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. 

Enterprise 2.0 Keynote #1: Driving Action by Design

At this week's Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, there was a wide variety of content, but one of the more compelling presentations I caught was a Tuesday morning keynote speech by Jascha Franklin-Hodge, CTO of Blue State Digital, entitled "mybarackobama.com: The Secrets of Obama's New Media Juggernaut."

Notwithstanding anyone's political leanings (more on this later), the presentation illustrated many topics of real and immediate interest to anyone doing business in this day and age, especially those of us who use social media and the web to build business and connect with our clients and prospects.

Mr. Franklin-Hodge spelled out six core principles of a successful new media campaign:
1.  Drive Action
2.  Be Authentic
3.  Create Ownership
4.  Be Relevant
5.  Build a Strong, Open Brand
6.  Measure Everything

The first of these, "Drive Action," resonated most strongly with me on a few levels. First, as I look at our firm's website, which we're in the process of re-designing, I see many opportunities for improvement, and few places where a user is directed to "Ask us for more information," or "Get started now."  Clearer calls and lower barriers to action help convert interest to action at the point where a prospective buyer is most likely to buy, and this was a cornerstone of the Obama campaign's web strategy.

Not only is "Drive Action" a mantra for web site design, however, it's worth considering in light of other business communications as well.  I frequently get e-mails that SCREAM for action implicitly, but no explicit action is requested by the author, so time is wasted on communications (i.e., negotiating the follow-up) that accomplish little.  For example:

 Author:  We need to meet to review this deliverable.

 Respondent:  Yes, I agree, let's meet. (READ:  "Back to you, author!")
 
 and so on.

GAH! Several cycles could be cut out of this communications loop by simple addition as follows:

Author:  We need to meet to review this deliverable.  I looked at your calendar, and it looks like  you're  free at 2 pm.  Can we meet then for 15 minutes?  Please let me know, and I'll send an Outlook  meeting request.

As a result of this presentation, I am committing that I will be more cognizant of ASKING for action when I want it.  There's a fine line between this and bossing people around, I suppose, but being clear and concise about what the next steps are, in any business communication, is critical to effective action.  How many meetings do we walk out of without a clear agreement on who is doing what next, by when?  Unacceptably many.

There were similar insights for each of the six core principles, and many great examples of beautiful, functional, effective design, but I must confess that for me they were diluted a bit by the partisan tone to the presentation, as illustrated by the following: 

• From the presentation's tone and content, it would appear that Republicans are immune to social community-building, mired in a 1950s world of press releases and position papers handed out to fedora-wearing, dead-tree media types. 
• Also, as some colleagues later suggested, I would also have been VERY interested to see a timeline showing how the Obama campaign's efforts were re-allocated from beating Hillary Clinton to beating the McCain/Palin Republican ticket (the presentation only focused on the D vs R segment of the presidential campaign).

Crowd-Sourced SharePoint Governance via DebateGraph Visual Wikis

I read with interest a recent post by one of my favorite bloggers, Paul Culmsee that I want to share.  I especially like Paul's blog because:

1. He and I care about some of the same things:  Project Management, Governance, SharePoint, and pop culture (although I prefer Eric B & Rakim to Opeth, and I haven't yet had cause to integrate Tom Cruise into my blog's content, thematically)
2. We're unlikely to compete with each other for business, given the distance from Perth to Boston, MA (11,635 miles).
3. He's generous with his knowledge and his opinions, and has welcomed correspondence and feedback on these topics.
4. He writes in a breezy style, accessible yet insightful.

OK, now that the honorifics are dispensed with, I'll get to the point:  Paul blogged this week on an innovative approach to SharePoint governance:  a product called DebateGraph, which serves as sort of a visual wiki that shows graphically how ideas relate to one another.  An example follows (sorry for the static image -- can't fit the interactive version into this format):

Seven Sigma has created downloadable DebateGraph SharePoint web parts to allow users to visually show the debate of any issue within a SharePoint wrapper, but to me the most interesting application is the one where "n" is the biggest:  Seven Sigma's public, Internet-facing debate about SharePoint governance, shown in the example shown above.

So, if you have strong opinions about SharePoint governance (I know you're out there -- you haven't been shy about expressing your opinions with me), please take a look, vote, and make your voice heard about what works and what doesn't in SharePoint governance.  Join the debate today!

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.