blog.frederique.harmsze.nl my world of work and user experiences

January 31, 2013

Can you share your desktop?

Filed under: New world of work — Tags: — frederique @ 22:25

It’s funny how important some tools are for my daily work. And how I take them for granted… until they don’t work.

Sharing my or your desktop is very useful to me

I collaborate with, learn from and teach information workers. The desktops we work at may technically be those table-like things, but they are mostly our computer screens. So when I want to see what they are talking about, I ask them to share their desktop with me. I don’t have to leave my table-like desktop to see what’s on the computer desktop of people who are in a different building, different city, different country or different continent.

  • When somebody in the business calls me with a strange question about a team site, they can show me where they are in the site and what behaviour they see. This may be very different from what I had imaged when they started talking.
  • When experts gives an interesting presentation, I can follow their presentation and their demo by looking at the screen they share. A picture is worth a thousands words, and a live demo that actually shows you what’s going on is worth even more. And of course I do the same thing when I am the expert giving a presentation or training.
  • In a project team meeting where we discuss a list of issues that need to be solved, we can be in different places and still have the same overview and the same live view of changes we make on-the-spot

For this purpose we used MS Communicator and Live Meeting, and now we use MS Lync.

But it doesn’t work if my Lync and your Lync bite each other

This week I was caught flat-footed when I clicked on the Lync link (huh…) in an Online Meeting invitation and got: “An error occurred”. Help!
And even worse, I was planning an important meeting about a technical subject with that same high-tech partner. So I actually had to waste time travelling to their offices and sit at a table with them, because I could not risk not sharing my desktop with them. How old fashioned is that?!

The problem was that their Lync and our Lync are not friends (ok, I mean: they are not federated). So when I click their invitation link, it opens my Lync, but my Lync does not recognize them.

Fortunately we can keep them apart

To my relief, I found a way to keep those unfriendly Lyncs apart and still see their desktop:  copy the Lync Online Meeting link from the invitation and paste it into a non-Microsoft browser (in my case Firefox and Chrome worked). This opened a web version of Lync, where I could enter as a guest.

Note to self: pasting the link in Internet Explorer does not work, because the Microsoft browser starts to be smart and recognize the Microsoft Lync stuff and then it tries to connect the unconnectable Lyncs.

So that should be the end of this error…

November 30, 2011

Metaphorical interlude: my blackberry is frozen

Filed under: New world of work — frederique @ 23:48

Ok, this sketch is almost a year old. But when I rewatched it recently, it still made me laugh out loud, so let me share it here…

And no, my phone’s not a blackberry, but it still gets frozen….

While we’re at it:

Dilbert.com

Dilbert.com

The New World of Work huh….

December 31, 2010

Last day of 2010

Filed under: New world of work — frederique @ 15:22

This is the last day of 2010. Ok, I am talking about the year 2010. I wish you all an enjoyable new year’s eve – champagne and all – and then of course all the best for 2011!

This definitely not the last day of “twenty-ten”, 2010 as in SharePoint 2010, Office 2010 and what have we. Twenty-ten is full swing: launched officially, used in real life and talked about a lot.

Actually, what is making my day this last day of 2010 is not twenty-ten as such. It is The New World of Work, which allows me to work from home.

We don’t need the latest & greatest technology for that. The client who I work for today is not using twenty-ten, but SharePoint and Office 2003. But I have a laptop that connects me to their network. And we have an agreement that working from home is perfectly fine, as long we get the job done.

In any case, most of my project contacts at this multinational client are based in other countries. So we work in team sites rather than in physical locations. We discuss our projects in Live Meeting rather than real life meetings. We talk via e-mail, communicator and, when things get complicated, over the phone.

Today our conversations mostly pertain to champagne, fireworks and other holiday related subjects. I could easily interrupt that to open the door for the delivery guy who brought me my party ingredients for tonight. But over the last weeks I have been working from home more seriously. The bad weather blocked the trains or at the very least delayed them substantially. And I was extremely pleased to be able to work from home and actually get things done, instead of wasting my time on freezing platforms, waiting for trains that did not arrive.

So I’m all set for the new year, even if we get more snow and ice. And I have interesting things to look forward to in 2011: my client is going to leap from 2003 straight to 2010 in 2011, and we’ll have a huge new productivity platform to conceive, create and get adopted.

Happy New Year!

September 30, 2009

Cliquez Parcourir pour télécharger le ficher?

Filed under: New world of work,Usability — Tags: — frederique @ 23:31

Currently I am working for an American multinational. I am based at the headquarters for the international part of the business, which are in The Netherlands, and the other half of my team is in Chicago. Because we are one company, the intranet and collaboration environment that binds us together is in English. The idea being that we can all understand and use English, the lingua franca of the modern age and the obvious choice for a company with its main headquarters in the Chicago area.

However, are all my colleagues in that multinational quite as comfortable with English as all that? I am afraid not…

Language barrier
The language barrier may be underestimated by the people in America, as well as by the people in The Netherlands. The Dutch are not native speakers, but they can handle English just fine. After all, it is a small country and a “small language”, so everybody is at least familiar with English. But this is not the case for, for example, Russia and France.

In the project I am doing with the Russians, it is an ongoing struggle to try and understand each other. My contacts there have to write all the texts for the site we are creating and end-user materials in Russian, to allow the end-users to understand it. Fortunately SharePoint can deal with the Cyrillic script, even if I can’t….

Mixed terminology
It is easier for me to do projects with my colleagues based in Paris, because I do speak French. But I am only familiar with the terminology in English. I prefer to use English language settings on my computer, because I do not like to get my terminology translated. A browse button should be called a browse button and nothing else. But my French colleagues have computers that are French all over. Except for the intranet itself, because that is in English.

They see a button in the intranet that says ‘Upload’ and they have to know that this means ‘Télécharger’. And then their version of Windows takes over and offers them a button that says ‘Parcourir’ and I only know that that means ‘Browse’ because it appears in the location where I usually get the browse button. And none of the Help files and training materials are in French, so no help there.

So, the user experience that is straightforward when you are working in an English world becomes really messy when you are working on a French computer. It is not surprising that the employees in France hardly use the intranet at all and they don’t feel that it is meant for them.

What can we do?

  • Offer the most relevant content in different languages and make sure their content is not hidden behind anything English. That means personalization, as well as a lot of communication, to tell the people that it is worthwhile to look at the intranet and use the collaboration tools.
  • Configure the collaboration sites to be as local as needed: local time zone and time settings (not 10:00 AM 9/31/2009 Chicago time but 17:00 31/09/2009 Paris time), local language headings and explanatory texts.
  • Make sure the Quick Reference Cards and other ‘first aid’ user materials exist in all main languages of the company. It took me a moment to translate the Quick Reference Card to French, but it is not that much of an investment.
  • Preferably, the intranet and collaboration platform should also exist in different language versions, which follows the regional preferences of the computer. Most of all the buttons and action links that ordinary users see in their collaboration environment, such as Upload document, Edit document.

The last point requires a major overhaul of the system and is not something that we can do right now. But we are getting started with the other points. Now see if I can find a colleague who can start translating into Russian and Portuguese and what else do we need….

August 31, 2009

Limits to my New World of Work

Filed under: New world of work — frederique @ 21:14

At the moment, I am on a business trip in Chicago. As I also have to do some work with people in my original time zone in the Netherlands, I had planned to get some work done on SharePoint team sites and then join a Live Meeting session from my hotel room. Always on, always connected, right? But here I encountered some limits to my New World of Work

No network, no work
It all went swimmingly, until my secured connection broke. From that moment I was unable to get online. Well, I already knew I was addicted to team sites, but having no network at all was far worse! No SharePoint, no Outlook, no Live Meeting, no Instant Messaging, no Google… The main part of the work that I wanted to do was impossible without a network.

Phone as first aid
Fortunately I still had my phone. So I could send an SMS to the person with who I was to have that Live Meeting, to tell him I’d miss the meeting. And it is a smart phone, so I could still use one of my e-mail accounts and find some basics on the internet. I try to limit that use while I’m here though, as well as using the phone in the classical way to call people, because it costs me a fortune.

Offline as backup plan
And fortunately I had taken the relevant documents offline, so I still had the information I required on the spot. My means of synchronizing online and offline information are far from perfect: I just download and re-upload the relevant documents. But it works, until I get better tools.

Real life meeting versus Live Meeting
So, you may ask, if I am wallowing in the new world of work, why take a trip across the Atlantic at all and not just use Live Meeting? Well, because in any world of work, it good to actually meet people in real life from time to time. Not just to work, but to have a drink together. Drinks are not a collaboration feature in the new tools yet…

We want to have some brainstorm session with a larger group of people. It is a lot easier to do that effectively and efficiently if you can see each other in person. Video conferencing is getting better, but what we have at our disposal is nowhere near as good as a trip to Chicago to meet in real life.

July 31, 2009

My New World of Work

Filed under: New world of work — frederique @ 23:55

Microsoft, the local paper and everybody talks about the New World of Work. What do I think about it? Well, to me the New World of Work is not about the technology, but about flexibility. It means working when and where suits me best, so that I can be more effective and efficient. And of course make my life easier.

To be honest, I have never had a job where I had to be in an office from 9 to 5. In the nineties, I could get far with a key to the office building, a terminal and e-mail that allowed me to collaborate on an article with a co-author in New York. Today, I have better tools.

Wherever & whenever

I can work any time and any place where the internet is available. So I don’t have to commute to the office during rush hour, which makes my life easier. And I can check for e-mail before I leave and before I go to sleep, and help out my clients in Australia during their office hours. That makes me more effective and efficient.

  • Right now, I’m working from my couch at home after dinner, using my laptop and wireless internet.
  • At Macaw, we work in a SharePoint team sites. So I don’t need to be in the office to share documents or knowledge with my colleagues.  I really miss it when I collaborate with people who don’t have access to a team site.
  • Also, I have a secured connection that allows me to work within the company network of my client. So I can access their more heavily secured intranet.

Long distance

My current client is a multinational, so I do projects with teams in many countries. Most of them, I have never met in person. But we can still work together.

  • We share our desktop using Live Meeting. We can all see what the presenter is showing in a team site or a powerpoint presentation.
  • With a phone bridge, we can join a call and talk with the entire team. We have phones for that of course, but I can also call via Communicator on my laptop. A headset helps me to talk freely.
  • If I don’t want to interrupt a colleague with a phone call, I use Instant Messaging to chat. This is especially handy to talk with my team mates on the other side of the Atlantic: I can see if they are available in the Presence information displayed in the messenger tool.
  • The different time zones are a complication. But it helps that I can have a meeting from home, so that I don’t have to wait in the office for the Australians to wake up.

So yes, I do like this new world of work. And yes, I am working a lot more hours than the usual 40 hours a week. But I prefer spending that additional time to get results that I can be proud of.

June 30, 2009

How Outlook helped me survive the post-holiday mail stack

Filed under: New world of work — Tags: — frederique @ 23:23

I have just come back from a three week holiday. If I am not careful, I land in a huge stack of unread e-mail upon my return. Finding the urgent and important e-mail in that stack is difficult but very necessary. But I’ve set up Outlook to help me deal with it, by structuring the pile more than in previous years. It’s not high tech, but it’s effective. I have used the following:

  • Out-of-office assistant: Of course I try to warn my contacts in advance that I will be out of office, but it is useful to have an automatic reply which tells the sender when I’m back and whom to contact during my absence. In Outlook 2007, I could set the end date and distinguish between mailers from within my organization and mailers from the outside. In my other workplace, with Outlook 2003, I had to switch it off manually after I returned, but it did warn me. (Tools > Out of Office Assistant).
  • Rules to sort mail: I used rules to sort mail into different folders. Especially recurring mail that usually is not that urgent. For example, all mail with the word ‘newletter’ in the subject goes into the newsletter folder. This works already in Outlook 2003 (Tools > Rules and Alerts)
  • Rules to forward urgent mail: For projects with deadlines that interfered with my holidays (actually, it’s the other way around), I set up a rule to forward mail to colleagues, so that they could deal with it immediately. That concerned mail with specific keywords in the subject or from particular senders. This works also in Outlook 2003 (Tools > Rules and Alerts)
  • Archive: I cleaned up the Inboxes beforehand, so that they would not overflow during my absence.

And I have switched off many automatic notifications, that alert me of changes in project sites. Or at least changed them from immediate or daily notifications to weekly notifications. Of course I don’t need to be notified immediately if anything happens in an interesting project site or blog while I am watching the puffins on the cliffs of Orkney…

Note to self: next year, take the same measures, because they really help.

May 31, 2009

Addicted to collaboration sites…

Filed under: New world of work — Tags: , — frederique @ 22:26

In my job, I use SharePoint project sites – or more generally team sites – to share documents and information with my team mates and to keep track of projects. I’ve just discovered how much this way of work has become a part of me, when we were planning our holiday. Help, I’m addicted!

We are going island hopping in Scotland in the busy season, so we need to book several ferries and bed & breakfasts. And for that we needed some idea of what we wanted to see and how much time we would want to spend on each island.
My travel companions live in different locations, so we discuss our plans whenever we meet in person, by phone and by e-mail. However, I soon lost track of our ideas and decisions and of the status of the bookings that different people were taking care of. So I found myself itching for a project site.

Unfortunately, we don’t have Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) running on our home computers. But fortunately, there are other tools available: We used Google Docs to share our plans.
It doesn’t work as well as my usual sharepoint project sites. For example, I have not found a way to get a notification whenever somebody edits the document. And it wasn’t a coherent environment where we could also share announcements, tasks and contact information in an easy way as well. But hey, it worked and at least I could get my collaboration fix …

February 18, 2009

Going public

Filed under: New world of work — admin @ 00:15

Why did I start this blog?

For the past five years, I have been blogging within the intranet of Macaw, the company that I work for. I enjoy sharing ideas with my colleagues in our blogs. But I cannot share stuff that is behind the Macaw firewall with “outsiders”.

On the internet, I am an enthousiastic Flickr user. I like to share my photos, get feedback, find inspiring images and discuss interesting photos that others have taken – not just my current friends, but also complete strangers. That can result in unexpected insights, from unexpected people.

And I appreciate others blogging on the internet. When I search for specific information, I often find the answer in a blog. It is not fair to just read, without contributing as well, is it?

So what was lacking was a place where I can develop ideas outside the company context and share them with other people. That problem is easily remedied nowadays.

Hence this blog.

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