Google Sync - Unified Blackberry / Google / Exchange Calendars !

Like everyone one else, I noted the release of the Google Sync from Blackberries with some interest. We have been doing an eval of Google Apps Premiere at work, and the first question we get on calendars is "does it sync to my Blackberry or Exchange?".

Until Wednesday, the answer was "no". Well, "maybe" if you bought some 3rd party app. But we hadn't bothered to test any of others without strong business needs articulated.

When I downloaded Google Sync (see here to get a link sent to your Blackberry), I was wondering what would happen. Had Google added a new category of events to my calendar ? If I created an appointment on my Blackberry, would I get an option to sync to Google or Exchange or both ?

Hmm.

Since there seems to be little discussion of Google Sync yet, here is what I have seen -

• Everything you have in your Blackberry/Exchange calender before the install is ignored.
  
• Feature Request - It sure would be nice if there was an option to populate existing events into your Google Calendar.
• All events created or modified after install Google Sync show up in your Google, Blackberry, and Exchange calendars.
• Modifying events on any of the three places seemed to work fine and sync fine.
• With the default "server wins" setting in Google Sync, events don't disappear from the Google calendar (since the server wins).
• Settings the option to "handheld wins" causes all three calendars to be in sync. This seems to be the way that Google Sync turns your Blackberry into a magical bridge between Google and Exchange.
• Google Sync gives you the option to also sync events from other Google calendars you subscribe to. I would be careful with this.
• Bug - Making meetings private in Exchange does not flow through to your Google calendar. So anyone with access to your Google calendar can see your dentist appointment or other embarrassing stuff.
• The app seems to sync about every 5 minutes and a manual sync takes about 15 seconds.

BTW - Google Sync works with either a regular GMail calendar or with your domain if you are Google Apps user.

I hope to see more Good Things in this arena. Have fun.

Return of the Ravens ?

A couple of years ago a pair of raven's built a nest on a conference room window ledge at work.

They laid their eggs, three hatched, and two chicks survived. It was pretty cool and I have kinda missed them.

Now my co-workers office has a few large twigs on the ledge. Hopefully the ravens are coming back.



Kingpixel kindly reminded me of the photos he took and posted of the original event. Thanks !

PC Hell

The world of the PC is crashing down around my head.

1. When I came back from a trip and turned off my Outlook out-of-office, I stopped getting meeting reminders.
   
   
2. The IT guy couldn't fix so, so he put my XP virtual machine (I am running XP under Parallel's on an iMac) on the domain. Outlook worked fine. For a few hours.
   
   
3. After lunch the new Outlook would not let me reply or forward messages. Instead it would crash. Whoopee. Plus my Outlook and Blackberry calendars were no longer syncing.
   
   
4. Did I also mention that we are in some kind of calendar hell with all the daylight savings patches going on for servers, desktops, Blackberries, Exchange, BES, etc. ? They seriously told us to print out our calendars for the next month. Joy.
   
   
5. I had some kind of power surge at home that blew out all the lights in the kitchen and killed the power supply in my PC. Joy again.
   

Instead of mucking with my old junky PC, I decided to look to see what a new PC would cost. Dell and the like cost way too much and give very limited control of your configuration. So I ordered this from Polywell for just over $2100 + tax -

• Motherboard:Poly i680SLi ATX MB,3PCIe,2gLAN,7.1A,6SATA-R5
  
  
• Processor:Intel Core2 Duo CPU E6400 2.13GHz 2M 1066FSB 65W
  
  
• Memory: 2x DDR2 667MHz 1G PC5300 Memory Unbuffered
  
  
• Case:TS514 10-Bay Black Tower with 250mm Side Fan (the image above is the case)
  
  
• PowerSupply:700W Quiet PFC SLI P/S, 85% High Efficiency
  
  
• HardDrive1:Seagate 750GB SATA-II 7200RPM HD 16M Cache
  
  
• Floppy:Black Floppy+Media Reader 7-in-1 Internal Drive
  
  
• Disk Controller:On-board SATA RAID-0,1,0+1,5 Controller
  
  
• I/O Device:On-board 1394 Firewire Ports
  
  
• Keyboard:Logitech Cordless Internet Pro USB KB+Mouse BLK
  
  
• Audio Sound:On-board 7.1 3D Audio Sound
  
  
• DVD-RW:Lite-On 20X LightScribe DVD+/-RW IDE Drive Black
  
  
• Graphics:Nvidia GeForce 8800GTS 640M PCI-E Graphics Card
  
  
• Networking:On-Board Gigabit/100/1000T Ethernet
  
  
• O/S:Windows XP Professional CD+License
  
  
• Optional Support:3yr Parts Replacement in Advanced
  

Not bad a bad price at all. Any comments on the configuration ?

futures markets

I attend a presentation today by USC Center for Effective Organizations on the topic of "Information Futures Markets for Human Resource Planning and Management". Whew. What this basically means is using the concept of futures markets to better determine the state of affairs than traditional information gathering and analysis. Think the Hollywood Stock Exchange for your organization.

You can find basically the same presentation I heard on the presenters' Penn State website under "Narrated Presentation".

My take-aways from this are -

1. A futures price is a great aggregator of information into a single value.
2. For business, using a sports betting analogy is better than a stock market analogy due to the the smaller number of 'traders' and the ability of them to influence the market
3. Who creates the virtual commodities is critical. The very act of what is created and when is hugely important.
4. Organizations low on politics and high on innovation do best
5. The futures market is best to aggregate current information, not to make predictions.

I am also noticing USC is doing lots of interesting stuff these days. There is the Center for Effective Organizations, the EA sponsored games lab, Cory Doctorow's work with the Center for Public Diplomacy, and the new Cinematic Arts minor in video games. Hmm.

Office 2.0 Conference 2006

(belatedly published;stolen from my work blog)

I attended the first Office 2.0 Conference. The conference burb is -

What is Office 2.0?
Imagine a computer that never crashes, or gets infected by a virus. Imagine a computer onto which you never have to install any application. Imagine a computer that follows you wherever you go, be it at school, at work, abroad, or back home. This computer does not exist today, but it will in the future, and this future might be much closer than you think.

Here are my notes and comments, starting with the Top Three Things (in my opinion).

1. Office 2.0 is a poor name, since it invites parity with MS Office. Work 2.0 is probably more accurate, since we should truly be looking to change how people work not just the tools they use. Work 2.0 reduces the disadvantages of being small, but not the disadvantages of being big.
2. There is a continuous mention of the generational shift in expectations about work and collaboration. In general look for reduction in email usage, expectation of continuous connectivity, and comfort in working as part of several distributed teams at the same time.
3. Some companies have banned email attachments and shared drives, forcing the use of wiki's and/or sharepoint. This reduces security risks and allows the discovery of documents by others. Interesting !

Keynote by Ester Dyson

• Why do people at conferences work feverishly on their laptops during the presentations ? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of being there ?
• We are at the beginning of the beginning of the Work 2.0 revolution.
• Dyson has connectivity as a big issue. This is brought up again in almost every session. I think this problem will vanish (at least in the 1st world) in the next few years with the common usage of cell modems and wimax.
• The big win right now is in coordination of activity and effort. This reduces the latency in the human equivalent of the SYN SYN ACK handshake.
  
• Dyson is big on the software having business rules encapsulated in it. I disagree as content is hard enough to get explicit. Maybe the software can get smart enough to implicitly infer business rules.
  
• Work 2.0 reduces the disadvantages of being a small business, but not the disadvantages of being a big business.
• Continue to look for the innovations to come from the consumer side.
• Collaboration lacks a grammar. When it has one it will be much more useful.

Enterprise 2.0 Keynote by Andrew McAfee

• Enterprise 2.0 is currently used to make "ad-hoc-cracies".
• Enterprise 2.0 needs to making the barrier between structured tasks (think SAP) and unstructured tasks (think email) more porous.
• Studies indicate people over value current things by a factor of 3 and under value potential things by a factor of 3. So make sure your cool new thing in 10 times better than what they have already if you want it to succeed.
• The big deal is that Enterprise 2.0 make communications persistent and accessible to others.
• Enterprise 2.0 sets up some conflicts. Control versus empowerment. Fiefs versus communities.

Office 2.0, Where are we ?

• 10 people from SAP at the conference and 8 from Microsoft. But 2 from a small bicycle company looking to become just a bit more efficient.

One Day in the Life of an Office 2.0 Worker

• Mashup standards emerging. See something about Simple Ajax Mashup here.
  
• Gmail is down and a few demos don't go so well.
• Thinkfree has a Google Docs type product that we could host internally.

Collaborative Document Management

• Alfresco profiles content to suggest reference material and subject matter experts.
• Office 2.0 is a good opportunity to re-define *what* a document is.
• Ease of use is critical to increase the pathetic adoption rate (~5% even in tech companies)

Evangelizing Office 2.0

• Why bother ? Because Office 2.0 is scary to Corporate IT, has *fewer* features, and is a painful to use right now.
• The two big factors in Office 2.0 rise will be the expectations of the upcoming generation coupled with frustration with traditional IT.
• Office 1.0 is about "personal" computing. Office 2.0 is about "collaborative" computing.
• Office 2.0 embraces the chaos of the real world.

Managing Blogs and Wikis in the Enterprise

• Blogs are for temporal information where the value degrades over time. And they clearly have an author.
• Wikis are for long lived content that undergoes continuous improvement. And has muddled ownership.
• Blogs and wikis will likely eventually overlap to the point they become indistinguishable.
• The big power of a wiki is that it is *not* a document. Like the Internet, the value in a wiki is less in the content and more in the links and the evolution of the links.
• Ward Cunningham (wiki pioneer) would intentionally have minor errors on pages to encourage other's to make a correction. Once they made one edit, each subsequent edit became easier.

Making Office 2.0 Enterprise Ready

• SOA is a prerequisite to Office 2.0
• To succeed, Office 2.0 needs a simple value proposition.
• Maybe the question is instead - 'Is the Enterprise ready for Office 2.0 ?"
• Lots of dissent on the panel on whether Corporate IT is friend or foe.
• Business user greatly empowered and Corporate IT and the CIO *must* participate to achieve long-term business success.

Making the Transition to Office 2.0

• Back to "What is Office 2.0?". Is has to be *less* than "some business application delivered over the network".
• Office 2.0 drives connectivity to true utility level.

You made it to the end of this lengthy post, so here is a link to Dan Farber's blog about the event on ZDnet. It has much better pictures than mine.