Smarter Messaging [Mike Jones, UK]

One of my great influencers is a guy called Jon Udell and I’ve mentioned his work here before. He recently joined Microsoft after a long career in various journalistic roles including time at Byte Magazine and more recently InfoWorld. His role at Microsoft will be to continue to make abstract technical capabilities into real-world, exciting use cases but he’s going to try to also move the audience to a less “geeky” one. Jon is such a geek that he uses the term “outlying data point” to describe himself, which is in itself a geeky phrase!

The reason I wanted to write about it was I’ve been thinking along these lines for the areas that I’m working in at the moment. If you can’t make your technology accessible, understandable, relevant, etc. to end-users then it can be the most life changing software in the world but it will not gain adoption.

Technology will continue to advance at an enormous rate, but will it be adopted at even a moderate rate?

I recently attended a training course for Groove 2007 in Berlin, Germany which took place after the SharePoint Conference. Groove is an excellent software tool that I used to run my consultancy a few years back before it got acquired by Microsoft … Groove that is, not my consultancy! It’s best used as a tool to enable small teams to collaborate on a shared goal or goals. It encompasses document creation, communication, note taking, data gathering and many other things. It’s even clever enough to have the right mix of technology to be peer-to-peer and manageable by an organisation. Most people think of peer-to-peer in the negative sense of disruptive and bandwidth-intensive. One of the many things that struck me as interesting on the course was that they were acquired back in April 2005 and released no products from then until the release now of Office Groove 2007 which actually has features removed from the version 3.1 which was their last before Microsoft. Sure they’ve added some manageability features and made it fall under the security programme that Microsoft run, but how much more innovation could they have had outside, in the agile start-up world? Then I realised that it didn’t really matter! Groove as it stands now has enough features now to more than satisfy most peoples needs. What it needs is adoption by passionate lead users who will invite colleagues to work with them and help them overcome the inevitable conceptual and technical problems will have.

Groove will have a helping hand because it is very different to most enterprise (not consumer) software that exists today because it is viral. When you want to work with someone in Groove you “invite” them. If they don’t have Groove they can get a 120 day trial and by then they’re either hooked or they’ve finished the project but lost nothing.

Most software doesn’t have this advantage but what can we do to make sure that our friends, colleagues and clients can get hold of the knowledge and understanding that will help them run their organisations better? I believe one of the key ways will be defining use cases and finding ways to present them better. Whether this be podcasting (subscribe-able audio downloads), videoblogging (capturing people talking on camera), screencasting (videos of software demonstrations) or any of the presentation methods yet to be invented it has to be language that is accessible and use cases that are relevant.

Another key way will be not telling people about things. It sounds odd but sometimes my passion makes me tell people about stuff that is not ready for prime time. I often haven’t realise how many work-arounds I’ve unconsciously done to make something work until I try to introduce it to someone else and then I have to say “Oh yeah, ignore that button for now it’ll crash it” or other such phrases.

I look forward to the future of technology but I think a job more important is to make the most of what we have now.
technorati tags: technology, groove, microsoft, jonudell

This morning Steve Clayton pointed to a video of Bill Gates and Gordon Brown speaking at the Scottish Parliament (Windows Media File). I noted in the comments that it only takes Gordon Brown 20 seconds to make his first mistake by calling Bill the CEO… he’s the Chairman. If you jump to 50 minutes into it you get to the point where they sit down and take questions from people who’ve written in and both of them seem to become more engaging. They seem very comfortable and even make a few jokes! However they both make the same irritating pointless gestures with their hands that a lot of public speakers seem to make these days in an attempt to appear more active and lively. When I talk I like to put one hand in my pocket (I feel a song coming on) to stop me falling into that trap, and only bring it out when making a gesture that requires it.

It also got me thinking about the parallels in collaboration and team-work. What pointless gestures do we make to try and appear active and lively? The one that immediately came to mind was in the use of carbon copy (cc) in email. We try to include everyone and their uncle that might possibly have a stake in the thing we’re talking about. Instead of just engaging with people to fix a problem or achieve a goal we try to do that and make doubly sure we get credit for it.

[photo courtesy of Lori Tingey]

technorati tags: billgates, gordonbrown, gestures, steveclayton

Symantec have just released “Information Foundation 2007” which according to eWeek consists of:

Symantec Enterprise Vault; Symantec Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator; Symantec Enterprise Vault Compliance Accelerator; Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series; Symantec IM Manager; Symantec Information Foundation Mail Security for Exchange; Symantec Mail Security for Domino; and Symantec Web Security for Microsoft ISA (Internet Security and Acceleration) Server.

Of those listed I’m very familiar with the first 5 and they are all excellent products, especially the Enterprise Vault and 8300 series. eWeek also say:

Symantec Information Foundation is available as a single enterprise license and is priced on a subscription basis, per user, per year. Estimated pricing starts at $95 per user, per year, with volume and multi-year discounts available.

I was joking to someone I know at Symantec that it’s a bit Lord of the Rings, one CAL to rule them all, one CAL to bind them and decided to mock up the image so they could use it for marketing purposes!

technorati tags: symantec, informationfoundation, enterprisevault

I’ve spent a lot of the last year working pretty closely with Symantec here in the UK. Most of the people I’ve run across have been excellent, hard working people. There’s a few “less useful” individuals but with 16,000 employees what do you expect?

Whenever I talk to people about working with Symantec they always say “Oh yeah, the ones who make the anti-virus … That ruined my computer” … or something similar. These people often include hardcore IT professionals. Take a look at the comments on this high profile ZDNet blog. How on earth are they going to get past this negativity? If you take a look at the products pages on their site you’ll see they do a huge amount in a number of areas.

You know what they should be doing? Getting out there and on these blogs and forums using the abundance of tools out there for tracking what people are saying and countering negative with positive. Engaging with the issues which are often repeated again and again. The excellent Jon Udell recently interviewed Paul English on his weekly podcast who stuck his entire staff on support so they would fully appreciate customers problems. I know 30 staff are different from 16,000 but there has to be some parrells!

technorati tags: symantec, communication

I’ve just moved the site over from my old domain “collaborationconsultant.com” to this new one “smartermessaging.com”. I did this for a number of reasons but the biggest is that I was not blogging stuff because I felt it didn’t fit under that banner very comfortably.

Why Smarter Messaging?

In the last two businesses I’ve been involved in I’ve tried to get across to customers the concept of “Smarter Conversations”. My last business was actually called Smarter Conversations Ltd (even though the trading name was Bubble) and on my business card I had “Enabling Smarter Conversations”. The concept was inspired by a guy called Hugh McLeod (warning: some bad language) but my variation on it in making it relevant to my field is this:

If I can give you tools and skills that enable you to have the clearest, most up-to-date data when you are engaging with customers, partners and colleagues then you can have smarter conversations.

With my Bubble business this involved creating mobile applications that roaming staff could send and receive data from. With my current role it is giving people secure access to Instant Messaging applications so they can have timely synchronous conversations with each other.

So the reason I settled on “smarter messaging” as opposed to “conversations” was because I hope to be able to extend the application of this concept into all the areas I’m currently involved in and the things I hope to do. Fun times ahead…

technorati tags: smarter, conversations, messaging

This week I’ve been thinking about the last year in our industry and the changes that we’ve seen and what really stood out for me is the number of different ways there now is to connect with people over IM.

In the early days of instant messaging networks it was quite easy to define the different types of systems and ways of accessing them. The two key ways used to be:

• Public: Systems run by large service companies such as MSN, Yahoo! and AOL, connected to via their own client.
• Enterprise: Private systems deployed behind the firewall such as Microsoft Live Communications Server, IBM Lotus Sametime and Jabber

I started to make a rough list of the ways you can now connect:

• Enterprise - LCS/Sametime
• Enterprise with public federation
• Public - MSN, Yahoo, AIM, AIMPro, ICQ, Google Talk, Skype, etc
• Public with federation - MSN to Yahoo!, Google to AIM
• Web Messenger - As provided by public networks
• 3rd Party Web Messenger - Meebo.com etc
• Web Messenger toolkits - Embed it into any site
• Mobile Native Client - MSN etc on Windows Mobile
• Mobile Web Messenger - in mobile browser
• Mobile Enterprise - Like LCS client on Blackberry
• IM over SMS

I know some of these have been around more than a year and I’m sure I’ve missed some off but it really is an impressive list. The challenge that we’re facing right now is how we manage users across the different access modes rather than just shut them down and loose the productivity gains. A challenge for sure!

A question I often get asked by users that are going monitored and protected by an Instant Messenger (IM) security system is “what’s in it for me?”…

Depending on who the user is I then list off some of the following reasons:

It can be your “Sent Items” for IM
How many times a day do you go and retrieve something from your sent items in your email program? Most of the newer IM clients have the ability to capture transcripts of your conversations but it’s usually off by default. I’ve also had problems with them moving the location of the stored messages between versions of the client, corruption occurring, forgetting which IM network I was talking to a person on, etc. However, if you have your messages logged by the server and your administrator has enabled access to your personal archives then you can just go to a web page and browse or search your archives.

It protects you against infection from virus’ of varying kinds
One of the main reasons organisations deploy IM security systems is the virus protection. IM is a totally different infection path to email and the attacks are increasingly sophisticated. They can include the virus chatting to you first before sending you a link that sends you off to a web page to get infected. Generally the people on your contact list in IM are usually people you know and trust and so when one of them sends you something you click it blindly.

It protects your contacts against infection from you!
I’ve heard some great stories in the past of very senior IT staff specialising in IM getting infected then passing the infection onto their teams! Can you imagine how embarrassed they were? Your contact lists may include suppliers and clients, would you like to be the one who sent them the virus that killed their system and lost them a whole heap of productivity?

There are plenty more benefits to the users but those mentioned above are usually enough to convince someone it’s not just another “big brother” ploy!

Sometimes I’m amazed at how incompetent large companies can be. Example:

1. Take a large UK based hosting company which claims to be the biggest in the UK
2. Set-up an email only account with them because they do nice cheap Exchange boxes
3. Decide you’re happy with them so open another one for a related company
4. Decide you’re happy with that too and want to add hosting to the domain too
5. “Sorry sir you can’t do that. You have to create another account, delete the old one, re-set up the old mailboxes on the new one, and apply for a refund because it’ll charge you again for the mailboxes”
6. Decide that seeing as they’ve not started using the mailboxes and won’t loose anything its worth the hassle.
7. Do it.
8. Phone the “Customer Service” team to get the refund
9. “Oh no sir they’re different accounts, we don’t give out refunds for that as a policy”
10. “But the man in sales said you would”
11. “No the person is sales would have said you ‘could try’”
12. “Err no”
13. “I’ll put it through to management as a request and we’ll have to take it from there”
14. “Can I make a friendly request that you can put to whatever person you do internally that you make it possible to upgrade an ‘email only’ account to include hosting?
15. “No we can’t do that because they’re different systems. Different servers do different things. So even if we wanted to we couldn’t”
16. [try and explain that it’s not a server problem but a problem with their system]
17. “No sorry you need to understand its not possible”
18. [silence as you contemplate if its worth fighting an idiot]
19. “OK. So you’ll but that request in for me?”
20. “Yes”
21. “OK, thanks. Bye.”

I can so see why the point I mentioned before sits so well:

… some enormous percentage of calls to call centres (or is the correct phrase “contact centres” now) are because something has gone wrong. However, they rarely are logged as “complaints” they are just handled. We have armies of people whose only job is to deal with exceptions that if they were captured in a coherent manner could probably be dealt with to stop everyone else suffering the same fate. Of course if you product or company is so dire that it can’t change in response to issues you might as well just give up now!

technorati tags: fasthosts, hosting, business, incompetent, customer, services

I was just talking to a friend about Thingamy and I pointed him at the website. His comments after looking at the site and my having to confirm it wasn’t a joke were:

“I thought it was a later version of the NaDa system”.

I’d never seen that great site before (the only bug is a great part). It’s not a joke, I promise… and our clients who are beginning to experiment with probably hope that too!

Some Values

Pipeline Data (P) = 2

Knowledge Base (K) = 2

Some CRM Package (S) = 1

Thingamy (T) = 2

Some Sums

(P * S) + (K * T) = 6

(P * T) + (K * T) = 8

Conclusion

Yay! It’s still valuable even if you don’t “put everything in it“