Adventures in home working

Back in September of last year I wrote a post on the lack of support for authenticated RSS feeds and the BIG issues that this was going to cause enterprises trying to do rollouts this year. 

Jon Udell recently mentioned this and the comments and his post are quite useful.  In particular the clarifications around the behavior of Outlook 2007 and the common feed store.

What surprises me is that people consistently seem to think that authenticated RSS is rare, on the Internet maybe – but definitely not in the enterprise.  Although the comments do show that a lot of people and a lot of readers do support authenticated feeds I suspect that most of them will only work with Basic Authentication over SSL.

I have recently been thinking a bit about Enterprise RSS and getting frustrated by key features that seem to be missing, confusing or partially implemented, two examples being:

• Lack of unread status syncing between multiple clients of the Windows Common Feed Store
• Lack of support for basic authentication in the Windows Common Feed Store

I have also been thinking more broadly about security and management issues in general, so I was pleased to come across this post on the Collaborative Thinking blog which provided a useful list of topics to consider concerning enterprise RSS, my additions are in bold:

Security

• Ensure support for SSL and related authentication methods
• Ensure support for basic authentication over SSL as well as NTLM and Kerberos (which are mainly of interest in a Microsoft environment only)
• Some way to authenticate to RSS feeds that are protected by forms based authentication, common when enterprise portals are involved
• Browser add-ins should run “Internet zone” or “restricted sites zone”
• Require Windows XP SP2 Attachment Execution Service support
• Ask about block lists, content filtering, and handling of malformed feeds
• Outline how RSS enclosures are managed
• Require ACL’s per feed at group/user levels integrated via AD and LDAP
• Ability to encrypt the feed store and enclosures,  a lot of enterprise data is going to end up in this store, especially if enclosures are used
• I am also interested to see if some form of DRM could be applied to enclosures, with the digital rights acquired for the download user at the same time as the enclosure is downloaded.  I am concerned that enclosure enabled document libraries will result in very efficient document hoarding and resulting data leakage.  This may be a scenario that’s supported by Outlook and SharePoint 2007 IRM,  but I suspect that the common feed store DOES’ NT acquire the rights for the logged on user as part of the download process, which will make it difficult impossible to view the enclosures offline.

De-duping

• Assess how multiple updates to posts are handled and impact to read/unread marks
• Synchronization
• Check to make sure read/unread marks are managed across clients and devices

Storage

• Primarily a concern when feeds are sent into e-mail systems
• Potentially a compliance concern   

Network Utilization

• Assess download schedule management
• IE7 “salting” the interval (is it good enough)
• Is the RSS 2.0 Time To Live (TTL) tag honored
• Use of / support for Incremental feed updates (RFC 3229 (“Delta Encoding in HTTP”))
• Compression of feeds and enclosures

Management

• Ability to associate automatic feed subscription with LDAP directory group memberships, this really is going to be essential if feeds subscriptions becomes important to process compliance, e.g. a person gets informed when their Quality Management System is updated via a RSS feed.
• Ability to track usage

Personalized Feeds

• Not really an easy feature to implement at this time

Attensa and Newsgator seem to be addressing several of these issues,  but Microsoft and IBM don’t so it will be interesting to see how enterprises get on when they deploy Office System 2007 and Notes Hannover.

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.

Microsoft reveal a lot of useful info about terminal services improvements in Longhorn in this chat,  I can see myself making a lot of use of this on my lab servers at home as well as for customers:

Brian Madden has a lot of useful comments on each feature, my favourites are in bold.

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.

Anyone you read my blog knows that I am a big fan of multiple monitors.  In Vista support for multiple monitors is slightly more restrictive, here’s a summary:

• Multiple monitors attached to a single card – no problem
• Multiple monitors attached to multiple cards with the same driver (which normally means the same chip set family) – no problem
• Multiple monitors attached to multiple cards with different drivers – no support for Glass

or more details check out this link

 A few months ago Om Malik posted some predictions about email growth by 2010 that had been published by the Radicati Group,  although the raw numbers were impressive, the growth wasn’t except for the growth in the number of wireless email users. 

The graphic was done in Excel 2007.