Friday, June 01, 2012

Mobile Madness is paying off . . . saving a tree = happy staff

I know this is probably old news, but it makes me happy when I get to impart new stuff to my team mates that will not only lessen what they have to lug around but helps in the promotion of the organization.

This coming weekend a group of the Fight Colorectal Cancer team will go to Chicago for the American Society of Clinical Oncology - ASCO conference - along for the ride . . . three iPad tablets outfitted with video, presentation material and PDF documents.  Not available . . . WiFi or Broadband service.

Before I even start with the documentation part I needed to convert our YouTube videos we wanted to have available - to make sure they were not a zillion gigs in size I used a slick tool from AVS4You called AVS Video Converter http://www.avs4you.com/ - it's simple, it works and even runs in Windows - I'm sure there a ton of similar tools but I like to go with what I know.  I was able to easily convert my high end videos into iPad format.

PowerPoint documents and PDF files were also slated for use at the conference - the easy solution was to use the simple "Save as . . . " option in PowerPoint and convert the document to JPG files. 

PDF was even simpler - when you use the iBooks tool in the iPad and select PDF to view the files there is no conversion necessary, simply drag and drop the PDF documents into Books within iTunes and sync away.  NOTE: If you don't see BOOKS listed in iTunes open up Preferences and select it from the list.

[[posterous-content:pid___2]]

So the challenge was to make sure all these materials were able to run locally and the team was comfortable in syncronizing and access these files.  For us "accidental technologist" types this should be a piece of cake . . . for those who don't typically teather their tablet or do much with iTunes and file management, the cake may be a little stale.

[[posterous-content:pid___3]]When it came to PDF files I used the exact same instructions as listed but instead dropped the files in to the Books tab.  For the JPG files we used the Photos tab and sycronized as we did any other photo. 

Coming up with these directions seemed to work well, staff are on their way and I'm looking forward to hearing how the technology was received.  Being able to market with mobile tools like the tablets is a big step forward. One of many I hope to continue.

Be careful out there, and keep those lawn blades sharp!

Michael Sola finds solutions and can translate tech into english.  He's a blogger, invited presenter and speaker, he knows how to listen - he also rarely has to show ID to walk into a pub.

Follow him at http://twitter.com/michaelsola : his views and comments are his own. He doesn't like talking about himself in the 3rd person, just ask him.