TipTalk: from Microsoft At Home & At Work : Collaboration

Tips to help you work less and relax more in 2009

ahawblog — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 07:26:00 GMT

Certainly, today's always-on-and-available-anywhere technology can lead to addictive work habits. We've all seen examples of that among friends and family.

But having a cheap, convenient, 24/7 global reach through technology can also efficiently enable you to live the life you've always wanted. The choice is yours.

Here are some affordable tools and ideas that harness technology's power to save you time and money.

Use Voice-over-Internet protocol phone service (VoIP) to create a virtual office.
To maintain a professional phone line and still travel, take time off or live abroad, VoIP telephone services are a terrific help. You've probably heard about such affordable services, which, basically, use the Internet to send and receive calls. Usually, you pay only for Internet access and not for calls, much the way e-mail works.

There are dozens of VoIP providers to choose among. Try a Web search if you don't know one.
Use online services for office communications and banking.
If you host your company computers on external servers, you can access all e-mail, files, and financial information or transactions from any Internet café. (Of course, you do want to have privacy safeguards in place when working this way.)
Leverage the power of a professional Web site.
Setting up a Web site, more than any other technological helpmate, will shave considerable time and effort from your workdays.

With a professional site, you can more efficiently conduct business, fulfill orders, organize contacts, share documents with employees or contractors, and market your wares or services, even when you're out of the office or on the road.

For more about launching a site, see the Microsoft Office Live Small Business offerings. Once your site is up, you can bolster its effectiveness by keeping customers, stakeholders, or media up-to-date with an online media kit.
Use your site features to stay in touch with customers.
With so many marketing channels and consumer options these days, increasingly, it's the business that quickly responds to customer needs that gains a competitive advantage. You can use your Web site to "listen" and react to what your customers request.

For example:

Set up an online forum so customers can register and post comments to you and to each other.
Set up a survey that customers can take online. This can be a focus group type of survey (say, about a new product) or a customer satisfaction survey.
Set up a special e-mail address and ask customers for specific feedback or advice whenever you launch a new product, service, or special promotion.

To get more tips, read the full article by by Joanna L. Krotz.

SharePoint 2007 Documents to go - working with online/offline documents

ahawblog — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 12:12:00 GMT

I work with SharePoint sites quite a lot and leverage technologies new to Office 2007 such as SharePoint Lists synchronized in Outlook 2007. Essentially Outlook 2007 allows you to have offline synchronized copies held in a local .PST file that you can work on, on a plane/train, at home, etc. When you get back on the LAN or have VPN access you can re-synch. HTTPS (Outlook Anywhere) support is available without the need for a VPN, but most corporations turn this off to stop data roaming, or being spied on, say, in a hotel or coffee shop. OWA also supports this feature (i.e., HTTPS tunnelling through to SharePoint 2007 sites), but again it can be turned off.

Outlook SP Lists, support check-in/out, version control, workflow tasks, and compare and merge control in Word 2007, for example, all natively from within the application once opened via Outlook 2007. If two people are working on the document at the same time, you get prompted to open a read-only copy, plus automatic notification when the revised document becomes available. Once the other person releases the document, a dialog box pops up asking you to open it in Read/Write mode with the option to merge any changes. The long Document Updates pane below only appears when there are conflicts outstanding due to differences in the local Outlook-based copy against the Server copy.

Outlook 2007 simply acts as the data store and makes sure changes are passed through to SharePoint 2007 and vice-versa. You have to open and close the document and not update the Server Copy to get the additional SharePoint functionality to percolate through—a tad frustrating as I would at least like to see these options grayed out and an explanation as to why they are unavailable. After the document has been edited via Outlook and you click the Do Not Update the Server copy, you can click the Office button to reveal a new Server tab. Now you should see the additional SharePoint functionality come through.

Now, in fairness, all this extra functionality works fairly well and without much ado, but couldn't it be done more elegantly and be more closely married to the SharePoint interface look and feel? Well yes, step in Colligo Contributor for SharePoint 2003/2007 with full Outlook and Internet Explorer integration. Below is an offline view; check-in-out, discard check-out etc, are all available by right-clicking on the files.

It's pretty neat and mirrors SharePoint libraries, tasks, calendars, etc, including InfoPath forms. What is cool and Outlook lacks somewhat is drag-and-drop support. You just create a new folder via the New dropdown, say call it E-mail, then drag and drop a bunch of e-mails into the folder, voila, you're done. it actually creates a Word document library with e-mail icons.

The rest of the interface is pretty easy: Just right-click on the grayed-out links to enable or disable being included in synchronization.

More info here.

-- Rob Atkinson

Using Groove 2007 to stay in synch

ahawblog — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 10:47:00 GMT

This short demo shows succinctly how Groove 2007 can be used effectively. One of the examples/problems shown is how to alleviate chain-mail, whereby people can end up having to trawl through a long email with multiple replies and subsequent out of synch file attachments
Groove acts as a lynchpin in making sure teams can collaborate effectively across multiple time zones and disciplines, at the office, home or on the road. Groove can also be combined with SharePoint to publish content to a central portal. The best way I can describe Groove is akin to a structured scratchpad, were you can store documents, spreadsheets, slide decks, InfoPath forms, you name it, in a peer to peer, or peer-peer-server hosted infrastructure. Groove acts as a peer-peer collaboration tool, keeping everyone in synch, seamlessly and securely. And for me one of the really neat things is that Groove can punch through firewalls and home routers whilst securely passing only changes (deltas) to other users systems

Microsoft Office Groove 2007 demo - Groove - Microsoft Office Online