Busy Busy Busy
Working OnWhere does the time go? Holy cow, where did June go? For that matter where did the first half of 2008 go? Can you believe it's the second half of the year already? All those projects at work that I've been pushing off until the end of the year are now fast approaching. Those will all have to wait until I can get this other stuff done.
Here is a short list of what I've been working on:
- eTech Channel Web Site: This is an internal web site that my group developed. We are creating CNET TV like videos on the technology we are working on. We launched the site on teh 23rd and so far the feedback has been good. It's done in .Net which I'm not happy about but it will do for now.
- Digital Signage: DS seems to be taking off lately. We have one call center installing it now with another agreeing to install yesterday. I'll have a meeting next week sometime with the President of the newest call center. I've been told I need to create some content to WOW him. I am working on a web site where users can create messages and have them posted on their digital signage board. In short this works with the web site posting the message to the database and then the digital signage server reading the database for message and displaying them on the monitors.
- Thunder: Need to get caught up on our PolyVision Thunder Room. Haven't performed too much on this project lately, although we did get network and power to all four tables in the room. Thats 16 ports of network and 16 power jacks folks. Go ahead, plug in! I need to come up with a project to promote Thunder with amoung the employees in Dallas. I think I'm going to call it "Thunder Days". We want people to come see the room and then sign up to use the room for real meetings
Those seem to be the big three projects lately. I've also be working on other little things but nothing work noting. Lots of documentation.
Last Friday AT&T announced that we are moving our headquarters from San Antonio to Dallas. That annoucment sure has shook things up here. We have people moving others moving out.... crazyness. I did get to meet our CEO, Randall Stephenson, yesterday. That was very exciting, he's very tall!
Thats all for now. I am still running and loving the Garmin 201 Forerunner device that Jenell let me borrow. Ran almost 30 miles in June.
Good Day!
Ryan
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David Ackerman Wannabe
Evolving Technologies, Working OnSo part of my job at AT&T is to reasearch new technology and evaluate if we feel it would fit well within the company. Since this "research" often involves getting new hardware and software to play with we thought we'd start an CNETTV type web site for internal use. So far we have about 13 videos created. The site goes live around June 23rd, wish me luck.
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Good Day!
Ryan
PS David Ackerman is a very lively senior editor at CNET who reviews laptops.
Digital Signage from Cisco?
Working OnDigital sigange from Cisco??? Really??? 'tis true!
A while ago I wrote a blog post on a technology I am working on called digital sigange. In it nut shell this technology allows you to take a monitor, big or small, and turn it into an electronic billboard. A billboard not for a single ad but for multiple areas of content. It's really big in the hospitality industry and we're trying to see where it fits within out copany. At any rate the Cisco equipment came in earlier this week and we will be hooking it up and testing it today.
THIS is the fun part of my job! More to come on this topic I'm sure.
Good Day!
Ryan
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Where's Ryan??!!
Working OnHey Everyone,
As you've probably noticed I haven't been blogging much lately. I don't really have an exuse other than things have been really busy at work and it's been spilling over into my "non-work" hours. At any rate here is a short up date on what I've been working on.
PolyVision Thunder
As I explained in one of my older posts the team that I'm on right now gets to play with a whole bunch of new toys. One of these new toys is called PolyVision Thunder. I'm not too fond of the name but the product is really cool. Thunder is paper flip chartting gone digital, with some new twists! With Thunder you have your easel which is actually a 50in plasma with a touch senstive overlay on it. This allows users to use their finger or the included stylus to write on the digital pages. From there your digital pages get procjected on the wall using ceiling mounted projectors. This is a very cool feature and Thunder can support up to 8 projectors. With the easel in portrait mode you get two "pages" per projector or one "page" per projector with the easel in landscape mode.
Other features include the ability to save, email and print your Thunder presentations. You can also have multiple Thunder Rooms connected to each other so users in location A can collaborate with users in location B! In this scenario each location would see the same pages on their projectors and be able to edit those pages on their easel. Additionally you can add download software that allows remote users to connect to the Thunder session from their desktop or laptop. Users connecting this way also have the ability to see and manipulate the presentation. They can also share out their desktop for others to view and "print to Thunder" which takes a document from their computer and prints it to a page in the Thunder session.
We just added a Thunder room here at my location and I'm very excited to start working with it. Based on feedback from the vendor I know of a few other companies that have Thunder. Do any of you out there use it?
This turned out to be a longer blog post that I had planned on. I have a few more things I'd like to talk about but I will save those for a couple days.
Good Day!
Ryan
What I'm Working On: Digital Signage
Working OnSo what the heck does a guy working for the Evolving Technologies Organization do all day? Work! Yes, as fun as the job is it is still work!
My first project with the new organization had to do with a
technology that isn’t exactly new but it is new to AT&T. The technology is digital signage and it’s
the idea of taking a wide screen monitor and filling that monitor with different
streams of information. Seen more and
more in the retail and hospitality industry, we’re looking at digital signage
as another form of employee communications.
As a society we are much more visual today that we were even 15 years
ago. It wasn’t all that long ago that we
read our news in the newspaper or listened to it on the radio. Today, cable TV and the Internet bring us our
news and information on demand and in full color and full motion.
When I think of digital signage I think of a billboard, a billboard not for single ad but for multiple ads or multiple streams of information. Company news and events, rewards and recognition and even live TV can all be displayed on a single monitor. With the right software call centers can even use this technology to display their call statistics for their employees. Call stats like the number of calls currently on hold or maybe the number one employee in sales.
We are currently evaluating a product called TargetVision from Symon Communications for our digital signage needs. A basic set up would consist of a Symon Server a Symon Digital Appliance (SDA) and a large LCD Monitor. We are recommending LCD over plasmas at this point due to the likelihood of burn in on the plasmas. Content is developed on the server then downloaded by the SDAs then displayed on the monitors. More complicated set-ups obviously exist to include multiple monitor being fed from one SDA.
I’m really excited about this technology and it actually brings be full circle back into my first job with the company. Back then we made a similar home grown system called TechNet. With TechNet we deployed a CRT TV and computer to every garage in the Midwest region. These computers are connected to a web server over the company network. TechNet is used to keep the technicians informed of company news and to provide them with training. In a sense Symon’s product is the next generation of the TechNet project I helped to develop years ago.
Well that’s all I’ll bore you with for now. If you or your company is working on digital signage I’d be curious to hear how it is working for you. If you have any questions please let me know.
Good Day!Ryan
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