Monday Apr 14, 2008

Getting out of Email Jail - Email Jail Bail

By Nick Hortovanyi

We've been cutting back on email for a while. Today, Alex has written an excellent wiki entry on Email Jail. So if you have an overcrowded inbox, and who doesn't now a days that is sitting in a large organisation, check out Alex's solution overview being Email Jail Bail. In it Alex is proposing to use a Wiki as the means of getting out.

Now if you think there are other solutions for Email Jail, you can register and update the wiki yourself. For those not inclined to register there is an open discussion page (well open at this time).

Using a Wiki in this way enables many to many communication, removing potentially a lot of duplicated email communication in an organisation.


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Sunday Mar 09, 2008

Cutting back on email

By Nick Hortovanyi

There are a lot of people I know that are bombarded with email and for many of them it has become one of those dreaded daily chores. It is even worse when left unchecked for a period of time. I've heard a new term that aptly describes this phenomenon as "Email Jail".

Luis Suarez, a Social Software Evangelist from IBM, has been actively experimenting on "Giving up on Work e-mail". His status report for Week 4 makes for a very interesting read. I've been communicating with him through twitter on this subject and he still receives email but then actively encourages conversation through other means and tools.

About a year ago,  I wrote about email, in a blog entry titled "Email that's what I use to talk to my Grandfather" inferring that the newer generations entering the workforce, or indeed currently working in it, expect more modern tools for communicating then just emails. Invariable, they use other tools to communicate to their friends and associates but revert to email to communicate to their older relatives. A year on I've seen a steady rise in the usage of sites like facebook from within the confines of the corporate work environment. Some organisations have embraced these off-premise communication means and some have blocked them. But for both, email is an issue. The availability of which now has a critical impact on daily operations.

We actively use Lotus Sametime for our daily work, Alex has written up a blog entry on his experiences with it. This enables us to minimise our email usage, to really offline communication (Offline Sametime would be good IBM) or to information that we need to send external to other organisations. Everybody I show Sametime to, is impressed with it as we can also share screens (take control of other screens), use white boards and quickly capture screen shots and snippets in a conversation to expand meaning.

Now we are also experimenting with a wiki server for public and offline "walled garden" communication and it is open to others, who register, to collaborate on content with us. More on this later in another blog entry, as I see this as being an ongoing exercise.

For us, we lose productivity if our Lotus Sametime services is not available, thus it would be more critical for us to have that facility operational than email.

So if you are stuck in "Email Jail" the first step is to acknowledge it and the second step is to find other means to communicate. Even picking the phone up can be an escape (we'd prefer to use a VOIP service like Skype over traditional  landlines).


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Friday Feb 01, 2008

SOA Success Plus Wiki

By Nick Hortovanyi

Recently, we have created a SOA Success Plus wiki. This wiki is open to all, who register, to contribute if they so desire regarding experiences around SOA. Yes, wikis are all the rage at the moment and we are working out how to gain contribution from the larger SOA attentioned community as we go!

I've created a front page of types but am now thinking of creating six major sections being:

  1. SOA Architecture Style;
  2. Governance for SOA - both business and IT;
  3. SOA Tools;
  4. SOA Platforms;
  5. Knowledge Transfer; and
  6. Services (well this one is open to interpretation a little :) ).

Any assistance, suggestions or comments on getting this wiki up would be greatly appreciated.



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Tuesday Dec 18, 2007

Our 2008 styled web site

By Nick Hortovanyi

We've finally done it and released the new web site http://www.toasttechnology.com.au . This is our new one page design that I talked about in a previous entry - Trends for 2008 corporate web sites. We have put key messages about our company on that page and included cool things from the MooTools tool kit and stuff from Google Code like the Google AJAX Feed API so its got a strong Web 2.0 focus.

Now we have tried to take into account those corporate users that don't have Flash (yes, they do exist)  by having a fall back image  for them. The page does take a little longer to load then our previous front page but the number of dial up users accessing our old site is minimal.

Many thanks to Alex, Ric and Claire for their valuable help with this exercise ;) .

One key thing we have done, is linked in a wiki server at http://wiki.toasttechnology.com.au . The wiki is open to any person who registers to read/write pages. As such we are going to actively seek for organisations that we work with and partner with to update content directly. I think this is going to be the real challenge!


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