Cedar Mill Communications

I had the opportunity recently to be a co-presenter in a media training session. One of the tips we always give prospective spokespeople is to avoid the use of jargon and meaningless tech words.

We have a pretty good list:

• Leading
• Enhanced
• Unique
• Significant
• Solution
• Integrated
• Innovative
• Advanced
• Sophisticated
• E-anything
• Best-in-Class

And, last but not least, the word I’ve found most bothersome of late: Leverage.

Most of the time PR, marketing and sales folks are leveraging leverage to such a degree that it’s meaningless. Whether as a verb, noun, adjective, it’s been misused, overused and tweaked to the point where all relevance and impact is gone. There probably hasn’t been an enterprise hardware or software press release issued in the last 20 years without some leverage, somewhere.

It’s especially popular in headlines:

“Oracle Service Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo”

“IBM reveals Long Term File System (LTFS) to leverage LTO-5”

“Webinar: Leverage Microsoft SharePoint in you Online Marketing”

“Leverage Your Existing EMC Centera Investment with OnBase”

“RIM’s New MVS 5 Leverages Cisco Unified Communications Manager”

Maybe somebody knows what it means to leverage LTO-5 with a long-term file system, but you’ve got me with that one. The point of putting out a press release, for instance, is to communicate information so that it can be understood, not to leave people scratching their heads in confusion. Most of time when I see the word leverage, it’s pretty unclear what going on. Maybe the author didn’t know either.

If you’re a TV watcher, you know that leverage even has it owns series on TNT starring Timothy Hutton. The series is solid, and the use of the word leverage here almost forgivable. Leverage is so vague that you’re not entirely sure what the show is about. As names for undercover spy-like thrillers with a twist go, it’s tough to top Mission Impossible. But I guess Leverage isn’t all that bad.

If you’re producing a hit TV series, I’ll let you off the hook. For everyone else, take a minute and look at your copy or slide deck. How many times are you leveraging something? Three? Five? Ten? Do yourself and your readers a favor and cut that number in half. Or, if you’re truly committed to reform, delete them all. You just don’t need any more leverage.

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For those us who have been unable to transition our lives to Twitter and Facebook, we are highly dependent upon email.  Unfortunately, the entire email system is overrun with unscrupulous types who blast out vast quantities of garbage, to the point that we must waste considerable time sifting through these pointless missives to get to the mails we care about.

For the past several years, Outlook has included a junk mail filter. This sounds promising but in reality it doesn’t do a very good job. The spammers have figured out how it filters the mail and game it with ease. What’s worse, it will also trap mails from clients and others I want in junk mail purgatory.  This means that I have to look through all the putrid junk mail in case a mail I want got misfiled.

In my quest for a better alternative, I have landed on the service from Cloudmark. It installs a lightweight toolbar in Outlook and then taps the collective brains of its users to spot the spam.  This means that it can’t get false positives, and it gets the vast majority of spam out there.  I’ve been using it for about a week and in that time it caught an astonding 1,360 spam mails that Microsoft’s junk mail filter missed.  Wow. What a lifesaver.

Here’s a tip for you.  Cloudmark charges $39.95 per year per subscription for the service. Well worth it. But you can get it for less from Sunbelt Software under the brand name I Hate Spam for $29.95 or, and here’s the best part, $49.95 for a home site license.

If enough people start using this, maybe the percentage of people responding to spam (somebody must respond to spam or the spammers wouldn’t keep sending it) will go from .000001 of a percent to 0% and the spammers will all starve to death and leave us alone. One can hope.

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When it comes to new gadgets and technology, my attitude is bring it on. I’m willing to try anything. But the things I keep and cherish have one thing in common: they work and they work well.  Whether it’s a bicycle wheel that stays true or a phone that I can drop in the water and have it keep working (the Casio G’zone), things that do their job effortlessly are keepers.

The operating system on a computer is pretty vital.  Its main job is to connect all the applications, printers, Web sites that I need to do writing and PR and to keep them safe from bad guys and prying eyes. Oh, and it needs to do all this quickly. With the Vista operating system, I think Microsoft wanted to make the OS more visible and lost sight of what we really need from an OS: for it to just work. Vista has a tendency, at least on my desktop system, to randomly slow down and then crash, although it does seem secure. But the biggest problem is that it’s just slow. And it’s not my computer, which is plenty fast and has more than enough memory and disk space. Vista is just a slow and inefficient OS.

More than once, I’ve considered switching over to Linux or dropping back to XP. But in both cases, I would have to give up enough in the way of features that I haven’t made the downgrade. Plus, it would be a hassle. Still, I was more than ready when the Windows 7 beta came out last week, with Steve Ballmer proclaiming “we heard you.”

Now, after downloading and installing Windows 7, it appears that Microsoft did in fact hear us, and get it right. It works. I simply upgraded my existing Vista install and everything came up roses — working fine. The user interface is clean and easy to use, and, more importantly my computer is back to being fast. Windows open now. Even Outlook 2007 is running better and faster.  Since this is just beta code, hopefully the experience will continue to improve as we get nearer to production.

If you have Vista, save yourself some time and get Windows 7. Even in beta, from what I can tell, it’s a nice improvement.

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Despite my earlier rant about the slowness of Outlook, which is slightly better with a lot tweaking, there are some things about Microsoft Office 2007 that are pretty cool, but with a caveat.

As has been duly noted by many reviewers, the ribbon interface is a good thing.  What I really enjoy about it is that using Office is actually fun. Maybe it’s just the newness factor, but it’s fun to click around the ribbon thing and find little nuggets of functionality.  But the one new thing that I find truly useful is the smart art feature. It let’s me instantly turn any list into a cool 3-d chart of my choosing.  The effects are pretty good and add a lot of pop to slide decks or documents.  Once everybody starts using Office 2007, smart art graphics won’t be a big deal. For now, however, I’m loving having the coolest PowerPoints around.

The caveat?  Unfortunately, slides that incorporate the smart art, can’t be edited by anyone using older versions of PowerPoint. In any sort of collaborative environment, this is a problem.  But, I’m still using the Smart Art. 

 When I get a chance, I’ll put up a few examples.

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Like most people in communications, and in fact business in general, I spend a lot of time writing, sending or reading email each day. The application of choice over the last 10 or so years has been Microsoft Outlook.  It has its flaws but overall I like it, and have always moved to the new version when it became available. Each new version has been an improvement, so I was excited to see what was new in Outlook 2007 and installed the beta.

Overall, I liked the beta but noticed that everytime Outlook checked for new mail on a POP account, my computer would slow significantly, almost to the point of not being usable.  I chalked that up to beta software, figuring that the problem would be solved in production versions.  I’ve just recently moved to the official released version and, if anything, the problem is worse.  If I were on a slow computer or had a slow Internet connection, I could see this.  However, I have a modern dual-core CPU and 1 GB of RAM, so that’s not really this issue.  I also have Outlook 2007 running on a Vista computer, and while the problem isn’t quite as bad on Vista, it’s still there.

I’ve checked a lot of threads, and a lot of people are having this problem, and so far, there doesn’t seem to be a solution. If you are thinking about an “upgrade” to Office 2007, my suggestion is to wait until Microsoft posts a fix to the Outlook slowness problem.  It’s very difficult to be productive with your computer essentially locking up for 30 seconds or so every time there’s new mail to be downloaded.  This is a huge bug and very disappointing from a company like Microsoft.

As an aside, I’ve done a lot of work for Microsoft and have a ton of resepect for them. I’m confident they will get the problem fixed, and overall Outlook 2007 is a step forward in usability and convenience. For for now, beware the upgrade.

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