The invasion of the iPhones

A little footnote to the conference blogs. I saw a good number of colleagues using their iPhones, among the NT supplied Nokias and Blackberries. When I found one wasn’t using his for his Trust calendar and email. I showed him how. I should have checked with all the other owners, to make sure they also knew how. We want a groundswell of popular iPhone use to make sure that our IT department don’t turn off the the OWA function that pushes us our email and diaries!

While I was writing this post, I was interupped by our head of e-engagement. We talk about all sorts of stuff, but I ended up briefing a new colleague if his on how to use her iPhone for exchange access. The march continues!

Guidebooks

First of all, apologies for the short hiatus. My home Mac crashed last week running iPhoto (I blame my wife, which is unfair but it happened on her watch). All sorts of weirdness happened wih the finder, including loosing the menubar and dock, and clicks on desktop items having no effect. A Time Machine restore back to the day before didn’t help, neither did going back to the day before that. So, frustrated, I did a clean install, and now I’m having to rebuild my digital life from the Time Machine. Thus no posts about work stuff. I did however just download the new WordPress iPhone app, so remote blogging without the clunky mobile interface, here I come!

To business. I met with the retail managers from across the region yesterday to talk about guidebooks. Guidebook sales are down this year – down more than the drop in visitors we are currently experiencing. Add in that that measure is based on the income form guidebooks, not the unit sales, and its a pretty sorry picture. Prices have gone up, so units sales must be even worse.

It’s not the retail managers fault. Guidebooks are sold in the shops yes, but are most likely to be bought at the front desk. The retail managers have little influence over what goes on in visitor reception, but the the guidebok sales are part fo the shop’s bottom line, and thus effect the percieved performance of the retail manager. So I thought it was only fair to ask the team what they thought of the guidebooks as a product. Are they proud to sell it? Is it on sale at the right price?

Over all the shop managers were positive. Our guidebooks are a mixed bag. Newer ones are of course more highly regarded, and there are some very old ones still in (huge) stock. Retail managers would like to see guidebooks updated (with a new cover at least) every three years. They’d also like to make sure that the people selling the guidebook (visitor reception team members generally and volunteers) had a better knowledge of what was in the guidebook and how a visitor might use it. There is also room for some price flexibility, and some sites are experimenting with dropping the price to improve sales. They also thought a separate sales point after reception but before the main area of the visit would take some of the pressure of the reception team, if enough suitable volunteers to man it could be found.

Guidebooks are updated by a central team, at a reasonable rate. But I’m wondering if the region shouldn’t invest in a bigger updating push, to make sure all our guidebook product is as good as the best-sellers.

In Praise of ActiveSync

 

Sync'd! My work calendar now appears effortlessly on my iPhone.

I was planning to write about the reading I’ve been doing around TMS today. But I’ve got great news! I can see my work emails and calendar on my personal iPhone! I’ve been an iPhone user since last November. I won’t go on about why, except to say I’ve long refused to have anything to do with mobile phones until they had no buttons but a touch screen, and finally, with last year’s release, the technology caught up with my wishes.

 

I love my first gen iPhone so much I have no interest in last weeks release of iPhone3G. But I was interested in the 2.0 firmware and the launch of MobileMe, either one of which I hoped would finally allow me to keep all my appointments, work and personal, up to date on the one device. Previously, because the NT run a pretty secure IT ship, with no useful downloads or the ability to plug in your personal device allowed, I had to kludge my work dates onto my phone. I used to periodically export my work calendar to a .csv file, upload that to Google calendar, publish/subcribe that to iCal on my home Mac Mini, and finally sync iCal with my iPhone. And because that was a palaver, I’d do my best to enter new dates in both work and iphone, and forward meeting invites to yahoo mail, so that they got pushed to my iPhone.

Phew! So, I was pretty keen to see if I could get the new ActiveSync enabled iPhone firmware to talk to my Exchange account at work. If that failed I was excited by the possibility that MobileMe, the replacement for .Mac, would be able to sync with Outlook on Windows machines. I thought it was pretty unlikely that the NT would be running ActiveSync, as all the Senior Management Team have Blackberries, which use a proprietary alternative to ActiveSync. So I’ve been looking more keenly at MobileMe. But that, it turns out requires iTunes on the PC. I can’t load iTunes (or anything else) on the locked down Desktop, so that was a non-starter. Which found me idly playing about with the settings that I use to access webmail when I’m at home without my laptop, or when VPN is playing up (our VPN and Outlook appear to have a love-hate relationship). No luck, until I tried adding a domain to my username, and hey presto! My inbox and, when I flicked the switch, my calendar too! god bless Steve Jobs (and Microsoft of course, which wrote ActiveSync)!