Adventures in home working

Although I have not yet had chance to try IBM’s workplace client and have only seen marketing material around Hannover,  IBM seem to be about to pull off a neat trick – building a modern flexible platform and still delivering compatibility with existing Notes applications.  This is something that Microsoft consistently fails to do with their collaborative platforms, and their approach may be justified if it were the only way to keep driving improvements at a reasonable pace, however IBM seem to have found a “third way”.  Jeff Eisen’s post The Road to Hannover listed the 10 achievements that impressed me:

1. Run any application unmodified in the Workplace Client
2. ALL Notes applications run
3. Existing applications run unmodified in new user interface
4. Run existing Notes/Domino applications unmodified
5. All current APIs Supported!
6. APIs unchanged
7. no rip and replace
8. Preserves investment in software
9. As always, strong commitment to backward compatbility
10. Composite applications … preserve investment in Notes applications

When I was 18 I weighed about 10 Stone and had a 28 inch waist, over the years the weight crept up to 12 Stone.  3 years ago I lost about a stone in hospital and took the opportunity to get down to 10 Stone 7 but I have recently crept up to just over 11 Stone again.  I was feeling quite relaxed about this but I just measured my waist and was shocked to find it was 35”.  I think I need to stop watching my weight and start watching my waist instead.  

The kids are on holiday for 6 weeks so this seems like the perfect opportunity to cut back and exercise more, so by the time the kids go back to school I am hoping to be back to at worst a 32” waist.  This should provide the added motivation to get me back into swimming,  we have health club membership and the pool is only 5 minutes walk so I really have no excuse and I have noticed that my shoulders and elbows are getting increasingly painful so I really need to get back in the water.  So I have committed to swimming 5 days a week and am adding 2 lengths a day for 4 weeks as well as walking at least 6 miles a day and drinking plenty of water. 

Wish me luck! 

I am on holiday this week and all 4 kids are doing activities (film and video, drama and sports club) so Debbie and I are able to spend from about 10:00 – 16:00 on our own just relaxing in and around our home town – St Anne’s on Sea.  At home I like nothing more than a mix of long walks along the coast (east to Lytham and West to Blackpool), simple Cafe food, cycling, meditation and reading and the last few weeks the weather has been superb, with glorious sun with a warm breeze.  When the kids get home it’s time for swimming and beach games – perfect. 

4 days into this relaxing routine and it’s also noticeable that my arthritis pain is fading fast,  a few years ago and after a weeks holiday it would be gone completely, now it never goes completely but relaxation and many hours of exercise definitely still has a very beneficial effect.

For the last few weeks I have been testing an iMate SP5,  I had high hopes for it thinking it would be a great complement for my TC1100 Tablet.  My main requirements (with scores) were as follows:

• small enough to take anywhere *****
• worked great as a phone *****
• seamlessly receive push email in the background without impacting mp3 playback ******
• basic calendar, mainly used in day view ***
• ability to lookup people in company address book for email and phone numbers  X
• mp3 playback of mainly podcasts and recorded conference calls ***
• rock solid stability ***

Overall conclusion:

I really liked it, but won’t be keeping it.  In the end it just doesn’t compare with the Treo 650 which with a few important additions is optimised for me to be the perfect device.

Detailed conclusions:

The SP5 is a compromise device,  if you start out wanting a great phone with a well integrated contact address book then you are onto a winner.  The fact that you also get calendar integration and email are real bonuses.  Because I have a Tablet I hadn’t expected to use the SP5 to send emails - I have never been very comfortable with a keypad – but the SP5 has well integrated voice email functionality so I ended up using that a lot whenever I needed to send or reply to email.

Size – great, very small and light, keys are a reasonable size
Sound – the external speaker was very loud,  much louder than the Treo,  sound via the headset was ok too.
Battery life – reasonable – about one day of intensive use
Stability – I have had to restart it on average once every 5 days, once because it completely froze and all the other times because it slowed to a crawl.
Bluetooth – not tested
Storage – Mini SD card, under battery.  Not very easy to change but I used a 1GB card and so it was fairly roomy, drag and drop of files made it easy to add/delete files without taking the SD card out of the device.
PC integration – ability to copy files to and from the SD card was very reliable,  I copied hundreds of MB’s at a time without a hitch, application installation was quick and easy.  I actually didn’t need to use ActiveSync as all my sync was wireless via OneBridge which is just as well as I had an issue with Active Sync, caused by using Windows 2003 Server.
Speed – just acceptable, no where near as fast as the Treo, switching between applications was painfully slow at times.  However music always played just fine
Launcher – I dislike the fact that I can not control the order in which the applications appear, but otherwise it works ok
Buttons – rubbish there are not enough hardware buttons and no modifier keys to make the few buttons it does have dual use.  I really like hardware shortcut buttons on my Treo so this was a big usability issue for me
Wifi – never got it configured, not sure what I would use it for
Phone – great, I think the signal strength was better than my Treo, the speaker phone was loud and easy to use.  The call history is good, quick redial is good.  I particularly liked the fact that you could do a type down search against the call history.
Contacts – great,  but I really wanted directory lookup, which didn’t work in my configuration – OneBridge GPRS connection to Lotus Notes.  I particularly liked the type down search
Email – great for reading, even with the small screen emails were easy to read.  Wireless synchronisations worked well, ticking away in the background.  On the Treo OneBridge can not run in the background with an mp3 playing without causing the mp3 to stutter every 10 seconds or so,  so I had to use on demand sync.  Great for sending email as well provided you already have the person in your address book, or are replying to an email.  In both cases sending is only viable if you are a keypad wizard or – in my case – you are happy to record and send voice notes.  I think voice notes are fantastic and seem a much better idea than sending terse emails that are easily misinterpreted
MP3 player – I really didn’t like Windows media player,  it’s handling of podcasts is poor, its library management is fiddly, the lack of a slider to skip backwards and forwards in long podcasts was annoying, the headphones were ok, but I really missed the ability to use the button on the headset to control the media player.  On the Treo you can use Headset control to turn any wired headset into a remote control.  I tried 3 or 4 alternative media players Pocket Player was the best but it’s no where near as good as Pocket Tunes on the Treo.
IE – ok if you are really desperate to browse the web,  but obviously the screen size and slow speed make it a real challenge.
Task manager – rubbish, but then I don’t use task management in Notes, so I never really used it
Calendar – poor – the day view is pretty good,  I personally hated the week and month views but I am sure others must use them for something.  Creating personal appointments works, but you can not create meetings, invite remote attendees and have this information sync to Lotus Notes.
Voice Notes – I had high hopes for the voice notes function, but the quality was very low and their was no hardware button for it.  I use CallRec on my Treo and this is amazing well integrated, especially if you make most of your voice notes whilst listening to podcasts or music like I do.  It also records phone calls.
Camera – pretty good, much better than the Treo as expected.  I am a big fan of good camera’s in phones I think they are incredibly useful, especially with good desktop integration like that promised by OneNote
RSS reader – I tried out NewsGator Mobile.  I had very high hopes for it,  the usability and speed were acceptable and I think it would have saved me a little time at my desk because I could use it whilst queueing etc.  In practice as it was a beta I found too many bugs in the synchronisation to be able to use it much.

SP5 vs Treo 650

I have used a Treo 650 for over a year so when I was asked to test the SP5 it was only on the condition that I could keep the Treo in case the SP5 failed to impress.  I knew the Treo would be hard to beat!  What surprised me was how subtle features made the Treo the better SmartPhone for me, and also how good the low cost/free software is for the Treo.  It seems obvious to me that the developer community has taken to th palm platform and the Treo in particular with great enthusiasm and fixed many small usability issues.  

The SP5 wins over the Treo in only a few areas:

• Smoother multi-tasking, in particular this is noticeable with the email background synchronisation that never seems to affect other functions of the device.  On the Treo OneBridge in particular causes mp3 playback to stutter
• Smaller and lighter, the Treo is not a small device, however you do get a keyboard!  However the weight really affects me now as I have a couple of great clip in cases that are very easy to use, and get close to the dock in case experience of the Blackberry.
• Voice notes/Email integration,  this is very slick and easy to use on the SP5.  Definitely a feature I will be requesting on Treo.
• PC integration, especially the ability to drag and drop files from the desktop.  I use Card Export on the Treo to do the same thing,  but it’s not as reliable or as easy to use

The Treo wins over the SP5 in all other areas,  but particularly worthy of note:

• The media playback experience, especially for podcasts and recorded events
• The larger screen and keyboard, make reading longer documents easier
• The touch screen, means that more functions can be surfaces for easy access, on the SP5 you have fewer features and the few there are are hidden away behind several menus
• The voice recording, this really is very slick on the Treo,  as I do a lot of my research on the move,  I listen to a lot of podcasts, conference sessions, analyst briefings, recorded conference calls etc on my Treo.  Using headset control I can pause/play/skip them with a single headset button click and now with CallRec I can record snipets from them, or record notes for myself – ideas, web sites, book names etc – with a single side button click.  If a make or receive a phone call my media player auto-pauses and restarts after the call and I can also record all or any part of the call with a single side button click as well.

All too often when we talk about collaboration as IT folk we start by discussing all of the great new technologies that are available, or at least that’s what I did a decade ago.  Now I tend to focus on the people so it was very refreshing to read a great article this morning on Mike Gotta’s Collaborative Thinking blog entitled Collaborative Choreography & The Future Of Work one particular paragraph really resonated:

We need to raise the discussion level up from technology. Improving collaboration begins with understanding organizational dynamics around people such as their motivations, behaviors, relationships and interactivities across groups, teams, communities and networks and how such dynamics influence “work”.

My personal experience has been that a few things are really necessary for collaboration to even stand a chance:

• The participants in the collaboration need to have the time and energy to get involved
• The collaboration must either be well integrated into their personal knowledge management processes or need to be small incremental step
• Everyone involved needs to know that their contribution to the collaboration will be recognised
• The more innovative the desired outcome the less “common ground” the team should have at the beginning, ie diversity should be the order of the day.
• The less common ground the people have at the beginning the more they need to have common ground created by the processes and tools, for example people who have worked together for years doing routine development work can probably collaborate pretty effectively using email and the phone whereas a team brought together for the first to create an innovative new product will benefit considerably from a face to face project launch and every collaborative technology going.

Mike throws down a challenge in terms of the evolving skill set that technology solution providers will need:

Comprehending what goes on at the social level within an enterprise is typically beyond the skills and competencies of most IT organization unless they employ resources that have a background in organizational development, ethnography, anthropology, psychology, sociology, epistemology, and so on. I believe that skill and competency gap will change as business leaders increasingly call upon technologists to provide them with some perspective on the role of technology, collaboration and the future of work.

In the comments Mike makes a point I make all the time,  that we need to stop thinking in an application centric way and start to think more in terms of the people who interact with many different applications.  When I am working with customers on collaboration I like to think in terms of people, places and lifecycles.

I believe rather strongly that people far too often focus on the technology when it comes to collaboration. We (technologists) also tend to look at things from the inside out - that is, from the viewpoint of the application which often represents a time slice of task and functionality. I would hope that technologists begin to understand the viewpoint of the user (outside in) and elevate their understanding of groups collectively rather than users singularily.

I have often used the word seamless to describe some of the refinements that I have been seeking in the end user experience,  although recently I have tended to substitute seamless for integrated without really knowing why.  Well today I read a post by Dean Bubley titled Redefining semalessness in which he says:

[seamless] ignores the fact that at the “seam” lots of things change. Bandwidth, latency, price, maybe ownership, control, security, context and lots of other things. While the user should (in some cases like an ongoing voice call) have minimal interaction, the device itself and its resident applications need to be fully bearer-aware to enable a good user experience, especially for data applications. Moving from a low-latency to high-latency connection has a huge impact on software that has complex “hand-shaking” procedures, for example. And moving from an unlimited-data environment (eg home or office WiFi) to one that is tariffed per-MB clearly needs intervention. If I have anti-virus software, for example, I don’t want it downloading 5MB of stuff unannounced, especially if I’m roaming. And I want the music application on the device to recognise I’m at home on WiFi, and default to getting MP3s from my PC hard drive, rather than defaulting to the operator music portal.

This is a really great insight and demonstrates a key issue,  that one really needs to think things through from the end users perspective,  and not just from a technology perspective.  In my personal case I actually go so far as to have different user accounts that I use on my different devices, and replicate different data to each, because each device is setup in a way that’s optimised for it’s usage context, so whilst I want some things integrated I want control and I certainly don’t want someone else deciding where to put all of the seams.

The Inescapable data blog has two recent posts (here and here) that describe some of the gathering momentum around home working that are worth reading.  I am a great fan of home working personally,  although I have some short term reservations about how home working is often implemented by companies.  I think new processes, tool and cultural norms will rapidly mature to make home working a more satisfying experience in the medium term.  I think the nail in the coffin of the office will be when companies start to give employees an allowance that they can choose to spend on a company car, company PC, company phone, company desk and company office space all of which are optimised for the company or they can choose to spend it on creating an optimised personal environment that addresses their work and home life in a more integrated fashion.  I know which one I will be choosing. 

In fact I run an allowance system of sorts myself at the moment,  I gave up long ago expecting my company to invest as much in the tools of my trade as I would have invested if I was given the choice.  So when I started working from home I took the money that I was saving in fuel, personal broadband and other incidental travel and office related expenses and stuck it in a dedicated bank account.  I now draw on that account – without guilt – whenever I need/want to invest in my personal effectiveness and I am much happier as a result,  I no longer spend every day wishing my laptop had more memory, or wishing I had a second display, or a better headset,  I just buy them!

Rod Boothby has an interesting article describing some the the real business applications of blogs.  He chose managing projects in this example and I am a big supporter of this.  I have spent a lot of time observing projects and programmes failing and think that blogs can play a really important role in fixing these broken programmes.  I wrote about my ideas on how blogs would help a couple of years ago – so long ago that the term blog was hardly known.  The essential insight is that project management is more about the people than it is about the process, and blogs are a great way to facilitate the necessary team dynamics and cross team dynamics that’s so essential to success.

I have just spent most of the day listening to a group of people debate how my company should develop a range of new service offerings.  Lots of opinions, not many new ideas and a lot of obstacles.  I finished the day not particularly encouraged by the prospects but not too discouraged either. 

Half way through the day my boss asked me to provide some thoughts about IT trends and the most stand out trend is “simple software as a service” and that developers of such services seem to:

• Start small and lean
• Have ownership of the entire end to end solution
• Innovate in small steps in direct response to customer feedback
• Have a direct relationship with their customers, no sales force, distribution channel, company IT team etc in between them and their customers
• Automate everything and use network effects
• Supply their service direct to the user over the web
• Create a community around their solution to create buzz and provide an efficient mechanism for scaling
• Have a persistent relationship with their users, ie one that doesn’t end once the user has downloaded their software

Then I took a break from my long conference call to watch an episode of Horizon on space tourism,  it was absolutely inspiring, as I watched I realised that the companies involved were incredibly innovative and achieving productivity levels that were orders of magnitude greater than their traditional aerospace competitors.  How were they doing this,  it seemed to me that they had a lot in common with software as a service providers. 

I concluded my day thinking that we need to make a lot of structural changes to compete in this new world.

I upgraded from Vista beta 2 to Vista 5456 and I previously thought that it was 5456 that broke Maxthon but others in the news groups had it working.  So I have finally found time to do a clean install of Vista 5456 rather than an upgrade and Maxthon is working again.  This is a huge event for me because in the interim I had to hobble along using Firefox and a few plug-ins to improve the tab and session management,  but these were so crude by comparison with Maxthon that it really impacted my productivity.  The impact was so severe that I really have had no time to blog for the last week because of it.

Anyway it seems to be working very nicely now, many issues seem to have been resolved and issues I had with hardware buttons not working on the TC1100 also seem to have been resolved.  My judgement would definitely be that a clean install is more reliable than an upgrade!