http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=219519&title=twitter-frenzy
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3weqLgnPfQ&hl=en&fs=1
Now I reckon there is a business case for Twitter but certainly not the way most people seem to be using it! No matter what you think I can assure that Twitter is coming to a screen near you real soon. As I always say, technology distractions don’t just occur – THEY SEEK YOU OUT.
Tweet, Tweet.
SharePoint videos
Microsoft has just released a swag of SharePoint videos. Details below.
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Demo: Use a blog to connect with your coworkers
You can use a blog to improve communication in your workplace. The blog authors can post information such as updates on benefits changes, promotions of seminars, and detailed information on policies. Employees can post their questions or comments and see the responses from the blog author.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Demo: Search for information on a SharePoint site
When you use a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 site, you can use the search feature to help you find information, files, Web sites, and people. In this demo, you will see how an employee at a fictitious company called Adventure Works uses search to locate information on a SharePoint site and complete job-related tasks.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Demo: Display KPIs in a dashboard
A dashboard is a special Web Part Page that displays business data from a variety of different sources in high-level visuals like reports, charts, and key performance indicators (KPIs). The data displayed in dashboards can be filtered automatically or filtered by properties selected by users, enabling comparative data analysis across an organization. Because they pull together important business intelligence data from different sources in an easy-to-understand visual format, dashboards are useful tools that enable managers or decision makers to quickly assess the status of their business. This demo shows you how to create a dashboard page on a Report Center site and how to add a KPI Web Part to the dashboard page to display KPIs. You will also see how to add a KPI Details Web Part to a dashboard to display detailed information about a specific individual indicator.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Demo: Make better business decisions with reports and dashboards
Business intelligence (BI) is the process of aggregating, storing, analyzing, and reporting on business data in order to support informed business decisions. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides tools that can help you extract data from a variety of sources and present that data in ways that facilitate analysis and decision making. In this demo, you’ll see how employees at a fictitious company called Adventure Works use a Report Center site to create and manage reports, dashboards, and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Demo: Enterprise Content Management with SharePoint Server
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides powerful Enterprise Content Management (ECM) features for creating, managing, and storing content across an enterprise. In this demo, you’ll learn how a fictitious company called Adventure Works uses SharePoint Server to publish Web pages, archive and audit records, and manage documents. The demo shows how the Technical Documentation team uses a Document Center site as a centralized repository to create, organize, edit, and review all customer-facing external publications, such as user manuals and product specification sheets.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Demo: Streamline business processes with forms and workflows
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 can help you integrate and streamline your business processes. You can use the InfoPath Forms Services server technology in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to create browser-based forms and gather data from organizations that do not use Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007. People in those organizations can complete forms in a Web browser or HTML-enabled mobile device. Workflows automatically move documents or items through a sequence of actions or tasks related to a business process. Workflows can streamline the cost of coordinating common business processes, such as project approval or document review, by managing and tracking the tasks involved with those processes.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Demo: Simplify collaboration with a SharePoint team site
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides organizations with a platform for sharing information and working together in teams. A SharePoint site offers specific kinds of tools and workspaces that you can use to communicate with team members, track projects, coordinate deadlines, and collaboratively create and edit documents. In this demo, you’ll see how employees at a fictitious company called Adventure Works use features on a team site such as lists, document libraries, calendars, slide libraries, and blogs to collaborate on documents, track projects, and share information.
Email “free” days don’t work
One of the “solutions” that companies mistakenly believe will solve their email overload problem is the concept of email “free” days. On a nominated day no-one is allowed to send emails to each other, they must find another way to communicate, be that phone, conversation, SMS, whatever.
Now this concept is bankrupt as the article “E-mail ruined my life” demonstrates:
E-mail is so ingrained in our working lives that Deloitte’s experiment was abandoned after only a month. But the company still thinks it was worth it.
Bzzzzzt, wrong. Email “free” days don’t work because they don’t CHANGE the bad habits people have. All they do is forcibly prevent them but when that edict is removed everyone returns to their former unproductive behaviour. In short, nothing has changed so how do you suddenly expect behaviour to change? It won’t but it seems even large companies can’t understand that.
The secret is providing people with the training necessary to change their habits, to improve they way the use emails. It is only with this change will you see an improvement in productivity.
For more information about improving email productivity visit www.doemailless.com.
Facebook follies
Now we all probably know the story of Facebook. If not then I suggest you have a read of “How Facebook is taking over our lives” to give you an idea of the impact that it is having and the speed at which it is growing. What many people don’t seem to appreciate is that we are surrendering our privacy to commercial entities like Facebook at an alarming rate.
Many people don’t understand that whatever they post on the Internet is generally searchable and available to anyone. A good example of this is “Facebook scam: Ferrari man’s true identity revealed”. In short a recent Facebook scam featured a man standing next to a Ferrari (as if you would drive an Enzo on the road!) claiming that if you followed his method you’d make enough money to own an Ferrari (an Enzo costs over US$ 1 million by the way). Now the interesting thing, as the article details, is that the picture of the man standing next to the Ferrari is actually someone who uploaded his holiday snaps to the Internet and had no idea they were being used in this way.
The moral of the story is that you should never upload content that includes ANY private information about yourself to the Internet. I also reckon that you should also specifically avoid photos of yourself or your family. Problem is, many people don’t see anything wrong with it and continue to do so, not appreciating that once it is up on the Internet you no longer have control over it. Would you offer that information to a stranger on the street? Probably not, so why are you offering on the Internet to billions of strangers?
Facebook is a commercial entity. Its sole purpose in life if to make money for shareholders. If it allows you to sign up for free where do you think it makes money? It does that by collected as much information about you and selling that. If you willing provide more information, it will sell that also. Don’t be fooled by claims otherwise, your information is valuable. If you don’t think so then someone else certainly does.
Don’t get me wrong, things like Facebook and Twitter have their place but you should stop and consider how much information you are giving away and what you get in return. Once you have given that information away chances are you’ll never get it back. So, at the very least, don’t upload a picture of you standing next to a really expensive car or you could be the face of the next Internet scam!
Email interruption
A while back I did a post on Productivity costs of emails based on the average Australian wage. Since then I’ve come across “The cost of email interruption” which is a short report from researchers at Computer Science Department of Loughborough University located in the United Kingdom. Although the report appears a little dated now some of its observations are still very relevant, like:
– It was notable that many of the email messages employees received were not really relevant to for them.This usually resulted from an email sent to all employees.
– The common reaction to the arrival of an email is not to delay response to a time that is more convenient to the user but to react within 6 seconds, again almost as quickly as they would respond to telephone calls.
It is amazing when you realize that people actually respond to an email faster than they do the phone. Now multiply that by how emails a day they receive and you get an idea of how bad email interruptions are.
Here’s another interesting finding:
During the study it was noticeable that none of the employees monitored used message rules within their email application
That’s right, none of the employees used message rules to filter their incoming emails! Like most applications we have on our machines these days we have no idea of the true power they provide us. We (and our employers) spend so little time learning how to use the technology tools that we are typically using a screwdriver to hammer in a nail. It does the job sure, just not very efficiently.
So what’s the solution according to the report?
Introduce training to all staff on how to use email in areas such as, setting email priority, email house keeping with message rules, effective use of the user groups and address books, constructing better structured emails.
and having recognized these issues myself that is exactly the training that I provide. Why? because it is truly amazing how much more productive the whole business (or the individual) becomes when they understand how to use email and their email programs correctly. They are never going to learn this on their own, it something they need guidance with.
You can find more information about the email productivity training I provide at www.doemailless.com.
SharePoint book review
In summary, I liked it because it is one of the few books that is specifically focused on Windows SharePoint Services rather than SharePoint in general (which also includes MOSS). It covers a good deal of ground from installation to using to advanced configuration including things like network load balancing. Some of more advanced topics may not be relevant to those using WSS v3 with Small Business Server but none the less I feel this book is a worthwhile reference for those looking for information about WSS v3.
Twitter clients
1. Web Client
When you start out using Twitter you simply post and monitor your updates via the Twitter web site. This has the advantage that you can achieve that from any Internet connected device but it also has a number of drawbacks in that the interface is pretty simple and to keep track of things can be difficult.
2. Twirl
Twirl is very much like Microsoft Live Messenger in that it keeps all your Twitter info inside a nice little application that can be minimized. It is easy to follow people and post using Twirl. The problem is that Twirl is another application I have to install, swap between when monitoring Twitter and has all the annoying interruptions that Messenger has (although it can be customized). The other issue I have with Twirl is that all the posts, including direct messages, simply appear in the same feed.
3. TweetDeck
TweetDeck is another very popular Twitter client application. The good think here is that it splits up replies and direct messages as well as other updates. It has a whole host of other features and is very pretty to look at. Problem was again it is a separate application that I needed to install and swap to when I wanted to monitor Twitter traffic. Annoyingly, by default, like most other “messenger” style clients it keeps interrupting me when a new post arrives.
4. OutTwit
By far the best client I have found is OutTwit which is an add one for Outlook. Once installed you can easily configure how often OutTwit checks for postings (yeah!). You can also select a folder in your mailbox for postings to be sent so you can review them at a later date. With the OutTwit toolbar in Outlook, you can post Twitter updates directly from Outlook. It even keeps track of Twitter statistics that are displayed in a graphical format.
To maintain productivity I really don’t want to be running another program to check Twitter. Given that I use Outlook for emails it makes so much sense to have Twitter postings also delivered here as well. I love the ability to schedule and automatically route incoming postings. Now with all my Twitter information inside Outlook I can use all the power of Outlook (searching, categorizing, archiving etc) to make better use of what come to me via Twitter. For me it just makes so much sense.
OutTwit wins hands in my books down because it integrates with the way I work now and means I don’t have to open and monitor a separate program. It would be nice if Microsoft could do this also for Messenger I reckon. Sure, I’ll still use the web interface now and then when I’m not in front of my Outlook, but these days how often is that?
Productivity costs
So, I was reading “Average weekly pay now $1166” in the business section of the Australian newspaper and thought I’d just run a quick calculation based on my favourite email productivity statistic which is:
If we assume a 44 hour week (normal 40 hours + 4 extra hours i.e. 10% = 44 hours per week average, which I reckon is high on average anyway). That means the average earnings per hour are $26.50.
So, if 8.5 hours are lost per week to email interruption that’s worth $ 225.25 per week and $10,812 per annum (assuming 48 work weeks a year) PER EMPLOYEE. Now if the “average” number of employees is say 10, that’s $108,120 per annum lost in productivity simply due to email interruption. ON AVERAGE, per business!
That’s almost the cost of two people on the average wage (which comes out to $111,936 based on the same assumptions). It certainly indicates that by simply being more efficient with the ubiquitous technology like email and preventing interruptions, perhaps businesses could maybe save two full time jobs.
It might not sound like a lot when you look at lost productivity per person, per day but add it up over a year, over all employees and I think you’ll start to understand that poor email behaviour is money down the drain. Who can afford to throw away that sort of cash these days?
For more information about improving productivity don’t forget to visit www.doemailless.com.
