Steve Richards: ITDirections

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Outlook - Domino Connecter

Thu, 12 Aug 2004 23:42:53 GMT

I was seduced, (for the third time), into installing the Microsoft Outlook Domino Connecter for the following reasons:

I wanted a single place to manage my RSS feeds, personal email, tasks, calendar and work email
My trial of mNotes completes in a few days and I needed to decide whether to buy it, or whether I could use Active Sync alone, (as my Local Notes replica would now also be in Outlook)
I would get a unified search environment, (because X1 would search my Notes data, which would now be in Outlook)
Graham said it works fine for him

I have tried it twice before, and had to give up both times, despite considerable effort. I kept telling myself the problems were to do with the sequence I did things, by interactions with mNotes, X1 etc, because I did not leave it alone – i.e. I tried to use it! Having tried again a few times these are some of the problems I have had:

Synchronisation is painfully slow
It does not synchronise according to a regular schedule, it just does it in the background, but not as frequently as I would like
It affects the stability of Outlook quite badly, Outlook has hung on me at least 3 times today
It created duplicate email and calendar entries, (never did figure out why, but assumed it was some sort of cascade effect caused by replica’s and mNotes).
I ended up with a corrupt document in my Local Replica, I am currently creating a brand new local replica to see if I can fix it
It does not handle standard s/mime signed documents, (gives a security subsystem error)
Formatting of some message is a bit strange
X1 tries to index entries as soon as the headers arrive, then triggers a pull of the body causing a dialog to keep opening up, very annoying
if you do a full synchronisation, you can not use Outlook until its complete, (either that or Outlook was hanging).

It’s the stability problem that was the killer for me. I could have carried on trying to work through the other issues. I also got worrying that there were some version issues, Windows 2003 Server, Outlook 2003, Notes 6.51 is hardly a combination that has been well tested!

So I have just trashed it yet again and gone back to good old Notes! Which is surprisingly refreshing because it does work reliably. I also like the fact that it’s nice and colourful, especially when you use custom colours for emails from certain people, and colour different calendar entry types! I just hope this new replica works ok!

Superb article about the meaning of Open

Mon, 09 Aug 2004 22:53:40 GMT

Jonathan Schwartz writes another great article about what's important about the word Open in an IT context, he does this by comparing and constracting Open Source with Open Standards. he goes further by showing the great work Sun has done to create reference implementations of their J2EE standard, and provide tools to verify compliance. He provides a few real world illustrations of how the difference affects real business decisions.

Definately worth a read.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040808#rewriting_history_and_vocabulary

I need help

Sun, 08 Aug 2004 10:28:52 GMT

This is a posting that I made to the GTD discussion forum.

I am about to start a small research project into personal productivity, I am going to be looking at the following main areas:

Personal knowledge management
Time, task and action management
Communication and collaboration
Team working
Subscription and research

As you can see these are quite relevant to exponents of the GTD methodology, and so I need your help.

First I wanted to explain a little about my personal experience with GTD and history in using similar techniques.

“I love to be organised”

I am one of those people who likes a clear desk, who like kids to have tidy bedrooms, who likes to be in control. I invest a lot in my IT, and a lot of my time in researching how to be organised. I can also invest a lot of time in establishing a new system. But once that new system is established, I find it hard to keep going. Here are some of the reasons why:

I only tend to be motivated to create my list of, “everything that needs to be done”, when things are out of control. The process of creating the list brings me back in control and that tends to last about a month. During that month I gradually begin to feel that I am working for my system rather than my system working for me, so I give up.
I find that although they all seem important when I write them down many of the items on my, “everything that needs to be done list”, never actually get done, as new things keep being added. So in reality I am only ever working with the things that filter to the top. In most cases I already know about the things at the top of the list. It’s the 80/20 rule all over again, I only ever work on the top 20% of my list, and most of the stuff in the 80% never gets touched because new items keep adding themselves to the top 20%.
During the times of my life when I am not following a GTD like methodology, I find I value the fact that my Brain forgets the 80% that’s never going to be done, and lets me keep my sub-conscious focussed on the 20% that is, and my conscious on the 5% I am working on. When I do follow GTD, I find myself distracted by the 80% feeling it’s important and must be progressed, managed, tracked, researched etc. For example for a month I captured research notes in Microsoft OneNote on everything related to my GTD list. Most of that time was wasted because in the end I never got around to the tasks. After the month was up I ended up deleting most of it because I wanted a tidier and better organised OneNote.
I find my Brain balances, “Important/Urgent” , pretty well
I generally always do some form of daily and weekly review and I get close to the “mind like water”, feeling.
I have seen lots of projects suffer because of too much project planning, and too little project management. By that I mean the project manager and project team start to serve the system, they spend all of their time and energy on task definition, tracking, reporting etc and not enough time on requirements, millstones, dependencies, estimating.
I think the above problem with projects is the same problem I see with GTD. Too much attention to managing your tasks and not enough time managing your time and goals.

Ok so you sort of get the idea of where I am coming from with the above, but I said I needed help. Well I have seen a few posts in this forum that really got me thinking. I will repeat a few of the key points here:

Someone said that it was the act of making the list of things to do that was key, not the resulting list. They tested it with for example shopping lists. If you make the list and then forget to take it with you, you still end up buying everything you need.
This was built on by someone who said that if you forgot the list you might actually do better because you might respond more openly to inputs/ideas that you have while out shopping, and maybe reassess your needs more openly as well, (i.e. decide not to buy things, whereas if its on this list you feel compelled to buy it).
In a critique of presentations someone reported how PowerPoint stifles many meetings. The bulleted list stops people thinking, because it trivialises issues, and the slide by slide format constrains discussion and debate. I have actually tested this myself by presenting on an eWhiteboard and its amazing how liberated you feel.
Discussions comparing “Putting first things First”, top down methodology, (which works like my Brain, but perhaps not everyone’s brain), and GTD help to bring the debate into focus
A few people have pointed to Life Balance and there is certainly a lot of thought gone into that software. I tried it for a while, but again concluded that I was likely to end up being controlled by the software, and spend a lot of my time working for it, rather than it working for me!
Finally its obvious that a lot of people love GTD more than I do, I want to understand why!

I was hoping that in discussion of this post more nuggets like those above might help me work this topic through in my mind in a more open way that I have been able to do by just reading the GTD books.

The final problem I have is the systems that support these processes just don’t work for me. When I look at my starting list again:

Personal knowledge management
Time, task and action management
Communication and collaboration
Team working
Subscription and research

I really need an integrated system that supports all of these. I have not found such a system. Although if I were able to use Outlook for my email maybe I would get close with the combination of NewsGator, Outlook, Outlook GTD plug-in and OneNote.

Another good diagram showing personal information management flow

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 18:10:29 GMT

In this post I described my "information processing pipeline". Here is a diagram that touches on the same area.

It was created by Mario Asselin in a response to this paper "Distributed KM" by Martin Roell

The blogging workflow

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 13:16:35 GMT

This is a very very nice summary of how blogs work by Roland Tanglao at Streamline, it complements my comments because it provides more details of some of the server side infrastructure:

1. Joe Blogger writes something and publishes it to his blog.

2. Joe's Blog system updates his site's HTML, updates his RSS file and sends a 'ping' message to the 'Aggregation Ping Server' indicating that his site has updated.

3. Search engines like Google and RSS specific services like Feedster, Technorati and PubSub periodically ask the Aggregation Ping Server, "Which sites have updated?".

4. Since Joe's site sends pings and has an RSS file and is easy to update frequently, Joe's search engine rank is higher than a 'normal site'.

5. Techie Teresa uses a program called an RSS reader to subscribe to Joe's site. The RSS reader checks Joe's RSS file for updates periodically (usually once/hour or once per day) and notifies her of Joe's updates. Teresa no longer wastes time manually surfing Joe's site. She just checks her RSS reader.

6. As a result, Teresa's information flow is more efficient and she can monitor more sites in less time.

7. Joe Surfer (who is not related to Joe Blogger) still can access blogs the old fashioned, slow and less efficient way using his web browser and search engines.

Understanding Microsoft

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 12:11:51 GMT

A lot has been written about the history of Microsoft. This article reviews a new book that looks at Microsoft from the perspective of the changes that it has had to introduce and continues to push forward as a result of its legal difficulties and "evil empire" image. The full article is worth reading but here are a few of the more interesting quotes:

"They need to get the outside world to learn to accept them without thinking that there's something shady going on there all the time. That's a very long-term process," he said. "There's an awful lot of cynicism out there. No matter what Microsoft tries to do, nobody's going to turn around overnight and say, 'Well, we accept them now as good neighbors.' "

One of the best insights:

In simple terms, some of Microsoft's critics might characterize the ongoing changes as an effort to shift the outside perception of the company from "evil" to "good." But Slater said he doesn't see it that way.

"I don't think they were ever evil," he said. "I think they were unable, or unwilling, to curb the zeal that was always part of the Microsoft culture." He said the company seems to be starting to make the shift from "excessive zeal" to "reasonable zeal."

And the bottom line:

"Before the last couple of years, Microsoft never talked about these types of things," he said. "The idea was to be as competitive as possible, and that was it."

The power of the blog

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 11:34:50 GMT

The Radicati group recently published a report titled

"IBM Lotus & Microsoft--Corporate Messaging Market Analysis" (June 2004), available at www.radicati.com/reports/single.shtml.

Its a truly awful report, as many people have commented. It breaks all normal reporting rules:

It does not compare like with like
It commends Microsoft for the same things it criticises Lotus for
It does not provide its sources
It uses emotive language to commend Microsoft and Criticise lotus

I actually looked forward to reading it when I first heard it had come out because I had some concerns over Lotus Workplace and how Lotus Notes/Domino would transition to the new architecture. However the report was so biased I ended up feeling much more positive about Lotus than I had before. The basis for my change of view "IBM must be on to something with Workplace if such bad analysis is the only tool available to make Microsoft look good". I was also left even more uncertain over what Microsoft is up to with Exchange, as I have already blogged on here and here.

The last straw for me in this report was the criticism of IBM/Lotus over migration to Workplace and the commendation of Microsoft on the same issue, lets look at a few examples:

How seamless was the migration from Exchange 5.* to Exchange 200*, having just done a major project to do this the answer is NOT VERY, admittedly it was a pretty complex environment that we migrated, (with lots of consolidation and some Lotus Notes migration as well).
How easy is it to migrate from SharePoint Portal Server 1, using the Web Store to SharePoint Portal server 2003 using SQL Server. Impossible without significant loss of functionality.
How easy will it be for developers who used the Microsoft's Web Storage System, touted by MS as a "Notes Killer - ha ha ha", to a future version of Exchange based on SQL Server, (pretty near impossible probably, if Microsoft failed to do it themselves with SPS what hope does anyone else have!)
Who believes that the Migration from Exchange Public folders to some future SQL server based environment like Windows SharePoint Services is going to be seamless!

The bottom line is that Microsoft's record in document management and collaboration type technologies is appalling, with very little strategic continuity and even less product compatibility. Lotus's record is second to none.

I am guessing that the Radicati group wished they had never gone near this subject, it has damaged their credibility no end. What is interesting is the power of blogging in bringing this issue to the fore and brutally analysing this flawed work in public. If you want to read the gory details follow this trail:

http://sharedspaces.typepad.com/blog/2004/07/response_to_the.html

http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/07232004073204AMEBRFJL.htm

http://www.radicati.com/response.html

Eric Mack as always does a superb job of pulling the whole topic together in his blog

http://www.ericmackonline.com/emo/emonline.nsf/dx/dr-radicati-responds-sort-of

And IBM finally gets around to a formal response, which is the final nail in the coffin:

http://www.lotus.com/lotus/offering1.nsf/wdocs/c3b85eec9126b30885256ee4006c9003

Red Hat goes from strength to strength

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 22:05:51 GMT

I was talking with some senior guys from Red Hat last week about their potential move beyond platforms towards solutions. We were actually discussing collaboration solutions. There view at the time was that their focus was to take what was available in the Open Source community and productionise it. Its interesting therefore to see them release an application server. When you look at the potential though to address the collaboration market Red Hat would do well to consider packaging a solution for email, IM, document management etc. At the moment they ship the bits, but the bits don't make a solution. If you look at a previous post about Microsoft and their, "integrated innovation", marketting there is probably as much scope if not more to do the same thing in the Open Source world. Start thinking Solution guys, you seem to have Platforms and Component packaging fairly well sown up.

I used to love my Blackberry - but this looks like a dream

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 19:44:25 GMT

The new Seimens SK65. Full blackberry functionality with a really innovative format, tri-band. Hopefully it has a decent task manager! For more details check out this web site.

Linux and thin clients

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 12:52:55 GMT

eWeek reports that Wyse, (a long term user of Windows embedded technologies), is now moving into Linux in a bigway.

"Linux has really grown, and has become 20 percent of the worldwide thin-client marketplace,"

What actually suprised me was that the market share was so low, given that Linux seems to be a perfect fit for the embedded market, but clearly it takes time for things to catch on.

Interesting view on XML and the benefits of generic solutions

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 12:46:17 GMT

This article describes some of the characteristics of XML that make it so powerful The bottom line is that its generic nature means that generic solutions can be created tat can be applied to all manner of different problems. The example quoted is a tool that compares two XML files, produces an XML file showing the differences. The article then goes on to explain how this generic tool might be applied to different types of problem. Well worth a read if you are trying to get your mind around some of the things that will be possible in the future. Reminds me a bit of Unix pipes!

IBM and Linux, - but what about Sun?

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 12:31:23 GMT

Jonathan Schwartz, provides a very interesting perspective on the pickle that IBM have got themselves into over Linux. Whats even more interesting is that he does not discuss Sun's simillar predicament! Maybe thats because his series of blogs on this and related topics is building up the background for Sun's position which is likely to see a return to the promotion of Solaris as a viable alternative to Redhat which is gradually being positioned by Jonathan as a kid of "proprietary solution", certainly one that locks you into RedHat.

Update: I am not the only one who is puzzling over what Jonathan is up to with his blog. Look at this eWeek article that pulls lots of opinion together, it appears Jonathan is playing a pretty risky game.

Connected car and other concepts

Thu, 29 Jul 2004 19:15:44 GMT

These video's are pretty good examples of some of Microsoft's integrated innovation ideas. Illustrated by the connected car concept

Open Solutions or Open Source?

Mon, 26 Jul 2004 17:01:53 GMT

Although not strictly contradictory, it makes for a nice title. This article is about one of Microsoft’s reactions to Open Source and one way in which it is delivering on its “integrated innovation”, marketing strategy.

The basic concept is that Microsoft takes a collection of their products, and applies them to the solution of a particular business need. They publish for free standard architectures, processes, templates etc. You can populate these architectures with some products of your own choice. In a way whilst this is not Open Source it’s a sort of Open Solution.

The concept is quite interesting to me because one of the challenges with Open Source software, due in the main to the way it is created, is how to build a coherent solution from the many different components, without some over-arching architectural vision. Where does this vision get created in the current Open Source development model? It happens within IBM, Red-hat and Novel etc and it probably happens in a proprietary way. Even if all of the source for the components in the architecture are Open, the architecture itself is likely to evolve in directions specific to the motivations of its creator and be effectively proprietary.

So I am left thinking should the emphasis shift from Open Source to Open Standards and Standard Architectures. Maybe this in the long run is more important. If the software that implements the standard happens to be Open Source then that’s all well and good, but at the end of the day possibly of only transient importance. In their own way, (Microsoft always do things their own way), Microsoft is giving us an example of Standard Architectures, implemented increasingly with Open Standards. Not quite what I had in mind, but it’s what got me thinking in this direction.

Solaris and Linux

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 12:27:00 GMT

Johnathan Schwartz writes a nice article about Sun's dilema, now resolved, about how to compete against Linux. Linux is not a product, its a social movement that Sun applauds, so how can they compete? He goes on to explain that in reality Linux is delieverd as many incompatible distributions, and that its not viable to test against them all. Out of this confusion, in the server space especially, Redhat have appeared as the clear leader. Now says Johnathan, Sun has someone to compete with, and their relationship can be a normal business competition without the complexity of the social movement.

He talks a little about Open Source Solaris, gives a download link for Solaris and I provide a link to a Whitepaper that provides more details on Solaris.

I'm not the only one who thinks multiple monitors are cool!

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 12:03:53 GMT

This video of Microsoft Reasearch into large screens and multiple monitor support, shows some of the cool things that you can start to do with all of that screen real-estate.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=14162#14162

Productivity before elegance

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 14:28:45 GMT

In this article, webservicespipeline.com discusses the rate of adoption of .NET compared to J2EE. Its conclusions are quite suprising. It seems that the rate of .NET adoption continues to grow at quite a rate, and puts usage on a par or slightly greater than J2EE. It puts .NET success mainly down to increaded developer productivity and ease of deployment and management.

This is signifiacnt for three main reasons:

In the hard nosed business of IT software development, even with all of Microsoft's woes, when it comes down to making business decisions, many IT companies still seem to make decisions based on rational criteria, and long term strategy and architectural elegance or portability don't win out in many cases.
There is likely to be a lot of new software developed for the Windows platform
Mono is going to be a pretty important Open Source project

How does Open Source Software come to be?

Sat, 17 Jul 2004 18:23:17 GMT

This may seem like a simple question to answer, i.e. is written, just like any other software! It also might seem a strange sort of question to ask, but you will hopefully get my point if you read on!

NOTE: No thorough analysis supports the observations I report here.

It seems to me that the vast majority of the important Open Source Software comes to be through the following mechanisms:

Cloning or reproducing in some way an existing design specification or similar. Examples of this route being Mono(.NET), Linux(Unix) and Wine(Win32). This technique is usually to force a product or interface into the open, by creating an alternative.
Donating, i.e. some third party gifts pre-existing Open Source to the community, examples of this being OpenOffice, Zope and Niku. This route is often taken by closed source product companies with an old product that is not generating much revenue. The closed source community uses this old product line to, improve their image, generate services revenue, stimulate demand for optional closed source products, kill off a competitor etc. In some cases the original developer continues to have some involvement in the development, in other cases not.
Sponsorship, i.e. some third party, usually a commercial company, for reasons of their own, sometimes benevolent sometimes not, sponsors the community to develop a product or improve it in some way. Perl and Python are examples of this. Most often those sponsored are development leads. This is often taken by companies wishing to safeguard investments that depend on the continued evolution of the Open Source product, or to stimulate demand for a relate product like training or books.
Academia, i.e. some academic project deliverable evolves or develops some Open Source software.
Community demand, the final and by far the rarest mechanism is that the community sees a need, appoints a leader and builds a community to solve the need. The best examples of this are extensions to the four categories above, for example a driver for Linux or a filter for OpenOffice. I believe the most important example however is Apache.
Individual demand, i.e. a person pursues an interest, or a personal need, programming languages are a good example of this for example boo and pylon. The passionate individual becomes the leader by default and may gather around then a small band of co-developers who share the interest.

I hesitate to put them in order of importance, because of the importance of the exceptions, however if we set aside Linux, then Donating seems to be the most important way for "market shaping" software to become Open Source. The order of importance is then probably:

Donating
Cloning
Sponsorship, (because it funds the community leaders)
Academia
Community demand
Individual demand

Of course these mechanisms are not the sole domain of Open Software, Free Software, (i.e. free to use), has also been developed extensively and uses all of the same mechanisms to come into being. An additional very important mechanism for Free Software being bundling, i.e. its free with this book, magazine, operating system, training course, paid for product etc.

Future posts will reveal why this analysis is important, in my view at least.

Microsoft and integration

Mon, 12 Jul 2004 22:32:33 GMT

I have thought for a long time that Microsoft don't make much use of their own software to build pre-integrated solutions for their customers, (unlike Oracle for example). They seem to have caught onto the idea at last, (not from listening to me though :-)). Anyway a few months ago they started to talk about solution accelerators, which are solutions built from sets of MS products with associated processes, procedures and best practices as well as custom systems integration. These solve particular business problems, like for example, the process of hiring new employees. There is also evidence that Microsoft is doing the same at the infrastructure level where the range of tools available to them is even richer, SQL Server, BizTalk, SharePoint etc. This is a good example:

Microsoft also plans to make available to enterprise partners a "zero touch provisioning" accelerator that will enable end users to self-service tasks such as requesting the installation of an application or resetting a network password.
"We built in a rules-based engine based on BizTalk that can automate requests, get approved by a manager, and install a new application," Hassall said. "And the opportunity is not just for desktop deployment but add-ons for server infrastructure using SMS and Active Directory and BizTalk in providing an infrastructure for installation and provisioning services."

The company also plans to make available to enterprise partners a "zero touch provisioning" accelerator that will enable end users to self-service tasks such as requesting the installation of an application or resetting a network password.

"We built in a rules-based engine based on BizTalk that can automate requests, get approved by a manager, and install a new application," Hassall said. "And the opportunity is not just for desktop deployment but add-ons for server infrastructure using SMS and Active Directory and BizTalk in providing an infrastructure for installation and provisioning services."

Microsoft's latest marketting phrase - Integrated innovation is starting to mean something. If you want to see more on this topic then enter "integrated innovation", into the search box on the left, include the quotes!

Architecture Lifecycle

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 19:35:33 GMT

HP have posted a short article on the role of the Architect throughout the IT project lifecycle. I like the perspecitive as often the dominant role of the Architect is the "design" role, and this is the one that is most repeatable and easy to capture in methodology. The following picture provides a summary of the idea, with the yellow boxes representing the roles, and the ovals the phases.

The whole article is available here. but this is a summary:

The following sections map the the responsibilities and associated skills and capabilities of architects onto the Architecting Process. The responsibilities may fall to a single architect, or be distributed among a team of architects. Thus, someone on the team must play the role of leader who is empowered by management and the architecting team to make decisions that stick (the "architect with a baseball bat"). Others on the team may take on implementation responsibilities during prototyping or technology evaluation. If the architecting team has a project manager, that person may take on much of the "up and out" communication responsibility in addition to handling the personnel interface. Nonetheless, the lead architect must have a good proportion of the skills and capabilities identified below. The rest of the team must be good collaborators, modelers and system thinkers with significant experience in the domain.

Some progress in server infrastructure for processing XML documents

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 19:17:30 GMT

Its interesting to see the slow but sure emergence of middleware to exploit XML documents. Microsoft have WSS which can manipulate Infopath docuemnts stored in its document libraries for example. InfoWorld report on a mor ambitious tool from IBM, code named Project Cinnamon, you can get the full details here, but here is the real content:

Cinnamon was born in IBM's Almaden Research Center and is a tool designed to automatically create mappings among different forms of data. By allowing users to define how an XML document gets mapped into a database such as DB2, the technology makes it easier to store those documents and to manage their content.

The upcoming utility hopes to address one of the thornier problems associated with XML-based development. Although XML serves as a clear standard for how content in a document is defined, the schema or definition of that content can be markedly different from document to document. This makes it impractical to place thousands of different documents in even a single data source and be able to retrieve certain data using a single search engine, an IBM representative said.

InfoWorld also says:

Some analysts think the upcoming technology can play a central role in helping corporate users crystallize the implementation of their Web services and SOA (service-oriented architecture) visions.

It may play a part, but I think "central role" is over stating it a bit.

The five top objections to open-source

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 00:07:47 GMT

Computer World has an article on this topic, most of which has already been debated many times with simillar answers to the ones that CW gives. However I repeat the list here, because item 5 on the list is actually new to me:

Support availability
Functional limitations of the software
Software license terms
Rapid software release cycles
Package road maps or future plans

Items 1 to 4 are answered pretty well, and I don't think are a major concern now for most companies and the service offerings are developing at a rapid rate. However here is the answer to item 5:

Package road maps or future plans are important to most companies. Major vendors tend to heavily promote their road maps, even to the extent of publicizing future capabilities years in advance. Of course, there is no promise that any advertised feature will ever see the light of your computer display. Not all vendors publish such road maps, and some share them only with strategic accounts under nondisclosure agreements.
Some open-source groups publish road maps, and some do not. At times, the stated goal is to mimic the functionality of a commercial package, though when any particular feature will appear is anyone's guess. The best advice is to make decisions based on what you can see and touch. If a feature doesn't exist, assume it never will, even if it shows up on a road map or vendor presentation.
With all these potential drawbacks and pitfalls, why would anyone consider using an open-source package versus buying a proprietary product? Ultimately, it's not about cost, so forget all those total cost of ownership arguments. It's about value and free-market choices. With any software acquisition, evaluate needs, explore options and select the best fit. Think of open-source as buying software from a small supplier. There may be additional risks, but the rewards can make it worthwhile.

I am not sure I agree with the conclusion that you should "Think of open-source as buying software from a small supplier", in my eyes for many of the major Open Source development projects you are actually buying into a roadmap dictated by an asset thats owned by and will increasingly run the world. Imagine all of the different agendas that will need to be accomodated when Open Source gets that popular, and the challenges that will exist to stop it branching in a way that damages compatibility. Lots more on this topic to come I think, but thats the first thought that popped into my head at 1:00AM when I should really be in bed, but am not able to sleep because of the blasted Steroids I have to take, that give you insomnia!!

More loss of direction around Exchange?

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 23:51:57 GMT

Ed Brill makes a point in one of his posts about the woes of the Exchange Group in Microsoft, here is the guts of it:

It hasn't been a good few months for the Exchange product team at Microsoft. First the Outlook team ships an updated connector for Lotus Domino; then they dismantle their own roadmap; and now they are facing internal competition:

"Our first product here is going to be using Outlook that uses the Hotmail e-mail infrastructure. So you don't need to have an Exchange Server if you're a small business; you can just use Hotmail and you can have that synchronized experience, as well as the calendaring and everything else with other people who are on Hotmail."

Sort of confirms the feeling I got when I posted on a simillar topic a while back. Then I got a bit more encouraged when I posted this. lets hope for some clarity soon!

More on the conflict between personal productivity and enterprise IT management

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 23:42:13 GMT

I wrote about this topic a while back. Its nice to see some discussion starting up on it for two reasons:

Its really interesting, and a topic that deserves more public debate
I want to do some research on it, and need all the input I can get. My own blog is sort of work in progress research but I want to spend a month or so giving it some real attention

Check out this post which gets the debate started. Eric Mack has a real good contribution.

In fact if you are interested in personal productivity in general then the discussions on the Getting Things Done site are of a very high quality.

My Home Office

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 18:16:03 GMT

In another post I am going to talk a bit about why I think multiple monitors are really important, but first I want to introduce you to my home office, so you can see my personal working practice in its full context. First things first:

Everything I need is within arms reach
I try to scan all my paper, and its all there in PaperPort, see below
I have two desks, a computer desk where I have my three monitors, and drive all my clients and servers from one keyboard and mouse and a layout, reading etc desk where I have space to organise. The kids use this desk at night if I am happy to be disrupted a bit.
I have a web cam on top of my primary display, again more on that later

For the full article click here to continue ...

3 Monitors is the way to go!

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 23:25:58 GMT

I have been quite happy with my two monitor setup at home, but using maxivista I am now able to drive three monitors from my main desktop PC. This is just great. I can now have my email in one, my RSS feeds in another, be using Office in another etc. I am also using a lot of virtual PC's and I can have these displaying on different monitors. So I can have RedHat on one monitor and SUSE on another and still be using Office on my third. It really must have driven my productivity up 20% when I am doing this sort of work, which is probably 50% of the time. That's at least £100/day. A staggering return on investment - the third monitor, (old laptop), was being scrapped and Maxivista is about $40!!

The other great advantage is that your concentration and focus is not disrupted, you might think it would be, but it seems that by not switching applications all the time, and by being able to focus on the task at hand on your primary screen, the other two monitors just provide supporting information.

We really must get more people to understand the value proposition of multiple screens!

Some background on NewsGator and Syndication

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 11:34:15 GMT

This post by Brad Feld, a Venture Capitalist who has recently invested in NewsGator is useful if you too have invested in a copy and want to understand a bit about where the tool is going. But its also interesting if like me you want to understand a bit about syndication in general and the market opportunity as investors see it. I recently posted on how I see the market from a technical perspective for behind the firewall corporate environments, in discussion with NewsGator this market is certainly in their plans.

Greg adds a bit more detail in his blog

Yet More on PowerPoint

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 11:29:00 GMT

More PowerPoint posts continue to catch my eye. The first is from Brad Fled, a venture capitalist who has recently invested in NewsGator, Brad writes:

I've looked at thousands (tens of thousands?) presentations pitching new businesses since the mid 1990's. The vast majority of them suck. Unfortunately, it's not Powerpoint's fault (no - it wouldn't be better if Freelance has become the standard).

Brad points us to:

Edward Tufte - a master of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, thinks Powerpoint is evil and corrupts absolutely

He also gives us a good outline presentation for pitching to a VC, which is definately worth checking out if you ever have the need. In fact its a good start if you need to make a pitch for any kind of investment.

The experience trap

Thu, 01 Jul 2004 11:15:56 GMT

David Chappell, a professional speaker, who often works for Microsoft has written a very interesting little article on the subject of the experience trap. In essence, as you get more experienced, especially in IT, that experience can cause you problems as well as give you an advantage. He recalls discussions with computer science professors who are debating which programming language a person should be taught. Here is an extract in his own words:

The difficulties faced by teachers of computer science provide one example of the problems experience can cause. But the challenge certainly isn’t limited to professors—we’re all in danger. And since the experience trap isn’t much of a problem at the beginning of a career, it can sneak up on you. When you’re twenty five, you don’t rely much on experience because you don’t have any. When you’re forty five, however, it’s tempting to rely too much on experience. The truth is that experience is useful only if the future is like the past. In software, what will be important next year is often very, very different from what was important last year. Realizing that a significant part of our hard-won knowledge becomes valueless every year is a necessary part of moving forward.

He concludes with an interesting remark:

After teaching for a decade or more, I’m sure some of the computer science professors I spoke with wished they’d chosen to teach history instead. History professors don’t have wholly new topic areas suddenly appear, nor do they need to readdress basic pedagogical issues every few years. But my conversations with these people reminded me of how important it is for all of us—professors and practitioners—to sometimes ignore our own history. Avoiding the experience trap is an essential part of making real progress.

I found this fairly interesting from two perspectives:

I have just turned 40 and after years of feeling like the new kid on the block with lots of bright ideas, I have started to feel like the experienced old hand. learning new things has become more difficult through a combination of age and lack of time and the volume of new stuff to learn and the online resources available to help have exploded.
The second reason is that I recently recalled a series of psychological tests that I udertook a few years ago, and part of the feedback was that I was likely to be resistant to change. At the time I ignored this feedback as I was taking my company through some of the most radical change it had ever seen in IT and it was a very challenging time for me as well as well. However in the light of point number 1, recent posts on how I like things that are familliar to me, and how too much choice, (loosely linked to change), affects happiness I think it needs revisting.

Bottom line is that as I get older I need to be ever more focussed on following process rather than instinct. Following the right process should help make sure that I do not rely too much on experience and do not resist appropriate change. Instinct probably drives me in the opposite direction!

If you want to read the whole article have a look here. David is an interesting person to listen to and read, but watch out for the fact that he makes his living evangalising Microsoft technologies and that some of his talks are sponsored by Microsoft, although he does generally make that clear.

Amazing array of Windows Powered Devices

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 16:28:53 GMT

I was wondering a few weeks ago why the Tablet PC team were moved into the Mobile and Embedded Devices division in Microsoft. Then I saw this web page and the array of Tablet format devices and I realised why! Theres a very good write up of recent news from the Embedded developers conference here. More links to Windows powered devices can be found below:

Tablet PC
Pocket PC
Media Center PC
Smart picture frame
Portable Media Center
Smartphone
Windows Automotive
Gametrac gaming device
SPOT watch
Windows-powered cash register at store
iCEBOX kitchen PC and home controller

Office 12 and other key release dates

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 13:09:50 GMT

Some interesting roadmap data has been published at Tech-ED. Well perhaps more stunning than interesting. I posted previously that maybe Microsoft were loosing their nerve and pushing product to market rapidly through fear of loss of revenue, and that there strategic re-architecting of the main product lines was potentially being compromised. However these dates tell a different story:

The core foundation elements, i.e. Longhorn Client and SQL Server come first. Then Longhorn Server, then Exchange Kodiak, Office System 12 and SPSv3 in 2007-8. Hopefully a new version of WSS sits somewhere around 2005-6. This implies that Microsoft are planning something significant in Office System 12, and that the information management and collaboration story might actually start to come together with the next versions of Longhorn server, Exchange and SPS. There’s a jpeg of the roadmap slide available here.

Microsoft are planning to give me some details under NDA of this stuff quite soon, so I maybe able to confirm some of this speculation at a high level.

Extreme Programming

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 12:59:04 GMT

The spoke has a short post on extreme programming. Its been a long time since I have been a real programmer, and was probably never an extreme one by any definition, however I have managed my share of development projects and a few things appealed to me in this report.

Developer bids for work: developers in the team bid for tasks. Lowest bid wins and gets the job.
>> This is a very cool motivational tool, if you have the right team and culture.

Work in pairs

>> This is a new one on me, although I have done some of my best work when working in pairs I have never seen it formally laid out like this as part of a methodology. The overhead cost is considerable at first glance; it would be interesting to see the overall effect on lifecycle cost though.

Work in pairs: but the most experienced one does not drive the keyboard. He/she watches the other one and makes comments

Lies: two developers will be more candid about the prospects for the development. They are also better able to negotiate deadlines and features and less inclined to lie about the situation.

Blame: it is harder to blame two people for getting something wrong. And they will be better able to defend themselves.

Crucial: no one person can be crucial to the development. Rotate the pairs so that expertise is spread around the developers.

Building Systems

>> This is all about the daily build concept. I came home with this one a couple of Tech-EDs ago and my dev team at the time were sceptical however they gave it a go and it worked out great. In fact the approach they took was really pretty impressive. They were working on a web application using IIS and Exchange accessed via WebDAV and ADO. They setup an automated system that allowed each person to have their own work in progress system running live on the same system. Each night they checked in any code they thought was ready for the rest of the team to test and this went live in a shared environment on a test server. Each night any code that had been tested by the dev team was made available in a semi-production environment. The old code from previous days was also available live and could be accessed just with a different URL, to test regressions. The whole system was automated and very easy to use and resulted in very rapid development and lots of early feedback from the users of the semi-production system, who used it live, to run a major programme, but were mainly friendly IT guys themselves who did not mind the odd glitch.

Design in the test: write the test specs first. Test everything. All coded paths. Automate your tests. Make the testing easy, so you do it lots.

Daily Build: Build regularly. But not every day perhaps. If someone breaks the build process they must mend it. Make running versions with limited functionality. The deploy process is part of the build and should be similarly automated. Anything which takes more than 10 minutes to build is probably worth looking at.

More on PowerPoint

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 12:45:50 GMT

Powerpoint seems to be cropping up all over in my blogs at the moment. I am a big user of PowerPoint. I recently checked my local machine using X1 and I have 669 PP files at the moment. Anyway I was pleased to come across this post by Michael Hyatt which point to all of his favourite Powerpoint Resources on the web, they are repeated here, but for more details Visit Michael's blog. I have added to and annotated his list, you gan get the details here ...

WIndows 2003 Server, anywhere access

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 12:36:45 GMT

It's TechED Europe this week and Microsoft have announced more details of the next release of Windows 2003 Server. The area of most interest to me is, "anywhere access", which Neowin reports on. Anywhere access enables users to use terminal services over port 80 (HTTPs/RPC), Outlook over port 80 (HTTPs/RPC) and also file shares from within corporate LANs over port 80 (HTTPs/RPC).

These are very interesting developments, the WTS capabilities removing one more advantage that Citrix has over Microsoft. The file share access is interesting, as file share access using WebDAV is already available I can only assume that this is CIFS access tunnelled over HTTPS, this would be a big improvement over WebDAV as it would support more applications, the properties dialog and other features not available today using DAV. I thought Outlook over HTTPS was already part of Exchange 2003 server, so I am not sure why this is included in a feature list for Windows 2003 server unless its actually provided by the OS or probably IIS rather than Exchange.

These HTTP access mechanisms are useful not just in providing internet access to corporate resources but also for corporates wishing to provide controlled access on their WAN for third parties, aquisitions or businesses in the process of being disposed of.

Open Document Formats - XML to you and me

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 21:49:58 GMT

This is one of the areas I am going to be looking at so its good news that there has been a recent flurry of activity around it. here are some of the more important links.

The debate was started by the EC report into this topic which is summarised here the full report can be found here. One of the nice things about this report is that its been reviewed by Microsoft and Sun, and their comments on it, (at least those they made public), are also published. Tim Bray, a man with some credibility in this area, (now working for Sun), describes his meeting with the EC team here. John Udell writes up his views on the EC report here. Dare Obasanjo responds to Tim Bray here.

Then the thread starts to drift a bit, but Tim Bray also talks about his views on how the OpenOffice team have used XML, he is impressed! And a snippet on how Microsoft have used XML in Office 2003, he is less than impressed! Tim also talks about the use of custom schema’s and concludes they are not a good idea, (Microsoft implement them in Office 2003, OpenOffice don’t). Jean, (a MS employee), gives his point of view, Jean like Tim is also a member of the team that created XML.

Graham builds on his Ownership thread

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 13:53:28 GMT

Graham is continuing his posts on the concept of "ownership" in IT with comments on an article in Computer World on Why Business Leaders Ignore You, like most IT people I am sure you have had that experience. I wrote extensively on a simillar issue a while back when I described the disconnect in perceptions between IT Managers and IT users over how important there personal productivity is, and I built on that yesterday in my post on Work Space design.

Update on X1

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 13:10:05 GMT

As I have mentioned before I use X1 for all of my local system searching, a friend of mine asked how I was getting on with it, he is using Blinkx. So here is an update.

I am running X1 on Windows 2003 Server, its not supported but it seems to run just fine. I have moved the indexes out of my local profile and onto my data disk, but thats the only change to the standard configuration.
I don't have it configured to autostart when I login because I often have multiple sessions running, one console and the others using Windows Terminal Services, I only have it running in my console session.
I have it indexing 27,000 files out of a total of 130,000 on the machine.
I have had the odd machine slow down when its doing some heavy indexing, like my database of RSS feeds, but since thats 44,000 items I don't hold that against it as its only when I rebuild the index, (for reasons of my own making)
Some people don't like the fact that it has tabs for email, attachments, file and contacts but I think its great because I generally want to search within these scopes not across them
I find the type down searching just perfect, on my machine its effectively instant and the great thing about it is after entering just a few clues you often only have one or two matches and its easy to just look at the document previews to find the correct one. Without type down you end up building really complex searches that are a waste of time
The document preview is still the killer feature for me, I almost always use it rather than opening the actual file. For RSS feeds there is never a need to open Outlook.
Lotus Notes indexing is not there yet, nor is support for phrases. Although a new version is due version is due very soon and promises these. Lotus Notes is important to me, I generally manage just fine now without phrases however.
I picked up my copy cheap because I had already purchased Newsgator, (there was a discount if you purchased both together), which I thought was a fine deal, discount after the fact. I think this is the first time I have ever seen such an offer before.

Workspace design

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 22:02:29 GMT

One of my favourite topics just started to get an airing on the web, Work Space design. It’s been an interest of mine ever since I can remember, it’s the frustrated Architect in me, (I was never good enough at art to take it at University). Anyway what really bugs me about the topic is my belief that it has a huge impact on individual and team effectiveness, but receives very little focus and even less investment by many companies. Even companies that reap huge profits from their consultants tend not to invest in their productivity. I talked about this in a previous post, but mainly from an IT SW perspective.

Since I have been working from home I have invested quite heavily in my own work environment and I certainly notice a huge improvement in my productivity. The biggest improvement comes from two large monitors driven from the same desktop PC, supplemented by a management console that I use to monitor my lab and anything else that I need to check frequently. I also have a dedicated portable that I can just pick up and carry away whenever I need to move around the house, I use a dedicated portable for this because I don't get any issues with windows being resized and moved around between monitors and because I want my primary machine to be my desktop, (that way I get two large 19" monitors").

As all of my machines run Windows Terminal Services, X Windows or Remote Desktop, I can easily connect to any of them from any machine, and I have dedicated short cuts to them all to make it really quick. As my desktop is running Windows Server 2003, I have two short cuts one to take over the console, and the other to login a separate session.

I have made a few other investments:

1. A fan to keep the air moving

2. A nice big table next to my desk in case I have meetings or need layout space

3. Everything within easy reach

4. A great scanner and Paperport to minimise the amount of paper clutter

5. A good but simple filing system

6. Music

7. A good speaker phone

8. A desk lamp

Anyway that’s a bit about me. But what about a workspace design in a corporate context, I might talk a bit about my experiments in this area, (mainly flexible offices), in another post but I wanted to link to some other interesting posts that I have just come across.

It starts with the results of a survey by Microsoft which concludes:

Nearly two-thirds of office computer users tie the fatigue they experience during the week to working at the computer for long periods. In addition, nine out of 10 said the design setup of their workstation directly affects their ability to be most productive at work. More than 50 percent of those surveyed said one of the best ways employers can show their commitment to employees' success is to provide them with the latest technologies so they can do their jobs more efficiently.

I particularly liked this bit:

This compares with 23 percent who said they would prefer motivational tools such as morale-building and social outings, and 16 percent who would opt for perks such as free soda and parking, which are commonly offered in workplaces today.

It goes on to say:

Researchers have found that individual performance increases by 25 percent when employees use an ergonomically designed workstation

However this is from a study in 1991, so is probably not that relevant today, but check it out and make your own judgement. 25% is a lot!!

In a similar survey by Logitech, reported by CNN, it states:

In a survey by office furniture manufacturers Logitech asking workers to grade the design of their workspace, 56 percent rated their office or cubicle as a "C" or below.

Only six percent of employees gave their office an "A" grade.

More than half of those who rated their desks as "C" or worse said they would feel more valued if they were given more input into shaping their environment and 84 percent said their comfort levels could be improved.

According to the research, workers now spend an average of 37.5 hours at week at work -- more than 14 hours a week longer than in their living room -- and a majority say they place equal importance on the comfort and design of both.

To get you thinking here are some hints and tips on Work Space design taken from PowerHomeBiz.com

· Do try to arrange your space in an L-shape or triangle, with a swivel-style desk chair in the middle of the configuration. With a spin of your seat or a slight roll backward or to the side, all essentials are within arm's reach.

· Don't skimp on comfort, especially when it comes to your desk chair. Choose one with a cushioned seat and back, adjustable height so your feet are flat on the floor, a back that tilts and curves, and wheels on the bottom to get around easily.

· Do group equipment and furnishings into different centers of operation. These might include your computer, phone/fax, mail handling area, and worktable.

· Don't be stingy about storage space and lighting. Put in as many cabinets, cubbies, and shelves as you can without crowding your workspace. Illuminate individual work areas with their own direct lights.

· Do plan with portability in mind. Cordless phones and laptops allow you to move your work close to your children, if necessary. Other portable conveniences are furniture on casters, baskets that can quickly be repositioned when needed, and a rolling cart to easily transport files and correspondence so you can work in the kitchen, family room, or even outside for an hour or so.

· Don't set up your office where it should be; put it where you want it to be.

· Do personalize the room by hanging up children's drawings and other favorite artwork, propping family photos on the desk, painting the walls your favorite color, including a knickknack or two, and adding other special touches. These not only make for a cozier space, they can help reduce stress.

· Don't do everything at once if money and/or time are tight. Start with the bare-bones basics, adding on when you can afford more. As your profits increase, you may even consider hiring a professional designer to help you make improvements. Most charge between $75 and $150 an hour for a consultation, and it would not take long to toss around some design ideas.

· Do plan for future growth. Architects and designers recommend that you project 25 percent more space than you currently require, especially if you're remodeling your home to accommodate an office or buying a new house with work-at-home potential.

PowerPoint, putting the audience in control

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 21:02:33 GMT

One of my friend's posts pointed me to beyond bullets a blog about communications. It was strange because a few minutes later I came across another link in another feed I was reading so I decided to check it out. I liked this post on the Presentation Dashboard, an idea for putting the audience in control. I like this concept very much and have used it myself many times in different forms; here are a few of them:

1. I have created several PowerPoints that I designed not to be presented but to be emailed out or web delivered and navigated around. This was done with lots of buttons and links and was very effective. We also used this idea for training courses

2. This worked so well that I changed my PowerPoint standard template and so that I created a master slide with index buttons all the way down the left hand side. Because it was in the master it appeared on every slide. When I presented it made it very easy to jump around the presentation following up on any topics the audience wanted to discuss. Depending on which section you were in the appropriate link had a bright yellow border, this prevented me getting lost, (some of the packs had 100 plus slides), and gave the audience context.

3. I also created quite a few master presentations that linked to other presentations. Each link went to index pages. These worked great to, I called them "Master Slide Packs" and were particularly useful for new users joining my teams.

4. Finally I evolved the master slide pack idea, and started doing document maps, again full of links to documents and presentations. Sometimes these maps were graphical, but I think in the end the narrative types were the best because they allowed me to talk through a project from its history and background all the way through to the latest information and how to keep up to date with the project. As you followed the narrative there were links throughout to the documents, document libraries, presentations or associated web sites.

All of these were examples of putting the audience in control. I use X1 to index my PC, I just checked I have 699 PowerPoints on it at the moment!

How to avoid flamewars

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 20:38:35 GMT

Given my recent post on Zealots I thought this post by Dave Winder complemented it nicely.

It's when I see something like this that Microsoft really disappoints me!

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 18:31:18 GMT

I have just been sent details of this InfoPath web application by Microsoft. I should have been pleased, but I was very disappointed, not by InfoView which seems to be a great way of publishing an InfoPath form so that it can be completed using a web form, but because Microsoft did not ship it!

Microsoft would have got such a different reception and eliminated a lot of trust issues if InfoPath had been positioned as a web form designer, offline editor and aggregation tool, with a complementary web forms interface for those not able to take advantage of the native client. I can not believe that developed in parallel with the thick client developing the web client would have been that big a deal either.

Anyway Microsoft chose a different route and instead of being seen as producing a great innovative standards based product that demonstrated the best of rich and reach, they chose a route that exposed them to constant criticism over attempting to lock people into Office and Thick Client technologies!

Come on Microsoft examine everything you are planning from the perspective of those who are uneasy about your track record, I think it will be your best long term form of marketing!

Next steps

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 13:33:08 GMT

I had some very good news today. I am to be working for most of my time for probably 6 months or more on alternative desktop solutions, looking at what the viable alternatives are to the Microsoft Desktop solution. This is an end to end review, ie not just looking at the Operating System, but at:

The operating system
The layered personal productivity tools
Integration with peripherals and PDA's
The service and systems management tools
The security tools
The integration issues
Application compatability and portfolio migration issues
The data and personality migration issues
The TCO issues
The user change/culture change issues
Changes to my companies service model and associated technologies
Some of the issues that result from running a mixed environment, or a parallel environment, for example VMware hosted
The architectural changes, eg thick or thin client, application delivery approaches
Some of the strategic differences including those that arise from the different motivations of Microsoft and the alternatives
The decision making process that a client needs to go through before choosing to go the alternative route

I won't be posting much more detail than this in my blog, but you can expect some of the key questions that I am asking myself to be posted along the way as I try and pick my way through such a lot of different factors. Its quite interesting to be starting work on this just a day after my posting on Zealots!

If you look at my blog on posts related to this topic, these are the most important:

Zealots

Rich Versus Reach - my perspective

Personal Information Disaster!

Which Office Suite?

Microsoft: Linux isn't cheaper

More integration of Microsoft Products?

Who will Longhorn appeal to?

In pursuit of personal and team productivity

Zealots

Sun, 27 Jun 2004 22:29:04 GMT

I get pretty frustrated around Zealots and there’s lots of them lurking around the IT blogs. I recently read a refreshing article by Jeff Dillon from Sun expressing similar views and it’s worth a read just to convince yourself that it’s possible to be passionate about Linux and Open-source in general and still leave room to admire something that Microsoft does. A while back a couple of people mentioned to me that I was perceived to be something of a Microsoft Zealot, well I found that quite amusing, you see my own perception is that I am familiar with Microsoft and Realistic about Microsoft’s role in the industry and like any reasonable person I admire some of Microsoft’s products, people and culture. Probably also like most reasonable people I dislike some of Microsoft’s products, and culture, and if I knew enough of them would probably dislike some of their people as well.

I hardly think this classifies me as a Zealot, but some people do mistake familiarity and realism for zealotry when it comes to Microsoft. Well I got to thinking why that is and came to the following conclusions:

Microsoft has had such a bad press recently that its not really in anyone’s interest to be seen as a Zealot even if you are one
Most reasonable people having read this bad press would find it difficult to be a zealot, at a push I guess one might admire the way Microsoft can recover from such legal embarrassment and technical and procedural neglect of issues like security.
Most people don’t really understand where Microsoft are going now, as Microsoft is talking only about long term vision and technical infrastructure. The products that will be built on this technical infrastructure that are going to deliver this vision are to a large extent still a mystery. So unless you are a real techy there’s not much to be a zealot about
Microsoft employees however are another matter, and continue to support and evangelise their company despite the above, which proves they must be doing something right on the culture front and maybe the product and technology front as well.

That said it’s likely that the absence of many real zealots outside of MS, means that realists like me are sort of the next tier down. Compare and contrast that however with Open Source Zealots though to see the real difference. Here we are talking Zealotry taken to the levels of the religious fanatic, and that means taken to the level where its impossible to trust anything they say or do because its not driven my a motive that most people can understand, i.e. not profit, customer satisfaction, personal satisfaction etc.

Of course I have nothing against open source software, I am not as familiar with it and realistically its not going to wipe Microsoft off the face of the earth during the next few years, but I have used and admired it for nearly two decades and watched it mature and become a real force in business and a force for good.

So I just wish the Zealots would lay off, that way we might see the reality more clearly and be able to trust what we read more often, this applies equally to the MS and Open Source guys. Let’s hear it for the realists!

Goodbye to the Tablet

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 22:01:59 GMT

There is a flurry of debate in the blogs because Peter says, I Still like the tablet. But I am all out of love, well I have a story to tell about Tablet love as well.

I got my first Tablet, a HP TC1100, in January and it was love at first sight, I just took to the slate format and at the time forgave the terrible keyboard, (although it didn’t take me long to remember my old IBM keyboard with increasing longing). I wrote all about my early experiences in my tablet blog. Well my circumstances changed and I found myself working mostly from home so the mobility benefits I was getting from the tablet reduced and I started to look at the platform more objectively. These are some of the conclusions that I came to, but I think it’s a pretty personal view so don’t expect any conclusions that I draw to apply to you.

The Tablet didn’t work for me when I was mainly deskbound:

I love screen real estate, before I had a Tablet I had a 1400*1050 resolution ThinkPad A20p, it had a great keyboard to, (I love IBM keyboards).
At home now my desktop drives a 19” 1280*1024 LCD and a 19” 1600*1280 Flat screen LCD and I still have my ThinkPad A20p as a management console for my home lab. So for me the 1024*768 screen on the TC1100 was just not up to the job.
With a screen that size the Tablet is a huge improvement over a PDA, but it’s a lot bigger, I have just settled on an IPAQ 4150 so you can see that size, or lack of it in true portable device is pretty key for me.
As an auxiliary display things improved considerably but the docking station was a bit ‘strange’ and I still found myself struggling to use the small screen for anything really useful, when I had a glorious 19” LCD as my secondary. I tried using it to monitor my email but I found I could do that just as easily on my IPAQ, which had a brighter screen as well.
I found it slightly under powered compared to my desktop, but I could have lived with this, it had 1GB of memory and this seemed to make up for the slower processor and hard drive.

The true mobile experience I was hoping for never happened:

When I first got my Tablet one of the real benefits I was looking forward to was being able to take anywhere and use it inside and outside. However all too often I found that the lighting was not right. Outside it’s practically unusable and this was a real disappointment.
I also never came across a really good case that I could use at work and home that was small enough to always take with me everywhere
Battery life however was never a problem for me as I had two batteries and I managed 6-8 hours.
The end result I ended up leaving it behind and wishing I had a Pocket PC so that I could take something everywhere. In the end I bought a Pocket PC!

I still needed a keyboard:

I was impressed by the handwriting recognition when I got the Tablet and blown away when I started testing XP SP2, but I still needed a keyboard for so much of the work I did when I was mobile, even when I was just sitting watching TV, answering a few emails or reading blogs I missed the keyboard. This was a real shock to me as I just love the slate format, its just that the slate format is only really useful when you are making very short notes, browsing/reading or making hand written notes or drawings. If you are doing any serious writing or PowerPoint for example you really need mouse and keyboard with today’s applications. Strangely enough PDA’s seem much easier to use in slate mode, they are lighter, the applications are better optimised and my expectations about being able to write are much lower.
I have found since switching back to a laptop when mobile, a IBM ThinkPad T40, that I use it much more sitting in the lounge or in the garden than I used my tablet. Quite the opposite of what I was expecting when I let the Tablet go.

So what did I like about the Tablet:

I loved the slate format
I thought the HP hardware design was fantastic, apart from the keyboard, they should have recognised how important the keyboard was still going to be
I thought the handwriting recognition was first class, especially in SP2 and was vastly improved over that on my IPAQ, however it should be put in its place, a useful complement to the keyboard, or a bonus when you just have the slate with you
I loved the natural interaction model, and the more applications that are developed to take account of it the better
I loved OneNote, but still think it could be optimised slightly more for the pen interface, look at a product like Pocket Informant for some clues
I loved some of the concepts, but not the reality, for example the voice recording and recognition just did not meet my expectations

What needs to be done to get me back in love:

I need a first class keyboard
I need a much higher resolution screen, one I can read an A4 page on, 1400*1050 would be just fine!
I still want to be able to use it in slate mode, keyboard detached, to minimise weight and maximise portability
I want some innovation put into cases, or protection so that I can bung it into my rucksack and take it wherever I would take a pad of paper
I need to be able to read the screen outside
The price point needs to be right
It needs to be light enough without the keyboard to hold in one hand

Interestingly all of these improvements are hardware, there have been a lot of criticisms of the platform, but I personally liked it well enough, sure improvements would be welcome but these are unlikely to win me back on their own. At the end of the day today’s hardware does not allow for the radical new way of working that the operating system and applications already support.

For another personal perspective, I looked at the needs of one of my daughter’s who suffers from Raynauds and Scleroderma. I think a Tablet would be just perfect for her, I wrote that up here.

Tablet PC for Jennifer

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 21:57:09 GMT

This is a short article that I wrote for the occupational therapist who works with one of my daughters who has Raynauds and Scleroderma.

There are a variety of different types of technology assistance that would benefit Jennifer in an educational setting. My perception is that a range of techniques will be required that reflect the unpredictable nature of her symptoms and the variety of different tasks that she needs to perform. There is no magic bullet solution that meets all of her needs.

Writing

When Jennifer has to write for extended periods there are a number of issues that need to be considered:

1. Her ability to dictate in a fluent fashion is limited at this age

2. Her hands get cold

3. Her hands get tired

4. Sometimes the movement/dexterity of her hands is limited

What solution options are available in addition to traditional pen and paper?

1. Voice recognition

2. Hand writing recognition

3. Simple gesture recognition

4. Different types of keyboard

5. text substitution

Each option is considered in brief below:

Voice recognition

Voice recognition is still not a mature and easy to use technology. Some of the important characteristics are described below:

1. The software, (SW), requires training and this process requires some dedication and can be very frustrating

2. The SW works best when the person dictating has mastery of fluent speaking

3. The SW works best in a quiet environment, although some people have reported success in a normal office environment with a high quality noise cancelling microphone

4. Considerable skill is required to use the SW for anything other than raw text input. In addition keyboard less editing of text input can be complex and very frustrating.

All of these characteristics are indicators that Voice Recognition will not be a magic bullet for Jennifer.

My view is that one should expect to use the SW as a complement to other techniques, where it is appropriate, and almost always alongside a keyboard and mouse or a stylus.

Hand writing recognition

Hand writing recognition has improved dramatically in accuracy and is now approaching 99%+ accuracy in SW that will be available in the mainstream operating systems by mid 2004.

Hand writing recognition may seem a strange option for someone who struggles with spelling, and traditional pen and paper however there are some significant advantages:

1. The SW works for people with fairly bad handwriting. Jennifer’s writing is neat by comparison

2. The SW allows the person to write large letters, much larger than would be appropriate for pen and paper

3. The SW recognises words by comparing against a dictionary, so for a poor speller accuracy can be increased significantly

4. The SW does not require significant training

5. Correction of words that have been incorrectly recognised is a fairly natural process and presents likely words from the dictionary improving spelling

6. If the digitiser used for entering the text is a Tablet format PC, the screen is warm and will keep Jennifer’s writing hand warm.

7. Using the same Tablet PC interface it is possible to transition between voice input and handwriting input seamlessly. This is useful for example if the stylus is used for correction and voice for bulk text entry. Or the stylus used for difficult words or for maths and voice used for descriptions.

8. Maths SW is also available to automatically calculate the answers of maths problems

9. Handwriting can be captured without conversion to text. Or can be converted to text later if required

Voice recording

As a complement to the two techniques above, rather than convert voice to text, it is also possible to record voice directly. There are some significant advantages to this as a complementary technique:

1. If Jennifer is getting behind she can just record her voice and she or her SSA can translate to text later if needed

2. Notes and annotations can be saved as voice

3. Note taking SW is available that merges the voice and text streams so that it is possible to hear the person’s voice at the same point in time that a note was being written.

Simple gesture recognition

There are alternatives to hand writing recognition that involve significantly less hand movement and much simpler gestures. This software can be used as a complement to the other techniques. It has the following important characteristics:

1. A stylus is used, so it has some of the benefits of handwriting recognition when used on a tablet, i.e. the writing surface is warm

2. The stylus movements are much simpler, generally just straight lines and L shapes

3. The movements can be small or large

4. A game is available to aid in learning

Different types of keyboard

There are a wide variety of specialist keyboards available that allow single handed typing. Gel keyboards for low impact etc. Although the mobility of a device with these keyboards is limited and they are only likely to be of benefit for extended text input.

Text substitution

Used in conjunction with most of the above, this allows short words to automatically be expanded to long ones, or difficult things to type to be substituted with easy things. It has the disadvantage of making people lazy, but it would help Jennifer. For example if you type:

1. dt, then the date and time can be substituted like this: 03/11/2004 @ 02:48 PM

2. dont can be automatically converted to don’t

3. address can be substituted to

Road

Town

County

Postcode

Note taking

A lot of school work is about note taking, research and idea assembly for projects etc. A variety of powerful techniques are available including, some of which have already been mentioned:

1. Ability to record teachers words, make text notes and listen to the teachers words later to reinforce the text note or to clarify the note

2. Ability to take notes using a keyboard, voice recording, handwriting and handwriting conversion to text. Or a mixture of these

3. Ability to annotate scanned in workbooks, text books and handouts, annotations can take any of the above forms

4. Ability to aggregate information from lots of sources, scanned, web, and personal input into a project

All of these mechanisms are integrated in products like:

1. Microsoft One note

2. Microsoft Journal

3. Agilix GoBinder™ For Students

Annotating

Annotating is key for students. In Jennifer’s case especially so as she is likely to focus on annotation of existing material and notes, rather than note taking. The primary technologies available are:

1. Freehand drawing using a digitiser, ideally integrated into the tablet PC format

2. Freehand writing

3. Handwriting converted to text, likely to be used for project work and other formal submissions

4. Voice annotation, (see comments above)

5. Voice to text, (see comments above)

Compilation/Project work

Project work is ever increasingly important. Project work involves:

1. Research

2. Assembly of material

3. Integration of information from diverse sources

4. Annotation of this information

5. Original input

All of these activities are served by Note taking solutions like Microsoft Onenote described previously.

Diagrams and Art

If any activity suited itself to the tablet, stylus driven input model it’s diagramming and art. Software is available that:

1. Converts freehand gestures to lines, circles, flow charts etc

2. Software is available that allows the production or graphs, and other diagrams using mouse or stylus

3. Voice or text annotation or freehand writing annotations can be added to these diagrams

4. They allow a person with reduced dexterity to produce neat well organised work

5. They provide powerful ways to correct mistakes, especially useful for people with low dexterity.

Other considerations

1. It would be great if Jen did not have to carry lots of books, notes etc around with her. A tablet format device with scanned notes and books or eBooks would be ideal.

2. Preparation for the future. The skills learnt in using technology to support the learning process would be invaluable in later life

3. Self sufficiency. The tools described would potentially reduce the level of SSA input, but make Jen more self sufficient and equip her better for later life.

Recommendations

1. Jennifer should continue to spend a significant amount of time reading out loud at school and home, as this will improve her fluency and prepare the ground for voice recognition SW later

2. Jennifer should undertake a trial of a tablet PC, recommended to be Tablet PC version 2004, (available mid year), for approximately 2 weeks for handwriting recognition. Potentially small changes made now in her style could significantly improve successful use later

3. Jennifer should begin to play with voice recognition SW at home, (equipment is available), so that it comes easily and naturally to her when she has to learn it for real

4. Jennifer should begin to play with Microsoft OneNote to keep her personal diary, so that she becomes familiar with navigation, and use, (voice annotation, voice recording etc)

5. Consideration should be given to equipping her with a Tablet PC and handheld scanner during her first year at high school. Access to ebooks and scanned books should be explored through the school and school book suppliers

Microsoft Monitor on the Tablet PC

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 17:03:04 GMT

Microsoft Monitor is probably the best blog out there if you want a real insight into Microsoft and provides consistently high quality challenges to Microsoft as well. This entry on the Tablet PC is typical of what to expect.

Tips for using Lotus Notes and GTD methodology

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 10:51:56 GMT

I recently read Getting Things Done, and wanted to apply it using Lotus Notes. I struggled a bit and to tell the truth I have not fully implemented it even after a month of playing around. I am trying again now that I have a new PDA, better synchronisation software, mNotes and some hints and tips from Eric Mack on using Notes and GTD and on using Notes for task and action management.

Choosing a PDA - can it really be so difficult!

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 16:59:40 GMT

I used to have an IPAQ years ago and despite using it a lot in the beginning I gradually stopped using it mainly for the following reasons:

I did not like having to sync it
It was too big to carry around everywhere
I did not have a case that gave me instant access to it when carrying it around, so it tended to be in a bag
The battery life deteriorated to the point where it could not be relied upon
It did not have enough storage space without a great big expansion jacket add-on

Then along came a Blackberry which I instantly fell in love with, I have talked about my love affair with my Blackberry before in my gadget blog. However I recently started working from home and the subscription costs to the Blackberry service no longer seemed worthwhile so I decided that I would take that money and invest it in something that was a higher priority, I decided I would try a traditional Palm or Pocket PC PDA again.

The process of choosing is a classic example of the tyranny of too much choice.

My experience went something like this:

Every day I changed my mind because I loved my Blackberry so much
Email and Calendar on a PDA always seemed like a compromise compared to the Blackberry, but everything else I wanted from a PDA either was not an option or didn’t work too well, like tasks for example.
I have a company supplied phone and for some reason its incredibly difficult to get GPRS approved so I would have a PDA that was only online at home, making the transition from the BB even more difficult
On the days when I did decide to go the PDA route I alternated between Palm and Pocket PC.
Each day I switched from wanting a lovely large high resolution screen at all costs, to wanting a small Bluetooth and wireless equipped machine

I finally managed to make a decision to swap from the BB as follows:

I gave myself the money from a years BB subscription and asked myself how I wanted to spend it
I decided that it was useful to break the instant email addiction
I decided that when I was out of the house it was most likely that I was not working so getting a device that had many non work related distractions would be a good idea

I made the Palm/Pocket PC decision as follows:

I run Windows 2003 Server on my desktop and I was able to make sure that Active Sync worked fine and that Wireless worked fine with Pocket PC before I made the purchase
I had quite a lot of software left over from my old IPAQ. Particularly eWallet and Pocket Informant which I really liked
I use Lotus Notes at work and came across some fabulous synchronisation software called mNotes and I was able to check this out before I made the decision, (its available for Palm too but I couldn’t test it)
I was familiar with Pocket PC and knew that it was good enough

I made the decision on which form factor to get as follows:

I knew from past experience that having a small device was important if I was to be successful in motivating myself to carry it around
The small devices were cheaper than the half or full VGA models
The VGA models had problems with some applications using the screen in VGA mode that required hacks to get around and whilst these seemed to work for most people they seemed to stop WIFI working for some people
The VGA models were first generation. Next generation models were likely to be much better, but I didn’t want to wait
I decided that if the next generation models were really great then I would do a bit of cascading and make my eldest daughter very happy when she starts High School in September!

I finally decided on an IPAQ 4150 because:

HP has a good reputation and they are going to be in the market for the long term
I had an IPAQ before and that gave me confidence
It is very small
It has a great screen
It has a good software bundle
It has Bluetooth and WIFI
I found a great case, holster style that fits on my belt and is as close to the Blackberry case as you can get. That decision was easy I wanted something exactly like the Blackberry, this is it.
I got a good deal and had money left over for the case and 512MB storage card
Battery life seemed ok, but a high capacity battery is available if I have problems

The Tyranny of Choice

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 16:58:40 GMT

An article in Scientific American, titled The Tyranny of Choice has sparked a considerable debate on the web about the problems faced by western societies as a result of too much choice. In fact the idea is a very old one, I came cross it years ago but it is not mentioned very often by your every day Happiness literature which tends to talk more about internal changes that people can make to the way they think rather than factors from their external environment.

You can sum up the material prior to this article as follows:

The intent of advertising is to make us dissatisfied with what we have
If we meet people who have more than we have, or have different spending priorities or saving priorities then we tend to be dissatisfied with what we have

These two factors are the main environmental factors that effect happiness. In my experience they are even more powerful than having somewhere warm and dry to live and enough food to eat, which I soon got used to. However some people disagree with this and consider these to be essential, (Hygiene factors in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

This new article extends the model a bit with the following concepts:

Too much choice can be a bad thing
Especially if when faced with a choice you spend a lot of time and energy of assessing the options and agonising over them. This is a particular problem now days with the popularity of “what xxx” type magazines and the Internet which:
- Exposes us to ever increasing choice
- Provides access to a huge amount of information on each option
- Provides access to a huge amount of often conflicting opinion about each option
Even worse if when you finally make a decision you then continue to expose yourself to options and opinions that may change the choice you made and lead to dissatisfaction. In fact this can easily happen anyway because often the way that tradeoffs are prioritised when making a decision then change once the decision has been taken and real life experience refines or overturns them
These factors are compounded with easy credit which does not provide a natural limit on peoples capacity to dream and plan to acquire things.

I don’t want to repeat the article, but it’s worth mentioning that it identifies different personality types who are affected by the above to a greater or lesser extent.

There are a few articles that discuss this topic in more detail and I have provided a few of the links here:

Worth repeating is a great quote by the great physicist Richard Feynman, who when faced with the dessert menu in restaurants always chose the chocolate option. As Feynman saw it, while the other desserts might be better, they might not be. On the other hand, the chocolate option was always pretty acceptable - so why fret for ages over making a choice that might be wrong anyway?

In many ways Richards approach mirrors my own, I am happiest and most at ease when I am doing simple familiar things, that I don’t have to think about, but which I know I enjoy. When faced with the option to do something different I will often avoid it to reduce the risk that I won’t enjoy it, rather than take the risk that I will enjoy it more. However when faced with choice I definitely suffer from the problems described here. Read my blog entry about choosing a new PDA for an example.

Writing the living web

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 15:23:56 GMT

I just read a very nicely crafted article describing 10 tips for writing the Living Web. Essentially its about writing blogs. As I progressed I wondered increasingly who could have put together such an article and what motivated them to put in the effort. When I got to then end I found it was Mark Bernstein who is chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, publishers of Tinderbox, a personal content management assistant. I went straight there to have a look, (so its good advertising Mark!), but unfortunarely its for the Mac only, but they are working on a Windows version.

More integration between WinFS and XML

Wed, 23 Jun 2004 13:52:03 GMT

Jon Udell of Infoworld says in his blog:

Meanwhile I've been working on a story about Longhorn, for which I had long and an extremely interesting interview with Quentin Clark, ~~the architect of~~ director of program management for WinFS. I'd like to transcribe the whole thing to post along with the story, when it runs, but the upshot is that Microsoft is planning more and better integration between WinFS and XML -- both in terms of data definition and query -- than I'd previously heard, which is welcome news

I'm pleased too because it means we are one step closer to the vision of WinFS that I have been talking about in my blog. Complementary and not competetive to the web.

He then goes on to talk about the different types of search experience:

It seems clear, though, that whatever can be accomplished by means of what I've come to call "managed metadata," we'll always want that Google effect to be happening in parallel. When asked about the Semantic Web and RDF at InfoWorld's 2002 CTO Forum, Sergey Brin said:
Look, putting angle brackets around things is not a technology, by itself. I'd rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than by forcing humans to write in ways computers can understand.

From my perspective, this isn't an either/or choice. I'd rather make progress by having computers understand what people write and by helping people to write in ways that computers can understand. What's more, I'd like to construe "writing in ways that computers can understand" as a problem for which hybrid SQL/XML technology is a solution. When managed metadata exists, or can be acquired, purely relational query will be powerful. When metadata is implicitly present, for example in XML fragments, XPath and XQuery can leverage it. The combination of relational, XML, and free-text search is the best of all worlds. As I've mentioned before, by the way, Kingsley Idehen has been demonstrating this for several years.

I agree but I don't think its a suprise to anyone that "The combination of relational, XML, and free-text search is the best of all worlds" and its my understanding that that's what MS is trying to achieve with WinFS, but the trick is that they are capturing as much of that relational and XML information automatically or transparently as people go about working with their emails, contacts, calendars, office documents etc.

Rich Versus Reach - my perspective

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 19:04:44 GMT

The Rich versus Reach debate is raging in the blogsphere at the moment. The debate has been very healthy with less of the usual emotional clutter that clogs up most debates that touch on the future of Microsoft. I am an enterprise guy, with a complex home network as well, which gives me an interesting perspective so I thought it would good to pull some of the threads together.

The debate mainly started with a post by Joel on How Microsoft Lost the API War it’s a good article at the start but then begins to lose its focus and starts to make some bold assertions which are hard to substantiate. These are partially rebutted by Olivier Travers in his post Microsoft Lost the API War? Not So Fast and more thoroughly by Robert in his post Seven Reasons Why the API War is Not Lost After All, which comes over a bit evangelistic but is still a good contribution to the debate. Robert introduces a new perspective for me on Avalon where he describes how it may be possible to download XAML directly from the web as an alternative UI experience to HTML but still accessing all of the same server side web services. Piva wraps up most of the discussion with a good summary. Finally there are a few less emotive discussions on the topic of Thick versus Thin which you might like to look at:

So what do I think about it all:

First let’s remember where the debate started which is that Microsoft has missed the boat again, and that the world will be a different place application wise by the time Microsoft finally ships Longhorn. The result Microsoft will have lost its platform advantage and all apps will be delivered to some platform neutral client. My comments:

Organisations, and individuals for that matter do not constantly upgrade their applications, nor do application vendors change platform rapidly. Whilst I have seen a huge number of web applications appear, many of these are new classes of applications that were only practical or economic to deliver via the web, were information delivery applications, or were reach interfaces that complemented the primary rich UI. In recent desktop refresh programmes I have been involved with Win32 applications have dominated and very few of these have had web equivalents that allowed us to ease the migration challenge.
In building Longhorn Microsoft appear to expect this to continue to hold true, hence they:
1. Are providing support for legacy applications
2. Providing UI services today, Winforms, that will still be there in Longhorn and in active use for 5 or so years
3. Expecting it to take 5-10 years before WinFX is considered the mainstream platform
4. I hope providing first class support for web applications and the ability for Longhorn to act as a web services client
5. I hope learning the lessons of the past, see later
I have debated here, my view of the Longhorn value proposition. It’s a lot more than just a platform for the delivery of applications. Longhorn will provide a rich set of UI services, communications services, data integration services etc that will enhance applications in ways that will be difficult to achieve with web apps alone.
There are a whole class of applications, (look at my PC as an example), that need a rich client. This does not of course mean a Windows client but it does mean that some form of rich platform will be around on the desktop for a long time. If this is Longhorn, and for many millions of desktops I guess it will be, then there is a good chance that applications will build on top of these services if there is a strong value proposition there. My feeling is that there will be a value proposition but that it will be a very long time coming for many applications. A lot depends on how much effort Microsoft make to ensure that Longhorn is appealing just with the applications that they supply or hardware vendors bundle with new PCs.
There is a lot of third party activity around thick clients, in the OS client space, (Linux and Windows), and in the application space with Java application platforms.
Personal computing is likely to see a resurgence, with personal information management, device integration, information aggregation from many different sources, news/change/subscription integration from many different sources. Some of this works well server side but some of it is just so much easier at the client side. I have talked a bit about what I want to see here
My hope is that Microsoft and others will make VERY sure that the problems we all face with thick clients and rich applications are largely resolved. With massive improvements in device deployment, device backup and personality restoration, operating system and application maintenance and application delivery needed as a minimum.
Information Bridge Framework gives some hints of the type of UI binding mechanisms we might see with Longhorn and how these can be driven by context that is maintained dynamically on the client based on what you do. I talked a little about IBF here.

Finally let me state my position:

I would like to see less emotion in the debate
Provided Microsoft make Longhorn a first class web client I have no problems with them
There will continue to be a variety of approaches to the delivery of applications, the market will decide based on features and TCO which approach suits which applications
It may be that Microsoft is on to something with their Integrated Innovation concept that will bring real compelling value, it may be something that only a company that sells an OS, Office Suite, Development tools, and application servers etc can see and make happen, good luck to them – Linux and IBM will keep them on their toes.
It maybe that Microsoft invented Integrated Innovation to protect their Client OS and Office suite revenues, in which case they are likely to be caught out in a big way fairly soon. I am debating this point in this blog entry
There are a lot of VERY smart people at Microsoft now, (a lot of them did not start at Microsoft), and they have a lot of money, enthusiasm and vision. Don’t under estimate them.
Microsoft are being extremely BOLD at the moment, they are facing a huge revenue hole over the next couple of years. They are undertaking a huge re-architecting of their platform and the applications that run on it. That boldness maybe born of arrogance, but I suspect not completely!

here is a recent blog entry that gives a fairly thhorough review of the original post by Joel.

Researching Tablet PC

Sat, 05 Jun 2004 18:12:58 GMT

here is a great thread, with links to useful resources on Tablet PC's. Focussed on people who are undecided and want to understand the platform and what it can do for them.

http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=12320

Personal Information Disaster!

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 16:58:05 GMT

I wrote this post then lost it! So this is just a place holder to remind me to get around to writing it again.

links I need are

http://www.novell.com/products/ifolder/

http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/index.html

http://esw.w3.org/topic/PersonalInformationDisaster

http://www.kde.org/

http://oopm.openoffice.org/

http://news.com.com/2009-1016-5103226.html?tag=nl

http://www.adambosworth.net/archives/000021.html

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/office2004/office2004.aspx?pid=highlights

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/06/17.html#a1025

http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween11.html

and my own blog entries

Which Office Suite?

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 16:22:43 GMT

Which Office Suite? Is shaping up to be a fascinating decision making process. I am not ready to expose all of my thinking on this topic but it goes something like this:

Some people think its easy, MS Office alternatives are cheaper and most people don’t use the bells and whistles in Office so people will migrate provided the alternatives meet peoples core needs.
I think its more complex than this and as a minimum the costs of migration, lost productivity, and compatibility and rework need to be factored in
Intertia is a big one in Microsofts favour, for a business that has SW Assurance or an EA, the decision is deferred probably for at least 2-3 years after their EA expires and probably longer if they do a lot of data interchange. That probably means 4-5 years from now!
But this is the trivial stuff. Sure direct and indirect cost comparison is important but I want to consider:
1. How do people really use Office and is it really true that people only use a small amount of the functionality, and if they do, do they all use a different small amount?
2. I also want to consider vision, MS has a vision for Office, What is that Vision?
3. How open is that vision, probably not very! Is the value proposition worth the lock-in? Is the ‘integrated innovation’ that Microsoft are fond of worth the lock-in
4. What’s the vision of the competition, for some of them is it to catch up with Office 97. For others it’s a complete reworking of the concept. So it’s important not to just ask the question can it do what office does!
5. Remember the vision is the important stuff, if the decision is 4-5 years away!

Maybe that all sounds a bit dry, so why do I think it’s so interesting:

Consider how many users of Office there are
Consider how much of Microsoft’s profits come from Office and how desperate MS are to keep that profit coming in, desperate people innovate!
Consider how important Office is to drive MS Operating system sales and how important OS sales are to MS profits, desperate times two!
Consider how desperate the competition is to break the MS Office Suite monopoly
Look at the last few versions of Office, basically a stagnant product, innovating sure, but within a straight jacket imposed by the fact that all of the core Office stuff is effectively done, and improvements are marginal.
All the real interesting stuff requires further client side, client server, peer to peer and device type to device type integration
Hence we see the push in the Office System areas, Mobility, WinFS.

So its integrated integration where the action is from Microsoft's perspective and they are pouring billions into it, how are the competition addressing integrated innovation, or do they have an alternative perspective. How do the differing approaches affect real enterprises and real users, (see this blog for the difference). Thats the question I want to answer!

As a twist the answer may not just depend on the type of person you are, but on the type of device you use. So maybe portable device users and especially tablet device users will have a more compelling reason to stick with MS because for these people the flexible input technologies, online/offiline experience, home/work integration, device integration etc are more important.

Some of the important links are listed below:

Advantages of the OpenOffice.org XML File Format Used by the StarOffice Office Suite

Migrating to StarOffice Software from Microsoft Office

Draft of OO Product Concept Document

Accepted OO Projects

Calendar Feeds

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 16:04:41 GMT

In this blog, I started to talk about the evolution of subscription beyond news. Here is a great example of how this might work. This site describes the RDF Calendar format. It provides a few examples, (I have added a few as well), of why you migt want to subscribe to a calendar, and includes ToDo list examples:

Subscribe to you travel itinery and have the events automatically added to your calendar, flight times etc, and automatically updated
Subscribe to a list of bugs which flow into your todo list
Subscribe to an event schedule, for example football matches
Subscribe to a favorite TV show

More information is available here

Some of the scenarios are listed below:

EventDiscovery
CalendarScraping
TravelTools, PathCross
CalendarSynchronization
ScheduleAnimation
OpeningHoursUseCase
AnnounceOMatic
HTML views of calendars (see datebook2html.xsl in telagent for example)

One more example of the Personal Information Disaster that is the web today!

It's good to see some clarity around the future of the Tablet Platform

Sat, 29 May 2004 23:26:12 GMT

There is a good update on TabletPCTalk on the current status of the Tablet PC. Here is the key bit

We continue to be incredibly proud of and committed to the Tablet, and we are hard at work on developing those technologies for future versions of Windows. In fact, not only do we have a significant development effort underway for Longhorn (we spoke directionally about this at WinHEC 2004), but we have a group of people focused on Tablet technologies for the version of Windows after that.

Good news for Tablet fans.

Another short article that describes whats important about RSS

Sat, 29 May 2004 20:56:37 GMT

This site has just appeared http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com it includes the following bullet list of things that make up RSS.

RSS is...

1. A format.
2. Content management tools that generate feeds in the format.
3. Aggregators and readers that subscribe to the feeds.
4. Search engines and utilities that crunch the information and ideas.
5. Services from technology companies like Microsoft and Apple.

6. Authoritative publications like the BBC, The New York Times, CNET, InfoWorld, PC World, Time, Wired, Salon, Yahoo, Reuters -- that distribute news and opinion in RSS.
7. Many thousands of weblogs covering virtually every aspect of life on this planet.
8. A vast and growing community of thinkers, writers, educators, public servants, and technologists.
The revolution of RSS is what people are doing with it, what it enables, the way it works for people who use technology, the freedom it offers, and the way it makes timely information, that used to be expensive and for the select-few so inexpensive and broadly available.
RSS is the next thing in Internet and knowledge management. It's big. A lot bigger than a format.

Just getting the idea of smart clients, now we have smart documents

Sat, 29 May 2004 16:13:41 GMT

Joe describes the concept of a smart document:

A smart document is a document-based solution which provides a user with help information, auxiliary data, actions and custom tools that are pertinent to WHERE a user is in the document and that are presenteddynamically WHEN a user enters that region of the document.

Then describes the tools that Microsoft is working on to develop Smart Documents here

This is not an area that I know much about, but given the amount of time people spend authoring documents and forms, and the amount of times people get them wrong it looks important. Even more important when document content is tagged in XML and that tagged content can be mined, document content quality will need to increase and it sounds like Smart Document concepts are going to be key to driving that quality improvement.

Giving tablets another try

Sat, 29 May 2004 16:06:52 GMT

I must admit that whilst I love my Tablet I rarely use it for text input. For flexible browsing, reading, reviewing etc its a great machine. For text input and voice recognition the quality is just not there. In this article Tom Yager of Infoworld agrees, and gives the tumbs up to Tablet PC 2005, part of XP SP2, which radically improves the recognition quality and the general usability of text input, although I am not sure about the voice recognition yet. He also notes that hardware innovation is continuing.

RSS Extended Attributes

Fri, 28 May 2004 23:39:45 GMT

I blogged here and here about my ideas for the future of RSS and similar XML based technologies and how I use them myself. I then came across some stuff on RSS extended attributes, and the support for them in NewsGator and outlook 2003. So I built a little demo, here’s how:

First I took a copy of my RSS feed and put it here
I edited it to add a private namespace <rss version="2.0" xmlns:steve="http://example.org/cool">
Then I added an extended attribute Technology to about half of the entries in the feed, for some I set the technology to DATA, and for others to DESKTOP, like this <steve:Technology>Desktop</steve:Technology>
Look at the actual RSS file for more details
If you want you can subscribe to this feed for your own demo, but its not very impressive, so I encourage you to build your own!
Next in NewsGator, select the folder you want and pick Options
Then go to the render tab and the column mappings dialog.
Add a new namespace, in my case its prefix is Steve and its URI is http://example.org/cool
The add a column, name Technology, Type Text and Xpath originalItem/item/steve:Technology
Then create a folder under your RSS root folder called Steve Richards Test Blog
In Outlook click on the new folder and right click on the column headings and pick customize. Add a new custom column called Technology. Fields -> User Defined Fields In Folder -> New Field
Then subscribe to my feed, it should get delivered into the customised folder
The custom attribute should then be displayed for the feed items as they arrive, you can sort, group by etc on this attribute
Here's what it looked like in outlook in the end

Now that was a lot of work for not much gain, but that’s how it is with hand crafted demo’s. If the RSS feeds were already created, and the client side UI a bit more integrated, (i.e. no separate NewsGator and Outlook configuration), and the UI already understood the most common extended attribute sets then you can see that the experience would be pretty rich.

I guess this is exactly where MS want to take us with WinFS and the Longhorn shell, so its worth thinking around the concepts now.

The examples for how to use this stuff that immediately spring to mind are RSS feeds for:

Documents libraries
Film reviews
Book reviews
Scheduled events
Price lists

Poking around the web I found the following:

A proposal of an extended attribute set for scheduled events
A simpler proposal for events
There are quite a few standard attributes to play with as well, not sure if they work the same though, if at all as they don’t have a namespace
This is where I got the idea from

An excellent article on blogging and RSS

Fri, 28 May 2004 21:47:37 GMT

Here is an excellent article on RSS and Weblogs. It has good coverage on discussions and collaboration aspects, which I neglected in my own simillar article.

My working practice

Thu, 27 May 2004 16:57:59 GMT

Over the last few months I have discovered the power and potential of web based syndication formats and news aggregators. The dominant format for web based syndication is RSS, (Really Simple Syndication). I have written a short article on the potential application of RSS and similar formats like Atom on the information processing pipeline which you can find on my blog here:

I have also written about how I have applied the concepts in this article myself and the tools and techniques I have used, you can read about it here. As Architects we do a huge amount of reading so I thought for anyone who has not yet discovered RSS these hints and tips would be useful to get you started, even if you are already familiar with RSS you might find something useful.

My personal information processing pipeline!

Thu, 27 May 2004 16:25:01 GMT

In this blog I talked about a generic concept of operations associated with a conceptual information lifecycle.

however with the advent of RSS, we now have an Open and Simple way for applications to publish, for users to locate and subscribe and for subscribed content to be accessed, processed and ultimately scanned and consumed, discussed, archived and subsequently retrieved

In this article talk about my personal application of tools and techniques to that lifecycle.

Publishing, for all of my web publishing I use Radio Userland, either directly through the Radio Userland Web UI, or through MailEdit which provides an email interface which I can use through my BlackBerry. MailEdit uses a number of directives to define for example the title for the entry and the categories that it belongs to. I use autotext on the BlackBerry to make entering these easier. I tend to write the entries in Word though because the screen area is bigger and because of the spell checking, and then just paste and post. You can read my blog here
Location, like most people I locate RSS feeds in a wide variety of ways. The primary way is through other people’s recommendations, but I also subscribe to some key magazines like eWeek and InfoWorld. You can find a list of the RSS feeds that I subscribe to here. The list in contained in an OPML file. If you download it you will be able to import it into most RSS aggregators. In addition I have a few searches that return their results as RSS feeds. I personally use Feedster as my RSS search engine.
Subscription, I subscribe to all of my RSS feeds, Atom feeds and NNTP feeds using NewsGator which is a plug-in for Outlook 2003. I really like the Outlook environment and use it for my personal email so it seemed a natural choice for me but there are many other options. I will talk later about why NewsGator is such a powerful tool. I use the NewsGator online service as well because it allows me to access my feeds from the web and synchronize all of my machines and keep a single copy of my subscriptions. Subscribing in NewsGator is as simple is right clicking on any feed in IE.
Access and processing, all of my feeds are delivered into a separate local outlook PST file, i.e. not my mail file, each feed has its own folder which is automatically created. For feeds that just have a link to a web site, i.e. they don’t include enough information to assess whether you want to read the item I use a custom style sheet which grabs the web page and saves that instead of the RSS description.
Scanning, I have far to many subscriptions to read them all so its key that I am able to scan through them all really quickly. This is one of the key strengths of Outlook 2003. I simply create a search folder, which shows only unread entries from every folder under my root folder. By doing this I get a single list, (grouped by folder name), which I can very quickly scan. I also create a button on my toolbar that sets all entries in the search folder read, I click this each time I complete a scan. As I scan I do one of two things, I flag an entry for follow up, or I open it in my browser. Once that’s done I am ready to start reading.
Consuming/reading, OK so now I have a few flagged items in outlook which I want to come back to later, so I ignore these, they are easy to find because I have a search folder that aggregates all flagged items. I also have maybe 20-30 articles that I want to read in more detail, write a blog entry about, forward to someone etc. How do I manage all of those open browser windows, I use MyIE2. MyIE2 is a wrapper for IE that implements a tabbed UI, I find this fantastic because it allows me to open as many windows as I want and then come back to them for some serious reading. In addition as I read I often want to open more windows and I can do that in the background with a middle mouse button click on the link. Once all of my background windows have opened I can go and review their tabs. I can delete windows as I read them with a double click on each tab. It gets a bit better than this though, because I have two monitors I have Outlook on may main monitor when I am scanning, MyIE2 sits out of the way but visible on my second monitor. Once I start reading I switch them over. One other great little MyIE2 feature is that if I have 20 web pages waiting to read and I want to restart my PC, no problem, I just save them as a group and reopen the whole group of pages later.
Discussion, I don’t tend to have enough time to do a lot of commenting on other people’s blog entries, but if I do I do it while reading from the web page for that entry.
Archive, all of my blogs sit in a PST file, which is fairly scalable, however I auto-archive items that are a few months old to a separate PST. This makes no difference to retrieval because the tool I use searches both. In addition I often use Google to search online, but I find it easier to find things I have seen and want to find again by reviewing my personal archive.
Retrieval, I have tried lots of local search tools but in the end I settled on X1. X1 indexes all of my outlook feeds, emails, contacts, and files, (and promises to do Notes soon). It has some great features. As you type it shows you the matching documents in real time, its easy to filter the results based on full text, subject, author, folder, date etc. It has a great preview window, which is particularly good for files. X1 just sits on my second monitor waiting to jump into action.

Email enabling SharePoint Document Libraries

Thu, 27 May 2004 08:28:55 GMT

I did'nt know you could do this. But this blog got me started. The feature is a little mis-named because the SP document library is not being email enabled, the Exchange Public Folder is being email enabled, but the document library is collecting attachments and email metadata from emails that arrive in the public folder. Its quite a nice feature really, but true email enabling would also be good. It also appears, since a URL is given to the public folder, that the collection is being done using HTTP, probably WebDAV.

Still leaves me wondering when MS are going to start talking about how WSS and Exchange Public Folders are going to be replaced by some next generation collaborative store, hopefully with a longer life than the Web Storage System, now called the Exchange Storage System to denote its more limited ambitions.

Microsoft: Linux isn't cheaper

Wed, 26 May 2004 22:00:40 GMT

Yet another Linux isn't cheaper story from Microsoft. I don't get the focus on cost all of the time. To me cost is a small part of the story. The Linux/Microsoft debate needs to consider the following in this order, (client side):

The application portfolio that needs to be delivered to the client device. In most enterprises there will be hundreds of client applications, many of these won't be deliverable on Linux even using emulation.
Whether you believe in Microsoft's value proposition. Only Microsoft has the 'integrated innovation' value proposition that links client, office tools, infrastructure services and application services. If you buy into that value proposition then you are probably going to continue to use office and Windows. My view right now is that MS is doing a pretty poor job of telling us what that value proposition is in their next generation products, I think because they are still figuring out how to move forward when they are dragging such a legacy behind them
Whether the user-base can be segmented. Its likely in every enterprise that some users will be best suited to Windows Portables, some Windows Desktops, some Linux and some thin client technologies or one sort or another. If the user-base can be easily segmented, and ideally if different types of users occupy different types of building real-estate and if enterprise wide applications can all be cost effectively delivered thin to all desktop types, then and only then, is it likely to be cost effective to segment the user-base in terms of client technology.
Training, conversion and lost productivity. If your business would be impacted by small scale disruption across large numbers of people, (which is what you should expect for 3-6 months), then its probably not cost effective to change. However if like many businesses you believe that these small scale disruptions have no effect on your bottom line because they just consume time that would otherwise be frittered away browsing the web etc then this is probably not an important factor for you.
What do your users use at home. Uniquely Microsoft has its users homes as a training ground. Many people play more at home 'honing' their productivity than they do formal training at work. Home use is useful, and changing their environment at work could cause resentment. Right now Linux is nowhere in the home market, although its growing its a long term trend and is unlikely to effect decisions in the next couple of years.

The decision on office suite, needs to be factored in here, and it is in point 2, however whilst linked different but similar criteria apply.

Information Bridge Framework

Wed, 26 May 2004 18:32:10 GMT

My first thought when I cam across IBF, (who could miss it!), was that it was another Microsoft thick client solution. I am still not sure but it looks like it might be a bit more creative than that for the following reasons:

I have always been a big advocate of standardizing the infrastructure capability layer and integrating it with the line of business layer. That way an enterprise has its infrastructure in common, regardless of which process or division of the company you work in. IBF looks like it addresses that need pretty well
I have also felt that the ad-hoc processes and information and collaborative processes are under emphasized in businesses that have a lot of formal mega processes that they like to optimize. I talked about this in another blog entry. IBF allows you to integrate ad-hoc and formal business processes.
It seems that a lot of thought has gone into making the maintenance of the IBF client environment as 'thin' as possible. It still requires a client component to get started though. I need to look into this more to be sure but it looks hopeful.
Its all about consuming web services, caching them at the client, and rendering them in a standard way. This seems to be to be a major part of what WinFS, and the Longhorn Shell are all about so its good to see some early thinking in this area. I have talked about this a little here and here
Although its being hyped Microsoft seem to be doing a good job of positioning it appropriately
In a way its a bit like gmail, parsing email content for example and providing link to web services that might be appropriate, (in gmails case adverts but its easy to see the similarity), so it will be interesting to see how server side equivalents of the IBF idea take off now that Microsoft have given people the idea.

It just works!

Wed, 26 May 2004 18:14:21 GMT

Great little piece of writing by Scott about the fact that some stuff just does not work easily enough and how people will seek out maybe pretty complex ways of doing things just to be confident that it will work first time every time. This is right up my street, I really like things that 'Just work' and MS and the Linux community need to really focus on that effortless simplicity. For inspiration I look at the Nokia phone UI, (6310i in my case), and the Blackberry which I think is inspirational from a UI design standpoint and reliability standpoint. How much of what we use in IT every day from any supplier would pass the test, effortless, reliable, intuitive etc and to what extent are these attributes sacrificed for fancy features, customizability etc.

One of the most impressive things about Scott's post? He wrote it all on his Tablet PC using the new input panel in SP2, his experience 'it just worked', that was my experience to with the alpha, except in Lotus Notes which kept crashing, so I had to uninstall it!!

WS-Federation and other Web Services, an area where MS seem to be getting things right?

Wed, 26 May 2004 16:03:06 GMT

PC World talks a bit about Web Services for identity management. The list of vendors demonstrating interoperability, (Netegrity, Oblix, RSA Security, OpenNetwork Technologies, and Ping Identity), as well as MS and IBM is pretty impressive.

Web Services seems to be one of the few areas where MS seems to be getting its story straight, if my impression is correct:

1. Very involved in the standards process

2. Perhaps to the point of dominance of the standard process?

3. Building great tools and middleware in VS and Indigo, so that their platform is the best way to implement the standards

4. Building an innovative client environment for the caching and presentation of web services, WinFS and Avalon/WinFS Shell

5. Integrating Office and Collaboration processes with line of business processes, Information Bridge and InfoPath

That’s not to say that there are no problems in these products. But the story looks fairly coherent at least. Have a look at this MS document if you want more details.

Exchange Futures

Wed, 26 May 2004 15:46:11 GMT

Infoworld talks to David Thompson, a Microsoft corporate vice president who has been in charge of the Exchange Server group since early this year. It maybe just me but I get the distinct impression that the Exchange Group is in a bit of a state. They don't seem to really know where storage is going because of the flux around Longhorn server, and they don't seem to know where to take Public Folders and other Document management like capabilities because they are dropping the old store and because of 'competition' from SharePoint services. Core email does not have much growth potential in it, so all that seems to be left to work on is Edge Servers! Not a very exiting roadmap!!

Last year I thought that the 'big thinking' that must be going on in Microsoft was starting to pay off in terms of well architected products that did not overlap and were being rebuilt from the ground up. Now I am not so sure, I see the delays in the foundation layers, ie SQL Server and Longhorn Server, triggering panic in the Office tools and Collaboration space, who are probably starting to think more short term about customer driven next versions, rather than strategic re-architecting of products.

Longhorn Search

Wed, 26 May 2004 15:33:33 GMT

Chris Sherman at SearchEngineWatch talks a bit about Longhorn search and links to a Channel 9 video clip where you get some glimpses of how search is going to be implemented in Longhorn. What’s clear right now is that they are:

1. Planning for a search experience that operates at multiple levels, local, intranet, internet etc

2. That at the local level integration and meta data is going to be key. The example sited on the video goes something like this: "find me all of the PowerPoint presentations, attached to meeting invites that I attended in the last month attended by someone from Shell". This links together a lot of WinFS metadata.

3. Interestingly almost every WinFS search scenario is based on integration of other things with Outlook, for example, "Where I was at a particular time", information or contact information or email context.

4. The next version of Outlook and its integration with WinFS and some sort of super journal in WinFS are going to be key

In my case, for now at least, I have settled on X1 for the following reasons:

I like to search in scopes, ie emails, files
The type down experience is great
The ability to filter based on the content of fields is ace
The preview window, Inside Out viewers, at the killer feature for me
They are planning to support Lotus Notes in the next version

More integration of Microsoft Products?

Wed, 26 May 2004 15:22:54 GMT

Microsoft Watch describes the trend at Microsoft towards more integration of Microsoft Server products. Although the areas of integrations described don't seem that great to me:

Management packs for all Windows Server System products that will allow them to be managed by Microsoft Operations Manager 2005;
Windows Installer and Windows Update support for all Windows Server System products; and
Consistent methodologies and prescriptive guidance support for all members of the Windows Server System family

There's more on this topic here:

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3359261

However whilst the Architect in me likes the idea of integrated products, built in a layered infrastructure fashion, with each layer isolated by standards, I don't see this happening with Microsoft. What I see is ever tighter integration between products, locking the products into a set that all need to be purchased from MS, and all upgraded together to get real business advantage. At enterprise scale linked upgrades of products always spells trouble, (making the business case, getting the agreement, managing the disruption, risk), and the assumption of everything from Microsoft is equally troubling, unless their is a REALLY compelling value proposition, and that’s definitely not evident today.

Loosely integrated products by contrast, ie those that rely on stable and open standards, IMAP, POP, LDAP, RSS? etc seem to provide for good integration and great flexibility and innovation. Of course the areas that Microsoft is integrating are not well served by standards, and even if they were the standards are probably not very mature and stable, however the principle still applies. Loose integration wins in my book over tight integration. Microsoft always goes for tight.

Microsoft Monitor also discusses the integration point at some length, although you have to talk to an analyst to get the real detail

RSS and its role in Information Management

Wed, 26 May 2004 14:44:09 GMT

I have written a short article on the subject of, RSS and its role in Information Management, where I describe a conceptual concept of operations, involving the following processes:

Recently however with the advent of RSS, we now have an Open and Simple way for applications to publish, for users to locate and subscribe and for subscribed content to be accessed, processed and ultimately scanned and consumed, discussed, archived and subsequently retrieved

and show how RSS contributes to making them more effective. In a later article I will describe how I have applied RSS and associated tools to my own real information management process.

Who will Longhorn appeal to?

Fri, 05 Mar 2004 22:35:48 GMT

Right now it seems to me that Longhorn is being targeted at three communities:

Home users, particularly those looking for a great multi-media experience
Knowledge workers, especially those at the top end, who aggregate, integrate and assemble lots of information from many different sources
Mobile workers, for whom thin client computing solutions don't work and to whom the blend or personal and corporate features will appeal.

It’s got lots of other features that will appeal to the mass of task and structured task workers in corporate environments, but true thin client approaches will probably appeal more strongly for these users IT managers, particularly with the current wave of smart client rich UI toolkits that run on top of a JVM.

So how might this pan out in reality:

Microsoft might get 20% market share from portable users
A maximum of 20% market share from high end knowledge workers, who are not mobile
Maybe 20% that it picks up just so they can use the same environment as the rest of the people in the office

So maybe that leaves 40% of users who will either switch to thin clients, unless Microsoft can convince businesses to stick with them because of the benefits of standards, or consistency with their home environment. A tough sell as lots of them will probably want to ‘prove a point’ to Microsoft.

If it’s going to achieve capturing this wavering 40% what do Microsoft really need to do:

Make sure they DO capture the home market in a big way with Longhorn
Make sure they convince their current huge number of ISVs to create Longhorn applications
Make sure that Longhorn and Office 12 really do deliver compelling benefits right out of the box to the simple stuff that real people do every day and not just the stuff that appeals to the techno geeks.

What about the competition:

Well for me Linux is still trying to get where Microsoft is today in terms of doing the basic things VERY simply and easily and its going to take a couple more years to get there, and even then its unlikely to get the home market penetration it needs
Linux does not have the application portfolio to allow it to compete head on in current migrations, and has an incredible battle on its hands if its to get that application portfolio in place in Longhorn timescales
If the above are true then Linux is really competing for the Task and Structured task workers and the Developers, pretty much the same market that Star Office is going after today. But this is the same market that the thin client device is going after.

My view:

I think Windows, in the form of Longhorn will continue as the main stream general purpose client OS
I think Linux on the desktop will fail to complete with thin clients
I think that Linux will succeed in the special purpose client OS space, much the same as it is in the special purpose server space today
I think Microsoft has a HUGE battle on its hands to convince big enterprises that it can be trusted OR that its value proposition is so compelling that they can afford to take the risk.

I admit that I like some of the stuff that Microsoft is doing, but they have a long way to go before they convince me on the last point. Unfortunately change is required, and if Microsoft was not doing Longhorn or Longhorn did no succeed who would have the ability to drive the change through.

As a final thought, look at the web, and the very small number of things that it’s possible to assume as universally available reliable standards. DNS, TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML 3.2? maybe a bit more at the network level, but not much over a period of decades. Then look at what Microsoft are trying to establish as a pervasive set of services available on every client! However maybe that’s why nothing should be done at the client and it should all be server side, but that’s the subject of a different debate. As a lead in to the inevitable questions, I think that what Linux, or perhaps more accurately GNU has achieved in terms of a pervasive set of services available on every client is incredible so far!

Another WinFS article that starts to help

Fri, 05 Mar 2004 08:26:23 GMT

One of the topics I am really interested in with WinFS is to distinguish between the client side and the server side storage needs. This interview is a good example of client side integration with WinFS.

http://www.searchengineguide.com/beal/2004/0204_ab1.html

I am also keen to understand whether as security and application isolation becomes a fundamental part of the OS, and everyone has computers at home whether we will see a merging of business and personal computer use within corporates as has happened already with phones and PDA's.

The 'my life bits' research gives some insights into this.

http://research.microsoft.com/barc/mediapresence/MyLifeBits.aspx

Sharepoint and RSS and more ...

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 11:41:08 GMT

Just came across this great Blog that describes how to really exploit WSS. One of the interesting points in here is about how to reuse existing WSS functions using for example XSLT, rather than writing custom web parts.

Several useful things, but the one I liked was the web part to present lists and document libraries as RSS feeds.

http://www.asaris-matrix.com/sweber/playground/downloads/forms/DispForm.aspx?ID=6

A good description of WinFS?

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 09:19:32 GMT

I have been looking for a good description of how Longhorn would behave in a client server environment. The Longhorn evangelists have been posting some scenarios, but they don't completely work for me because they are not general enough to allow me to easily extend them to my own environment. However I have pretty much summed it up in my own mind.

Longhorn is being designed to be a great client to web services
Indigo will be the best infrastructure for interacting with those web services
WinFS will be the persistent store/cache for web services data
Avalon will be a great presentation engine for the data in the WinFS store/cache

This may be obvious, or of course it may be wrong, anyway I had not seen it put that way before. Maybe more importantly as I looked around for information in this area I came across Adam Bosworth's Weblog, and particularly his discussion of his ideal Web Services browser. To me his browser cache sounds exactly like WinFS. In fact so much like WinFS that his scenarios are better WinFS examples than the ones Microsoft is publishing. Read them here:

http://www.adambosworth.net/archives/000014.html

The interesting thing about Adams description is that he does not seem to see the link?

What would I like?

Sun, 29 Feb 2004 13:23:49 GMT

In my previous blogs, I talked about my concerns over the neglect of employees productivity and my personal productivity challenges. In this blog I talk about some of the simple things I would like. Its interesting that lots of them sound quite easy to achieve, and some of them work right now if only the systems were configured that way.

A single inbox, that works all of my email services and with the appropriate directories I need to access
A single calendar, that aggregates and synchronises calendar information from different sources and allows me to interact with different resource reservation and freebusy services
A single task list, that aggregates tasks from different sources and responds to the source with task progress and completion information
A single contact database, that synchronises with the server side record if there was one
A single presence/IM environment, that integrates with my contact database
A single way to get subscriptions, RSS seems the likely candidate, whether its subscriptions to company announcements, or WSS lists, or search results, or changed web sites
Then a place to make notes, link stuff together, annotate
a way to record everything I have touched in any way, has written by me, read by me, been pushed to me, subscribed to by me, and store it in a way that makes it easy to find again and easy to backup, perhaps peer to peer, ie to another machine in my home, rather than just to that expensive server infrastructure in my company.
an easy way to share subsets of the above with my peers
Then a UI for it all like the Avalon/WinFS stuff people are showing that allows me to search across all of this, group/visualise it in anyway I can imagine etc.

All of the above need to be integrated, so tasks can be converted to email, emails into tasks etc and other applications need to interact with them. This sounds fairly easy. Web Services standards for handling tasks, calendar items, emails etc. A standard client side representation like that in WinFS, standard UI components that all spps can leverage client side. Standard ways to deliver subscriptions, but more extensible than RSS, because I need more metadata associated with the items in the subscription.

Then I need something similar for files, probably a lot like WebDAV on the server side, but with support for pulling down all that rich meta data that’s on the server, remembering which server the files came from, understanding how to work offline/synchronise, version control etc.

Finally I want my devices to be in sync, without having to think about it, and if I get a new device I just want to be able to tell it who I am, and it rebuilds all of the above from some peer to peer replica.

This sounds a lot to me like Longhorn, but probably not explained as neatly and tidy. However I don't see the Longhorn value proposition being communicated in these terms, they are still trying to sell to the corporate audience, not to the individual. Maybe that comes later.

My personal productivity challenge

Sun, 29 Feb 2004 12:49:03 GMT

In my previous post In Pursuit of personal and team productivity I talked about general problems. In this post I talk briefly about my problems. My company:

Uses Notes for email and some applications
Has an extensive Intranet for functional web sites, news, standards etc
Uses Plumbtree as its portal and to host communities, some are still hosted on Notes
Some of the projects I am working on use MS Project Server
Others use just MS Project
My company uses Lotus Sametime for IM
One of my project teams uses Microsoft Exchange IM
External contacts use MSN IM
Some of the projects use a Windows file server for project files
My function uses a Notes Database as its repository for Work In progress and approval
Some of the projects use WSS, for documents, risks, issues and changes
Some use spreadsheets
Some of the projects use an in house developed collaboration server
My customers use even more systems, some MS Team Services, others use Documentum

What do I use, in addition to all of the above:

I use my local disk for all my work in progress, archive, to read, to review, to watch etc
The family email is accessed using Outlook express
My personal email is accessed using Outlook, because I use Newsgator for RSS
I use Onenote for note taking and for my daily log
I use Radio for my blog
I use Office 2003 Pro most of the day

I have a range of different devices, which I talked about here and here.

I think this mess is pretty typical, but one thing I know - it certainly is not productive!

In pursuit of personal and team productivity

Sun, 29 Feb 2004 12:26:54 GMT

There is a conflict between people and the companies they work for, (well probably lots, but I'm only going to talk about one of them). The bigger the enterprise a person works for the more focussed that company is likely to be in central server centric computing, central support, consolidation, BPM, single sources of information etc. All very important for sure, but these companies will probably not even consider team productivity and almost certainly personal productivity as worthy of investment. These companies are on a crusade to save money, real money, i.e. savings off the bottom line. 1 hours labour saving per month for a big company project would be amazing.

Individuals on the other hand, especially information/knowledge workers will happily spend hours a month honing their personal environments to suite their needs, aggregating, storing, and restructuring the data that they are researching, or creating. They often invest their own money on Home PC's, PDA's, Task management Software, List Management Software, PC search software, Laptop to server file synchronisation tools etc. In the pursuit of personal productivity they probably spend more than 1 hour per week.

So how come individuals spends perhaps 4 times longer trying to make themselves more effective, than big companies are trying to save through server side business process reengineering projects, or major application upgrades.

In my view it comes down to three things:

The tools available to information workers are so poor that people live in a state of perpetual frustration, trying to find an environment that lets them aggregate, integrate, process and create information more effectively.
The people working on server side improvement projects assume people only work on their project, process or team. When often people are working with such a wide range of different web sites, document management systems, team sites, portals, networked file systems, personal file systems and trying to access them through a range of different devices.
The benefits that people perceive they will see if they could only get the two issues above resolved are so amazing, not just in raw productivity terms, but especially in quality and team coordination, that they feel very motivated to continue to strive for them.

Lots of peopole have tried to solve this problem.

Server side guys have taken the portal approach, which at best integrates a few processes, or a few fragments of information
The client side guys have created ever richer PIM's, but made the mistake of assuming everyone will work only in their PIM
The device guys have given us an ever greater number of devices to fragment our information across

Some players have realised that the only way to solve this problem is at the platform and standards level, on both clients and servers:

You can see some evidence of this with groove which provides a rich set of platform services, and some real application functionality on top that addresses just this area. But the platform is not popular enough to really transform the way people work outside a few enlightened environments, and of course the platform costs quite a bit of money, for bottom line centred enterprises to invest in it.
A slightly different approach is taken by the guys developing Chandler, which is an open source set of platform services, which will eventually be funded by layered application vendors building on top of the platform. However its unlikely to become pervasive with such a small team behind it, although the vision looks great, if a bit limited in its scope, (given the size of the team though a small scope is essential if they are to ever deliver).
Everyone continues to invest in full text search and its longer term accuracy as more metadata becomes searchable as data migrates to XML format, but search is still such a blunt instrument.
Microsoft have a grand vision with Longhorn at the client end, with WinFS as the store utilising the Shell and Avalon presentation services. Reaching out and integrating a vast array of server side environments exposed through Web Services, but its a long way off. Microsoft is certainly taking a platform centric approach, and of course will deliver a slew of compelling applications to exploit that platform. They are also in a unique position with the release of Longhorn to invest in the marketing of a new way of working, and to present the commercial opportunity for thousands of ISVs to exploit that platform to tempt people to upgrade their applications.

So what’s my take on the future, cautiously optimistic:

I think Microsoft has learnt some lessons in the past and will do a great job of delivering the Longhorn platform and some great applications that leverage that platform
I think Microsoft is the only company who has a vision of the future that takes an integrated and balanced view of client side and server side computing
I think Microsoft is VERY strongly motivated to re-invent client side computing, which has hardly evolved for nearly a decade
I think the Linux community needs to seriously look at what Microsoft is doing to the platform, and build standard services of the type provided by WinFS especially if its not to get left behind still trying to complete with XP when Microsoft has completely moved the goal posts.
I think Longhorn lives or dies by how good it is at aggregating and integrating a mix of client and server side information. Which means that it needs to be the premier client for aggregation using for example RSS as it evolves. All Microsoft’s applications need to start exposing their capabilities in a standard way, again RSS and Windows Sharepoint Services comes to mind. If WSS provided an RSS interface to subscriptions, lists, document libraries etc, and had come offline support it would be transformed.

Ray Ozzie, of Notes and Groove fame provides some good commentary in this area as well and Adam Bosworth's Weblog discusses some of the server to client interactions as well.

A releated area is support, almost everyone prefers to receive certain types of support from their friends and their peers, who they know to have particular expertise or who understand their needs and environment. In a survey I did about 5 years ago over 90% of people preferred to receive support from their local "super user" rather than call the help desk. However in the central/standards dominated corporate IT environment this support model is not encouraged, which means that it is not facilitated and made efficient. It still happens of course, (a 90% preference is too strong), it is just not done very well. This is a real shame because peer support tools like Microsoft's remote assistance, discussion groups, expert groups etc can be very effective. Again a few years ago I setup a support forum for my corporate, that provided both peer support and support directly from the developers and architects responsible for the environment. In many ways it was much like some internet forums today and like blogs, in that it put the developers and users in direct contact. The affects were amazing in the goodwill generated within the user community and the improvement in quality that the developers were able to achieve with this direct linkage to their users. I will blog more on this whole area soon.

Finally I would love some of these Longhorn Evangelists to start talking about the future for Knowledge workers, and not just about how Longhorn and Indigo will affect vertical business processes. However maybe that would mean revealing some commercial in secret stuff about the next version of the Office System and Longhorn Server.

IT Directions

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 11:08:03 GMT

I work in Infrastructure Architecture, and used to be a Chief Architect for a BIG account for a BIG SI company. It was a great job, but my condition - AOSD - has meant I can not take the strain anymore. However that does not stop me thinking, so I thought I would blog about some of my ideas and concerns over whats happening with IT infrastructure, especially in big businesses.

Some of the topics I would like to talk a bit about are:

The whole, Thick, Thin, Smart client debate
The information worker, Longhorn, Portals, Office etc
The tradeoff between flexibility, productivity and cost