Archive for July, 2005

Jul 29 2005

Office 12 - Information Worker Related Topics

Published by Steve Richards under 1


Information Worker
The new Office user experience (Presenter: Jensen Harris) Office 12 introduces a substantially redesigned user interface designed to make the core Office programs easier to work with.  This session will review the design principles behind the new user interface and explore in depth how it will make it easier for users to find and use a greater range of Office capabilities.
Outlook 12 & Exchange 12 — Even better together (Presenter: Dan Costenaro) Hear about all of the “better together” investments this release, including Account Setup, Cached Sharing, OOF, Free/Busy, and more.
Core spreadsheet advances in Excel 12 (Presenter: Joseph Chirilov/Brandon Weber) Excel 12 offers the mainline spreadsheet user a number of advancements that speed up common tasks and enable results that were not possible in past versions. Learn about the new spreadsheet functions as well as the next generation formula UI, both of which are direct responses to common customer problems and requests. This session also covers the Excel 12 investments aimed at working with tables of data in the grid, which improve tasks performed by virtually 100% of spreadsheet users.These include improvements to sorting and filtering, formatting, calculating on table data, and data visualization.
Create great looking documents effortlessly (Presenters: Joe Friend/Matt Kotler) Learn how Office 12’s improved user experience plus enhanced graphics and formatting tools will let you get your message across with more clarity and impact by creating professional looking documents easily.
Charting in Office 12 (Presenter: Kris Tolle) Charts have received a complete facelift in Office 12 with better integration across Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, improved workflow, more discoverable options, and easier ways to create professional looking charts that sizzle.
Harnessing unstructured information with OneNote (Presenter: Owen Braun) OneNote 12 features improved organizational tools, tighter integration with Office, and enhanced sharing capabilities, along with responses to many of our customer requests. This session will describe the role OneNote plays today in customers’ information ecosystems, talk about the roadmap for the future, and show off some of the new features for this release.
Overview of PowerPoint 12 and a look into new graphics capabilities (Presenter: Nathalie Collins) This session will walk-through the new PowerPoint features and graphics capabilities, including: how to create a presentation using new custom template capabilities; create impressive charts, tables and diagrams using Office Art improvements; and take content from an existing presentation through the slide library, making it easier and faster to create PowerPoint documents or presentations.
InfoPath tools for information workers (Presenter: Josh Bell) An introduction to form creation for the InfoPath rich client: This session will focus on codeless form development, and highlight the Office 12 enhancements in the rich client and design mode, including the Design Checker, Word Import, Template Parts, and many other new features
Outlook 12 - Improved Outlook Calendar reliability (Presenter: Dan Murillo) Learn about the changes made to meeting workflows in the Outlook Calendar to help make sure it’s accurate and up-to-date.
InfoPath Forms for Outlook (Presenter: Nate Stott) Learn how to use InfoPath’s Outlook integration to deploy, collect, and analyze information.  This session will cover the InfoPath integration touch points, the use of property promotion to group and sort information in Outlook folders, and how to use form information for more detailed analysis.
FrontPage 12 overview — a professional Web design tool (Presenter: Rob Mauceri) FrontPage 12 is a great tool for professional Web designers and information workers alike.  Learn about deep support for working with Web technologies like CSS, XHTML and ASP.Net, and powerful new tools such as read/write data web parts and a workflow designer for building SharePoint applications.  See how the new FrontPage Contributor Mode allows IT managers and site administrators to keep fine grain control of how FrontPage is used to edit and customize Web sites.
Publisher 12: Beyond small business (Presenter: Rob Dolin) Departments within larger organization share many of the marketing needs of small businesses. This talk looks at some of the ways in which Publisher 12 empowers information workers to do effective print and e-mail marketing communications themselves when hiring a designer isn’t an option.
Visio 12 overview (Presenter: Eric Rockey) Learn about the powerful new capabilities of Visio 12 including data visualization as well as new features that make it dramatically faster and easier to create great looking diagrams.
Scaling up your spreadsheets: Bigger, faster Excel spreadsheets (Presenter: Chad Rothschiller) Excel 12 offers more rows and columns, faster calculation abilities, and less constraining limits around cell contents, formulas, and more. In this session you will learn details about Excel’s larger grid and what you need to do to take advantage of it. You will also learn about the many architectural limits that are being increased for Excel 12 (e.g. a cell can now display more than 255 characters!). Finally, you will learn how Excel is able to divide up formula evaluation & computation tasks (a.k.a. the calculation chain) onto multiple calculation engines which run simultaneously, making Excel’s overall calculation times faster, when running on PCs with more than one processor. This session will also provide hands-on tips and tricks that you can begin applying with Excel 12.
Making Access approachable to information workers (Presenter: Clint Covington) Market trends show that tracking information is becoming integrant part of information workers activities. While previous releases of Access required specialized expertise to build database applications, Access F6712 makes it possible to quickly jumpstart a new database, easily collect data and create rich reports, with little database experience. This session will cover:
· Introduction to database templates and new user model
· New features that enhance any Access application including easy filtering, attachments, rich text, and date picker.
· Extend templates by adding fields to tables, forms, and reports
· Easy creation of new reports
· Collect data using html or InfoPath forms via e-mail
Building tracking apps with Access and WSS (Presenter: Suraj Poozhiyil) Sharing data with others is becoming a necessity in any work environment. When you connect a rich client tracking tool with a web-based collaboration platform you empower information workers to easily access data and process it for better-informed decision making. This session will cover how Access 12 and WSS together enable new usage scenarios to create business impact:
· Connect to SharePoint lists
· Take lists offline
· Rich data features such as append only and version history
· Advertise forms and reports in SharePoint
· Migrate Access applications to SharePoint
· Workflow on SharePoint lists
Quality template solutions with Word (Presenter: Roberto Taboada) This session will show you how to create robust and professional template solutions that will improve your employees productivity and increase the quality of the documents they’re able to produce. We will introduce you to the following new features you can use to build your templates.
This session will cover:
· Document parts
· Smart placeholders
· Themes/quick formats
· UI customization
· Basic data binding
· Migration/deployment tips
Overview of Microsoft Office Project 12, including Project Professional and Server (Presenter: Dieter Zirkler) This session will drill into the new capabilities of Project 12 (Project Std/Pro and Server)
Getting in the Groove - An overview of the newest member of the Office family (Presenter: Marc Olson) Learn about Groove Virtual Office:  what it is, how it works, enterprise deployment support, and the roadmap for Office 12.  Workspace-centered collaboration complements e-mail and other existing tools by providing a centralized location where you can bring together the people, information and tools you need to get work done on time and within budget.  As a result, team members can interact directly with colleagues and clients in real-time, and within the context of their shared work.  Groove’s value comes when the members of the workspace span enterprise boundaries, are frequently mobile or disconnected from the network, or are distributed across multiple geographic locations.  
Office 12 & Real-Time Collaboration This session will cover:
·Overview of LiveServer and introduction to LiveServer TAP  
·Design review geared around O12 and Communicator 1.1 integration scenarios
Creating SharePoint applications and designing custom workflows with FrontPage 12 (Presenters: Eray Chou/Alex Malek) FrontPage makes SharePoint great.  Learn how to build rich SharePoint applications quickly, easily, and without any coding.  Demonstrations include our next generation read/write Data View Web part, as well as, our powerful workflow designer. 
Professional quality spreadsheet output with Excel 12 (Presenter: Roy Simkhay) Excel 12 will add a host of new features to make formatting a professional looking spreadsheet and producing quality output simpler and much faster.  Find out how these great new features will enable your organization (and you) to look your best when presenting your numbers to both internal and external clients.

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Jul 29 2005

Office 12 - Enterprise Content Management Topics

Published by Steve Richards under 1


Enterprise Content Management
Document Management in Office System (Presenter: Rhae-Christie Shaw) Most companies are suffering from information overload including challenges finding or sharing corporate knowledge. This session will include topics aimed at helping you understand how Office can assist in meeting your corporate content management needs.
Applying Office workflow solutions (Presenter: Noah Edelstein) Now that Office and SharePoint offer a rich workflow platform, how should you prepare for workflow solutions in your organization?  This session will include topics aimed at helping you identify how and when to use workflow within your organization, how to plan workflow development, and how to get started developing within the Office 12 workflow environment.
Finalizing and protecting your documents (Presenters: Jason Cahill) What are different types of sensitive information (do not distribute vs. don’t tamper, etc) and what are the best technologies to use to address these scenarios? This session will provide a more in-depth look at IRM, Digital Signatures, and the new Document Inspector.
Records management, policy, and auditing (Jason Cahill) We will presents our story for how to keep and manage documents/email and other records in a long-term repository. This will cover all of the features we are building to help companies be and stay compliant with the various laws and regulations that they face and how they expand to Outlook and Exchange with our SharePoint records management repository as the long-term archive.
Enterprise Search in SharePoint (Presenter: Drew DeBruyne) Search is an integral part of the new world of work.  This session will provide an overview of the enhancements we’re making to enterprise search in SharePoint, including:
· New relevance ranking techniques to return the best possible results.
· Modernized, customizable user experience.
· Integration of structured and unstructured information.
· New management functionality.
· Updated APIs for custom applications.
Deploying and extending SharePoint Search (Sid Shah/ Deepali Tekmalker) The new version of SharePoint brings new deployment flexibility across a wide-range of site types and topologies.  There are also new extensibility opportunities for custom search applications.  Come learn about how you can put Search to work in your organization.
Creating and managing content-rich Web sites (Presenter: Ryan Stocker) This session will introduce the content publishing features of SharePoint and how to use those technologies to build and maintain great Web sites. This session includes the fundamentals of the page model, creating and editing pages, the web authoring console, authoring controls for building pages, site navigation, site management tool, and the creation of pages from Microsoft Word documents. These pieces are assembled, along with other Office 12 features, into a great intranet site.
Building and operating Internet facing Web sites (Presenter: Jim Masson) This session builds on the session “Creating and managing content-rich Web sites” and covers the additional features of SharePoint that are used to create great Internet facing sites. This includes creating custom master pages and page layouts, customized navigation, server hardening, authentication in internet scenarios, content deployment in multi farm topologies, and caching technologies.
Enterprise Project Management: Project Server overview (Presenters: Patrick Conlan/Keshav Puttaswamy) Learn about the features, capabilities, development opportunities and implementation requirements for Project Server 12.

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Jul 29 2005

Office 12 - Developer Related Topics

Published by Steve Richards under 1


 Developer
What’s new in Office 12 and WSS v3 for developers (Presenters: Joe Andreshak/Mike Fitzmaurice) This will be a detail-oriented “what’s new” assuming that the attendee knows something about developing in Office 11 and WSS v2.
Creating Office application customizations with Visual Studio Tools for Office v3 (Presenters: Drew Lytle/Andrew Whitechapel) This session will introduce and discuss programmability around the new managed add-in and application-level task pane support for the Office 12 client applications.
Developer model for the new UI (Presenter: Savraj Dhanjal) The new user interface ships with a markup-based extensibility story designed to simplify the development of 3rd party solutions and applications.  Principles behind the new UI, the extensibility model, and recommended best practices for developers will be covered in this session.
Assembling, repurposing and manipulating document content using the new Office file format (Presenters: Eric Carter/Brian Jones) The new file formats are meant to allow Office document content to be a key part of business processes.  Their ability to be read from server-side code and edited/created by server-side code will be highlighted.
Building Your ASP.NET Web application on WSS (Presenter: Mike Ammerlaan) This session will cover SharePoint SharePoint Services’ behavior as an ASP.NET Web application, specifically in the areas of Web Parts, master pages, pluggable authentication, and more.
Implementing custom workflow with WSS (Presenter: Rob Lefferts) This session will cover two primary topics:  (1) how to use Windows Workflow Services within WSS to create and use new workflows, especially using FrontPage designers, and (2) creating new SharePoint-specific workflow activities.
Advancements in document, content and data storage in WSS (Presenter: Dustin Friesenhahn) Office servers use SharePoint sites as document repositories, Web content channels, e-mail archives, discussion threads, and a lot more.  This session will cover how such facilities work and how you can use them in your own applications.
WSS Feature Packaging and Custom Site/Feature Provisioning (Presenter: Mike Ammerlaan) Feature definitions (new to this release) are the means by which Office can graft spreadsheet, form, and enhance document features into SharePoint sites.  Site definitions (improved in this release), lets you define and deploy complete custom site definitions that let users provision ready-to-use sites that fit specific business activities.  This session will explain how these facilities work and how to use them.
Developing InfoPath Forms for both InfoPath client and Web browsers (Presenter: Boris Moore) Come learn about the new web browser capabilities for InfoPath forms. This session will cover building forms optimized to run both in the InfoPath client and in the browser.  We will cover server and client architecture, execution of managed form code on the server, and will also show how InfoPath forms can integrate into web sites and SharePoint Document Libraries.
Outlook 12 – Developing solutions using the consolidated Outlook Object Model (Presenter: Randy Byrne) Developers often need to integrate their solutions with Outlook. In the past, Outlook development was a complex and sometimes painful process requiring the developer to learn several APIs, including Outlook Object Model, Exchange Client Extensions, Collaboration Data Objects, and Extended MAPI. In this session, you’ll learn how to build an Outlook Add-in that leverages powerful new search functionality using only the Outlook Object model. We’ll cover the significant new investments that Outlook has made in extensibility, making Outlook 12 the most programmable version of Outlook ever. You’ll leave this session with detailed knowledge on how you can incorporate these extensibility investments into great new solutions for your own organization.
Leveraging Excel spreadsheets in solutions with new server calculation and Web services features (Presenter: Danny Khen) This session will cover development of custom solutions using the new Office 12 SharePoint Servers and Excel Web Services API. We will look at scenarios that lend themselves to calling server-side Excel calculation in applications, and explain how the API enables IT developers to implement those scenarios. The session will feature live coding demonstrations.
New world of solution development in Word: structural integrity, data/view separation (Presenter: Tristan Davis) Word 2003 offered rich XML support, but developing a basic solution required code, XSLT, and XSD just to get started. With Word 12, you can seamlessly integrate with SharePoint, or even your own XML data without writing any code. Quickly apply structure to a Word document that will be enforced for you, with the ability to specify data types and apply granular permissions. For those that are more advanced, benefit from almost twice as many events as in previous versions of Word. This session will cover how:
· Smart Placeholders enable rich structured content, with improved robustness to put an end to fragile solutions
· Data/view separation is enabled with code free XML data mapping to the surface of the document
· Rich acetate layer provides easy data type enforcement of structured content
· Powerful events enable rich logic around structured regions
· New Open XML Formats easily expose your data (no Office XML in the way)

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Jul 29 2005

Office 12 - Data & Business Intelligence Related Topics

Published by Steve Richards under 1


 Data & Business Intelligence
Office 12 Business Intelligence overview
(Eran Megiddo)		 This session will introduce the Business Intelligence investments we have made in Excel, Visio, and SharePoint and explain how they integrate with the overall Microsoft BI platform and strategy.
Analyzing and visualizing data using Excel 12 (Presenter: Allan Folting) Learn how Excel 12 makes it easy to connect to data and design and explore data with next-generation PivotTables and PivotCharts. We will cover the new layout tools, the new filtering and sorting capabilities, and new exception highlighting and conditional formatting features that will help business users analyze and explore their data to uncover exceptions, trends, and insights.
Querying external data with Excel 12 formulas (Presenter: Howie Dickerman) This session will instruct you in the use of new Excel OLAP Formulas that enable querying external data and leverage all the power of Excel calculations, layout and formatting. We will demonstrate how you can build a wide variety of reports that were not possible before, including asymmetric reports, “T” reports, and reports which blend multiple data sources.
Publishing Excel Spreadsheets to the enterprise (John Campbell, Dan Parish) This session will discuss the end-to-end scenario for sharing and managing Excel spreadsheets — from completing the authoring in Excel to publishing it to many different users for viewing and interacting in a secure and managed way.  It will cover publishing from the Excel client, workbook security in SharePoint, and viewing and interacting with workbooks on the server. You will learn how to use new SharePoint security and policy features in conjunction with server side spreadsheet calculation and rendering to solve the “one version of the truth” problem for Excel in the enterprise.
Report Center: The hub for Business Intelligence in the portal (Chris McKulka/Brian Welcker) This session will review Report Center and how it enables users to manage and view the latest spreadsheets, reports and Business Intelligence information. You will see unique features that focus on delivering reports vs. documents and learn how to customize an out of box Report Center to enable users to find the information most useful to them. You will see how SharePoint together with new Excel functionality on the server integrates with SQL Server Reporting Services to provide a true hub for BI in the portal.
Building dashboards and KPIs in the portal (Presenter: Chris McKulka) This session will demonstrate how information workers can build compelling visual dashboards that aggregate Key Performance Indicators, Excel spreadsheets and Reporting Services reports into one unified view. You will learn how to setup dashboards, customize them and use new controls to filter entire dashboards.
Data visualization with Visio (Presenters: Matt Adereth /Bill Morein) Using Visio, learn to create rich, live visualizations of Excel, Access, and SharePoint data. This session will focus on real world scenarios using Visio’s Data Mapper and PivotDiagram features.
The Business Data Catalog: Line of business data in the portal (Presenter: Jonah Burke) New capabilities in SharePoint enable you to register external databases and web services with the portal and leverage that data across the portal. Learn how to display external data using out of box web parts, collaborate on data in SharePoint lists and index external data using SharePoint search.
Business scorecarding, budgeting, planning, forecasting & financial management with “Biz#” (Presenters: Ryan Burma/Sanjay Jacob) Office 12 includes a new Business Intelligence investment area called Business Performance Management (BPM).  This session will provide exposure Microsoft’s BPM strategy as well as a functional and technical overview of the upcoming BPM applications codenamed “Biz#.”  Included in this session will be live product demonstrations of Biz# scenarios including Business Scorecarding, Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting.  
Making connecting to data easy, secure, and manageable (Presenters: John Campbell/Andrew Datars) Find out how to centrally manage external data connections and how they are created, shared, and secured between the client and server. Learn how to use Data Connection Libraries to help end-users find and connect to data, and help administrators manage data connections across the enterprise. Learn how to use SharePoint Single Sign On to securely connect to data.
Next Steps: Setting-up and evaluating Office 12 BI features (Presenter: Sanjay Kulkarni) This session will teach you everything you need to know in order to successfully evaluate Office 12 BI features. How should you prepare for BI solutions in your organization?  It will cover setting up Excel and SharePoint to enable data analysis and visualization, server based Excel spreadsheet calculation and rendering, dashboards, and Report Centers. And will discuss the different topologies available and security, performance and scalability considerations.

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Jul 29 2005

Office 12 - Client Deployment Related Topics

Published by Steve Richards under 1


 Client Deployment
Understanding a language-neutral/multi-MSI design & multilanguage deployments (Presenters: Brad Corob/Amanda Hartin) This session will cover:
· Benefits of a language-neutral architecture
· The multi-MSI design
· Using the Office 12 setup controller and admin drag-and-drop
· World-wide deployment of multiple products and multiple languages
Tools and strategies for getting through Office 12 migration (Presenters: Paul Barr/Tony East/Brian Jones) How should we handle migration to the new file format? What should we do about some divisions in our company using Office 2003 or older while others already are on Office 12? This session will cover these topics and also will present an overview of a new MSP (patch) based customization and maintenance infrastructure integrated into setup.
Office diagnostics (Steve Greenberg) Some users of Office have terrible experiences and crash repeatedly. Office Diagnostics, a new tool included with Office 12, attempts to deal with this problem. Included are a set of diagnostics that identify and fix common causes of systemic instability. Come to this session to hear about the goals of the Office Diagnostics team and the work that’s been done so far. Provide us with feedback that will help us refine this V1 tool before we ship.
The Office 12 Resource Kit, the Office Migration Toolkit, and prescriptive deployment guidance (Presenter: Mike Jorden) The ORK will be completely redesigned for Office 12.  Come see the new direction to learn how much more valuable this resource will be. You’ll also have the opportunity to learn about the Office Migration Toolkit.
Where’s My Content? Office’s revised security model (Presenter: Colin Birge) Tired of clicking through security warnings?   Want to keep your secure defaults and still get work done?  Office 12 provides new ways for administrators and users to easily run the solutions you want while avoiding viruses, Trojans, and other hacks.  Learn about how to set up Office 12 in order to provide the best possible security and user experience.
Privacy in Office 12 (aka But I didn’t WANT to show everyone my previous revision!) (Presenter: Colin Birge) Privacy is about more than protecting your personal data.  It’s also about knowing what data you’re sending out, and who’s reading that data.  Office 12 introduces new tools and new information to help you manage the personal information in your documents.  You can also enforce your preferences in allowing Office to contact Microsoft for Web-based services.  
Migrating settings and deploying solutions securely (Presenter: Ambrose Treacy) The goal of this talk is to cover the ability to match Office 2003 settings with new Office 12 settings and also to spend time talking about new options to deploy trusted solutions to trusted locations that “just work” without tweaking security settings or asking users to answer security dialogs.
Panel discussion with MS IT deployment gurus Pick the brains of the people who plan and manage the Office System deployment at Microsoft. This will be the Q&A continuation of the lunchtime speech.
File Format migration - repeat in brief (Presenters: Tony East/Brian Jones) If you missed the talk on tools and strategies for getting through Office 12 migration, this session will repeat just the file-format migration portion of the longer talk.
Migrating Spreadsheets to Excel 12
(Eric Patterson)		 Understand the new Excel architecture and what it will mean for migration to 12 and compatibility with previous versions.

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Jul 28 2005

Welcome to my CSC private blog

Published by Steve Richards under 1

A number of people within CSC who read my public blog have started to ask me how we go about improving communication around emerging technologies and concepts within CSC. At the moment too much knowledge is locked up in peoples heads, and where it is briefed it is to a select audience, or is in the form of large documents that don’t get read and certainly aren’t distributed in a way that promotes discussion. The new CSC portal - being branded CSC SmartWorkplace - is moving in the right direction but a version that supports SME blogging is a while away.

I have been promoted to do something to improve this situation in the very short term because of the amount of information that’s flowing to me in the form of vendor NDA that needs to be distributed, commented on and discussed and because of the importance of that discussion to some of the initiatives I am working on. So I have decided to experiment with a secure area on my public blog. The area will be password protected and invisible until you login.

Ideally I would like you to create and use your own accounts, and send me the details so I can give you access, but the one above will get you started.

Once you login you will see my public postings seamlessly interleaved with the CSC private material. if you just want the CSC private material then use this URL

http://steves.blogharbor.com/blog/CSC

I won’t be posting any sensitive CSC plans or strategies to this area. Although I do intend to make people aware of activities, concepts, frameworks etc

The first set of postings will relate to a 3 day briefing next week on Office 12, and the Office System and on discussions with Microsoft on Desktop Strategy. Read the blog for more info.

2 responses so far

Jul 28 2005

Gmail Journal, Streamload, and secure blogging

Published by Steve Richards under Main

GmailI have made three major changes to my working practice today:

  1. I have setup a StreamLoad account which provides me with UNLIMITED storage and 1GB a month of download capacity for $4.95.  I am in the process of uploading my entire software library and music library,  my photo’s have already been uploaded.  Streamload has a great feature that allows you to send emails from your account with embedded download links, effectively allowing you to send multi-gigabyte attachments!  Pretty useful for emailing around Virtual Machines for example!
  2. I have setup a company NDA area on my blog where I can post information for readers from my company that I receive under NDA or information on projects that is appropriate for company only readership.  You won’t see this area exists unless you login.
  3. I have a new gmail account especially for use as a journal/archive of all sorts of useful bits and pieces.  See below for details.

Gmail as an archive:

  1. Get an account especially for the purpose so you can keep it clean
  2. Create labels for all of your archive/journal categories
  3. For each label create a filter that looks for emails sent to <yourname>.journal+<yourlabel>@gmail.com replacing <yourname> and <yourlabel>.  I didn’t realise today that email servers – or at least gmail – ignores anything between the + and the @
  4. The filter needs to be set to “skip inbox” and to “apply label” <your label>

here are some example filters:

Matches: to:(joe.blogs+notes@gmail.com)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “notes”
 
Matches: to:(steves.journal+thanks@gmail.com)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “thanks”
 
The first one will automatically apply the label “notes” to all emails sent to the address joe.blogs+notes@gmail.com and will remove the email from your inbox
 

One response so far

Jul 28 2005

Productive Friction and Innovation

Published by Steve Richards under Main

FrictionIn some recent discussions I have been introduced to the concept of “productive friction”, which is an effect that’s created when team members with a diverse background get together.  It happens for example when people from different cultures or academic disciplines or companies work together to solve a problem and it increases the level of innovation.  John Hagel describes it in his book The Only Sustainable Edge and in his Article in the Harvard Business Review.

This recent article in Newsweek describes the effect,  and gives some practical and simple advice on how to take advantage of it in your projects:

What they found was that the most successful teams did two things right. First, they attracted a mixture of experienced people and those who were newcomers to whichever field they were in. That’s not surprising–the need for fresh blood has long been recognized as an important ingredient in success. The second criterion, though, was far less obvious. What successful teams had in common was at least a few experienced members who had never collaborated with each other. “People have a tendency to want to work with their friends–people they’ve worked with before,” says Luis Amaral, a physicist at Northwestern and a coauthor. “That’s exactly the wrong thing to do.”

Blogs and social networking tools help people establish the essential connections between experienced people with different perspectives, and this is one of the main reasons why I keep a public blog, and long for an internal blog, or an alternative mechanism:

The study also suggests a role for technology in bringing seasoned people together. Tacit Knowledge Systems, a start-up in Palo Alto, California, is marketing a computer system that links people with similar professional interests. The system monitors e-mail in a corporation or other large organization and keeps tabs on what employees are interested in. If a worker is looking for somebody to collaborate with, he or she can query the system to find somebody appropriate. Tacit is developing a new version that actively forges connections by prompting employees when it finds people who, on the basis of shared interests, might make a good team. Finding a way to maximize creative potential is one of the most pressing problems in corporations. Knowing what makes one team more creative than another is an important first step.

If you want to find out more,  but don’t have the time or the money to follow the links above,  I recommend you download and listen to these two interviews from IT conversations.

In this IT Conversation Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with John Hagel, who with co-author John Seely Brown, has written “The Only Sustainable Edge,” a new perspective for business.

In this IT Conversation, John explains why he considers web services to be a “deceptively disruptive technology” and why he’s an advocate for web-services strategies that focus on the edge of the enterprise rather than lower-return internal integration projects. “Companies are losing opportunities by not thinking systematically about the technology,” he says.

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Jul 27 2005

So much happening in the real-time collaboration space

Published by Steve Richards under Main

Only a few minutes ago I posted about developments in VOIP and Sametime integration,  then we get the Microsoft Live Meeting 2005 add-in:

Live Meeting Add-in for Outlook
With the Live Meeting Add-in for Outlook, you can:

  • Schedule a Live Meeting from Outlook
  • Identify individual meeting participants as attendees or presenters
  • Send separate invitations for attendees and for presenters
  • Specify default meeting options and override those defaults for specific meetings

Live Meeting Add-in for Office Collaboration
With the Office Collaboration Add-in, you can start a Meet Now meeting directly from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, or Project. The document appears in an application sharing session.

Live Meeting Add-in for Instant Messaging
If the recipient also has the Live Meeting Add-in Pack installed, you can start a Live Meeting from Windows Messenger or from MSN Messenger.

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Jul 27 2005

Vista beta 1 on its way

Published by Steve Richards under Main

WinVista_v_ThumbI just started my downloads of Longhorn beta 1,  or Windows Vista:

  • Client
  • Server
  • IE 7 for XP
  • Release notes
  • How do I? documents

If you are not beta testing,  check out the video or this blog post, and the development center on MSDN

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