Ross Goodman

photo credit: laffy4k

If you look at the left hand menu you will see the items:

• Mail
• Calendar
• Contacts
• Tasks
• etc

These can be quickly accessed by using the following shortcut keys:

• (Ctrl+1) – Mail
• (Ctrl+2) – Calendar
• (Ctrl+3) – Contacts
• (Ctrl+4) – Tasks

In addition, when you use Ctrl+1 to access mail, this takes you to the folder that you were last using, if you would rather jump straight into your In-Box – use (Ctrl+Shift+I).

A nice quick hint.

I kept forgetting to start Google Calendar Sync when I started Outlook. I don’t always start Outlook when I start my laptop and I’m not always online when I run Outlook so puting it in my Startup folder is not really an option.
My solution, a macro that runs when Outlook starts that gives me the option of running Google Calendar Sync if I feel it’s appropriate.

Private Sub Application_Startup()
Dim response As Integer
Dim RetVal

response = MsgBox(prompt:=”Do you want to run Google Calendar Sync?”, buttons:=vbYesNo)

If response = vbYes Then
RetVal = Shell(“C:\Program Files\Google\Google Calendar Sync\GoogleCalendarSync.exe”, vbMinimizedNoFocus)
End If

End Sub

I’m using Microsoft Outlook 2007 and I think it’s a great piece of software.
It has a built in RSS feed reader. Typically I use Google Reader but as that can’t handle authenticated feeds I’m using Outlook for all of my work related Sharepoint feeds.
In order to introduce people to RSS, Microsoft have included two “standard” RSS feeds: “Microsoft At Home” and “Microsoft At Work”.
The only problem is, I’m not really interested in reading these feeds.
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Last week I gave a colleague a demonstration on why, if you have numbers stored in a character string you should convert them explicitly to numbers:

select ‘Yes’
from dual
where ‘1000′ between ‘000′ and ‘999′;

‘YES’
—–
Yes

photo credit: eshm
I was having a flick through my employment contract and I found the following clause:

13.2
You agree that during the course of this contract and after the termination of the contract for whatever reason without limit in point in time you will keep in confidence and shall not disclose to any person unless authorised to do so with the prior written consent of the Company the following:-
13.2.1 Any consultancy know-how, methods, tools, techniques or intellectual capital.

I realised that some of my blog entries or tweets could fall foul of this clause so I asked for written permission to continue blogging generic “work related” content such as Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Data Modelling and Business Objects.
Rather than granting this and leveraging the fairly good google rankings that my posts seem to get I was asked to remove all work related posts.
Business Objects Best Practice (higher ranking than BusinessObjects.com)
Business Objects New Features (Page One)
Dimensional Modelling (Ralph Kimball ?)
As such I have password protected all of my work related posts.
If you are struggling to find content there are a variety of searches that could turn up interesting content.
Alternatively you can go to my company site, contact details can be found here or here.

What song do you think best sums up Business Intelligence?

photo credit: mistress_f
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Business Objects – Best Practice – Universe Design

The purpose of this document is to provide a description of what I consider to be best practice when designing a Business Objects Universe. We will also describe the reasoning behind the suggestion.

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I’m a big fan of Remember The Milk (RTM) and David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD).
The one concept that I have been missing in the whole process is how to set reminders for following up emails.
I regularly use a waitingfor tag and a tag for each persons name but my habit of actually creating the task is not quite there yet.
The habit is no longer needed now.
I have “discovered” that from RTM | Settings | Info there is an “Inbox EMail Address”. For any e-mail I want to chase I simply BCC the message to this address and it creates a task in my inbox. The body of the message goes into a note attached to the task.
All I have to do then is move it to the appropriate list and set any tags or due date.
I would recommend using BCC, if anyone discovers your inbox e-mail address then they will be able to create tasks in your inbox too!