Adventures in home working

I really like this idea by Alan Lepofsky, he’s asking his readers to share things that they need to get done during their normal working days. 

There’s no mega business processes here, just the simple stuff that fills most of our time and is often still poorly optimised despite much investment in IT over the last couple of decades. The trouble is that most of this investment has gone into automating repeatable tasks and as a result these tasks largely don’t exist any more. What’s left - and what people spend most of their time doing - is hardly touched by the ERP, CRM and PDM systems.  This so called information work is still pretty much left to email, Microsoft Office, file shares and clumsy collaborative workspaces and portals.

So Alan good luck, I think it’s really valuable to think in these terms rather than asking people which features they want in existing products.  I tried something similar a while back when I documented my personal information lifecycle practices and an older version here.

This whole topic relates closely to one of my concerns, which is the gulf between an individuals perception of the importance of investing in their productivity and that of their employer,  this is probably my best post on that topic, it’s certainly the oldest.

I am consistently surprised by Microsoft’s low key marketing around SharePoint lists and also by the fact that the power of lists is rarely mentioned by enterprises who select SharePoint for collaboration.  The focus seems always to be on document libraries, blogs and wikis.

My surprise can be traced back to the fact that there is a LOT of focus within enterprises on the issues caused by the explosive growth of Microsoft Access databases and the concerns within the enterprise about their limiations for sharing information between far flung teams.

As many enterprises consider removing Access from the desktop in a heavy handed attempt to “solve” this “problem”, SharePoint lists are the easiest was to provide a simple level of database capability to these otherwise frustrated users and they provide a great way to improve team collaboration. 

At the simplist level lists allow a team to work together from a single version of the truth, which might be:

1. A list of requirements
2. A list of tasks
3. A list of risks, issues or change requests
4. A list of assets
5. etc

I have always thought that SharePoint lists are great, but SharePoint 2007 improves them in so many ways, I really like the improvements in subscription to change and RSS, the improvements in versioning and integration with Access. 

But I am very disappointed by the fact that bi-directional sync with Excel is no longer, with this functionality now only available in Access.

For me the Integration with Excel is vital.  Whilst SharePoint lists are an excellent way for teams to collaborate, they’re not so good for bulk data input, bulk data updates and for analysis and visualization (graphs, conditional highlights etc).  So I was very pleased to discover however that it’s possible to get this sync capability back with the additional of a free Active X control from Softluent, who needed the capability for one of their own solutions.

My second favorite feature is the way that SharePoint promotes meta-data in office documents and Infopath forms into lists (creating databases from documents) and synchronizes changes in list meta-data back into the documents.  People are lazy and this integration makes it much more likely that people will use document meta-data and that it will be kept up to date.

For more details on lists and how they can be used, check out this useful screencast by Jon Udell who demonstrates them in the context of Office Live.

My Mum said she was attending a computing course the other week, so I decided to get an old laptop repaired and set it up for her. 

She picked it up this weekend and it was quite an experience!  To date I have worked mainly with IT professionals and super users, I haven’t really any experience of working with people who have spent all of their lives without touching personal computing, here are a few things I learned:

1. Mum wasn’t at all interested in all the things I had set up for her, she already had a lot to take in at the level of how to flip up the screen, switch the laptop on, login and shutdown.  It turns out that all this is actually pretty complicated for her with all the options that the user interface presents and after she explained it from her perspective I could see why.
2. Basic things threw her, like seeing a big “shutdown the computer” button on the welcome page where she logs in and less obvious instructions related to actually using the computer.
3. she was similarly confused by the idea of clicking Start, then picking “Turn off the computer”, and then even more confused by the fact that after picking “Turn off the computer” she was presented with a dialog offering “standby”, “turn off” and “restart” - hadn’t she just picked “turn off”? and what the heck do restart and stand by mean? (there’s no help)
4. She was very confused by the idea of running multiple applications at the same time
5. She was amazed at the idea that she could edit text that she had entered into word without deleting it all and typing it again
6. of course the list goes on!

After about half an hour of discussion it became clear that the course she was on had not introduced her to personal computing at all.  When she arrived the PC was already up and running with Word 2003 started.  All interactions with XP were via the File Open and Save dialogs, she had no concept of login, shutdown, start etc.

My first experience of personal computing was an Amstrad Word Processor and it struck me after a few minutes that this was what she really needed right now, an appliance.  You should have seen her face when I opened up Windows Media player, I thought she would be pleased with the idea of having her music all there, but no, she was terrified.

At the same time it was wonderful to see her true amazement and excitement at the potential she was glimpsing.  Word 2003 for her was truly amazing, she was thrilled by simple things that the fact that text reflowed as she made changes, or indented it for example.

For the first time I really understood what a challenge Microsoft have when designing a product like Vista that needs to be usable by me and my Mum! And I think I will be a lot more forgiving of some of the decisions that they have taken to simplify the experience and choose defaults that never really made sense to me before!