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Tweaking Collanos Workplace

by | Jan 19, 2007 | Evangelism, Technology, Uncategorized

I’ve blogged about Collanos before.

I’ve had to tweak the client to make best use of bandwidth. I’m finding that because most of my team are on pretty fast connections – fast DSL, fast LAN – the default settings are too conservative.

I suggested to the Collanos people that they have a ‘I have infinite bandwidth’ setting.

Here are my two settings that I changed.

Under Tools – Preferences, select Connections. Select Individual and click Apply.

Next click on Advanced Bandwidth Settings and bump up the upload and download speeds; also set the upload and download to use more threads.

100 days of ZENworks – flying home. Check-in powered by NAL

by | Jan 12, 2007 | fun stuff, Technology, travel, Uncategorized, ZENworks

Post 2 of many in the next 100 days – talking about ZENworks.

Ah – time to travel home from Düsseldorf. Up early and to the airport.

It’s great seeing your product in use. Lufthansa check-in desks are powered by NAL. Check-in agent logs in, up pops NAL and all of the applications.

I’m travelling United from Chicago to Salt Lake City – and United are also a ZENworks customers.

Take a look next time you fly. You might be having your check-in made possible by ZENworks.

100 days of ZENworks – training in Düsseldorf

by | Jan 10, 2007 | Technology, travel, Uncategorized, ZENworks

First of a long series of posts from the next 100 or so days talking about the next version of ZENworks.

Training

I’m in Düsseldorf – running an internal training course on ‘Pulsar’. I wrote a pretty detailed, deep dive, technical training course on ‘Pulsar’ and delivered it today.

I’ve been polishing and writing labs and training course notes all week; I’ve had a couple of hours sleep in the last three days.

Today was the actual training – and I think it went well. We trained 25 internal people from across EMEA on the next version of the product; yesterday was training on our messaging and positioning; tomorrow is marketing, positioning and ITIL training.

It’s been a long time since I spent time with this many EMEA people in technical training; the response so far has been very positive.

on New Product Management

by | Jan 7, 2007 | Evangelism, Technology, Uncategorized

An interesting post by Charles Zedlewski of SAP on Product Management. He also references Storm Grillin – another blog on ‘agile Product Management’.

Especially interesting; we had training from Pragmatic Marketing a few weeks ago – which was a good refresher.

Here are the interesting comments; readers at Novell – I’m pointing fingers at you.

a product manager needs to be:
A salesperson. Selling the vision of the product to the development team is essential. How else can they come up with lots of good feature ideas or believe in the priorities? More energy is spent explaining the “why” of the product versus the “what.” 

This also means a product manager should not be:
A document generator. Why bother to generate that 100 page PRD? It’s going to change a month into the project anyhow.

These shifts in focus also change the psychic rewards for the product manager. Most product managers I’ve known love being the satisfaction of being resident expert.

and from Storm Grillin’

Agile product development is all about focusing on real value and delivering it as quickly and measurably as possible.  Many times this means we focus on story cards and use cases and velocity.  But on Monday, the dev, qa, and support folks took things to a completely new level.  They wanted to talk about the business.  They wanted to understand the key metrics that determine financial success, and they wanted to measure their progress against those metrics!

 Interesting thoughts.