Stu Downes

Following on from my last post.  You’ll notice I used 0,1,2,3 etc to prefix folders.  This was simply to ensure they appeared at the top of my folder list.  To put folders to be bottom of my list I ise a $ or $$ prefix.  Just a little tip.

Collaboration

We all work differently.  I agree with Steve that sharing the way we work can help others.  I am in a role which requires me to be involved with 3-6 large (over 2,000 hours) IT projects at any time.  I generally work on the projects to the point that things become repeatable and I can step back.  For example one project presently moving over 10,000 users to 2 new servers for email is now well into migration phase, my involvement is a 30 minute catch up call each week.  Another project where a customer is planning an upgrade and is in design phase - in terms of infrastructure, software and designing the project processes I’m heavily involved with but will again step back when processes are repeateable and the project has bedded down into a “steady state”.  So with 3-6 of these going on at any time and also assisting others with technology roadmaps I find time management crucial.  I don’t find one methodology helps and need to use several although the general bias is towards using the GTD Methods.

Lotus Notes is my mail repository for what needs doing.  I employ the following folder structure in my email account:

• 0 Tickle (with folders 0,1,2,3 each with subfolders from 1-9,10-19,20-29 and 30-31 respectively).
• 1 Next Action 
• 3 Closed

Emails in the tickle folders are for action on that day of the month.  Next action is emails that I need to action (or list in my GTD Database).  And closed is obvious.  I don’t worry about waiting or project.  I do have other folders for reference relating to account names.  I don’t store data for each project as this becomes an unwieldly complicated folder structure.  I have one other folder for Team and one for Personal relating to team and personal activities.

I don’t use Notes tasks.  Just don’t like them.  Never have.

I use my calendar for meetings and appointments and keep it up to date even of the invitee hasn’t used Notes.

So at the moment I have tickle folders and these are the only hint in my mail file of things needing to be done on a certain date.  To make my time management work properly I need a method for  capturing next actions and listing them.  For this I use the free GTD for Notes database.  This is a functional database, not something that has been designed to be pretty.  However it works for me.  I don’t use all the in-built GTD methodology but some of it.  I have master tasks (again as with my email folder these are account names).  Under here I store tasks.  Each task has next actions, whether I’m waiting for someone.  I also store due dates here.

I haven’t found the prefect time management system yet.  My “half GTD half Stu’s own way” approach helps me.  Oh and after my last post ….. switching off email and only going to email or rss feeds at intervals during the day.

 

Collaboration

Today I turned off email notifications.  It has been amazing how much more productive I am now not being tempted to the in-box every few minutes!

Collaboration

 My personal view is that collaboration is hard.  I want it to be simpler.  I hope I can help make it simpler where I have influence.  I’ve talked previously about making collaborative interfaces, in terms of email, suit the users that it serves (1,2).

Today’s “rant” is really about vendors not bridging the gap between the various areas that the user performs their work.  The information workers we deal with day in, day out have a plethora of needs when it comes to the software they use.  So let me write down my top 10 annoyances with collaboration:

1. Poor interaction between the file system and collaborative systems.  Why in most cases do I need to enter the collaborative application, click on attach, browse to the file I want to attach then ….. etc.  Why is there not a method with most solutions for Right Click, Send To with a logical expanding menu to send the file to the application of choice.  Take a lesson from Flickr here with their uploader tool and also a right click tool.
2. Why even in recent releases of some instant messaging products can I not drag a file into the chat to send it?
3. Within collaborative workspaces why do most vendors not consider import/export of data between workspaces, remembering that project spaces have finite lives before they become legacy, however elements of the projects will remain relavent and data may be required in other spaces.
4. Why are most implementation of collaborative environments not self provisioning?  Recently within my employer this trend has changed.
5. When self provisioning environments are enabled how easy is it to delegate access control and is the act of producing the access list a straight forward process.  In one example I see regularly the self provisioning workspace is excellent whereas the interface and directory for access management is god awful.
6. If most of a users collaboration is in their email why don’t we utilise this more?  Why do we insist the user must move data here, and there, and then over here.  What the user sees is one thing that hasn’t changed in terms of folder structure for years, it has been defined by them to suit them.  OK we IT bods may have migrated them from system A to system B but their folder system and emails are generally still there.  Hence, they like it, they feel comforatable with it.  They use it more than any other interface.  Why force them to move data into collaborative workspaces for projects?  Why not just share data within email files between users engaged on projects?  If I had my way then every folder in a users mail file except the in-box or a “keep hidden” folder would be indexed for searching and retreaval by collegues.  After all its a corporate system, the data is corporate.  Someone is already saying “yes but what if someone sees data they shouldn’t”.  Well training should help there, and how many of us know of examples of sensitive information being sent to large numbers of users via email?  I can think of many examples.
7. Reply to all with attachments ……rrrggghhhhhhh!!  Default it to OFF, please!
8. People who set themselves on IM to do not disturb all day long.  There should still be a way of highlighting to that user that you need to chat to them.  Perhaps by clicking on them and then your icon in their buddy list turning a different colour.  Sametime 7.5 has selective do not disturbs, which are good, but my view is there are still times when I need to get someones attention and they may be on a conf call.
9. Don’t fill portals with useless information!  We hate it, so users will hate it.
10. And finally ….. use subscription based approaches to collaborative software wherever possible.  Train users of the benefits of subscription and feeds.  Foster collaboration from ground up.  Don’t be scared of corporate blogging.  Worst case is if you don’t do it internally some of your employees will be doing it externally (case to point here).  I’d love the opportunity to have a corporate blog internally and discuss items I can’t post here.  I’d also like an aggregator as part of my desktop suite of applications rather than rely on bloglines at work.

 In conclusion corporate collaboration needs to be user friendly, interactive between various interfaces and corporates need to open more to disruptive technologies and let their leading edge people use the new tools internally rather than force them to use them externally.

Collaboration

 Well the small shoe is quite agile but its owner falls over more frequently.  The large shoe is unwealdly and can end up too big to fit into tight corners or get round obstacles quickly.  That is similar to my home pc and my corporate laptop.  I’m free, within the bounds of legality, to put what I want on my own PC.  This allows me the freedom to install IE7, Office 2007, Messenger 8, Sametime 7.5 when it is released as beta, in fact anything I choose.  My corporate machine locks me down….I need to stick to corporate standards (athough I bend these where I can!).  But still I’m constrained.

Steve has also grappled with the same issue and has invested heavily in his home setup.  He has some interesting posts recently on virtualisation.  This is one of those distruptive technologies which I hope corporates can adopt to allow staff who need to extensively test beta software to actually get it in the environment with minimal risk.

Collaboration

Well excellent news for all those admins who have previously spent quite some time extracting stack traces from NSD files.  For those not interested stop reading now!

The automatic fault recovery in ND7 includes a re-start notification which is emailed to administrators.  My reading is slightly behind, but thanks to this LDD article I can see that the email now includes the stack trace for the offending thread.  Quite simple now to extract the items from the stack and search for them in the knowledgebase.  This will save time when performing root cause analysis and fault diagosis, especially compared with the old methods I documented here.

Collaboration, Domino

I recently listened to this podcast from IT Conversations.  The podcast was delivered by Scott Anderson from HP.  It was interesting to hear that HP allow staff to blog without approving their output.  This must have been a massive corporate shift.  The world appears to be changing and swinging away from the traditional well crafted press release and falling back to news cascading through blogs and their feeds.

The other very interesting point from this article was how corporates should, or rather should not, deal with negative comments.  It was a really interesting article.

Collaboration

Second, and final, post following the Lotusphere comes to you session in Manchester.  Darren Adams presented Notes “next” (or maybe someone will finally agree to call it Notes 8 then we’ll have a product name to tell people about ).

During his presentation we saw demonstrations of the alpha version of the client.  What I saw and really liked (I’m not going to go through all the features):

• Gone are ticks to select documents.
• In comes click to select, control click to multiple select, shift click to select a group of documents.
• The difference between Notes and Outlook in terms of how email data is displayed in panes almost disappears (Graham discussed the present differences here).  It would appear IBM are sick of being beaten by people saying “Outlook has a better UI”.
• All applications will from previous versions work (even from Release 2 - allegedly!)
• I’m increasingly impressed with the ability to portalise multiple applications onto the same screen with “portlets” for each application carrying information relavent to the document that is selected in the Notes application.  The power of this will be immense and opens up the notes client to federate information from multiple sources.

Again IBM have really focussed on the UI and usability of the client.  Incorporating all the productivity features from previous versions with a better, slicker UI.  I can’t wait to see activity explorer, the new contextual collaboration tool, but it looks like (my guess) Hannover won’t come out as Beta until Lotusphere 2007 and will probably only ship in Q3 2007.

Sadly I have no screenshots from the alpha version.  Further reading and some older screenshots are here.

Collaboration

Well now I just can’t wait for the beta to appear next month.  Having attended a Lotusphere comes to you session in Manchester we saw a lot more of the new client.  I’ve blogged about some features before (1,2) so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much.

Things I saw that made me go wow (new from previous posts):

Type ahead style quick find for contacts.  Excellent - I’m not the best organised in my buddy list and sometimes struggle to find someone.

Location awareness based on IP address, to give a general location - but can be customised, for example “Working from Home - Euxton” etc. 

Spell checker built into the rich text chat typing area.

Rich text allows graphics to be rendered (I’ve already mentioned ability to screen scrape into the chat here)

On the whole the UI looks very clean.  The client has been built on the Eclipse framework and will be fully extensible, allowing branding and allowing other applications to be rendered into the client.  I can see this leading to tabs at the bottom of the client for team announcements, urgent service announcements, click here for IT support etc.  I hope it also fosters a free plugin fiesta similar to those found in the community using other IM clients.  I can’t see it being as big but I’d hate to see all the plugins becoming market opportunities for business partners, but as openntf.org has shown there is a place for the community designing

My first impressions are - good job Lotus.  With built in VoIP capabilities the client also addresses the “I’m fed up of typing” scenarios that we all see today when we reach the point that an IM chat will become more effective with a conversation.  Although corporates are probably worrying already about the bandwidth implications (so some numbers here would be good although beta testing will allow us to find these ourselves).

We didn’t cover anything on the new social networking tools which will be bundled in with the product.  However these would appear to have been ported across from IBM Community Tools.  In this area I think we will all need to focus …. how will the communities we support make best use of the tools.  The improvements to the chat client will be fairly straightforward and are in fact simply Sametime catching the rest of the IM community.  The community tools elements (Polls, communities of experts, real time forums and a few more) will take some more thought.  I can see the benefits of all of them, how it fits into a process for collaboration and sits in an information workers toolkit will be more interesting.

Further information and reading available directly from Lotus.com

Collaboration

I really like Webimager.  Key features:

• Screendumps
• Screenscrapes
• Save as jpg, png, bmp (bmp by default)
• Link to your flickr account to upload

Really great free tool which looks great for producing documentation etc etc etc.

Collaboration