Adventures in home working

RSS has grown up on the public Internet and it seems that authentication will be problematic when it moves into the Intranet.  On Intranets expect to find the following authentication mechanisms:

1. NTLM
2. kerberos
3. Digest
4. Forms based
5. Basic (usually combined with SSL)

Only the last of these mechanisms can be assumed (with any confidence) to work with most desktop RSS readers and often web based readers often don’t even support that. 

The essential issue is that the web pretty much assumes that we can cope with all of these authentication mechanisms because all access is interactive, but with RSS it needs to be automatic and transparent.  The following issues spring to mind:

1. NTLM – so far as I know is only supported by IE 7  and the Vista RSS platform and very few servers,  but if you are a Microsoft shop and are only connecting to SharePoint 2007 then this may work for you
2. Kerberos – same as above, but probably even more demanding
3. Digest – hardly ever used in my experience, either on client or servers, but I may be wrong and has the disadvantage that your username and password will need to be stored somewhere on the client, and many enterprise security policies don’t allow that
4. Forms based – very popular server side, but no chance of supporting this in everyday RSS readers.  I have seen a hack which involves browsing to a web page from within the RSS reader, authenticating, getting the cookie and then synchronising your feeds.   VERY VERY messy
5. Basic with SSL – very widely used, supported by most readers and RSS servers, but has the disadvantage that your username and password will need to be stored somewhere on the client, and many enterprise security policies don’t allow that

This leaves us with a problem.  If you are a Microsoft shop you might get away with a combination of 1,2 and 5.  If not then it looks like it’s time to start lobbying your security policy makers to allow Basic over SSL and local (encrypted) credential storage.

Stephie and I went for a long walk this morning beside the salt marshes, just a short walk from our house. 

Stephie has just got back from hospital having been in for a couple of nights with concussion, she was still struggling with her balance and not very confident,  by the end of the 3 mile walk though she was much better.

I decided to take some snaps to give her a break and this old tree caught my eye,  I have often seen Herons wading just beyond the tree, but unfortunately not today.

I even managed to get a picture of Steph sitting in the sand dunes and smiling,  which is quite unusual as she is pretty camera shy!

Having spent a long time as a customer it continues to frustrate me that many companies seem to neglect existing customers, it seems illogical to me:

1. We want existing customers to be repeat customers
2. Existing happy customers are a wonderful sales asset
3. Existing customers are where we prove that we can deliver and not just sell
4. Existing customers can be great partners in driving improvements in our products and services
5. Existing customers are a great source of market intelligence

This neglect manifests itself in so many ways, but I loved this picture from the creating passionate users blog

Attracting and retaining best staff is becoming a bigger issue, my experience has always been that leadership, flexibility and freedom are big factors in retention.  CnnMoney.com has a useful article that describes what the next generation are looking for and it seems to be more of the same:

77% of Gen Xers say they’d quit in a minute if offered “increased intellectual stimulation” at a different company. And they’re intent on managing their own time: 51% would jump ship for the chance to telecommute, and 61% of Gen X women would leave their current jobs if they were offered more flexible hours elsewhere.

When I work on desktop transformation projects I am continually amazed by the number of applications that we find installed in an enterprise.  It’s not unusual to find several thousand in a medium sized company, most of them used by less than 10 people.  However as Rod Boothby points out this is the tip of the ice berg, because once we go beyond packaged applications and include the non trivial spreadsheets, macro enabled documents and databases we find an order of magnitude more.

Now Rod thinks that these ‘Office’ applications will be displaced by tools like blogs, wikis and Microsoft’s Excel services.  I partially agree I think these tools will just complement the traditional Office applications and extend their reach beyond the desktop and the network file server.  Here are some (mostly Microsoft)examples:

1. Applications built by using custom searches, probably encoded in the URL, against Internet and intranet search engines.  Expect to see this particularly in situations where the search engines let you reach into databases and document metadata
2. Applications built using the incredible versatility of SharePoint custom lists and workflow
3. Applications built by combining InfoPath, Word, Excel XML documents with data selectively promoted from the XML into SharePoint lists
4. Applications built processing RSS data from all manner of applications and then mashing it up with other data, or pulling it into Office or web based analysis tools
5. Applications built using the next generation of web based 4GLs like DabbleDb and Coghead
6. Composite applications built by integrating portal components, including some or the above, like Intalio’s, built from Dabble DB, FeedBurner, FeedDigest Flickr, Google Analytics, LinkedIn, Technorati, WordPress,Zoho Writer.

This is the true long tail of software,  traditional office applications enhanced and integrated with web office, collaboration and line of business applications.  However lets not forget the humble desktop application.  Its had a bad reputation in the past – largely because of DLL hell – but as new classes of applications appear that don’t need to be installed in the traditional sense but can just be streamed down to the PC, cached and executed I expect that desktop apps will get a new lease of life in the enterprise. 

Mike Gotta provides an excellent description of the concept of context zones and how they allow us to deal with information in a way that reflects our needs, or as Mike puts it:

the right information, at the right time, in the right context, has been a holy grail for IT organizations for many years

In his article Mike describes 4 zones (my comments in red):

1. Salient Zone: Information directly relevant to the activity that has the user’s attention and primary focus, or fits a user profile that includes topics the person is interested in (with an implied immediacy in terms of awareness and delivery timeliness).   e.g. Project 1 – changes
2. Peripheral Zone: Information that is strongly-to-moderately associated to a set of activities that the user participates in or to their profile (exclusive of the current activity). While there is likely discretion in terms of how and when the user needs to be aware of the information, there is an implied desire for it to be readily “glanceable”.  e.g. Project 1 and Urgent
3. Ambient Zone: Information users should find interesting but could just as easily ignore. The information could be tertiary, having a no strongly patterned relationship to any activity. But it also might have some intriguing synergy with, or some discernable influence on, activities or other user interests. Communication here is more informal, with user no guarantee that users will divert attention and interact with the information.  Research
4. Nascent Zone:  information forming at its early stages that might have some latent relevancy in the future. Users might be interested in cycling through ever so often as part of general awareness and trend analysis.  Email and general feeds

The problem with the single inbox concept for information is that it provides all 4 types of information in a single stream, and it’s very difficult to cope with this by constantly scanning this stream.  Even when you apply methodologies like GTD, which force you to categorize email and other information it’s still difficult to see just the information you need in every particular context unless you are very organized.

RSS has a better chance than email because it arrives pre categorized, according to the feed title, which most aggregators use to deposit each feed in a separate folder.  Even better most aggregators allow groups of feeds to be placed in additional folders.  These groups of folders if structured around based on context will definitely help.

Consider the following folder structure:

• It allows me to click on Projects, and see all feeds from every project – useful for a daily activity scan.
• Click on Project 1 – changes and I am ready to focus on my Project change board meeting

The beauty of RSS is that once the structure is defined feeds look after themselves.  In addition in tools like Outlook it’s also possible to use flags and search folders to create lists of actions, items, folders with items aggregated by author, by date etc.

IBM are also moving in the direction of context zones with the context being an Activity (for me see here and here), and their activity explorer being the tool I interact with.  The activity concept is very powerful allowing me to associate RSS feeds, emails, IM messages, documents etc with an activity.

In addition there seems to be a general consensus amongst search gurus that search tools will soon be watching what we are doing, how busy we are, who we are talking too etc etc and will be presenting us – non intrusively but proactively - with the information we need from a wide variety of sources, transparently and without forcing us to interrupt we want to.

The graphic below provides a summary of the dynamics of the SaaS marketplace.  Naturally since SaaS have a lot of buzz right now everyone wants a bit of the pie and Gianpaolo Carraro provides a great description (and the image) on his blog of the different players and the most natural strategies that they can take to take advantage of the this growing market.

Whilst I don’t personally have a lot of involvement with active SaaS projects I recently took a look at a few areas where I have seen SaaS proving popular with customers that I work with and I saw an interesting trend. 

Lots of interest in SaaS during the early phases of the lifecycle, however once a products value was accepted in the enterprise and its usage grew substantially most of the SaaS services were brought back into the enterprise.  I am sure that won’t always be the case but it was surprising consistent. 

I guess such a lifecycle is not very surprising, however it does make me think that SaaS will be most successful where:

1. the SaaS supplier can deliver some value – beyond simply scale – from hosting multiple customers on the same Internet facing infrastructure
2. the service is by its nature shared,  with no single enterprise having ownership
3. an individual enterprises demand for the service fluctuates considerably
4. the SaaS application provides capabilities that are not available in enterprise products
5. the integration with other SaaS or enterprise systems is either not required or is simple

I went out for a walk on the beach with the kids tonight, they played in the park while I sat in the sand dunes and made some notes for a speech I will be giving next week.  .  When I finished we walked along the promenade and watched this glorious sunset!

We get a lot of great sunsets here, but this one was pretty special because of the reflections on the wet beach and the clouds.

I have recently been reading about Dave Pollard’s very focused attempts at using self experimentation to challenge his Colitis, so I thought it was probably time to provide an update on my progress challenging Arthritis.

First off, my form of Arthritis is a rare one, Adult Onset Stills Disease, which about 1 in 200,000 people suffer from.  Untreated it manifests as raging fevers (103+), severe widespread muscle and joint pain, fatigue, lack of concentration etc.  During a flare it’s impossible to do anything, except maybe watch a little TV, read a few pages and try to sleep.  The pain is too bad to eat, so I also lose a lot of weight. 

Fortunately it does respond to conventional treatment, in my case Steroids during a flare, Methotrextate to damp down the immune system between flares, Amitryptiline to damp down the daily pain and help me sleep and various pain killers during the day as required. 

So thanks to the meds described above I am reasonably ok,  I am left with the following symptoms:

1. Widespread pain in my joints, that’s worst in my feet, ankles, knees, shoulders, elbows, wrists and fingers
2. More localized pain in my tendons/muscles, that’s worst in my feet, Achilles tendon, forearm, fingers and jaw
3. Migraines 2 or 3 times a week and headaches most days
4. Very poor concentration and memory
5. Fatigue
6. I catch infections easily and don’t show many traditional symptoms for a while.  When I eventually do I feel pretty bad and my Stills symptoms flare

Psychologically I sometimes also get a bit depressed, normally when I get worse after a few good days,  it normally takes me a day or two to fully adjust,  I also suffer from anxiety,  I am told that the challenge of dealing with the symptoms above is quite enough for most people and that any additional stress triggers anxiety.  For a “normal” person the level of stress that needs to accumulate before anxiety is much greater.

The Challenge

By December last year (2005) I had noticed that I was in slow decline,  I was catching an infection every month which was triggering pretty bad symptoms for at least 2 weeks a month and it was taking me a week to get moving again. 

So I was getting no more than 1 week a month of reasonable mobility and I was probably only doing quality work for 10 days a month.  I was pretty worried and realized that if I didn’t do something significant I would gradually decline to the point where I had no good days at all. 

So I set myself a new years challenge of getting back in control of my life so far as was possible,  I started keeping a daily log where I recorded 5 things:

1. My symptom level (25 factors)
2. How well I had scored on doing all the stuff I new from the last 3 years helped me feel better ( 7 factors)
3. How badly I had scored on doing all the stuff I new made me feel worse ( 3 factors)
4. How many hours I had worked

I plotted these over time.  Completing the spreadsheet every day takes a couple of minutes, but it forces me to review each day and try harder the next day.

I realized throughout January that I had slipped into a pretty bad pattern of behavior:  See the diagram

My approach

To break the cycle I needed to find ways to combat the following:

1. Pain
2. Concentration
3. Fatigue
4. Stress
5. Migraines
6. Catching infections

Pain was my number 1 issue, it sapped my energy and enthusiasm.  I realized pretty early on that it was my attitude to pain that needed to change, so I got a book on pain management which was fairly useful, at least it got me thinking.  Here are the steps I took:

1. Every morning, no matter what the weather I go out walking (at least an hour) or swimming (20 mins).  I trained myself to walk through the pain, the more it hurt the more determined I was to ignore it
2. I meditate for at least 20 minutes a day.  I sit cross legged, which hurts, after a few minutes meditating on the pain, I can ignore it and focus on my breathing
3. I have improved my diet, whole grains, fruit, veg, chicken, seeds, dried fruit etc
4. I have lost a stone in weight, that takes some pressure off my knees
5. Every hour I break for 5 minutes
6. Every evening I go out for another walk, usually for 30 minutes
7. I do strength training 3-4 days a week, this really hurts and it makes my muscles ache, when my joints and muscles ache from Stills I imagine that it’s because of my strength training, which helps me create a positive association with the pain
8. During weekends I will try and exercise for 1 hour in every 2 and sometimes more

This has been very successful,  I have trained myself to no longer limp for example. 

Next concentration, I am rarely able to concentrate for an hour, if I am reading I struggle to read more than 10 pages and I really struggle keeping real focus for more than a couple of minutes.  I often fall asleep while reading and doze off on conference calls and my balance is terrible

1. I avoid concentrated periods of activity,  I read short articles every day for an hour,  that’s nearly 10 working weeks of reading a year when you add it up.   This means that when I get a new work activity I have probably read a good deal of information on it already, so I don’t have to spend a couple of days doing reading to get up to speed.
2. I read in Cafes, they are noisy and there is a lot of energy, I have trained myself to focus despite the noise but the general buzz keeps me awake
3. I take a range of medications (natural) that improve concentration and they seem to have a minor effect
4. I have designed a highly productive computer workstation – using three screens – that makes it easier for me to keep track of different documents, web pages emails and conversations I am conducting over IM as I analyze or assemble information
5. I watch DVD versions of tech conferences and other videos for about 1 hour each work day – again several weeks of intense conference activity smoothed out over the year
6. I break up my day email – walking – reading – breakfast – reading – walking – computer – lunch – watching – computer – meditation – tea – walking – reading – computer – TV – computer
7. I balance on walls, play on the kids toys in the park, balance on the trampoline and play on a wobble board while we watch TV

Concentration is an issue that I have definitely not made as much progress on as the pain, it’s not helped by the migraines and the Migraine meds and by the sleepy feeling in the mornings from the Amitryptiline, but I am doing well with balance

Fatigue.  The fatigue can be really bad, as I have already described I often struggle to keep awake.  I have no real solutions but I try to:

1. Keep active
2. Keep doing stimulating activities, and switch activities when I get stuck
3. Jump on my trampoline every hour or so
4. Pace myself
5. Talk to people on the phone
6. Do fun things, balancing on walls, playing with the kids, trampoline, running up sand dunes, watching fun TV
7. I sleep always try and sleep from about 11:00 PM until 8:00AM,  I have tried to sleep less, but to be honest I actually think I need 10 hours sleep now

Stress.  I have done pretty well with the Stress:

1. Pacing
2. Meditation
3. Plenty of sleep
4. Learning to say no at work
5. Not taking responsibility for important work deliverables, but helping people as much as I am able
6. Trying to keep to no more than 4 hours of desk work a day
7. having fun

Migraines.  I have thought for about a year now that the Migraines are related to Methotrextate,  they come on about 24-48 hours after I take them,  so I have changed my Methotrextate time to Friday morning, because my weekend is more relaxing than a week day I tend to get fewer Migraines that way

To avoid infections I try not to:

1. Travel on busy trains
2. Go into busy offices
3. Travel on international flights
4. Travel on the London underground
5. and all the other stuff listed above helps too

This has been a pretty successful.

Overall I have noticed a slow improvement over time, to maintain this improvement takes a lot of focus and energy every day.  I have noticed that it’s very easy to slip into laziness and then I start to decline again, but keeping a daily record makes that less likely.  I don’t think there is much more that I can do now, without pushing myself too hard and my goal is now to stabilize myself at this level, which allows me to do some (4 hours) quality work most days and maintain a reasonable quality of life.

I have just come across a post by Eric Mack describing a customer who was considering scrapping Lotus Notes,  it didn’t take long for Eric to help them realise just how much value Notes was and could deliver to them. 

I told  them that I thought they should switch away from Notes. I offered to help them make a shopping list of what they would need to purchase to match their current capabilities.
Half way through helping them with the shopping list, someone said, “But our [Lotus Notes system] already does all of that.”

We often forget in our rush to adopt new tools just how good the ones we have already are, if only we put some effort into learning how to use and then exploit them. 

It’s coincidental that I have a few recent posts on the same topic where I look back on the value of email and networked file systems when used correctly, compared to collaborative workspaces when used inappropriately and also the fact that Excel 2003 could already do many of the things I like most about Excel 2007 but just didn’t know how to do.