Stu Downes

One of the most powerful features I’ve experienced so far is the desktop search.

From the start button (can’t stop calling it that for now!) the easiest way to find anything be it an application, document or email is from the search bar.  For information workers like myself who prefer flatter file structures search is the most important feature an OS can offer.

The type ahead search results are returned quickly within 1 second I have a list of application names for the letters “ex” and within 5 seconds I have all the files and emails/rss documents from Outlook.  This will be very powereful especially if vendors plug into this capability to return results for their applications and web services.

As yet the default flickr uploader is not supported on Vista.  Thankfully Matthijs Dubbeldam has been hard at work and has coded a solution which recognises tags applied to images in vista when uploading them.

Although basic this is an excellent tool and will certainly bridge the gap until Flickr release a supported version.

Well I took the plunge last week and rebuilt my home PC from ground up.  Backed up all the data and dove in!

My 3 year old HP machine, 3 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM works really well.  Very fast, faster than my old XP build **caveat – the XP build was not best optimised after 3 years**.  It recognised my old GeForce 5200 and Aero works well.  My sound card is running fine on a beta driver from Soundblaster.

Things that don’t work:

• My HP Photosmart 7760 Printer
• Norton Anti-Virus …. and I did install the 2007 version immediately after installing XP before doing anything else …. and it still didn’t work.  The fix from Symantec was to uninstall and re-install.  And guess what that didn’t work either.  Live One Care is now in place and working nicely.

I’ll blog more about it in coming posts.  I also took the opportunity to build 2 partitions and now dual boot with Ubuntu so will be doing some posts on that adventure also!

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ThinkFree recently supplied me with a U3 pendrive in order to look at their product.  Although I haven’t completed a full evaluation I thought I’d post my initial thoughts.  Thinkfree are still open to testers. 

The aim of the ThinkFree office suite is to give you both an online document sharing / editing experience and with this product a portable and personal experience.  They also claim to be closest to give the best Microsoft Office 2003 functionality available.

The product includes a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tool.  It launches quickly and opens into an interface which looks uncannily like Microsoft Office 2003.

The functionality and ease of use is excellent and there are nice features like save to PDF which aren’t standard in the office suite.

Where products of this nature come into their own is offering a rich experience away from your normal computer.  My pen drive assists me with my enterprise work using the following:

• Office document editing with ThinkFree and OpenOffice
• Email access (Notes 7.0.2 for USB)
• IM access (Sametime in Notes 7.0.2)
• Browsing with Firefox

From a personal perspective U3 offers:

• IM through Trillian
• Voice with Skype
• for a full list see here

Annoyances. 

• The Memorex U3 startup places a splash screen over my work while it loads (this doesn’t happen with my SanDisk U3 pendrive). 
• I’ve opened some fairly complex documents and only saw some minor errors in rendering some graphics.  I haven’t tested fully so can’t comment on whether changes to graphics would impact on the look and feel of the document when returned to a traditional office experience.

Who would use this?

Now this is where I struggle a little.  The only real cases I can think of for enterprises using pen drives would be:

• As an emergency reserve for traveling workers just in case of hardware failure.
• To allow workers forced to leave there normal machines during business continuity events and use generic build machines.
• When travel security restrictions impact laptop movement (although that would possible also include pen drives).

Initial thoughts for me?

I’ll use it at times when needed, but they are likely to be very few and far between.  It’ll be a good small tool to carry round for use when the unexpected happens (eg. the out of the blue call when I’m at my parents and miles from my laptop but need to login and have access to their computer).  I wonder what the roadmap is for ThinkFree in terms of Office 2007 functionality if Microsoft Office is their main target.

I will post again when I have had more time to assess the product.

So RSS is emerging more and more in the enterprise.  Many of us will be thinking about how RSS will impact our communities of information workers.  I posted recently on the issues surrounding information overload.  Tonight I’ll focus my attention to the subscription experience itself.

I don’t use Microsoft Outlook for my work email client, we are a Lotus Notes shop and my predominant work background has been, until recently, focused on Lotus Notes (including as a beta user for Notes 8).  I do however use Outlook at home and think they have really hit on the right formula for subscription. 

Here’s why I like the Microsoft method:

- the interfaces are clean and intuitive

- you subscribe to feeds during your normal browsing experience (with IE7)

- your feeds are then automatically synchronised using the Windows Common Feed List into Outlook 2007

- once in Outlook the posts are to all intent and purpose an email so it is simple for the user to forward articles to colleagues.

- they have obviously thought about how people work and how to make the experience better for the information worker.

The link between RSS and email is one of the features I would look for in any enterprise RSS reader (be that standalone or bundled/plugged into an email product).

I stumbled across Knowledge Network recently and Mike Gotta has also posted recently highlighting the emerging Social Network capabilities from Microsoft and IBM.  The Microsoft product doesn’t have a firm release date yet and in their latest post they state that “KN will be released as a technical preview, which is a way for us (Microsoft) to provide a long-lead time to our customers to look at future technologies that Microsoft is working on”.  That post is a slight dissapointment in terms of suggesting a longer term release rather than the mid 2007 release suggested earler, and the real dissapointment to me is because the concept and logic behind the product are very strong. 

The basic remit seems to be:

• Index everything.
• Analyse that data.
• When searching that data allow all data to be analysed.
• Display results based on relavent security.
• Ability to include email in the seach (Exchange/Outlook only)
• Display people affinities to your search based on all documents indexed rather than just those you have access to.

The expert location results from Knowledge Network would appear to be much more powerful than the standard people search packaged in SharePoint 2007.  It would also be interesting to see this functionality wrapped into desktop search which is no doubt where this will lead.

There does appear to be a client requirement – I do wonder why MS requires client side products (and hence licences) in order to do extension features from Sharepoint like Knowledge Network and other more basic features like presence awareness and chat in SharePoint.

This youtube video is an interesting and thought provoking view of the web we live in today by Professor Michael Wesch of Kansas State University.

link to youtube

Several weeks ago I enabled snap and said at the time “I’m not 100% convinced it adds value”. Well now I’m decided I find it distracting and annoying so its gone.  It may look interesting but I can’t see the benefit so its gone.  Comments welcome.

OK, most enterprises are looking at web 2.0 technologies.  They may not know it but they are.  Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services 2007, Lotus Quickr, Outlook 2007, Notes 8 all these are being bundled with RSS capabilities.  Great.  Now, or very soon, our information workers will have telephone calls, meetings, conference calls, email, instant messaging, internet reading, books and RSS feeds to consume.

Even now most of us accept that even with methodologies like GTD we can’t keep up with everything.  We prioritise, we junk, we place into that “someday” folder – do we ever go back there?  So given the problem how do we, reputable, respectable IT types deal with this issue.  Within 48 months or so most organisations through normal upgrade paths will have moved without realising into a world where this new media for the enterprise, RSS, has moved out from the geek desktops and into the mainstream.

Dealing with the problem – the vendors

From a vendor perspective there is a disconnect at the moment.  The key collaborative players, Microsoft and Lotus, are relying on partner products for the perimeter and network level aggregation appliances. In terms of clent RSS experience both have integrations into their “email” clients Outlook 2007 and Notes 8.  Notes 8 will soon be public beta and at that point I’ll post specifically on their RSS integration.

Outlook has the more mature reader right now, being a full production release.  The Outlook client offers a good base RSS reader including:

• RSS within email and articles have the same look and feel sitting in folders within the familiar user inbox experience.
• Integration with the Windows Common Feed List allows users to subscribe to feeds in IE7 and have these autosubscribed in Outlook.
• For the information worker and high end users even Outlook doesn’t offer everything we need.  For those key workers the enterprise is likely to have to consider a plugin based solution (and that is likely to be true for both Outook and Notes 8).  There are many on the market the big players in the end user space being Attensa and Newsgator.

What do I use?  What will enterprise workers use?

Well for now I’m still using FeedDemon as I personally have so many feeds I don’t want to clutter my email with more information.  I also don’t want the “unread” distraction in my mail file.  Am I typical?  No.  So in 48 months time I see most of the enterprise workers using a basic or enhanced RSS client within their email experience.

Attention – Data Overload Approaching

Attensa have recognised that there is going to be a data overload issue and are working on their concept of Attention.  Using algorythms they can determine the articles that should be of most relavence to you.  Nothing is going to be 100% ideal and a mathematical formula is never going to match your needs exactly but I hope this effort will result in a tool which is useful for information workers.

What do the vendors need to focus on?

Steve points out that security and authentication will be an issue both inside and beyond the enterpise boundary.

I am still wondering why we need RSS appliances?  We already have perimeter infrastructure well capable of routing and handling documents (only difference is they focus on SMTP right now not RSS or ATOM).  I’m sure given the increases in processing power, network bandwidth and complexity of software development that the two functions can be combined.

Common standards push in terms of blog posting and comment submission to allow single clients to be developed to both consume the initial feed and join the conversation as I posted recently.

A good productive reading experience.

What do enterprises need to focus on?

We need to be ready for this.  Sooner or later the vision of everyone having an enterprise blog may become a reality.  That in itself is a massive shift of information, or rather a massive addition to information (email isn’t going away).  We need to think about how our information workers can consume the data efficiently and effectively.  Even if enterprises don’t start blogging internally the immense volume of data in RSS feeds makes them the most useful took within an infomation workers arsenal right now. 

In order to cope with this increased data load my opinion is that we’ll need to be looking at plugin enhanced email clients consuming RSS.  We’ll need RSS appliances to control the network traffic and proxy requirements.  We’ll need to offer mobile access to those who already expect mobile email and applications.  The savvy enterprises will also think about browser enabling access to feeds, either through the mail system or a bespoke feed reeding service.