An interesting piece from CNET News Australia: a study from the Queensland University of Technology’s Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation shows that open office floor plans, the ones where there’s no cube walls around workstations, lead to higher stress, and in turn can lead to higher frequency of illness for employees.

The high level of noise causes employees to lose concentration, leading to low productivity, there are privacy issues because everyone can see what you are doing on the computer or hear what you are saying on the phone, and there is a feeling of insecurity.

Seems plausible, I suppose.  On the flip side, though, open floor plans do facilitate more open communication between employees.  And it also makes it harder to spend your entire day playing mine sweeper or solitaire.  I doubt anyone would buy that excuse if I tried to use it as a reason for calling in sick, though.  This sounds about as useful as saying that the fluorescent lights are bothering you.

More details on CNET Australia.

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People that know me well enough can attest to my frequent and perhaps frustrating habit of not listening to voicemail.  My outgoing message usually says something along the lines of “please note, I do not listen to my voicemail, but here are the best ways to contact me…”

Please allow me to explain.  I hate voicemail.  It’s a technology that was a good solution at the time it was invented, but by now there’s really no excuse for anyone to use it anymore.  Everyone that has access to a phone should have access to email, or the web, or have some way of contacting me through some other mechanism that is much more convenient for both me and the person trying to get in contact with me.

Voicemail is weird and awkward, for both the person recording a message and the person listening to it.  I have to listen to someone on the other end, perhaps nervous or uncertain of what to say because they were expecting to hear my voice instead of having to leave a message.

Voicemail isn’t succinct or thought out like emails, text messages, or instant messages.  People often ramble in voicemail messages, and there’s no way for me to jump into their head and remind them to get to their point as they are leaving me their message.

Voicemail is far too asynchronous.  I prefer technologies that allow me to both receive my message and reply quickly, as close to real time as possible.  Voicemail typically means a 2-3 hour turnaround time, and sometimes the return call I make ends up being longer than I intend – I really only want to tell you what you called me about, it’s nothing personal, but I can’t talk to you for twenty minutes about your trip to Florida.

Voicemail gives people a false sense of immediacy.  People sometimes leave “urgent” voicemail messages.  Odds are, even when I did listen to voicemail routinely, it would take me 2-3 hours to return a call.

Voicemail is far too linear.  I have to listen to it from start to finish.  Sure, you can skip parts of a voicemail, or fast forward it, but then there’s no way of knowing what it is that you might be skipping.  Is it the most important part?  Who knows.  And yes, I know there are services (like PhoneTag) that transcribe your voicemail into email, but that only solves a part of the problem – the part about me having to listen to the voicemail in the first place.  And besides, I don’t want to pay for a service that transcribes my voicemail into email.  I just don’t want to listen to your voicemail message at all.

It’s really nothing personal.  I just want a solution that works better for us both, something faster and less asynchronous, something very cheap, and far less time consuming for us both.  Here’s hoping that 2009 sees less voicemail for everyone.

Filed under: Offbeat | 1 Comment »

Apple announced DRM-free iTunes earlier this month at MacWorld, which in part means that tracks downloaded from iTunes will work on other players.  But there are still lots of details about the new DRM-free tracks to pay attention to.

Amongst them:  it costs money to transfer existing purchases to DRM-free tracks, you can’t choose to upgrade just a part of your current iTunes collection – it’s all or nothing.  But perhaps the most distressing part of the DRM-free iTunes tracks still contain personal information about yourself, namely the email address that you use with iTunes.

I’m not sure how to feel about this.  I still believe that Apple’s move was largely one of fashion: DRM is un-cool, and Apple is all about selling hip consumer products.  I also believe that Apple was trying to improve the experience for users, which seems to be a part of their core beliefs as a company.  But I’m not sure what Apple’s aim is by including the email address in their iTunes tracks.  This appears to be a left-over piece of tracking information that has been noticed since 2007.  I suspect that the goal of including the email address in the iTunes track is to identify if you’re a repeat broad-sharing offender: someone who buys tracks from iTunes and then shares them frequently with others.  But what happens if your laptop gets stolen, or if someone you know and share files with gets their data taken from them?  I wonder how Apple might approach situations like that.

In a way, it seems like Apple has potentially gone further in transferring the responsibility of preventing file sharing from themselves to the consumer.  I’m not sure how that will play out with consumers if that turns out to be accurate.

[More iTunes details at CNET News]

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Microsoft is still in the process of testing Office 14, which will likely coincide with the next release of Exchange Server.  Microsoft already offers a hosted version of Exchange 2007 for some customers, but the next release of Exchange Server, currently known as E14, will include improvements to make Exchange Server more suited for a fully hosted version.

This is good news for Microsoft, considering that recent research form Forrester shows that services like Google’s Gmail cost 1/3 that of traditional on-site email solutions.  According to Forrester, it costs around $25.18 per month per user for on-site, hosted email vs. $8.47 for Gmail to operate.

Email is one of those services that I still say is easier to convert to SaaS than others.  It’s one I’d really love to see more companies adopt.

Filed under: Enterprise Web, Google, Microsoft, SaaS | Comments Off

Just earlier today I wrote about the SaaS hype curve hitting its peak.  In a report from InformationWeek, 52% of 1,300 developers said they expect to work on SaaS projects in 2009, with most developers working on SaaS implementations in North America.

Also of interest: cloud computing is expected to be less frequently used, with only 10% of developers using cloud services (although many of the SaaS vendors may ultimately leverage cloud computing vendors on the back-end to provide scalability, so who knows).  Development of RIA, or rich internet applications, was also expected by 68% of the respondents.

I still think this isn’t too surprising: cloud computing as a concept is useful for folks that want to take the halfway step.  It’s great if you don’t want to own datacenter maintenance, or if you want to deploy a piece of enterprise software on a scalable infrastructure, but there are more upfront benefits in jumping into a SaaS solution right away rather than taking the cloud computing interim step.

Also, with so many varied definitions of RIA, and so many easy-to-use frameworks (Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flex, Sun JavaFX), it’s not surprising to see such a high percentage of respondents say they’ll be working on an RIA project.

[c/o InformationWeek]

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Enterprise Web, SaaS | Comments Off

The last few years have offered easy and exciting ways to demonstrate packaged software to customers.  One of the frustrating things, both as a prospective customer and a product manager, is getting a sandbox demonstration environment together (especially for complex not-available-through-SaaS types of software – which usually means most enterprise software available today).

First there was VMWare and Microsoft Virtual Server (VHD) virtual machine images to demonstrate software.  The problem there was always: who wants to download a 600-900mb VMWare image and deploy it on their personal laptop?  And furthermore, who has the local computing resources for it? 

Now Adobe has taken it one step further, offering 10 hours of runtime on an Amazon EC2 hosted image that includes LiveCycle ES Solution Components for customers of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program.

Additional details from Adobe:

• Provides pre-installed, pre-configured virtual instances of LiveCycle ES.
• Reduce time required to download, install and boot new server instances.
• Develop LC ES applications in a fraction of the time.
• Virtual instances can be used as to build proof-of-concepts

Using virtual machines hosted on the cloud is a good way to let customers play around in a sandbox environment.  If you’re not already a pure-play SaaS provider, and you don’t have a sandbox datacenter of your own that you want to maintain, this could be a good alternative.

[Adobe LiveCycle ES Developer Express c/o InformationWeek]

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I’ve been paying more attention to the SaaS data portability space, especially since data portability in general is an important and currently undervalued area of enterprise software.

Here’s a round-up of three that I know of that focus on enterprise data (including Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft applications):

• Jitterbit
• Talend
• SnapLogic

Of the three, Jitterbit is my favorite so far.  They seem the most advanced in terms of capabilities, and their editor UI looks the cleanest.  I haven’t spent much time playing with all of them yet, though, so I’m not sure what the pros/cons are of each of them (yet).

It’s interesting to note that all three of the ones I mentioned are offered as open source.  Most of them offer free tools for smaller scale projects, and an enterprise version for larger projects.

And then there’s Gnip, which seems like a good solution for SaaS providers to create data endpoints that only get polled when data is updated, rather than periodic polls that often end up in empty sets.

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