Stu Downes

Steve, Samantha and I have all been at VoiceCon.  Its been a good event, the final day being tomorrow.  During that time I’ve been experimenting with the best way of note taking and sharing information.

Option 1 : MindJet MindManager

Failed for me.  With structured sessions its not the correct medium.  Perhaps for taking notes during unstructured discussions it would be better (I’ll try that tomorrow).

It just didn’t let me take notes against slides and this really was where I wanted to add some value to the presentation.  I also miss the audio recording features available in other products.

Luckily most of the sessions are available in PDF and where this is the case the best option has been…

Option 2 : Annotating PDF’s

I chose to print the conference slides (PDF’s) into OneNote and then use the X60 in tablet mode to take notes unobtrusively without keyboard disturbance to fellow attendees.  Thats not to say that I didn’t use the keyboard!  But this is only good if slides are there before the session and time permits to print them through.  I am aware of pdf annotator but haven’t used that tool.

Option 3 : Onenote with Audio recording

OneNote with X60 in tablet mode.  The problem is the internal microphone on the X60 picks up all your pen strokes and makes listening annoying, so I’m now using my webcam as the microphone although an experiment in video recording during the sessions failed as it was just too difficult with a webcam to focus on the presenters.  The value of OneNote comes when reviewing my notes, I can hover my mouse anywhere in the notes and then play the audio at that point (see highlighted section in the image above) thus reminding me of the point in the presentation for the note.  It was also useful when using OneNote with slides pre-loaded to draw small lines between slides so as to have a record in OneNote of slide transitions.

Option 4 : Onenote with keyboard not tablet

The other option with OneNote was to do the same but use the keyboard.  I actually found this the most useful in terms of being able to re-use the data quickly afterwards, i.e. to copy to livewriter for my blog or copy to our corporate wiki for the wider team.  There are lots of opinion and strategy thoughts that I don’t place in this blog.  So in the end typing won the day.

Conclusions and Evernote

I also tried Evernote in both tablet and typing mode, Steve used this to great effect to publish his notes from sessions, but I wanted more granularity in what I published and preferred coming to OneNote and adding images etc.  However Steve’s approach was more efficient and certainly faster.

Johan Krebbers, Group IT Architect, Royal Dutch Shell

Johan gave an excellent overview of Shell’s strategy for their 108,000 employees in 130 countries.  Their solution is a Microsoft Office Communication Server infrastructure with other software as shown in the slide below:

80% of teams are globalised, it is not uncommon for people to work anywhere at any time, it is not uncommon for Shell to have significant input in projects from partners and people beyond the enterprise boundary.  Their aim is to implement a single interface for unified communications.  For remote workers today OCS is the voice communication channel and softphones will be rolled out across shell, replacing the majority of desk phones.  They see OCS as removing the need for much of their video conferencing capability.  They see a growth in telepresence but OCS will replace much of the room based capabilities today.

Overall the collaboration architecture for information looks like this:

His conclusions were to:

• Take the user as the starting point, what and how do they work
• Then examine the business drivers
• Treat voice as you would any application
• Ensure different generations are supported by what you propose
• Be clear with your roadmap and targets for delivery, don’t focus on today
• Cover real time collab and information sharing at once.
• Forget the borders, you’ll collaborate beyond them from day 1

David Farrell, Vice President, IBM Software Europe

IBM presented a mixture of slides, demonstration and screen capture:

• UC is not a cost saving, its a business value and need to exploit business processes
• IBM aim to unify the experience.  How do you find and expert, reach an expert, collaborate effectively
• Demonstration of screen sharing from within a chat
• Demonstration of CISCO Unity for voicemail in Sametime, Quickr plugin, communties plugin
• (?Re-?)Announced that Sametime unified telephony available Q4
• IBM will retain relationship with PBX suppliers and not try to replace their solutions [obvious difference in strategy to Microsoft]
• Then we had a screen captured demo of the telephony client, there were obvious network issues in the conference room and I felt a little sorry for IBM not being able to live demo.
• Key slides:

Speaker – Joe Burton, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Unified Communications, Cisco Joe delivered a session which flowed as follows:

• Focus on the world is flat, but now crowded, and increasingly the spotlight is on IT to deliver even if it is a non-standard application.
• 17% of CISCO workforce use Macs, CISCO IT doesn’t support or pay for Macs, consumerisation message.
• End points for unified communications are increasing.  End points may be anywhere.  2 key drivers are cheap multimedia chipsets with UC capability and virtualisation.
• CISCO spend 25% of their development budgets on interoperability.
• Discussed CISCO thinking on tiered solution UC >> Video >> web 2.0 building together to a collaborative platform.

Example 1 : UC improves process for service / repair industry:

• Customer calls
• Telephony system integrated with salesforce.com to bring up customer details
• Call handler takes customers fault information
• To increase screen estate the cisco phone shows the map with the nearest available engineer

Example 2 : Coca Cola improve warehouse operations:

Old system:

• Order slips on paper
• Pickers (fork lift drivers) take paper and collect order
• Take order to checkers who validate
• Loaded to lorry
• Go
• 78% accurate

UC way:

• No paper
• No checkers
• Fork lift drivers get audio instructions over headset to go to particular place in warehouse
• Validation codes via audio to confirm correct location
• Then instructions on what to collect
• Then load on lorry
• 99.8% accurate
• Reduced traffic movements and accidents in warehouse
• Ability to move fork lift operators who are loading lorries for outward delivery to one area of the warehouse allowing the operators who stock the warehouse to efficiently re-stock

Microsoft presented and demonstrated Office Communication Server release 2 today at VoiceCon, in tandem they hit the press.  Eric Swift announced the new release and the key elements I noted were:

• Audio conferencing capabilities from within OCS.
• Ability to dial in from any telephone not just OCS attached devices
• Communicator client support for video up to high definition quality
• Delegation support for telephony (secretary / manager scenarios)
• Attendant client allowing for switchboard style control of calls and grouping of people to help route calls
• Attendant shows call queues and historic information about callers
• Web access to OCS meetings without need for live meeting client – then used web meeting to call the user on a standard telephone to link that web user to the audio
• Screen sharing from within the Communicator client.
• API’s available

Attendant Client

Looking Forward

The stated aim from Microsoft was to remove the requirement for the PBX.

For those with CSC GlobalPass ID’s I’m going to publish more detailed information, with more comment rather than observation, into the Collaborative Wiki space.

More images are available in my Flickr Set for the event.

I’m lucky to be spending the bulk of this week at VoiceCon.  Today was tutorials and a round of keynotes.  The keynotes were from:

- Eelco Block (KPN)

- Gerhard Otterbach (Siemens)

- Eric Swift (Microsoft)

KPN’s Eelco Block was the platinum sponsor of the event and used the session to inform the audience of the KPN/Getronics offerings, positioning the services they offered and describing their Human 2.0 offering, reflecting the increased nature of remote working and more typical information style of workers:

Siemen’s Gerhard Otterbach talked about their organisational differentiation, their view on UC, on the changing workforce before focusing on Openscape and their offering in the UC field:

He then went on to announce at the conference their new mobile extensions to this offering which extended the reach of their products to a comprehensive list of mobile devices.

For those with CSC GlobalPass ID’s I’m going to publish more detailed information, with more comment rather than observation, into the Collaborative Wiki space.

For the Microsoft Keynote see my next blog post!

More images are available in my Flickr Set for the event.

Made me smile when I plugged the power in last night.  Although you never know, this may be commonplace in 5 years.