Lenovo Connections

We connected the Lenovo community forums to the Lenovo Facebook fan page this week as part of a larger effort to make it easier for our customers to find answers to their questions and to share their experiences with others.

There are many compelling reasons to do this, but I’ll note just a few.  First, customers can now associate their Facebook and Lenovo forums IDs and even use their Facebook account to log in.

This makes it even easier to participate and I think it is a potential step toward some sort of universal social media “passport” that may eventually develop across the industry.    Today, many sites allow comments to be made using open ID sign in using Blogger, Wordpress, Livejournal, Facebook or Google credentials. I think this is necessarily an evolutionary journey as it is difficult for everyone to conceive of and agree to a “master plan” for interoperability.

Secondly, I see this as a way to more easily connect people who are involved in different styles of online activity – those who are sharing and exploring many interests and experiences socially on Facebook, and those who are engaged in longer running and more specific discussions in forums.

Lenovo Fans on our Facebook page can click the forums tab and type in a short question.  This question is parsed and run as a search against the discussion forums and the community’s integrated knowledge base and articles and discussions of likely relevance are returned.   Ideally, these answer the question.  If not, the Facebook user can start over and amend their question, use the full search function above the window, or just click continue to enter more details and post through their question to the forum where others can then respond, and the results will be added as comments on the Facebook page.

This connection is just one element of a much larger and developing story .  I’ll share more in an upcoming post…

Is your system’s BIOS and battery firmware updated to the latest level?   If not, you may  not be getting the maximum capacity and run time from your battery.  Lenovo’s engineering team released updated BIOS and battery firmware in July that is applicable to customers who have ThinkPad models X100e, L410/L510, L412/L512, SL410/SL510, T410/T410i, T510,T510i, W510 or ThinkPad Edge, 13, 14, or 15 inch units.  

“This battery firmware update utility fixes an issue where some batteries indicate an incorrect full charge capacity value. Because of this error, the amount of energy available for use is artificially low, decreasing the amount of time the system can be used on battery. The fix is entirely contained in the battery firmware update; there is no need to replace any hardware for this problem.”

Customers who use Lenovo ThinkVantage Toolbox would have received a notification and opportunity to apply this update, and Lenovo’s ThinkVantage System Update tool would also identify and apply these updates.   If you aren’t using either of these tools, and have one of the systems above, please follow this link to our support site.  You can learn more there, and download and install the updates specific to your system.

Probably also worth mentioning, is an earlier tip applicable to X200t and X201t tablet users who have 8 cell extended batteries.  This technical tip and related BIOS updates ensure these batteries properly charge to their full capacities, and resolves a particular symptom where the battery would stop charging at less than 50%.

Today, while looking through the world of Lenovo in the blogosphere, I ran across Jesse Anderson’s Lenovo S10-3T blog.  His most recent post – an impromptu effort to collect improvement feedback from his audience really caught my eye because he seems truly passionate about the S10-3T and gathering ideas for future improvements from other customers.  He also wondered  if we were paying attention.  I’d like to think we are!

After reading over his blog for a few minutes, I was really impressed by both the breadth and depth of content,  his effective use of YouTube to demonstrate what he’s talking about, and the fact that he’s been going strong on this subject for five months!

Disclaimer : Lenovo is not affiliated with this blogger and is not responsible for any offers or representations made in the video, or on the blog.  The Video is shared here for reference only.

Lenovo just released an updated version of Lenovo ThinkVantage Toolbox that includes a number of performance and functional enhancements based on customer feedback previously received.   Internally known as version 1.4, but reported by LTT  as version 6.0.5514.60, the new release made available for download in June is faster loading, easier to use, and contains new features.

While many customers liked prior iterations of LTT, we heard the phrase “bloatware” used in a number of the comments critical of the product.  So, we focused on trying to make it faster and lighter.

Version 1.4 is definitely leaner and faster.  The download file size has been reduced by 7 MB, and when idling, uses 0% CPU time and has a 50% smaller memory footprint that prior versions.   Subjectively, launching LTT seems much snappier.   The welcome screen is now displayed within 4 seconds and time to first message and application start times have been dramatically shortened.  For example, a T42 running XP service pack 3 previously took some 26 seconds to present the first message and 29 seconds in total to load.  Now, the first message is displayed in 6 seconds, and total load time is 26 seconds.    More dramatic improvements will be seen on newer systems running Windows 7.  For example, a T60 running Windows 7 took 1 minute and 9 seconds to load previous versions.  Now, the first message is displayed in 4 seconds, and total load time is just 22 seconds.

We’ve also improved the diagnostics by adding the CUDA test to support many of the Nvidia graphics equipped systems, along with new tests for video ports, WWAN functions, and a quick keyboard test.  The UI has also seen some updates and a lot of redundant prompts have been eliminated.

We also frequently heard the perception that LTT was always loaded in memory – it’s not.  The toolbar launch icon is installed, but can be suppressed during the installation if desired.  Simply uncheck the second item on the configuration panel shown above during install to avoid the LTT icon.  But, do give this some thought – the toolbar icon can provide alerts as shown by the X in the red circle, and this can be a helpful feature to have.

Another consideration during the install is whether or not to enable online support.  This is the third check-box shown on the set up screen above, and this feature enables communication between LTT and Lenovo.  Through this function, messages can be sent to LTT, and these messages are a mixture of technical alerts, feature updates and advisory messages, and special promotional offers.   Many customers find these offers helpful and take advantage of then, while others may not and have noted that through previous feedback.  Lenovo is considering an additional customization within LTT to allow the customer to select what kind of messages they want to receive, and I personally think that would be another great advance.  When I downloaded and installed LTT, I had 25 messages, and they were fairly evenly divided amongst general information, support, and promotional messages.  It was pretty easy to use the “dismiss” function to get rid of the ones I didn’t want to keep.

The online support selection enables more than just messages though.  One of the capabilities offered in a prior release and refined in this one, is the ability to detect a failing battery, determine warranty status, and guide the user through ordering a replacement.

If the system is under warranty, the option to check for warranty replacement will be offered, and if clicked, will display a form to collect the additional information needed to process the replacement battery order online.  This saves the customer having to call technical support and go through the normal support process.

Lastly, please make note of the “provide feedback” link shown in the bottom left corner of several of the LTT screens above.   We’ve added a survey feature within LTT to provide customers who use LTT a  direct and ongoing way to share feedback.  This  feedback  provides the development team with quantifiable information and helps prioritize efforts.   I hope that you will make use of this feature!

You can download LTT here.

If you don’t have LTT installed and don’t plan to, we would still like to hear from you in the comments on this blog.   If not LTT, what diagnostic program do you use on your PC and what features does it have that you like most?

Last weekend, a number of pages within the download section of Lenovo’s support site were the object of a Malware exploit.  The Malware intent was to attempt connection to a remote server for the purpose of downloading additional code to the user’s system.

Visitors accessing the site with Firefox or Chrome browsers  during this period may have noted that the site was blocked by a warning message like this one, triggered by Google’s detection of the rogue code on 6/20.

Based on an original write up by AV Bkis’ blog, news of these events circulated through a number of tech sites, security and malware focused blogs, forums, and twitter over the weekend, while Lenovo investigated, and worked to resolve the situation.

The site was confirmed free of infection by 9 am, EST Monday the 21st, and as Google rescanned the site and found it to be clear as well, the advisory messages lifted..

As a precaution, Lenovo advises customers who accessed the download section between late Friday, June 18 and Monday, June 21, to run an antivirus scan. It is also recommended that users run the automatic update function of their antivirus program to ensure it is using the latest definitions files. Additionally, since the installer filename is known, a simple search for the monskc32.exe file may be an easy added precaution.

Yesterday, the 75,000th customer registered in the Lenovo Forums, and this seemed a nice milestone in our journey to take note of.  Thinking back to  December 2007, when we officially launched the community, I can still remember pacing nervously around my living room on that Saturday morning wondering how quickly this would grow and whether the “If you build it, they will come…” saying would hold true.  

True it held and then some. Over the intervening months, millions have viewed the site and perused it’s content while tens of thousands of discussions have played out, and many have become solutions accepted by the community and so marked.   For most support communities, the accepted solutions or paired question and best / correct answer function has become a staple feature.  But what if you just want a coherent answer or tip from the community without having to read through a bunch of  forum pages?  

Perhaps the next logical  step in community evolution is the implementation of an integrated knowledge base  that provides a work flow to  harvest some of the best discussion and solutions and transform these into richer, more concise articles that can be easily browsed, searched, syndicated and socially shared.  We’ve recently added just such a feature to the Lenovo community.  

 As a best practice, I think it is important to recognize not only the individual who authors and edits an article, but  those who contributed the original content through forum posts that made their way into the article.   Of course, the knowledge base also provides for original articles to be created from scratch, supports pictures and embedded video,  easy access from the forum,  and  includes the ability to share articles effortlessly on Facebook, Twitter, and countless other social networks. 

Our new Community KB does all these things and then some.   I expect there is going to be a learning curve for community members to embrace the new features and to begin to think about the value of creating articles for themselves and others and then sharing them broadly.   This technology combines some of the best aspects of a Wiki – the ability for trusted community members to collaborate and recursively edit and update articles with some of the best features of community organization hierarchy, navigation, and perhaps most importantly, individual reputation and earned privileges.  Each discussion area has its own knowledge base so users can easily navigate to content that is most relevant to them, or they can navigate up to a product category or even the entire community to view all available articles.

As this is an emerging concept, it is still in it’s infancy both in terms of available articles and user adoption.  I expect the available content to grow quickly over the next few months, and the overall ease of use will improve as we apply further navigation and content integration.   Looking ahead, there are several other growth areas for our community this year and I’m eagerly anticipating seeing our 100,000th member register, and then who knows - perhaps a million or more one day in the not so distant future.

Hope to see you there!

Microsoft’s MVP program  is broadly recognized and certainly well regarded in the industry, so naturally I was delighted to welcome a growing number of MVPs into the Lenovo community.   Several members, like Aryeh Goretsky have been with us since virtually the begining, and have exerted a postitive influence  not only within Lenovo’s community, but in multiple venues across the web.

Recently, I was able to connect with Aryeh, and he was kind enough to answer some of my questions and share a bit of his exceptional story about how he got started with PCs, the online world, and the MVP program.    As we consider how Lenovo’s customer community continues to grow in size and diversity, I find  his experience and perspective valuable and appreciate his membership, along with that of his peers, all the more each passing day.

Mark:  What first drew you  to online communities and how long have you been participating in them?

Aryeh:  It seems like I’ve been online forever, Mark.  My first foray into online communities was in the early 1980s, with dial-up BBSes. Growing up in Silicon Valley, I had ample opportunity to go online, where I could talk and learn about computers and just socialize.

Since the BBS systems I called were locally focused, a number of them had periodic meet ups, whether as part of a user group meeting or just going out for pizza. It was through these that I met people who worked as programmers and engineers at the companies around the valley and had the opportunity to learn from them about computers.

It was through this hybrid online/offline community of BBSes that I got my first real job. In 1989, John McAfee started his anti-virus company through his BBS and I was a user on the BBS and became his first employee.  John recognized early on the importance of not just having a product but a community around it and the BBS became a hub for both support and virus researchers.

In 1995, I followed John to his next company, which made instant messaging and chat software, around which all sorts of new types of communities were built. It was an amazing experience to watch people interact in real time across continents and around the globe.

I had more time to answer questions on mailing lists and web forums, and started to share the experiences and expertise I had developed over the previous decade. In 2004 I received my first MVP Award from Microsoft.

Mark: From your experience in multiple communities, what factors do you think most influence the long term success of the community?

Aryeh:  For a community to be successful over the long-term, I think it has to have a very keen focus around its users’ expectations and adjust itself accordingly. This means not just adding new features and functionality as they become available, but also maintaining and not removing things they like and expect, as well. This can be a little tricky because customers rarely give positive feedback, instead focusing on negatives. Analytics can be helpful in determining general usage patterns, but they are not a replacement or a substitute for monitoring your own community’s activities.

Community has moved from something really at the periphery to a core tenet of some businesses, and when that kind of refocusing happens, it becomes important for the people who make decisions about the community to be participants, otherwise they may be making decisions based on abstractions, which may not be representative of the community’s needs.

 I think this is actually easier at a company like Lenovo, where the community is built in large part around a model of user-mediated support, e.g., how the product line is organized parallels how the discussions are organized around them. When a new product appears, a new area for discussions can be opened for it. Likewise, when a product is retired, its discussions can be moved to an area for legacy products or archived. Identifying and rewarding (and, sometimes, recruiting) contributors from your community is a fantastic way to ensure continuity.

In the case of a product support or other sponsored forums, volunteers may have an imperfect understanding of your business, so it is important to have people who can answer those types of questions available directly in the forum as well as available to your volunteers as an escalation path. Other than that, a lot of the success (or lack thereof) goes to routine administrative management of the community. Topics may need to be policed for thread drift, abusive behavior contained and the technical underpinnings of the community–the actual hardware and software which runs it–be administered properly to avoid downtime or data loss

Mark : To what extent do you think it’s important for an enterprise to adopt a formalized, programmatic influencer recognition program ?

Aryeh:  Lenovo is a great example of a company which is able to and has embraced community through its forum, blogs and through social media like Twitter. But there are enterprises where these types of interaction may not be appropriate:  The financial services sector and the pharmaceutical sector are both heavily regulated industries and may not be able to embrace community in the same fashion as a hardware or a software company.

Service industries like logistics and transportation might find a great advantage to having a corporate blog or a Twitter account, but a forum would be inappropriate and burdensome to their business.That said, I think it is important for an enterprise to have an understanding of what community means to their business is as well as a plan for it, even if that plan is not to have one at the current time but monitor how conversations about them manifest on the Internet to determine when it is the right time to begin participating.

Mark: What aspects of the MVP program have you found most interesting ?

Aryeh:  As a Microsoft MVP awardee I have been granted early access to some very interesting technologies, sometimes years before they are introduced to the public, and it is certainly very interesting to see those types of things.  

However, what I enjoy most about being an MVP are the engagements I have with Microsoft employees, as well as my fellow MVPs.  

For many computer users, Microsoft is an abstraction, a logo they see when their computer boots up, or perhaps when they run a program.  Microsoft is a company, though, and like any other company is made up of people. What I have found is that those people are some of the most genuinely intelligent and passionate people I have ever met, and they have gathered people whom they feel represents technical expertise in their communities. Being in contact with both Microsoft’s employees and my fellow MVPs allows me to learn a great deal. Although I left school behind many years ago, I think of myself as something of a lifelong student, and I learn quite a bit from my interactions with them

Recently, I had the opportunity as part of a small group of Lenovo employees along with representatives from some of the other PC brands to visit Microsoft as part of an OEM support summit.  I’ll confess that despite having worked in the PC business for more than twenty years, (and can still remember loading DOS 5.x and Windows 3.0 on newly assembled PCs) I had no real comprehension or connection to Microsoft other than through the user experience.

So, this trip to Redmond offered an opportunity to meet and interact with many Microsoft employees, and in that way, to really connect with the company for the first time.   Through all the presentations and discussions, I was struck most by the passion and commitment that each and every employee demonstrated.   The focus was all about the customer experience designed into the products and backed by every aspect support  from the in-line context relevant tools and automated troubleshooters, to the proactive updates,  online support communities and traditional contact centers.

The visitor center where we enjoyed an evening meal, was a fantastical technology showcase.   A  large globe  that seemed close to six feet in diameter  featured rotating images that served up news headlines, top Bing search terms, and relevant information in real time.  This stunning visual feat was accomplished through the careful integration of four projectors driven by six PCs .  

Visually stunning.

Phil,  checks out the Surface computer.  Touch computing on a grand scale is captivating to say the least.  Yes, phones are cool, and unarguably much easier to take with you, but this thing was truly something to behold.

Terry was drawn to a trio of W700 ThinkPads on display.  The gravitational attraction of three 17″ mobile workstations was almost as strong as the Surface.

Lest any of us take ourselves too seriously, a caricaturist was thoughtfully in attendance and captured our inner geek with stylized flare.  It was definitely a blast!

By the time the sessions concluded, there was no doubt in my mind that we find ourselves working in a fantastical industry at a extraordinary moment in time.  A time in which our customers can freely collaborate with us online to help shape the course of things to come, and more than ever, we are all listening.

Over the last several months, there has been a lot of discussion about Windows 7, battery run time and reporting on battery condition.    From my reading, I’m seeing two prominent discussion themes.  First, whether a given system is more or less energy efficient running Windows 7 than it was under Vista or XP, and as a result, whether or not run times per charge are longer or shorter than under a previously installed version.  Less of a discussion topic in our community, but a prominent theme in other venues is how a battery’s overall health is reflected by Windows 7.

Ken Seethaler, Director of Strategic Technology at Lenovo shares his thoughts on  Windows 7 reporting, and why the Lenovo Power Manager continues to be an added value for Lenovo customers…

“Microsoft has added a new battery function in Windows 7 to alert customers to batteries that have significantly degraded capacity.   The Windows 7 battery notification message has the ability to display a message instructing the customer to consider replacing your battery. Some customers experiencing this message, most of who had just upgraded from XP/Vista, unfortunately may have concluded that Windows 7 had somehow degraded the battery pack.  Microsoft has since explained this message in detail on the MSN blog.

The intention of this message/feature was to notify customers when their battery pack had degraded to a point that should be noticeable to the user, encouraging customers to replace their battery for an improved Windows 7 experience.  Microsoft has decided that the threshold for this notification should occur when the battery pack has reached 40% full charge capacity when compared to the initial design capacity.

Although informing the customer that their battery is at 40% of its initial design capacity may have some merit, this message has led some customers to ask questions as to exactly what this means to the battery’s overall health. 

Should the customer purchase a new battery pack? Is the battery safe to continue use?  Will the computer suddenly shut down as indicated by the Windows 7 battery message?  These questions are all reasonable, however the Microsoft Battery Notification message does not presently address them.

 Lenovo’s ThinkVantage Power Manager utility reports battery health and provides an accurate indication of remaining  run time (capacity) while on battery power.  A staple component in the ThinkVantage suite of applications,  Power Manager continually communicates with all of Lenovo’s battery packs and monitors the battery pack’s capacity degradation over time. The health status of the battery pack is reported within Power Manager and has three states: good, fair and poor. If the capacity of the battery deviates from the normal expected degradation curve Power Manager will report the battery condition as poor to the user as is shown below:

 
This condition is also a clear indicator of when a battery pack is eligible for a warranty replacement during the term of the warranty period, one or three years depending on the battery purchased.  In addition to signaling abnormal capacity degradation, the poor condition indicator is used to notify the user when a battery error has occurred. The operating performance of the battery is continually monitored and when the cells or the electronics within the battery pack deviate from the expected safe operating range the battery pack will be disabled and an error will be reported by Power Manager visible to the user.  Battery packs reporting errors are also eligible for warranty replacement during the term of the warranty, or if covered by a special service program which may specify qualifying batteries by their service part numbers, and validation through an online tool.

The fair condition indicator is used to notify the user that the battery has experienced a significant amount of capacity degradation due to heavy use over time.  This condition is a reasonable indicator to the user that it is a good time to replace the battery pack.  The computer will continue to operate, but the user will notice a significant reduction in run-time per charge compared to a new Lenovo battery.  The fair condition is closely analogous to the new Windows 7 Battery Notification message previously discussed.

Lenovo continues to recommend Power Manager as the battery health management tool of choice for Windows 7 installed on Lenovo products.  Power Manager provides a more complete indication of battery health than the Windows 7 Battery Message Tool.”

Who says those clever folks in Lenovo’s online sales and marketing don’t have a fun side?  With March Madness upon us, Lenovo has recruited 64 great sports bloggers to participate in Last Fan Standing 2010 – learn more! 

Be sure to bookmark the site and follow the contest for a chance to win some great prizes including a S10-3 Netbook in week 1, an IdeaPad U450p in week 2, and the cool new ThinkPad Edge 13″ in Midnight black in week 3.    There are even some Las Vegas accommodations at the Mirage to be had.   Don’t miss out!