using my head

I’ve decided to see if I can make it without biting the bullet and shelling out for MS Office for my business. So over the past few months I have been trying 4 alternative products: Apple’s iWork, ThinkFree Premium, openoffice.org and NeoOffice.

They all offer more or less the same tools as the standard Microsoft Office package, and as I am not in need of any database functionality, I based my trials primarily on MS Word and Excel equivalents, with a tiny bit of Powerpoint-y presentation work thrown in.

The first product I tried was iWork, but I quickly encountered problems when trying to send files back & forth to clients who use Word. When converting from Pages to .doc format, things went really weird with the formatting of text, especially tables. Although the interface and default templates were the prettiest of all of them (which is to be expected from Apple), it was all style not enough substance. Workflows in all the iWork products also took some getting used to, as the tools and steps were very different from MS Office. In some cases they were more intuitive, in others less so. I found Numbers really fiddly to work with, I had trouble getting charts & graphs to work as expected, and some key formulas were missing. The real star of the iWork show in my opinion is Keynote. This beats Powerpoint hands-down. It’s easy to create slick, polished presentations, and some cool features - like the instant alpha for removing backgrounds from photos, and an awesome built-in image/effects editor - really set it apart. If and when I need to make more presentations, I will be shelling out the dosh for iWork; the price is worth it just for Keynote alone.

OpenOffice.org was next, but their Mac offering was so unwieldy and frustrating, I could quickly see why the folks at Planamesa started the Neo Office project, which is another open source offering based on the OpenOffice suite. So I switched over to Neo Office, and things were instantly better. Neo Office isn’t going to win any beauty contests, but it seems to be a solid product and I haven’t yet experienced any major problems. I particularly like the ease in exporting to PDF from Writer, and out of all the office products on trial, Neo Office had the best compatibility with MS Word in my experience. The downfall seems to be their Powerpoint equivalent, which is ironically named Impress. I was wholly un-impressed, especially with the 1980s templates that make Microsoft’s cheese-fest look positively appetising.

But the most interesting package I tried out has to be ThinkFree. I got the ThinkFree Premium suite free when I spoke at Office 2.0, and although it’s a beta product, it shows real potential. The difference between ThinkFree and the others is that online/offline file synchronisation and storage is a core part of the product. This means you can access and back-up your files online, which is pretty damn handy. I did have some problems getting everything set up properly, but maybe that’s because I got a freebie. The big downside for me was the stability side of things, and ThinkFree seemed to run much slower than most of the other products I tried. Perhaps when it moves out of beta things will improve, and I think ThinkFree is definitely one to watch.

The winner?

For now, I’m sticking with Neo Office. It does exactly what it says on the tin, and once you get used to the workflows, it’s all pretty intuitive. It’s pretty basic, but that’s all I need right now. I like the idea of open source as a concept, and this is one of the movement’s true success stories so far. Yes, you can use it for free, but I like it so much I’ve made a donation to the project.

In future if I have some more cash to spare, I may consider iWork, even if it’s just to play around with Keynote more - it seems like fun even for non-work projects. And I have also kept my ThinkFree account active just in case. In a year’s time, who knows - maybe my opinion will have changed as the products grow and develop.

I’ve been meaning to write this post since Gordon Rae tipped me off to this article, as I’m not 100% convinced that large enterprises make “superb test beds for social software”. Sure, there are many characteristics of large enterprises which make this true: high volume of users, geographic distances that make other means of communication pale in comparison, likelihood of cross-team projects that require collaboration, and common interests/areas of focus between people in similar roles in different parts of the business - not to mention the fact that it’s a closed system (environment). But there are also a few factors that make the opposite true.

Large enterprises are slow-moving beasts, and they usually have existing systems that they’ve spent hundreds of thousands of pounds building, configuring and implementing. Any new software project will usually need to integrate or otherwise link up with these legacy systems, and that’s something that not many social tools on the market today can do easily. Furthermore, the business will have spent a lot of time developing relationships with the suppliers of these legacy systems, and it can often be easier (or seemingly more cost-effective) to go back to an existing supplier when faced with a need for new functionality. In many cases, businesses will take whatever’s presented to them by these trusted suppliers rather than waste time exploring whether or not the offered solution is the best tool for the users.

Even more challenging is the circumstance when social software is supposed to replace existing system(s). The business has invested so much in these systems, that it can be very tricky to disentangle the legacy tool, and incredibly complex to figure out how exactly to migrate across to the new one. Plus there’s the burden of training & support. And funnily enough, there’s also the cost factor. Ironically, most social software costs a fraction of what large enterprises pay for enterprise tools, and it’s exactly this that is so off-putting to budget-holders. Most of them have been spending 6 figures on things for so long that they think anything with such a low price tag must be gimmicky, dubious or unfit for purpose.

In a large enterprise, it’s the IT Manager/Director’s job to support the infrastructure, keep the data safe, and ensure technology in the business is robust and reliable. These guys aren’t supposed to take big risks, and that’s just what many of them see when presented with most social web tools. It’s much safer for them to stick with the Microsofts of the world than to embrace some new kid on the block whose reputation is only a few years old at best. The world of “permanent beta” just doesn’t fly when it comes to large corporates; these guys need solid, tested, guaranteed secure, guaranteed working tools. Because if it all goes wrong, it’s their ass on the line.

The formal style of management is also a factor in large enterprises. There tend to be several layers of management in these organisations,  and each of these will have their own KPIs and goals. It can be hard to sell in the value of seemingly “fluffy” benefits like having a more connected workplace or better collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Unless it’s something that can be easily measured with cold hard facts or slots nicely into the SMART system of performance management, it’s difficult to get buy in from all the necessary stakeholders. And without their support, you can rarely introduce new tools into the environment - or see them succeed if you do manage to get in there. When a worker’s manager thinks “all this social web stuff is a waste of time”, she’s much less likely to spend time filling out her profile page, commenting on internal blogs or tagging documents.

I’m not saying that social software doesn’t belong in large enterprise; in fact I strongly believe the opposite. But all of the above means that social software rarely stands a chance of getting through the door in the first place. And getting through the door is just one hurdle: the biggest one is often the corporate culture itself. Social software has the potential to be revolutionary, and can change the very fabric of the underlying corporate culture, moving some businesses from a ’silo-ed’, one-way, up-the-chain communication style, to an open, networked, free-flowing one. This cannot happen overnight, and it cannot happen without active engagement from people up and down the chain. And it’s the scale that’s problematic: it’s a lot harder to turn an aircraft carrier than it is to turn a rowboat, especially when you’re dealing with an intangible thing like attitudes and internal culture.

I’m optimistic that we are at the start of a sea-change in large enterprise, as the Baseline article indicates - but it’s going to take a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get us there.

Last night I went along to Chinwag Live’s final event of 2007, and as usual it was chock full of interesting people and ideas. The event this time around was focused on the future, and those jolly Chinwag chaps & chapettes asked some of the UK’s leading marketing and digital media folks to tell us what they thought things would be like for marketing, PR and all things online in 2012.

I won’t post a full summary here, as I’m sure the podcast will be available soon (and I can smell my dinner in the oven calling me), but some of the choice nuggets for me were:

• Nikki Barton’s predictions for the way user interfaces will change, perhaps even leading to the death of the mouse. She said that in future we would need different UIs because we would be accessing the net primarily through mobile. I think she’s spot-on, especially after my recent trip to Japan where none of my relatives used their computers (if they even had one) to go online, they all used their mobiles. In fact they used their mobiles for lots of things other than phone/SMS, the most useful for us being the Japanese-English dictionary.
• Guy Phillipson’s predictions that as information becomes cheap and readily available, people would have more space and time in their lives for creativity. He predicted that in future (not by 2012, mind!) we would have in-brain search engines where all you would need to do was think about something and the answer came to you. Kind of like Neo’s learning in The Matrix, but without the need for a socket in your head or an ‘operator’ with data stored on discs - discs are sooo last century ;-).
• The panel’s consensus that ‘digital’ is still a ‘ghetto’, a niche where specialist geeks reside and do their own thing; but a positive change for the marketing, PR & advertising industries in future would be that by 2012 digital natives would be reaching Board/Director level of these agencies, and so digital would inevitably become more integrated and taken more seriously.

After this came the Q&A, and I have to admit I must have done a pretty poor job of asking my question, because I think the panel got the wrong end of the stick. I made a comment on how no one had really talked about virtual worlds, and I also wanted to pick up on something Guy had commented on earlier in the talk about privacy issues in social networks, as I felt that in virtual worlds, most of the appeal is the privacy/anonymity factor. I personally think of Bebo, SecondLife, there.com and other true virtual worlds as simply another form of social network - which is why I place MMPORGs like World of Warcraft in another category (the core purpose of WoW is gaming, not just hanging out).

Unfortunately, the panel seemed to interpret this question as a question about the future of virtual worlds specifically in terms of platform (ie. who would ‘win’: SecondLife, there.com, etc), which is not what I meant at all - but it probably didn’t come out that way. To me, it’s pretty obvious that the future of virtual worlds is being able to move seamlessly from one world to another… but this is exactly where it starts to cross over into the troubled privacy waters social networks like Facebook are facing now. In order to port your data (or avatar) between systems, you will need to have something like Open ID, which will tell the system who you are and what data/inventory/avatar is associated with you. While I’m a big fan of Open ID, I’m also intensely aware of the fact that much of the appeal of virtual worlds is being anonymous, or keeping your FirstLife identity private and separate from your virtual life.

A lot of the backlash I’ve been hearing/reading about Facebook is tied to the fact that Facebook knows who you are, as a real person. And as they don’t seem to be uber-keen on keeping that data private, it also means that quite a lot of people can also find out who you are & what you’re up to: (potential) employers, retailers and of course some people whom you lost touch with over the years for a reason.

So my question was more about what impact the social networking privacy issues would have on virtual worlds in the future. Would a single identity system come into play within virtual world social networks, as well? And what would that mean to people like the members of Second Life’s umpteen support groups, who are only able to exist because they offer the comforting cloak of anonymity? These groups convene in the safety of virtual worlds to talk about rape, mental health, abuse and other very private issues that are very difficult to talk about in real life. In fact, I’ve found that general conversations with many of the people whom I’ve met in Second Life  or overheard in open chat are intensely personal, and disclose deep feelings and thoughts that would rarely be revealed to even the closest of real life friends.

Things are already changing in Second Life, when the introduction of voice chat inevitably changed the landscape massively. After all, it’s quite hard to keep up the facade that your female fairy avatar projects when you have a voice like James Earl Jones. So what next? I guess only the misty advance of time will tell.

Well, I’m back after spending the best part of a month entirely offline (visiting family & travelling in Japan). I thought it would be a real struggle, but surprisingly I didn’t feel the withdrawal and in fact it was a refreshing change - though I think that was mainly because I was busy doing other things. I can imagine it would be very different trying to stay offline on home turf.

In catching up with my feeds today, I read in TechCrunch that there’s yet another online project management and collaboration tool that has sprung up, but this one, called Phuser, is taking a different tack than the others by incorporating other webapps directly into the product. Apparently Phuser will have all the usual features you’d expect from an online collaborative workspace - such as different spaces for different projects, ability to invite/manage other users, document storage, discussions, etc - but will also use existing popular 3rd party tools like Slideshare and del.icio.us to boost functionality.

If it all works and is as seamless as this slideshow promises, Phuser could provide welcome relief for users (like me) who find all these webapps useful, but disjointed. What would be really great is if Phuser eliminated the need for people to create separate accounts on these 3rd party sites, which I think is one of the main annoyances (if not barriers) to people who want to use these tools within the business context. I’ll be interested to see how Phuser manages this.

I’ve been thinking about looking at alternatives to CentralDesktop now that there are a handful of others on the scene, so I’ve signed up to the beta and will be taking Phuser through its paces, alongside my old favourite CD and popular upcomer Huddle - especially interesting as both Huddle and Phuser are UK startups. If I have time, I’ll try to include the now somewhat old skool Basecamp, plus others like Goplan and Zoho Projects. I might just end up with a handy comparison chart that others may find useful.

After 2 years at NESTA, I decided it was time for me to move on to new challenges. I have decided to take the plunge and go freelance, in hopes of being able to share my experience and skills with a wider variety of organisations. I am looking forward to the accelerated learning experience this will afford me, by being exposed to a mix of different types of projects, companies and people in a shorter space of time.

So I now take on the much misunderstood title of ‘consultant’ or other such non-specific wording, and will spend the next few weeks working out how I can best use my skills in the big wide world of self-employment. This blog will become my business blog from now on, and I will be posting lots of the thoughts and ideas that I’ve had over the years that never quite managed to fit into my business blog that was tied to an employer.

It’s been an interesting experience blogging for NESTA, with some limitations as well as some unique freedoms. I hope they will continue to keep using blogs as a way of engaging in conversations with people who are interested in innovation. As for me, I’m going to keep on blogging about all that’s happening in the world of online, right here, so stay tuned.

My full notes from the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference are posted on the NESTA blog, but in summary the key themes were about making web-based tools more social, and the increasing need for interoperability - that is, the need for all these separate web-based tools to start talking to each other, and allowing users to port their information from one environment to another. Who wants to keep up with loads of different logins, profile pages and content in lots of different places?

You can read the full post here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

Off the back of my recent invitation to speak on a panel at the Office 2.0 conference, I decided it was about time I went public about all the online tools that I & my team have introduced to NESTA. Here’s a quick runthrough:

Our Intranet is a structured (hybrid) wiki powered by ThoughtFarmer… We’ve also been using CommunityServer to drive our internal blogs & discussion boards… We use Central Desktop for a number of things: my own team uses it as a collaborative workspace for all work, from steady-state ‘rolling’ work, to discrete projects… We’re using del.icio.us to do some pretty cool things aside from the usual social bookmarking. For example, our Innovation Digest email newsletter is created from a del.icio.us feed, as is the online version… we’re using Yahoo Pipes to meld 2 feeds from our Typepad blogs to fill the ‘blogs’ slot on our website homepage… We’ve introduced Netvibes to various staff members… We’ve used WebEx to enable our UK Partnerships team to collaborate across distances, often as an alternative to flying…

More info can be found in the full post on the NESTA blog >>

Because NESTA is all about innovation, I do a lot of reading about the topic. I recently read Suw Charman’s post about the sources of innovation, and republished/summarised the key takeaways on my work blog:

Innovation does not have a size…it can be a small change that helps solve a big problem.

Innovation is not in a vacuum, and anyone might have a solution, including young people and customers.

Innovation will succeed in business when the business accepts innovation as part of their corporate culture.

It’s important to stay connected to technology and what’s going on in the outside world and new media if we want to really be innovative.

And finally,
“Innovation is not a buzzword to be repeated in meetings, it’s an action, a culture, a day-to-day activity.”

I had my own additions and amendments to these, which you can find over here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

A few days ago I posted my own definition of the semantic web on the NESTA blog. I tried to explain what the next generation of the web will be like, in terms that even my mother could understand. I guess I did a pretty good job of it, because as of today it has been linked to several times, and translated into Italian and Portuguese. People seemed to particularly like this handy diagram I did:

If you’ve never understood what this term means, have a look at my definition and let me know if it makes sense to you. Because I predict you’re going to hear a lot more about it soon.

Following on from my earlier post about the death of internet radio as we know it, the UK has once again followed the US model and hiked the royalty fees paid by internet radio stations to levels that will make it nearly impossible for niche stations to exist (legally) anymore. What they’ve really done is killed off one of the cheapest marketing tools the music business has ever seen. More details are in my post for the NESTA blogs:

What stations like Pandora do is provide an excellent way of selling more records. Here’s how: you type in the name of a song or musician you like, and Pandora plays you music that is similar. You may never have heard of the artist or song that Pandora plays to you, but if you like it, you can buy it from iTunes or Amazon at a single click…

Read the full post here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>