Adventures in home working

I will be getting a Treo 650 in 2 weeks time,  I already have a personal 600,  but this one will be provided by my company and will have wireless email, calendar and address book.  I am really looking forward to it.  I will also get to play with a Margi presenter-to-go kit, which should be fun,  I have never been convinced of the benefits of presenting from a PDA, but it will be interesting to experiment.

One of the reasons I have always liked wireless email is that I always forget to sync my PDA’s, the only one that was ever up to date was my Backberry and it was never in its cradle and the only time it synced to the PC was during a SW upgrade.

I recently refreshed my utilities by browsing through Scott’s great site strongly recommened.  These are the ones I use:

• Notepad2 (Scite also uses the codebase) – A great text editor. First class CR/LF support, ANSI to Unicode switching, whitespace and line ending graphics and Mouse Wheel Zooming. A must. Here’s how to completely replace notepad.exe. Personally I renamed Notepad2.exe to “n.exe” which saves me a few dozen “otepad”s a day. Here’s how to have Notepad2 be your View Source Editor. Here’s how to add Notepad2 to the Explorer context menu.
• Windows Desktop Search - The betas were rough and tended to lock up, but the free final edition is tight. I can finally bring up a file almost as fast as I can think about it. One important note that sets it apart from Google Desktop Search is that the items appearing in the result window are first-class Explorer Items. Right click on them and you’ll not only have all your context menu extensions, but also Open Containing Folder.
• TaskSwitchXP and/or TopDesk - Two better ways to ALT-Tab and Task Switch in Windows. Don’t confuse TaskSwitchXP with the old PowerToy. This one is fast and powerful. If you envy the Mac’s Expose, then use TopDesk. Personally, I use both and set a cursor hotspot in the lower-right corner to tile my windows. Be sure to have DirectX9 installed.
• Magnifixer – My ZoomIn tool du jour. Be sure that you have SOME kind of ZoomIn tool installed. I like this one because it automatically follows your cursor and your typing and saves settings without asking. It also has a nice eye-dropper for the RGB in you. Learn how to use this tool if you present at all.
• SysInternals – I showed specifically ProcExp and AutoRuns, but anything these guys do is pure gold. ProcExp is a great Taskman replacement and includes the invaluable “Find DLL” feature. It can also highlight any .NET proceses. AutoRuns is an amazing aggregated view of any and all things that run at startup on your box.
• WinDirStat – There’s a lot of Disk Visualization Tools out there, but this one just seems to tell me exactly what I need to know and it can be run without installation.
• BlogJet – I freaking love this little guy. Works great with DasBlog, supports spellcheck, file upload, makes clean HTML, and includes Music Detection support as well as posting of Audio to your blog.
• BootDisks.com and the Ultimate Boot CD and the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows – I’ve downloaded and saved everything from BootDisks.com, including Win95 and Win98 boot disks and a DOS 6.22 disk. The boot CDs are life-savers and should be taken to all family gatherings where the relatives KNOW you’re a computer person. They’ll expect you to save their machines before the turkey is served.
• FileMon – Displays file system activity in REAL TIME.  Just who is that writing to the disk right now?
• Process Explorer – The ultimate replacement for TaskManager. Includes the amazing Find DLL feature to find out what processes have your DLL in memory.
• TinyUrl.com – Makes big urls tiny. For when you’re emailing a long URL to someone and you KNOW they will freakout it if wraps.
• Del.icio.us – A social distributed bookmarks manager. It took me a bit to get into it, but their Bookmarklets that you drag into your Links toolbar won me over. All my bookmarks are here now and I can always find what I need, wherever I am. Very RESTful.
• Google Maps
• Ultramon – Why this kind of functionality isn’t built in, I don’t know. But it’ll keep the guy at RealTimeSoftware in business! Ultramon is the ultimate utility for Multiple Monitor systems. It’s most significant features, IMHO, is the addition of TaskBars that are monitor specific, and the addition of buttons NEXT to Minimize and Maximize to move open windows over to other monitors. Great if you’ve got 2 monitors, but a MUST if you’ve got more than 2!
• SlickRun, Windows Search and/or Dave’s Search Bar – Pick one, and love it. Why there isn’t a floating or docked command-line in Windows I do not know. Probably so my mom wouldn’t freak out.
• RoboCopy – When COPY and XCOPY just won’t cut it, try the “Robust Copy”
• BgInfo from SysInternals - If you log into a lot of boxes remotely and always wonder, where the hell is this? This wallpaper tool creates custom wallpapers with all the information you’d need, like IP Address, Box Name, Disk Space, and it’s totally configurable.
• AutoRuns – I always am suspicious that someone is running something automatically on my system.  AutoRuns (from SysInternals) checks EVERYWHERE that could be running something, the registry, win.ini (remember those?), the Startup Group, etc… 
• Paint.NET – The Paint Program that Microsoft forgot, written in .NET.
• Junction Icon Overlay – If you’re digging Junctions (NTFS Reparse Points/Symbolic Links) like I am, then you’re lamenting the fact that Windows Explorer is CLUELESS about them. Well, no longer, thanks to Travis and his Junction Overlay for Explorer.

In this post I explained that I, along with a few thousand others, was pretty excited about Microsoft’s XML format developments.  I also pointed to Brian Jone’s blog which is proving to be a great recourse.  At Tech ED Brian gave some demonstrations showing the power of the new format, stressing the benefits of the ZIP container format and the fact that different parts of a document are represented as different objects in the ZIP container.  Read for yourself,  or read on and see some of the examples which are pretty cool.

1. Updating a diagram in a spec: I showed an example of taking a technical spec with an old diagram, and outside of Word I swapped it out with a more up to date one. The main purpose of this wasn’t to show that an end user would do that to their files, but instead to show that people could easily build solutions that push relevant pieces of content into files.
2. Removing comments: Most people that manage collections of documents or deal with publishing documents have seen the problem that can occur with extra information in their files. I took an example of a whitepaper with a bunch of comments in it. Often, an end user will just turn the comment view off, and not realize that when they save the file and post it up on the web, everyone else can still see those comments. If it turns out that an end user doesn’t know to delete the comments, it’s still easy enough to just build an automated step in the publishing process that strips those comments out. In my demo I just unzipped the file, deleted the part called “comments.xml”, and showed that when you then open the file back up all the comments are gone.
3. Document corruption: I took a rich Word document and opened it up in a hex editor. I scrolled down to a random spot and just started zeroing out a bunch of bits. I then tried to open the file with a ZIP tool and showed that it was corrupted and couldn’t be opened. I opened in the Word though, and it opened just fine. Even all the formatting information was preserved, so most likely the only thing corrupted was some of the meta-data or some other piece of information that didn’t affect the display (obviously a much improved experience over the current binary formats).
4. Footer & Header update: I took a nice looking whitepaper with a rich header and footer that was synced to the document title and author name. I then opened another whitepaper that had a really lame header and footer. I showed how in an automated process, it was easy to quickly take the header and footer used in one file, and apply it to the other file. This was an example of how easy it will be to update a collection of documents to match a specific corporate standard.
5. Bulk style change: I used the System.IO.Packaging in the WinFX SDK to go over a collection of 100 whitepapers that all had a basic style associated with them, and update the styles to match a more colorful collection of styles. It took just a couple seconds to update all 100 documents.

Brian Madden reports that CITRIX have demonstrated a web part that provides integration between SharePoint and Presentation Server.  It sounds pretty good:

One of the most exciting things I saw at Citrix iForum Edinburgh this year was a demo of a SharePoint web part from Citrix that will allow a SharePoint site to act as a web interface into Presentation Server farms. (This is called “WISP” for “Web Interface for SharePoint.”) Using WISP will be much simplier than trying to strip down the existing Web Interface to stick into a generic SharePoint HTML web part.

Citrix is making the WISP functionality available as a standard SharePoint web part. WISP will be composed of two pieces:

The first will contain an application area and a session control panel area that will hold the icons for applications that users can click on as well as basic workspace control options (Reconnect all, disconnect all, and logout).

The piece is an extension to the standard Microsoft document library web part. (The document library web part is a web part that displays files and documents stored on a SharePoint server.) Citrix has extended this web part so that it allows documents to be opened in remote Presentation Server sessions instead of on the local client. If the user clicks on a file but they don’t have that application installed on their client, the system will automatically open that file on a remote Presentation Server. (This is basically content redirection via the web client!)

If the user does have the application installed on their client then they can choose whether to open the document locally or remotely.

If you’re using SharePoint Portal Server (the one you have to pay for), then you can even use the Microsoft Single Sign-on Service to associate Citrix credentials with your SharePoint account. This will allow your credentials to be passed through to Citrix automatically for application enumeration and connection.

If you’re using Windows SharePoint Services (the free version of SharePoint) then you can’t use the single sign-on service. However, you can still use integrated authentication for the Citrix web page if you use Citrix Presentation Server’s Kerberos-based authentication.

WISP also lets you “drag and drop” both Presentation Server application icons and content onto your desktop directly from the web portal, and you can double-click on these at any time to launch the appropriate application or content.

One thing that’s interesting about WISP is that it allows the SharePoint server to act as the web interface for Presentation Server. It doesn’t integrate with Citrix’s Web Interface–it replaces Citrix Web Interface. This means that you’ll have .conf configuration files on your SharePoint server and that it will talk directly with the backend Presentation Servers via the XML service. (Of course this is all configured via a standard SharePoint web part configuration widget, so it’s really easy to setup.)

WISP was available for us to play with in the Tech Lab here at iForum. Citrix is planning to release a technology preview of WISP to customers via the mycitrix.com portal in upcoming months.

As of now, WISP requires SharePoint 2003 (either Portal Server or Windows Services versions) and Presentation Server 3 or 4.

I posted a while ago about my quest to go paper-less, its going very well btw although I find it’s becoming a bit of an obsession .  Anyway I recently came across this interesting article and trend graph. 

I also got an email from Milton, who had read my post on going paper-less.  Milton has a blog where he talks about paper-less office ideas and articles and even better he has written and eBook on the subject that he sells on his site.  He has been kind enough to send me a copy to read, so I will report back on that soon.

This is big news and widely reported, and live on video.  I am increasingly impressed around the evolution of Office,  I think Microsoft is finally realising that people don’t want more incremental functions to refine what they already do.  They want new way of working to be enabled.  The new features in 12 seem to be going in that direction at least in the collaboration and information management areas, I can’t wait to see what they do when they can build on top of Longhorn and WinFS.  That’s not to say that OOo is not doing some great creative stuff as well, and of course the killer value proposition of OOo will be its ubiquity as within 3 years I doubt there will be a corporate desktop anywhere that does not have access to OOo,  I don’t think we will be able to say that about office 12, so Microsoft needs to get creative, Metro is the first glimmer of that, we will have to wait and see!

One of the best places to keep informed seems to be Brian Jone’s blog, a bit about Brian:

Brian is a program manager on the Word team. He’s been at Microsoft for about 6 years, and has been working on XML support in Word and across Office for a good percentage of that time. He set up his blog to talk with people about what Microsoft are doing in the next version of Office around XML

It seems to be fairly well received so far, main point are:

1. Open Format: These formats use XML and ZIP, and they will be fully documented. Anyone will be able to get the full specs on the formats and there will be a royalty free license for anyone that wants to work with the files.
2. Compressed: Files saved in these new XML formats are less than 50% the size of the equivalent file saved in the binary formats. This is because we take all of the XML parts that make up any given file, and then we ZIP them. We chose ZIP because it’s already widely in use today and we wanted these files to be easy to work with. (ZIP is a great container format. Of course I’m not the only one who thinks so… a number of other applications also use ZIP for their files too.)
3. Robust: Between the usage of XML, ZIP, and good documentation the files get a lot more robust. By compartmentalizing our files into multiple parts within the ZIP, it becomes a lot less likely that an entire file will be corrupted (instead of just individual parts). The files are also a lot easier to work with, so it’s less likely that people working on the files outside of Office will cause corruptions.
4. Backward compatible: There will be updates to Office 2000, XP, and 2003 that will allow those versions to read and write this new format. You don’t have to use the new version of Office to take advantage of these formats. (I think this is really cool. I was a big proponent of doing this work)
5. Binary Format support: You can still use the current binary formats with the new version of Office. In fact, people can easily change to use the binary formats as the default if that’s what they’d rather do.
6. New Extensions: The new formats will use new extensions (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx) so you can tell what format the files you are dealing with are, but to the average end user they’ll still just behave like any other Office file. Double click & it opens in the right application.

There are two white-papers for more details:

 The Microsoft Office Open XML Formats: New File Formats for “Office 12″

http://download.microsoft.com/download/c/2/9/c2935f83-1a10-4e4a-a137-c1db829637f5/Office12NewFileFormatsWP.doc

This first whitepaper is a general overview of the file format, and is targeted at multiple audiences. It starts off with an introduction about what’s going on and also briefly touches on the history of the current binary formats and how we got to where we are today.The Microsoft Office Open XML Formats: Preview for Developers

http://download.microsoft.com/download/c/2/9/c2935f83-1a10-4e4a-a137-c1db829637f5/Office12FileFormatDevPreviewWP.doc

This paper talks more about the architecture of the formats and is targeted at developers. This paper has a similar introduction to the first (but from a slightly different angle). The last 7 or so pages of the paper go into solutions and what people can do with these files. It’s a great way to start thinking about the possibilities, and what types of things you can probably expect to see built on top of the format.

Microsoft and Sun put on a nice show recently to demonstrate that competitors can still work together to improve interoperability for the benefit of their customers, this follows a couple of years of real progress by Microsoft in working out (with partners and competitors again) an architectural approach (web services) that allows them to innovate but inter-operate.  Of course the Open Source world has been showing the way on that for years, so its nothing new, but it’s certainly an encouraging move by Microsoft.  This last report on their approaches to Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik and more recently Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative and vice president of open-source affairs at Red Hat is further evidence.  Certainly in my discussions with Microsoft I am detecting an increasing awareness of the real world that customers live in,  rather than the ideal world (in their eyes) that Microsoft would like us to be in, progress, slow but sure.