Adventures in home working

In this post John Hagel describes the phenomena that is Dubai,  it struck a chord with me because I recently watched a BBC2 series on Dubai called ‘Dubai Dreams’ and it really scared me….

Dubai is a tiny place, its rich but its oil is running out,  to replace the oil industry its rulers are focusing on a raft of initiatives including financial services and tourism.  The scary part is the focus, speed and vision with which they seem to be able to act,  cutting through or eliminating bureaucracy with ease, marshaling incredibly diverse resources and making multi-million/billion dollar decisions routinely and rapidly.  Western countries beware,  if the developing world follows the example of Dubai then it won’t just be the size of their cheap labour market that we need to be scared of!

In this article eWeek discusses the fact that Exchange 12 has several competitors for the Email market.  This is undeniably true however most enterprise Exchange users must inevitably be seeing the future of Email as an integrated part of a broader and integrated communication and collaboration solution.  In that context the suppliers of highly effective Open Source Email systems are not really a credible competitor.

However for the few enterprise customers who have no needs for anything but Email they are certainly worth considering.  For everyone else though the competition really continues to come from mainstream corporate suppliers like IBM and Oracle and perhaps from specialist collaboration players hoping to expand into mainstream markets, like Documentum and OpenText.

Microsoft however continues to play to its strengths as it brings to market highly integrated and user friendly solutions that are increasingly enterprise and internet friendly as well.  Next year (2006) we will see a new collaboration centric version of Office, of SharePoint and of its real-time collaboration solutions including Live Server which integrates instant messaging, audio, video and data conferencing as well as some equivalent products aimed at the consumer market.

Monad continues to inspire me,  I have written about it a few times and am really excited about the long term potential for automation within Windows.  However the casual observer might find it difficult to understand this potential,  in which case I recommend looking at way the Exchange team decided to integrate Monad into Exchange 12 and a recently published example showing how Monad can be used to automate the spell checking of a directory of files, using Words spell checker.  This snip gives you an idea of the power:

$wordApp = New-Object -com Word.Application

get-content (dir *.txt) | foreach {ParseFileForWord $_} | where {!$wordApp.CheckSpelling($_)} | Sort -unique

$wordApp.quit()

Well I have been concentrating on work.  My doctors have recommenced that I spend no more than 6 hours and usually only 4 hours working at my desk, so I have been concentrating on work during those 4 hours.  Blog posting has therefore had to take a back seat, however its the holidays now so I have a bit of spare desk time!