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...
Given all of the negative talk about the delay to WinFS I just wanted to say that I have thought since I first glimpsed it that Microsoft are really onto something with WinFS, I have discussed it before but its timely to give my top five reasons again: 1. It’s...
IT is becoming more accessible and more personal in many ways. The combination has many implications.
1. If I can get at the services others provide for me from anywhere
2. If I can customise the access to these services in a way that suits me
3. If I can aggregate the information that flows to and from these services in a way that suits me
and if I can do all of this from any device, and over any network then the power that corporate IT held over me declines and IT just becomes more like the rest of the world I live in, for example:
1. Most companies don’t specify which car a salesman has to use they just provide the money to buy it.
2. They don’t specify or fund the suit he wears, just the standards he has to comply with
3. They often don’t specify the pen I use, or the type of diary
As standards mature, security becomes more pervasive and applied to content, rather than container, (e.g. the content of the document is protected, rather than the directory it resides in), IT will go in this direction. …
My company currently uses Plumtree and I must confess that I have not been a great fan of its portal. However I did like this posting which described the most successful application types that have been built using their Portal, and probably any other as well. Expert location/knowledge management workspaces...
Greg has just written one of the few posts that starts to discuss RSS and its impact behind the firewall. That is in a corporate environment. greg hughes – dot – net – More on RSS and how it can change the way we work and live I wrote extensively...
I admit I have written a business case or two in the past that included saving paper. One actually did make the savings it claimed, but the other like millions of others resulted in more paper usage. There is a good article on the topic on the Bloor blog IT-Director.com. ...
This is one of the areas I am going to be looking at so its good news that there has been a recent flurry of activity around it. here are some of the more important links. The debate was started by the EC report into this topic which is summarised...
I just read this post by Greg that describes the impact RSS has had on his productivity, it’s as if I wrote it myself so for once I will repeat it here in full!
My RSS reader saves me about 300 hours a week
The one about how using RSS opens up information to me in a way that is so reliable I could only do it this way manually if there were two of me…
Okay, so maybe it’s a little exaggerated. But seriously, I read an incredible amount of information these days. So much more than I ever did, and a lot of it on the Internet. Not only that, but I get the information I need (or want) so fast now that I can practically always act faster than most people when news breaks. Research that used to take hours and hours of searching and browsing now takes just minutes. I’m consuming much, much more information and doing so in much, much less time. What I can accomplish today in the information gathering department would have taken two of me just a year or so ago, before I found the real beauty of RSS.
I use RSS feeds …
Dan Gillmor has written a book about how the web and blogging in particular are changing the nature of journalism. Its available online here there is a companion blog here. This is the marketing spin:
Grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media’s monopoly on the news, transforming it from a lecture to a conversation. In We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, nationally known business and technology columnist Dan Gillmor tells the story of this emerging phenomenon, and sheds light on this deep shift in how we make and consume the news.
This is a posting that I made to the GTD discussion forum.
I am about to start a small research project into personal productivity, I am going to be looking at the following main areas:
As you can see these are quite relevant to exponents of the GTD methodology, and so I need your help.
First I wanted to explain a little about my personal experience with GTD and history in using similar techniques.
“I love to be organised”
I am one of those people who likes a clear desk, who like kids to have tidy bedrooms, who likes to be in control. I invest a lot in my IT, and a lot of my time in researching how to be organised. I can also invest a lot of time in establishing a new system. But once that new system is established, I find it hard to keep going. Here are some of the reasons why: