Technically speaking…

Assigning delegate access to your mailbox or parts of your mailbox can be a great way to make sure your email is watched or meetings managed while you are out of the office.  It can also be useful to those with assistants and very busy schedules allowing the assistant to manage incoming mail and meeting requests.

It is important to note that while delegation within Outlook is useful in many situations, the access should not be taken lightly.  Sending email on behalf of another user can be a very powerful thing, use it very carefully and be sure that you are considering both your own and the other user’s best interests.

How do I delegate access?

To delegate access to your mailbox to other users complete the following steps:

1.   In Outlook select Options from the Tools menu

2.   In the Options Dialog box click the Delegates tab (shown below)

Figure A

Adding delegates

3.   Click the Add button to select the users who will receive access to your mailbox

4.   Enter the name(s) or select users from the list

a.   Ctrl+Click will select multiple users

5.   Click the Add ->button to include the selected users

Once all of the accounts have been added, click the OK button on the add users dialog box

This will display the Delegate Permissions dialog for your mailbox.  On this dialog you can specify access for the user or group of users you selected previously.

Note: When selecting multiple users to provide delegate access, all of the users you select at once will receive the same access rights to your mailbox.  To assign different access to users you will need to complete the steps presented here for each user or group of users.

6.    On the Delegate Permissions dialog (shown in figure B below) you can specify the degree of access the selected user(s) will have for each section of your mailbox.  The access types are available:

• Editor - users with this permission can read, create, and modify items in the selected mailbox folder
• Reviewer - users with this permission can read items in the selected mailbox folder
• Author - users with this permission can read and create items in the selected mailbox folder

Each folder listed on the delegate permissions dialog can have different permission and these are configured separately by choosing a permission level for each in the dialog box for the folder.

Figure B

Configure delegate permissions by choosing the access level for each folder listed

For the calendar folder, you can also check a box to send meeting requests to your delegate as well as to yourself.  This will speed up the response process by delegates because a copy of the item will arrive in their mailbox as well.

For the delegate user or group as a whole, you can select one or both of the following checkboxes at the bottom of the permissions dialog:

• Automatically send a message to delegate summarizing these permissions - emails the delegates you selected to let them know that they have been assigned access to your mailbox. The email will summarize the level of access the user(s) have as well.
• Delegate can see my private items - this allows delegates to view calendar and other items marked as private

7.   Click OK on the Delegate Permissions dialog box to save the permissions

8.   Click OK on the Options dialog box to alert the chosen delegates of their access rights

Note: Some folders may not appear as soon as access is assigned for the delegates, there may be a need for them to logon again to see these items.  Also it may be a requirement to have the delegates open calendar items as a shared resource if they do not appear.  This should not affect their delegate access.

Assigning delegates is a great way for managers and supervisors or departments with multiple staff members to get help managing their email and meetings.  It can also help keep things flowing during periods of extended time away from the office.

Managing outlook delegation effectively can make everyone’s day a bit easier and remove some of the burden from your organizations IT staff when others need access to your resources.

Lately I have been asked a few times what RSS is and to provide some examples of how it works. There has been an article posted here previously, but given the length of time between then and now I thought maybe a newer post might be in order.

The original post is here.

RSS or Really Simple Syndication allows publishers large and small to get content to their readers in a much faster fashion. The person reading the blog or website will subscribe to the sites RSS feed using an aggregator, as new items are added to the site, these will be pushed to the subscribers and appear in their feed readers as items are added.

The benefit to the blog or site publishing the feed is that the readers who wish to be kept up on what is going on receive the updates regularly. Also the site’s feed will not require an email subscription (although this is possible) and can avoid being caught in any spam filters that may be configured.

The benefit to the reader is time. Subscribing to a website’s RSS feed will allow the posted updates to be retrieved as they are posted. Reducing the amount of time that the reader spends visiting websites or trying to remember where they read that interesting tip on how to make paste (or something else).

How is an RSS feed created?

An RSS feed can be created in a couple of ways. Many blogging applications create a feed of the posts and/or comments automatically and allow the editor to make these available to readers. This makes feed generation immediate and requires no extra work on the part of the author.

Another way that a feed can be created is through a third party service, some of these will generate a feed based on any content, no matter the platform that actually publishes the information. A great reason to allow your feed to be managed by a third party application is that there is no maintenance and also there is likely to be a much more manageable URL for the feed than http://www.myblog.com/posts/feed.xml.

I understand that a feed will save time and spam, but why use it if another application is required to read RSS feeds?

An RSS feed is simply an aggregate collection of updates made to a website that is published to anyone who subscribes to it. Several software vendors have created applications which can process the XML based feed into something that a subscriber can read.

Since feeds are XML based, the application needs to make these files presentable, this is the reason an aggregator is needed. The aggregator simply formats and sorts the different XML files that are added to it. A feed will be displayed with a title and a summary. Each update is separated into its title and information, making the posts easy to read.

Some popular aggregators are:

NewsGator Online - an online based reader and account for storing and reading subscriptions

FeedDemon - a Windows desktop based reader published by NewsGator that integrates with a NewsGator online account.

Microsoft Outlook 2007 - Microsoft has Integrated Feed aggregation into the latest version of Outlook

Google Reader - An online based reader that allows users to share feeds with others and post notes about items they have read

There are many other options for reading feeds, but these are a few of the most popular and outside of Outlook they are free to use.

Now that I can get to and read feeds what else do they do for my website?

Techhelp uses a third party service provided by Google called FeedBurner. Feedburner creates a feed based on the provided URL. It also allows authors to track stats, like subscribers and views per day. Keeping track of your subscribers helps you keep an eye on the popularity of the feed you are publishing.

Feedburner also allows additional links to be inserted into both the website post and the feed post which will allow the reader to submit the post to other web services such as Digg or Del.ici.ous making it easier for them to share items they are reading with others, resulting in even more traffic for publishers. This type of exposure can generate a great deal more page views and subscribers long term simply by exposing the content to more people.

Tracking the stats of feeds will also allow a site operator to see just how much the readers are growing and even which reader they use to access a feed this can be helpful in determining if the content being published into a feed is effective. As new content is published, if subscriptions increase or decrease dramatically, it may be an indication of the effectiveness of the content being published.

Note: Techhelp does not receive any perks from Google for mentioning Feedburner. This is purely the service that is used with this blog, so it is the one we know the most about.

In addition to all of the great feed information shown to subscribers and made available as part of the feed, the status of a sites feed can be monitored. When the feed is down, a separate feed (available to the publisher) will be updated to allow tracking of a given feed.

Bottom Line: Maintaining a feed for posts on your website makes tracking readership easier for authors/editors and makes keeping up with your updates an automatic thing for your readers.  This is a win/win for all involved.  I have also found that once you get started with feeds, it is very easy and tempting to read alot more blogs than one might think in a day.

Many web applications besides blogs and news sites publish feeds or have an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows a thrid party to create an aggregate feed of content from a given application as well.  Some of the more popular applications either posting a feed or being aggregated into a feed are:

Flickr - Photo sharing site aquired by Yahoo!

FriendFeed - newly popular social aggregation site.  This site pulls in account info from many different social networking sites and pushes them out as a feed.

TwitterFeed - push your blog’s feed to twitter

Remember the Milk - an online task service that publishes a feed of your tasks

There are many other applications on the Internet that will begin making use of RSS or other feed driven technologies and formats.   We here at TechHelp love us some RSS and will post here about it as new things we think you might find useful pop up.

Hopefully this post has got you thinking about RSS and some of the things it can help you accomplish.  In a future post Techhelp will take a look at a couple of the aggregator applications out there for use with RSS feeds and the pros and cons of these.

For doing something many users have been hoping they would see for the last couple releases of Office.

PDF support .                                                                                                  

Microsoft has included Export to PDF functionality in the beta releases of Office 2007. They have also been in talks with PDF creator Adobe about how they could get this done.

Apparently Adobe is not happy with the fact that Microsoft wants to trim some of the bloat out of the add-in and limit its features.

This is a rediculous argument. A properly configured installation of PHP on the web can create PDF documents from virtually anything you can save in Office. Also… there are a number of open source PDF writers out there that do the same thing as the MS Office addin functionality would do, enable me to not buy Acrobat.

Open Office supports this functionality (or did in the last release I downloaded) so what is the big deal… Money.

Adobe wants Redmond to raise the cost of Office to include the feature or charge for an addin… that doesnt make sense, because all you have to do is look for it and there will be a Free PDF application that you can use from any other software including MS Office.

Why not give the users of all of your products a little help (regardless what other applications they use)?

Adobe is looking to take Anti-Trust action agains Microsoft in Europe… apparently somethings might not wash here so they goto Europe to kick Microsoft in the knees?

I am not saying Microsoft is always right, but they are trying to provide a service that will likely bring benefit to both companies, not to mention a host of Users worldwide.

I was sifting through subscriptions in my newsreader (not Outlook 2007) and came across an article reminding me that Office 2007 will allow you to blog from Word and publish directly to your site.

Fortunately Word Press is one of the blogs supported by this feature.

To set up word blogging you need to download and install Office 2007 beta 2 from http://www.microsoft.com. Then open Word 2007 and click on the Office menu at the very top left of the window (see image below).

The thing in the image that looks like the office logo… that is a menu for general purposes. Print, Open, New, and Publish are in there.

Once you click there, select Publish and from there choose Blog

You will then be prompted to configure your blog settings, Username, password, URL and blog type. Once this is done and saved, the word interface will change to add a space for post title and a publish button.

Note: When you choose a blog host of Other, the screen above will appear empty so you can fill in custom settings. The help me fill out this section link will provide a good deal of information for correctly entering the API and the URL for your blog. Word press uses MetaWebLog and http://www.yoursite.com/<wordpress>/xmlrpc.php

Another cool feature… Spell checker. Your blog posts will be checked as you type just like any other word document, which eliminates the need to copy the word document into the blog post screen.

I have used this feature once, for this post, but will make use of it as the posts here grow. It is a step in the right direction, we will see If additional features are added for RTM.

Note: Uploading pictures doesn’t work as of yet, could be a word press setting preventing this, but I will keep trying. And the date on word posted items is way wrong. I got 12-31-1969 for this originally and edited it on the site to correct.. not huge, but in need of work.

The snazzy new Office application from Redmond hit Public Beta this week and the downloads of the application numbered quite high. I of course was quick to get the software. I thought I might go through some of the things I have found so far (which isnt many but I will post more as they come to me).

The Excel 2007 application is sweet. It uses tabs with mouseover rather than traditional menus (shown below)

Excel also uses this mouse over styling to show you things like conditional formatting so you do not have to commit to the choice without viewing it, which is rather nice. The conditional formatting options are also improved, you can use in cell coloring to draw users to certain data or KPI style stoplights to present key items.

External data display is also improved. When using pivot tables to showcase external items you are allowed to drill into the results of the dataset. You can show or hide additional details.

Traditional tables allow for advanced sorting, even/odd row colors and are very easy to use/create

An example of a table with applied conditional formatting is shown below:

Another nice thing, since we have a table above that could grow as John Doe’s sales increase, is that Microsoft has gotten rid of the 65000 row limit on worksheets.  The limit now sits at over 1 million rows, making in place drilldown possible.

I am sure there are tons of other features in Excel 2007 and the other Office applications and I will try to look at each of them here as time and testing permits.

If you have a chance to download the beta, I would go for it.  Remember the rule though, it is in beta, so there is no support outside of the newsgroups and you should not run it in a production environment as it may crash unexpectedly.  But if you want to see the features, and have a system meeting the system requirements, give it a shot…

Office is a worthwhile software to test drive…