Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

Office 2010 Web Applications Preview

In this window between Microsoft's July Worldwide Partner Conference (with many Office 2010 previews) and Microsoft's October SharePoint Conference, I'm working to learn about Microsoft's Office 2010 applications.

A recently posted video shows an interesting aspect of Office 2010:  Office Web Applications that are positioned as an on-line companion to the richer Office client experience, for users with only a browser and needs for high-fidelity collaboration around Office documents.

Office Web Apps Video

Office 2010 Preview Site

Late addition:  ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley wrote a great article recently summarizing Ten Things To Know as Microsoft Office Web Apps go to testers. 

Webinar-apalooza: SharePoint Thought Leadership

The dog days of summer are busy days for KMA.  We've got a lot of content queued up for our KMA Insights Webinar Series, as well as other events with our business partners, bunched up over the next few weeks, with these three the next wave of thought leadership:

On August 26, I'll be presenting a lunch-and-learn webinar about "SharePoint and Enterprise Social Computing," with always-insightful industry analyst Gil Yehuda and Laura Farrelly, VP of Marketing for NewsGator. The invitation to this webinar can be found here.

That same afternoon, my colleague Sadie Van Buren will be presenting the results of our firm's annual survey into SharePoint adoption trends in a webinar for the Special Librarians Association (SLA) entitled "Dispatches from the Front Lines of SharePoint-based Collaboration."  I'm told that this session is sold out already, but Sadie will be delivering the KMA Insights Webinar Series September lunch-and-learn webinar about "SharePoint - The Sophomore Year" with similar content. More information about Sadie's SLA presentation is here.

Shortly thereafter, our colleague and resident "compliantist," Sean Megley, will be presenting a webinar along with our business partner Blue Moon Industries about the new MA Privacy statute and KMA's SharePoint-based compliance management solutions.  The slide deck to his recent presentation (KMA Insights July webinar) on this topic can be found here, and I'll post invitation and more details about this Life Sciences-focused event as they become available.

Office 2010 -- First Impressions

At last week's Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, I learned a bunch of things, to wit:

• Microsoft has a HUGE wave of technologies poised to hit the market over the next 12 months (Windows 7, Office 2010, and many others)

• Microsoft LOVES to compete with the likes of Google, VMWare, Cisco, Apple, etc.

Notwithstanding these big, obvious themes, I was pleased to get my first look at Microsoft Office 2010.  Here are a couple of first impressions, formed via Chris Caposella's value keynote, some executive roundtable meetings, and a hands-on lab session with Office 2010 at WPC:

Outlook:

  The ribbon finally shows up in Outlook 2010, eating up some valuable screen real estate but also providing access to some interesting new features.  One is a "conversation view" that allows the user to group messages by conversation, and expand or compress conversations, very easily. 

My favorite new Outlook feature is a "Clean Up/Ignore" function that allows the user to quickly and systematically re-direct or delete messages in a thread -- it's also known as the message "mute button."  For example, once a thread gets unwieldy (5 reply-all's, 5 "please remove me from this thread" messages, 3 "me too" messages, etc.), a user can systematically trim out the chaff, keeping only the messages where a decision was made or action required. I remain curious, however, how this feature will handle branching of messages outward from a thread, and look forward to testing this feature in more depth.  

Another useful feature is the addition of a small, relevant snippet of a calendar view added to meeting requests so that the user can see his/her calendar from within the meeting request.

Excel: 

I'll likely write more about this in the future, but the addition of sparklines and a feature called "slicers" add more BI and data visualization capability to Excel, and the keynote demonstrations included a user easily working with a data set containing 1.5 million rows of data in a workbook via the SQL Server 2010/Excel 2010 integration previously code-named "Project Gemini."  

Word: 

One exceptional thing I saw demonstrated in Word actually applies to several of the Office products:  the ability for multiple authors to concurrently author the same document.  This is a frequently requested capability, and I look forward to demonstrating this when the SharePoint beta is set up in our lab environment.  For now, you can see this process via the demo in this video (note: fast-forward to the 54-minute mark).

 
[BP0VK] The Business Productivity Opportunity: The Next Wave, Your Customers, and You

PowerPoint:  

Other than the co-editing capabilities which I saw only in the context of Word but which I expect to be most valuable in PowerPoint, the most interesting new features I saw related to new tools for editing of pictures and videos from within PowerPoint.

In all of the Office products, the "Backstage" view replaces the combination of the Office button and the Document Information Panel as the place to see and manage metadata and other document properties.

There were several new features in Office applications like Access, One Note, etc., that I saw in demos but have yet to take for a test-drive.  KMA has the bits installed in our lab, so watch this space for more updates as we continue our testing and learning.  Meanwhile, check out this excellent image gallery that shows off the new user interface and other key features in Office 2010, and this overview [Download OfficeOverviewFS].

On-Line Identity Management 2.0: DandyID

Our firm focuses a great deal on collaboration as a way to solve business problems, and we view social media tools as a great addition/complement to the Microsoft Information Worker technologies we use and advise our clients about every day.  Accordingly, several of us have accounts with such services as:

• Typepad (blogging)
• Flickr (photo sharing)
• Delicious (social bookmarking)
• Twitter (microblogging).

One of the most difficult things about using all of these "best of breed" services is maintaining a centralized record of account credentials for each of these services.  I recently learned of a tool that I've been looking for for quite a long time: DandyID, an on-line tool for managing, in one place, all of my on-line identities.

I tried out DandyID this week, completed my profile, associated my DandyID with my various on-line profiles (out of the hundreds they offer), and used DandyID to verify my credentials with the services that offer this option.  I also was able to see where I rank among the digiterati, as far as the number and quality of my on-line presences.

I then took a link to my DandyID profile and dropped it into my e-mail signature so that people can follow me on-line using the services and accounts I've chosen to share with them.  (NOTE:  This is not managed on a user-by-user level via DandyID -- content is shown or hidden based on security/privacy settings in each of the individual services.)

  

I've used the free version to do everything I've described here, but DandyID also has a premium offering for $4.99 a month that includes social stats and analytics about how and where people interact with you on the Web.  I've also yet to explore the "Contacts" functionality in DandyID -- looking for a good use case to test this.

Now, if I could only find a centralized service to manage all my passwords across those accounts...

NOTE:  Shout-out to @DougCornelius and @jackvinson for the Tweets that led me to this tool.

SharePoint Workflow via K2 blackpoint

As a firm with deep investments in .NET development at more of a "foundation" level (e.g., Windows Workflow Foundation), KMA has been somewhat hesitant to invest aggressively in third-party workflow solutions for SharePoint such as Nintex, AgilePoint, and K2.  In the meantime, we've invested in developing a thorough understanding of three key approaches to SharePoint workflow:

1. effectively using SharePoint's native workflows
2. creating SharePoint workflows with SharePoint Designer (now a free download from MSFT) 
3. creating custom workflows in .NET with Workflow Foundation.

In fact, a few years ago, we created a white paper about these different approaches, detailing the strengths and weaknesses of each.  At the time, we consciously chose not to include ISV (Independent Software Vendor, or third-party developer) solutions because it would expand the scope of the white paper too broadly.

Meanwhile, we've monitored the marketplace for ISV workflow solutions.  This week, I attended the monthly New England SharePoint User Group meeting, including a featured speaker from K2, a leading workflow ISV.  K2 has had a presence in the workflow market for many years with their K2.NET and blackpearl workflow engines for the enterprise.  blackpearl is K2's current enterprise offering, and it contains some capabilities for SharePoint-specific workflow development.

In this week's session, we were shown key differences between K2's new blackpoint offering and the richer blackpearl as follows:

• blackpoint has business-user-oriented user interfaces for workflow design that blackpearl does not have in its current version: 
  1. blackpoint Studio, a standalone Integrated Development Environment for creating workflows
  2. blackpoint Web designer, a SilverLight-based tool for visually designing workflows from within SharePoint
• blackpoint has reduced complexity (read: reduced functionality) to make it easier for business analysts and business users to develop SharePoint workflows without writing .NET code.
• blackpoint is priced much more aggressively than blackpearl, its enterprise-class cousin.  blackpoint pricing spans from $5,000 to $15,000 per server; blackpearl is orders of magnitude higher.

Given the aggressive pricing for blackpoint and K2's reputation in the Microsoft community, I look forward to our firm's being able to see more and test blackpoint, as many of our clients are approaching business process automation as a key initiative in their "sophomore year" with SharePoint 2007.

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.

I Tweet, Therefore I Am (a Lemming?)

It is an adage in marketing that a prospective customer needs to be exposed to your product or service up to nine times before they will be ready to buy from you.
(source:  Guerrilla Marketing, by Jay Conrad Levinson)

Between the CIMS event at Babson a few weeks ago and yesterday's KM Forum at Bentley College, between direct inquiries ("Are you on Twitter?") and speaker references to Twitter, I hit that number easily, achieving the internal, metaphorical critical mass that made me take the plunge. 

If you're both a frequent visitor to this blog and super observant (this is indeed a small set of humanity), you may have noticed a new widget in the lower left corner of the page:  my Twitter stream.

I'm still struggling to find the value in Twitter for me.  I'm not sure that many people are interested in "what I'm doing" at any given moment, and of those who are, most can see this on my LinkedIn profile, my Facebook page or on my IM message, or (God forbid) in an act of desperation, call me).

• Facebook -- lets me stay connected to my niece and nephews in high school and college, and some other friends.  A place to play.
• LinkedIn -- lets me stay connected to old friends and people in my professional network. A place to work.
• IM -- lets me communicate instantly with a specific audience of people with whom I have a relationship, and broadcast my status to them.

Twitter allows me to do a small subset of this, namely to broadcast what I'm doing at any given moment, using 140 characters or less.  I'm not sure this gets me anything I don't already have, but the cost of entry is next to nothing (other than time that could be more productively spent), so I'm willing to give it a shot. [ed.  If that last sentence isn't a summary of most Web 2.0 phenomena, then I don't know what is.]

If Twitter turns out to be a big time sink for me, I'll bag it.  Also, if you see this (note:  NSFW content on this site) happening to me, please let me know and I will cease and desist immediately.  I may also claw out my own eyes as well if it gets to that point.  :-)

If I'm missing something big and obvious here, you have found immense value from Twitter, and you're convinced that I'm not going to be able to contribute meaningfully to society without it, please let me know.  In fact, "tweet" it to me:  http://www.twitter.com/mikegil

Collaboration 1.0 Meets Web 2.0: Tagging + E-mail

As I've discussed ad nauseum with pretty much anyone who will listen, tagging and search are playing a far greater role than ever before in how we organize digital data, at the expense of traditional tools like folders.  An example I've used before is my Outlook e-mail, which I've long since stopped organizing into folders and just kept in a pile, using search to find whatever I need. 

At the suggestion of a colleague, I've experimented with taking it one step farther:  using tagging as a way to organize my e-mail.  I downloaded an evaluation license for a product called Taglocity, which I've been using to tag and organize e-mail messages in my Outlook.   Taglocity has many other capabilities which I've yet to explore, but a few screenshots tell the story best. (note:  screenshots have been redacted/whited out to hide customer-specific information)

Tag cloud -- for selected e-mails, click on the term in the cloud to tag the message:

Filter cloud:  click on a term in the cloud to pull up a filtered view of your messages tagged with that term.

Overall, I am finding Taglocity a nice complement to Outlook's native views, search, and metadata, and well worth the few seconds it takes to add a tag to each message.  I look forward to exploring other Taglocity features, including using the "Auto Tag" feature where Taglocity "learns" from patterns in your tagging to assign tags to messages, getting "smarter" as it does more.

Time is Money: What is this meeting costing us?

In doing some research on another topic, I stumbled across a cool blurb on Michael Arrington's TechCrunch about a company called PayScale and a web application they created called "Meeting Miser."

If you've ever been in a meeting, looked around the room at the assembled people, and tried to figure out what the meeting was costing you, Meeting Miser is a utility that will calculate the "hard" costs of a meeting based on the positions of the people involved, the location where they work, and PayScale's enormous database of salary information.  You can also manually enter/adjust salary amounts if known.

On the right is an illustration showing the cost of a meeting in Waltham among a VP of Sales, CEO, and COO:  $2.82 per minute.  Meeting Miser also has a timer that you can start and stop during the meeting (try putting that up on a screen during your presentation!).

Of course, this question typically only arises if the meeting in question is bogged down or not very productive, so perhaps it's more important to focus on improving the quality of your meetings.  There are more resources on this topic than I could possibly point to, but I'm a big fan of authors like David Maister, Dale Dauten, and Seth Godin, each of whom has advice for running more effective meetings and presentations. (Seth's ebook and blog article on "Really Bad PowerPoint" are priceless)

WorkDay : ERP :: SalesForce.com : CRM?

Late in August, there was suddenly lots of love in the press for WorkDay, a new contender in the ERP world, seeking to validate the SaaS (Software as a Service) model for ERP. Certainly worth noting if you've been tracking the progress of Microsoft's Dynamics Live (currently applicable only to CRM) initiative, or if you work with traditional (i.e., managed on-site, not hosted) ERP. You may want to keep an eye on this one…I've attached a link to WorkDay's news and events page, a good jumping-off point for reading up on them, for your convenience.