Stu Downes

After many years I’ve finally started using one browser for 99.9% of my requirements.  Yes it happens to be Firefox 3 but thats old news for any readers here, many of you use it, but interestingly NOT a majority here.

The real benefit to me and most other Firefox users is the extensions and plugins.  Here are my favourites:

1.  Feed subscription:

Firefox allows me to choose the tool I’ll use to subscribe to feeds by clicking on the RSS Icon to the right of the URL:

2.  Evernote Integration

The ability to clip text from a web page using the “elephant button” or save a URL to Evernote (”clip to evernote”) is absolutely superb.  I’m finding evernote and increasingly useful research tool and its tablet capabilities are excellent.

3. Session Manager for Firefox

Now this is superb, I can’t fault this at all.  It gives me equal functionality to the session management in Maxthon.  It is great to open a session and be exactly where I left it, down to how far I have scrolled down a page.  You can also open the folder containing the session files and send one to someone else using this plugin, great for sharing links …. but thats where the next one comes to the fore…

4.  Sharing Sessions Online

Agglom is a superb tool that allows you to share a group of URL’s either publicly or privately (Hat tip to Marjolein Hoekstra).  This can be in the form of a web page, multimedia web page, RSS feed or slideshow.

Conclusions

Longer term I can see us using many tools to access the web.  I’m in agreement with Stowe Boyd, in future we won’t access the web with a single tool, it will be the correct tool for the job.  The job of research, making use of the massive overload of information on the web, is made that much easier by these tools.  I’d recommend these tools.

I regularly have to run powerpoint presentations through web meetings.  And we all know the joy that brings.  Steve pointed me to zoom-it many months ago.  Today though I want to share how I use it with my lenovo tablet.  Prior to the conference I run zoom-it and set the options to run annotation using the left arrow:

Note: when you stop presenting you may want to change this back or close zoom-it otherwise everytime you left arrow you realise that annotation has started and you didn’t move left a cell in excel

So now in presentation mode in the web meeting with tablet in tablet mode I can use the buttons available to me on my mouse to control slide flow, the left button on the tablet to trigger the annotation and the escape key to remove annotation before moving to the next slide.

Why the left arrow?  simple, there are very few buttons available when in tablet mode, the X60 has enter, the arrow keys and escape.  You may want enter to advance slides, escape you’ll need to cancel the zoom-it pen function, and there are no other keys available.  You can see a sample of the kind of annotation here.

Its a really simple yet powerful adjunct to running the slide show in the web meeting.

Even if I’m presenting in normal PC mode using presenter view I’ll use zoom-it over the in-built powerpoint pen as I find it just doesn’t work well when working in presentation mode.

Would you mind spending some time completing a survey for a friend.  He is completing a PhD focusing on agile development and wants some developers to complete a survey.  You don’t have to be using agile today, any developer is encouraged to complete the survey.

http://ou1211237011.agile-adoption.sgizmo.com

Several colleagues have been twittering about how they work with the information flow from RSS and Twitter.  Doug states that he uses twitter and the power of the crowd to link to useful content.  Charlie is struggling with RSS and Steve says RSS is a daily chore.

RSS Readers: My view

RSS readers offer me the only way I have of keeping up to date with blogs and announcements and I do find the information in the feeds useful.  I don’t feel I can go as far as Doug and rely only on links in twitter.  One reason is the way twitter works and the fact I miss things in the flow.  I think that providing you use RSS readers with the attitude that you will miss things and don’t have to read everything then its good.  So I treat it like a pool in a stream, it collects some of the water for a short period allowing you to wade through it when you can.

I find certain bloggers act as very good aggregators of information for me, the best example I can think of being Michael Sampson on collaboration.

Twitter : my view 

Twitter however is a waterfall, you can only watch it effectively for a period of time, if you need to walk away and do other things or focus then you lose that information, I very rarely go back into twitter to find things I missed.  Its great as a virtual water cooler, its not great to keep me up to date with information in the way Doug works as I have days when I may never see twitter, 2 days like that are coming up.

Conclusion

I use both.  I need to explore RSS tools which allow for better ranking of information (Attensa’s attention stream springs to mind).  For now though I’ll accept that I miss data which flows through the RSS pool and certainly miss data in the twitter waterfall.

I saw this request recently, I want "collaboration tools that work".  It was one of those quotes that has been niggling at my brain since I read it.  In fact I’d say it has really made me reflect on collaboration and the whole meaning behind the word and the technology that helps enable.  So instantly given the "make it work" thought I moved into:

• Was the technology right?
• what solutions were implemented?
• how are they used?
• who uses them?
• why do they use them?
• what is the culture of the organisation?

But with time my thoughts have moved and are now along the lines of:

• how do we drive adoption?
• how do we maintain participation?
• how do we switch people on to the benefits of collaboration?

Having toddlers is great, it makes you realise that they have a constant drive to learn and participate, but they key is that they also have plenty of enjoyment along the way and although initially they may be scared they will try things (sometimes with a push) but then come back to go again and again and again….and each time they get better at it.

My top 5 thoughts…

• You need to find what motivates people and exploit that to your advantage.  (remembering that a significant minority of your co-workers will give up time to volunteer - so if they do stuff for nothing outside work how can we get them to do more in a collaborative fashion within work?)
• How do we make the experience the most engaging thing they’ll do - will they enjoy it  (many of the people we want to be collaborative are highly collaborative outside the gate!)
• How do organisations recognise the value of collaboration over the value of individual work?
• The Google 20% Time seems an great method to force people to do things they wouldn’t normally do, with people they wouldn’t normally work with.
• Find your enthusiastic people and give them a voice.  Kill the "bloody work" crowd, many folks love and are passionate, give them a voice and set them free.

I hope that came across as passionate rather than ranting :-)  Richard has a nice video blog entry which explores different areas along this theme.

I’m amazed by Mrs D’s New iPhone.  So what does each do best in my opinion:

Things I haven’t yet tried on the iPhone:

• Using it as a speakerphone
• Bluetooth
• Seeing how it copes with phone calls during media playing

Application Delivery

This is one area where RIM could enhance the experience.  Apples application store is a superb user interface and is the model of simplicity for users to download applications direct to the device.  Some will no doubt express concerns that all apps must go through apple and they can vet applications so I’d suggest to RIM support both models, a smooth application delivery mechanism they control and direct installations.

Conclusion

The Apply multitouch display is the future, not too sure the keyboard is there yet on those screens but all in all if someone gave me the choice in the enterprise tomorrow …. I’d go for the iPhone.

Before anyone at CSC panics, no this is not me!!!  Mrs Downes gave up traditional employment recently to become self employed.  I thought it would be good to share the architecture and "how-to" articles I used.  Mrs D is a chartered marketer and in terms of workstyle here are her basic requirements:

• Email, synchronised read marks on 2 machines and a mobile device, accessible from the internet
• Calendar, synchronised between 2 machines and a mobile device, accessible from the internet
• Files, synchronised between 2 machines, accessible from the internet and an internet connected mobile device
• Files, ability to share files in a restricted and public fashion.

Email and calendar:

Basic Arrangement:  All messages are collected from various POP3 mailboxes into an IMAP enabled googlemail.com account.  All end clients then maintain unread marks, folder structure etc. through the IMAP capability.  Messages can be read and responded to from any device.  On all devices apart from the mobile device responses can be made from any email address.  At present the googlemail mobile client we are using doesn’t allow for responses from addresses other than the googlemail.com address.  The PC based mail clients all run on windows vista.  One client is Outlook 2007 and the other due to me being too stingy to pay for a licence runs on Thunderbird.  The mobile client is the googlemail application for a blackberry smartphone.

Calendar is slightly more complicated due to the mix of mail clients, the core element to this is a google calendar. On the outlook client I’m using google’s synchronisation plugin which can be downloaded here.  On the thunderbird client I’m using the lightening plugin to enable calendar functionality, then this additional provider add-on to allow calendar synchronisation.  The excellent instructions I used are here.

File synchronisation:

I must first thank Steve for pointing me to sugarsync.com.  What an excellent service.  Immediate backup to the cloud, synchronisation of files between multiple PC’s, availability of files via the internet and from internet connected mobile devices.  I’m not going to draw a diagram but this webpage describes things much better than I can.  It is just superb in the fact that if offers both backup, sync, web access, mobile access in a single service.

File sharing:

Whilst I haven’t settled on a final solution here I think it will be Microsoft’s skydrive.  Although in true modern day style please leave a comment if you have a better solution.

The next steps for Mrs Downes’ IT organisation

Well I think the next steps will be an internet presence, a content management tool etc.  She has no need at present for web meeting, audio or video bridging services, but if she ever does I’ll share those here also.

And then in our enterprises?

This work has made me reflect on how many of these services are available.  How much of this can you do today?  The tools today in the consumer space far surpass those in most enterprises - and the smaller the scale, the less change control, the less application integration etc etc.  It is easier than in the enterprise.  The challenge going forward will be "mashing" all these tools into more homogenous "organisational" blobs as more people work in the consumer space.

Graham Chastney, a friend and colleague here at CSC, has been short-listed for the Computer Weekly IT Blog awards 2008 in the IT Lifestyle section.  Hope you will all vote for him here.

David Pollard had an excellent article on his blog recently discussing Knowledge Management in 2020, more importantly the article focuses on the working practices of a number of employees within a fictitious organisation.  I’ll focus on one short extract:

"Omni has no formal ‘website’ — just its collection of blogs and its interactive directory of people with their contact information. Since they started these and abandoned the traditional website, readership of their pages, and follow-up work, have soared.

Their big KM project for this year is Reinventing the Water Cooler, designed to find a way to replicate the opportunity for serendipitous, unscheduled conversation that the old water coolers once enabled."

The reason I focused on that short extract is that I actually see the formal website is already being diluted by blogging today.  If we look at IBM, Microsoft and others we see that to find the latest information about their products and services their blogs rather than the website are the best sources of information.

I see the style we will work is about to be turned on its head as the value of sharing information is increasingly recognised.  I see new working arrangements coming into place, agreements where both the client and the information worker agree what information can be shared and where it can be shared.  I see the default being information is shared publicly - but shared in such a way that attribution isn’t just to the information worker but also to the organisation commissioning this work.

This will be a major change to the way enterprises operate today in terms of "owning" information.  You’ll also notice that I’m not using the work employee and employer.  Maybe I’m wrong but I see more and more people wanting the freedom to work independently, today’s UK university graduates are more likely to take risks (hey what have they to lose they’re already saddled with much more debt than my graduating generation (1994)).  My generation will have more stability as our youngsters will be older, our mortgages a few more years mature and we’ll be more willing to work in less traditional arrangements.  Am I ready to take the leap - not today but ask me again in 2020…

Most organisations are looking to see how they can change the way they work:

Patrick Slesinger, director and CIO of Wallem, is working to transition Wallem from being a top-down, command and control directed business to one where transparency unlocks the value of information in Wallem’s systems and delivers the highest levels of customer value.

Via Scott Niessen at Attensa

This is really interesting for me.  We will all probably see these changes, and in fact probably are seeing these changes today (even if the enterprise doesn’t realise it).  We are all changing from a top-down hierarchy into a network driven model. 

This leads to an interesting question … How do organisations implement Enterprise 2.0 technologies?  My view is that they don’t!  A strange response from me so let me clarify - culture changes and workstyle changes require new tools - and those tools happen to be Enterprise 2.0 technologies.  As I blogged recently about the Generation Game my opinion is that it isn’t the driver today, I think enterprises are seeing the value in changing their cultures and the tools to support them in the enterprise 2.0 space are maturing.  Its an interesting time to be in this field!

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