Managing Your Storage Space
Over the past couple of months, we have received several inquiries about conserving space on RIDGIDConnect. Here are some of the methods that the team came up with that you may find useful:
1. Remove Duplicates - One piece of media can be associated to (put on) several reports. There is no need to upload the same media more than once! To check for duplicate media, navigate to the "My Media" section of the site and change the media pane to "Detail View" (the horizontal bars just to the right of the words "Change View"). Here, you can sort your media by file name and easily discover and remove duplicates.
2. Remove Unassociated Media - Have media that is floating around in your “My Media” section that is not associated with a report? Consider deleting it! If the media is not on a report, it’s not doing work for you and is costing you space! Remember, deleting a piece of media will cause it to no longer be backed up by RIDGIDConnect.
3. Use Images - Does an image tell the story? If your video isn’t clear or has minutes upon minutes of cloudy footage, consider going into the video and extracting still frames of the key points by selecting that option when creating bookmarks. Then, you can always delete the video from your account and just work with the images. Only the images you extract will count against your storage quota. However, your video will no longer be backed up by RIDGIDConnect.
4. Reduce Video Size - It’s no surprise that lengthy videos take up a significant amount of space. However, adjusting attributes such as the frame rate, resolution, and autolog quality (HQ) can help reduce the size of videos. Check your camera's software settings for more information.
Put RIDGIDConnect on your site…and make it fit in!
So you're up and running on RIDGIDConnect. You're sending reports out, documenting your work, and overall, being more productive. As you look through the "my Account" section, you come across "Put RIDGIDConnect On Your Site." After reading through the description, this sounds like a great idea. You will still get your customers the report you created, and can drive more traffic to your website, provide your customers with the sense that this is a complete solution since they'll be going to your website and not RIDGIDConnect, and expose them to any special offers or deals you currently have running while they're looking at your site.
Then, you come across the form to create the code snippet you need to embed on your site and say, "Whoa, I'm not a web developer, this looks like it's in a foreign language! Well...I'll give it a try."
There's all sorts of strange combinations of letters and numbers but you finally discover that if you click on the little red box you get a pop up with a choice of 100 or so different colors. You find a red that looks similar to your website and decide to go with it. Maybe you customize the text or the size of the box a little bit...but, finally you copy the HTML code snippet at the bottom and get it embedded into your web site. It's close to the right color, not perfect, but that's the best you could do, right? Wrong! Follow along for an easy way to seamlessly produce a "Put RIDGIDConnect On Your Site" box that looks like it has been there all along.
Next to where it says, "Background color" there's a text box with six characters in it. This corresponds to the specific color code that you've selected. It is made up of six characters and each one can range from A-Z and from 0-9. I'll spare you the details, but for more you can read this. If you can't ask your web developer or graphic designer what this value you should be, here's how to get it:
Using Mozilla Firefox as your web browser, you can search for "Add Ons". Click on the "Tools" menu and select "Add Ons" from the drop down that opens. Search for "ColorZilla".
Once you get it installed and open your browser back up, you'll notice that in the bottom left corner there's an eye dropper. If you click on this eye dropper you'll start the ColorZilla add on. It will replace your mouse pointer with a set of cross hairs and as you scroll over your website, you'll see that it gives you the RGB value as well as the six character hexadecimal HTML color code that you need. Simply find the color you want to match with, copy down the six character value as highlighted in the picture below, paste it into the box on RIDGIDConnect, and voila! Your "Put RIDGIDConnect On Your Site" box will be matched perfectly to your website.
Promoting Your Brand
I have been working with a few new customers and potential customers that are all trying to do the same thing: GROW THEIR BUSINESS! Hey, I am trying to do the same thing here 
Here are a three ways our current customers are using RIDGIDConnect to grow their business...
- Using reports to demonstrate capabilities to customers. http://bit.ly/dw1jWw
- Adding supporting literature about your company to all of your reports to help promote your other offerings or further explain your offering. http://bit.ly/dAjhZp
- Advertising online report retrieval from their website... http://neptuneplumbing.net/
How are you using RIDGIDConnect to grow your business? Leave me a comment and let me know.
Would I Give Up My Blackberry for My EVO 4G?
Nope, but would I give back my EVO 4G? Nope! What is the big deal with this phone, and why my hesitation to use it for everything?
Let me start with the good. It has a ton of very cool apps. Of those apps, there aren't many I expect to use on a regular basis. They are creative in how they integrate the camera and GPS, but they just aren't useful for much more than showing off the phone.
It is a WiFi hotspot for my other devices! It is very simple to activate the hot spot feature and get other devices on the net in seconds. That means my Evo, iPhone, iPad, laptop and Blackberry can all share the same internet plan. Picture this: You are trying to get a wireless signal from your laptop in a basement during a job, but you just don't get cell coverage. Well, you could not connect via wifi to your hot spot sitting on the main floor. Pretty cool trick to extend wireless access that you cant do with tethering or an aircard.
This EVO just doesn't have as polished of an experience for navigation and messaging that a Blackberry does, but for internet browsing it rocks(Flash support! ...kinda). It sports the popular WebKit based browser that the higher end mobile phones all seem to be running now. This is coming to Blackberry in their new devices this year!
So what is disappointing about this device? It is big and clunky for one. As I stated before the navigation between apps isn't great. The on-screen keyboard is a pain to deal with when you are entering data in form fields. It is also difficult to type while doing something else and looking away from the keys like you can on a Blackberry. The speed of the processor in this thing comes at a price: battery life! Oh, and if you happen to have some divx movies you want to watch, think again. There isnt support for the amount of media players that you have on the Blackberry.
Overall, it is a very cool device for some niche applications. If you are on the thing all of the time messaging, tweeting, face booking, or talking, then you might want another device.
What does this mean for RIDGIDConnect? Some of you already know about our mobile client that will be released soon based off our award winning CRM Application. Expect to see a media uploader come out first. Along with the Blackberry uploader, we are working on an Android based one as well. Most of the professionals we have seen use a Blackberry, but we know there are other devices being used. If we see enough activity in this area from our customers, you can expect to see a lot more attention paid to this area to remain a top mobile development company.
What device do you carry today? What will your next mobile device be?
Catching Up…
We have seen some neat things happen over the last few weeks. First, we have a new tweeter (is that what they are called?) from the development team in charge of our twitter account, so expect to see more updates from the source there now. We have seen some activity from Australia that we weren't expecting, but glad to see! We have some new developers on the team working on some of our new mobile clients and product integrations. Oh yeah, and we have been working on a lot of new features that you have all asked for. Here is a basic rundown of 10 high points since launch...
- Removed the credit card requirement from registration
- Job Scheduling in the job report template (ability to assign, set priority, change status, start/end time)
- Ability to filter jobs on assigned to. Defaults to your jobs when you go to the job list. Great for users that have multiple technicians in the account.
- Ability to create Teams and assign jobs to teams.
- Revamped the flash uploader to be way cooler and easier to use. Be sure to sign in to the installed desktop client and update your version today!
- Revamped the flash player (maintains aspect ratio, hover-over play bar)
- Drag-and-drop sorting on the job page for media elements. Now telling your story on RIDGIDConnect is even easier.
- You can now search for media based on who uploaded it
- We now show special graphics for the different types of attachment files instead of just showing a paper clip. For example, Excel files will get their own graphic, PDFs get their own graphic, etc.
- Added the ability to tag media (although you can’t search on this just yet. in the future you will! Great for seeing how much of your work is around one application or another)
This is just a few high points that I figured I should share. We streamlined some of m.ridgidconnect.com for your mobile devices, but I will wait to talk about mobile for a bit longer;-)
If you want one-on-one attention getting started with or demonstrating RIDGIDConnect just click on Contact Us (http://www.ridgidconnect.com/Public/ContactUs.aspx) on the site and let us know. We would be happy to help in any way we can make you successful in using RIDGIDConnect.