Adventures in home working

Microsoft are right to be concerned about the fact that their customers uses perhaps only 20% of the capabilities of their products and their bold move – to radically change the UI – was definitely needed. 

I have found myself making great use of the new formatting capabilities in Excel 2007 for example and I never realised that anything like this was possible in Excel 2003. 

So even though I am amazed and impressed by the conditional formatting tricks in this post on the juice analytics blog I know that without the ease of use that Excel 2007 provides, I would rarely have the time to use them and if I did I would forget how to use them anyway.

That said I have written this post so that if I do need to create a really professional spreadsheet in the future that will see a lot of reuse, and therefore that’s worth putting a lot of effort into, at least I will be able to remember and find the tricks again.

Dave Pollard provides a great review of Writely for collaborative editing, it’s especially useful because he includes a sample document that was edited by a group of people with no real familiarity with the tool. 

It demonstrates to me that whilst Writely might have a useful role as an embedded web editor and a niche role for people who find themselves without a PC,  its really compelling feature – collaborative editing – still needs a lot of work and it doesn’t seem very useful for collaborative reviewing when compared to using Word and especially Word 2007.

One of my most popular posts was a mind map that attempted to capture the main themes of Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind.  Presentation Zen has a great post which applies the themes in the book to presentations and it’s well worth a read.  I particularly liked one of the slides in the article, which I have re-used to the right.

The following short extract summarizes the approach taken in the article – excellent:

The six fundamental aptitudes outlined by Pink can be applied to many aspects of our personal and professional lives. Below, I list the six key abilities as they relate to the art of presentation. The six aptitudes are: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning. My discussion is with presentations (enhanced by multimedia) in mind, but you could take the six aptitudes and apply them to the art of game design, programming, product design, project management, health care, teaching, retail, PR, and so on

Ron Oglesby has written an interesting article on the Brian Madden blog about the future of Virtualization, I highly recommend that you read all the comments as well.  One of the points raised in the comments concerns the over use of the Virtualization word, which I fully agree with,  it seems that any technique that is used to achieve isolation or abstraction now needs to be replaced by virtualization – very annoying!

Yesterday I wrote a post that touched on my frustration with web based team collaboration spaces, lots of people agree and some even got around to commenting which is not that common on my blog!   My experience is that many people find collaborative spaces difficult because:

1. They require an additional step following saving a file to the file system
2. They are slow to upload and download files
3. They often have no off-line support and when they do it’s not a seamless experience
4. Their ability to sort, filter and perform bulk operations is a lot slower than the file system
5. Even if they are integrated with applications, like Office and SharePoint,  they are not very good at supporting the number of file operations I do in a day (hundreds) while I search for documents, copy content from old documents to new ones, pull up reference documents for a few minutes, print extracts from documents etc.
6. None of these things is as much of an issue for published documents, but for work in progress – where there are perhaps multiple versions a day – they are hopeless.

It’s possible that AJAX, increasing network speeds, improved tagging, better support for rapidly previewing document content in web apps might improve things, but for now, the easiest way to share files within an enterprise is a network file system. 

Inter enterprise its interesting to see that Oracle collaboration suite, Groove and now Documentum and probably others that don’t spring to mind have integrated their collaborative workspaces directly into the Windows explorer experience – good move. I have written on related issues before in these posts:

Is the file server dead-

More on file systems, how I work now

OneNote 2003 already has one of the most comprehensive implementations of “flags” that I have seen in any software,  and it’s getting even better in OneNote 2007, this post gives some details.  It’s worth reading for three reasons:

1. If you use OnNote you can learn a lot
2. If you are interested in the whole concept of how to use flags to catagorise the content your personal knowledge management system, OneNote can provide some inspiration, although tags also take some beating
3. The most important reason to read this post though – because the OneNote blogs (here, here and here) represent a superb example of how a product development team can use this new media to inform, build a relationship with and take feedback from their community of users and prospective users!

Microsoft needs to work extra hard to win over members of the Open Source community and their Open Source Software Lab is at the forefront of that work.  One of their recent proposals is to effectively open up their entire research plan to peer review to make sure that they are working in the areas that their customers want. 

Perhaps even more important they will open up each research activity to peer review before it starts so that hopefully the research results will have more authority.  This blog post includes the details and the comments make interesting reading.  The following extract gives some indication of how the peer review process could improve the quality of the research:

The peer review feedback could let us know (just a sample):

• if the hardware used was the kind of hardware that would be used in real world situations?
• if the topology made sense, or did we need to evaluate different topologies?
• were the workloads real?
• what were some common variances in workload?
• were we using the software to manage and download patches that our peers would use?
• were there factors like quarterly financial report generation that meant that a realistic experiment would need to span more than the period specified?
• did the assumed distribution of patches make sense or were there fewer or greater number of patches?
• did our peers actually care about the failures we would measure?

Despite having access to a wide variety of collaboration tools, email and IM continue to be the tools I use most often,  in particular I struggle to use collaborative workspaces efficiently.  Why do I keep using email?

1. It works great offline
2. I can keep an offline replica on all of my PCs and devices and they all sync up nicely so I don’t need to worry about which machine I use.
3. It is well integrated with my calendar and contacts
4. It handles attachments well
5. It works well in the background, it’s very rare I have to wait for it to do something
6. I know that everyone I work with will have access to it and know how to use it
7. Every email has its own initial access control list
8. Good support for groups (distribution lists)

I use Lotus Notes so there are some downsides:

1. No RSS support yet
2. Personal information management workflows are not well supported, for example there is currently no equivalent to the GTD add-in for outlook

However in both of these cases I believe that IBM really understand what’s needed, its just a case of waiting for the next release.

There are many things about wikis, blogs and team spaces that I really like,  but none of them offers all the advantages of email,  so right now they all are useful complements to my collaboration system, rather than at the core of it.

For more interesting posts on this topic, check out these posts:

Permanent Link to Email- The Good Enough Collaboration Tool

The Future of E-mail

Email is critical to Enterprise 2.0 and Office 2.0

I have read a few posts recently – this is the best one – on the subject of banning homework.  I am personally in favour for two reasons:

1. I think it switches many kids off school
2. Most of the creative project work kids do ends up being at home on their own, and not in a collaborative setting

I also like this point extracted from the parking lot blog:

Homework robs children of the time they need to develop real skills and passions. When I was in school for example, I taught myself music theory and theology during my grade 11 year. I wasn’t taking either of these subjects at school, and I set aside a lot of homework to learn them. I failed several exams at Christmas 1985 because instead of studying, I was writing four part harmony arrangments of Queen songs and reading Martin Buber. Both of those experiences have stayed with me long after I can even remember what classes I took at school that year, and both continue to be useful in my life.

Since I have been working from home and doing restricted hours I have been very conscious of the culture of overwork, and homework is part of that culture extended to our kids.  My personal experience is that since I halved my hours I have definitely not halved my output, instead I have prioritized more, been more focused on productivity and made sure I don’t get involved in things that sap my energy or where I struggle to make a significant contribution.

I have been playing around with SharePoint 2007 for a while now and I think I am most impressed by the power that it puts into the hands of IT savvy end users, to create line of business solutions and to enhance these solutions further by integration with Office 2007.  

It seems to me that it’s these middleware and customization features in SharePoint that set it apart from the competition in this space.

Joe Wilcox talks to the same issue on the Microsoft Monitor blog, where he says:

Middleware, you ask? Whatever SharePoint was it certainly isn’t just portal software in the 2007 version. Microsoft has turned SharePoint into a multi-facited product for many business line applications, like business intelligence, workflow and search. Will SharePoint do any of these functions well, or has Microsoft tasked it with too many things? We won’t know until Microsoft gets the software out of beta and businesses put SharePoint into real production use. Functionally, SharePoint Server 2007 is middleware, whatever the origins.

These features are going to be a shock to IT managers and a delight to users, the inability for IT to respond to users needs has already led to an explosion of client side application development using Excel and Access, but now similar rich capabilities are going to be possible using Excel Server, Forms Server and the amazing tricks you can do using just SharePoint lists and workflow.

Fans of web 2.0 technologies will be happy as well with built in support for blogs, and wikis and the fact that pretty much everything in SharePoint 2007 is a list and every list can be RSS enabled!  Podcasts are pretty easy as well, just RSS enable a document library, set the RSS feed to include enclosures and drop mp3 files into it and you have a podcast feed.  I discuss this in more detail in this previous post.

Dion Hinchcliffe has a useful post that talks about blogs, wikis and web 2.0 as the next application platform (I used his diagram above),  I think SharePoint 2007 meets all his requirements, but I think in his model he misses the importance of Lists as a way to make databases more approachable for normal users.  SharePoint also offers some pretty compelling integration with Excel and Access for power users allowing easy, bulk data entry, visualization and analysis. 

And finally Outlook offers limited offline support, although look to products like those from Colligo for more comprehensive offline support.