Adventures in home working

There are lots of blogs reporting on Microsoft’s new Surface product but Michael has a great post where he describes a wide range of collaboration related scenarios that it could support, definitely worth a read. 

However I can’t help but think that Surface is a bit like Telepresence, a technology that will be reserved for a very small number of scenarios.  Personally I’m more interested in the application of technologies that will impact on most of us. 

My take on Surface is that I would be more excited by a vertical version.  I know it wouldn’t have the benefit of being able to interact with things placed on it, but being vertical it would benefit from being:

1. Larger
2. Allowing more people to interact with it
3. Providing for a more vibrant and interactive experience, because people could interact with the whole surface more easily (with the horizontal version people get in each others way a lot)
4. Easier to see from a distance, in a “war room” type of environment

All that said - except from the very richest of collaboration scenarios I really like to see solutions that work well from the desk, and with multiple monitors now so affordable I think it’s easy to envision some very rich experiences. 

A few customers have recently pointed out to me that they are going to have a significant number of early adopters of Office 2007 in advance of their migration to SharePoint 2007, this will be particularly true where SharePoint is used at an enterprise level.  Previously I had assumed that SharePoint (being server side) would migrate in advance of Office.

This got me thinking about how little I had seen from Microsoft about the issues of compatibility between mismatched versions of SharePoint and Office.  As my area of interest right now is Office 2007 used with SharePoint 2003 here are a few of the issues I can guess (possibly incorrectly) at and there will probably be a great many more:

1. Groove 2007 only provides support for offlining document libraries whereas the previous version also supported discussions and some other tools.  So users of Groove 2007 are going to see reduced functionality – assuming Groove 2007 works with Office 2003 at all. 
2. Although some of the missing functionality in Groove 2007 migrates to Outlook 2007 this migration will only be relevant when the SharePoint 2003 environment is migrated to 2007, in addition it’s only likely to be suitable for users of Groove within the enterprise.
3. Excel 2007 doesn’t support bi-directional replication of lists and publishing of lists to SharePoint 2007,  although existing lists created with SharePoint 2003 will continue to work.  I am assuming that Excel 2007 when used against SharePoint 2003 will have the same limitation. So users will see a loss of functionality, similar functionality will be available in Access 2007, ie the ability to publish tables to SharePoint and take bi-directional replicas offline, however this functionality in Access 2007 will only be relevant when the SharePoint 2003 environment is migrated to 2007, and of course you need to have a SKU that includes Access.
4. I don’t expect that SharePoint 2003 will support the new Office XML file formats for searching, and document property promotion and demotion.
5. In SharePoint 2003 documents were checked out to a hidden area on the server and so could only be worked on online.  SharePoint 2007 and Office 2007 now check documents out to a hidden directory under [My] Documents, I am not sure which behaviour if any will work with mixed versions
6. Word 2007 includes a rich interaction model with SharePoint – which features of this will work?

If anyone knows of a good information source on this topic, please leave a comment, or if you know of any issues I have missed or issues I have highlighted incorrectly please leave a comment as well.

Standards Blog provides some useful information on the Workplace Office client.  The context is a series of articles looking at various ODF clients of which Workplace Managed Client is one.

I’m pleased to see that IBM are now picking up speed in their attempts to engage with their community through blogs and other direct to consumer communication channels which is good news as I have previously been a bit critical of their efforts. 

However there is still not much diversity of opinion.  In the IBM world there tends to be one information source and several commentators, which contrasts strongly with the Linux and Microsoft worlds for example where we see many independent people reporting the same thing and much more comment.  So its always useful see see independent posts like this, even if only the questions asked are independent.

Just by chance I came across a vision document for the Chandler open source Personal Information Management (PIM) client application which has a very innovative design and ambitious plans for sharing, extensibility and cross-platform support.  Even if you have no interest in Chandler as a product I recommend you have a read because it includes some really useful concepts that might help you assess the capabilities of alternative products.  Take this extract as an example:

Who says that the lines between emails, events and tasks are clear? Users need to manage their information according to project, not according to application. Chandler offers heterogeneous collections, able to contain any kind of Chandler item as well as resources that might otherwise live in random places in the file system. Naturally, searches can also cover all application areas at once or alternately be limited to specific kinds of items.

More subtly, we believe it’s powerful to allow users to not only put their peanut butter and chocolate in the same cupboard, but also to mix their peanut butter and chocolate together in the same item. We call this stamping, as in “I want to stamp this note as a message” or “I want to stamp this message as a task”. The user adds email-ness or task-ness to the pre-existing item without creating a separate item. Consider some of the possible use cases for this:

• An incoming email leads to an ill-defined task. Rather than have to create a task and try to decide exactly what it is and what to call it, just stamp the email as a task to be sure to come back to it later.
• A co-worker has to be notified about an upcoming event. Rather than create a mail and give it a subject then copy information from the event to the email, just stamp the event as a message and fill in the “To” field.

Stamping replaces the flagging feature that traditional email clients often support. Flagging is tantalizingly close to being useful for many people but lacks the ability to define due dates or detail to explain why something was flagged. Since stamping an email as a task is just one click, it’s as easy as flagging and doesn’t force a series of decisons. All the user has to know is that there is probably something to do, sometime, and stamp as task. Later the user can remove the task stamp, assign a date, or add more details to the description of what has to be done.

The image in the sidebar shows an event that was stamped as an email, adding “to” and “from” fields but keeping the same subject, body, and all the event attributes.

Some of these ideas seem to have found their way into Notes Hanover and it’s activity explorer.

Microsoft’s direct push technology for delivering email, calendar and contacts from Exchange 2003 SP2/Exchange 2007 to Windows Mobile 5 devices seems to be pretty simple, functional and elegant, even better it’s being licensed for use with other mobile device operating systems.  For more details this blog is a great place to start.

Watch the Microsoft demos and the offline capabilities of SharePoint look really slick, but dig into the details and you find that it’s not as rosy as you first thought, in fact in some areas, like Excel 2007 integration with SharePoint 2007 it’s actually worse than in the 2003 products.  To get a much more balanced understanding of just what to expect and what the alternatives are check out this really useful webcast.  It’s sponsored by Colligo who sell a best of breed Offline SharePoint solution, but its not a sales pitch.

This is a great article if you want to get a good overview of the features of Exchange 2007,  these are my favourites:

Voice Messaging System

Voice mail can now be stored in the mailbox and accessed from a unified inbox in Outlook, Outlook Web Access, on a mobile device, or from a standard telephone. This unification improves employee productivity by simplifying access to the most common types of communications. It also dramatically reduces cost by removing the need for a standalone voice mail system and by taking advantage of any existing investments in Active Directory. Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging can be connected with a legacy private branch exchange (PBX) infrastructure through an IP gateway, or can be directly connected with certain IP PBX installations.

Self-Service Voice Mail Support

Using Outlook Web Access, users can request a reset of their voice mail PIN, set their voice mail greeting, record their out-of-office voice message, and specify mailbox folders to access when calling in by phone to hear e-mail messages through text-to-speech translation.

Outlook Voice Access

Users can access their Exchange mailbox using a standard telephone, available anywhere. Through touch tone or speech-enabled menus, they can hear and act on their calendar, listen to e-mail messages (translated from text to speech), listen to voice mail messages, call their contacts, or call users listed in the directory.

Play on Phone

Exchange Unified Messaging allows users to playback voice messages received in their Exchange inbox on a designated phone. This feature is useful when a user is in a public place and does not want to play the voice mail over their computer speakers. Play on Phone routes the voice mail to a cell phone, desk phone, or other number specified by the user.

Outlook 2007 Experience

Outlook Web Access, an AJAX application since its first release with Exchange Server 5.5, provides a rich, Outlook like experience in a browser. New features in Outlook Web Access 2007 enable users to:

• Schedule Out of Office messages and send to internal and/or external recipients
• Use the Scheduling Assistant to efficiently book meetings
• Access SharePoint documents without a VPN or tunnel using LinkAccess
• Use WebReady Document Viewing to read attachments in HTML even if the application that created the document is not installed locally
• Access RSS subscriptions
• View content in Managed E-mail Folders
• Retrieve voice mail or fax messages through Unified Messaging integration
• Search the Global Address List

Search

Information can be quickly found from a mobile device using the search capability of Exchange ActiveSync. When executing a search from a mobile device, both the local device store and the user’s entire Exchange mailbox are queried. Results found through the over-the-air search of the Exchange mailbox can be rapidly retrieved to the device. This capability enables access to information sent or received days, weeks, or even months before, regardless of the storage limitations of the mobile device.

Direct Push

Mobile devices incorporating Exchange ActiveSync maintain a secure connection with Exchange Server 2007, receiving new or updated e-mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks as soon as they arrive on the server. This push method optimizes bandwidth usage while keeping users up-to-date.

One of the more interesting business trends is increasing mobility and how it will change many lives, it’s certainly changed mine allowing me to work from home, out walking, from cafes and restaurants and hotels.  So I was pleased to find this very interesting open survey on this critical dimension of knowledge work on this blog,  you can complete the survey here:

Survey :: http://tinyurl.com/sjsar
Password :: GMWS2006

Complete results are instantly available to you when you complete the survey instrument. It takes a scant 10 minutes. I found some very interesting trends in the survey results. Could you please share your responses?

Note: the survey summary is anonymous and does not include answers to open-ended questions.

I just saved the results as a PDF file and I will be having a good read through on Monday.

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.

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.