Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: Collaboration

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Why I love working in the end-user and work-group computing field!

I have worked in this area for most of my working life and it continues to amaze me that it is still an area of IT that has the – untapped – potential to transform peoples lives.  Most of the customers I work with are struggling to deal with all the information they have to cope with in their work and home life (which are becoming more integrated).  They live high-bandwidth lifestyles!  Its with great interest therefore that I read the following results from the Information Work Productivity Council (IWPC) which is an independent group of companies and academics that have joined together to study the issue of information work productivity. The goal of the Council is to build a model that measures productivity in today’s information-centric business environment. 

They recently published the results of a survey into how the average user spends their time at work.  According to the study, the average user:

  • Spends 3 hours and 14 minutes a day using technologies to process work-related information—just over 40% of an 8-hour work day
  • Devotes 1.58 hours/day to e-mail (49% of the information processing time, and 20% of an 8 hour day
  • Spends 47 minutes, or 24% of IP time on telephone and voice mail
  • Receives …

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Way to go Adobe!

Adobe Acrobat v7 release is really quite astounding, with most if not all of the key infrastructure functionality from the full V6 product now bundled into the new version of the FREE Reader.  It’s a perfect split of the features needed by content creators and content consumers/reviewers.  Microsoft look VERY VERY hard at this and learn the lesson that Adobe is teaching you here and OpenOffice.org will teach you when they build X/Forms support into OOo, and make OOo an essential part of everyones desktop Infrastructure and destroy the market for InfoPath and possibly MS Office XML documents in general.

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Way too many portals

Its seems that everyone has a solution on the way for inter-enterprise collaboration.  Use their portal and only their portal or application!  The problem is that OpenText, Microsoft, IBM, Groove etc all want you to use their solutions, for example:

Workplace creates a unified front end for technologies facing suppliers, customers, and employees, according to Larry Bowden, vice president of the Workplace division at IBM. Each of those users has different roles, but they are tapping the same back-end information sources through Workplace, he added. ?Collaboration among peers within an organization is moving toward organizational productivity, which shifts toward [collaboration] between organizations,? he said.

Well that’s not my vision of collaboration!  I want something more along the lines of POP3, RSS and Trillian (a bit of a mix of standards and products I know but hopefully you get the idea).  All you enterprises out there can use whatever collaboration solution you want, but when I connect to you and integrate all your portals into my Personal Knowledge Management environment I want to aggregate you using bog standard protocols and the clients of my choice.  Of course these enterprise portal applications could be aggregated by portlets as well for people who don’t have the …

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Maybe theres hope for mainstream inter-enterprise collaboration afterall

I have been frustrated since the beginning of the Internet at the difficulty of collaborating inter enterprise.  The current techniques don’t work for me.  They frequently depend on too much inter-enterprise coorperation, expensive client software, too many firewall ports opened etc.  Well it seems that a mainstream solution is finally on the horizon with Microsoft’s LCS 2005 product.  Here are a few snipits to get you started:

The product, formerly code-named “Vienna,” is expected to be available in beta sometime in June or July. Microsoft is looking for customers to test the product in beta, leading to a general availability release of LCS 2005 by the fourth quarter.

and it allows inter-enterprise connections:

Chief among the new features in this version will be support for federation of IM and presence so that customers can extend the technology to their partners, suppliers and customers. This will allow users to see presence information across, not just within, enterprises, from other applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Excel and SharePoint Services.

fairly firewall friendly:

Users from outside the network will use the Windows Messenger client and tunnel into the network using Session Initiation Protocol over firewall port 5061, Microsoft officials said. Full encryption and authentication …

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InfoPath gives insights into the future

I have always looked upon InfoPath as a example of a product that needs to be part of the infrastructure of the Longhorn platform.  At its simplest it’s a product to render forms defined in XML, allow them to be completed offline, validated, and then submitted them to web services. 

 

If you think of WinFS as effectively an XML store, which manages sometimes connected interactions with server side data sources (especially web services) then InfoPath type capabilities are a natural part of the WinFS shell.  So I was interested to see this MSDN paper on Submitting forms in InfoPath 2003 because of the potential implications on how Microsoft is thinking about WinFS and Synchronisation and sometimes connected operation.  These new adaptors allow:

 

  1. Submitting to a Web Service

  2. Submitting to a SharePoint Site

  3. Submitting through E-Mail

  4. Submitting to a Database

 

These new capabilities are interesting but the ability to complete the form off-line and then, when connected, send it to the server is still way to clunky (but likely to be a key area the Longhorn team will need to make slick).  

 

I was also disappointed that they did not include submitting via email …

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Collaborative editing

Michael; who writes the Shared Spaces blog has recently written about the challenges of collaborative editing of documents/presentations.  The problems not too difficult to solve within an business (Net Meeting etc) but solving the problem between businesses (through two sets of firewalls) in a secure fashion is another problem altogether.  Its even more difficult if like me you want to do it on an ad-hoc basis, during a telephone or IM conversation, rather than using a multi-user conferencing system like Lotus Same-time, Oracle Collaboration Server or MS Live Meeting.

These are the options that Michael came up with, as these all cost loads of money, require a client installation and lots of coordination between collaborators they don’t fulfil my ad-hoc need, any other areas would be welcome:

  • Groove Virtual Office Professional 3.0. Staff put the document to be shared into a Groove Document Review shared space. Internal and external participants are invited. Using the “Co-Edit” function of Groove, one person in turn can have edit rights of the document, and once they save their changes, everyone in the co-edit session gets to see the changes immediately. It’s not true real-time co-editing, but it’s extremely close … and it definitely …

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How do you blog?

This is a great series of articles on different blogging styles, it includes hints and tips on when to use each one and how to use it to best effect.  Well worth a read even if you don’t blog, as some of the insights are useful for any type of...

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BlackBerry Enterprise Software v4.0

A new version of the BES has just been announced.  Loads of great features, my favorite being finally getting rid of desktop sync, which never worked reliably for me.  Worst feature no improvements in task management, and wireless task and address book management.  More details follow: BlackBerry Enterprise Software v4.0...

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Seven rules for email

One of the researchers who works for my company produced a great guide on the uses and abuses of cummuication and collaboration technologies a few years ago.  When I first read it I was impressed but at the same time depressed at the neglect that most companies have of their basic (common) business processes.  I have continued to be interested in how companies can extract maximum advantage from simple IT infrastructure technologies by focussing on how to use their tools to best effect. 

The following post therefore caught my eye – seven rules for e-mail – it would be great to see a best practice debate on how the phone, SMS, email, syndication, IM and conferencing technologies should be used.  The seven rules above provides a good but limited start. 

As an illustration of such a debate in action, albeit on a slightly different subject, there is no better example than the getting things done forums.

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Don Box, like me, finally tells it like it is

It’s nice to see that even Don Box, who has grown up on Object orientation, application integration and database middleware gets it: For better or worse, a significant amount of the world’s data is stored outside of relational DBMSs, specifically in Microsoft Word and Excel files. As these files move...