Lenovo Twist

Harbor joined the Lenovo partner team earlier this year after I went to a show in Florida and had an opportunity to put my hands on the new products in a small environment of 20 IT firms and about 5 Lenovo VP and upper Management types. I made some great contacts within Lenovo at that time. That level of contact is the type of thing that I look for in a new vendor. Will they treat you (our clients) as mere numbers or will they treat you as a valued customer and listen to the feedback that we pass up to them. Are they interested in small business or are they just making enterprise products that they think can shoehorn into smaller businesses?

I’m please to say that we’re now a Lenovo partner. I was suitably impressed with what they had to say, now they interacted, and now they’ve opened an assembly plant in the USA. They have also promised us better than website pricing when we purchase direct.

I placed the Lenovo Twist into Missy’s hands. She was still using the $200 Dell Netbook from several years ago. The upgrade served two purposes. First she really needed something mobile and the Netbook just wasn’t serving the purpose anymore and second, she’s our only non-IT person and so is the only one that can really give new hardware a realistic test.

The Lenovo Twist is a touch-screen laptop running Windows 8. The screen can flip around so you can use it as a tablet. It’s very thin, all things considered. It has 12.5” screen so it’s not huge but it’s “big enough for mobile work”. It can however double as a desktop replacement when paired with the USB docking station. The USB docking station can handle 2 DVI monitors, sound and 6 USB3 devices. 

The Twist has 12.5” touch display, i5 processor, 4GB ram, gorilla glass, and a solid state hard drive. It’s water resistant and anti-microbial. It is classified as an UltraBook which means that it’s thin, light and doesn’t have a DVD drive. It is lightening fast and has a battery life of about 6 hours.

I’m really, really impressed with it. Based on the solid feeling that it has I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it will live up to the reputation of Lenovo as being built like a tank. It feels like it will handle any amount of travel you can put it through.

It comes with Windows 8 Pro 64. Most importantly Missy took to it like a duck to water. She hadn’t seen Windows 8 before but immediately liked the touch environment, long battery life and instant start-up.  If you’d like to see one in person, we’re happy to bring it over next time your tech is in the neighborhood so you can check it out.

-Amy

“Eating Our Own Dogfood”

Eating your own dog food is a phrase that IT people use that means, using the products you recommend. There’s a verb for this too; it’s dogfooding. Dogfooding happens when we are testing something in production to see if it’s going to be worth mentioning to you or not. At Harbor we both Eat Our Own Dogfood and Dogfood hardware, software and services to see if they live up to their hype. It’s how we stay ahead and can make educated recommendations.

IT people have a lot of strange terms for things. Some items end up being our favorites and so they end up in production here as a permanent fixtures: Sharepoint, Office 365, Harbor Secure Cloud, Lync, Windows Phones. We just couldn’t get along without them. Some things are absolute winners like MultiPoint, Hyper-V, IP Phone systems, Spectorsoft and Remote Desktop Server. Some things comes and go: iPhones, NetBooks, Onsite Servers, Desktop PC’s, scanners, and fax machines.

Here’s a few of the items that we’re dogfooding right now.

• Intune, mobile phone management, Azure, SkyDrive Pro, non-domain environments, two-factor authentication, single sign-on and password servers
• Lenovo Twist, NUC, and Surface
• Policy’s, policy’s and more policy’s

We think that most of these are winners and so that’s were we are focusing. Some ideas come and go but the ones above are items that we’ve decided to really focus on because early indications are that these things are going to solve problems that we see developing.

Unsubscribe Does Work

I’ve been conducting an experiment on my email recently. The experiment was to determine if unsubscribing from mail I don’t want worked or didn’t work. It worked! I’m now getting a lot less mail that I’m not interested in.

Why unsubscribe?

The Can Spam Act paved a two-way street for spam. On one side of the street it makes advertisers provide an easy unsubscribe option and expects them to prove that you opted into their mailing list. On the other side is prevents anti-spam services from blocking mailing lists that you signed up for.

Now we all know that in practice we are getting newsletters and mail that we didn’t explicitly sign up for. I get a lot of mail where I can see that my address has been passed along by magazines, newsletters, website registrations, credit card companies, conferences I attended, etc. There are a myriad of ways for my name to end up on someone’s approved list that technically meets the requirements of the Can Spam Act but that doesn’t mean I want their mail. Since the spam filter can’t block this “legitimate” mail I need to unsubscribe.

In days past it was known that unsubscribing from mail just put you on more lists of email addresses that actually exist. Spammers sold these “verified” mailing lists at a premium. But the good news is that the Can Spam Act has done some good. I just went through a period of a couple of weeks where I went through and unsubscribed from everything I didn’t want as mail from that source arrived. My unwanted mail is now down to a tolerable minimum.

If you want to unsubscribe from an email, scroll all the way to the bottom and look for the unsubscribe link.

This will carry me through until the next conference I attend so this is a war that is never won, but the battle can be and the result is a much cleaner mailbox.

-Amy