About Useful Technology Blog
My name is Allister Frost and I'm a Marketing Communications Manager for Microsoft in the UK. I look after our marketing programmes to consumers (i.e. real people doing real things with software to get more out of their lives). Seeing people achieving more thanks to a great piece of technology is what drags me out of bed in the morning and makes my work feel worthwhile.
First and foremost I'm a brand marketer. I love to build brands that make people's lives that little bit better. I'm passionate about creativity and innovation and have committed much of my career to helping bring out the best ideas in others and make them a reality. I love football and R.E.M. My lawnmower makes me angry. I'm a qualified copywriter and can get really excited by great words and language. The incorrect use of words makes me really tetchy. I'm a dad and a husband - nothing is more important to me than that.
Strangely for someone with a blog on Technet I'm not a technologist. The buttons and widgets intrigue me but I'm more interested in the human benefit of the technology than the technology itself. I enjoy digging into software to see how I can make it work harder for me but I turn to others to create the code that's needed to make it work.
When I did a personality test recently I discovered that my top 5 traits are Ideation, Strategic, Focus, Belief and Futuristic. My bottom 5 were Adaptability, Includer, Context, Consistency and Harmony. Make of that what you will. I know I have.
This is the place where I stash my top tips, discoveries and factoids about being productive using what I call 'useful technology'. There's lots of stuff here about Microsoft software, primarily Outlook and the other productivity tools so many of us use every day. Thanks for stopping by.