Adventures in home working

At every opportunity I complained to my contacts at Microsoft about the fact that restricting full Office 2003 XML support to Office 2003 Pro was a big mistake,  and would not stimulate Office Pro sales,  instead it would slow the adoption of the suite and the use of XML in general.  So I was very pleased to see the following, on Brian’s blog:

I haven’t seen much mention of this yet so I wanted to call it out in case folks weren’t aware yet. For Office “12″, all of the XML functionality will be enabled in all SKUs. In Office 2003, the XML file formats were enabled in all versions, but the support for customer defined schemas was only in the Pro-SKU and not in the standard SKU.

Now lets hope Microsoft see sense about InfoPath as well.

It’s a simple idea,  but I suspect that the VMware player is going to create disruptive ripples throughout the desktop computing industry,  we thought we liked Linux Live Distro’s well imagine being able to download a myriad different pre-build VMware environments and run them on your normal PC, (memory allowing of course).  Here is a snip from VMware:

VMware Player can be used by anyone to run virtual machines on a Windows or Linux PC. VMware Player makes it quick and easy to take advantage of the security, flexibility, and portability of virtual machines.

I use VMware a lot and it’s certainly going to make my life easier to distribute VM’s to other people. I can use my www.streamload.com account for the purpose,  which allows me unlimited uploads (I have a 100GB download account) and I can email out links to VM’s for people to download.

Even better for me,  I expect to start receiving a stream of VM’s from suppliers and colleagues with pre-build VM’s for evaluation, and VMware have kick started that process through relationships with; Novell, Redhat, Bea, MySQL, Oracle, and spike. 

In addition the concept of appliances will become viable,  with single purpose pre-built environments being distributed.  VMware themselves have an example – a browser appliance.

Licensing implications are likely to prove interesting,  but for Open Source SW I expect it will prove massively popular as a way for people to increase their confidence.

Despite the fact that there are many specialist collaboration products that are far superior to Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange/SharePoint – IBM and Microsoft continue to be the mainstream players and certainly dominate if you consider collaboration from the “buy a platform and build on top of it” standpoint.  IBM’s strategy is unfolding – Stu tries to make it clearer – but until the Hanover release it still seems to me to be a series of small scale sustaining innovations,  by the end of 2006 maybe IBM will have a platform that again allows it to innovate more aggressively,  rather than spend all of its time on re-engineering and optimising its current technologies.

Microsoft is also doing plenty of re-engineering,  now nearing beta release of  version 2 (3 if you are generous) of its SharePoint product which is happily disrupting the market it established for Exchange Public Folders and the now defunct Web Storage System.  It’s clear that for collaboration all things point towards SharePoint and related real-time products and that the primary client is Office, especially Outlook.  I can see no long term future for Groove myself.

However these platforms move slowly, as they both seem to draw considerable innovation from the client products,  and have to bring with them a huge installed base.  While Microsoft and IBM plod along a myriad of web based products are disrupting their old established platforms,  at the same time as Ajax, Flash, .NET, and Java continue to reduce the value proposition of the thick client.  Having seen Office 12 and SharePoint in some detail a few months ago I have to admit that I was impressed, but was I impressed enough to spend some hundreds of pounds upgrading,  we will have to wait and see. 

My gut feel is that in the future enterprise wide upgrades will be difficult to justify simply because the Office 12 value proposition is all about business improvement and business improvement across an enterprise is very difficult to achieve.  Its much easier to buy a specialist product that solves a real business problem for a small user community, and repeat that many times over.   So to compete against these specialist suppliers Microsoft (less so IBM) will need to show that their platform can be delivered incrementally and that it can add real value – rapidly – to specialist business process areas, and then be incrementally extended in its deployment scope and ambitions over time.  First indications are that this is the first version of Office I have seem that may be able to achieve it – nimble and strategic, focussed and a platform – not easy to pull off, and only if enterprises continue to buy into the need to upgrade Office in the long term,  which is a very difficult sell these days – now that upgrade pricing is no longer available and the Open Source competition is VERY capable.

There is another option, enterprises can get MUCH better at extracting business value from their infrastructure investments,  and so people/organisations who can  “business improvement across an enterprise is very EASY to achieve” will be in high demand in businesses that continue to invest in the Microsoft platform.  This is a key area that Microsoft and it’s partners need to address.

My experiments with Smart Phones continue….  My daughter has an SPV C500 which I always liked but couldn’t use because it was locked to Orange and my business SIM is Vodafone and she loves it anyway so Dad’s not that mean!  Anyway an upgrade opportunity presented itself and for £29.99 I had a nice new C550, which 5 minutes later was unlocked with the aid of a freeware utility

I already have an excellent Treo 650,  but its locked down by my company so the camera and video don’t work and it’s got layers of security enabled to protect my corporate email, which makes using the media player and phone far too many clicks away for my liking,  plus I am unable to have push email active at the same time as the media player,  just too many compromises :-(.  My colleagues and I have been discussing the options and most of us seem to be deciding that right now convergence is not quite there for us, and we are gradually migrating to two devices.  In my case that means:

• The SPV C550 used primarily as a phone and media player,  always with me
• The Treo 650 used primarily as a wireless email and calendar,  with me when I want to be working an extended day,  or need to be in touch with work while out of the house (I work from home)

This combination is probably not optimal, as it would may be better to use more specialised devices for these two roles,  but it will serve me for a while as I assess the pro’s and con’s of this approach.

I have already discussed the Treo 650,  which I rate very highly,  but what about the SPV c550?

• Very small and light (feels like half the size of the Treo – though its not)
• Fantastic high resolution screen
• Very easy to navigate around with one hand, much easier than a locked down Treo
• Excellent music player, with great hardware buttons that make it very easy to use.  The integration with the phone is great – pause and resume when you make or take a call
• I have added a 1GB storage card, which provides plenty of space for podcasts and music
• Calendar is pretty poor,  but ok as a last resort
• Address book is excellent,  I prefer it to the Treo
• Keyboard is ok,  but my fingers are small!
• Camera seems good,  I really missed the camera.  One of the reasons I was keen to get a working camera again is the functionality in the next version of OneNote that lets me sync photo’s straight into OneNote and then automatically OCR the content,  I am hopeful that this will be a revolutionary feature!!

So what’s not so good:

• I use Lotus Notes at work,  so to sync my contacts and calendar I have to use DoubleLook, (there are alternatives,  but this seems the best option as it also means I can drive Skype from my Outlook address book as well)
• My other headphones microphones (with 2.5mm jacks) don’t work,  the supplied ones are fine
• The USB and Headphone cover is just so inconvenient,  I pulled it out after 8 hours!

I have just posted about how impressed I am by the OneNote team,  and I especially like it when they share details of how the team uses the product themselves to push the boundaries of their processes.  In this extract of a long post,  Chris describes how they use the next version of OneNote to help with the planning and estimating process:

For our last milestone we used OneNote 12 and created a shared notebook, using several sections but one especially held a page for every proposed feature. We put a table at the top of each page, and embedded the spec document in question. The table also had a place to list the devs, testers, comments, unanswered questions (marked with note flags), etc. Everyone on the team could see the notebook at any time, even on the bus ride home. You could see which devs had started making comments on which spec. Two devs could comment on the same spec at the same time. We could query the whole notebook to see how many unanswered questions there were and what they were.

There were some neat side effects too. For example, previously we used to put these specs out and dev would say they would estimate them. Now we could actually see that they didn’t start estimating them until the following week (with an integrated development team it is gold to know what is really happening, not just what is supposed to be happening). Some PMs took advantage of that knowledge to put up an updated spec that had more detail - something we had been asked not to do in the past as devs had often started estimating the spec unbeknownst to us.

The most amazing thing was that we were done with the whole exercise and had higher faith in its being well executed in a matter of a week - usually it takes a month. This underlines one of the selling points of this approach - it makes your organization more agile. I was talking to a law firm the other day which is interested in OneNote. I asked them why a firm that charges by the hour is interested in time-saving productivity tools? The answer: law firms that engage in litigation are more interested in winning the case than in hourly fees. Anything that allows them to put a case together and move faster than the competition increases their chance of winning. The CIO told me that he learned something from a General when he served with the military: winning is all about not waiting your turn.

One of the things I like best about OneNote is that the development ad product management team explain (or at least summarise) the decision process they have gone through for major features and then explain how they expect these features and related features to be used.  This not only benefits us,  but also provides them with valuable feedback.  Done early enough in the process it means that the users have the chance to get involved in the design process, and I like this idea a lot.  In fact I like it so much that I want to start using it more within the company I work for,  here’s hoping I can pull it off.

Anyway back to OneNote here are two examples, first an explanation of multiple notebooks:

While we were hearing this request from people trying to organise their personal information in OneNote, we were also talking to a lot of customers who were experimenting with using OneNote to share information between the members of a team. This was not their personal stuff, but separate stuff that was team knowledge – for example, precedents for a case being researched by a team of lawyers. And OneNote’s approach to storing your information – one big “My Notebook” folder on your hard drive – didn’t match the way they wanted to store those separate sets of information either. They not only wanted their personal notes stored in one place and their team notes stored in another, they already had a place to keep team files. (As many teams at many companies do.) We really wanted to really nail this “group notebook” scenario in OneNote 12, so we wanted the user interface to make this separation clear.

and an explanation of working as a team with shared notebooks:

With a shared notebook:

• You can work by yourself or with others - it is asynchronous
• You can come and go as you please - there is no “session” to reconnect to, and no duplicated pages when you reconnect
• Everyone can edit at once
• Everyone or anyone can be offline (no net connection) and still edit
• Offline edits are synced and auto-merged with the shared notebook when the user gets back on-line (even several weeks’ worth of changes)
• Changes are automatically propagated to a server and thence to any of the clients involved in the shared notebook
• The contents can be searched instantly since they are cached locally and indexed.
• Team members can be added at any time and their machines will sync up to the latest bits.
• Everything written is tagged with who wrote/modified it and when it was created/modified
• You can query the notebook to show you what was written since you last looked at it - the actual text gets highlighted.
• Creating a shared notebook is as simple as creating a new notebook and picking a file share or SharePoint (or any WebDAV-capable server) for it - we’ll pick a decent default as well if you don’t care. If you make a notebook shared, we’ll offer to send an email invitation to the team members you specify and that’s all there is to it.

Brian Jones’ blog is fast becoming an essential read for anyone interesting in Office 12’s file formats and import and export formats.  In this important post be describes the fact that Office 12 will be able to SAVE AS PDF, a very useful feature that is of course already present in competing suites, most notably OpenOffice.org.  key questions remain unanswered:

• Will the same capability be implemented in Windows Vista as a print driver
• Will the PDF file support hypertext links, bookmarks, forms, page thumbnails etc
• Will the PDF support electronic signatures
• How will this effect the positioning of Metro

Its well worth checking out the comments on this post,  and waiting for Brian to answer them which he often does after a couple of days.  Here is a snip from his post:

The PDF support will be built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Visio, and InfoPath! I love how well this new functionality will work in combination with the new Open XML formats in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. We’ve really heard the feedback that sharing documents across multiple platforms and long term archiving are really important. People now have a couple options here, with the existing support for HTML and RTF, and now the new support for Open XML formats and PDF!

This web page gives a list of PDC Slide decks, Microsoft web sites and Blogs that talk about Windows Workflow Foundation,  work checking out.

David Chappell is an authoritative commentator on middle-ware,  in this post he explains why workflow is important and confirms that the addition of workflow services to Windows will also be important:

Yet one application of workflow technology is by far the most important in a service-oriented world: providing logic that coordinates the activities of a group of services. Sometimes referred to as orchestration rather than workflow, this coordination is fundamental to creating composite applications. And composite applications look like today’s most promising approach to building new software that really meets business needs.

As I’ve argued elsewhere (here and, at greater length, here), the coordinating logic of a composite app requires a particular kind of supporting platform. Workflow/orchestration technologies provide this platform, and without it, composite applications are tough to build. Developers and architects will need to learn how and when to use what workflow offers, something that’s sure to take time. Still, by including workflow in Windows, Microsoft is clearly indicating that it views this technology as a standard part of the modern developer toolkit.

Windows Workflow Foundation sounds like it’s going to be important.  One of the first things of note is that there will be a client and a server version.  Here is the summary from the MSDN web site on the subject:

Windows Workflow Foundation is the programming model, engine and tools for quickly building workflow enabled applications on Windows. It consists of a WinFX namespace, an in-process workflow engine, and designers for Visual Studio 2005. Windows Workflow Foundation is available (currently in beta) for both client and server versions of Windows. Windows Workflow Foundation includes support for both system workflow and human workflow across a wide range of scenarios including: workflow within line of business applications, user interface page-flow, document-centric workflow, human workflow, composite workflow for service oriented applications, business rule driven workflow and workflow for systems management.

I will be reading the article Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation next week to get me started,  while I wait for my PDC 2005 DVD set to arrive,  as unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend in person.