Look Ma no hands! (or how to autotweet from PowerPoint)

During the presentation Harmony Turnbull & myself delivered at the recent AGOSCI conference we were able to send tweets automagically whilst we were on stage. Had a couple of people ask how we did that, so at the risk of de-mystifying it, here is what you need to know.

Firstly, the process I followed is detailed here on Tim Elliots website. There are a number of options available to display and interact tweets as well as create them as part of his solution, I am only talking about the AutoTweet part in this post.

The process is actaully quite simple.

Create a free account over on SuperTweet.net – this is the site that will do the grunt work for you. Simply sign in with Twitter, create a secret password and you are done.

Download and install the AutoTweet addin for Microsoft PowerPoint – I run Office 2010 and from experience Tim’s suggestion that the Office 2003 version works best stacks up. Download it here – note there are TWO files in the zip. I used the Office 2003 Autotweet.ppa file for office 2010, found the Office 2007 version (the ppam file) didnt work.

Next Start PowerPoint and go into File then Options. Cick into Addins and at the bottom where you see Manage, click on PowerPoint Add-ins then click Go

In the new window click on ‘Add New’  and then browse to where you saved your add-in file (downloaded from above), select it and click OK

Back at the manage add-in window click Close

Now in PowerPoint you should see a new Ribbon command called ‘Add-Ins’. Go ahead and click into it.

From there you should see the AutoTweet command. Click on it to open it up for configuration.

Now fill in the blanks! Start with your twitter handle and then add in the password you created on SuperTweet.Net

Add in a hashtag to appear on all your tweets – all of the good conferences have one.

Tick ‘Display Success Status of Tweets’ if you want to see a confirmation appear briefly on your presenter screen.

Leave the ‘Enable Auto-Tweeting’ OFF (the default) whilst you create and rehearse your presentation, but remember to turn it back on for the big reveal!

Click the OK button to confirm the settings

So, telling it what to actually tweet. Easy part this! In your speaker notes, simply add in the tags [twitter] [/twitter] – any text you put between the tags will be tweeted once the slide is up on screen! How easy is that!

Hit me up if you need some assistance

Not long to wait now

Almost time for me to fly off to Sydney for the biennial AGOSCI conference being held at the Hilton this week.

A week of networking, learning, and a healthy dose of fun with a group of hard working and dedicated people. The conference theme this year is Connect2Commmunicate and it promises to be HUGE! And in the spirit of the conference theme I will be blogging at the end of each day and sharing my thoughts and viewpoints on the sessions I attend.

For those on twitter, you can join in the conversation by following the conference hashtag #AGOSCI2013

Journey of (IT) discovery as a small charity Part 4

So now that you have a website up & running, what’s next? Search Engine Optimisation  or SEO might be top of mind, but as you built your site on WordPress chances are it is doing a pretty good job of that already – WordPress is well regarded as being optimised for search out-of-the-box. My recommendation, and what we have done at Glow Kids, is getting onto the key Social Media channels and promoting your website on them (and vice-versa) if you haven’t already.

Facebook should be one of, if not the first, port of call. Make sure you create a business page, not a personal one. If you do happen to create or already have a personal page you can convert to a business page easily enough, Facebook have a really useful page here that explains the process. The key advantage of a business page for me is that you have fans not friends, which means people can like your page without you havent to accept them. There are also a bunch of statistics available so you can gain some insights into who is liking your content, the penetration of your postings so you can tailor for your audience and your potential audience. There are a number of ways you can cross-promote your website and Facebook page –  Wordpress has a number of plug-ins available for social media, and the theme you choose may also have some integrated.

Two important things to add to your website – a ‘Follow Me on Facebook’ button and the ability for your content to be liked and/or commented on. The follow me button lets people easily find you on Facebook, and it doesn’t HAVE to specifically say ‘Follow Us on Facebook’. If you look at the Glow Kids website, we have a simple button at the top of the page which was part of the Admired theme we used. By making it easy for visitors to like and comment on your website content you make it easy for them to promote it on your behalf and again there are plug-ins you can use to achieve this. On the left you will see a sidebar plug-in that easily allows visitors to see your last Facebook post and Like your page.

On your Facebook page, remember to promote your website content. If you add new content to your website, put a link to it on Facebook with a hint of what it is about to get people to click through to read it in detail. Add your website URL to the ‘About’ section on Facebook so people can find your website easily. You do not have to post new content every day that links to your website of course. Depending on your charity you can promote affiliated organizations such as national bodys, or charities in a similar or aligned sector. Liking their Facebook page is a good start here as you can then easily share their contemt, and they may well like & share yours in return. And remember to keep it human on Facebook. For Fathers Day for example I wished all fathers a happy day and asked what everyone was up to for it. Not at all related to Glow Kids cause, but helps remind people that there are humans behind the page and that is what social media should be about – connecting people with people.

Coming up next, the ‘other’ social media channels and how you can maximise them for your charity.

Journey of (IT) discovery as a small charity Part 3

One of the must-haves we identified as being needed on our website at Glow Kids was the ability for people to donate online. There were four companies in New Zealand that I considered before choosing PayPal, all with their own pros and cons. To save you some of the headaches I had, I have summarised them below, information taken from the respective vendors 16th August 2012 so may differ from their current rates.  Whilst PayPal best suited my needs, one of the other providers may be more aligned with what you want to achieve.

Company	Setup Cost	Annual Cost	Transaction Fees	Pros	Cons
e-Way	$0	$150	$0.30	No setup fees. Can setup recurring billing (donations)	Needs SSL to be established on the website. Need to set up an IMF (Internet Merchant Facility) with bank – separate from normal bank a/c and has additional fees. Need a developer to implement
Payment Express	$150	$600	$0.50	Flat transaction fees, no %age cost +	Complicated to setup, needs a developer by the looks of it to implement. Needs SSL to be established on the website Need to set up an IMF (Internet Merchant Facility) with bank – separate from normal bank a/c and has additional fees
Flo2Cash	$200	$120	0 – $5000  3.40% + 25c/trans $5001 – $15000  2.90% + 25c/trans $15001+  2.40% + 25c/trans	Hosting company recommends them, no IMF needed Basic Plugins available for WordPress Appear to offer preferential fees for NFPs	Needs SSL to be established on the website Probably need a developer to maximise functionality
PayPal	$0	$0	$0-$5000 3.4% + 45c/trans $5001 – $15000  2.9% + 45c/trans	A number of WordPress plugins available, incl recurring donation options No SSL needed No IMF needed	Need to open a Paypal account, cannot have funds deposited direct into bank account

Paymark have a good list of providers in New Zealand, although not all offer online payment processing.

PayPal offer charities discounted fees, but one of the conditions is proving you are a charity. This is where it can get a little messy. I was unprepared for the amount of paperwork needed to get the account validated, and to make matters worse, there is a time limit of 7 days to get this done before the account is locked. So what information is needed? Helpfully the website doesnt tell you! But I will, read on!

Before you even THINK about opening an account with PayPal, get the following documents together on either pdf or jpeg format, as they WILL ask for them to confirm you are a registered charity and therefore entitled to the discounted rates:

• A summary of the nature of the organization (the organization’s mission statement), and type and purpose of payments that you intend to process through PayPal.
• Proof that you are a registered charity, a copy of the registration certificate is ideal
• You need to add a bank account under your organization’s name and provide the bank statement or the voided cheque for it.
• A letter of authorization on official letterhead of your organization, signed by an officeholder/bearer (e.g. Chairman, Secretary, Treasurer), to indicate the authorized persons (the PayPal account holder must be authorized) to manage all PayPal account related activities. The letter should meet the following requirements:

(1) The letter needs to be printed on the organization’s letterhead. The organization stamp (if available) should be added in the signature section.
(2) Please include the specific email address of this PayPal account in the contents of your authorization letter.
(3) One of the named authorized persons should be the PayPal account holder and responsible for all PayPal account related activities.
(4) The person signing the letter should be a different person from the authorized PayPal account holder and could be an officeholder/bearer (e.g. Chairman, Secretary, or Treasurer). Please state that the authorized person is acting for and on behalf of the organization in handling all matters related to the management of the PayPal business account.
(5) If the account holder is the sole owner of the business (i.e. there are no other directors), he/she may sign the letter. The company stamp is required in the signature section.

• A proof of identity of both the authorized PayPal account holder and the person signing the letter of authorization. Examples of acceptable proof of identity (with photo) include: Passport or Driver’s License.

If you can get all of that ready you will be in business. Saying that, they do of course reserve the right to ask for more information or less information. The upside is you can start using the account as soon as it is active, you do not need to wait for it to be confirmed. I found the PayPal team to be really quick in responding to the information as I uploaded it and to email queries I had.

Journey of (IT) discovery as a small charity Part 2

In the last post we set up free web hosting with 24/7 Hosting and installed WordPress. In this post I want to look at a few of the options and plugins available by using WordPress. The first thing to decide upon is the theme of your site. WordPress has a large number available for free download or for a small cost. It is possible to get a custom-made theme, however I found that the cost for a basic site was around NZ$900 + gst. Once you have decided on a theme, you can get to work customising it. Depending on the theme you may be able to change the color settings, logo and fonts. They all have different customisations available so I won’t go into details here. You can also change your theme at any time, so don’t feel as though you have to get it perfect from day 1.

Helpful tip: Create a new homepage, then go into Settings –> Reading and change the front page settings to look at your new page, and set your posts to appear on a different page. This way your websites home page will stay as your ‘fixed’ content front, and your postings will appear elsewhere. I personally like to use posts for News:

Now you can get into the really good stuff and hunt out some plugins. Depending on your needs there will be between a few to many plugins available to extend the capabilities of your site. A couple that I really like and use are Donate Plus, Events Manager, and Facebook. Bit of an overview on these below.

Facebook. Pretty self-explanatory, this gives your site integration into Facebook. You do need to log into Facebook and create an App ID, but this only takes a few minutes and is free. Pop the information into the plugin and then you can set-up things like ‘Like’ buttons for your pages. This also adds in widgets (not to be confused with plugins, widgets are dragged & dropped into the sidebar of your site) that give you additional functionality to promote your website on Facebook and vice-versa.

Donate Plus. There are a number of options to gather online donations for your website. I chose a free plugin for WordPress that uses PayPal to handle the payments. I will blog more about PayPal and other online payment options soon, it is a little tricky & time-consuming and there are a number of gotchas for new players. The attraction for me of Donate Plus is the ability for donors to set-up recurring payments as well as one-off. There is also a donation wall so you can promote your generous donors, if they tick the box of course.

Events Manager. This is a really big plugin. Lots of options come with it including pages for event locations and the ability for people to manage their bookings. Because we have a number of events through the year this plugin really appeals as it lets you sell tickets to your events, and manage ticket quota’s so you know at a glance in real-time how many you have sold and how many are left to sell. There is a pro version available for around $80 that lets you use PayPal to accept payment online for tickets but even without it there is plenty of value just from having it manage ticket sales.

There really are a huge number of plugins available that can help deliver on your website needs, and it is worth spending a little time investigating all the options.

Next time, online donation options and PayPal.

Journey of (IT) discovery as a small charity Part 1

 

I haven’t been online much in the past month or so as I recently joined the Board of a small charity in Auckland called Glow Kids. Glow Kids provides Conductive Education to children with (primarily) a motor neuron disorder such as Cerebral Palsy or Dyspraxia. One of the key tasks assigned to me with my IT background was to get a digital presence up and running for them, including a website and Social Media.

In this series of posts I want to share some of the awesome tools available to charities to get online and then manage the results, all whilst doing it for FREE! Yes, free.

For those that do not know, I currently work as IT Manager for a large not-for-profit in Auckland so working with limited money & resources isn’t a new concept to me. What differs between my day job and Glow Kids is the economies of scale. The day job does have budget to get certain things done, such as web hosting & design, external marketing ‘experts’ and collateral and the like. Glow Kids, as a small start-up charity has extremely limited funds and resources. The challenge was to move from looking at tools that cost or are for larger organisations to alternatives that are, shall we say, more cost-appealing or fringe.

First up, a website. Two parts to this; hosting and Content Management System or CMS. There are a lot of hosting providers around, but I settled on 24/7 Hosting for a couple of reasons. First, they offer FREE hosting to charities! Secondly, they use Softaculous App Installer. This is a nifty tool that lets you install all manner of web applications with a single click, such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Moodle. They are also a Kiwi company with local support. There are a bunch of other services they offer but for me free + easy set-up nailed it!

I decided concurrently to use WordPress as the CMS. This blog you are reading now is WordPress and it is really simple to use. One of the other attractions for me is the number or plugins available to extend the product. I will go into the ones I deployed in a later post. With the hosting company and the CMS platform decided, I filled out a really simple online form and before I could finish my coffee I had an account set-up. We already had a couple of domain names to during the sign-up I moved them over and pointed them to the new service. Took a day to get the account verified as belonging to a charity, then it was a simple matter of logging into the portal, clicking WordPress and within 5 minutes it was done, and we could browse to the root page. How easy is that!

Next post I will go through WordPress in a bit more detail, and share some of the useful tools we have deployed so far.

 

Week One as an Apple OSX user

Been a week since I powered up a Macbook Air for the first time. Having never touched an Apple laptop or PC I was more than a little apprehensive – sure the iPods and iPads are intuitive to use but would the desktop products be the same?

Well so far so good. The boot up and shutdown is impressive, even compared to my Acer laptop, running Windows 7 Pro x64, 4GB RAM and a SSD drive. Installation of software via the App Store is quick and easy, and occurs much like installing an app on an iPad or smartphone. I run a Windows network at work, so one of the key challenges was getting it to play nicely in that environment. Joining to the domain was initially tricky, but once I found the right place to enter the network information (Users & Groups is a strange place to hide Network Account Server!) I was away. One trick for new players – have to enter the FQDN so domainname.local not just domainname to connect. My next ‘learning moment’ was logging on. I rememebered to change the login from ‘List of Users’ to ‘Name and password’ but do you think I could get authenticated! Seems there is a known bug in Lion but for me at least waiting a minute let me authenticate. Oh that and NOT entering the domain name in the login name! I was trying domainname\username but it refused to connect. Tried username alone and BAM! logged in fine.

At this point I was feeling pretty damn happy! I have installed Parallels for Mac as well, and created a Win7 virtual machine. This is to run Windows-only apps for network admin tasks and the performance is really nice. I do have one small gripe though. Apple users are always bagging Microsoft for all the OS updates. First time booting up the Macbook Air, 1.67GB of OS updates! After installing, another 1.1GB of updates! And for the next week I have had updates of some sort each day.. yes some of them are for iMovie and iPhoto but still….

Today is printer and network drive time. Managed to download the Ricoh driver ok, double-click the dmg and installed happily. Went into ‘Print & Scan’, hit the + to add a printer and browsed through the Windows network to install from the Windows print server. Having a less-happy time with the Konica Minolta though, will persevere…

So all in all, happy little Apple convert here. Missing the right-click I have to say, although I am sure I will adjust…

The eyes have it

So it looks like the next tech battlefield will be our eyes, with first Microsoft last year and more recently Google announcing plans to make information more readily available to us through platforms that are literally ‘in our faces’.

This week Google unveiled their Google Glasses aka ‘Project Glass‘ which will enable the projection of information right in front of our eyes as we need it. Last year Microsoft Research announced ‘smart’ contact lens that could be used to not only display data but also support people with Type 1 diabetes to monitor their blood glucose levels. For those that haven’t seen the promo for Google Glasses here it is

Both of these, and I am sure any competing products that are in the pipeline, will be truly disruptive developments. Education will finally get the shake-up it needs – imagine being able to just look at an item and then gain access to information on the Internet about it without having to open a stuffy textbook. Exams will never be the same again, somehow I cant see teachers asking students to remove their glasses or contact lens before entering an exam can you?

Advertisers and marketers will have a whole new way of interacting with consumers, literally popping their marketing message in front of us in a way we can’t avoid unless we close our eyes. Driving will be radically altered. We have a ban on using mobile phones in New Zealand unless it is through an approved hands-free kit. What will happen when emails and other data starts appearing in front of us? Sure aviation has had HUDs for years, but in fairness the skies at 30 000 feet are not as crowded as a downtown street! Will we need to have smart cars that can block signals as soon as we step into the vehicle?

For your average consumer on the street there are potential benefits, such as map directions right in front of you and augmented reality games. Have to wonder though, people are already walking around like mindless zombies staring down at their phones, will this just make them worse? And what about information overload? We are already more connected than we were 50 years ago, what potential health risks will being plugged in 24/7 create?

To quote Bob Dylan, the times they are a-Changin’ – only time will tell if it is for the better or worse, but one thing is certain, they will be transparent.

Related articles

• Microsoft developing electronic contact lens to monitor blood sugar (gizmag.com)
• Google offers look at Internet-connected glasses (mercurynews.com)
• Google: Yep, we’re testing augmented-reality glasses (news.cnet.com)

Extending the Nokia Lumia 800 battery life

I have been really impressed with Nokia Lumia 800 since I got it, but one thing that started to be an annoyance was the battery life. I would charge it in the evening then find it was down to 20% in the morning. Wifi and Bluetooth are both off, and Microsoft Exchange email is set to push – the same set-up I had with my Samsung Galaxy. I decided to play a little with some settings and the first thing I changed has had the biggest impact. That was turning off ‘Feedback to Microsoft’ – turns out that is constantly running and therefore draining the battery. Turning this one thing off has taken overnight usage from 80% to a measly 10-12%. Here’s how to do it.

From the home screen, slide left to show the menus, then down to Settings

In Settings, go down to the bottom, until you see Feedback

Tap into the Feedback option and slide the indicator to ‘Off’

As much as I like to send feedback to Microsoft to help improve the product, battery life is a lot more important to me.  Nokia has scheduled an update to improve battery life (see image below for release in NZ or to click through to the Nokia site for other countries) but I see my Lumia is already on that release.

Has anyone else got any battery saving tips they can share?

Related articles

• Nokia Lumia 800 review (aaronoverington.wordpress.com)
• Nokia Lumia 800 battery fix finally released (techradar.com)

Gen-i ICT2012 Conference in review

I had the pleasure of attending the Gen-i ICT 2012 roadshow/conference yesterday at Telecom Place. It was split into two parts: FWD_LIVE and bizgo. Almost predictably Gen-i rolled out their tried & true video clip about a future that is not so far away

The FWD_LIVE session had a focus on the fibre rollout and included briefings from Gen-i, Chorus and Huawei. Was interesting to see some of the stats around this, such as 30 000 kms of fibre is already in the ground around the country. A couple of customer stories highlighted the value having a fast internet connection can offer. Fletchers for instance purchased Cisco’s Telepresence to reduce travel costs between NZ, Australia and the USA and it is made possible because of a fast reliable fibre connection. The session was rounded out by a panel discussion, in my opinion a bit of a waste of time as there were a handful of questions only. There was the predictable question for Dr Bernard Lee from Huawei:

I ask Huawei rep ‘Will security issues affect bulid-out” he says “We are number 1 telco provider, there’ll be ways around it”… #ict2012

— Sim Ahmed (@simantics) April 2, 2012

After a half hour coffee break the bizgo session started. This was more of a general ICT vendor session with HP, Cisco, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia and Trend Micro giving 15 minute presentations on their wares. Couple of highlights here for me.

• HP have a Windows 8 powered tablet coming at the end of 2012
• They also have a E5000 server which is essentially Microsoft Exchange 2010 in a box – all the hardware and software preconfigured to ‘just work’
• Microsoft Lync of course, a personal favourite
• Motorola showed their latest handset, the Atrix 2. It can transform from a mobile to a laptop by connecting into a dock. Very cool!
• Nokia flashed their new Lumia range. As a user already of the Lumia 800 I can attest to how freaking awesome it is!
• Trend Micro showed off some Deep Security stuff for VMs, interesting stuff particularly around VDi instances

You can see all the tweets from the session here

On that subject, was very cool to have a tweet screen going – any tweets using the conference hashtag of #ICT2012 were displayed. I managed to get a laugh from one of the HP presenters; his offsider said he would buy anyone a coffee if they asked him about a product. Naturally I sent this out to the Internet for everyone to take him up on his offer!!

All in all it was a really good way to spend an afternoon. The bizgo sessions were only 15 minutes and maybe a bit more value would have been achieved from allowing 20 minutes. Saying that, there were stands on-site where attendees could see the vendors up close & personal and ask for more information. Only downside for me was not winning a prize at the end.