Adventures in home working

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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!