Who’s down for a few hardware, software, and productivity tips? For those of you familiar with me, you likely know that I enjoy sharing with the community. Since I’m in a wonderful, new role here at GEO Jobe, this is the perfect time for me to implement new work strategies, adopt new productivity tools, and focus on being organized (ironically, that sounds a lot like Admin Tools for the ArcGIS Administrator also). Keeping with my strategy of sharing , I’d like to share a few tips about tools that not only help me be more efficient and productive, these are also useful tools for the team here and likely, for many of you.
Hardware Tip
I’m a Google user, I depend on Google for many things, both personal and in business, including Google hangouts for meetings, Voice for my calling, Calendar for managing my appointments and task milestones, Drive for document management etc… And so it should be no surprise that I’m also Chromebook fan. I have shiny, new device (a 14″ HP Chromebook), strictly for business use, that enables me to stay connected with my team and work from any place at any time. Best of all, if something should happen to the computer like a drop, loss, theft, or even a coffee spill, I’m only out a little pocket change and I can quickly and easily get back to work without missing a beat or losing my data thanks to the Google cloud. Now don’t get me wrong, you get what you pay for and the Chromebook isn’t exactly a GIS power workstation – I have a sweet HP all-in-one Z1 workstation for running my ArcGIS projects – however, for a sleek, light, all-in-the-cloud, take any place mobile computer, the Chromebook is perfect, oh, and the 9 hour battery life is an added bonus!
Software Tips
The Chromebook is great, providing me with quick access to all my Google apps and services. However, some added productivity comes with the addition of some Chrome extensions and here’s a couple that you may find useful:
Marker 2.0 is an extremely useful extension if you find yourself frequently taking screenshots and sending them to your team or to customers and clients. Click one button and you’ll be given the option to take a screenshot of an entire webpage or a specific portion of it. You can annotate your screenshot with text, arrows, shapes, and emojis. Once you’re ready to share it, easily send directly to a connected service like Slack, Github, Trello, and more For instance, if you want to upload a screenshot to Trello, you’ll be given the option to add it to a specific board and give the card a name directly from your browser window. Check it out here
Example, in the image below you’ll notice a screen capture made with Marker. We can use this to quickly capture and annotate product documentation for sharing within our org or we can send customers tips and support via a graphic.
Marmoset is a really cool extension for you coders. Using Marmoset you can take beautiful snapshots in seconds with this tool, which gives you the option to change the color scheme and style of a selected body of code. Just save it and share it with your dev team! See more here
Finally, for those of you who have difficulty spelling or with punctuation (I’ll admit that I’m far from perfect), be sure to add the Grammarly plugin to your web browser. You’ll get tips and alerts about errors inside almost every app or client running within the web browser – a definite life saver!
ArcGIS Admin Tip
Time for the shameless plug – ha! Are you looking to be more productive administering your ArcGIS users or your entire ArcGIS-based organization? Admin Tools was created just for you. With more than 40 productivity tools, you’ll be amazed at your increased productivity and time savings, particularly when it comes to managing your installations, users, and data. The Free version will amze you and just imagine what you’ll be able to accomplish with the Pro and/or Portal versions!
What tools do you use to make you more efficient and productive? Admin Tools users, which tools do you get the most out of and save you? Feel free to comment or drop a tweet to @geojobegis
Source: Chome extensions
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