of any SharePoint site. So, in the case of my blog go to http://supportweb.ciaops.net.au/blog/m and you’ll see:

which is a listing of the recent entries and if you click on one you’ll see:

You’ll get the same information but you’ll get in a “leaner” form, which is perfect for mobile devices.

As I said in the beginning the mobile accessibility is automatically configured with SharePoint right out of the box, nothing more to do. Also, don’t forget that all this functionality comes with a product that is free for you to download and is already included with SBS 2008. How could you ask for any more?