Issue #27 March 4, 2003

1. Tele/Video conference tips

With travel for meetings reducing all around the world, organizations are making increasing use of tele-conference or video-conference meetings. These can be a great substitute for a face-to-face meeting if you follow some simple guidelines. Before the meeting, make sure you know how to use the equipment and you have tested it. I can’t even guess at how many of these meetings don’t occur because someone didn’t know how to connect everyone on the phone or get the video equipment to work properly. Send all materials that you will want to refer to well in advance – usually 3 to 7 days ahead and follow up 24 hours ahead to make sure everyone got the materials. Always have page numbers and document titles on each document so it is easy to refer to a specific item in a document. Set out ground rules for the call in advance and have the moderator of the call enforce them. Right before the call, make sure you have everything ready on the table or desk in a quiet place and make sure you have gone to the washroom. Make sure that during the call someone is taking notes and these notes get distributed to everyone after the meeting. I have expanded on these ideas in an article on the web site at: http://www.communicateusingtechnology.com/tele_videoconference.htm

2. New MS Office Service Releases

If you are using Microsoft Office 2000 or Office XP, you will want to know about a new service release for each of these packages. Microsoft has now released Service Release 3 (SR3) for Office 2000 and Service Release 2 (SR2) for Office XP. There are many regular fixes released to each of the packages and every so often Microsoft puts them all together into a Service Release. In my opinion it is a good idea to keep your software updated with these service releases. Microsoft has made it easy for you to figure out which updates your system needs by creating a web-based Office Update scan. If you go to the following web site: http://office.microsoft.com/ProductUpdates/default.aspx you can click on one button and it will scan your system and determine which updates you should download. Always scan the download list and select the ones you think are most important to install. It is a good idea to do this twice a year to keep your software running smoothly.

3. Useful Resource – www.projectorcentral.com

Our presentation web site resource this time is the http://www.projectorcentral.com web site. This web site is absolutely the best site hands down when it comes time for you or your organization to purchase or lease a data projector. It has listings of all of the latest models from all of the manufacturers, allows side by side feature comparisons and reviews a lot of the projectors available. They don’t sell projectors, so you won’t be seeing the sales hype that you might anticipate. All you get is great information about an item that will cost a lot of money and a purchasing decision that you do not want to mess up. When I leased my last data projector, this is the site I went to in order to compare two models I was looking at and to ask some probing questions to the sales rep. If you are in the market for a data projector, click over to this site right now!