Adventures in home working

With everyone seeming to praise the latest Vista build 5456 I took the plunge and updated Beta 2 on my TC1100.  A few things of note so far:

• The upgrade took nearly 2 hours!
• I had to re-install upgrades to my Graphics card from Windows update
• My admin account was disabled
• I am still fighting [and loosing] with search to try and tell it which folders to index
• Maxthon no longer works (opens and a few seconds later Vista reports that it’s not responding), which is a massive pain for me.  I have installed Firefox on my key machines and a few plug-ins to simulate the group management functions, but it’s very clunky by comparison
• Video no longer seems to stutter, (but I need to check my Tablet on battery power as well)

Microsoft have just published a set of short videos that give a great introduction of the new features in Exchange 2007, definitely worth checking out.  Most of these videos use OWA, for more information on Outlook 2007 with Exchange 2007 check out the better together site.  I liked the unified messaging videos best!

Integrating Communications With Exchange Unified Messaging
110 KB | 300 KB
Phone-Based User Experience With Outlook Voice Access
110 KB | 300 KB

I have a bit of a backlog of podcasts so I have not had a chance to listen to this one yet,  but the show notes look very promising:

• Why is Sametime 7.5 NOT “just another chat client”?
• What are some of the reasons you’ll want to upgrade from older versions of Sametime?
• Discussion of the new role-based security architecture
• The new Sametime plugin architecture, some neat things you can do with it, and talk of a forthcoming online Sametime Plugin Catalog
• Improvements in the Sametime Meeting Center
• How will we need to upgrade? Clients first? Servers first? All at once?
• Options available for telephony and connectivity to other chat networks via the RTC Gateway

Sametime is my favourite Lotus product by far and I have high hopes that 7.5 will finally be good enough to win me away from Trillian with the Sametime plug-in!

This video is definitely worth checking out,  in it Marissa Mayer talks about innovation and culture in Google, in summary the principles they follow are:

1. Ideas come from everywhere
2. Cheer everything you can
3. You’re brilliant, we’re hiring
4. A license to pursue dreams
5. Innovation, not instant perfection
6. Data is apolitical
7. Creativity loves constraints
8. It’s users, not money
9. Don’t kill projects, morph them

Link via Innovation tools

I must have been asleep during May because I missed the announcement of this tool, which is an add-on to Office SharePoint 2007 and also includes a client component that allows an individual to control the information from their local Email folders and IM that they want to submit to SharePoint search so that it can be mined via SharePoint people search.  Microsoft certainly seem to have taken privacy concerns seriously and also used a lot of social networking smarts as this snippet from their blog shows:

When you run the KN client for the first time on your local machine, you can choose which Microsoft Office Outlook folders are included in your local analysis. (The KN client supports either Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007.) After the KN client is done with its local analysis, it will recommend keywords and contacts for you to act on. The word “recommend” here is very important in that KN is only recommending keywords and contacts. It is only you who can decide what to accept, edit, or reject before your profile information is published to the server. You can also decide at this point whether or not you are willing to help your colleagues in an anonymous manner.

 

Once your profile information is published to the server, when your colleagues use SharePoint Server’s search facility to try to find someone with a particular area of expertise or particular contacts, the KN server responds to the query with personalized results that are displayed according to social distance and inferred relationship strengths, which were calculated by the innovative algorithms that we’ve developed.

 

So, KN can save you significant time when you’re trying to find the right people to connect with. It also allows you to choose the information you want to selectively share with your manager, your immediate workgroup, your colleagues, or your whole organization.

Definately looks like this is a blog that’s worth subscribing to.

Activity centric computing is central to IBM’s personal knowledge management and collaboration vision and this paper lays out some of the underlying concepts that we will hopefully see start to emerge in the Hannover release. The following snippet from the paper lays out the challenge IBM is trying to address:

The “big picture” is the activity. But working through to completion of the activity involves people in many kinds of interactions and the use of many different file types, communication modes and outputs such as emails, instant messages, phone calls,  presentations, spreadsheets, documents, meetings. These don’t interoperate, and their outputs live in different containers and locations. Some of the outputs are in forms that might be posted to a team workspace if one has been created; some are never shared effectively. 

People try to get organized, but it isn’t easy. There are folders for email, folders for documents, folders for photos, folders for videos, No folders for instant messages, etc. Whether working on individual or team projects, participants must remember and mentally hold in context the many related outputs and exchanges that advance the work. That is, the humans must provide the adhesive that glues the whole project together.

 The paper sums up with this vision:

“Right now, the ‘glue’ that associates tasks and objects within an activity remains in the users’ heads. But if we’re able to create and save the thread of an activity, we should also be able to preserve it as a pattern that others can reuse when performing the same or similar activities. In effect, people will be writing their own programs for executing business processes at the same time as they execute the processes. It’s going to make capturing best practices a lot easier for organizations, and it has the potential to change the way organizations think about programming.”

having taken a good look at Office 2007 and in particular Groove and Outlook I don’t think Microsoft will have anything approaching the sophistication of this concept for a while,  so it will be interesting to see if IBM pull it off and start winning over the hearts and minds of their users, in the same way they have with system admins and IT managers.

Rob Boothby has written yet another excellent paper on the subject of web office, which is his term for a collection of web based tools which are rapidly disrupting established business systems for knowledge workers, key elements of the toolkit include not surprisingly blogs, wikis, social networking, search, podcasting/event recording, web email, instant messaging, presence and IP telephony.  Rod concludes the paper with 5 compelling reasons why business needs to take this seriously:

There are five reasons why any senior executive needs to start thinking about Web Office now:

1. Web Office technology will make partnering and out-sourcing more efficient by creating a platform that can seamlessly support virtual ad-hoc teams. Thus, it will quickly reduce your costs.
2. If you have any competitors using Web Office technology, they are going to have a significant productivity lead over you. Web Office will be as big and important as email, and you wouldn’t imagine running a business today without email.
3. Your new hires are already using this technology. The MBA class of 2006 has lived and breathed the web since they were in high school. If you don’t provide company endorsed solutions, they will end up using tools that are available on the open Internet until you do.
4. Most importantly, Web Office will help you to increase the pace of innovation within your organization. As I explained in my last paper “Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators”, constant innovation is the only business strategy capable of producing a stream of above average profits. To achieve constant innovation, senior executives need to bring everyone into the effort. Web Office is the ideal tool to help achieve that goal.
5. Web Office is cheap. You will get a lot of bang for your buck.

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to come across a recorded talk by Thomas Malone on the future of work.  Tom is a great speaker and conveys his key messages very clearly, and the implications of the message is definitely important for anyone working on personal knowledge management or collaboration.  To see why it’s worth reading Tom’s summary:

I think we’re in the early stages of an increase of human freedom in business that may, in the long run, be as important a change for business as the change to democracies has been for governments.

The reason I think that’s happening is because for the first time in human history it’s now possible to have the economic benefits of very large organizations — like economies of scale — and at the same time have the human benefits of very small organizations — things like freedom, flexibility, innovation and creativity. And the reason that’s possible is because a new generation of information technologies — like the Internet, the World Wide Web, e-mail and business intelligence — is now making it possible for huge numbers of people, even in very large organizations, to have enough information to make sensible decisions for themselves instead of just following orders from someone above them in the hierarchy.

There are some powerful messages here, especially for knowledge workers, for example a few of the implications that spring to mind are:

• an individuals personal knowledge management and collaboration solution will become increasingly important
• individuals and small groups will become more self sufficient units
• these units dynamically form relationships with other individuals and teams and collaborate to get things done
• This will result in a significant reduction in the need for stable, traditional command and control hierarchies.

There are some good additional resources available to dig deeper into his ideas:

• An interview with Gartner
• A paper – What do we really want? A manifesto for the organizations of the 21st Century
• A paper – Making the Decision to Decentralize
• A book – The future of work

I just came across a really good – long – but comprehensive description of IBM Workplace Collaboration Services.  The article sets out to address the following challenge:

Long-time users of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino (especially those using them for more than just email) know full well the richness of functionality and the power of the platform for creating all kinds of collaborative applications. Many Notes/Domino fans are not, however, sure what benefits they can derive from combining the power of their Domino-based applications with IBM’s J2EE (Java 2, Enterprise Edition) frameworks and product offerings. Some people are still not sure what the real differences are among the three major J2EE products: IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM WebSphere Portal, and IBM Workplace Collaboration Services. (There are many IBM product offerings under the Workplace umbrella; this article focuses on Workplace Collaboration Services and on the architecture on which it is built).

It addresses the following scope:

The purpose of this article is to explain how these three J2EE products are actually layered, one upon the other (Workplace Collaboration Services on WebSphere Portal on WebSphere Application Server) to form a coherent whole. We also present an overview of how Lotus Domino might integrate with each of these layers and what the different problems are that you might solve with each type of integration.

A couple of days ago I wrote a post that discussed the importance of considering blogs and Wikis as a complementary pair technologies.  Today I came across this great description of a blog on Rod Boothby’s blog:

a blog is an entire CMS implementation for one person, available free and at the click of a mouse, with virtually no set-up but infinite possibilities for customization and configuration.

Sounds pretty impressive put like that,  I just wanted to add though that a blog is only part of most peoples Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system, ie the part of the PKM that handles personal publishing.  Rod goes on to provide a great post that describes the challenges and opportunities associated with enterprise blogging.