The new collaboration

I've been working on a dreamforce 11 presentation about chatter. It's a powerpoint presentation and I've been on google apps for a while and I really noticed a difference between the "old way" of collaborating and the "new way".

In Google apps, I create a document, share it, and then just make changes to it as I see fit. If my co-presenters want to make changes, and I've given them the rights to, they can. If we want to have a chat discussion about the changes first (which is always a good idea) we can chat right in the document. It's very cool and allows me to focus all of my energy on the content and none on the logistics of sharing the document.

But for this presentation we are using powerpoint. Don't get me wrong, I love powerpoint. Frankly when I'm working on something it's great. The challenge with it is when I need to work with other people.

The way we work as a team with powerpoint is slower. Basically I make a draft, and email it out, in this case it's too big so we use Salesforce content deliveries. My co-presenters make changes and email it back. If they both made changes I need to merge the changes together and then email it back out. Repeat until done.

As you can see I have to spend a lot of energy just managing the changes, which means less time making them. As much as I hate to admit it, my amount of time to spend on this is limited so the more I can spend on creating content versus managing changes, the better.

Now powerpoint is better for creating presentations than google presentations. Everyone knows powerpoint, it has cool features like "smart art" and with Office 365 it's supposed to be better at collaborating. I hope either MS gets better at collaborating or Google adds more features.

I love the new way of working, just need to get the best of both worlds in one tool.

Microsoft cloud

We had a great day today in Waltham, well once we got past the tipped over sheetrock truck on 95/93 interchange. Sitting on 128 for an hour was not great.

Wed reviewed Microsofts' Office 365 and azure offerings and I can honestly say that they seem to have a good story on how to get your existing Microsoft infrastructure in the cloud. Exchange is an easy move to the MS cloud and in the next year you will get new features more quickly than the on-premise versions. Very cool.

Office 365 allows you to change your licensing model and have "viewers" have a less expensive option that can be accessed anywhere from "any" machine. "Any" is somewhat misleading since it does need to be a current browser and a standard OS with silverlight support, or at least it didn't work on my joli OS based web machine. Someone more savvy than me might be able to get it working, but after an hour the challenge stopped being fun.

Even SQL seems to have a good roadmap of getting to the cloud. I'm not really a SQL guy but it looked pretty cool from what I know.

And Windows Azure also seems pretty cool, though having to rebuild applications for the cloud means legacy applications will probably stay where they are and new ones will be built on Azure instead. I'd rather there was a "upgrade to cloud" button somewhere, but I'm sure some partner somewhere will come up with one someday.

All in all it was exactly what I expected, which is the problem. It's not really disruptive. If you read my post on google's cloud vision, it was a drastically new way of running IT. It gets rid of clients (essentially) and lets me get out of managing clients and servers and all the things that go with it, like antivirus, patching and even backups. It lets me stop running IT and starting moving the company forward instead.

The MS one is a much easier migration with much less risk. In fact if done correctly most users would never even know they are in the cloud. If your CEO comes to you and says "We need to go to the cloud" and you are thinking "Ugh, who did he go golfing with that put this in his head", the MS vision is perfect for you.

OK that's a bit harsh, there are a lot of reasons to avoid a big change on a largely unproven technology vision.

If you are trying to shake things up though that doesn't do it. Sure it helps shift infrastructure costs to a monthly subscription cost, which frankly is a numbers game, IMHO. It also gets you out of managing servers and patches for the applications you move to Azure or Office 365 (sharepoint, Lync, Exchange) and it gets you "somewhat forced" regular upgrades. You have the option to wait up to a full year before being forced to upgrade. It's not bad, in fact for some people it's a great fit. I just wonder if it is enough of a change....

Week two in the cloud

This ends my second week of being pretty much entirely in the cloud.

Gmail continues to "tune itself" and does a good job figuring out which emails are important and putting them in the priority inbox. Spam it seems to struggle with a little but and I haven't figured out how to whitelist some sites, like say linkedin, facebook, or google.

I didn't get any time to play around with google gadgets yet which I really want to do, but we did enable something called "Cloudworks" from Appirio that is very cool. By default it gives us salesforce integration and some gadgets for chatter, which we use all the time, and pulls in contact data. I think it does opportunities and leads too but since I don't email with customers on a regular basis, I haven't seen that yet.

Jolicloud released a few updates that got added for me automatically and I figured out how to lock my screen. Turns out it's Ctrl-Alt-L.... They also added two cool features that I just started with. The first is google docs integration so all my google documents show up as a folder on my desktop. They did the same thing with dropbox so I had to break down and create an account.

I'm still waiting on the ipad version and the dual display version.