My Digital Life

I’ve just been looking at Yammer a bit more after signing up over the weekend.  It’s a great idea - twitter for the enterprise.

Essentially you sign up using a work email address, and then you only see messages from users with addresses from the same domain. Clever idea.  What’s more, although it’s free for end users, the company can pay for administrative controls.  A nice business model I reckon.

They have a web client, a desktop client, iPhone client and one for Blackberry.  It’s odd there’s no Windows Mobile app, but I can only guess that will appear at some point.

It’d be good to see a SharePoint webpart as well, perhaps a couple in fact.  Maybe one to add a Facebook like status, and one to show your messages etc.

I also wonder what would happen for companies with multiple domains used for email - I know we have a bunch of them at work.  And perhaps whether you could ‘federate’ (in the LCS/OCS sense) your company messages with those of a trusted partner.

I really like the idea - I just need to get a few people from work to sign up!

Apps that I use day in day out…

Hahlo - not strictly an iPhone app, but the best mobile Twitter client that I’ve found.  It does everything I need of it (apart from maybe twitpic), it’s quick to use and looks pretty.  The only downside it that as it lives in Safari you occasionally get unwanted refreshes so you loose you place in the list of tweets.

Facebook - I’d pretty much stopped using Facebook before installing this app, but now I check it once or twice a day.  It just makes it so much easier to check for updates and messages.

Linked In - This app is much the same as the Facebook app, but perhaps slightly less well executed.  I have to say I use Linked In less, but it’s still a worthwhile app if you have an account.

Tris - I always was a fan of Tetris :)

Evernote - A fantastic tool, if you don’t have an account you should go and try it.  I love the way I can take a photo on the phone, it’s then uploaded to Evernote, OCR’d and indexed.  It makes recording notes from whiteboards so much easier, just take a photo then search for keywords. 

A few weeks ago I posted up a few initial thoughts about my iPhone 3G.  Without reading back through the post, I think it’s fair to say that my opinions were mixed.  Although I loved the device itself, the silly battery life made it hard to use as a day to day phone.  Now I’ve had the iPhone for a few weeks I thought I’d jot down a few more thoughts.

So do I still like it…?  Yeah, I do.  It really is a great little device, and it’s really changed the way that I use my mobile.  I’ve used smartphones for email, calendar and contacts for years, but mobile browsing has always been something that I’ve done only when I needed to - like checking train times or something like that.  I guess at first cost was a barrier, but I’ve also realised that the general usability of the devices and the browsers played a big part.

Although the iPhone is physically bigger than something like the HTC Diamond, all that extra screen size makes it so much more usable for browsing or running applications.  I now spend much more time browsing when I’m on the move.

That’s not to say all is perfect on the browser front… Although the Safari browser on the iPhone is ok, for me it’s very much a love-hate relationship.  Yes it’s probably the best mobile browser so far, but it crashes faaaaaarrrrrrr to often for my liking, and the lack of support for flash etc is a real pain. 

The traditional mail, calendar and contacts tools are also pretty good.  For me the Calendar particularly stands out, as the interface is much better then the Windows Mobile equivalent.  Although I have seen a few ‘ghost’ appointments where previously re-scheduled meetings still appear in their original times on the iPhone, but not in Outlook or on WM.  Very odd, but repeatable on a number of iPhones at work.

I’ve also seen a slightly worrying security issue with the iPhone and Exchange Activesync…. I’m not going to post the details until I’ve had a chance to check it out with MS and Apple, but it’s a little weird to say the least.

Apart from that push email from exchange works very well indeed, though I’d still like to see a ‘working hours’ style option to set the hours that push email is working and when it should go to manual.  I used that feature on WM to both stop myself checking work email at weekends and save a bit of battery power over night.  It seems like a strange thing to leave out.

Other things I can think of… the lack of MMS doesn’t bother me too much as email or twitter do the job for me anyway… copy and paste - what were Apple thinking by leaving that out?!…  I’m also puzzled why I can’t record video… 

Overall I still really like the iPhone.  It really has changed the way I work for the better.  There are problems that Apple need to fix but I’m sticking with it… for now… :)

As promised Apple released v2.1 of the iPhone firmware yesterday.  I’ve upgraded mine, and so far so good.  I can’t say it’s ground breaking but it doesn’t seem to have made things any worse :)

The published updates are:

•  Decrease in call set-up failures and dropped calls
•  Significantly better battery life for most users
•  Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
• Improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
•  Faster installation of 3rd party applications
• Fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes for users with lots of third party applications
•  Improved performance in text messaging
•  Faster loading and searching of contacts
•  Improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
•  Repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
•  Option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts
•  Genius playlist creation

In addition to those, there seem to be quite a few undocumented tweaks elsewhere.  I’ve noticed an option to disable the camera functionality - possibly useful for companies that operate in secure environments, though in my experience you’re just not allowed phones there.  There’s also some new icons and an extra ‘Load Earlier Messages’ button for SMS’s.

Hopefully Safari will crash a bit less, it time will tell.

Update:  Here’s a useful list of the undocumented additions: Linky

In a my post earlier today I noted that Google Chrome wasn’t passing credentials through to our SharePoint intranet.  Having played with Chrome a bit more this afternoon unfortunately it seems it’s not just SharePoint that suffers.  

With Chrome seemingly not supporting Windows Integrated Authentication, if you’re using an Internet proxy server with authentication enabled you’ll be prompted for credentials each time you want to browse an external web site.  Not a great user experience…

The good news is that the problem is logged with Google here so will hopefully be fixed in the future.

Mutt Cutts who heads up Google webspam team has posted up some useful info on Chrome:

• Answers to common Google Chrome objections
• Preventing paranoia- when does Google Chrome talk to Google.com

That’s now two posts about something I wasn’t going to look at today! :)

I didn’t really think I’d be posting anything about Chrome… there’s just so much out there already.  Having downloaded and installed it though there are some interesting things in there that I thought I’d comment on.

1. Proxy Settings - it would seem that Chrome uses/obeys the Windows Internet Properties, so if you’re configuring proxy settings etc via GPO Chrome will obey these settings.  From an enterprise perspective this is good - it was the first thing people asked here for example.  It’s nice to see Google following this route, though end users wanting to bypass said proxy servers might not like it..!It’s worth noting that I imported settings etc from IE during the installation, so Chrome might have picked up this behaviour from there.  I’ll have to test it later.
2. Integrated Authentication - Having just visited our SharePoint based intranet I noticed that Chrome isn’t passing through my Windows credentials to the site resulting in a logon prompt that I don’t get with IE.  Once you’ve logged in though, the credentials are cached for the remainder of the session.
3. Sharepoint - From an initial look, Chrome doesn’t seem to offer a great experience in SharePoint, I’m not sure it’s even providing the ‘Level 2 Browser‘ experience you get with Firefox et al.
4. Default Search Engine - This is something I’ve never configured on my computer, though I do always use Google.  It was nice to see that Chrome picked up what must have been the standing default and is defaulting to Live Search.  Not that I use that, but I like that they haven’t just defaulted Google.

Generation Y.  It’s a term that keeps coming up.  Before that it was Digital Natives, and I’m sure different companies and areas have their own terms.  What makes these guys so special eh?

Well I guess the most basic answer is that these are the guys that our companies will be employing from this point on.  If you work in an internal IS group like me, that makes them our customers.

For anyone born after 1984 or so, social web applications like Facebook and messaging tools like MSN or Sykpe are part and parcel of life.  Of course there are plenty of other examples, and I’m sure that these things are just as important for some of us slightly older types.  But it’s Generation Y that really sum up this new wave of technology savvy people who use and rely on technology far more than ever before.  It’s this consumerisation of the workforce and the tools they demand that cause problems in enterprise IT.

For the past 10-15 years the primary drivers for many enterprise IT groups has been simple:  Reduce your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and then hopefully earn the opportunity to use some of those savings to deliver extra value to the business. 

This lead to the usual standardising of services to reduce complexity and and consolidation of those services to further reduce management and support costs. 

In effect this means standardising and locking down what people can do to server the greater good.  It’s never really been a popular move with end users, but from a business standpoint it has made a lot sense. 

The times are a changin’ however.  The need to attract and retain Generation Y is starting to have a profound effect on these old strategies.  With technology now playing such an important part of peoples lives its becoming a factor in peoples decisions about where they work.  The traditional locked down computers, controlled applications and restricted Internet access just isn’t going to cut it with people used to communicating and collaborating live online.

What does this mean for IT?  Well for a start we’ll need to be a lot more open in our approaches.  The problem is that often the old drivers for low TCO etc still stand.  So in the short term at least there are some compromises to be made.

I was just catching up on my RSS feeds and ended up reading an old article about cloud computer by Dion Hinchcliffe over on ZDNet.   It’s quite a good article, but one bit caught my eye:

Like so many aspects of Web 2.0, the industry is moving a lot faster than most businesses are currently able to keep up with.

Being a customer looking at cloud services, that was news to me - I’d argue that the opposite is true, at least for some enterprises.

Whilst there are some maturing cloud services out there, many of the big players that Enterprises will traditionally deal with just aren’t quite there yet.  Whilst they’ll talk a good game, when you dig into the details and try and actually buy this stuff you soon find out that the grass isn’t quite as green as you’ve been lead to believe. 

It soon becomes clear that whilst many of the big players aspire to providing cloudy ’service effect’ style solutions very few are able to deliver them at the moment.  And those that do have solutions are often both limited in scope and more expensive than doing it yourself.

I’ve found that billing models aren’t developed, when you look for the simplistic £-per-user, £-per-GB, £-per-CPU/hour models you’ll find them strangely absent. 

What’s worse is that one of cloud computing’s big selling points - reduced capital investment and cost of entry -  is also quite often AWOL.  Many of big players are still reluctant to take on the cost and risk of owning the hardware layer, preferring the more traditional hosting and support style agreements.

Unless you’re specifically looking at apps that you can move to solutions like EC2 or App Engine, there are very few options available right now for delivering applications and services from the cloud.

So in my experience the appetite of enterprises for cloud services currently exceeds the markets ability to deliver them.   Or at least deliver them against the promises it’s already made.

Seth Godin made a good point on his blog today about online ads being the new tip jar.

What he’s saying is that if you’re reading some content you like, why not click an ad on the site to say thanks (clicking on the ad will result in the site getting a little bit of cash).

It’s something I’ve tried to do for ages, not usually on the larger commercial sites, but on peoples blogs or on smaller sites where the author is more likely to benefit.  The way I see it, if some content entertains or helps me then I’d like like the author to get something for their troubles, it just seems like a decent thing to do.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/ads-are-the-new.html