Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Useful tools - a bunch for starters

This blog seems secure though, however - before I am starting to post competitive, sensitive background stories and juicy details, let's start with the easy stuff. Every new consulting rep has a lot of things you like to use in a day2day. I wanna start with my own one, as probably this or that is new to you. Please feel free to complete the list from your side.

GROUP BY priority
Important
  • Salesforce Outlook Plugin - synch your contacts, tasks and events (PIM) from Outlook <-> Salesforce. That's helpful more and more, as at least SSVs are starting to work more and more in SF, even put send / received emails and attach them to an opportunity, contact or account
  • Organise and store your adressbook online, but manage it in Outlook. Another great plugin for outlook is Plaxo - this really helps to keep it clean and sorted.
  • Firefox-Plugins overview: Just a short hitlist. imagine, I am using DART with Firefox. Ye, you know how, with the IE Tab Plugin. You will have all Tabs / Favorites etc. inside of your FF, but set the domain "df*.doubleclick*" to use with IE-engine, and automatically after clicking on the DFP UI Link, your FF opens the URL embed in FF as an IE. Fasterfox, Fastdownload and Videodownloader are more sweet tools and worth to give a try
  • Another very useful Firefox-Plugin: A macro recording tool. You'd be able to record once, how a clickcommand is created in DFA, and the tool does the several steps including prompting for dynamic stuff by itself.
  • More Outlook plugins from MAPILAP. Unfortunatly commercial, but you can try out several ones for a short shareware-time. Cool stuff to mention first:
    Follow-up plugin: It creates automatically a reminder-email to people, where you've send an email a defined while ago. Get rid of your monkeys and let outlook remind them automatically, that you're waiting.
    Remove duplicates: Helps sorting and deleting old emails / archives / tasks / events.
    Remove adress: Cleans your adressbook from double entries, bit redundant to the Plaxo professional version.
  • Any Password helps to store and secure your douzens and hundreds of different passwords within an open source freeware tool. You can be sure it doesn't call home.

Medium / standard

  • Skype - not a lot to say about it
  • Trillian - I like it more then any cross-functional IM tool. You can install and setup your AIM, Y!, MSN messanger, ICQ, IRC account inside and see it all in one IM window. Message with your different peers without starting 5 different tools, plus: very low MEM-usage. And several hundreds of Plugins (Pop3, Gmail, Weather, stock quotes, RSS-feed) allows more functionality then any other.
  • Winamp
  • Antivir - free private Antivirus software, quite regulary update (almost every day automatically)
  • Antispy - also free, a good trojan / hacking / registry tracker. Even Adpepper is identified ;-)
To be continued...

Daniel

3 comments:

David Blog said...

Any Password is really good. Beats opening up an excel spreadsheet all the time!

Hakuna said...

And Ray made a good comment here: Save it on your USB-stick and carry it with you. The exe is small and the PWD-file highly encrypted, this gives you all your passwords whereever you stick it into :)

Anonymous said...

This is a useful utility.
If your machine crashes, and you just have the pwd file, you can download and reinstall the exe, and you are up and logging-in with your passwords available to you.
Thanks for the tip Daniel

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