Comcast Smartzone Calendar

Comcast sent out an email last week about a new Calendar feature within Smartzone.  I had a chance to poke around with the Smartzone Calendar tonight.  While I do like it I don't see myself using it all that much..  For my personal appointments I use my Blackberry Calender which I always have access to so it is much more convenient.  For my work appointments I use my companies' corporate Outlook client. The Smartzone Calender does have a feature which allows synchronization with outlook calendars but this is not something that my corparate IT department would allow as you need to install a toolbar.

Overall  the Smartzome Calendar seems so have most of the features that the Outlook calendar has.  These features include:

• View the Calendar by Year, Month or Day
• Add an Event/Meeting or recurring Event/Meeting
• Ability to Share your calendar with Comcast and non-Comcast Users.
• Create Tasks and Notes
• Get pop-up reminders of meetings/events
• Ability to synchronize with Outlook via a toolbar install.
• Ability to view upcoming OnDemand movire releases (which is just an advertising tool for the OnDemad services)

Kudos to Comcast for continuing to add new features to the services that they offer.  More info in the SmartZone Calendar can be found here.

New Smartzone Features - email and digital voice

When Comcast switched over to Smartzone one of the biggest complaints that many people had was that you could no longer see all of your email boxes in one place. Comcast apparently has been listening and has recently added this functionality to Smartzone. They went a step further as well and you can also add third party accounts like Yahoo and Hotmail.

I tried adding my secondary accounts last night and it worked great. My accounts showed up in my Smartzone homepage and also show up in the folders section of the email page. My only complaint is that when I imported the accounts all of the messages in those mailboxes showed as unread so I had to go in to mark the as read in order to easily tell that I have new messages. No big deal though. For instruction on how to add additional email accounts go here.

Comcast has also recently launched a feature that allows secondary account users access to check voicemail in Smartzone. Unfortunately it isn't completely working for me. I was looking forward to this as I have access to messages online and but my wife does not. In order to listen to messages online she needs to log onto my account, kind if a pain. I was hoping that this new feature would solve our issue but it does not seem to be working. After going through the instructions here, I had my wife log into Smartzone and the voicemail messages still do not show up. She can see the messages if she clicks on the voice tab on Comcast.net and logs in but it does not show unheard messages and she can not access voicemail from within Smartzone. If anyone else has successfully set up secondary access voicemail access or is having similar issues post a comment to this post

And just to keep us interested Comcast promises a couple new Smartzone features coming soon:

• A Smartzone calendar tab
• Additional Comcast Digital Voice online calling features
• Reading pane preferences
• Ability to send email to multiple contacts directly from your address book

Secondary Email Accounts in SmartZone

I wrote in a previous post that I was a little disappointed that in Comcast's new SmartZone email software you can no longer view email from a secondary account. My workaround was to forward all email from my secondary accounts to my primary account. It works well for me but I got some comments on the blog post that it was an ideal solution for everyone.

Interestingly I got an email from Comcast the other day entitled "Answering your questions about the SmartZone Communications Center. One of the FAQs in the email was how to see all of my Comcast email in one place. The solution is to add the secondary email accounts as External POP accounts using the below steps:

1. Go to the Preferences tab
2. Select the Email Manager sub tab
3. Select Add External Account
4. Enter Unique Account Name to identify the account (e.g. Sandra-Sec1-Ext)
5. Enter the Secondary account's email address (e.g. Sandra-Sec1@comcast.net)
6. Select POP3
7. Enter Email Server: mail.comcast.net
8. Enter password
9. Click Test Settings to make sure the external account setup is correct
10. Click Save

I went through the above steps with one of my secondary accounts and it does work although not exactly how I expected. It adds the account as a new folder within the folders list. You can see all of the emails in that account but when you send an email from that secondary account comes from your primary account. So I guess this solution is a little better but not quite as good as webmail where you could access all of your accounts and send email from those accounts separately. I do look forward to a future SmartZone release where I can access all of my accounts as I did in Webmail.

Still to me is a minor inconvenience for all of the new features that SmartZone has included. I have had much more time to use SmartZone since my original post and the more I get used to it the more I like it. Comcast can't make everyone happy but I think once customers get used to SmartZone they will like it as well. I think Comcast is trying hard to address customer concerns and questions by sending out emails, FAQs and Tutorials to attempt to resolve customer issues.

SmartZone

This morning I was upgraded to Comcast's new email software called SmartZone and I have to say I really like it. I first heard about SmartZone back in November when I got an email from Comcast informing me that in a couple days I would be upgraded. A couple days, then weeks passed and no SmartZone. Around the end of November I got another email from Comcast staying that my upgrade was pending. Not sure what "pending" actually meant I went to the Comcast Help Forums and found that the servers where having some capacity issues and that they were suspending all upgrades until after the 1st of the new year.

So now here it is 3 months later and I am finally upgraded so I figured I would talk about what I like and don't like about SmartZone

What I like:

• The interface is designed to work like Microsoft Outlook. So there is now all of that cool drag and drop and right-click functionality. Very intuitive and easy to use
• I can still access my old address book and saved email folders.
• My email box in now increased to 10 Gigabytes in space.

What I don't like:

• I can no longer access secondary email accounts from the main page of my primary account. I have heard they are bringing back this functionality in a future release but it is not really that big a deal for me. I just turned forwarding on in my secondary account and have emails forwarded to my main account.
• There seems to be a bit more advertising on the interface. I remember a little ad within the old interface but there seems to me more of it with SmartZone.
• When I was logged on this morning the interface seemed to be a little slow. It seems fine now so I am now sure if it was a connection issue or an issue with the Comcast servers.

I think just like any new software it is going to take a little while to get used to SmartZone. Some things work a little differently like needing to double-click an email rather that single-click to open. Of course with all of the new functionality I am sure that SmartZone is going to be really slow on older computers. My two home PCs about a year old and my work PC is newish as well so I have seen no performance issues. Luckily, Comcast has released a SmartZone Lite version of the software for this very issue. I haven't used it yet but it can be accessed under preferences.

So overall I am very happy with SmartZone. After reading the comments in the Comcast Support forum I was expecting issues but for me the upgrade has been pretty painless. Working in the software industry myself I know how hard it is to keep everybody happy when you release new software but I think Comcast has done a pretty good job with this one.