New Outlook on the web features

Microsoft recently announced some updates to Outlook on the web. You can read about all of them here:

New features coming to Outlook on the web

But I thought I’d highlight a new feature that I have found pretty handy, and it is called Sweep.

So when you visit your mail in the Office 365 portal you should find a new toolbar across the top as shown above. In there you see an option called Sweep.

To use Sweep simply select a message from your inbox and then select the Sweep option from the menu. This should display a dialog box as shown above.

In this case I select the second option, Delete all messages from the inbox folder and any future messages.

Then select the Sweep button to complete the process.

You should then receive a confirmation like shown above. if you select the View rules button.

You’ll then be shown the rule that was just created from your actions. At the bottom you’ll also see any automated Sweep rules that have been created to keep your inbox tidy between visits.

Sweep is just one of the ways the Microsoft has improved your ability to manage your emails with the updated functionality in Outlook on the web. For more details on all the new features make sure you read the blog post:

New features coming to Outlook on the web

Being busy is an excuse for being unfocused

We all have stuff we need to get done, yet why do most people never seem to free themselves from the cycle of always being busy? The simple reason is they are not focused.
The world is divided up into stuff we like doing and stuff we don’t. The problem is that much of the stuff that actually needs to be done we don’t enjoy so we don’t do it. We find excuses to put it on the back burner while we go off and do something more enjoyable but far less important.
Thus, the stuff that should be getting done continues to pile up and eventually the chickens come home to roost and we have no choice but to actually do it. However, rather than now being able to select the when we do the task we simply have to throw our next available free time at the task due to its urgency.
We thus, no longer, have the choice of how we allot our precious time, it simply HAS to be allocated to get the task done. This is what people mean when they say they are busy. They are saying that they have to throw their available time allocations immediately at tasks they typically have not focused on or completed that can no longer be avoided. In short, they are no longer masters of their own time.
If you ask people what their most precious resource is, few will nominate time. That is why they use it so frivolously. They don’t value it and that is a fatal mistake. Why? Because time is something you never get back once it is consumed. No one can get more time and we all have a limited amount of time but worst of all, no one has any idea how much time they do have on this earth. So why the hell do people throw it away so casually?
They do so because they are unfocused. Because they haven’t created a plan to achieve their goals. Because they don’t value their time. If you begin to value your time as the most precious finite resource you have I’m pretty sure you’ll become laser focused on what you need to achieve. Try it and see.

Sugar-less

One of the things that I notice about the public in general (and IT resellers especially) is the the alarming amount of extra body weight many are carrying around. All the reading I have done on the subject tends to indicate that a major cause of this is due to the large amount of sugars in modern diets.

Don’t believe me? Stop and take a look at all the sugar you are consuming each day. You may think that you are doing a good thing but eating ‘lite’ and ‘fat-free’ food. The problem is that to make such food enticing the fat has been replaced with sugar and loads of it!

Why do I mention this? I see that there is a new documentary coming out very soon called Fed Up which focuses on the ‘sugar-issue’ and I would suggest that it is a must see for many. Here’s the trailer:

One of the things that you should appreciate as a small business operator is that if you can’t work you can’t earn a living. Thus, if your diet and lifestyle is making you unhealthy the sicker you are going to become, especially as you age.

If like me you are interested in trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle, it isn’t hard. However a very good starting point is the 4 Hour Body by Tim Ferriss.

I’d also recommend you getting something like a FitBit (which I have) and using that to track how active you are each day, how far you walk and your sleep patterns, which are all very important to your health. You can see my stats above since I got my FitBit recently for Christmas.

The first step in becoming more healthy, much like improving your business, is to start monitoring what is going on. I say start looking at your daily sugar intake and how active you are. I’d be surprised that if you reduced your sugar intake and increased your activity you wouldn’t become healthier.

Remember, you only have one life and it ticks away from you at every moment of every day, so make the most of it. If not for you then for the ones you love because you are an important part of their lives as well and you owe to them to look after yourself.

OneNote now FREE On all platforms

Some BRILLIANT news from Microsoft. They have made OneNote available on all platforms for FREE! This includes for the MAC for which I have been waiting for so long. Not having OneNote on the MAC was a huge limitation for me given I use it so much.
What Microsoft said was:
We have some exciting new developments for OneNote to share with you! In short these include:
1. OneNote for Mac is available for the first time and for free! With this, OneNote is now available on all the platforms: PC, Mac, Windows tablets, Windows Phone, iPad, iPhone, Android and the Web. And they’re always in sync.
2. OneNote is now free everywhere including the Windows PC desktop and Mac version. Premium features are available to paid customers.
3. The OneNote service now provides a cloud API enabling any application to connect to it. This makes it easier than ever to capture ideas, information and inspirations from more applications and more places straight into OneNote.
So if you haven’t experienced the joy of OneNote, now there is no excuse not to be using it EVERYWHERE!
I’m installing on my MAC as we speak and will report shortly on what I find.

Two sound suggestions

Thought I’d share with you two sound ‘suggestions’ I’ve come across recently.

In my never ending search for methods to be more productive I’ve tinkered with different types of background sound to help improve my focus. The best I have found so far is Focus at Will.

There are free and paid options as well a number of different sound tracks you can listen to. At the very least I urge you to give it a try and see if it does help your focus as that is what the tracks have been specifically designed for.

The other thing you may not have seen with Chrome is that when a tab is playing something a little speaker icon appears on that tab as shown above. This is great when you a lot of tabs open and some annoying ad starts making noise. A quick search of the tab headings in Chrome will allow you to locate that quickly and easily so you can deal with.

Love to hear what results you get with Focus at Will, because it has been very effective for me.

Better utilization

Although I am not one for New Year’s resolutions I am certainly one for settings goals. One of the ideas I have been mulling over of late is the ineffectiveness with which I have been approaching the resources I have access to.
If I stop and look at all the tools I have access it would be rare that I use even 20% of their full features. Many things, I suggest I would use even less. It is so easy to get distracted and lose focus with so many different options today but I started wondering how much more use I could make of what I already have if I simply spent some extra time learning what features are available and try and move the utilization of that tool closer to 80%.
One the other side of the coin, there are plenty of things that I have signed up for or access occasionally that I really don’t make good use of. If I don’t and I can find such features elsewhere I really should stop using that tool and simplify things.
So with those ideals in mind I am going to try and dedicate myself to looking more closely at the resources I already have and whether I can use them better or whether in fact I shouldn’t be using them at all. Basically optimization if you will.
My approach is going to be to focus more on something when I do use it the next time and try and learn a little bit more about it rather than just using the defaults as I always do. Hopefully, this will move me more towards my goal of 80% utilization along with reduction in the number of things that I do in fact use. I have already found it somewhat frustrating to spend that extra time dedicated to learning about something in depth rather than just moving on to the next item, however in the long run I believe it will pay dividends.
So the my question for you is, how much of the stuff you are doing now could be done better if you just looked a bit deeper into the tools that you use? Even a few percentage points more utilization I believe can yield significant returns.

The second fundamental difference between Office 365 and Google Apps

If you haven’t read what I believe is the first fundamental difference between Google Apps and Office 365 then you’ll find it here:
https://blog.ciaops.com/2013/08/the-fundamental-difference-between.html
The second fundamental difference is that Google Apps does not understand collaboration and here’s a few reasons why.
Google Apps and Office 365 are mainly about a suite of products. The main product most focus on is email. You know what? Email is a commodity. So many suppliers do it and there is not much real value or differentiation you can apply to email, in, as long as a business gets their emails who generally cares beyond that right? From a functionality point of view email is email and thus a commodity. Therefore whatever email functionality one provider has is generally the same as another provider so let’s agree to say hosted email systems are pretty equal.
What I will tell you is that email is an ‘old world’ technology. Today’s world is all about sharing and making information public so that it can be shared rather than siloed in someone’s inbox never to be seen again. Why do you think Facebook has over one billion users? Today people want to SHARE information. As a business I need to collaborate on all sorts of information quickly and easily including, files, folders, calendars, contacts, tasks and so on.
I will also tell you that those entering the work force now have little concept of traditional drive letters. They have no concept of C: and D: drives. They have no concept of network drives. They have no concept of mapped drives. To them it is simply data and the technology that gives them access is search. So the concept of files and folders in ‘traditional’ folders is really old world stuff.
When you take a look at how Google Apps approaches data they seem to me to still be locked into that old world of files and folders.

When you put files into Google Apps it goes into it’s own separate drive area. This is just like my old C: drive right? Can I add more columns or metadata around these files? Not from what I can see. Sure you can add a star but what about if I want to categorize files by customers? Again, just dumb old files and folders. How is that ANY different from what I did on my PC XT in 1984 in DOS?

SharePoint by contrast provides a single web location for files AND folders AND calendars AND tasks AND everything in ONE PLACE in what is known as a Team site. In the repository within the SharePoint Team Site that holds files and folders you can add as many columns as you like to describe your data. These columns can be text, numbers, dates or your a set of your own choices. You can sort and filter on multiple columns. You can create multiple views of the same data. For example you can change what file listings actually display to be just the file name if you want.
That is collaborative thinking not simply migrating old world thinking to hosted storage as what Google Apps have done.
In Google Apps if I want to move from Drive to my Calendar I click Calendar from the menu across the top. That opens a new browser tab with my calendar. But wait, isn’t that similar to opening a new application on my desktop computer by double-clicking an icon? Yup, it is. What happens if I return to the Drive tab again and click Calendar again? Just like double clicking on a desktop icon again it opens ANOTHER browser tab to show my calendar AGAIN, even though I ALREADY have a calendar tab open. Now I have two calendar tabs open. Again, old world thinking now just brought to you in a browser.
In SharePoint, click on the team site calendar you are taken there. Click on tasks, you are taken there, just as you would expect in a modern web environment!

Now let’s say that I want to create somewhere dedicated to a project. This will need a location for files and folders, calendar, contacts, emails, tasks and so on just for starters. How do you do that in Google Apps? I can go into another area and create a Google Site but then how do I get a common calendar there? How do I display my files? How do I create a shared tasks list? Again, old world thinking being one app for one job. I NEED collaboration not just storage.
Ok, so let’s take something that Google should be good at, search. If I am in my Google Apps Drive area and I want to search for an item in a calendar I can’t, I can only search in my files. Why is that? If I need to find something I want to search from anywhere and find it. Again, I don’t want to be constrained in a siloed ancient world. I NEED collaboration. I NEED to get to my information from anywhere as I might not know where it is.
When I use the Search option across the top in Google Apps I end up searching the whole web not just my data. This reinforces my first fundamental difference concept between Google Apps and Office 365. Google Apps is provided by an advertising business, who are principally seeking to maximise advertising revenue.

Look at what is the top result when I attempt to search in Google Apps. IT IS AN ADVERTISMENT! Again, see my first fundamental difference.

If I need to find something in SharePoint I go to the top right and and enter what I am after in the search box. Bingo, as you can see from the above I get results from file name, file contents, calendars, contact, tasks and basically everything on that site. I also get a preview of some document content embedded automatically on the page. With a few clicks I can expand that search to every SharePoint site I have access to. I can filter the results by file type, author, date and so. Isn’t this what modern collaborative search is all about? I should be able to search across everything I have access to in one hit. I also don’t see ANY results or options to search any information but my own and I don’t get advertising unlike with Google Apps.
As I said previously, the new world is all about social. What happens when I try to be social in Google Apps?

I am asked to join Google’s public social network Google Plus. What happens when I join there? Is my information private? Nope. Am I pushed more advertisements? Most likely. Without question, failing to integrate your environment with social abilities is really old world thinking.

SharePoint by contrast has private social networking built in. It allows the integration with Linkedin and Facebook out of the box if desired. Microsoft is integrating the enterprise social networking product Yammer into SharePoint and Office 365 every day bringing more and more social functionality to their products. Why? Because social is the new way to collaborate, it is how things will be happening going forward in the modern age.
I could go on and on with example after example of how Google Apps just isn’t a modern collaboration platform. Likewise, I could mention in contrast how SharePoint has inbuilt automation with workflows, how it allows you to work with groups of documents known as document sets, how it has inbuilt eDiscovery and more, oh so much more. Microsoft has been developing SharePoint since 2001 as a modern collaborative platform because it understands what collaboration means. Google Apps is still no where near a modern collaboration platform from what I see. They have a long way to come to even be in the ball game. When you boil their solution down, it is just like a normal desktop PC just with a different storage location. Old world stuff I am sorry to say.
Now honestly ask yourself which product understands and supports the concept of true modern collaboration? Which product is continuing to modernize their collaboration platform with the way that people will work in the future? I hope you understand why I can honestly say with my hand on heart that only Microsoft does because Google Apps just doesn’t understand collaboration, or as they would say in Hollywood:
Google has brought email to a collaboration fight.

No work at work

One of the best books that I’ve read this year is Rework. If you haven’t read it then you should no matter whether you run a business or not. I’ve also posted previously about how the authors are focused on improved productivity, unlike so many other businesses these days. Thanks to Hilton Travis there’s now another video of Jason Fried where he talks about how most people say that the office (i.e. work) is not the place they go to actually do work (i.e. be productive).

You’ll find the video here:

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/12/05/fried.office.work/index.html

and it is only 15 minutes or so long but well worth the watch if you want to begin to understand why being at work destroys your productivity. Jason also provides some suggestions for boosting the productivity of the work place by not having meetings and having a period of silence to allow people to concentrate. Now that’s novel eh?

It is amazing to me how many businesses, large and small, are still struggling to be more competitive. My advice? Take a look at your environment and see whether you are actually allowing your employees to work. If you are an individual I challenge you to closely examine how much uninterrupted time (no emails, no phone calls, no interruptions, etc) you allow yourself in a day. If you are honest about it then I think you’ll find out that you really are just spinning your wheels.

If you want more free time I say then you need to commit to being more productive. Until then you are simply in denial.