Just sitting here today banging away at all of these desktop ‘productivity’ applications on my laptop and thinking about how great it would be to have tools that are fundamentally different than what we have been using for lo these 20 years. I am rooting for new market solutions that can release me from these separate applications for ‘writing’, ‘calculating’, ‘emailing’, ‘collaborating’ and ‘presenting’. As Google, Zoho and others introduce new web-based office applications in the cloud they will solve the issue of local thick client installs of office software.  But, here’s hoping they, or some of our open source friends include fundamental changes in the nature of how these tools behave and inter operate, or at least have a plan to get there soon!

A small example - why should I have to switch out of my email presentation window to look for a map to an address presented within the message? We did a review (more…)

 

Gordon Haff crafted an interesting post this month on the Identity 2.0 conundrum, in which he notes that there is an increasing blurring of the line between personal and professional identities on the web.  I keep this “corporate” blog on Ingres, but include personal blog posts regarding music news and concerts since I am an avid music aficionado, with the intention that this mixes it up a bit by providing business and entertainment opinions. Regarding other identities, I keep all professional contacts in LinkedIn. I had intended to keep Facebook as my personal network, but find that colleagues ‘friend’ me such that I can’t consider all contacts there to be strictly personal any longer.

The topic reminded me of some consideration I have been giving as to how to weave social networking sites more into the fabric of the company. Part of what the IT team provisions to the company relate to communication and collaboration capabilities. (more…)

 

Have been preparing to be on a panel at the Office 2.0 Conference September 5th. This looks to be an excellent place to find out more about the future of online productivity and collaboration. Our topic is “Going 100% SaaS” on Friday at 9:45 am. In preparation for the conference, I joined the panel online to work on an outline using Google Docs. Even though internet explorer failed in the middle of making my first edits, the changes had been saved when I returned via Firefox. So first impression is positive with only a few reservations until off-line processing for desktop documents is delivered - looking forward to learning more at the conference!