Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: Productivity

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It just works!

Great little piece of writing by Scott about the fact that some stuff just does not work easily enough and how people will seek out maybe pretty complex ways of doing things just to be confident that it will work first time every time.  This is right up my street, I really like things that ‘Just work’ and MS and the Linux community need to really focus on that effortless simplicity.  For inspiration I look at the Nokia phone UI, (6310i in my case), and the Blackberry which I think is inspirational from a UI design standpoint and reliability standpoint.  How much of what we use in IT every day from any supplier would pass the test, effortless, reliable, intuitive etc and to what extent are these attributes sacrificed for fancy features, customizability etc.

One of the most impressive things about Scott’s post?  He wrote it all on his Tablet PC using the new input panel in SP2, his experience ‘it just worked’, that was my experience to with the alpha, except in Lotus Notes which kept crashing, so I had to uninstall it!!

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More loss of direction around Exchange?

Ed Brill makes a point in one of his posts about the woes of the Exchange Group in Microsoft, here is the guts of it:

It hasn’t been a good few months for the Exchange product team at Microsoft.  First the Outlook team ships an updated connector for Lotus Domino; then they dismantle their own roadmap; and now they are facing internal competition:

“Our first product here is going to be using Outlook that uses the Hotmail e-mail infrastructure. So you don’t need to have an Exchange Server if you’re a small business; you can just use Hotmail and you can have that synchronized experience, as well as the calendaring and everything else with other people who are on Hotmail.”

Sort of confirms the feeling I got when I posted on a simillar topic a while back.  Then I got a bit more encouraged when I posted this.  lets hope for some clarity soon!

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More on the conflict between personal productivity and enterprise IT management.

I wrote about this topic a while back.  Its nice to see some discussion starting up on it for two reasons:

  1. Its really interesting, and a topic that deserves more public debate

  2. I want to do some research on it, and need all the input I can get.  My own blog is sort of work in progress research but I want to spend a month or so giving it some real attention

Check out this post which gets the debate started.  Eric Mack has a real good contribution.

In fact if you are interested in personal productivity in general then the discussions on the Getting Things Done site are of a very high quality.

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WIndows 2003 Server, anywhere access

It’s TechED Europe this week and Microsoft have announced more details of the next release of Windows 2003 Server.  The area of most interest to me is, “anywhere access”, which Neowin reports on. Anywhere access enables users to use terminal services over port 80 (HTTPs/RPC), Outlook over port 80 (HTTPs/RPC) and also file shares from within corporate LANs over port 80 (HTTPs/RPC). 

These are very interesting developments, the WTS capabilities removing one more advantage that Citrix has over Microsoft.  The file share access is interesting, as file share access using WebDAV is already available I can only assume that this is CIFS access tunnelled over HTTPS, this would be a big improvement over WebDAV as it would support more applications, the properties dialog and other features not available today using DAV.  I thought Outlook over HTTPS was already part of Exchange 2003 server, so I am not sure why this is included in a feature list for Windows 2003 server unless its actually provided by the OS or probably IIS rather than Exchange.

These HTTP access mechanisms are useful not just in providing internet access to corporate resources but also for corporates wishing to provide controlled access on their WAN for …

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PowerPoint, putting the audience in control

One of my friend’s posts pointed me to beyond bullets a blog about communications.  It was strange because a few minutes later I came across another link in another feed I was reading so I decided to check it out.  I liked this post on the Presentation Dashboard, an idea for putting the audience in control.  I like this concept very much and have used it myself many times in different forms; here are a few of them:

1.      I have created several PowerPoints that I designed not to be presented but to be emailed out or web delivered and navigated around.  This was done with lots of buttons and links and was very effective.  We also used this idea for training courses

2.      This worked so well that I changed my PowerPoint standard template and so that I created a master slide with index buttons all the way down the left hand side.  Because it was in the master it appeared on every slide.  When I presented it made it very easy to jump around the presentation following up on any topics the audience wanted to discuss.  Depending on which section you were in the appropriate link had a …

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Goodbye to the Tablet

There is a flurry of debate in the blogs because Peter says, I Still like the tablet.  But I am all out of love, well I have a story to tell about Tablet love as well.

 

I got my first Tablet, a HP TC1100, in January and it was love at first sight,  I just took to the slate format and at the time forgave the terrible keyboard, (although it didn’t take me long to remember my old IBM keyboard with increasing longing).  I wrote all about my early experiences in my tablet blog.  Well my circumstances changed and I found myself working mostly from home so the mobility benefits I was getting from the tablet reduced and I started to look at the platform more objectively.  These are some of the conclusions that I came to, but I think it’s a pretty personal view so don’t expect any conclusions that I draw to apply to you.

 

The Tablet didn’t work for me when I was mainly deskbound:

 

  1. I love screen real estate, before I had a Tablet I had a 1400*1050 resolution ThinkPad A20p, it had a great keyboard …

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Tips for using Lotus Notes and GTD methodology.

I recently read Getting Things Done, and wanted to apply it using Lotus Notes.  I struggled a bit and to tell the truth I have not fully implemented it even after a month of playing around.  I am trying again now that I have a new PDA, better synchronisation software,...

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The Tyranny of too much choice.

An article in Scientific American, titled The Tyranny of Choice has sparked a considerable debate on the web about the problems faced by western societies as a result of too much choice.  In fact the idea is a very old one, I came cross it years ago but it is not mentioned very often by your every day Happiness literature which tends to talk more about internal changes that people can make to the way they think rather than factors from their external environment.

 

You can sum up the material prior to this article as follows:

 

  • The intent of advertising is to make us dissatisfied with what we have

  • If we meet people who have more than we have, or have different spending priorities or saving priorities then we tend to be dissatisfied with what we have

 

These two factors are the main environmental factors that effect happiness.  In my experience they are even more powerful than having somewhere warm and dry to live and enough food to eat, which I soon got used to.  However some people disagree with this and consider these to be essential, (Hygiene factors in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs…

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Writing the living web

I just read a very nicely crafted article describing 10 tips for writing the Living Web.  Essentially its about writing blogs.  As I progressed I wondered increasingly who could have put together such an article and what motivated them to put in the effort.  When I got to then end I found it was Mark Bernstein who is chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, publishers of Tinderbox, a personal content management assistant.  I went straight there to have a look, (so its good advertising Mark!), but unfortunarely its for the Mac only, but they are working on a Windows version.

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More integration between WinFS and XML

Jon Udell of Infoworld says in his blog:

Meanwhile I’ve been working on a story about Longhorn, for which I had long and an extremely interesting interview with Quentin Clark, the architect of director of program management for WinFS. I’d like to transcribe the whole thing to post along with the story, when it runs, but the upshot is that Microsoft is planning more and better integration between WinFS and XML — both in terms of data definition and query — than I’d previously heard, which is welcome news

I’m pleased too because it means we are one step closer to the vision of WinFS that I have been talking about in my blog.  Complementary and not competetive to the web.

He then goes on to talk about the different types of search experience:

It seems clear, though, that whatever can be accomplished by means of what I’ve come to call “managed metadata,” we’ll always want that Google effect to be happening in parallel. When asked about the Semantic Web and RDF at InfoWorld’s 2002 CTO Forum, Sergey Brin said:

Look, putting angle brackets around things is not a technology, by itself. I’d rather make progress by having computers understand …