Ian Palangio's Business Productivity : Outlook

Real Life Value of Software + Services

ianpal — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:47:50 GMT

I’ve been travelling overseas this week to a global Microsoft conference in the US. I sit here in the Airport departure lounge (offline) reflecting on my week.

A couple of events happened – and both are real life stories of the value of Microsoft’s Software + Services (S+S) strategy.

1) The hotel I stayed in was filled with Microsoft employees – who are all digitally connected to our work and live in email during all waking hours. We saturated the network and had a very slow internet connection. Browsing the web and synchronising email took a long time – It took hours for a couple of MB of email to synchronise.

2) While the Internet connection was slow, it eventually failed for about a day. I received the following letter from the President of North America Sales for the hotel chain:

“Due to a physical malfunction in routing equipment and the unexpected failure of backup systems, the internet access for the property was reported ‘offline’ by our Network Operation Center. After a number of attempts to get the network back online were unsuccessful, a Senior Engineer was dispatched from our headquarters to the property to join the other members of our team and replace the faulty equipment. Internet access was restored at approximately 2:45 today.”

While I did not have access to any internet functionality, I was still able to work on my presentation that I had to give at the conference and also read/triage my email inbox all while Offline.

The point is that if I did not have powerful software on my desktop and relied solely on services in the cloud I would have had no options for getting my presentation and work done. I know that Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors will say to customers “really – how often are you actually offline” - a situation like what happened above would stopped my productivity. This would affect any user that relies on software in the cloud – whether it is from MS Online Services or other vendors.

So while I’m not offline very often S+S gave me the choice to work as I needed to – for the entire week of a slow/missing Internet connection.

I’m particularly excited about Office 2010 and the Web Applications for OneNote, Word, PowerPoint and Excel. This next release of Office will give me, the user, the choice of how I want to work on my PC, in my Browser or on my Windows Phone.

Email Delay Rules

ianpal — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 08:57:03 GMT

As I mentioned in my email approach PIFEM one of the rules I have turned on in Outlook is to delay sending email by 1 minute.

This allows me to catch any emails I didn’t mean to send just yet, or more commonly, I remember to add something else just after I press send, such as another recipient, more text or an attachment.

This rule I have is called “Delay sending by 1 minute” is really handy sometimes – shown below in my Rules and Alerts dialog of Outlook. You might want to consider adding this if you write a lot of emails or if you frequently forget attachments.

Interestingly, I see Google has added a similar feature to delay sending by 5 seconds to Gmail http://www.smh.com.au/news/home/technology/gmail-panic-button/2009/03/22/1237656745000.html I can’t foresee how delaying by 5 seconds gives people enough time to catch it. I know that I’d rarely be able to catch it that fast.

Maybe I’ll rename my Office Outlook rule to be “The Panic Button”.

Use SharePoint Tasks to Manage Meeting Actions

ianpal — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:34:26 GMT

My manager Peter was asking my advice for how to help organise a weekly meeting that he organises. It’s a number of managers that are the leadership of our team, and they discuss the operations and strategy for the team etc.

One thing they struggled with was how to keep track of actions and follow up items that arise from the ongoing meetings.

The team was using ongoing emails to keep track of the outstanding actions, owners and status of those tasks. But this had problems such as lack of visibility into the status of other people’s tasks. And they found that some people didn’t necessarily focus on the action items between meetings – only in the meetings.

I talked to Peter about options they could use – including SharePoint Meeting workspaces, a shared OneNote file, SharePoint Tasks, and Workflow’s to manage the actions.

In the end, Peter started using a Task List in SharePoint to assign and follow up on, well, the tasks. He’s really happy with the solution because:

It was super easy to set up; and
With the integration into Outlook he actually has visibility into the tasks between the meetings and works on them.

So, if you are organising or involved in recurring meetings, here is a way to keep track of the action items:

1) Create a Task List in a SharePoint/WSS site somewhere – such as on your team site. When you click Site Actions –> Create there is a custom list called Tasks under the Tracking group.

2) In the browser, you can add tasks, assign them to people, add free text for details, the due date and the current status.

3) Before the next meeting – each action owner should update the tasks with the status. They can simply open the task in the browser and update.

4) However, an easier interface for the task owners is to synchronise the tasks to your Outlook task list. In this way – the task owner does not even need to open the browser to view all the related tasks, and update them. To synchronise them from SharePoint, click Actions –> Connect to Outlook. This will create a synchronised copy of the tasks in Outlook.

5) Now, each task can be opened, edited and even closed directly from Outlook. Because Outlook works well both Online and Offline – the tasks can be updated in either mode.

NOTE: I use Task Lists to manage a the items from a number of meetings. What I do to keep them visible is to Arrange the ToDo Bar in outlook by Folder. This compresses large tasks lists into groups by location, such as Inbox or Team Meeting X. I find this way works well to sort and group the aggregated list of Tasks that are displayed in the ToDo Bar from SharePoint, Outlook, Project and OneNote.

It’s a simple solution that has helped my manager run a recurring team meeting of his peers in an efficient and effective way. That can only help him, and me at performance review time :)

More Ways Office can Save You Money

ianpal — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:51:49 GMT

Gray Knowlton, Office Group Product Manager, just posted a nice blog entry Bits on Boxes about the cost savings of deploying Office 2007 versus doing nothing at all and staying on Office 2003. He has some interesting stats such as 73% of all security vulnerabilities reported for Office do not apply to Office 2007.

He includes additional justification that complement my recent post on 10 Ways Microsoft Office 2007 Can Save Companies Money

Thanks Gray!

10 Ways Microsoft Office 2007 Can Save Companies Money

ianpal — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:23:28 GMT

In economic times like these, organisations look everywhere in efforts to evaluate the value and possible cost savings around the business.

One software suite that is examined is Microsoft Office System. Office is considered by some as expensive infrastructure, and not as a business value. With that said, is there a case for considering how the 2007 Office System can save you money and operational costs? Sure thing, check out some of these ideas – all supported with real data from our customers.

CUT I.T. COSTS	REDUCE BUSINESS COSTS
1. Reduce Storage Costs	6. Reduce Travel Costs
2. Reduce Cost for BI Solutions	7. Reduce Paper and Printing Costs
3. Reduce Licensing Costs	8. Reduce Marketing Costs
4. Reduce Help Desk Costs	9. Reduce Training Costs
5. Reduce IT Support Costs for Project Workspaces	10. Reduce Office Space Cost

1. Reduce Storage Costs

Open XML formats in Office 2007 reduce the file sizes of documents by around 50% and often as much as 75% avoiding bandwidth and hard drive costs increases. I have an Excel spreadsheet from my team that is 53MB in size. When I save in the Open XML file format it becomes 13MB. It is still a big file, but is much smaller and more manageable, and is saving space in SharePoint, Hard Drives and Email in this format.

For example, the compact file formats helped Hobart Service avoid USD $50,000 per year of additional bandwidth usage costs. “This means we won’t have to buy more disk space for some time to come.”

See the Hobart Service Case Study

2. Reduce Cost for BI Solutions

With SharePoint and Excel 2007, create live, interactive business Intelligence (BI) portals that assemble and display business information from disparate sources. Dashboards can be easily created with Web Parts, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Business Data Connectivity technologies (BDC).

For example, Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics, a Johnson & Johnson company, expects that consolidation of the tools needed for BI it will be able to save more than $200,000 per year in licensing costs.

See the Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics Case Study

3. Reduce Licensing Costs

2007 Microsoft Office Add-in allows you to export and save to PDF and XPS formats in eight 2007 Microsoft Office programs. Adobe Acrobat is a very feature rich product and is able to perform many publishing, forms, collaboration and markup tasks – it’s most common feature though by many users is to simply create PDF files from other applications such as Microsoft Office.

For example, Honeywell Aerospace is experiencing higher efficiency and reduced costs due to the Save As PDF add-in for the 2007 Microsoft Office programs.

See the Honeywell Aerospace Case Study

Get the Save As PDF add-in from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en

4. Reduce Help Desk Costs

The Office 2007 user interface is designed to make it easier to discover new features and spend less time searching for commands and capabilities.

For example, Citrix expects “at least a 10 percent reduction in user support requests, thanks to the revamped interface and better cross-program integration within Microsoft Office Professional 2007”.

See the Citrix Case Study

Additionally, research shows that employees estimate an 18 percent improvement in time to complete tasks with Office 2007.

5. Reduce IT Support – Project Workspaces

Office Groove 2007 makes it simple to create, customise, organise and work in collaborative workspaces without IT assistance.

For example, the US Federal Aviation Administration finds “In many situations, projects teams can use Groove 207 and not need a pricey IT staff person devoted to the project. Anyone with manager-level access can create a Groove 2007 virtual workspace on the fly, with no programming knowledge.”

See the FAA Case Study.

6. Reduce Travel Costs

Office Communicator can help save travel cost by shifting from in-person meetings to web conferences and live chats.

For example, Podravka found “Office Communicator 2007 gives executives a credible alternative to face-to-face meetings, we expect business travel to drop 20%”.

See the Podravka Case Study

Groove workspaces allow project teams to effectively work together across departments and agencies. Travel costs are reduced as teams require less in-person meetings.

For example, Petrosea has decreased its staff globally, reduced its travel costs by 20% and been able to reduce it’s overall IT budget by 25%.

See the Petrosea Case Study

7. Reduce Paper and Printing Costs

With InfoPath 2007 you can create and deploy electronic forms solutions to gather information efficiently and reliably. OneNote 2007 can be used to replace paper files and notebooks.

For example Nypro found “although it seems a small thing, using paper forms across the company was expensive. With InfoPath we can significantly reduce the amount of paper we use, saving us up to $2 million a year.”

See the Nypro Case Study

8. Reduce Marketing Costs

The SmartArt features of Office 2007 allow anyone to create sophisticated special effects and graphics in documents and presentations – with only one click and without the need to engage an external graphic’s design shop.

For example Principal Asset found “by not having to enlist an outside marketing-communciations firm, we’ll save an anticipated $10,000 yearly”.

For another example, Honeywell found “the new SmartArt graphics help me create a presentation in a fraction of the time it used to take.”

See the Principal Asset Case Study and the Honeywell Case Study.

9. Reduce Training Costs

In OneNote 2007, anybody can create and distribute a training course. Plus, you can search for text within the entire notebooks, text within pictures, and for spoken words in audio and video recordings.

For example, the US Coast Guard training instructors can prepare an entire course – complete with documentation, video clips, and links to web-based resources and present it to students in one simple package. They say “a tool like OneNote 2007 could save new instructors one full month in training and preparation time…. (and for a single class) hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars in printing costs.”.

See the Coast Guard Case Study

10. Reduce Office Space Costs

With Office Communicator, you can work remotely and call using only an Internet connection – it does not require a VPN to connect to the corporate network. Outlook 2007 provides an Integrated solution to help you better manager your time and information, while in or out of the office – without the need for VPN to have the same experience as inside your network.

For example, Principal Asset found by providing easier access for mobile and remote users, this has allowed Principal Asset to grow substantially without having to expand office space. “We are saving up to $5,000 in monthly rent and utilities, on top of the up front costs of adding new furniture and IT infrastructure”.

See the Principal Asset Case Study

Additionally, Microsft Partner SynergyOnline is enjoying global expansion into Australia and Singapore. They are doing it without getting any office space. My mate Milan Gross says they are running as a virtual organisation with all employees working together and collaborating with technologies of SharePoint, Outlook and Communicator to virtualise their day-to-day interactions and business management.

Impact of New Microsoft Office Interface (circa 1990)

ianpal — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:57:02 GMT

I was reading the content of an article published in April 1990 of Software Magazine. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0SMG/is_n5_v10/ai_8411962. The article is a software review of the new Microsoft Word for Windows. In 1990 Word for Windows was quite revolutionary – it used a graphical user interface, and provided What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) formatting.

Up until 1990, Microsoft Word was available for DOS only. So this was a massive change for the end users.

It struck me that a lot of the potential issues highlighted in this article about the new interface are mirrored again today by some people worried about The Ribbon interface introduced in Office 2007. Some sample statements from the article are:

“WordPerfect and other character-based word processors are a lot faster than Word for Windows. If you aren't concerned with the WYSIWYG interface, you will be happier with a character-based system.”

Here, the argument is that the change of interface will slow people down, and that the existing interface would be faster to work with. I think it is clear that this argument is flawed. If Character Based Interfaces were indeed faster and more productive, they would have naturally become the standard. A graphical interface to applications has proven to be more flexible, and productive.

I know that research shows Office 2007 to be generally much more productive, fun, and users find more features. But the average person who hasn’t experienced The Ribbon in Office 2007 will feel that they are more productive in Office 2003. I challenge this position – and happily have users run Office 2007 and survey them about their experience with Office 2003 and Office 2007. Invariably, my independent research mirrors what the analyst firms are finding. More than 80% of users prefer Office 2007 to Office 2003 – even without any training or readiness, and create better looking documents faster.

“Second, you need at least a healthy 286 machine to run Word for Windows (or any Windows application).”

Indeed – software has been pushing and driving the innovation in hardware for as long as they have existed.

“However, by the time that most users are ready for Windows--if they ever are--there will be many other choices, including a version of best-seller WordPerfect.”

I like this fact that in 1990 there was fear that users would never be ready for a graphical interface like Windows. Similarly – there are people who wonder if the Ribbon in Office 2007 is temporary and will go away. Will people ever be able to figure it out.

I know the Ribbon is not going away in Office for the foreseeable future. Other applications are adopting it heavily such as AutoDesk AutoCAD, as well as award winning Application UI’s. The Ribbon is proven (by analsyt firms such as Forrester, Answers Research Inc), to be a more efficient and productive interface for complex applications such as Office.

It will be a matter of time when the decision makers of organisations get over the interface changes and allow their workforce to use a more productive tool set. Considering that writing content (emails, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations) accounts for about 25% of an Information Workers time, it is a commonly executed task in a business. It seems strange to me how little focus is placed on examining and refining this creation process in an effort to improve the content creation.

Outlook 2007 Training Videos

ianpal — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 01:08:16 GMT

A customer requested a list of training videos for Outlook 2007 for their users that are coming off of Lotus Notes.

One video was found by the customer to be very good: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA101672681033.aspx

The list of downloadable demos for Outlook 2007 is here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/downloads/CH102260811033.aspx

For Outlook, the “Up to Speed” series is quite good. This training is popular: http://office.microsoft.com/training/training.aspx?AssetID=RC101153581033, and has an accompanying demo that can be downloaded http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/outlook/HA100518161033.aspx

The interactive guide to map between Office 2003 and Office 2007 is also good, and downloadable http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/outlook/HA102221621033.aspx

Cheers
Ian

Email, Task and Time Management with PIFEM

ianpal — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:50:12 GMT

Well, for my first blog post I'd better cover PIFEM - which is an email management system that Angus Logan, Johann Kruse and I have been using with Outlook 2007. It is loosely based on Getting Things Done (GTD) and the 4 D's of email processing.

Angus and Johann have blogged about it in the past here and here and here.

PIFEM uses the out of the box Outlook 2007 features of flagging and categories to manage emails that you don't want to action/complete immediately. Once you date/time flag an item it is no longer clogging up your brain with secondary thoughts. If you manage it well... you can eliminate a lot of distractions from email, and focus on your highest priority items with laser focus.

In the end, no matter how good you think you are - you can only work on one single thing at any one time. And that one thing you decide to work on is the highest priority item to you at that time. Somehow in your decision making process you have come to the conclusion that the particular item is the highest priority possible. If you go to the kitchen to get a cup of tea - you have decided at that exact moment getting tea is the most important/highest priority item for you. That is fine - you do need to fit breaks, handle smaller tasks around other significant ones throughout the day. The main point is that you can only work on one item at a time - and this course helps you define what the Highest Priority item is for that moment.

I personally find this method very useful after travelling for a few days and am behind on email. Using PIFEM I get everything read and prioritised for action. In fact - the more emails I have in my inbox the more powerful and useful PIFEM is to me.

I created a training course on the theory of PIFEM, with the exact steps you need to follow to configure Outlook to match. The beauty is that you don't actually change anything fundamental in Outlook - so that if you decide to go back to your normal way of doing email it is still available to you. The "course" takes about 30 minutes to go through everything including setting up Outlook. It is created in OneNote and can be downloaded from my SkyDrive site. Click the image below to download from SkyDrive:

If you don't have OneNote you can download a free trial.

So if you are wanting your Inbox to look like this below (i.e. empty), try it out. My inbox is empty like this twice a day.