It first showed it’s true colors when I updated my work MacBook to the latest version of OS X and the whole thing died on me. Pulled every trick in the book to revive it, but alas, it was done for. So while I waited for the sys admin to trying and figure out what to do with it, I relied on the iPad to continue working, and it came through with bright and shining colors.

First off, it saved my ass in being able to email back clients and coordinating work. If that was the only thing I needed to do, it saved my ass. But it went further, and got me on the file sharing network, and I could edit reports with iWork, instant message with the team, update my calendar and more. It was amazing that no one in the office noticed I wasn’t on a laptop only until they came over to ask me a question and realize that I bought the new iPad and ooohed and aaahed in amazement at how thin it is.

But that was work, and now I find myself using this bad boy as my main device at home. I even stopped brining back my work laptop and doing everything I need on the iPad. My favorite use for it is when I go out for a shoot, and want to really see what I got without having to sit at the Mac mini at home in my room. I just plug in the camera connector kit, slide in the SD card, import the photos and I got instant large screen viewing of my pictures. Great for triage, and only keeping the best shots of the day. Also comes in handing when I’m not sure if you got a good shot and can’t tell from the small screen on the camera, I get a better view on a large screen without too much hassle. Though I would love to be able to do some preliminary work on photos right on the device. Rating photos, light and basic touch ups here and there. Would be a great workflow tool before I go in to Aperture on the Mac.

On a day to day basis, I use the iPad for emailing, calendaring, Facebook, Netflix, reading on the kindle, instant messaging and doing some light research and blog updates. With more and more specialized apps that take the interface beyond expectations, I see this as being my main tool and only going back to a laptop or desktop for when I need to do really heavy work like intensive reports and spreadsheets, photo editing and design intensive tasks.

So far, I’m loving this bad boy and how it’s changed the way I do things, and its so much lighter than lugging a laptop around. Best part is you don’t have to take it out of your bag when going through security checks at the airport. Bonus!!

I work in a mixed pc/mac environment using an online task and project management tool, which offers some rudimentary milestone scheduling features, and we use Exchange 2003 for our email and calendaring. I know, its old, and its almost deprecated, but until we upgrade, its what we have. But even if we upgrade it doesn’t solve the problem.

The problem is in open standards adoption of CalDav on Windows/Outlook, and the Mac’s implementation of exchange calendars in iCal and Entourage/Outlook for mac.

Windows and Outlook

In Outlook for Windows, unless your using exchange, there is very little you can do out of the box to get a could synchronized shared calendar solution. Sure you can use google calendar with a plugin, but thats not really ideal now is it.

Mac and iCal

iCal is great and I love it, and use it extensively with MobileMe. I have a whole bunch of calendars synched with my iPhone for scheduling on the go, and i cant live without it.

What gets my goat is that it doesn’t support older versions of exchange. It also frustrates me when sending and accepting meeting requests to pc’s. Its either outlook on windows cant read or open them, or it doesn’t get my meeting request replies. I don’t know if this problem is solved with a newer exchange server or not, but at the moment, is killing me.

Mac and Outlook

I’ve played around with Office 2011 Outlook beta, and i love it. I love how similar to Outlook on PC, and its spectacular. My beef comes down again to the fact it doesn’t support older versions of exchange, and again it doesn’t support CalDav. So i cant get my google or MobileMe calendars on it. Which cripples it severely for me.

I know this is a bit of a rant at the state of things, but it doesn’t seem like there is any planned future updates for some applications to improve this. iCal for mac may get an update soon in the next Mac OS X update that might solve this. I doubt Outlook on Windows will start supporting CalDav anytime soon, coz they would have already. As for Outlook for mac, turns out they left out that feature on purpose because they wanted to concentrate on exchange functionality first. So it maybe an added feature in future update. But until then, i cant use it much.

Anyone have any ideas or suggestions on getting a working Mac/Windows shared calendaring experience going smoothly?

I’m one of those people who is pretty much accessible on most of the available channels, to the point where some friends panic when I don’t answer the phone after a few attempts, or get frumpy when I don’t email or instant message back promptly.

I have to say, it’s becoming quite the chore to manage all of these channels, but you find a way to filter the noise, keep things sane with good tools and habits.

What happens though, when you encounter someone who isn’t as connected? Those who find cell phones intrusive and can’t stand text messaging. They don’t get the point of Twitter ( I sometimes don’t really), and Facebook is just too open and scary with too much information for their taste. How do you communicate with those who aren’t connected?

How do you handle people who are hard to reach? I just try and try again!!!

Engagement

Creating an environment that attracts users and keeps them is one hell of a task, and continuously engaging your users is not small feat. You have to create a culture of sharing, collaboration, and reciprocation that makes the user want to participate in what you developed, and pull in others in to the fun.

Social engagement needs to involve actions that builds on a users social connections, and something that will appeal to a circle of friends. The hook is the quick and easy action that is viral and has high visibility to social graph. The line is the engaging actions that bring in your social connections and continues to connect them. And the sinker is community that brings more people together one way or another.

Communicate

Communication, communication, communication is to social media what location, location, location is to business. Communication with your users is one of the most important aspects of social media. What do I mean by communication? Meaningful dialog with your users through blog post commentary, forums and discussion boards, Twitter and support channels.

Communication has to be a two way street, where you can personally talk to your users. Now you might be tempted to talk about your product, how people use it, and give them tips and tricks on how to utilize it better. Thats a great start, but the key is to find out what your users want to talk about and not what you want to talk about. This is where you have to get more personal with your users and learn from them. And here is the segway to the next point …

Learn

Learning from your users is the only way to iteratively develop and enhance your product and user experience. Users can be very vocal about what they want and what they like, but you need to build a dialog of trust that brings out the constructive criticism to you. It’s important to be able to track feedback, themes in constructive criticism and be able to prioritize and respond appropriately.

What you will learn is that they way your application is used, can be very different from what you intended it to be. Learning and understanding how your users are thinking differently about what you’ve built will get you farther in finding news was to engage than any other way.

How do you continually engage with your users, and what tools do you utilize to learn form your users?