Congratulations, Logan University, on your web site refresh! MindActive is proud to partner with you and Dovetail on this gorgeous rebranding and web site update, implementing new technology on a fully customized CRM.

From April to October of 2019, MindActive and Dovetail worked tirelessly to build a new, dynamic site that showcases the academic opportunities and student life available to attendees. MindActive took Dovetail’s vision and made it a reality with a highly customized template and design. We integrated existing content, such as the forms system, with the new platform and layout. The new site, www.logan.edu, brings the “Leaders Made” philosophy to life.

MindActive is proud to be a parter on the new and improved Fontbonne web site refresh project! Our goal was to create a fresh, updated site that brings the new brand to life while prioritizing user experience and sales conversion.The new site, www.fontbonne.edu, is live as of March of 2019. The newly redesigned site has provided Fontbonne with a platform to display their history, academic opportunities, and student engagement opportunities. The new site provides prospective and current students, faculty, parents, and members of the community with all of the details that they need to move their vision forward.

The Visual Art Quarterly of St. Louis has published a feature piece on Byron Sletten's ongoing collaborative project, where he and Poet Laureate Ted Kooser pair his original 3D works with Ted's unpublished poetry. See the complete article here.

In October, Byron Sletten of MindActive travelled to the Petrified Forest in northern Arizona as part of a team with an Artist In Residence grant. While there, Byron captured stunning visuals with the MindActive drone of an ancient canyon decorated with petroglyphs. This canyon was lined with petroglyphs between 1000-5000 years old. Per Byron, "We were moved by the beauty of all these anonymous artists leaving their work in 1000's of years of time. No one really knows the meaning of these works."

Interested in learning more about SharePoint? MindActive's own Jen McCarty has published an e-book on iTunes and Amazon, SharePoint On-Premises For Administrators. This guide is intended for current and future SharePoint on-premises administrators.

FlameWave Products announced today that they have been named a finalist for the 2018 International Home + Housewares Global Innovation Awards.

Our first update of 2018 has useful image configurations to help you with your workflows. There's a new, lighter option for your Portals UI, Roboflow improvements and many more helpful upgrades. Check out all the Cumulus 11.0.2 features.

The recently disclosed Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities negatively impact the security of virtually every computer in the world today. These vulnerabilities allow an attacker to gain control of a computer’s processor and steal data located on that computer. Organizations that store data in the cloud are particularly susceptible. Click here to view a webcast from Jimmy Graham, Director of Product Management for Qualys Threat Protection and Asset Inventory, showcasing solutions that can help you determine the impact of Spectre and Meltdown across your global IT environments.

Congratulations, FlameWave, on going international with your groundbreaking light modules and bulbs. MindActive is honored to be your creative partner for your web site and packaging!

Discussion boards and online forums are intended to be reflective, forcing people to read other perspectives and thoughtfully consider a response in back-and-forth interaction and engagement. Anyone who has seen a comment section with a troll, spambot, or griefer disrupting the conversation knows that’s not always the case. However, a company SharePoint discussion board is a safe haven for timely and topical collaboration, and a great opportunity to share ideas.

It’s a pretty safe bet that no one gets excited to see a survey from their management in their inbox, if only because we’ve been trained to dread surveys by constant exposure to bad ones. I think surveys can be very useful – what other options do you have, to get employee feedback, short of mind-reading? – but there is an epidemic of badly planned and formatted surveys making the rounds in corporate America.

Long ago, I spent some time at a global bank helping to manage the technology support desk’s knowledge base (KB) in a software system called ServiceNow. Our KB was full of technical guides, FAQs, process manuals, and outage alerts. Most of my time was spent going through old, obsolete articles and flagging them for clean-up, trying to track down metadata (e.g., who owns this? Who should maintain this? Who can tell me if this is still accurate, when it hasn’t been updated in years?) or straight up deleting documents that didn’t apply anymore (think Windows XP support, or an outage warning for a system update that happened years ago).

It was a nightmare. It’s also why I prefer SharePoint for my KBs.

I can personally deploy SharePoint enterprise-wide, from installation and design to administration and training, because I’m incredible. I’m like a bona fide superhero.

Just kidding.

With a Master’s degree in teaching and a background in designing global corporate training initiatives, I’m sometimes asked how I approach training roll-outs for new products and services. My reply is generally, “It depends on your training goals, and how much time you’re willing to devote to getting them accomplished.” I also usually ask “Do you have learning management systems in place to help with the nitty-gritty of the training administration?”

First, a disclaimer: I love Google. I’ve used Gmail since it was invitation-only, I’m in Google Calendar several times a day, I have several Hangout chats going at any given time, and it’s my search engine of choice.

However, I don’t like Google for professional and enterprise support. I prefer Microsoft, and Office 365, and I love SharePoint – which is why I’m the SharePoint specialist at MindActive. Before you grab the torches and pitchforks, hear me out!

Here at MindActive, I’m the lone Microsoft / Windows person in an office of Mac users, so I catch some good-natured grief for being one of “those people.” With my extensive background in SharePoint administration, it makes sense for me to be more Windows focused, since Microsoft and Windows are built to work effortlessly together. However, convincing my team – a group of Mac using, Safari loving, website image and video manipulating experts - to give SharePoint a try required some major research.

When I read this week that the MP3 is dead, I had a moment of panic. As the SharePoint design expert for MindActive, my experience with audio files has been limited almost exclusively to personal use. I have an MP3 player in a drawer at home somewhere, but I rarely use it (just like my mother and a host of friends and relatives – I imagine many people are in the same boat as me). When I listen to music or audio files, I go old-school with a radio or CD, stream it from my phone, or load up a podcast on my tablet. With minimal knowledge of audio file formats, my immediate reaction was “what does this mean for me?”

For all sorts of internet usage, from binge-watching Netflix to remotely accessing a business SharePoint site, there’s nothing worse than low bandwidth and intermittent network connections. The buffering, the error messages, or the dreaded “you’ve used all of your data” notification can ruin your plans for being productive.