Cobweb

Work is an Activity, not a Location

Becoming a dad for the first time in the last month has really brought it home to me the value of being able to work whenever and wherever.  Little Carter is fabulous but predictable he is not and when he wants attention he has to have it - whether his dad is trying to working or not. 

The flexibility to be able to work at a time that family life allows means that I am able to stay productive and respond to the needs of my team, partners and customers quickly and efficiently - whether it is via an ADSL/WiFi connection at home or sitting in Starbucks with a Windows Mobile device whilst he is sleeping.

Allowing and trusting your teams to work when and where the opportunity allows really does increase job satisfaction and helps me maintain a healthier work-life balance.  One of the main reasons I got into IT over 20 years ago was the potential I saw for how it could help make people's lives better - and now I am finally the beneficiary of the advances in mobile working technologies.

Let me know about your experiences of balancing family and work life and how technology helps you stay on top of things and how Cobweb could help improve the way you and your teams work.

 

Calendar Etiquette

I often see articles which talk about Email Etiquette, but not too many on the effective use of Calendars. One of the most useful and time saving features of Microsoft Exchange is the ability to quickly book meetings with colleagues and to be able to see when your colleagues are free. Until you have used this feature and organised a meeting with multiple people it is hard to understand how much time is saved compared to the endless round of phone calls and emails which were typically needed to book a meeting with more than a couple of people.

One of my biggest bug-bears with Outlook which I got caught with again today is when you try and schedule a meeting but someone has booked the time off as holiday, but used an all-day appointment to mark the time off. By default Outlook marks all-day appointments as "Free" so when you look at the Free/Busy information they look like they are available for your meeting.  So my request is - please always set the "Free/Busy" information on all your Calendar requests - it will make the lives of your colleagues much easier :-)

Let me know what your Outlook bug-bears are. I'll publish the most common ones as articles within our KnowledgeBase to help share the knowledge.

Where does the time go?

After returning from a few weeks away I checked when I'd last updated the blog and noticed it was almost a month ago already! It doesn't feel like it should have been that long but I think the adage that the older you get the quicker time goes is very true. I can't believe it's almost September already and my sister was reminding me to start my shopping for Christmas soon. (!)

In previous blogs I've mentioned the intention of Cobweb to become a 'greener, more socially aware' company and this has progressed since then. The more I've found myself looking in to what we can do the more I've found myself doing more at home too, not just to cut down on our carbon footprint but also to save money! For example one thing that I'd discovered was that just leaving a microwave on standby with the time on it was costing me £50 a year. £50 wasted just to have the time displayed! That doesn't happen any more. All plugs that are left in are switched off and not on standby, candles have been bought for the lower lighting needs rather than having things on a dimmer switch. Also, a single PC left on overnight and at weekends racks up an annual electricity bill of £53! (We have 60 people using PC's at Cobweb so that would be over £3000 a year for these machines to be left on at these times unused, money down the drain.)

What I'm doing is comparing what it cost us over the last quarter against what it will cost against the next quarter. Even if you feel that the whole 'environmental issue' is a lot of hot air then surely money disappearing out of your pocket will make people stand up and take notice. If you work it out over the year you could with a little bit of thought and effort save many hundreds if not thousands of pounds that you would have spent on what was wasted water and electricity. Is it really so hard?

Now, thats what I'm trying at home. Put that in to a business context where the waste is an infinately larger scale and you start to see the benefits of having something like an environmental standard in place. We may not be able to save the planet doing 'our little bit' but we can save money trying.

An interesting article on power consumption as an IT user can be found here

Mark

Which device is right for you?

BlackBerry or Windows Mobile?  A question I am asked almost every day by customers wanting to know which device is right for their business.  I've always been a Windows Mobile device user, and in particular PDA versions of Windows Mobile devices.  One of the downsides of the the PDA version of Windows Mobile devices though is that they are not great phones, and so I still have a trusty Nokia phone for making all my voice calls.

Increasinghly I keep thinking to myself that I need to sort this out and get a new device which combines the two.  A couple of things have happened in the last week which made me look at this question from a different perspective.

First Toshiba very kindly loaned us 2 new Windows Mobile 6 devices the G500 and G900.  Both have a certain quality feel about them with the sliding keyboards "clunking" just so when you open them and the weight is just right too.  Trying the G500 first was a real eye-opener for me as it took me nearly 10 minutes to configure ActiveSync using old "triple-tap" text entry - very painful.  I've tested SmartPhone versions before but the G500 brought it home to me the benefit of having a QWERTY keyboard on my current device.  The G900 is a really powerful device and has a great screen and the fingerprint scanner is a great addition for secure mobile email but it still isn't a great phone.

Second Dale Vile of Freeform Dynamics a customer and IT analyst emailed me after he had tried a new Windows Mobile 6 device compared to his BlackBerry device he was used to.  One of the big things he noticed was how verbose the Windows Mobile devices are when synchronising your email - giving a novice user far too much and often confusing information.  From a simplicity point of view BlackBerry really do seem to have the edge still.

So what am I going to do?  Probably carry on for a while using both my Windows Mobile PDA and Nokia phone.  I'd love to hear your experiences of different mobile devices and which one I should try next...

Do we need a solution for email compliancy?

There’s been a lot of noise over the last year or so about “email archival”, “data retention”, “Sarbanes Oxley” etc. and there’s good reason for this, Radicati Group are telling us - “Compliance and Policy Management Market Poised to Grow to Over $2.4 Billion by 2011.”   So, you can see why the big guys want a piece of the action! 

I have a view about this.  I believe that this is mostly PR activity and hype being generated by hardware and vendors whom are seeing significant returns on the high-margin hardware and software solutions being deployed to address these “areas of high risk”.   

There are some legal compliance issue in the US, this is true.  Meeting the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley, or being SOX-compliant, is a real issue for some organisations in the US, but not all of them.  Certain types of organisation are more open to this than others.  There are some providers of data and email services that are running scared of the whole compliance issue because they are unable to take on the legal burden of responsibility that comes with providing compliancy services to US customers.

In the UK and EU we don’t have such tight regulations which is a relief, however we’re still subject to the media attention and marketing surrounding this. I won’t say it’s scaremongering, because it’s not, it’s PR.  By focusing on the negatives and the legalities, companies are unable to see the real value that archival services can bring to a business.

What’s interesting is that often the regulations are self-imposed internal rules within the organisation and not a government legislation.  This is important – only do what your business needs to do and don’t be led by media-hype or vendor advertising to deploy a solution that’s more than you need. 

Ensure that you are addressing the real business drivers within your business.   Think about the roles within your organisation and the data that those people are sending and receiving.  If you FD was to leave your business, wouldn’t it be useful to have a copy of the emails from 3 months ago when that £2m leasing agreement was agreed?  What if there are some issues with the payments and previous conversations are called in to question?  How about your Sales team – who’s word will you trust if your biggest customer says “before Jimmy left he’d agreed a 25% discount if we renewed our contract”.   Being able to find and recall these emails in would be beneficial to your business in both of these scenarios and there’s no mention of legal or compliancy here!

I have an archived copy of all my email for the last 2 years and a copy of all mailboxes for previous members of my team that have left Cobweb for greener pastures.   We use an email archival solution inside of Cobweb that works well with Exchange.  You can take it as read that it’s seamless to the end-user, secure, robust and reliable – it works.  I can think of a few occasions where I’ve had to find an old email from an archived mailbox, or find a document from Sent Items that was missing from a colleagues handover before they left.   On one occasion we just wanted to see the background email conversations between a key staff member and a customer of ours that was having business difficulties of their own.   None of this was due to pending legal action or pressing compliancy issue, but I was glad that information was there, and I take comfort knowing that everything’s stored away should I need it one day.