Premium Plaxo for Comcast users …

I recently switched from DSL (which I’d had since it first was invented) to Comcast Cable for my Internet connection (and TV and phone). By doing so I saved about a hundred bucks a month over AT&T and DirecTV. Of course as soon as I switched, AT&T started calling me with a bundle that was roughly the same price, but that’s a different story.

One of the things that happened a while back was that Plaxo was bought by Comcast. I have always been a premium Plaxo user, feeling that I wanted to support them since I find the product so incredibly useful. What I learned was that if you are a Comcast subscriber, you are automatically a Plaxo premium user.

Now, being a premium subscriber used to only mean you got VIP support and access to a couple of tools (like the address and calendar deduplication tool). But now Plaxo has announced that the Outlook synch is a premium member only tool. While I worry that this decreases the value of the service (since there will be fewer reasons for people to sign up, therefore fewer members, and decreasing the number of automatic updates I get), what is interesting is that every Comcast subscriber gets access to these premium services.

To activate this, first you have to make sure that you are signed up for Plaxo through your Comcast email account. First, log in to your Comcast email by going to http://www.comcast.net and clicking on the Email link in the “My Comcast” portlet:

If you’re logged in already it will go straight to your email, otherwise you’ll get the login screen, where you need to log in:

Log in with your Comcast email address. This will be something like your last name and street address unless you’ve changed it. Once you have logged in, you’ll be at the Comcast email screen, which uses the Zimbra email client. From the tabs, you’ll want to choose the address book:

The first time you go to the address book, you’ll be asked to build your address book:

If you click on the “build your address book”, you’ll go to an initial Plaxo setup screen. Since they already have some of your information (name and email), they don’t have to ask you for anything but where you want to populate your address book from:

So now it gets interesting. If you click on Plaxo, you can link an existing Plaxo account to your Comcast email. If you were already a Plaxo user, this will get your current address book and calendar.

If you’re not already a Plaxo subscriber, you can choose one of the other options to build your address book by logging you in and pulling the address book from there:

Note that the GMail synch only works for accounts ending in “gmail.com“,  and not GMail accounts that are using Google Apps. I suspect that Yahoo accounts would also be restricted to “yahoo.com“, but I don’t know that for sure.

There’s a shortcut to signup to Plaxo immediately by simply going to http://www.plaxo.com/ftue/activateComcast, clicking the Activate button will get you set up:

This one does require you to fill in your name and basic information (or link to your existing Plaxo account by following the link at the bottom right). Either way, once you have the account linked, you are signed up and active as a premium member. Now not only can you set up synch points, but you can also install the Outlook synch tool on any computer you use.

Along the way the steps will ask you to update your address book, and if you want to invite your friends. I always skip that step, since I send my friends enough email already.

At the end, you can validate that you’re a premium member by clicking on “Settings” at the top right of the screen, and then choosing “Premium” from the list at the left:

This shows my account has premium status.

If you use Outlook, there’s a few more steps to get fully set up with the Outlook synch tool. There are multiple ways to get there, but ultimately you want to download the sync tool from http://www.plaxo.com/people/tools?src=tools

Note that you have access to all of these tools, some of which are very cool (like being able to roll back your address book). If you aren’t a Plaxo premium subscriber, you can download and install the tool, but you won’t be able to use it, since the synch verifies the account status when you run it for the first time.

Plaxo has a nice walkthrough of the install process here: http://www.plaxo.com/downloads/outlook?src=pulse_tools_outlook〈=en, so I won’t duplicate that. One thing that I did learn the last time I did this for somebody is that you have to install it with an account that has admin priviledges. The install won’t fail, but you just won’t get the Plaxo tool bar in Outlook.

Once the install completes, and you start Outlook up, it will walk you through a wizard that will sync your Outlook and Plaxo address books. From then on, you should see the Plaxo tool bar at the top of your Outlook screen:

There are lots of other neat things about Plaxo, not the least of which is that you can synch between multiple machines. There’s a version of Plaxo for the Mac, and it seems to do a fair job of interacting with the built-in Mac synch tools (including MobileMe).

I’d definitely recommend you take advantage of this “free” service if you are a Comcast internet subscriber.

iPhone Visual Voice Mail returns

This weekend, AT&T finally fixed my visual voice mail. I still don’t know what they did to fix it, but I’m pretty sure it’s related to a hack that I’ve been reading about which lets the phone do tethering.

Now I didn’t try this hack on my newly replaced phone, but when I asked the AT&T people about it, they said they were working on a fix on their side for a wider problem (meaning I wasn’t the only one who had gone without visual voice mail for some time).

I’m hopeful that this problem won’t recur, but I wonder if perhaps it was caused by AT&T trying to block the tethering hack. Now my phone is happy again, and I’m no longer missing calls (at least as far as I can tell).

iPhone non-visual voice mail …

A couple of weeks ago, I notice that my iPhone was not receiving voice mails, and I seemed to be missing calls on occasion. In fact, I hadn’t received a voice mail since around the time I upgraded to the 3.0 firmware.

Since I use this as my primary business phone, I was a bit concerned.

I had been seeing occasional error messages about being unable to connect to the network like:

So of course I called AT&T to find out what could be wrong. The first time I called, I followed the path that took me to an Apple representative, and they had me reset the network settings (From the Settings icon, General/reset/reset network settings). After doing that, all of my voice mail from the prior month flowed through into my visual voice mail box.

In the next few days, I was told by a couple people that they had tried to call me, and I again didn’t see any voice mail. I also started seeing the odd network errors again, sometimes in my email or browser:

So I called 611 again, and this time I talked to the AT&T  people. They walked me through resetting the network settings, recreated my voice mail box, and a number of other things. At one point, I even got the screen that asked me to setup my voice mail. But still I wasn’t getting the new voice mail messages appearing in my inbox. Finally after bouncing back over to the Apple guys, we made an appointment at the Apple store so I could have the phone checked out.

Somewhere along the line, the visual voice mail simply stopped working. Now when I hit the voicemail icon, I wouldn’t see the list of voice mails, but instead the phone would dial my voice mail:

No matter what we tried, we couldn’t seem to get the visual voice mail to come back. We even tried restoring it as a new phone without any luck. The support people thought that perhaps this was a result of the phone hardware failure, and maybe the Apple Genius could find a fix for it.

So I waited and went to my appointment at the Apple Store Genius bar. They ran some diagnostics, asked a few questions, and determined the phone did need to be replaced. They didn’t have one in stock, so they ordered one, and told me that they’d call when it was ready.

A couple of days later, I went to the store, and they activated my new phone. Naturally the first thing I tried was going to visual voice mail, and what did I see ?

So back home, more hours on the phone with both Apple and AT&T, now I have a case open with the AT&T network group.

To be continued ….

Plaxo: the service I love/hate

A couple of days back, I solved a problem I was having with Plaxo. For a few weeks, I was unable to connect to any of the Plaxo web servers from any of my home machines.

Being a fairly knowledgeable network person, I spent hours trying to diagnose the problem. I could get to all other web sites, but not to anything in the plaxo.com domain. Worse, I could resolve, ping and traceroute looked fine.

First I thought it might be something caused by Plaxo being bought by Comcast. Comcast had just recently been in the news for blocking traffic to keep bandwidth available, so I figured it wasn’t inconceivable that somebody made a mistake in a firewall somewhere that was blocking traffic between them and AT&T.

I sent an email to Plaxo to ask them if their site was up, and called AT&T to see if we could diagnose the problem. AT&T as usual was very nice (and annoying) and started me out with the normal insane steps:

1. Turn off your firewall
2. Clear your cache
3. Turn off your router

After getting past all the annoying stuff, I got to their level 2 support, and then to the 2Wire support to see if they could find anything with my router that might be causing this. Naturally they found nothing, and everything looked OK.

So I escalated with Plaxo, calling them on the phone to see if there was anything they could do. There were emails and phone calls back in forth that never solved the problem:

• First call I was told that there was a problem with one of their servers, and that it would be working the next day (not).
• Another call I was told they had found the problem in their web server, and it would be fixed shortly
• I got numerous emails telling me to uninstall the Plaxo software and log in again, which of course didn’t work since I couldn’t even get to the web site.
• I had numerous emails diagnosing the problem as a Mac issue, or a PC issue, which again it wasn’t since it was happening on the Mac, iPhone and PC (and the iPhone doesn’t even have a Plaxo client).

Finally at some point, I got a support guy who told me that my IP address was indeed blocked at their server. Now we’re getting somewhere. But no, it still doesn’t work.

Luckily for me this guy is good, so he tells me that there was an old version of the Plaxo client for Mac that their servers were detecting as a bot attack, so if I uninstall that everything should be golden. I do, and lo and behold I can get to Plaxo again …

So it appears that Plaxo can be incompatible with itself …

I wonder how many people are blocked with the same problem right now.