Rather often when I read posts or articles about software I see people referring to Microsoft Office as the “productivity suite” and I can´t really understand why. Maybe it is because English is not my native language. Some may think this is another stab at Microsoft beacuse they are the evil force in software universe. I will do that in other posts 🙂 This is just about semantics and choice of words. If MS Office is called that means that it using them must increase or at least contribute to productivity. But all the other software I like image and video editing software or for that sake alternative text editiors don’t they also contribute to productivity. It seems like there is a category missing here. Or is it because they span such a wide areas of use that no single catagory seem to fit. Also, and this is a question, does the OpenOffice suite fall in the same “productivity suite”-category for these authors?
Why is MS Office called a "productivity suite"?
Collaboration and why content management matters
For the past years I have been busy working on projects were collaboration have been in the focus. The overall ideas have been to enable people from different countries to work together in a smart way to solve a common problem. In my realm these problems usually have something to do with crisis management operations. Somewhere along these discussions the role of IT-support have came up and collaboration in general more or less automatically turned into collaboration technologies. Not so much about the specifics about which solutions to use for a particular problem but rather a general idea that some kind of easy web application probably could do the trick if only those IT-guys did their magic…
In the discussions around network centric warfare I have seen many Powerpoint slides outlining how people should share knowledge and gain “situational understandning” whatever that is. However, few of these slides have any substance on how we actually can use existing or emerging technologies to do the trick. There are usually lots of millions spent on handling data from radar, infrared and motion sensors. However most military HQs end up sitting with computers where people like to send messages, write documents, show briefing slide and other “office stuff”. Instead of treating that part of the information flow as innovativly as we do with sensor data (many millions spent on algorithms!) we keep flooding our email systems with attachments and everybody wonder how to find the information they need.
I follow all the Alfresco blogs reguarly and especially the one by John Newton, CEO of Alfresco and co-founder of Documentum. I smiled for myself when I saw a recent post from him where he presented yet another slide that illustrated the needs for people working in emergency relief operations. I recognized more or less every word in it. However, I believe John Newton not only understand how to solve that but have a product to sell that is critical in doing it.
To me the fascinating part is to look at this “we need to share knowledge between us”-problem from above. Instant messaging is moving into the enterprise now, people like to buy project management tools that are supposed to fix everything. Wikis and Blogs gets installed. Fueled by Google advanced search engines like FAST and Autonomy are installed to enable searching from different sources. Different people sees one (or maybe two) of these technologies as the key to solve the information chaos. Unfortunately none of these are any silver bullets.The worst part of it is that none of them usually have any analysis done of what the pieces of information really are and how they should be stored to be used efficiently. Enterprise Content Managment System have been around for a while but as Alfresco like to point out only 5-10% of the companies actually have one. That means that all this critical information is not stored as it should. Vital requirements of a repository are:
– Versioning
– Metadata as tags extracted from the documents
– Document-level security
– Workflow actions instead of sending attachment over email
– Lifecycle to handle status like draft, approved and archived.
– Free-text search engine
– Server-side transformation of content between formats
Without these features in the storage chaos will prevail. On the contrary, all other systems should store its document-based information in an ECM repository. That means that project documentation in the project management tool will be stored in the repository, users online on the Corporate IM solution will send(chat) references to documents in the repository and content from an approved document is automatically uploaded to the public website in HTML or PDF-format.
It is the integration of them that can lead forward. A successful implementation of collaboration techonologies requires an analysis of what Your pieces of information look like. Then these pieces need to be stored in a smart way. Otherwise there will be no “stuff” to collaborate around.
Mac Pro…for me!
I have been waiting for a couple of years now. I sometimes do some small film projects like documentaries and similar movies and I do want to use the new cool features of Final Cut Studio. However, my PowerMac 867 that I bought in 2002 have really become too slow for that. So I have been longing for a new Mac with multiple processors and today I bought it. I settled for a Mac Pro with Dual Duo-core Xeon 2.66 Ghz processors with 5 Gb RAM and dual Samsung displays. I felt really good to be back on top of the required specs for the software again. I can´t wait to start playing around in Motion to create some stunning graphics.
Apple best in test!
Today, one of Sweden´s biggest newspaper reports that in an independant test of laptop computers, Apple´s MacBook got rated best in test. It included parameters such as battery life, light intensity of the display and not the least a drop test where the MacBook was the only computer completely unharmed. Another good reason to swtich to a Mac.
Alfresco 2.0 Released
Alfresco is an open-source solution for Enterprise Content Management (ECM). It competes with products like EMC Documentum, IBM Document Manager/FileNet, OpenText/Hummingbird and many others. The idea is to focus on the content (and not projects or something else) within organizations and that means all kind of documents like Word, PowerPoint, PDFs but more and more also images, sounds and video as well. Increasingly these platforms also set out to handle structured content within databases. My experience is that employing a good information model for the content with an organization is the only way to start bringing some order to all the documents found on file servers.
Anyway, Alfresco is a really interesting open-source alternative to this. It has been designed from the bottom up by the same team that developed Documentum years ago. It features versioning, metadata support, free text searching, workflow management as well as a special web content management addition. The list of open standards it supports is very long and I think that is the right way to go. With some help from my friend Martin I installed it on a Apple XServe running Mac OS X Server 10.4.8 and it looked really nice with some new AJAX-powered user interfaces.
Web 2.0
Maybe you have heard about Web 2.0 or the next generation of Internet but wonder what the fuss really was all about. In essence it is not a single thing but a concept made possible by a few different technologies. The thing is though, that it is not so much about technology as it is about changing the way we do business, interact and collaborate. I think just a superficial understandning of these concepts makes it much easier to envision new ideas of how to create (IT-based) service that help us all do amazing things. Someone have put together a very nice video which does a good job of explaining this I think
Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
It is just 4 min and 31 sec and it is well worth it – especially if you are not a technology kind of person.
Mac OS X Tech Talk
A couple of years ago I attended a lot of Apple events here in Sweden and I enjoyed it very much. It is somehow very nice to be around other Mac users and see the glowing Apple everywhere you look. To me all these events also were some kind of a water hole for me because I could go there as a woman. I guess I tested the waters a bit there and it was always very nice days. This Friday it was time again but now the main reason was of course to listen to rather advanced presentations about the development frameworks of the upcoming Mac OS 10.5 Leopard operating system. There were people brought in from abroad to give very detailed presentations about the new exciting API Core Animation as well as Open GL, XCode 3.0 and other new stuff. I can´t tell you more because we signed an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) to go there but I can tell you the future for Cocoa developers looks promising!
A little more info is available here: Tech Talk Sessions
I would have been fired if I worked in the US Air Force
Sometimes it is easy to forget that Sweden is a really good place to live, for instance if you are a transsexual person. Even more if you happen to have chosen to devote your life to work in the armed forces. Some may have heard of the US policies called “Don´t ask – Don´t tell” which in essence says that you can be gay just as long no one knows. And the employer is not allowed to ask if you are. If someone finds out – you are discharged. The same goes for transsexuals, they are also discharged if they starts their transition while in the US Armed Forces. Makes me really sad. Read more here. Compare that to IBM who not only allows transsexuals in the company, they also pays for your medical care!
Why don
Sometimes I have a hard time understandning how people really work. I sometimes find myself in a situation when I am sitting in a group of people and someone is suddenly referreing to me as “him” or say “Well, boys…” to the group and I am the only woman sitting there. Usually no one ever says anything (to correct and remind) even though it is people I know. I have thinking about this and just wonder why they don´t. Here are some options:
– They did not notice at all.
– They do not care.
– They want to say something but think it is better for me not to.
– They want to say something but do not want to take that conflict (now).
– They agree.
Of course I also wonder why people say this at all. I am sure no one means any harm but somehow something about me or what I do make them not think of me as a female. The strange part is that in each moment it so very hard to figure out what that is. The question is of course if I know that, would I want to change all of that just to pass as a woman? Sometimes I might just want to be myself and occasionally it has the drawback of being seen as a sign of the other sex. This of course happens to all people but I guess it usually means more for my appearance than others. Still, quite a few men strive really hard to not “act female” in any way 🙂
Please feel free to comment!
Hillary for President
Well, today it happened and I guess we have all just waiting for when rather than if 🙂 . Hillary Clinton have officially announced her ambitions to become the next US President by forming a so called Exploratory Committee on her own webpage. I personally was a big fan of the TV-show Commander-in-Chief and even though it was prematurely cancelled I think it prepared the US people for a woman in the Oval Office. I am reading her book now and I can´t help liking her I think she will be a good President.