Stu Downes

Many vendors describe portal software as a glass through which you can view your applications.  I’m still to be won over that portalising applications is the best way to serve them to users.  I’m also increasingly annoyed about the level of version rigidity between portals and those applications.  It is increasingly apparent to me that the portal isn’t in fact a glass but a hall of optics which select a particular colour and transmit that colour.  So for most portals each application would be a colour.  The application and portlets would be the optics and the end result is you see many colours (or applications at the portal).  Change the version of the application, and hence its colour, and all of a sudden you no longer see that application on the portal.  This is so constraining it is beyond belief.  Simple upgrade projects turn into complex programmes.  To upgrade application to version z you need to update the portal to version y.  Moving the portal to version y prevents application a,b, and c from working.  Just a bit of a rant, especially when in some cases the portal and applications are from the same vendor.

Netgear have a great concept, a wifi phone that integrates with skype (here).  And Amazon are accepting pre-orders.  Top stuff but a recommended retail price of $299.  No way – won’t fly in the UK – certainly not with me!  I was looking forward to this as a skype phone which allows a skype experience without the need for my PC to be powered on.  Now I can’t justify this at that cost.

Microsoft have hinted recently at flavoured versions of the Office 14 product to suit different styles of information worker (Full Story via Microsoft Watch).  I can just hear the desktop IT managers in large enterprises groaning now!  However in my opinion this is the future.  IBM are also giving different themed experiences in their Workplace product for different business functions.  I also saw one of the presentations on the new Notes client (Hannover), presented at Lotusphere which eluded that IBM expect the client experience to be enriched through the extensible nature of the client. The experience would then be matched to the type of user.

Email, more specifically 

My hope is that the vendors will also turn the corner in terms of making the email experience richer and better suited to the users needs.  I’ve posted on this earlier (1,2) and Steve has some interesting posts on user experience.

The email environment we now live in is very different to that 5 years ago.  5 years ago it was mainly a communication and message filing tool.  Now many of us manage our tasks, time, meetings, actions from our mail boxes.  We need a richer experience.  While both Lotus and Microsoft have enriched the experience it could be a lot better.  Steve and I discussed this recently.  Most email products do not have a good intuitive form of workflow to change an email into a task (without losing fidelity), track this through meetings, sub actions, tasks you are waiting for others to complete, back to email or even a document in a shared workplace.  I can see that the Lotus model would allow me to acheive this simply through modifying the design of the mail template.  On the MS side I’d have to rely on plugins.  However both vendors seem remiss in not including better functionality in this area.  I’d like to see what is in Hannover for this and the later releases of the Office 2007 betas.

I read with interest (here) that Sharepoint 2007 will ship with single sign on plugins, potential for LDAP authentication against a directory other than AD, rights management, a trimmed UI (if you ain’t got the rights you don’t see the hyperlink etc), and most importantly document level security.  These have been arguments I have used against Sharepoint in the past……..

I have many contacts who are busy people.  They don’t read email regularly and spend a lot of time on conference calls.  They use Sametime, our corporate standard, for instant messaging.

 However at present, I know it is a feature in 7.5, they cannot have selective do not disturbs.  Even when that functionality exists they may still set me to do not disturb…..

….yeah but I really need to tell you something….how can I?  Given that email is useless as they’ll read it tomorrow, voicemail is no good as I need to get through to them now (and they are on a conference call).  Could we not have a feature in our instant message solution which allows me to be added to a list of people who wants to contact them?  Perhaps it could add me to a “need to chat urgently” group in sametime or change the colour of my icon?  I’d call this functionality an iNotice, potentially link it to an SMS.

So an iNotice allows some kind of alerting but no IM text.  It gives the person set to do not disturb the opportunity to IM me if they wish.

Anyone else like the sound of this or not?