I read an interesting paper produced by IBM today whilst travelling to London (link). The paper focused on email as a shared mail resource both from generic mailboxes “sales@company.com” down to the level of a personal assistant and executive sharing the executives mail database. What struck me from the report is the fact that these users really need a different flavour of the generic email template to suit their distinct needs. What is obvious from the report is no-one from the IT organisations featured, and I’m guilty here too, have considered the implication of how multiple users work with a single email database. In terms of the Executive/Assistant relationship the following simple features would appear to be key:
Who has read the email
Does the assistant need to take any specific action
Has the assistant annotated or summarised the email
Has the assistant provided further information
Does the email (and likely other relavent information)Â require printing
What emails need to go into “tickle” folders for the next month
In most cases the Executive/Assistant have devised their own workflow environment creating specific folders for specific actions. There should be a better way for them to do this. In terms of Notes and Domino all this would be easily acheivable using the designer, in terms of Outlook I assume a plugin or other feature (public folder applcation etc.) could be implemented.
Having read this report and given it some thought I think it would do most of us some good to recognise the unique relationship between Assistants and Executives, talk to them, find out what could be done to improve their use of the email infrastructure. My ideas, based on the review would be:
A subform to allow the assistant to add comments, hyperlinks, summaries etc
Modification to the inbox and other folders to show who has read the email with color coding. For example – green circle = PA has read it, no action required. blue circle = pa has read it, executive action required. purple circle = executive has
read it no action required. orange circle = executive has read it action required
The ability to add actions to the email without upseting the body of the email
So much design talent out there perhaps from a Notes Domino perspective this could be one for openntf.org
This post has come from a discussion with my collegues who work on the Microsoft Collaborative side of my employer. They sit about 3 feet away and outnumber me greatly (so we have some interesting discussions). One regular is the “I hate notes”. It generally starts as a dig at me after a client crash or little niggle that annoys them. I’m not good at conflict so tend to hide quite quickly so this post is my response:
What I like about Notes that Outlook doesn’t do as well:
Local replication of a multitude of applications, not simply email.
Views
Presence awareness within the application with no need for additional software.
Presence awareness in views (not just within documents)Â and at name fields in all applications.
Full text indexing and searching (especially from all documents view)
What I like about Outlook that that Notes doesn’t do as well:
The UI is cleaner and slicker (in my opinion)
The ability to seperate out faourite folders
The organise functions
It is much better at dealing with local directories
Configuration is simpler for the end user (especially when moving from server to server etc)
However Notes has some good reasons behind having a more complex UI. The client isn’t simply an email client but a mechanism for displaying Notes Applications, which like them or loath them can be very powerful. I do think Notes gets some bad press which is unjustified. I also think IBM and Lotus could do more to sing the client’s advantages.Â
I’d like to give one example of where Notes helped a customer, and where outlook couldn’t help. My old employer developed a Notes application which would store mental health records. The problem with such records is their complexity and the need for various organisations to be able to see only various elements of data. So in one example, and this is hypothetical:
Police are called to a disturbance at a house. The disturbance turns into a seige. They know who the occupant is and searching their systems it links to the mental health records and shows the person has psychiatric problems. They know no more than that. They call in the social worker who turns his laptop and with no connectivity and can bring up more information on the patient. If necessary the social worker can call the on-call phsychiatrist who has full access to the patients records.
This system is a proven and trusted tool implemented and used by several National Health trusts within the UK.
OK so where does Notes differentiate from Outlook here? The power of Notes is much wider than email. It is the power to use your applications and email when you have no connectivity – and this is important in many sectors of industry and public service. The UI could be improved and I hope to see a step change with Hannover. Heres to the future.
Spotted this post in the Lotus Developer Domain forum from David Marshak, Senior Product Manager, Real-time Collaboration.
“RE: Sametime 7.5: Release date ? Beta version ? David Marshak 29.Jan.06 13:47 a Web browser
General 7.0All Platforms
Release this summer, beta is Mar/Apr”
OK, so here goes on a lengthy post for the admins amongst us on NSD Analysis. An area I feel I know quite well …. however as you’ll remember from my last post this is based on publicly available information.
NSD (or Notes System Diagnostic) is the name given to software bundled in Domino to give a snapshot of what the Domino system is doing. The tool produces text files with enormous ammounts of information and can be run manually or will run automatically during a crash. Interested ? …… (it may seem a bit dull but the information here could save you a lot of time!).
Sometimes it may seem that I’m not blogging in full, skimming the subject or not showing any in-depth information on a post. Why is that? Well I’m not quite sure what I can blog here. My employers have no policy on blogging and I’m just not sure what I can and cannot say without getting into trouble. Can I share my knowledge or is that a breach of my empoyment contract? I obviously wouldn’t divulge customer or commercial information but just how much can I say. Am I the only person blogging on Collaborative products with that concern?
Notes and Domino have become quite famous (or infamous) for their simple and easy application development environment. The build in support for simple forms, workflow right through to more complex lotuscript and java integration made them a firm favourite with power users and developers alike. You’d have thought by now that this would have removed the need for paper based systems in most environments…..well no, not really. My workplace is still full of paper based forms …… or even worse in my view a form written in word which then gets emailed round a chain of people many of whom will then unpoductively detach the form and save it somewhere. Several products are on offer at a desktop level, infopath is an example. I’d love to see forms and the ability to create them passed back to the user in some form of rapid application development enviroment based around the browser. I’d love to see a common standard for forms and workflow built on XML. I’d love to see easy to use gui’s for users to create flow charts and forms with approval cycles. Lets face it that is the only reason we bother to fill a form it …. I’d like that please give it to me!
Maybe I’m wrong but most vendors are going along the route of needing an application developer to produce the workflow forms etc. I’d like to see us go back to the days when power users could create the applications they needed within their environment. Yes us techies would lose control and things would be harder to manage ……. but user satisfaction is the key here. The power user will soon hit their limit as the application got to the end of their understanding. Give the power back, lets have some open standards for workflow and form creation (someone will probably now point me to the aforementioned wish!).
Even better news is that several vendors have pre-build images so you can see how their products work with minimal installation learning overhead ….. these include workplace express …. http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vm/ibmworkplace.html
 OK, I now feel a bit clearer on where things are going. I spent 2 days last week with IBM at their superb Hursley innovation centre (near Southampton, UK) learning all about Workplace (more on that another post!).
Whilst there I could talk freely to IBM’ers about the roadmap. This is what I have for public consumption ….. Notes and Domino are here to stay. Hannover is a Notes client. There is work to develop Notes and Domino way beyond the next release. IBM would be stupid to turn their back on 120M+ seats (and it would appear they have accepted that).
Workplace is Workplace. Workplace and Domino will compliment each other but are definitely aimed at different markets. I expect integration to become tighter between the traditional Lotus Collaborative products (Domino, Notes, Sametime, Quickplace) and the new Workplace solutions.
Whilst the Hannover client will be able to run Workplace applications it is my understanding at this stage the the two products will retain their own clients. As for the Workplace Managed Client I’ve just started, after my time at Hursley, to use the Workplace managed client so I’ll blog on that later too.
Well I’ve discovered Gaim. I first heard the name during a podcast when Libby interviewed Bruce. I started searching for “game” and didn’t get very far only to be in a conversation today with a collegue about Trillian ….. one thing led to another and I bemoaned the heavy nature of the Trillian client and its unfriendly buddy list – well some may love it but I don’t. But what I did do was download Gaim and start playing with it…….and absolutely superb. A free, open source, multi platform, multi IM providor package …..out of the box it supports AIM, Gadu, Groupwise, IRC, Jabber, MSN, Napster, Silk, Yahoo, the SIP/SIMPLE protocol AND Sametime.
The gui is nice and easy to use. The product is extensible with various plugins available including a nice history plugin for referencing all those chat sessions. Well to date, and ok based on limited testing, I really like it. Considering I’m using V2 Beta it is very stable. Best 6 Meg download this year!!
Welcome to my blog on end user and collaboration technologies, amongst other things! The views here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employers.
7.0
Well I’ve discovered 
My Twitters
Subscribe to Stu's blog by RSS
Subscribe to Stu's blog by email
Recent Comments