eCommerce and

• As of March 11, 2010 Rhea Drysdale won the case against Jason Gambert who filed an application to try and trademark the term “SEO”.  Congratulations and way to stick with it Rhea.


• Matt Cutts was interviewed by Eric Enge.  In the interview Matt discusses the loss of PageRank through 301’s:
  
  “Eric Enge: Let’s say you move from one domain to another and you write yourself a nice little statement that basically instructs the search engine and, any user agent on how to remap from one domain to the other. In a scenario like this, is there some loss in PageRank that can take place simply because the user who originally implemented a link to the site didn't link to it on the new domain?
  Matt Cutts: That's a good question, and I am not 100 percent sure about the answer. I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).”


• Ars Technica reported on a collective of studies, all providing insights into the behaviors of social medial users.  They broke the report up into five key insights all of which are quite interesting:
  
  1. The majority of Twitter users are still just voyeurs.
  2. Mobile social networking is for the ladies.
  3. More more more!
  4. Facebook users are fans of traditional media.
  5. Social media isn't replacing real life just yet.


• Consumers are still researching online and purchasing locally.

Kohler is arguably one of the most innovative brands in the home improvement industry. The new Karbon faucet has completely transformed the kitchen and more specifically revolutionized the kitchen faucet. Meanwhile Kohler seems to effortlessly create bathroom fixtures that are not only sleek but save water, like the Escale toilet.

If you are on the internet, you almost certainly use email. Email was one of the first applications of the internet, and remains (along with the web) one of the most widespread. Online Businesses use email too, for internal communication, customer service, marketing, and general use. So it makes sense that there would be a good set of technical tools to support working with email.

Unfortunately, if there is, it's hard to find. While testing some code intended to automatically send emails on certain events, I needed a simple utility to configure and send test emails. After a few minutes of Googling, I realized it would be a chore to find what I needed. The results I was getting didn't have the interface, the features, or the transparency I needed. Given the simplicity of the application, I realized it would be faster to just to write my own. Twenty minutes later, I had my program.

It's a simple VB.Net application that accepts details about the SMTP server and allows you to write and send an email to that server. It's nothing fancy, but it gets the job done, and I know exactly what its doing. And because I found it useful, I'm sharing it with you. Obviously it's not a full-featured email application, but if you want to do some basic testing, it's a good place to start. To that end, I've also included the source code so you can see what's happening under the hood. Of course, all of this is provided "as is", and neither I nor Gordian Project will be able to offer any support for it. This is primarily for people who already know what they're doing. But if that's you, I hope I've saved you a few minutes, at least!

Enjoy.

SMTP Sender.zip (129.24 kb)

Little Giant has been hard at work engineering pumps that their most loyal customers have been waiting for. PlumberSurplus.com is your destination for the new Little Giant TSW Sump Pump System and their NXTGen Condensate Pumps.

Now, while I must disclose I am the resident advocate for the adaptation of all things social media at the Gordian Project, arguing against the effectiveness of social media becomes difficult when horrible tragedies like the earthquake in Chile are brought to light via social networking. Like Haiti before it, although not as wide spread since the economic conditions of Haiti do not allow for as much social media from its residents, social media is helping us put a face and image on the catastrophic 8.8 magnitude earthquake that happened over the weekend.

Within hours of the earthquake hitting Chile, Mashable was able to compile an entire article of Chilean earthquake pictures as tweeted by the people there. These pictures are both amazing and heart breaking at the same time, but it allows us, the followers in the United States and throughout the rest of the world, to see what is happening and connect with them. People tweeted pictures of their bedrooms with the ceilings caved in on their beds, pictures of their neighborhood in shambles and pictures of entire bridges collapsed. Through this kind of social movement, we are able to share with one another as a global community and bring an even deeper sense of recognition to events taking place around the world.

Further displays of the power of social media have been seen among individuals. One woman was actually able to connect with local officials and find her family members (who were without a phone) through the help of Twitter. Below you can find the comment she left on the above referenced Mashable article.
 
“…my sister-in-law was in Santiago and we couldn’t find her. No text, no phones, nothing. We were able to make contact with locals using twitter search to follow hashtags and several people contacted us asking for details. One of the locals looked for, and FOUND my brothers wife, 2 hours after first contact. I am so thankful for social media, grateful to the power of networking and beyond ecstatic my sister-in-law was safe and her home intact.”
 
Imagine the relief felt by those worried about their loved ones that have their prayers answered through simple and immediate interaction with twitter followers that are willing to help in a crisis.

Lastly, Ustream decided to run live video of local news broadcast on both the earthquake in Chile and the Hawaii tsunami warnings. They have stated that over 4.35 million of these streams (like this one) have been viewed.

I have no doubt that aid organizations are already working on the best ways to get in and help the people rebuild their lives; however, it is simply amazing to see this kind of interaction and support from people in the social media community. It also goes a long way to be able to put a face and a video to the crisis instead of plain newspaper text. I am sure it will help people to be more willing to donate and support relief groups helping Chile in their time of need.
 
Have you seen any other great ways that social media has been helping the Earthquake in Chile?

For the best prices, on the largest selection of faucets, from your favorite brands like Kohler, Danze, and American Standard shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Let’s start with ReelSEO and their article about the fight between online video ads vs. search ads. They predict that online videos ad revenue will grow from $734 million annually to $5.2 billion by the year 2014, an increase of seven times.

When compared to search, which is only predicted to grow one and a half times over that same time period an increase in revenue of this magnitude is significant. However, the amount of ad money being spent on search currently is around $10 billion, so video has a lot of catching up to do. Regardless, video ad spend is something you should at least take note of.

How Web Video SEO is Finally Coming of Age

This article has statistics that are staggering regarding web video. Based on the below graphic, over three years and three months worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every day, contributing to over 1200 years of video or 10,512,00 hours of video content being uploaded a year!

This article also talks about YouTube’s automatic translation that allows the user to have a transcript of the video added to the video itself. This allows the search engine to be able to index it (since text is able to be indexed, as opposed to video which isn’t).
 
They also talk about the future of video with the Apple iPad and other E-reader hybrids. These products are well equipped for the growing consumer need for easily accessible video. Google is recognizing this change and starting to implement more video results on the first search results page.  In that vein, videos will start to play a more important role in search results, as Google tries to keep search relevant with customer expectations, and customer expectations increasingly require video content.
 
Lastly, my favorite article from the last month can be found in Business Week “The Great Video SEO Frontier” While the content was taken from GigaOm, it's still nice to see video SEO capture the attention of a highly recognized publication.
 
In this article Nate Elliot does a lot of great research to provide statistics on video implementation. First off, he states that videos are 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results then text. He explains:
 
"On the keywords for which Google offers video results, we found an average of 16,000 videos vying to appear on results pages containing an average of 1.5 video results—giving each video about an 11,000-to-1 chance of making it onto the first page of results. By comparison, there were an average of 4.7 million text pages competing for a place on results pages with an average of just 9.4 text results—giving each text page about a 500,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of results."
 
Clearly this is not going to be the goose that laid the golden egg, but if you create good video content and can market it well, you really can see added benefits on the SERPs.
 
Until next month, keep the videos rolling, and let me know if you like any articles I missed in the comments.

The possibilities are endless with a bathroom remodel. Discover your classic side with a clawfoot tub, experiment with fresh bathroom vanities and coordinate it all with matching faucets. Shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all of your bathroom needs.

We received a communication from Google Apps this month that I was delighted to see. Google Apps is finally phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0. Hooray!

People have been saying that IE6 is dying for quite a while, but it maintained its grip throughout 2009. Lots of admins have been slow to upgrade because of support of legacy applications/pages that required much extra effort to get working properly in the now-antiquated IE6. Finally, Google Apps stops support and, hopefully, this means that admins and users will be forced to update in order to sustain usability.  Trevor recently predicted for 2010 that standards would take a step forward and this is a strong indicator that they will be/have.

It's not that I don't like IE6, it's that I hate it (Trevor, too). When we work on changing, updating, or adding some design element to our websites, invariably we have to budget time to support IE6. Not just older browsers, mind you, IE6 specifically. If I didn't think it would affect conversion, I'd add something like http://ie6update.com/ to our websites. Google will be telling their users, "Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser."

Thanks Google.

Kohler is arguably one of the most innovative brands in the home improvement industry. The new Karbon faucet has completely transformed the kitchen and more specifically revolutionized the kitchen faucet. Meanwhile Kohler seems to effortlessly create bathroom fixtures that are not only sleek but save water, like the Escale toilet.

My wife loves to watch the great American dream play itself out in arenas such as American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, and the like; anything that pulls at the heart strings of underdog to star. I’ve often wondered what that final night might feel like, "contestants" widdled down to the final two just before the card is read and ticker tape falls.

As a follow up to Networking Takes Many Forms Gordian Project enjoyed perhaps a taste of that sweet reward. Last Tuesday night amidst Riverside City Council’s weekly council meeting, Gordian Project was recognized as an economic success story for the universe. Ok maybe not the universe but definitely within our zip code.  Regardless, it's exciting to see community representatives championing our brands.

I grabbed some of the slides from the presentation that was accompanied by Councilmen Rusty Bailey’s comments on Gordian Project’s success story, it could be compared to something a bit like Cat Deeley’s, “Let’s take a look at your journey.”

The Councilmen started the presentation by introducing our company and our internet retail websites, PlumberSurplus.com and OutdoorPros.com.

He spoke about some of our core competencies and how we have been able to keep technologically minded people local, something Techies felt they previously had to head to the Silicon Valley for.

The presentation allowed time to explain how PlumberSurplus.com doesn’t just sell plumbing products and doesn’t sell surplus inventory.

He also told the group about our growth, the opening of OutdoorPros.com and discussed some of our future plans.

My wife and daughter would watch from home on the local public station, it’s just that this time I would be the star they would be rooting for.

Little Giant has been hard at work engineering pumps that their most loyal customers have been waiting for. PlumberSurplus.com is your destination for the new Little Giant TSW Sump Pump System and their NXTGen Condensate Pumps.

We live in a culture of information overload. If you’re reading this online (with certainty, you are) you understand that there are several programs or websites running in the background vying for your attention. This overload is a reality that forces each of us to constantly make hasty decisions about the meaning and importance of the information surging at us everyday.

The problem with this is that many times, due to the haste and lack of complete visibility, we make the wrong decision. In this process, we're given only a few seconds to decide that one item, idea or issue carries more weight than another.

We skim through important documents and speed through 15-second sound bites to decide which products we buy, which celebrity we admire and which political party we support.

As a customer service representative, I see the consequences of this information overload on a daily basis. A customer who thought that reading through our returns policy was not that big of a deal is upset about a restocking fee. Someone who based a purchasing decision on a picture rather than reading through the product description has (inadvertently) ordered the wrong item. Maybe they overlooked the stated lead-time on an item and are forced to extend an important deadline, all kinds of conflict that could have been avoided.

Though I see the results of cursory information evaluation, I am not guiltless of doing the same thing.  In a world where a tide of new information is crashing down on us at 7 megabytes per second, it is hard to keep your head above water. I confess to having hastily agreed to a fair share of returns policies before reading them through. Who has the time (or professional training) to decipher the foreign legalese anyway?

Someone very wise has told me that the foundation of business and sales is not only to convince a customer of the need for your product, but to convince them that it is easier to live with it than without it.

So, I might suggest that we take the same approach to presenting critical information. How do we make relevant information easier to have than not to have? It is easy to argue that information-- returns policies, terms and conditions, shipping information --is already easily accessible, which is true. But is it easier to have than not to have? I do not presume to have an answer to the great question of how to educate the masses for our own good. But, I’m happy to join in the conversation.

Meet Tom Wujec. This year at the TED conference he discussed just how it is that our fickle minds create meaning.

Maybe if we start with an understanding of how we work, we can figure out how to make it easier to live educated than it is to suffer the consequences of the uninformed.

For the best prices, on the largest selection of faucets, from your favorite brands like Kohler, Danze, and American Standard shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Identifying the “Knobs & Levers” that drive your company’s profitability is only the first step in a successful business. The second, and perhaps more difficult, is fine tuning those knobs & levers for a desired result. One such knob or maybe it’s a lever, is salaries and wages as a percentage of gross sales.

Focusing on balancing salaries and wages as a percentage of gross sales generally starts with the question, “When the heck are we going to hire someone to support our growth?” A few thoughts…

Explore all Available Avenues

While piles scattered about your desk, burning the candle at both ends for days, weeks, months, maybe even years and skipping one or more meals a day all potentially point to hiring reinforcements, these are not sole indicators hiring will be the silver bullet. Redistributing responsibilities (we like to call these buckets) can provide the efficiencies necessary to effectively manage the do-to list. You may just find a current employee stepping up to not only take on the additional responsibility but thrive on the opportunity to shine. Technologies within your current infrastructure may be able to offer more than you are aware of.  I’m not the expert on this one, I simply keep adding to the “request” list and IT finds a viable solution when available. With that said it’s amazing what the techies around here can accomplish when they put their heads together and look for alternatives that positively affect the bottom line.

Paint the Picture and Back it Up

Do properly identify a focused picture of what you’re experiencing, providing hard data that brings clarity to you or your departments needs. Let’s say you’re experiencing an elevation in outstanding returns (meaning your warehouse is backlogged on the returns it is receiving and needing to inspect and process).

Paint the picture…

New returns come in as one of two things, cancellation requests or RMA (return merchandise authorization) requests. Our Returns Team reviews the request, plans a course of action, and moves the issue to the appropriate bucket. For simplicity, cancellation requests generally move on to the reorder or refund tabs to be closed while all RMA requests require the attention of the Warehouse Team. The Warehouse Team is responsible for creating call tags (Call Tags tab) to get the product back and subsequently all product inspections (Inspections tab). The tabs are named and uniquely identified in our administration system where the processing takes place. Once an inspection has been performed the return is either approved as is or adjusted accordingly; moving the return on to the Pending tab awaiting a supplier RGA, Damage Claims tab initiating a carrier damage claim, or to the Reorder or Refund tabs to be closed.   As you can see quite a few different scenarios can take place, but it’s a system that’s been pretty well refined over the years.

Provide the data…

The simple snap shot shown above, while not indicitive of any real data will work for the purposes of what we are trying to accomplish for this post.  The chart provides the number of “transactions” open at the end of each day over a two week period by bucket. The work flow moving from left to right for each bucket has an identified outstanding target in red and subsequently highlighted anything greater than that target on any given day that it was not met.

In our example, with the exception of a single day the Returns Team is processing new cancellation and RMA requests within the target; driving the numbers down as they work through the week preparing for the weekend increases. A single instance can likely be attributed to a known issue or decision. The first Warehouse Team bucket (Call Tags) although significant is being met. This is an important step in the returns process as it sparks the products physical return. The first hint of bottle neck is at inspection, this is a time consuming, detailed, physically and mentally challenging step that sets the tone for the customer’s return experience. Although once the inspection has been completed the Warehouse Team technically moves the return back to the Returns Team via the Pending, Damage Claims, Reorder, or Refunds tabs, they’re not out of the spot light.  Once a supplier provides the required RGA from the Pending tab the Warehouse Team is responsible for shipping the RGA back to the supplier. Likewise, the Warehouse Team is physically involved in the damage claim if for nothing else than disposing of the damage once completed by the carrier. Finally, even a reorder has the potential to impact our Warehouse Team. That reminds me, they’re also responsible for inventory and order shipment including: domestic, LTL (light truck load), and international shipments. If you’ve ever shipped LTL or internationally you know you don’t just slap a label on it there’s a lot more that goes into it than just boxing up a product.

Analyze the Data

In this example if we’d looked simply at the Returns Team’s elevated outstanding returns we might have identified the need as an additional Returns Team member. With a more focused look at what’s being experienced throughout the returns process it becomes clear the Warehouse Team is struggling to support the volume moving through the numerous buckets they impact in the process. Assess and insure that the Warehouse Team is working as efficiently as possible taking into account their inventory, shipping, and returns responsibilities before moving on. Review available technologies for assisting those responsibilities. Pay attention to your bottom line, does the cost benefit impact to your knobs & levers more significantly impact the cost benefit of considering additional Warehouse Team support?

Connect the Need to the Big Picture

For our example:

• Overwhelming responsibilities may be heading your Warehouse Team to an elevated turnover rate. This only accelerates the issues currently being experienced in the returns process.
• Hiring warehouse support may also free additional time up from your Returns Team. The Returns Team may be working outside their responsibilities to help the Warehouse Team in an effort to meet their own targets. This inadvertently leads to inefficiencies in their own respective fields. Unaddressed, the same elevated turnover rate could result.
• Never forget the desired result of any returns process is a quality customer experience. Consider how you’re impacting the initiatives of the Customer Service department.
• As part of the inspection process (our examples bottle neck), the warehouse team works closely with the Data Team to identify discrepancies in data quality.
• Every effort is given to make inventory accessible to the Marketing Team’s initiatives to capture high quality images.
• Product that’s made its way through the returns process identified as unsellable is managed as salvage for philanthropic opportunities.

If you’re already sleeping at the office it can be difficult to slow down enough to move beyond the emotional desire for more support. Keep your eye on the prize; paint an accurate picture supported by data, coupled with connecting the need to the larger picture. It’s like asking, “When the heck are we going to hire someone to support our growth” but with an interest in affecting the salaries and wages knob or lever for a desired result.  Oh yeah, and in the end… turning a profit.

The possibilities are endless with a bathroom remodel. Discover your classic side with a clawfoot tub, experiment with fresh bathroom vanities and coordinate it all with matching faucets. Shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all of your bathroom needs.

I am primarily a developer. I like to work on the stuff in the background, the stuff that makes our sites work, rather than what our customers actually see. However, in a small IT department you wear many hats, and I tend to also do a lot of design work. In other words, I'm arranging all of the images, text, and so on that you see when you open a web page. I am sure there are others in the same position so I'd like to give a basic introduction about why design work is so hard, and some possible solutions that I'd like to see in the future.

Designing for the Web

Designing for the web is very different from most other types of design. For one thing, its interactive. The layout and content must change over time based on the actions of the user. More importantly, the layout must be able to change based on the capabilities of the user's system, and still look good. When designing a flyer, you may know that your design will be on an 8.5 x 11" sheet of paper, and it will always look exactly the same. Even movies and video games, media known for their dynamic nature, generally have a few standard sizes and easy ways to transition between them. This is not true for web sites.

There are three standard technologies used to display web content: HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JavaScript (or ECMAScript, to be precise). HTML is the most basic of the three, and displays the actual content (such as text, links, or images) on the page. CSS is layered on top of the HTML, formatting the elements that HTML displays. CSS determines where on a page an image or block of text appears, what color or font it is, and so on. JavaScript is the closest of the three to an actual programming language; it's primarily used for dynamic effects like reacting to user input or providing functionality not available in ordinary HTML and CSS. However, underlying all of these technologies is the actual system running them: the browser. There are many different browsers used to access the web, and none of them completely follows the standards. Each has its own little quirks and extras, which means that in order to display a web page correctly on all of them, a designer must be very careful with what HTML, CSS and JavaScript he uses.

Layout and Headaches like Internet Explorer

Layout is especially aggravating. It uses a very finicky standard to begin with, and browsers tend to take the most liberties with formatting. The primary offender is Internet Explorer, who being by far the most popular browser for a long time, apparently decided it would be fine to throw out the standards and make up their own. Thus the usual method in web design is to get the web page working in all the other browsers, and then do it all over again for Internet Explorer. This has improved in its most recent versions, but a significant proportion of users have never upgraded: we still get over 10% of our traffic from Internet Explorer 6 users, two versions behind the most current. Please, if at all possible, upgrade to the newest browsers! We web designers will thank you.

On top of the browser problem, as I mentioned, CSS itself has some major flaws. CSS is based primarily on "flowing" text layout, as in newspapers and magazines. However, as we know, static layouts aren't a good fit for dynamic web pages, and this model is far too limited to account for the layouts web designers want. This is mostly fixed by a cobbled-on system of layers and boxes, but many of the solutions are obvious afterthoughts. For example, one way to position a box is using "absolute" layout, which means the box is not part of the page flow but lies on top of it in the exact position you specify. This works pretty well, but it's based on the top left corner of the window, so if the browser is resized all the other content moves around but the absolute box stays still. This tends to break things. One way to get around that is to put the absolute box "inside" another box, so that it moves with it. The way to do this is to mark the other box with a "relative" layout, which means that that box stays in the normal flow, but is offset by an amount you specify. There is no logical connection between the outer box's relative layout and the inner box's absolute layout, but the makers of CSS decided that the former was the right way to indicate the behavior of the latter. This is just a simple example.


Changes That I Would Make

However, the situation is unlikely to improve in the near future. Indeed, it would be unwise to do anything drastic about it, because so much of the web is already set up to work as is: and it would cost the economy billions of dollars to make a major change. So web design is likely to remain in the hands of those of us who have experience in its arcane techniques. But if it could be changed, what should it be like? Well, first, I would drop all pretenses at preserving static layout. Similarities to print are analogies, nothing more. I'd make the box model the primary aspect of CSS, with text flow being a subset for use within boxes. I'd rework the relationship hierarchy between boxes to be more explicit with regard to things like positioning. Finally, CSS files tend to be large, flat, and difficult to navigate and edit. I'd like to change that by introducing variables: named styles that can be applied to several different parts of the page at once. There is already something like this (called "classes"), but it's not nearly as flexible as I'd prefer. I believe those changes would make formatting web pages much more intuitive, opening it up to a much larger group of site creators. I do think it's possible to implement these changes, but it would take a long period of incremental changes. In the meantime, I'll be taking on design tasks as well as my more normal development projects.

Kohler is arguably one of the most innovative brands in the home improvement industry. The new Karbon faucet has completely transformed the kitchen and more specifically revolutionized the kitchen faucet. Meanwhile Kohler seems to effortlessly create bathroom fixtures that are not only sleek but save water, like the Escale toilet.

As an IT Manager at a small to mid-size business, it's always a delight to see any system updates that are useful, well-designed, and fully functional. When these things are encompassed in an operating system, it's even more delightful. We operate a few different web properties and I've always wanted to maintain a good variety on our network (mostly for live testing purposes). You know, some users on Windows XP with Internet Explorer, some on Windows XP with Firefox, some on Windows Vista with Google Chrome, some on Mac with Safari, etc. I have been using Windows XP for some time, so when Windows 7 was announced, I was half dreading the transition; especially since I was due for a system upgrade and I knew I'd need to lead the charge. Also, Vista hadn't proven to play well with all of the software we used on its initial launch.

So, when I finally ordered my new system and started my transition from Windows XP to Windows 7, I was naturally trepidatious. I was also transitioning to a 64bit OS. How big a headache would it be? As it turns out, it's been the best operating system transition I've experienced thus far. New Dell laptop, check. Fresh install of Windows 7, check (also, the install was faster than I expected, and I didn't have any of the install issues that have been reported by some users). The only two things that have been a hindrance were easy to fix. The first was obtaining new drivers for a network printer; no problem. The second was some software with known compatibility issues on 64bit operating systems; no problem, Windows 7 has some great features to help with this, which I'll explain shortly.

While trying not to sound like a broken record with every other reviewer of 7, here are some reasons why I love the new Windows:

• It takes all the best features of Vista. The aero interface and more "favorite-present" functionality work well. While I haven't always been a fan of all of the wizards Microsoft includes in progressive versions of Windows, I like the additions that were made to 7. For most of my users, and most home users for that matter, I can see how the "hold-my-hand" style menus and wizards are useful.


• I love keyboard shortcuts and Windows 7 adds some really useful functionality. One useful shortcut is WindowKey+P to switch monitor modes (Computer Only, Duplicate, Extended, or Projector Only). We use multiple monitors at Gordian Project, so the strong multi-monitor support is appreciated and works well. Another set of new keyboard shortcuts for multi-monitor that I love is the ability to manipulate an active window; WindowsKey+UpArrow to maximize, WindowsKey+DownArrow to Restore/Minimize, WindowsKey+LeftArrow to dock to the left side of the active screen, WindowsKey+RightArrow to dock to the right side of the active screen, WindowsKey+Shift+RightArrow to move the active window to the monitor to the right, WindowsKey+Shift+LeftArrow to move the active window to the left monitor. Pretty cool.


• The taskbar now includes keyboard shortcuts, too. Press WindowKey+{Position#OfTheTaskbarItem} to open up or switch to the taskbar item in that position. The new taskbar may bothersome (one user has complained to me that it's sometimes difficult to discern which items are open and which are shortcuts), but I think it's a drastic improvement. The last keyboard shortcut that excited me is WindowsKey+B to access items in the system tray. This one has been a long time coming. You might be say that I should just use the mouse, but I hate to take my hands off of the keyboard and anything that saves me time while I'm working is a welcome improvement.


• The last thing that I've noticed, so far, about Windows 7 that's impressive is the improved compatibility engine. Not only does Windows 7 do a great job of utilizing the generic compatibility engine to make recommendations on compatibility settings, Microsoft has also made available Windows XP Mode. Windows XP Mode leverages Windows Virtual PC in a unique way that blew me away. First you download and install the Windows XP Mode package. Then, you download and install Virtual PC. This gives you access to a full version of Windows XP as a virtual pc, which, in itself, is pretty useful. But Microsoft took it a step further. Any application that you install in your Windows XP Mode virtual pc appears in the start menu of your Windows 7 machine! So, you can "Publish and launch applications installed on virtual Windows XP directly from the Windows 7 desktop, as if they were installed on the Windows 7 host itself." Not everything I needed to install and use is compatible with the 64 bit version of Windows 7, so this feature alone makes the upgrade far less daunting...at least for me.

For those of you IT managers out there wondering whether or not you should upgrade, I recommend it.

Little Giant has been hard at work engineering pumps that their most loyal customers have been waiting for. PlumberSurplus.com is your destination for the new Little Giant TSW Sump Pump System and their NXTGen Condensate Pumps.