So, I’ve used Jott for a while, and I like it. However, the little notes e-mailed to my inbox aren’t too helpful to me as my inbox gets quite full and it makes the notes easy to miss.

Well, Jott got me real excited when they introduced their Jott Links. Now you can call in and Jott a Twitter update, post to your blog, add an event to your Google Calendar, or even get Sandy to do something for you (I think I’ll start using Sandy soon!).

One of my biggest difficulties is remembering to do things that fellow staff ask of me in the hall. I usually encourage them to fill out a HelpDesk to ensure it gets done, but we all know that doesn’t always happen. It’s in my evening walk that I remember these things, the only time in my day that I have no computer to take action. Tonight, I got to thinking, “I wish they would add a Jott Link for Spiceworks, our awesome (and free) network inventory and HelpDesk software.”  This would allow me to pick up my cell phone and begin a ticket about the problem that came to memory.

Eureka! It doesn’t need a Jott Link - I just need to add the HelpDesk e-mail to my Jott contacts. Doing so allows me to call Jott, announce that I want to Jott “HelpDesk,” and begin spelling out the problem that needs solving. In doing so, I create a workflow on the Spiceworks HelpDesk that gets recorded for history and can be attributed to an individual machine at a later time.  Then, the problem gets solved faster, and you get applauded for your good memory (well, maybe not that far).

This would work on any HelpDesk software that checks an e-mail account. Give it a try - it could help you out as well.

Sending this update with Safari on my new iPhone.

We’ve started our network overhaul at church. We are so far overdue with this, and it’s not going to be fun, but I’m glad we’re finally doing it.

More to come from a regular keyboard later.

So, a while back Jason posted a tool for dealing with Outlook’s NK2 files. The tool is called NK2.info, imaginitively named after its Web site. As a brief briefing, the NK2 file is the file that contains Outlook’s address autocomplete data (when you start typing in the to box, these are the addresses that are in the drop down).

Jason’s reasons for needing the tool are a little different than mine though. See, every so often, one of my user’s NK2 files gets corrupted. It’s only happened twice since I’ve been working here, but it turns out to be a somewhat common problem with others as well. Deleting the user’s NK2 file is fine to do - Outlook will rebuild the file when it starts up again. However, all their autocomplete addresses are gone then.

Well, short of buying Ingressor’s $35 software, there’s not much you can do to recover the file so that your user won’t be impeded by his inability to remember addresses.

Jason’s tool is good for creating a CSV file out of the NK2 data, but I found one that I like a lot better. Now, it won’t do anything to fix a corrupted file, but it will capture the addresses and save them in a tab-delimited text file or HTML file for you to do something with. The tool, again with an imaginative name, is NK2View. It seems to do a better job of getting human-readable names out of the NK2 file, and it also is a bit more user-friendly. At least, it was more friendly to this user.

Here’s a screenshot:

We launched our network time clock last week. Yes, we’re finally saying goodbye to “punching in.” It was an interesting implementation with very limited documentation, but we’re up and running now. We’ve launched the first phase with our facilities and kids workers.

So, it’s a little hinky. The maintenance staff have to log-in to a computer, open the time clock, click the button, enter their employee number, choose the job code, and click clock in. It’s just a few more steps than remove your card, punch it, replace the card. With the kids workers, we were surprised that it was the first time that one of the ladies had ever used a mouse. Still, the convenience this brings to our financial team is worth the hinky behaviors.

WARNING: GROUP POLICY IGNORANCE AHEAD

We learned that it is possible for employees to change the system time to tweak the amount of hours they worked. Now, it’s not a huge issue in a church, but we don’t want it to be a temptation either. So, today I started playing with Group Policies and the registry editor. I now have the entire domain synced with the us.pool.ntp.org time servers, which is a good thing that needed to happen anyhow. What I can’t figure out how to do is to prevent users with local administrator accounts from changing the system clock. I set the GPO to only allow Administrators to change the time. Still, they can change it. More Google’ing to come.

I recently read David Szpunar’s post about Inventory management, and I’ve gotta tell you that his post was downright timely. I had been banging my head against a wall. How do I track all these computers? I started doing it with Excel manually, then realizing that I needed more dynamic information, I started playing with VB Scripts. There’s a lot you can do with VB Scripts, and Microsoft’s Script Center is a tremendously valuable resource.

David mentioned that he was experimenting with Spiceworks. I had never heard of their product before, but “free” always gets my attention. The product requires about 50 Mb of RAM from my server, a little more than I wanted to give up, but it requires no client software. Plus, the functionality it offers me is worth the price.

So, Spiceworks runs twice a day on my server polling each and every computer on the network. It picks up lots of useful information like the computer manufacturer, serial number, specs, and installed software. It even tells me when anti-virus definitions are not current.

The fun doesn’t stop there. Not only does it inventory computers, it also picks up printers, switches, wireless access points, servers, NAS devices, Linux boxes, and anything else plugged in to your network. It alerts you to problems like low toner in the copy machine, or low disk space on workstation hard drives. I have an alert set up to notify me when any user installs any software, and I can’t tell you how helpful that has been.

So, if you are a small to mid-sized church, I suggest Spiceworks to keep track of your computer inventory. I also suggest them as your HelpDesk software.

My first month at the church resulted in a $90 cell phone bill. Why? Because I’m never in the office, so people just call my cell phone. Well, the church reimburses $50 of my bill, but I still don’t like the idea of using all my minutes for computer support questions. I installed Spiceworks, and now I insist on every user entering support requests into the HelpDesk. It automagically sends me a text message (which is cheaper than minutes), so that I can quickly respond to the request. It has resulted in a lower cell phone bill and quicker response time. Plus, Spiceworks helps me track which users are needy and which machines are busted.

So, go over to Spiceworks.com and grab up the free download. I bet you’ll like it too.