Workamajig Tip: How To Use the Project Diary

Within Workamajig, the Project Diary is an important, but often misunderstood, functionality that provides you with the ability to quickly communicate brief, informal messages to other people, such as co-workers, clients, and vendors that have access to a given project. This tutorial will help you use the Project Diary more efficiently and correctly.

The Project Diary is your central place to capture communications for a project. This is useful to ensure that important data that needs to be associated with a project becomes part of the permanent record of a project. This correspondence tracking can be useful when you need to document client changes, particularly if you have to document changes in a budget, and relay communications to co-workers, clients, & vendors.

Project Diary notes are intended to be informal in nature, and should not be treated with the same formalities as email. If the content of your message needs to be formal, and requires a full To, CC, or Subject line, use should use email. If you do opt to use email, you can then use the method described in the next paragraph to get a copy of your email inserted into the Project Diary. This methodology helps keep your inbox tidy, and prevents the Diary from becoming cluttered and excessively long. It should also be noted that Diary notes are listed in chronological order, in other words, the newest notes are listed at the bottom.

Creating Notes From Email

You can use the Project Diary function to store email you send outside of Workamajig to the Project within Workamajig.  This is as simple as sending and email to or CC’ing the email address provided to you by your System Administrator that is setup to receive Diary notes. Within the body of the email you simply need to include the project number in double brackets “[[PROJECT Number]]“. You can also attach files that you would like appended to the Project Diary, however it is important to remember that these files are not stored in Digital Assets/Files and will not show up when searching for files.

You can also add Diary Notes directly from the Project Central screen. From Project Central you can enter a new note, browse all of the notes that you and others have posted, as well as reply to notes. When adding notes from Project Central you also have the option to email a copy of the notes to others who have access to the project.

Creating Notes From Project Central

To send a new note Click on the “New Note” button, enter the text of your note, choose whether or not this note should be allowed to be seen by Clients if they have access to the project, and select people that should receive a copy of your note in their email, and click “Save”. This will post your email to the diary and email copy of the note to those that you selected.

To reply to a note in the Diary, click on the link to the right of the original Sender’s name and Date of the original note labeled “(Reply)”. This will allow you to type and post a response to the original sender’s note. After hitting the “Save” button your note will now appear in the Diary indented below the original note.

Did Microsoft Miss The Boat On Windows 7 Pricing?

Microsoft announced the Windows 7 retail pricing structure for all of the various versions of the operating system today, and at first glance it looks at though they missed the boat. While Windows 7 looks very promising thus far, as seen in the betas and Release Candidates, it looks as though they are going to drive folks away from it by maintaining nearly identical pricing to Vista, which the world seems to agree was one of Microsoft’s worst efforts to date. However, as usual Microsoft has an ace in the hole.

Pricing is as follows:

Home Premium       $199.99 Full / $119.99 Upgrade / $49 Pre-order before July 11
Professional              $299.99 Full / $199.99 Upgrade /$99 Pre-order before July 11
Ultimate                     $399.99 Full / $219.99 Upgrade

Most Consumers Don’t Buy Windows

What Microsoft normally banks on is the fact that most people don’t buy individual copies of Windows and install them on their existing computers, they get Windows when they buy a new computer. Which in my mind is why Microsoft should lower the retail price significantly, so that they can fight the public perception that Windows is expensive, but they won’t because that would require them to undercut what they are selling the licenses to OEMs and businesses at. Doing so would cause an uproar with some of their biggest partners and clients.

Microsoft also knows that Windows 7 seems to run better than Vista on existing computers that are currently running Vista and XP. This has not traditionally been the case. In the past with every new Windows release, if you simply upgraded your existing computer there was a performance hit, your computer usually would run slower than under the old operating system. This does not seem to be the case under Windows 7, which seems to fly on older computers and lower powered systems like Netbooks. All of this means that the potential market for retail boxed copy licenses for Windows 7 is greater than previous versions of Windows. Also with the current economic conditions people are more likely to upgrade than spend money on a whole new computer.

Pre-Ordering Offers The Most Value

If you are one of the many that are actually planning on buying a retail boxed copy of Windows 7, I encourage you to pre-order it before July 11th, 2009, as this would entitle you to the lower pricing of $49 and $99 for Home Premium and Professional respectively.

8 Technology Investments to Help Small & Medium Sized Businesses Dominate the Recession

When the economy takes a turn for the worse most business try and make swift budget cuts to give themselves a better financial runway. Usually these cuts impact Marketing and IT with great severity, when ideally these are the two areas you should be at the very least maintaining budgets. With that in mind over the next couple weeks we will be highlighting 8 areas where you can make relatively minor investments in technology to help your business Small or Medium sized business dominate in the recession by doing more with less to gain competitive advantages.

The 8 Technology areas that we will be highlighting:

1. Communications
2. Data Deduplication
3. Cloud Computing
4. Learning how to use the tech that you already have
5. Electronic Document Storage
6. Virtualization
7. Hardware Upgrades
8. Going Mobile

Active Directory Tip: Access External Website With The Same Domain Name As Your Internal Domain

It is often the case that companies use their external domain (i.e. enirtia.com) for their internal Active Directory domain, and this is completely fine, except when you want to access your website which is hosted on an external server.

Active Directory automatically sets up an internal DNS server for use on your network, and assumes that it is the Authorative server for the domain you used, which in our case here is “example.com”. When clients on your internal network ask your Active Directory DNS server for a lookup on example.com it is going to direct them to one of your domain controllers. If you request”www.enirtia.com” and you happen to have IIS running on one of those domain controllers you will see whatever the default website that is running on that server.

To get around this we need to add a redirect to your IIS server, a Host record to your internal DNS server, and a delegation to your DNS server, all of which are simple to do. These changes are based on the assumption that your external website is setup on external DNS servers with an “A” record pointing”www.enirtia.com” to the IP address of the server that is hosting your website, and that example.com without the “www” is setup with a CNAME record pointing at”www.enirtia.com“. If it is setup in the opposite manner this will not work.

Host Record:

First find out what the IP address is of the external web server if you do not already know it. Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > DNS and locate example.com. Right-click and choose “New Host (A or AAAA)”. Type “www” into the name field, and the IP address of your external web server into the IP Address field. Click the “Add Host” button to save.

IIS Redirect:

To redirect “http://enirtia.com” to “http://www.enirtia.com we need to create a redirect in your IIS server. Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services and locate the Default Web Site. Right-Click on the default web site, and choose Properties. Go to the Directory tab and setup a redirect to point to”www.enirtia.com”.

DNS Delegation:

To create a DNS Delegation you must know the names of external name servers servicing your domain name. Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > DNS and locate example.com. Right-Click and choose “New Delegation”. Type www into the Delegated Domain field, click next and provide it with external authorative name servers for your domain name.