killthemeeting

With the impending release of Office12 (or Office 2007 or whatever Microsoft ends up deciding to call it,) there have been some demos, screenshots, etc. of the new Office functionality released that look interesting for helping to move the benefits of face-to-face, site-based communication out to non-site based workers.

Surprisingly, the Office application getting the greatest overhaul this version seems to be Word, which is a large change from Office 2003 (in which Word was practically unchanged from the previous version, while Outlook got the deluxe treatment.)  The UI is substantially changed, and in my opinion for the better.  Styles are more accessible (though not accessible enough); it's too bad that styles, one of Word's most powerful features, are so drastically underused since they're not presented in a very understandable way and thus people end up with "style pollution" in any documents that get shared among multiple people.

Outlook has gotten some improvements, though.  They've enabled side-by-side viewing and editing of multiple calendars (as well as the options of either viewing them entirely separately, or merging an arbitrary number of them onto one color-coded view,) which should be useful for anyone who needs to track more than one schedule (either other people's schedules, or their own for different jobs or projects.)  The task list and inbox are finally integrated (flagging a message for followup adds a task to complete,) making it a more functional organizational tool.  A "to-do" bar integrates appointments, tasks, and emails into one "Franklin planner" type view.  I wonder how much of this is a reaction to the new Google calendar -- looking at all of this, I can't help but think "now what would be really useful is putting all of this stuff on a web-site so that non-location-dependent workers could get at a full planner interface without carrying one around."  Google's new calendar, of course, is precisely that; I haven't looked at it enough to know how it is on organization and integration, but its actual calendaring/scheduling features look very nice.  Also, Outlook12 supports RSS feeds in the same way as mailboxes, newsgroups, or public folders -- it's not very compelling as an overall RSS aggregation strategy for Microsoft, but it does move Outlook closer to being "one-stop shopping" for daily information flows.

They've also put InfoPath into Outlook -- in other words, you can make a form with defined fields, email it to a bunch of people, and get back the tabulated responses to your survey instead of a bunch of emails.   And Project is integrated, too; a project manager can create a project, delegate tasks to various people in the enterprise, and have those tasks show up on their Outlook Tasks list.  There will be some sort of two-way feedback mechanism in this, though I haven't been able to try this out (most of Microsoft's groupware features require an Exchange or SharePoint server to work; great for the enterprise, not great for a blogger trying to check out beta software.)  Imagine being able to give project status updates within your tasks list instead of having to have constant "status update" meetings for every project -- that's the promise of this.  Time spent and tasks completed can be input directly, so the project manager can tell you're doing something without having to have you sit down at a table with him.  (Of course, the project manager should be able to tell by looking at the results of work, but we've all had project managers who don't have development knowledge.  Besides, project managers have managers, too -- and sometimes they won't take "I know my team, I can tell they're progressing according to schedule" for an answer.  They want numerical results, tasks completed, hours per day.  If nothing else, Outlook to Project integration will help feed the numbers machine.)

The big groupware project addition for Office12 is Office SharePoint Server.  SharePoint has been integrated into Office as a full member of the productivity suite.  It allows for resource libraries -- you could create a PowerPoint slide template, for instance, and put it into the library, where other people can make presentations based on it.  If you update the template, it automatically updates presentations based on it.  Workflow management can be defined and documents automatically routed through it.  They finally have real version control (as opposed to current versions of SharePoint, which have the utterly ludicrous feature of optional version control, in which each uploader can choose whether to add a new version or just clobber all old ones) and centrally managed policy.  

For the enterprise, at least (the market segment the Office division really cares about, whatever MS may say), it looks like they've actually produced a version of Office worth upgrading to.  It has its downsides (the radically new UI is less efficient for power users, and will require a total retraining of employees, retooling of training courses, rewriting of Office books, etc.), but the new features actually can improve productivity and project tracking in a way that a thousand Gantt charts full of wild-ass guesses can't touch.

It'll be interesting to see, in the coming months or years, how much of this functionality Google absorbs into their Calendar and Mail applications.  Most of Office's really good collaboration features depend on an enterprise environment (i.e. site-based & behind a firewall) that can host an Exchange or SharePoint server.  Google has the advantage that it is the server, so it can offer these features as part of its base offerings, rather than charging an extra few thousand dollars for serverware.  Of course, its disadvantage (lack of control; corportations don't like having their private information -- which usually means all their information -- on servers they don't own) may prevent real enterprise adoption, but I could see it being used by small companies.

Or maybe that's their real plan... package their collaboration software as an application service provider.  Pay to get mycompany.google.com as a server controlled by your company, and offering all the Google mail and calendar products.  The "Google Office" concept has been mostly dismissed, as Google is in no position to offer direct competitors to products like Word and Excel.  But what if those aren't the office products they intend to compete with?  It fits in well with the whole "Web 2.0" concept to have Google try to be the office suite for the distributed office. 

Posted by Grant at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Why is the life of the modern IT worker an endless series of not only mind-numbing but also amazingly useless meetings?  Why is it I can be more productive at home, telecommuting, than I can in the office, a place ostensibly designed for the purpose of work? 

I blame Microsoft Exchange.  Back before Exchange and its precursor Lotus Notes, scheduling a meeting was hard.  You had to call or email everybody, and try to find a time that would work for everyone.  Alternately, you could autocratically declare a time if you had sufficient authority, and just accept that some people wouldn't show up.  Meetings were mainly a periodic, scheduled thing -- you knew the project plan meeting was Wednesday at 2:00, the team meeting was Monday at 8:00, and your meeting with your manager was on Thursdays.  There weren't many, and those there were tended to have pretty large groups at them.  But now, thanks to groupware like Exchange (you probably know it as the Outlook calendar) and Notes, everyone can see everyone's calendar, so scheduling a meeting is quick and effortless.  The result is not just more meetings, but the creation of the ad hoc meeting -- the meeting you can't plan around because nobody bothers to schedule it until the day or even the hour before it happens.  This is impossible for telecommuters.

The technology aimed to solve a problem -- it was too difficult and inconvenient for people who needed to schedule meetings to do so.  The failure is that it worked too well -- it eliminated the transaction cost for scheduling a meeting.  I can now, in 5 minutes, take an hour of time from 10 people by scheduling a meeting with them.  Since I can see their calendars, they're even robbed of most convenient excuses.  If it took me two hours of phone calls to call all those people and arrange things, I might not even bother.  What's more, I can now easily schedule meetings with numbers of people that would have been quite impractical the old way.  Yet in my experience, the usefulness of a meeting is inversely proportional to the number of people attending it (yet its length seems to be directly proportional to attendees.)  The technology has created a new problem -- too many meetings.  This is one of the major reasons I actually get more work done in 5 hours at home than I do in 8 hours at work -- at home, I can work on things that are important, and when someone has a question, they send me an email I can answer in 5 minutes instead of scheduling an hour-long meeting.

To free workers from their commutes, we must kill the meeting.  Now, while I imagine I could easily get a cheering mob of office workers to joyfully chant "Kill the meeting!" (I've yet to meet someone who likes meetings), actually doing away with it is more difficult -- constant ad hoc meetings have become a major part of company culture in the American workplace. One possibility is that the only way out is through -- perhaps technology can solve the problem it created.

The latest buzzword in groupware and office applications is "presence."  Thanks to an in-development project called Istanbul that I used while at Microsoft, Windows Messenger now integrates with Exchange, to connect your IM free/busy information to your calendar (i.e. IM marks you "Away" during meetings on your calendar, etc.)  The idea is to make IM free/busy information a virtual indicator of if you're available or not.  If you open a Word document in Office12 (the next version of Office) in an Exchange-enabled environment, the sidebar has the IM icons for the other people who have worked on the document, complete with if they're available or not.  You can dispatch IMs to them right there with questions about the document, and they'll get the IM with links to the document so they can see what you're talking about.  If they open it, they get the same view you're looking at.  You can share the document and edit it simultaneously, while also able to IM chat (or voice chat, if you have PC headsets, or even videoconference if you have webcams.)  In other words, you can have an ad hoc meeting without leaving your desk.

This is not without its share of problems.  Just what we need -- one more way to be distracted by other people while you're trying to get work done.  It'll probably lower productivity overall -- every context-switch kills about 15 minutes of productivity, and people being able to IM you about document questions results in constant context-switching.  But... it does create virtual presence.  This sort of system allows telecommuters to do the virtual equivalent of dropping into each other's offices carrying a printout.  And since offices will blindly adopt it whether it's good for productivity or not -- just like they did with shared calenars -- it'll be out there in any case.

Posted by Grant at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)