Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: PKM

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Radio userland Kick Start

This book provides an introduction to using and programming Radio Userland.  I thought I would give it a read as it seems that radio userland is quite a powerful and flexible environment.  I have already played around with a few additional tools, particularly as I wanted a bit more power...

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Who will Longhorn appeal to?

Right now it seems to me that Longhorn is being targeted at three communities:

  1. Home users, particularly those looking for a great multi-media experience

  2. Knowledge workers, especially those at the top end, who aggregate, integrate and assemble lots of information from many different sources

  3. Mobile workers, for whom thin client computing solutions don’t work and to whom the blend or personal and corporate features will appeal.

It’s got lots of other features that will appeal to the mass of task and structured task workers in corporate environments, but true thin client approaches will probably appeal more strongly for these users IT managers, particularly with the current wave of smart client rich UI toolkits that run on top of a JVM.

So how might this pan out in reality:

  1. Microsoft might get 20% market share from portable users

  2. A maximum of 20% market share from high end knowledge workers, who are not mobile

  3. Maybe 20% that it picks up just so they can use the same environment as the rest of the people in the office

So maybe that leaves 40% of users who will either switch to thin clients, unless Microsoft can convince businesses to stick with them because of the benefits …

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A good description of WinFS?

I have been looking for a good description of how Longhorn would behave in a client server environment.  The Longhorn evangelists have been posting some scenarios, but they don’t completely work for me because they are not general enough to allow me to easily extend them to my own environment. ...

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My personal productivity challenge

In my previous post In Pursuit of personal and team productivity I talked about general problems.  In this post I talk briefly about my problems.  My company:

  1. Uses Notes for email and some applications

  2. Has an extensive Intranet for functional web sites, news, standards etc

  3. Uses Plumbtree as its portal and to host communities, some are still hosted on Notes

  4. Some of the projects I am working on use MS Project Server

  5. Others use just MS Project

  6. My company uses Lotus Sametime for IM

  7. One of my project teams uses Microsoft Exchange IM

  8. External contacts use MSN IM

  9. Some of the projects use a Windows file server for project files

  10. My function uses a Notes Database as its repository for Work In progress and approval

  11. Some of the projects use WSS, for documents, risks, issues and changes

  12. Some use spreadsheets

  13. Some of the projects use an in house developed collaboration server

  14. My customers use even more systems, some MS Team Services, others use Documentum

What do I use, in addition to all of the above:

  1. I use my local disk for all my work in progress, archive, to read, to review, to watch etc

  2. The family email is accessed using Outlook express

  3. My …

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In pursuit of personal and team productivity

There is a conflict between people and the companies they work for, (well probably lots, but I’m only going to talk about one of them). The bigger the enterprise a person works for the more focussed that company is likely to be in central server centric computing, central support, consolidation, BPM, single sources of information etc. All very important for sure, but these companies will probably not even consider team productivity and almost certainly personal productivity as worthy of investment. These companies are on a crusade to save money, real money, i.e. savings off the bottom line. 1 hours labour saving per month for a big company project would be amazing….

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Too many PDAs!

I have 2 pocket PC’s, a Blackberry and a Tablet, all of them play music but I also have a Creative Nomad 20G.  How did I get in this mess.

Well it started with one of the original IPAQ’s which a few years ago I thought was a marval.  I carried it everywhere and loaded it with loads of useless software and tried to squeeze a CD’s worth of muisic onto it.  After about 3 months I hardly ever used it because the battery life was too short and the synchronisation too much of a chore.  My 11 year old daughter has it now, and after a month of enthusiasm hardly ever uses it either.

Then I got the Nomad, I copied all my CD’s onto it and hardly made a dent in its 20GB, I converted all of the Tech-ED conference DVDs into WMA files so I could listen to them in the gym and out walking.  It got used a lot for a few months, and still gets used perhaps once or twice a week.  But if I lost it tomorrow it would not have much of an impact on my life, in fact I probably wouldn’t even notice….