Category: Technology

Getting Around the IT Department: User Innovation

Scorton here we comeThe Wall Stree Journal has an interesting article on how to get around the restrictions that the IT department places upon you “Ten Things Your IT Department Won’t Tell You“. Speaking as someone who effectively works for an IT Department I find this list, and others like it quite interesting.

If you look through this list it’s primarilly a list of 10 things that people want to do so they can keep working. These are things that people need to do, and they are willing to take risks to get them done. The IT Department is busy trying to constrain innovation, but the desire to innovate is so strong that people will take the risks to get them done.

We’ve seen this in IT lots of times before and should have worked it out by now, but we don’t seem to have done.

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SharePoint Building

Rain in Lancashire? Dancing in the rain.Microsoft are celebrating a new milestone for SharePoint:

Today, at Microsoft’s 2007 Financial Analyst Meeting, the company reported that its Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server business generated revenue of more than $800 million in fiscal year 2007, due to strong demand for the enterprise- ready, integrated server capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. This represents a growth rate of more than 35 percent over fiscal year 2006.  

The SharePoint team blog also does some reminiscing:

With these great results, it’s time for a little nostalgia and some looking ahead. I have personally been working on and off the SharePoint business since 1998 – anyone remember Tahoe? When we decided to start development on SharePoint Portal Server 2001, it was a big step forward for Microsoft. We were making a big bet that collaboration, portals, content management and enterprise search would become mainstream and gain the same kind of broad acceptance that personal productivity tools such as Microsoft Office had experienced.

It looks very much like another Version 3 Microsoft product is becoming mainstream.

The interesting statistic from those on offer is this one:

“The majority of SharePoint deployments in the survey base of 300 U.S. organizations are currently enterprise-wide (61 percent), with 28 percent of the current departmental deployments expected to become enterprise-wide within the next 12 months,” according to IDC. “This is particularly the case for large organizations, where 51 percent plan to extend SharePoint to an enterprise-wide audience.”

Most deployments are enterprise-wide, but even for those that aren’t many are expected to become enterprise-wide soon. Many departmental IT projects do not have a chance of becoming enterprise services because they aren’t capable of making that transition because of capability, but more often because of flexibility. Other enterprise projects fail to make an impact on the departments because there is no pull from the organisation who is expected to use the tool. Being able to start from either end and succeed is a difficult thing to do and shows that the product is flexible, but also that people like to use it.

Having a collaborative toolset that people like to use is very powerful indeed.

Having a collaborative toolset that is flexible enough to use at the corporate or the departmental level is even more powerful.

Having a collaborative toolset that is flexible enough to change from departmental to enterprise-wide is even more powerful.

Build some momentum and you are probably unstoppable.

aideRSS: PageRank for your blog

Scorton here we comeHere’s another way to see what’s popular. aideRSS is a new service which generates a rank for each of your posts – PostRank. It then uses this information to provide filtered RSS feeds for good, great, best and top posts. These filtered feeds then allow you to filter out the drivel from someone’s site.

My posts all rank exactly the same at the moment which isn’t very helpful. I suspect that is because I’ve not written anything interesting recently; it only shows my last 10 posts. If you want to have a look it’s all here: http://www.aiderss.com/all/oak-grove.typepad.com

I’m a bit puzzled by the whole concept really, because it feels a bit like a self fulfilling prophecy. The PostRank seems to be using things like the number of comments on a particular post. If lots of people only subscribe to the “best” posts then those posts are going to stay the “best” posts because they are the only ones being commented on and the other non-“best” posts aren’t going to get a look in. They must be reckoning on enough people subscribing to the full feed that the numbers aren’t completely skewed.

The other interesting thing is that they are running it on Amazon’s EC2. So you could says that it’s a virtual start-up because they don’t even have their own infrastructure to look after.

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BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance – Really !?!?!?

An early start for a long driveIt’s becoming a popular trend of reporting “BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance“.

Is that really true?

Is the device itself actually bad for work/life balance?

Does the very presence of a Blackberry or a PDA have a negative effect on your ability to balance your time?

It’s another case of us humans abdicating our responsibility over to the machines and letting them take the blame.

It’s not the machine that is the problem – it’s our attitude to the machine!

Do I have the ability to turn my Blackberry off? Of course I do!

Do I have the ability to leave my BlackBerry at home when I go out for the day? Of course I do!

It’s a tool that I use, it’s not my master and I’m not a slave to it.

If my boss sends me an email at midnight, that’s his problem! I don’t see why I should carry my BlackBerry around just in case he does.

If I choose to go through my emails on the night before returning from holiday so that I can have an easier run in on Monday morning that’s my choice. It’s not the machine making me do it. If I blame the machine then I’m just ducking the real issue.

When I was a child I kicked a ball through a window. When I was caught I blamed the ball, but I was still the one that was punished. N-one would expect otherwise.

I know that, for many people, the need to respond to something is very strong, but we need to learn to ignore it, or to turn it off. I would be a very rich man if I had a £1 for every time someone interrupted a face-to-face meeting we were having so that they could answer the phone. But it’s still not the phones fault for ringing, it’s our fault for answering it.

Stuff Happens

IMG_5179This weeks is a timely reminder that stuff happens.

For the second time this year whole areas of the UK are deep in water. Thousands of homes are without running water. Thousands have been without power,  thousands more would have been if it hadn’t been for some remarkable work by the Emergency Services.

Yesterday a power problem in San Francisco affected a number of popular web sites.

People in IT talk a lot about contingency and resilience but sometimes you just have to acknowledge that you can’t allow for every eventuality.

The Joys of Working from Home

Tarn HowesOne of the interesting things about working from home is having to provide your own power and connectivity.

It’s gone very dark outside because of a thunderstorm. The power has already dipped a number of times and I’m using CTRL+S (Save) rather more than normal just in case.

Thankfully the domestic supply in the UK is quite reliable, but it’s not guaranteed. As more people work from home, I wonder whether we’ll start to see the utility companies offering a premium service for home workers.

I'm on Facebook

Picnic by DerwentwaterOh dear, what possessed me! Why on earth have I done this thing?

Perhaps I thought it was time to get down with the kids.

Perhaps I thought there was something I was missing out on.

Perhaps I thought that there was some sort of experiment in social engineering that it might be interesting to understand.

I don’t know, but I’ve done it now, and once I’ve done something it’s done.

I have no idea where I am going to find the time to do anything with it though.

I’m not going to give you a link or anything, because I think that should be part of the experiment .

"A future in which all human experience is record"

Grandad hands over his boarding cardCharles Stross has written an interesting article on a potential future where all human experience is recorded for future reference:

“In the long term, almost all human experiences will be recorded. And in the very long term, they’ll be a gold mine for historians.”

Is that a good idea, or a terrible idea? I suppose it depends on your point of view.

There are times in my life, for instance, where I embarrass myself. I will relive those situations, in my mind, a few times until I eventually forget it. It would be awful for that situation to be recorded and available as a last reminder.

There are also times in my life when I wish I could go over a situation and see whether there is anything I could learn from it. It would be great to see if from other people’s perspective too.

There are other issues too.

The more we use a machine to remember for us, the less we will remember, it’s inevitable. I’ve written about this before. Would there come a point where we could no longer do anything useful because we didn’t have enough memory available to do it?

I also wonder whether our brain doesn’t retain everything for a good reason. Not because it is limited, but because it’s good for us not to remember everything.

UK Regional Dialect Dictionaries Now Available

Concorde - Still longing to flyOne of the most popular posts on this site is the one about hacking Windows Live Writer with a UK dictionary.

While Windows Live Writer lags behind, Microsoft have issued a set of Office dictionaries for some of the UK regions:

From Microsoft:

To celebrate the launch of the 2007 Office system and the richness of the British language, Microsoft has partnered with the British Library to develop a series of online dictionaries made up of local dialects…and we want you to contribute!

How many people talk about ‘hoying’ a ball or even taking a ‘crib’ when they have a cup of tea? With an ever increasing mobile population, Microsoft and the British library and keen to preserve local identities and heritage.

Jonathan Robinson, curator of English accents and dialects at The British Library says: “Britain has a rich heritage of different accents and dialects and, contrary to popular opinion, there is still a great deal of lexical diversity across the UK – where else would you find the words ‘cob’, ‘batch’, ‘bun’, ‘barm cake’, ‘stotty cake’, ‘scuffler’ and ‘bread cake’, all meaning bread roll?” said Jonathan. “But the English language is constantly changing. Due to a complex combination of influences, local words occasionally disappear from common usage or are replaced by others which become absorbed into our everyday vocabulary.”

The downloads are here:

This new fangled stuff is gradely!

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GROMIT Update

Grandad take a liftThe whole idea of GROMIT (Grumpy Old Men of IT) seems to be gaining some momentum.

I’ve had a load of comments from people, but for some reason most of them have chosen not to post a public comment on the blog, instead preferring to stay a bit more anonymous .

Office XML gets Massachusetts Green Light

Jimmy and Grandad survey FarnhamThere is some history to this story. A while back (2005) Massachusetts decided that all of the document sit dealt with would be open XML formats. At the time this meant ODF because the view was that the Microsoft format wasn’t open enough.

Many people expected others to follow the Massachusetts lead.

Today it seems that Microsoft have indeed done enough to make Open Office XML (OOXML) a suitable format.

Similar to my last post, this is a fight about primacy. In this case this is Microsoft fighting to retain primacy in the office application space by retaining primacy in the file format space. Microsoft wasn’t going to hand over it’s primacy without a fight. they may have had to become more open to retain it, but they have probably gone a long way to securing the file format primacy.

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