Zimba: an ajax communication client

Via Jon Udell, here’s gmail on steroids: zimbra. Zimbra is a beta, but looks like it does all the things I wish gmail would let me do – online calendaring and contact management (which, to be fair, gmail handles OK already) all integrated into the one interface, much like Outlook. Nice to see as a next-generation online tool; personally I hope the guys at 37signals hook basecamp into it, then I’d be really happy! I also liked the little googlemaps mash-up for showing location. Makes you wonder what Google will do to push this on a bit further - will they develop gmail as an online client some more and try to match some of this zimbra functionality?

CMS Projects - same old story

While visiting an immense project today, the following exchange was held between someone based at the project, another colleague, and myself (this exchange is not verbatim):

"Sorry, did I hear you say you used Documentum for Document Management?" (me)

"Yes, but not everyone uses it. It isn't really that user-friendly: when you start, the next page takes a minute, a minute-and-a-half to load up, and then you are presented with a list of options that no-one understands. Oh, and that means no-one uses it - everyone gets trained, and the system can do some really good things, but it's then two months before you use it again and you've forgotten everything. So we also had some document managers, but since everyone gives them the stuff to put in, they're swamped. So the system doesn't have that much information on it." (project colleague)

My colleague and I looked at each other, as she has been looking for a killer internal argument for usability to convince others. This isn't a criticism of Documentum - a great tool in the right hands - more an expression of my continued surprise at how little thought is typically put into human "engagement" in DMS and CMS projects, not just "usability" issues, but also ongoing training and workflow analysis. No matter how many projects you work on for different companies, you always hear the same old story - it would be nice to see someone doing it the right way from the start for a change.

Technorati tags: project | cms | documentum

Ajax Links

While looking for something else focused on rich internet applications, I came across the following link to A Venture Forth’s list of the top ten Ajax apps. The Periodic table is very nice!
NB: True to my promise, I used the Blogger Word plug-in to post this & it seemed to work fine.

Technorati tags: ajax | ria | blog

theguardian Re-design

The wonky title is deliberate, since - as part of its Europe-focused (?) re-design - The Guardian has gone all compressed and lower-case. I can't really comment too much as I have yet to swing by the news-stand and grab a copy in the flesh (apologies for the mixed metaphor), but, via Tom Coates, here is Dan Hill's cogent view on the branding exercise. I particularly like the use of Flickr annotations...

Laziness

I've not been too experimental with my blog recently (or particularly assiduous in writing posts), so I am going to endeavour to add technorati tags to relevant posts, think about actually re-designing the blog ("re"-design is a bit of a joke, as I didn't put too much effort into look-and-feel in the first place!), and fiddle about with posting direct from MS Word. If anyone has any suggestions for other stuff I should be doing (like updating my XFN network, for instance), just let me know!

Technorati tags: blog | resolution

Brand crises

I was just reminded of a presentation I gave last year on the role of online communication in crisis communication by the following quote from an article called "Brand Rehab: How Companies Can Restore a Tarnished Image" from the Knowledge at Wharton newsletter:

"The rise of the Internet poses new problems for post-scandal communications, adds Blythe. "Blogging can kill you. Before, when we had a problem, it was addressed in the public media. Now the Internet is many times faster, more unforgiving and out of control." Increasingly, Blythe's firm is helping companies monitor statements about them on the Internet and generate their own blogs."

The internet can make you or break you - today's brands have to react to threats in "internet time".

Technorati tags: brand | crisis | communications

Grumbles

I've recently had feedback complaining that I haven't written anything in a while - for which I apologise, only citing the pressures of moving and starting a new job. Real life sometimes gets in the way of blogging, I suppose.
Something which caught my eye today was an article in the Evening Standard pointing out that The Guardian is changing its format to a more tabloid, Berliner style, is changing its font (Guardian Egypt or somesuch), and is even changing its title typeface. As an arch-liberal Grauniad [sic] reader myself, I am slightly trepidatious, but also wonder whether the current British broadsheet transfer to tabloid style (think The Times, Independent) is anyway influenced by the Web, which is less columnar, and, from my perspective, not "broad" in a layout sense. It's just a thought, but I'm probably wrong and it has more to do with printing efficiencies or the logistics of delivery and display!
I don't remember such an upheaval in British print since colour newspapers first went live in the 80s (am I hallucinating, or wasn't the short-lived European the first, or maybe it was Today?). There must be some underlying force for this all to be happening in a short space of time - I can't believe that copycat activity is the only motivator.

Rich Wiki Editing

While I love the collaborative authoring aspects of Wikis, I've always thought that wiki markup, while nicely concise, acted as a barrier to their uptake in "the real world". Via socialtext, I've come across Wikiwyg, a JavaScript-driven wysiwyg editor for wikis (designed to integrate into existing wiki s). I just tried out the demo, and while double-clicking to reveal in-context editing is a bit counter-intuitive, it works really nicely.

2:1 Words of Wisdom

My colleague, Karl Pickering, repeated a real gem of an expression again today, while talking about establishing a new brand:

"You don't get a second chance at a first impression."

I like the simplicity of this statement as well as it's 2:1 ratio, which reminds me of my favourite phrase for project planning, the carpenter's proverb:

"Measure twice, cut once."

I'd love to hear some more 2:1 phrases I can bandy about in business meetings (and yes, I have thought of "birds in the hand")...

Back to the Smoke

After a few months of independent consultancy work, I've moved back to London to start a new job (which I can't say too much about for the time being, but it's very interesting). I'm not likely to post all that much over the next few weeks as I can foresee myself being exceedingly busy.

However, one thing that has struck me recently is the following: even in companies that approach project management in a formal, controlled manner, the approach to requirements gathering - the crucial portion of a project - often tends to the ad-hoc to say the very least. I'm considering taking a more controlled look at requirements gathering myself, and have already made some headway into developing my own approach, but when is everyone going to realise that taking a little extra time at the beginning of a project pays dividends in the end whether in terms of time, cost or quality?

Inspiration, reputation and perspiration

A reminder from The Times Career supplement (back-to-back articles, pps 3-4, 21/07/2005) that it takes effort to be inspired as well as to build (or in this case, restore) a reputation. A short article ("Ideas plucked from a blue sky") on innovation strategy pointed out - quoting Saj Parwani, MD of ?What If! - "Innovation is a science," in other words it requires time, study and effort. A similar tack was taken with the ten tips for "Polish a tarnished image". They're both short, simple articles, but well worth a once-over.

London Explosions

I was in London yesterday, and was approaching Angel Tube at 12.45 just as it was being evacuated and the Northern Line shut down - as the bus I needed did not appear to be running at that time, I instead enjoyed the opportunity to take a longish walk through London, walking first to Clerkenwell for an appointment and then on to Borough, then back up to Fleet Street for a drink with my friend, Dan.

It was a fascinating walk as, on foot, I was able to see much of the peripheral Police activity in dealing with the various incidents. This activity continued well into the night, from the sound of the sirens screaming through Islington. The general public - including tourists - appeared generally calm, although there I have noticed a slight mood change in the streets...perhaps a little less bustling, a little less driven and rushed. Someone did say to me earlier in the day that she had stopped using the tube and the bus, and while on Wednesday I noticed the underground was not hugely busy, there were still man people using it - so the majority have not been spooked and are continuing with "business as usual". It pleases me that there is a mood of seeming solidarity, a "no paseran" ("They shall not pass") sentiment.

Page footprints

I am always surprised at how little attention is paid to page footprints (size) on many websites and intranets (especially now that everyone seems to have a fat connection). Page footprints are not just about how fast the page loads for the user, they also offer fantastic savings in bandwidth.

This came to my mind last week - as I went onto the BBC site in search of news about the London Bombing tragedy, I noticed that the homepage had been completely stripped back to basics. At first I wasn't sure if this was deliberate, or if many BBC staff had been caught up in the disruption and that departments were too under-staffed to offer a full service. In fact, as Martin Belam points out on his currybet site, the action was deliberate in order to ensure that the BBC coud cope with the predicted (and in the event, huge) spike in traffic.

On a oragmatic note, you don't even have to be quite so proactive - simply switching to standards-based XHTML/CSS instead of table layout can reduce page sizes dramatically. I seem to remember a hypothetical redesign of a Microsoft page reducing footprint by 80%. Try to keep it lean and mean (where appropriate) seems to be a sensible watchword.

Governance...

Governance and guidelines are the essentials of a sound website, portal, intranet or extranet, and all too often neglected (nobody appears to enjoy documenting good practices, workflows and checklists in a company, let alone sticking to them) in my experience. Via James Robertson, I read this succinct and interesting article on portal governance, much of which relates to intranets and websites also.

I would take slight issue with the governance model showing a "Technical team" and a "Content and Community Team" as separate - firstly these two teams should be in relatively constant communication, and secondly, if they overlap it allows room for the technically-focused content people, such as information architects, information designers and usability specialists to have a voice and a position also.

Accessibility Testing

I came across this post via the E-consultancy E-business Briefing newsletter: a forum post asking site managers to stop relying on Bobby automated testing for accessibility. I was quite surprised, as I had assumed accessibility had reached a "critical mass" in terms of industry perception.

It's simple: automated tools can point you in the right direction, pick up on issues you might not have noticed and above all else are quick and easy to use, however they do not match a decent expert review and testing with a target audience. Decent alt descriptions, and why "click here" is so bogus, just will not make sense until you observe, for instance, a visually impaired user merrily zipping through your site, but missing the majority of content because it is "inaccessible". Automated tools are great for getting you started, as well as for acceptance testing at the end of a project, but they are not the be-all and end-all - human input is still required, particularly in some of the greyer areas of legislation and guidelines.

Above all else, ensure that your developers learn from the experience, they'll probably appreciate it from an intellectual curiosity and career development perspective, and you'll benefit from more compliant sites henceforward!

UPDATE - 14/07/2005: On this subject, here is an apposite demonstration as to how knowledge of accessibility good practice should be developed (using guidelines, testing with users) as opposed to relying on automated indications - "Accessible Data Tables" from Web Usability.

Kafka Management, the new KM

About a week and a half ago, I read a very small story in a newspaper about the Belgian government's Kafka red-tape cutting initiative (here's the ABC coverage, The Guardian website was timing out while I wrote this). I think this is a great piece of collaborative "knowledge management" that delivered huge savings - about £150mn, I think, just by getting user-focused and asking the populace what pieces of bureaucracy were unnecessarily annoying, and then actually acting upon the results. Shared experience delivering process improvement.
The website is nice too, and I particularly like the little Flash demo of registering a new-born old-style along with the new streamlined data sharing approach.
I'm not sure if this is a humorous touch to mingle with calling the system Kafka, but the guy in charge was "Secretary of State for Administrative Simplification, Vincent Van Quickenborne", nominative determinism if ever I heard it. Anyway, the savings as he put it come from "alleviating some of the administrative burden imposed on citizens and entrepreneurs." Nice.

Make Poverty History

My wife and I marched on the Make Poverty History demonstration through Edinburgh yesterday. What a magnificent site it was to see so many people (over 200,000) - in particular large numbers of the very young and old - gathered together for one message: "Make Poverty History". I do not for one minute expect the march to live up to its slogan - this would be a naive mis-reading of its purpose - but I do hope that it sparks off not only political action among world leaders, but also a greater, constant attention to world issues from the media, and a more concerted coming together at grassroots level of all the charities, NGOs and governmental organisations involved in assisting poorer and developing countries to become self-supporting.

Ajax Resource - Rico

Via Jeff Veen *, here's Rico, "a suite of rich internet components, behaviors and effects for the web application space." - I've not explored it very much at all beyond a cursory look, but its an open source resource of Ajax RIA effects. The demos are very nice with drag n' drop and resize functionality.
*(and its worth reading the comments below his post - particularly the reference to Macromedia Flex's HALO user interface model for RIAs)

Via the Knowledge@Wharton newsletter comes an interview with Philip Evans (Boston consulting Group), Janice Fraser (Adaptive Path) and Ross Mayfield (Socialtext): "Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does the New Internet Mean for Business?". I don't think that the article says anything new about the collaborative software space, but what I did appreciate was the attempt to explain the shift in enterprise psychology and organisation that is necessary to make the most of these "new" developments.

For me, three quotes stood out - one from each interviewee.
Connecting is about "decentralization and relinquishing control" according to Janice Fraser. I think this is an important point, but I always consider that within the enterprise it is more about "loosening control" (or "controlled freedom" as I like to call it) rather than relinquishing it. The aim is to have a clear set of governance policies and the resource to police and push collaborative efforts forward. Intranets , for instance, started down the organic path, expanded beyond control and are now being rationalised and brought under more central frameworks. Draw a line in the sand, but make it relatively fuzzy so that you do not discourage participation, then make sure that you enforce your policies. This has often been the issue with the various blogger sackings - companies have not been clear enough from the outset about which areas of business employee-bloggers can discuss without over-stepping the mark.

"One danger, however, is that of assuming that you can just grab some of these tools that have great social dynamics on the public web and believe they will work equally well inside an enterprise." is the second quote, coming from Ross Mayfield. This leads on from my remarks about governance in that a company needs to consider appropriate usage as well as auditing and control. In addition to this, however, a company needs to carefully implemement any collaborative strategy. "Why are we doing this?", "What do we expect as an outcome?", "Are our staff ready for this?", "Are we fully behind this?", "How does this fit in with our business strategies?" - these are the sorts of question that need to be addressed before sailing into the great wide yonder.

"So much of reengineering, which is what major corporations have been about for the last 10 or 15 years, has been about linear efficiency -- lining everything up in as tight a way as possible along a path. That's wonderful if you know exactly what it is you want to do, and the aim of that task will never change. Increasingly, that's not the relevant challenge. The challenge is adaptability, complexity, uncertainty and your capacity to mine the elements of your business, people and knowledge into different and new combinations." Philip Evans comment rounded things up for me: collaboration can assist in filling in some of the gaps in business, speeding time of response, pointing out the shortfalls in existing processes, exploring new market opportunities and so on and so forth.

I think that for the latest generation of social software (think Groupware) to succeed in the long-term, we should not focus on the types of software and technologies themselves: blogs, wikis, rss, online project management tools, but on the principles behind them: collaborative authoring, ownership of voice, timeliness of information, retention of experience and understanding, flow of information, point-to-point communication et al. The technologies will change over time, but the principles should not.

UPDATE: was just looking through my feeds in bloglines and noticed Mike Gotta listing
"Properties Of Collaboration?" in the same vein. His list read: Contextual; Situational; Behavioral; Transformable; Historical; Shareable; Securable...

Oxytocin and Trust

I've written about the hormone oxytocin and its role in trust before, but here (via The Guardian, via Nature) comes interesting corroboration as to howit influences our decisions as to trustworthiness:

"Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich and colleagues tested 194 healthy male students in a series of sophisticated games of risk and trust: the players were given notional currency and could choose to place all of it, some of it or nothing in the hands of trustees who would then decide how much to hand back after the stake had been tripled. Some players were given a whiff of oxytocin, some inhaled a vial of air. None of the players knew what they were sniffing and none knew whether the trustees were trustworthy or not: they had to make a decision. Those who sniffed oxytocin showed a greater propensity to trust someone than those who simply inhaled air. But when the trustee was replaced with a computer, both sets of investors showed much the same judgment. So the oxytocin did not make the investors generally more gullible or profligate: the effect was only visible when they had to deal with another human being. Paradoxically, Dr Fehr and his colleagues began the experiment because one of them believed that oxytocin signalled trustworthiness, rather than a propensity to trust."

I think I can just about get away with quoting this much of The Guardian article - the interesting point from a computing aspect is how to build trust within an oxytocin-free environment...