Latitude E6430s and its Biometrics

I received a brand new Latitude E6430s yesterday and found it great! Except for one thing....(there's always one thing isn't there?)...the fingerprint reader!

It wouldn't work and for the life of me I could not find out why.

I decided to call Dell Early Life Support (ELS for short) to resolve the issue. Being the first I imagine with this online hopefully Google will pickup on this and help someone else with the issue as well. Since we call can't wait on a phone for ELS to pickup....the on hold music was good though (*cough*)

The Fingerprint reader used to be access by a thing called Dell Control Vault...well thats been replaced (just in time too, I was getting used to making sure Control Vault was installed during Windows Deployments to get rid of unknown devices in the Device Manager)

You will now use software called Access. Yes just Access, sure its under the Dell folder called Dell Data Proection but if you search through the start menu just type in Access.

Follow the on screen prompts and register your finger prints (I would suggest more than one, you never know when a rabbid chipmunk might take off your finger). Configure your login options after that and you are good to go!

Now to make sure I install Control Vault....I mean Access from now on. This is just as bad as trying to remember a new password.

Apple iCloud, does it make more sense now than last year?

Being on the verge of exiting Apples mobile platform I reflect upon a great idea with horrid execution and see if it is worth it before IOS6 releases.

For those with ADD my answer is no, but its darn close. Let me iron out the features one by one.

Mail, Contacts, Calendar - Only useful if you do not have a mail carrier, or you have 2 IOS devices you need contacts and calendar information syncd on.

Reminders - Useful if you use reminders and want them synced so your devicds work in tandum. Though Remindersona 3Gs is primitive.

Bookmarks - Probably the most useful thing in iCloud. Being able to sync with your Desktop browser of choice is great.

Notes - Well notes is, notes...personally OneNote from Microsoft has more capabilities and can be synced to SkyDrive and Office.

Photostream - Is nice but the slowness of syncing  is a bit irratating. If using iPhoto on a mac though its good. If you have a PC use Dropbox.

Documents and Data - Never used it since so few apps support it.

Find My iPhone - Pretty darn cool, if you loose things.

Office365 and SkyDrive....not compatible?

It seems silly that two products from the same company aren't compatible, worse yet they let you sign up for both with the same email before throwing you lots of nice errors to make it warm and cosy.

I am talking about Microsofts Office 365 Suite and Sky Drive.

Long story short, if you decide to log into Sky Drive with your Office 365 account, you will be unable to log into your Office 365 account until you log completely out of the web page and then proceed to O365. Not doing so prompts your Office 365 address to redirect to Outlook.com making things about as confusing and useless as my finger on an LCD monitor.


EDIT (1/3/2014) : Since posting this Microsoft has made big strides in Office 365 by adding SkyDrive Pro support and increasing its compatibility across all of its services (including One Note for Mobile)

A few steps on migrating your company to a new printer

I had the pleasure of installing two new multifunction printers yesterday. I did find however a few things that I could've done better.

The first thing I would recommend is to get the printer on site before you need it deployed. I found that in being crunched for time, there was significant downtime for users who wanted to print but did not have a printer to print to. As the old printers were gone and I was still installing the new one people were very confused as to where to print to and what machines were available. I also ran into significant problems with the abilities of scanning to email and faxing during the period of installing these printers. A lot of these problems could've been avoided if I had given myself at least 24 hours to work on the machines before deploying them out and loosing the older ones.

The second act recommended is picking out a test set of users to test the machine. I would pick between  three and four users who would not be frightened by potential issues. While you can't test everything such as faxing you can at least test the basic functions of the machine giving you more time to devote to potential unknown issues.

The last thing to keep in mind is to not deploy all the features of the printer at one time. Take a breather and test each ability at a slower pace rolling them out to users when you are only 100% confident in their functions and abilities. This will give the perception that the printer has less issues and that you have not made a mistake by replacing an older machine users were familiar with.