Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

Integrating Search with Office Applications -- New from Office Labs

I discovered a great tool recently thanks to a colleague at Microsoft:  an add-in from the Microsoft Office R&D group known as Office Labs called Search Commands.

It's a tool that uses search to simplify navigating the new user interface in Office 2007 by dropping a "Command Search" tab into the ribbon in the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications.   This will be another useful tool in helping users make the transition to the new version of Office by allowing them to easily search for and find commands that may be hidden or in an unfamiliar place.

Here's how it works: 

1. Download a small (< 3 MB) file from Microsoft Office Labs. [direct link to download]

2. Install the add-in.

3.  Fire up Word, Excel, or PowerPoint 2007.

4.  Click on the "Search Commands" tab in the toolbar.

5.  Enter in the search window the command or function you are looking for.

6.  Select the command you want from the results, shown in the ribbon.

7.  Extra bonus:  note the little flyover that provides details about where on the ribbon to find the command in the future.

Between this tool and another Office Labs tool called Community Clips that allows you to create, find, and share screen recording videos to create on-the-fly tutorials for colleagues or others, Office Labs is working hard to smooth the way for broader adoption of Office by enterprise customers.

OK, I'll Admit It, I Had a Mullet

Or maybe it was a "mulldina," or pseudo-mullet.  In any case, it was a bad, 1980s-style, hockey-player kind of haircut.  Hard to remember -- it was fairly long ago, and (thankfully/hopefully?) there's not a lot of photographic evidence out there.  At the time, it was popular and of course I thought I looked OK.

I was thinking about mullets ("business in the front, party in the back") because a blog post I read today from IBM about tag clouds referred to Jeffrey Zeldman's original blog post making the tag cloud/mullet comparison.  Two interesting points:

1.  IBM has released a tool for creating tag clouds, a commonly-used web tool for visually representing word frequencies in selected text by sizing words according to their frequency.  It's called Many Eyes, and some of its capabilities (such as the ability to quickly draw up comparison tag clouds for two pieces of text) are bound to be highly useful, while some are just plain cool.  Thanks to Bill Ives' blog for the reference to this tool.

2.  In the Many Eyes blog, a reference is made to "one wag" calling tag clouds "the mullets of Web 2.0."  I thought that was hilarious, and a bit of quick research shows that wag is likely Jeffrey Zeldman.  The interesting part, to me, is that he did so in April, 2005.  For someone to be anticipating three years ago that web designers would be as sick of tag clouds today as we were of mullets, mood rings or the Macarena is pretty prescient. So, props to the cool kid. 

However, I'm not a designer, just a business user, so for me utility begets ubiquity.  Tag clouds are a super-useful device for efficiently navigating through tagged or indexed data using an easy-to-use visual tool.  For better or for worse, tag clouds are not going away until a new, easier convention replaces them, no matter what the cool kids say.  As the baseball player Yogi Berra famously stated about a Minneapolis restaurant, "Nobody goes there any more.  It's too crowded." 

Maybe IBM can give even the cool kids something to like about tag clouds again with Many Eyes.

Geek Reads 2008.3: The Big Switch

I was fortunate a few weeks ago to attend a breakfast meeting where the featured speaker was Nicholas Carr, he of the recent Atlantic Monthly article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and the famous and controversial essay (and, later, book) "IT Doesn't Matter."

The topic of Mr. Carr's presentation was his new book:  "The Big Switch," which I received at the event, took home and devoured.  The quality of the writing affirmed Mr. Carr's place at the top left of my PageFlakes "A-list Blogs" page, the digital equivalent of "Page 1, above the fold" in the world of newspapers (remember newspapers? see pp 151-157 in the book).

Carr builds on many of themes first surfaced in "IT Doesn't Matter," such as the metaphor of electricity to describe the evolution of information technology from an in-house component of the business to an outsourced utility that organizations can obtain more efficiently from a utility-style "grid."  Carr's historical research recalls many of Doug Burgum's keynote speeches at Microsoft events -- he grabs an historical figure of great relevance to the story but little notoriety, then he weaves a great story around an inflection point that this person created. Everyone has heard of Thomas Edison, but who knew about Samuel Insull?

Similarly to Sun's Eric Schmidt ("The Network is the Computer") expression in the 1990s, Carr puts forth the idea of the "World Wide Computer" to describe how computing power, human intelligence, and programmability of applications on the Internet can be put to use under the utility model he envisions. 

Carr goes on to review some of the consequences of this phenomenon, including:

• Companies executing against this model today (e.g., Salesforce.com, WorkDay.com, Amazon Web Services, Flickr, 3Tera, etc.)
• Broad societal and economic effects of the rise of the  "World Wide Computer" (e.g., concentration of wealth and control, fragmentation, polarization, crowdsourcing)
• Security and risk related to the "World Wide Computer," (e.g., the death of privacy as we know it)
• changes in how we as humans think and process information -- a precursor to an idea explored in greater depth in the Atlantic article

The last paragraph of the book was possibly my favorite.  In it, Carr describes technological change as generational change.  Remember this, you who have young workers entering the workforce:

"The full power and consequence of a new technology are unleashed only when those who have grown up with it become adults and begin to push their outdated parents to the margins."

In speaking with knowledge workers and executives, I often remind them that they will soon have a workforce who has never known a world without tools like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.  "The Big Switch" details quite ably, in the language of economics, history, business and technology, what we should be prepared to do about it.

Great article, but I just skimmed it

In this month's Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr explores the notion that the always-on, always-at-our-fingertips nature of the Internet in general and Google specifically is changing the way we, as humans, process information.  It's worth a read (not just a skim, seriously -- really READ it), and perhaps a re-read. 

Nick Carr is one of the most skilled people on the planet at thinking and writing about this type of subject matter, and I found it interesting that when I met and chatted with him at MIT last week where he was plugging his book, he said he had quit Twitter.  We didn't talk about it much at the time, but Twitter is precisely what brings out the feeling in me that he writes about in the article:  that all of my ideas and discourse are getting distilled/compressed/dumbed down into, and consumed in, sub-140-character chunks.

I hope I can make it through his book in my dumbed-down state.  Nick stays top left on my PageFlakes "A" list blogs page.

Ramp Up Your SharePoint Training

 

A common question from customers interested in SharePoint is:  "How do we get our people 'SharePoint ready'?"

In addition to the content rolled out in conjunction with this year's SharePoint Conference, our team at KMA has developed some of our own materials containing specifics such as, for example, local training partners, and it's been well-received.

A newly released resource (scroll down from top of post -- it's there!), from the Microsoft SharePoint Team, is a summary document definitely worth a look if you're focused on ramping up your organization's SharePoint skills.  It provides a fine starting point.  Enjoy!

[Note:  Also of note in the article -- the SharePoint Team will have a booth at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.  I hope to attend if schedule permits!]

Clever Idea: Metadata Included

I encountered an interesting innovation this week.  I was at MIT to hear Nicholas Carr, one of my favorite writers/bloggers/thinkers about technology, speak.  While people were gathering and chatting before the presentation, I met a few people and we exchanged business cards.  One of the attendees shared with me his business card, and it was unique.  Not just unique in the "I've never seen that before" kind of way (although it was), but unique in the "tailored precisely for this event" way.

The typical business card I encounter typically has the following elements:

• name
• title
• company name
• mailing address
• phone #
• fax #
• e-mail address
• [optional elements:  blog, IM, etc.)

This one added two elements:

1. a picture (more on this in a moment)
2. a quick blurb saying where we met: "We met at T-Systems Event at MIT 5/29/08"

I thought the blurb was ingenious.  It instantly added context to that card by placing the person at a specific event, and it saved the recipient from having to do what I often do after events:  jot down some notes about where I met this person on the back of his/her card.  This addition clearly reflects a super-organized person who tailors his business cards to every networking event/opportunity.  The downside, of course, is that it seems impossible, even given typical high-quality business printing capability, to create the letter-quality, printed-on-80-pound-stock business cards that are de rigueur in most businesses. I found the tradeoff to be worthwhile in this instance, although if I made up cards like this, I would likely keep a cache of traditional, higher-quality business cards on hand for more formal customer meetings.

Of the picture, I am a little more skeptical.  Generally, in my experience, real estate agents are some of the only people I've seen who can get away with having their picture on the face of their business card, and even then it is often, for lack of a better word, cheesy.  Of course, my experience is relatively parochial (I've lived in the Northeastern US all my life), so I'd welcome dissenting comments/points of view from readers farther afield who've had different experiences. The one mitigating factor in this case is that it complements the blurb well -- the next time I am at an MIT networking event, I am more likely to recognize only this person's face and recall where we met.

It was just a tiny idea, but clever - one often finds innovation in places (and at events) like this.  My old habits are hard to break, however, and I'll bring traditional business cards, and a pen, to future networking events.

Packaged SharePoint Deployment Planning Services

I was thrilled today to see the long-awaited announcement of some packaged service offerings for SharePoint rolled out by Microsoft.  The program is called SDPS, or SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, and it is being offered only by Microsoft Consulting Services and select partners who meet strict eligibility requirements (e.g., certifications in SharePoint and competencies in portals, collaboration, content management, search, etc.).

What does it mean to you as a Microsoft customer?  If you license your products under Microsoft's Software Assurance program (SA), you are eligible to use services dollars you receive as a benefit under SA to fund structured SharePoint planning engagements of 1, 3, 5, 10, or 15 days in length to do things like build proofs of concept, conduct architectural design sessions, etc.  It also means you get to select among a small group of highly qualified services organizations, armed with best practices and well-vetted tools available only to SDPS partners, to deliver these engagements.

If you're considering going down the SharePoint path and you license your Microsoft products under SA, you may find the SDPS program highly worthwhile.  It is designed to take risk and friction out of the process of deploying SharePoint.  However, this is only part of the equation and no substitute for actually knowing what you intend to do with all these wonderful SharePoint technologies.  :-) 

A few starting points I'd recommend to help clarify and prioritize your objectives if commencing a SharePoint project:

1. Clever Workarounds' excellent recent series on "Why SharePoint Projects Fail." Paul touches on, among a million other good points, the importance of having a well-defined set of business goals before launching a SharePoint project. (He also mixes in some snark and makes it fun)
2. Microsoft's Infrastructure Optimization tools, which you and your partner can use to ascertain your level of optimization around functional areas such as Unified Communications, Business Intelligence, or Search.  To the classicists among you, think "Capability Maturity Model" as applied to business productivity tools.  While not a "cure-all," it provides a structured way of assessing and prioritizing many of the options you have as an IT professional or knowledge worker regarding where to spend your time and resources.

Our firm aggressively pursued this program and became (I was told at the time, in November 2007) the second partner in the world signed up to provide these services, but the program itself was just officially rolled out this week.  We've invested heavily in these areas and have been champing at the bit to execute against this!

Web 2.0 Tools Update

I love the part of the show House Hunters on HGTV where, after the buyers have decided on one of the three properties, the show's producers come back and revisit the new homeowners to see how they've settled into their new home.  In this post, I'll attempt a similar "re-visit" of some of the Web 2.0 tools I've blogged about over the past few months:

Tool	Date of Original Post	Rating 1 – 5, (5 = best)	Comments	UserID
Del.icio.us	11 March 2008	5	Immensely useful for storing and sharing bookmarks and tags.	mikegil
Taglocity	10 April 2008	3	Useful, pretty to look at, but hard to keep up with volume	n/a
Twitter	10 April 2008	4	Wickedly addictive, but still not clear on usefulness	mikegil
Swaptree	26 April 2008	2	Jury still out, have not yet transacted, too soon to tell.	mikegil

If you want to join the fray, please look me up on any of these services, but don't blame me if all of your discourse turns out to be under 140 characters (or, if you're one of the cool geeky kids, exactly 140.)

New Skills Needed for "Work 2.0"

There's an old saying about the weather:  "Everyone talks about it , but no one is doing anything about it."  The same thing seems to be happening with Web 2.0 (63,100,000 results for this term on Google, a very small percentage of which actually prescribe skills you'll need to thrive in it).  At a recent KM Forum meeting with this theme, however, I got some very specific prescriptive guidance for survival in the Web 2.0 world in a presentation from Ray Sims.

One slide in particular from Ray's presentation really stuck with me.  The slide (slide 34 of 51) enumerates some skills we're going to need in this new world, such as:

• efficient network creation and vetting (knowing who is worthy of your time and your trust),
• being OK with sharing ideas before they are fully thought out, and
• attention discipline (rather than scatter-brained multi-tasking).

There is plenty of worthwhile content all throughout this presentation, but I found this slide, in particular, to be worthy of immediate action and long-term resolve.  Ray's blog post on the definition of knowledge management is worthy of a separate post (or series of posts).

One last thing about the KM Forum. It illustrated something I've felt for nine years via opportunities like the KM Forum or last week's Sloan Sales Conference, or even the random guy sitting next to me at last week's Sox game quoting Hamlet's soliloquy to me as we chatted about David Ortiz's slump:  I'm blessed to live in an area where there is just an insane concentration of brainpower.

Earth Day Meets the Long Tail

A very simple, yet appealing idea came to me this week, compliments of Very Short List, a favorite website for surfacing strange and wonderful ephemera on the web:  Swaptree.

Swaptree works on a very simple premise:  we all have books, DVDs, music CDs and video games we no longer want.  There are other people who want them, and they have books, DVDs, music CDs and video games that we want.  Swaptree creates an exchange where people can connect and trade their cast-offs in these categories.  Users need only pay shipping costs, which Swaptree will calculate and show.  In fact, users can print the required postage directly from Swaptree, turning a tedious computer --> post office trip into a slightly less tedious computer --> mailbox trip.

Of course, since it's a "web 2.0" community, you can find and maintain a network of friends within Swaptree.  Find me (username:  mikegil) if you've got any good stuff to trade -- I'll be working on my "items i want" and "items i need" lists.

Simple, useful, leveraging the web and the wisdom of crowds, and eco-friendly.  Happy Earth Day.