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Talking about Lala's Christmas Performance 2008

  
Video: Lala's Christmas Performance 2008

Unfortunately, after what I thought was a very good keynote yesterday for somebody in the marketing field, this morning session entitled Agency 2.0 is very disappointing.  The presenter is doing nothing other than just reading the slides he's created, not engaging at all, and it just boring overall.  Too bad, I was really looking forward to this session, and its just horrible.  I guess I've gotten used to the standard of many Microsoft presenters and they are quite skilled at what they do.

A few things gleaned from yesterday's keynote and thoughts afterward:

• We have to look for opportunities to go towards a more interactive medium for advertising
• We have to find a way to build a brand for our clients on the web, moreso than just a static website with a consultation form.
• While traditional mass media is not dead, it is morphing and changing with the times.  Rather than TV driving people to the web, the web is now pushing people to TV and to other forms of traditional media.

The reality is that going forward, we're going to have to look to non-traditional forms of media.  One of the issues that does complicate matters for cj is the target demographic of our clients' customers.  They tend to be either lower income, or older which are two demographics that interactive media really won't have that large an impact on.  The question becomes, do we focus resources on the larger demographic that tend to not be direct response customers, or do we just focus on the people more typically suited for a direct response approach (via Yellow Pages, TV, outdoor advertising, etc.).

My thought is that if we don't invest some resources into this "future" media, we'll be left behind, wondering what happened.  We need to lead the curve, rather than follow it.

Sitting in the intermission between sessions of Building a .NET app using Silverlight.  I know there will be plenty of people calling this the Microsoft Flash, and I can see that viewpoint (I guess), but the truth of the matter is that it appears, at least on the surface to be much more.  I really can't wait to start getting in and playing with these bits to build some media type apps.  I think Silverlight will be exactly what we need at cj, considering we are a MEDIA company.

Sitting in the intermission between sessions of Building a .NET app using Silverlight.  I know there will be plenty of people calling this the Microsoft Flash, and I can see that viewpoint (I guess), but the truth of the matter is that it appears, at least on the surface to be much more.  I really can't wait to start getting in and playing with these bits to build some media type apps.  I think Silverlight will be exactly what we need at cj, considering we are a MEDIA company.

We're moving from a POP3 server hosted by Electric Mail right now to an interal Exchange Server 2007.  Given the relative growth of our company, we needed a better solution for mail management, but especially for calendar sharing, and the benefits of OWA and Outlook Anywhere.

I knew that trying to integrate Exchange 2007 and Entourage 2004 on OS X would be fraught with much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.  I found a number of articles on the web concerning people getting the two to work together fine, but no matter what I tried, Entourage did not want to hook up to Exchange 2007.

Now, I need to note here that this is for fresh, clean installs of Exchange 2007, not upgrades.  You'll see why in a minute.

If you have a clean initial install of Exchange 2007, in order to get Entourage to work properly, you have to install the legacy folders for OWA.  Mind you, none of the books I read, nor did any of the blogs/forums I read mention this rather essential fact.  What I found was the following:

• If you create the legacy folders of Exchange and Exadmin specifically, you should be ok.
• You will probably have to use the address of http://mobile.yourdomainname.com/exchange/username@domain.com in order for Entourage to correctly hook up.  Note, you have to use exchange, not owa which is the new Exchange 2007 folder that should be useable.

Hopefully, this tip will help someone out there before they go through 8 hours of frustration and wanting to rid myself of every Mac in my office.  We only have 5, but what a headache they can be.

That being said, I'd still take a MacBook Pro if I had the opportunity.  Boot Camp is a wonderful thing, and if it can run Vista or OS X, to me that would be the best of both world.  May a large lightning bolt not hit me in the head for having said that... :)

Yeah, yeah, so my previous post was lame. 

Here's the downlow: My name is Jason Clark, I'm currently the IT Directory (and lead ASP.NET developer) forcj Advertisingg in Nashville, TN.  This blog will be more of a professional blog, I have a more personal blog at http://www.riceboyler.com, my main site.  (And yes, it's on PHP for now.)

I've been developing using ASP.NET since 2003, where I started at Dell Computer as a reporting analyst and web developer.  Previously, I had been working in PHP exclusively on a site for MECA (which I just recently finished migrating to ASP.NET, and subsequently due to my promotion at work, had to relenquish), and other car related sites.  I still dabble in PHP, but love ASP.NET more.  Most of my ASP.NET development work is not web facing, in the strongest sense of the word.  Our web department at cj is very talented at design, and their collective strengths lie with a little more PHP.  In the future, I may push for that to change somewhat, but for now, it works well.

Hopefully, moving to Spaces can get me more motivated to blog more often about both development issues and stuff I run into in the IT world.  I'll post one such thing in a minute.

That's my professional life in a nutshell.  As of May 2007, we're looking for a good young ASP.NET developer to come on board at cj.  If that person is you, email me at jclark at cjadvertising.com.