Adventures in home working

About 8 years ago I was a member of a group charged with selecting a new Email system, we looked at our requirements and were rapidly swayed by visions of the strategic role that Lotus Notes could play in our business unit.   Exchange and Outlook by contrast could only demonstrate ease of use and focus (perhaps I am being generous here).  Anyway not surprisingly we selected Lotus Notes.  Well; years passed by and although Notes was used for much more than Email corporate strategy over rode business unit concerns and Notes Email is no longer – replaced by Exchange.  

Was Notes really so bad during this period to justify its replacement – not in my view,  these are the key issues I saw with Lotus/IBM over those years:

• Notes lost out primarily because Lotus focussed too much on the customer and not enough on the user,  the customer – those guys in IT – liked the compatibility, the ease of upgrade, the rapid application development, application integration etc,  but the end user saw little of that,  and if Microsoft has done anything right in the past its the focus on the end user.  The end user wanted the OS, the Office Suite and the Collaboration suite to feel like and integrated set of applications and to be the same as the tools they used at home.  In addition they liked that fact that Outlook was a platform that was so extensively supported by third party application developers and by portable  devices.
• IBM and Lotus sold a grand vision, and as all to often happens in IT that vision was over taken by disruptive alternatives long before it was ever realised.  

During that same period however we have seen more serious issues with Microsoft:

• Little innovation within Exchange and Outlook
• Many different poorly integrated collaboration solutions (SharePoint v1, Public Folders, Team Spaces, Web Storage System, Team Services …) although these are all very slowly converging to SharePoint although it will be SharePoint v4 at the earliest before we see full convergence
• A very poor off-line working experience across these various different systems
• A poor user experience, especially when you include IM, presence, Groove, news groups, audio, video and data conferencing
• Great difficulty (except with Groove) to use these products across the enterprise AND the extended enterprise
• A very complex development experience
• A mine field of different application version dependencies

However recently I have seen some encouraging signs:

• Microsoft is slowly but undeniably improving the user experience
• Outlook is being considered more of a platform, or collaboration integration hub,  for example it is providing off-line client capabilities to SharePoint as well as Email and Public Folders and RSS
• Office integration with SharePoint continues to improve, and Office 2007 begins to show for the first time the early realization of the benefits of integrated innovation
• Usage across the extended enterprise is starting to look viable
• Office 2007 is giving a lot of power back to individuals and teams, and is starting to look very much like a worthy enterprise implementation of most key web 2.0 concepts
• The web services commitment in Exchange 12 and SharePoint looks good,  especially as Office 2007 and project 2007 integration with SharePoint and Project Server is all achieved using these services.  I look forward to the day that the same can be said of Outlook and Exchange.
• Monad support in Exchange 12 is a great manage-ability improvement and is a taster for what’s to come in the future for all Microsoft products.
• However we can see many similar improvements within the IBM/lotus space.

However there are still concerns:

• Exchange is suffering growing pains and too much focus is having to be directed towards basic engineering and manage-ability rather than customer driven innovation
• Microsoft has scared customers by de-emphasising Public Folders whilst still not having a viable alternative for several key scenarios, see the comments in the previous link.
• The off-line experience for SharePoint in Outlook 2007 is still limited
• Outlook is still not a universal information worker client, not including for example support for NNTP (still need Outlook Express) and not providing a full rich client interface to SharePoint
• There is a new disrupter on the block, now that Microsoft have acquired Groove, and I am concerned that trying to find a home for Groove will take effort away from making Outlook the collaborative hub that it needs to be.
• Competing information management and collaboration technologies in Vista will further confuse and dilute focus
• The tensions within Microsoft around rich clients, IE web clients, other web clients and other rich clients, for example RSS readers make a coherent vision difficult to achieve
• Version dependencies between Microsoft products continue to be a major area of worry for me

Outside of Microsoft and IBM though the world is moving at breakneck speed:

• We see public infrastructure services springing up daily
• We see adoption of these services taking place at near exponential rates
• We see a myriad of creative business models
• Fuelled by the mix of Search, XML, RSS, REST, AJAX etc we see early signs of a new model for interoperability and integration
• We see employees increasingly driving the agenda for change within enterprises by demonstrating – using their own resources and public infrastructure services –  the art of the possible to their employers

The next couple of years will be very interesting,  a few of the questions running through my head right now:

• Will Office System 2007 prove to be a realization of the web 2.0 model for enterprises, or will it be an example of a legacy environment trying to demonstrate such credentials too little to late?
• How compelling is the ability that Microsoft have to integrate the client, with the office suite, with the directory and security services and with the application services, and will such integration slow down innovation or speed it up?
• Will enterprises choose the flexibility of loosely integrated public infrastructure services over tightly integrated enterprise infrastructures?
• Will enterprises keep control or even need to control their users,  or will users increasingly buy public infrastructure services to meet the needs of their teams and projects,  will this create a need for new classes of integration and management infrastructure?
• Will IBM’s strategic vision be disrupted before it has chance to be widely deployed, or will it prove agile enough to keep up?

This week has been mind mapping week on my blog, and this will be the last post on the subject for a while.  Chuck Frey emailed me to provide details of his Mind Mapping Resource Center which is definitely worth checking out,  it has links to articles reviewing most of the software available and well as information about his e-book;  definitely worth checking out.  Chuck’s site also places mind mapping in context with other innovation tools, including:

• Innovation research
• Innovation management
• Idea management
• Brainstorming
• and TRIZ problem solving

If you want to find out more about innovation then it’s also worth checking out this excellent white paper, by Howard Smith of CSC.

I recently came across a quite amazing offer from AxoSoft,  that allowed me to get a 5 user version of their project management software OnTime for just $5 rather than $495, even better the $5 was donated to the Red Cross!  I have been struggling to find a project/task management solution thats flexible enough for my needs so I thought I would give it a try.

You can get access to the offer from here,  there is no link on the web site,  so the only way is through the blogsphere.  At the time of posting they had taken 645 orders and raised $3225 for the Red Cross.

5 minutes later my activation key arrived and I was up and running.  You need to install MSDE, but once thats done you have a 5 user system that is really powerful.  Here are a few of the highlights:

• It’s designed to support defect, feature and task tracking/management,  but its very easy to re-configure it. In my case I changed Defects to Activities, changed a few field names and removed a few others and I now have a project management and task management solution, instead of a bug tracker!
• It’s client server,  it has a great web client that connects to an SQL server or MSDE database
• They say that MSDE can easily support 50+ users
• It has a web client as well that’s broadly equivalent in functionality
• It allows you to build a hierarchy of projects, and browse your tasks at any level in the hierarchy
• It allows you to sort, group, filter and search items
• It allows you to store a description, notes, attachments (linked or embedded), work logs, emails and more against every item
• It’s wildly configurable,  the descriptions of pretty much every field and view can be changed to suit your needs and pick lists like status, priority etc can be customised
• It allows you to create emails, from items
• It allows you to automatically monitor any number of pop email accounts, and auto-process the emails that arrive in them.  In my case I created a number of email accounts and associated them with the activity and task lists.  Found that I could then automatically create an archive of emails associated with each task,  just by forwarding or cc-ing the email accounts I created and placing the task number in the subject field, (for example adding [#44] anywhere in the subject would attach that email to activity 44.
• You can create custom fields, add them to forms and and then group by them,  which is great for GTD users,  although you already have severity, status, priority fields as standard, but you can add fields for different places and different categories.

This is a truly amazing tool for the small project team,  but really excellent for a single user as well.  Unfortunately the 5 user for $5 trial may soon be over, but don’t despair because the 1 user version – which is functionally the same – is FREE of charge.  Here is a sample screen shot:

A few other notes:

• You will want to backup your database,  to do that I created an ODBC connection (in control panel) to my database and then added the following command to the batch file that does my regular nightly backup.  (onetime is the name of the ODBC connection)

OSQL -E -n -D onetime -Q “BACKUP DATABASE onetime TO DISK = ‘D:\Steve\SQL server\master.bak’ WITH INIT”

• There are some really great screen cams that show you how to use it,  start with the overview to get an idea of the power
• I found a bug in the pop email account monitoring service,  it doesn’t seem to download attachments, which is a real shame.  They are working on a fix.
• This is not a great solution if you need to keep your tasks in sync with your laptop, desktop, PDA etc.  However you can use the automatic email processing to allow you to create tasks by sending the appropriate account an email, which is pretty easy.  In fact as many of my tasks are initiated by email in the first place it’s often pretty natural to do it that way.  There is a feature request in to create Outlook sync.
• Check out the support forums for more bugs and issues

A quite few people have asked me which mind mapping product I use, because I have just linked previously to Mindjets web site and not been specific.

Well I use MindManager X5 Pro,  which is not the latest version that Mindjet provide but it’s pretty good.  My daughter (13) has been using a trial version of MindManager 6 Pro which she likes,  but it’s a very expensive upgrade ($174) and I am not a fan of trials (they tend to get you hooked – which of course is the plan :-)).  Here are the main improvements that caught my eye:

You can now edit in the Outline view,  it always seemed strange that you couldn’t before and I do find it useful sometimes to use the Outline view, particularly when I am doing a end to end review of the content of the map, and you want to edit when are reviewing!

You can use the topic “right click” menu to add icons, which is great if you have a large map and don’t want to show the task pane.  Even though I have three 19” TFT displays I still tend to have an application per screen so this is really helpful.  It would be mice though to have some of these task panes as drag off windows that I could place on my other screens.

You can now attach multiple files,  this is really useful as I tend to have one map always open to use as a dashboard showing me all of the work I currently have on-going and like to have all the associated files linked to it.

You can now re-balance the map,  which I seem to remember is an area where other mind mapping products out performed Mind Manager,  so I am pleased to see this as I have often searched for this feature expecting to find it in the previous version.

I export lots of my maps to Word,  in fact I normally write the first draft of a Word document in MindManager, so its great to see that I can now format lists.

Another feature I really liked in a competing product was grouping – with comments, this has been added to version 6

Export to PowerPoint now looks much more usable as well,  I often tried this but was never that happy with the result

What would I like to see?

• Definitely more clip-art,  the current selection is pretty limited and for a product that is so visual it needs a much better selection
• Better support for multiple monitors,  I bet that 30% of Mind Manager pro users use a laptop and a second monitor or a desktop with 2 or more
• Automatic resizing, so that the map fits the screen,  maybe with a threshold so that not resizing every few seconds
• A kids version,  my kids love MindManager and use it for homework and revising all of the time but its not a viable option to buy them their own copies
• One click PDF export, and ideally the ability to auto generate a PDF when the map is saved.

I thought I would share another of the ways that I use mind mapping, to create a project plan.  Mind Manager (my tool of choice) really lends itself to this because you can export a map to a Microsoft Project and synchronise changes.  Although I don’t use the sync feature that much I find it far better for creating projects than Microsoft Project for the following reasons:

• Mind maps encourage you to think about the structure or shape of the project,  it really is trivially easy to visualise even very complex projects and to merge and re-structure them as your understanding evolves
• If you are brainstorming a project,  its MUCH easier for other team members to keep track of what you are doing in Mind Manager than it is in Project
• Mind maps use screen area much more effectively that one dimensional outlines so you get to see at least twice as much content,  without suffering from information overload
• Its easier to jump around the mind map for example to show the whole map and then tunnel into an area of interest, and to resize the map so it fills the screen
• You can add icons, images etc,  that provide visual queues to help you relate to the content,  and you can add icons to represent additional dimensions to your map,  for example priority, or to flag problem areas
• Its much easier to add rich text and link documents to your map,  without adding clutter.

In summary as an Architect/Solution manager I tend to use mind maps to define the content and structure of a project,  once that’s been brain stormed and reviewed, we export the map to Microsoft Project, add dependencies and resource types and then hand ownership over to the Project Manager who adds resources, milestones and administrative tasks.

MindManager is a great tool that I have been using for about 3 years,  I routinely create Mind Maps of books that I read by jotting down key ideas and concepts on a folded A4 sheet of paper that I use as a bookmark.  A recent book summary that I generated captured a bit of interest and this review by Marc is particularly interesting, as he describes how he uses MindManager to achieve similar objectives:

I tend to map almost everything from meetings and presentations to project plans. Mapping a book requires a different approach than scribbling notes in the margin. It’s one of the great applications I’ve discovered for the Tablet PC and is possible because MindManager, the mapping program I use, is so well designed for the Tablet. I keep the Tablet next to me in slate mode (screen only) and jot down key points, interesting quotes (with page citations), and summary lists as I work my way through the text. I create a new branch for each chapter and always add a narrative summary in a note attached to the main node for that chapter after I’ve completed reading it.

Marc’s insights prompted me to share a few of the ways in which I use MindManager.  I often use it when I am hosting a web conference,  I share MindManager and use it to make notes,  this note taking model is much better than conventional serial note taking for the following reasons:

• The resulting notes reflect the outcome of the meeting much more accurately than serial notes,  which represent the progress of the meeting.  For example I often find that a particular topic of discussion is returned to – and refined – many times in the meeting,  in serial notes these contributions are scattered throughout the record,  in a Mind Map they are all logically grouped under the correct topic.
• Its really easy to restructure the map as our understanding of a topic evolves
• The whole scope of the discussion is always visible,  so it helps people to remember the context for any particular discussion.
• The hierarchical structure of the map helps people who would otherwise loose track of what is being discussed and how it relates to other areas of the discussion.
• Supporting material can easily be pasted in the the Mind Map as notes or links,  without creating clutter that obscures the key points.
• The resulting map is often a great start point for a really useful post meeting deliverable.  I often take the Mind Map and tidy it up after the meeting, add a few graphics and then send it out for review, or re-purpose it by exporting it as a Word document,  or Project Plan.
• The volume of screen updates sent to web conference participants is very low,  so its much easier for participants to watch than when someone is paging up and down in a word document for example.

Here is an example Map that I produced following a meeting where we were discussing Web 2.0

Last week I read the book “A whole new mind” by Daniel H. Pink.  I found it very interesting, especially – as a parent of 4 girls – I am increasingly concerned about their futures.  Daniel describes in this book the skills that are going to be needed to succeed in the future.  The following mindmap is a summary of the book.  A more details version of the map is also attached, as a PDF and a native MindManager file.

One of the nice features of the book is that at the end of each section it includes exercises that you can use to develop these skills, I started a mindmap of these two which is shown below and again a more details version of the map is also attached, as a PDF and a native MindManager file.

File Attachment: Skills.pdf (279 KB)

File Attachment: Skills.mmap (57 KB)

File Attachment: A whole new mind.mmap (55 KB)

File Attachment: A whole new mind.pdf (86 KB)