infowork

As of right now, this blog is on hiatus. I’m starting another blog with a broader range of topics at Changebowl. Rather than talking about what went wrong in this blog, I’ll post what I’m going to be doing on Changebowl.

Changebowl is about:

Technology: I work in the software industry for a professional services firm. I wear many hats: vision facilitator, thinker, product manager, program manager, engagement manager, business analyst, writer, scope negotiator, salesperson, marketer, tinkerer. I spend most of my days thinking about software, the Internet, the social web; about how information workers are working now and how they will work in the future. Technology and how it affects our lives – personal and professional – is my profession.

Community: Community is about how we interact with each other – in the world and online. Community is also how we’ll solve the many challenges afflicting our neighbourhoods, cities, countries and the planet today. I care deeply about how we live in this world, and I’m very interested in participating in (and observing) long-term and ad hoc communities trying to solve problems in creative and authentic ways.

Design: Even though I’m not trained as a designer, I believe in good design and much of my work is about designing things: software, processes and experiences. I’m also genuinely interested in seeing examples of good design and using them in my life, whether they’re objects, gadgets or websites. Expect links to, and thoughts about, designs that are beautiful, functional, evocative and inspiring.

Business: In our post-capitalist world, business isn’t just a mode of working but has become a mode of being. I’m in ‘business’ only only slightly less than reluctantly, and always with a healthy skepticism. I think business will ultimately be responsible for bringing forward the really big shifts in how we live (think green business, for example). I see it as my role to continually search for more authentic and honest ways of conducting business. If I could eradicate dysfunction in the workplace (inside organizations, and between them), I would.

Please come and visit my new blog at http://changebowl.net and subscribe!

Thank you for your readership over the last year and a half.

It isn’t really “news” because nothing actually changed, but today, Google removed the “Beta” tag from Gmail and various other Google applications. It’s seen as a move to appeal to enterprise customers who wouldn’t commit to applications that are still in beta.

What’s more interesting for people who watch this space is the series of announcements from the Google Apps team over the past month or so. I took particular note of these two announcements:

• Google Apps Synch for Microsoft Outlook: This provides a connector for MS Outlook to Gmail, Contacts and Google Calendar. Google’s marketing demo bluntly says it’s meant to replace Exchange Server while allowing users to continue to work in Outlook, which is what they’re used to.
• Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server: (Slated to be released this month.) This is potentially an exciting development for BlackBerry users, for whom Gmail, Calendar and other support has, to date, been a patchwork of little synch apps, third party solutions, and awkward forced decisions (Gmail app or Gmail via IMAP through RIM’s mail service).

Note that these require the pay-for Premier or Education editions of Google Apps (Premier is $50/US/user/month).

Other improvements announced and/or already launched include:

• Custom templates in Google Docs
• Search and API improvements to Google Contacts
• Docx and Xlsx support for Google Docs
• Google Calendar now supports Tasks

This is such an interesting space to watch right now. Microsoft appears paralyzed by its protectionist behaviour – focusing, in equal measure, on improving and extending its core ‘cash cow’ Office business (and, of course, creating some fabulous products in the process), and trying to figure out how to ‘put stuff online’ that’s compelling to users but doesn’t erode the core business. Which, very likely, is an impossible task to complete.

And if that’s not enough of a fun ‘dancing bear’ spectacle to observe and delight in, Google – like a slightly fat, spoiled, but still focused dog – is running around Microsoft, yapping and snapping at its heels while MS dances with itself.

I’d like to say that in the end, the user will benefit from all this, but I’m not sure that’s actually going to be the case. Instead, I think the Google Apps story is way too fragmented to truly appeal to advanced IT needs and I’m saddened that Microsoft is choosing to dilute its R&D dollars with things like Office Online.

Three years ago, Microsoft’s SharePoint marketing team launched SharePoint 2007 with what’s become known as the SharePoint marketing “pie” or “wheel,” a simple graphic representation of SharePoint’s feature areas (collaboration, portal, search, ECM, business process and forms, BI). This has been a handy visual aid for explaining its rich functionality to customers. And it has certainly also served to deepen the confusion about SharePoint, as it doesn’t clearly express which of these feature areas are mature, and which aren’t; or where to start.

Be that as it may, I’ve been working a little bit with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 lately, Microsoft’s customer/citizen relationship management platform. For my type of work, this is sort of the “other side” of the equation – a surface for dealing with structured data (in contrast to SharePoint’s unstructured data), and a powerful platform for managing sales, fundraising, marketing, citizen outreach and customer service.

One thing I discovered quickly was that the sales/marketing literature for CRM was not particularly highly developed from a conceptual perspective. I’m not completely sure why that is, but I know that from where I sit, I prefer strong theoretical air cover when I talk to customers, a context for what I’m offering, a way to articulate where it fits in.

So I took the liberty to draw an equivalent “feature pie” for Dynamics CRM 4.0. Here it is, followed by a very, very short and high level description of each feature area:

• Contact management is the ability to enter and store contact information, associate contacts to organizations and capture notes for each contact.
• Sales force automation offers the ability to generate and qualify leads, track quotes, orders and invoices, manage and track customer interactions and manage a product/service database.
• Marketing automation allows organizations to manage marketing-related activities, such as creating targeted marketing lists, running direct email campaigns and measure their success.
• Customer service management (case management) meets the needs of customer and product support departments that handle phone, email and web-based service requests from customers. CRM tracks cases, manages services and creates an evolving knowledge base.
• Service appointment scheduling allows customer service representatives to assign tasks based on available resource time, and define work schedules and calendars based on location.
• The workflow features of Dynamics CRM serve to automate an organization’s customer-centric business processes.
• The reporting and analysis features allow CRM users to run default reports, create advanced queries for selected sets of records, and create advanced custom reports using Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.

What I’d like to do is work towards expressing an end-to-end information management story that articulates how SharePoint and MS CRM, together, enable good information management practices from capture to storage to knowledge management/BI to records management and archiving. Because I think that in the final analysis, the real value of the Microsoft platform is its comprehensive nature (rather than claiming that it’s best-of-breed in any one category, which it isn’t).

Today’s links:

• Next Wave of Microsoft Office Products Will Redefine How People Work: Q&A: Chris Capossela, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Information Worker Product Management Group, discusses what people and businesses can expect from the upcoming release of Micr – We developed our new Office products in response to a shift in how people and businesses use technology today. The line between home and work has blurred, so people want more choice and flexibility in how, where and when they work.
• AIIM – SharePoint and ECM: Better Together – Microsoft’s SharePoint (MOSS 2007) can provide both the collaborative functionality as well as document management functionality that, in some cases, can meet the business’ ECM requirements.
• Lifehacker – Gmail’s Keith Coleman Talks Five Years of Gmail and What’s to Come – Exclusive Lifehacker Interview Google Email – Gmail turns five today, so we sat down with Gmail's Senior Product Manager Keith Coleman (virtually via Gmail, naturally) to discuss where it's been, where it's going, and that five-year-old beta tag.

Have you ever experienced this? You write a document in Microsoft Word, inserting images – charts or illustrations – along the way. Maybe you’re using a business drawing program to create them, like Microsoft Visio or SmartDraw. In Word, everything looks fine: the images show up smoothly, using the fonts you stipulated when creating them:

Now, using your favourite method (mine’s documented in my previous post), you create a PDF from the Word document. Depending on your method, different artifacts will show up in the images; in my example, the text labels on the cycle diagram don’t show up correctly – the fonts appear broken/blocky somehow, and – in the red portion – the text label appears to hover in a while block. Not acceptable for a business document:

This is one of those cases where the theory is better than the implementation: between Windows and Office, all sorts of copy-and-paste formats are available which should help circumvent this problem (Windows Metafile, Enhanced Metafile, etc.), but – depending on what applications you’re using – none of them seem to work very reliably or consistently. And the surprise always comes when you’re on a deadline…

The best workaround I’ve found is to follow this model:

1. Export your image to a high-resolution PNG (Portable Network Graphics format) (explanation of “high resolution” below).
2. Load image file into Word as if inserting clip art.
3. Create PDF the regular way.

So what does “high resolution” mean in this context? There seem to be two reasons the artifacts are showing up. One is that fonts don’t seem to translate reliably when copying and pasting vector image formats (which is basically what Windows seems to do by default, to keep file sizes to a minimum). That’s why I am getting the weird white block in my text label. The other reason for bad looking images in PDFs is that the screen resolutions of many bitmaps aren’t a good match for the size of a page. More spcifically, what looks large and smooth on your screen at 72 dots per inch (typical screen resolution) will not be smooth enough for printing at 300 dots per inch. The software will scale the image to the size you’d like to see it at, and this may look fine on your screen in Word, but when you ‘print’ the document to PDF, your diagrams show up fuzzy or blocky.

“High resolution” basically means creating a PNG file from your graphics program at a size that makes sense for your page. If you’re printing on Letter size paper (8.5 x 11 inches), you may need your image to be saved as 2-4 inches wide (check your program’s page or canvas size settings, or there may be a dialogue during the Save As process).

This method typically creates quite a large PNG file (to contain all that image information), and it will make your Word documents and PDFs bigger in size, but your images will look smooth and – because you used PNG, a bitmap format – your fonts won’t have any artifacts.

Cumbersome, but it works. It would be nice if more application developers (thinking of you ere, Microsoft…) would ensure that copying and pasting between applications worked properly, but this is a surefire workaround for the time being.

For many users, Microsoft’s PDF and XPS Converter for Office 2007 simply doesn’t work. It’s not that I have anything against it per se, but it seems to be plagued by a bug: some users can use it without any issues; other users always get this error message:

Office 2007 PDF Error

“The file is in use by another application or user.” I’ve done all kinds of Googling (Binging?) about this, to no specific avail. The error message is a general Windows error, legitimately displayed if someone else (or a hung application) has grabbed and edited a file that you currently have open and that you’re trying to save. There’s enough information about this to make me think this is a ‘known issue’ but not enough to actually help me resolve it. I’ve reinstalled it twice already. I’ve tried changing the PDF output location to another folder – and that works in about 20% of occurrences. Nothing conclusive then, but it’s just too irritating for those situations where you need to – quickly! – make a PDF. (Personally, what I love the most about this error message is the link at the bottom: “Was this information helpful?” – “Hm, no, not really.”)

Back to the old school way of making PDFs: by using one of the myriad free Windows printer drivers that save as PDF. Since I’m using 64-bit Vista, I’m recommending “doPDF” which advertises itself to work on both 32 and 64-bit Vista. And it works great: it’s fast, consistent and its output is actually more reliable than the Office PDF converter’s (compared to PDFs generated on another machine with Microsoft’s utility, images PDFed with doPDF are more ‘readable,’ particularly those that were once vector/Office SmartArt/Visio diagrams and were pasted/inserted into Word).

Configuration and use of doPDF couldn’t be simpler. After installing it, simply select it as your printer and print the document you’re working on. It works for any Windows application that can print. In the free version, the options are limited – but then again: how many options do you need when creating a PDF?

doPDF Printer Properties

You can set the resolution, page orientation, and that’s about it. Once you start printing, you can also select where to save the resulting PDF and whether or not you want to embed fonts. While embedding fonts results in a much larger file, I learned the hard way that in most cases, it’s the right thing to do (for example, one of the local print shops I use didn’t have ‘Calibri’ installed – they were using an earlier version of Office – and a recent document didn’t print out very well…).

doPDF Save As Dialogue

Like anything that’s free, doPDF is the little brother of a more configurable payware PDF printer driver called novaPDF. I can’t say anything about novaPDF because I haven’t tried it specifically. But if I ever find myself in need of greater configuration options during PDF creation, doPDF has established the company’s ability to write good software, and I would spend the money. (I suppose I should really consider getting Adobe Acrobat, but it seems very expensive for what it does. Adobe have become the victims of their PDF format’s success.)

Evernote for the BlackBerry

Evernote has finally launched a simple but serviceable client for the BlackBerry. It allows you to easily add:

• A text note
• A picture/snapshot from your built-in camera
• An audio note from the built-in voice recorder
• A file from your BB’s file system.

It all works as advertised – no complaints. You should be aware, though, that it doesn’t in any way bring your Evernote content onto your BlackBerry other than via its built-in web browser. This makes sense if you consider how small the BlackBerry’s own storage is, but it may – at first glance – be disappointing for users.

Further to my last post, now I’m just hoping Evernote upgrades its Windows UI (the main application) to provide a better editing/note-taking user experience. The risk they run if they don’t is that user will move their actual note-taking activity back into Microsoft Word or some other, better editor. And that may end up being a missed opportunity for Evernote…

Note-taking is one of those things that get better with age, like wine or jazz. I didn’t take notes for many years at the beginning of my career, and I think I was significantly less productive because of it. In my day, I think university students weren’t taught to take good notes (I certainly wasn’t; in the Arts we were basically supposed to glean most of our inputs by reading books anyway).

The older I get, the more I realize that often, taking notes is the difference between success and failure. Writing things down, even informally, is the difference between having something to “show for it” and not having anything at all. Clients and coworkers respond surprisingly well to, “I have in my notes that you agreed to do X.”

The $8m question is how to best capture notes. Basically, there are three broad categories:

1. Written notes on paper
2. Written notes on a computer
3. Audio notes using a digital audio recorder (that you’ll have to transcribe later).

In the course of the last 15 years, I somehow lost my ability to easily write by hand for long periods of time. My physiology must have adapted to using a keyboard most of the time. I have also, in the last few years, mastered the art of being fully present in meetings, participating, and still typing to take notes.

My note-taking tool of choice today is Evernote. I’ve tried, at various times, Notepad, Word and OneNote. Notepad is just not practical for a variety of reasons; Word is easy to work in but doesn’t offer anything over and above what word processors offer; and OneNote (Microsoft’s note-taker, part of the Office suite) is full of good ideas but poor implementation: Being able to type anywhere on the page makes the notes’ reuse value low in other formats, and its lack of proper ‘cloud’ data storage makes it just impractical. (Yes, I realize it can be configured to store its notebooks on a shared folder on a corporate servers – but that means I would have to continually be connected to my office network somehow.)

Great features of Evernote:

• Notebook storage in the cloud
• Ability to work offline and synchronize new notes later
• Ability to install the client on multiple computers and operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux)
• Ability to obtain client for mobile devices (still missing a BlackBerry client though, which I – and thousands of others – are waiting for…)
• Ability to send email to one’s notebook
• Ability to send pictures containing text to it – and it OCRs the words (white boards from meetings, pages in books in libraries or bookstores)
• Screen clipper always running: allows you to capture any screen region and save it as an image to your Evernote notebook, where its word contents will be OCR’ed and become searchable
• Firefox plugin to easily add web text (including the source URL) to the notebook
• All notes are also available through the web interface when you’re at a computer that doesn’t have the client software installed.

Each of these would be a great feature by itself; together, they offer the greatest feature density of any note-taking applications I’ve looked at. There are, however, some things that could be vastly improved in Evernote:

• The ‘pop-up’ text editor: it’s unfortunately not really good enough. Both Word and OneNote provide a significantly better user experience than Evernote’s simplistic ‘almost like Notepad’ interface
• Lack of a BlackBerry client: I understand that the iPhone and Windows Mobile are significant platforms, and maybe the BlackBerry is a difficult platform to develop a client for, but I think that Evernote’s basic value proposition is to ‘own the category’ of note-taking, and as such, BlackBerry users deserve a client
• The main window scroll bars are a little confusing and not easy to use. I’m still not sure that I’ve worked out why there are two, and what they are each supposed to do. I’ve learned to use searching and tagging instead of scrolling, but that is definitely a limitation.

Here are some annotated screen shots from Evernote:

Evernote’s main window, showing notes, toolbar with search, tags and double scroll bars.

Evernote’s text editing window. This feature could be vastly improved; the formatting and behaviour is quite simplistic.

Each Evernote note can be tagged with any number of tags. This becomes helpful if you’re using Evernote to manage notes for different projects.

Evernote’s tags are shown as navigation; this is an easy way to ‘filter’ notes between projects and categories.

Despite some minor but irritating shortcomings, I would highly recommend Evernote. The free version will be good enough for most people (it enforces a monthly traffic/upload limit); the pay-for version offes larger monthly upload limits and SSL security for data transfers.

For better or worse, the Twitter phenomenon has really taken off in the last couple of months. Whether you use it for micro-blogging (responding to Twitter’s insistent question, “What are you doing?”) or as an asynchronous, public instant messenger, you soon realize that the Twitter web interface is a little clunky and can be very, very slow, especially at certain times of the day. A client is what’s needed.

Ironically, if you’re a Windows user, the options are quite limited. (No, let me rephrase that: there are tons of Twitter clients that work on Windows, but almost none of them are any good.) Basically, the field breaks down into two kinds of clients:

1. Those that are built using the Adobe AIR platform (a cross-platform run-time environment that allows developers to make lightweight applications to run on Windows, the Mac, etc).
2. Witty – a client that’s built especially for Windows and that uses the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

Witty is simple but effective. Similar in shape to an instant messenger client, it sequentially displays your Twitter time line (messages from your friends and yourself). You can use the ‘Replies’ tab to see messages that were written in response to something you tweeted; the ‘User’ tab shows you all messages from a specific user (plus their profile info); and you’ll find any private tweets under ‘Messages.’

Entering an update is simple: simply hit the ‘Update’ button at the bottom of the screen and start typing. Responding – publicly or privately – is as easy as right-clicking on a received tweet and selecting the relevant option. The ‘Update’ dialogue counts down the number of characters left – which helps you meet Twitter’s 140 character limitation.

Finally, the Options dialogue lets you set preferences, helps you filter whose tweets you want (or don’t want) to see in Witty and gets you help about Witty’s keyboard shortcuts.

Summary: I think Witty is a worthwhile Twitter client to try if you’re a little skeptical of Adobe AIR and interested to see what can be done on Windows natively. I recognize that it doesn’t (yet) have the same kind of rich feature-set that TweetDeck (on Adobe AIR) offers. But it’s rock solid (hasn’t crashed once in more than a week of usage, through suspends/unsuspends, on two different Vista Ultimate machines) and offers a small memory footprint.

If your Twitter needs, like mine, are pretty simple at the moment and you’re on Windows, this may be the client for your tweeting activities.

Download Witty from Google Code.

It’s been just over a year since I started the Infowork blog. And, truthfully, it’s nowhere near as successful as I had hoped it would be. That’s primarily because I think my subject matter is too wide in scope and too poorly defined, and because the somewhat undefined nature of my topics often leaves me without any ideas about what to write next. So I don’t post at all. And that’s certain death for any blog.

My Google Analytics statistics tell a simple but powerful story, too: the most popular posts by far are ones that provide practical instruction or review a product. All my Microsoft industry commentary turns out to have been a labour of love for, maybe, five people who care; everyone else was – justifiably – bored by it.

Starting today, that’s all going to change.

When I think about what I actually get excited about in my daily work, it’s the tools and techniques that make information workers (people like you and me) more productive in their daily computing activities. The software that makes things easier. Knowledge that helps us do things faster.

I’m pretty resolutely a Microsoft guy: I don’t think you’ll find me using a Mac or Linux anytime soon. So I’ll focus here on

• Windows and Office on the desktop
• Other desktop apps that make life easier, quicker, simpler
• SharePoint and other Microsoft server technologies that are directly relevant to information workers (Exchange, Dynamics CRM, etc.)
• Web apps (“web 2.0″) that work well with Windows and/or Office

I intend to post more frequently (and the posts will probably be shorter, too).

“After all, computers crash, people die, relationships fall apart. The best we can do is breathe and reboot.” – Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City.