The last six months since my layoff has been a flurry of freelance work especially article writing. Moving from the glacial drift speed of a federal government contract back to freelance writing meant I had to get organized quickly. It was back to living by my ideas again.
One of the first things I did was get reorganized quickly and came to rely on the following apps:
If you’ve attended a web conference using an iPhone, you may have missed some of the meetings because of poor connectivity and limited mobile features in web conferencing client apps. However, with the release of the Adobe Connect Mobile for iOS app and Adobe Connect 9, you can more reliably attend and even host Adobe Connect web conferences using your iPhone. You can also use the app to augment your web conference and control the Adobe Connect features (just login once from your PC and then your iPhone).
Adobe Connect has several different purchase plans, including the option to pay-per-use. Organizations that use Adobe Connect or regularly interact with customers or partners who use Adobe Connect should definitely take advantage of the free Adobe Connect Mobile for iOS app.
via Web conferencing with Adobe Connect Mobile for iOS | TechRepublic.
Takeaway: Yammer, the enterprise social network, has a capable iPhone app that can help mobile users stay in touch with their coworkers. Will Kelly demonstrates the basics of the Yammer iOS app.
Yammer, the enterprise social network and recent Microsoft acquisition, is actually quite iPhone friendly. The Yammer iOS app lets iPhone users get access to their organization’s enterprise social network, so they can monitor their feed plus send and receive messages from other network members.
One of Yammer’s goals is to replace the email inbox, and the Yammer iOS app helps extend this new breed of social enterprise to mobile users.
Takeaway: MindNode Touch lets you create and manage mind maps on your iPhone. Will Kelly walks through some of the basics of this app.
TechRepublic blogger Andrew Makar recently wrote about the top mind mapping apps for the Android tablet. Fortunately, there are plenty of mind mapping apps for smartphones as well. I’ve found MindNode Touch to be the most effective mind mapping solution for the iPhone, because it requires a minimum of taps and adjustments to create a map. Let’s take a look at how to use MindNode Touch.
via Create mind maps with MindNode Touch on the iPhone | TechRepublic.
Takeaway: The iOS calendar is a useful app, but Agenda Calendar is a great low-cost alternative that offers greater control over the presentation and accessibility of your calendar data. Will Kelly explains.
As it goes with many of the apps in an operating system, you may need more features or grow tired with the user interface. That is the point I reached with the iOS calendar on my iPhone. I went to Agenda Calendar as a substitute, because it has a minimal design, a great user experience, and more configuration options.Let’s take a look at Agenda Calendar 3.0, which includes some speed and UI improvements. You can download Agenda Calendar from the App Store for $0.99 USD.
via Replace your iPhone calendar with Agenda Calendar | TechRepublic.
With today’s mobile and geographically dispersed teams, subscription-based eSignature platforms like Adobe EchoSign and DocuSign are more secure and sane options for sending documents for signoff than emailing PDF documents, having the recipient print them out, sign them in ink, scan the document to PDF again, and then send them back to the sender. Take one of these eSignature platforms a step further and integrate it into a CRM or document workflow, and documents can be sent securely to multiple mobile users who can sign off the documents from their iPhone.
via Three free apps for securely signing documents with your iPhone | TechRepublic.
I wrote this post for the Smartphones Blog on TechRepublic.com:
Microsoft Office 365, a cloud-based collaboration platform, is starting to get a lot of attention from Small to Medium Businesses (SMBs) and enterprises wanting to outsource their Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange email, and Unified Communications (UC). While some critics cite Office 365 as not being “mobile enough,” the iPhone setup is quite friendly and certainly a time-saver for organizations that are used to managing more complicated smartphone/email server setups in house.
via Connect your iPhone to Microsoft Office 365 | TechRepublic.
Take Control of Screen Sharing in Lion by Glenn Fleishman from TidBITS Publishing, Inc is a comprehensive book about the technology and art of Screen Sharing in OSX Lion. It’s the book to read if you want to learn the ropes of screen sharing in OSX Lion.
Fleishman leads readers through the basics of screen sharing through screen sharing with iChat (good coverage just too bad iChat is going away); sharing via BonJour; sharing via direct network connection; sharing via Back to My Mac; and sharing via Skype. The steps are all very detailed in each section. However, I would have liked the book to be a bit more generous with screen captures for the more novice Mac users reading this book.
One of the technologies I’ve been waiting to advance more into the mainstream is electronic signatures. While I have a smooth process down to print out contracts and other documents that need my signature and then scan them into PDFs with my Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, I would still like to whittle down the signatory process even further. Now that EchoSign, an electronic signature solution is an Adobe acquisition, I decided to reopen my research into electronic signature options.
Even smaller projects can benefit from a project management tool where the team lead and members can at least centralize task management. However, Microsoft Project can be overkill in such situations so it is better to look for a more mid-range tool for managing such projects and tasks. This is where cloud based project management applications really excel. After recently writing about Do.com, I learned about Asana – a cloud based task management application and had to check it out.
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