I spent most of last week in a 6S (some will say there are only 5S’s) “Lean-Sigma” event. Our organization is in the process of adopting these philosophies and I’m on the steering committee to make that happen. In the last few months, I’ve attended several events, training classes, meetings, etc. on the topic - and it’s all pretty good stuff.

Which got me thinking: can these concepts, which are most easily applied to manufacturing, be applied to IT?

The answer: yes!

We held a 6S (sort, straighten, shine, standardize, sustain, safety) event on our network shared drives. The goal was to clean it up and reduce all files and folders by a factor of 25% (keeping in mind that they had NEVER been cleaned in mass like this for about 12 years). In the end, we had a first-pass clean up of 34% and marked much more for “red tag” (kind of a soft-delete concept) which will automatically be deleted in 30 days.

This really is a great event for an IT department to sponsor. We gathered people from each department and spent a day talking about what type of information should be stored (and where) on our network drives. We talked about how to organize, assign an owner and define retention periods for different types of data. In the end, we reduced the top-level number of folders from over 230 down to just under 20, making it MUCH easier to find information. And reduced the company-wide network share by 68%! We’ve now scheduled events to attack other department-based network shares as well.

For more information about how we went about doing this, including how to setup a similar event in your organization, please click here to download a PDF of the initial presentation used in our event. Or you can access it on-line via SlideShare.

If you do one in your organization, please stop back and post the results, feedback, etc. I’d love to hear how it went!

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Wow. Long title.

Since day 3 of Lotusphere 2008, I’ve been running the Notes 8.5 Mac client beta. Its really nice to have the “8″ experience on my Mac without starting Windows, but it is very much a beta client. There are a number of odd bugs (most of which hover around the Sametime integration for some reason). And my favorite is that when it crashes you get an eclipse error message… that can’t easily be closed. It runs off the bottom of my monitor and there isn’t a “quit” option in my menu. Hmm… maybe if I had that 30″ Apple Cinema display?!

The 8.5beta experience takes a dramatic turn for the worse when you connect to an 8.0.1 server running a current version of your mail file. In short: Notes becomes unusable. The amount of bugs and extremely slow performance means you just can’t get anything done in the client.

So… for the last week, I’ve been spending A LOT of time back in “Paradows.” (Parallels+Windows — can I do that? Can I start a “thing” there?)

The 8.0.1 client is much better and I really like the new UI. I’m still not crazy about the speed. It really seems to be noticeably slower and I worry if our user community will tolerate that in exchange for stuff that’s new. What’s more, there’s just something … wrong with telling them that a benefit is the Exchange-esque 3-pane vertical arrangement of their mail.

But the single most annoying thing thus far is the lack of the selection gutter in my mail and calendar. I’ve always thought that the ability to “check” a bunch of documents easily without using “control” or “shift” keys in the process was an awesome idea that made Notes unique … and now its gone!

That problem is amplified by the fact that, today, the only way I can sync my Notes & iPhone calendar is by selecting multiple calendar entries in Notes and exporting them to an iCal file. Its quite hard to do that in 8.x.

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Over at Ed Brill’s place, there’s a link to a video from Sybase showing the iPhone being used to connect to corporate messaging system (Domino or Exchange).

I’ve fallen into this trap lately of being instantly enamored with anything that holds the promise of connecting my Notes email and iPhone. However, even the support team at PocketMac admitted that they’re having trouble understanding and fixing why I can’t sync Notes and the iPhone (I get a number of calendar errors and it apparently takes much longer than it should). The Sybase solution looks like another alternative, but its still not as slick as the MS Exchange demo Apple did a few weeks ago at the iPhone SDK event.

In short, it appears to require a server on your DMZ that acts as a go-between to your device and Domino server. Contacts are delivered via a web page optimized for the iPhone. And some contact information can be pulled from whatever is cached when you’re working off-line (although I’ve noticed that the web pages “blank out” after a period of time, meaning there’s just a white page instead of whatever content was there the last time you accessed  the page on the iPhone while connected to a network). But here’s what I found amusing about the video:

If you look closely, you’ll see the battery level is very low. Now, this could simply be that it took the guy A LOT of takes to shoot the video OR it could be a reflection on the battery life needed for the product. Our company used to use Sybase’s iAnywhere product for a variety of smart phone devices and the number one reason we replaced it with GOOD’s product was the effect it had on battery life. I found it funny to see that problem exist on the iPhone video demo.

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The following article is provided for entertainment purposes only. It is not an accurate psychological review.

I did it. I finally moved my Windows start bar from its default position to the top. As a Mac user, I just got sick of looking for the clock in the upper right corner and not seeing it there when I was in Windows (using Parallels in full screen mode). I avoided doing this because I didn’t want to be “that guy.” It sparked a brief conversation among people in the office where the following, highly scientific, system was devised that describes you based on your Windows start bar location:

Normal desktop and start bar location
You’re a typical Windows user.
Exception: If the placement of your start bar is at the bottom and you have many odd icons near the clock (like weatherbug, an American flag, etc.) or a desktop background with cats on it, you are probably 27 days away from having so much spyware on your computer that you won’t be able to get much done. Also, if you refer to your desktop background as your “screen saver” you are both a normal Windows user and highly unaware of the labels your operating system provides for its features.

Double (or more) start bar size
You most likely have no clue how it got there and have just decided to live with it. You’re afraid to ask IT, ’cause let’s face it, they’ll just fix it in an instant and you’ll feel stupid. When others notice it you say “yeah, isn’t that neat?”

Side start bar location
Your a moron.
Exception: OK, you might not be a moron, maybe you just can’t remember how you got it there. See “Double (or more) start bar size” for more.

Top start bar location
You’re “that guy.” You know exactly how the start bar got there and think you’re pretty clever for having figured it out. You’re tempted to install Linux somewhere but secretly scared at all the “root” stuff you keep hearing about. You often drag your mouse to the bottom of the screen and then realize the start bar is at the top - right where you put it. For a brief moment, that frustrates you - until you think about how many people have been seemingly impressed at the fact that you know how to move it.
Exception: You’re a Mac user who has to use Windows for some odd application that isn’t available on a Mac. — Right? I can justify the fact that MY start bar is there based on that? Can’t I?!

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Today, Apple announced their new SDK for the iPhone. They also announced the availability of integration between the iPhone and Microsoft Exchange. Here’s the rundown of what it does:

• Push email.
• Push contacts.
• Push calendar.
• Access to global address books.
• Remote administration (including a remote lock-out feature).
• Fast. Easy. Instant.

I honestly believe that what we’ve witnessed today is the beginning of the end for the Blackberry. And I’ve witnessed is the most compelling reason I’ve ever seen to consider jumping off the Lotus Notes/Domino wagon.

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You read that title and you’re still here?! Seriously?!

Here’s the deal, today’s workplace has so many different options available (mediums) to us for how to communicate with one another. However, the typical workforce is comprised of employees from different backgrounds and generations, so it might not be obvious to everyone when it is appropriate to use each communication tool.

For that reason, I did a bit of research and put together a sort of common knowledge approach to the subject. (If there’s something formally written on this that I’m not aware of, please let me know. Otherwise, if you’re looking for a great thesis idea, this might be it!) I formatted this into a few slides that were then used in a presentation about some new VoIP, IM and Cisco tools we were launching at the company.

We start by listing out major categories of communication mediums. These are then subjectively rated on their ability to be effective for the types of messages listed below (each is described in more detail beside it):

• Urgent Issues - Issues that require you to quickly get ahold of someone, communicate and arrive at an action plan.
• Complicated Issues - Topics that can not easily be summarized by a few sentences. Perhaps things like designing a new product or dealing with an intricate process.
• Presence Awareness - Messages that require others to be absorbing the message instantly. For example, a faxed message assumes a person will get to it within several hours, perhaps days. An instant message (IM) assumes the person is on-line and available to read that message within a few moments.
• Retention - The persistence of the message. For example, a phone conversation only stays around in the memory of the attendees whereas an email is documented until deleted.
• Conveying Content - All the visual and contextual information about a message. Gestures, intonations, etc.

My stab at a matrix to define this looks like:

So that does a good job of giving people something to think about when choosing what medium to use. You can simply think about the message you need to send and pick the best option. Designing that new product might be best done face-to-face and over the phone (which, arguably could be broken into their own segments - but the focus of this presentation was more on thinking about this topic in terms of technology enabled communication mediums) and asking Joe where you’re doing lunch today would be fine to do over IM.

But that’s only part of the picture. You also have attributes of the communication medium itself that play into the picture. Things like:

And those can be shown graphically on a chart that measures them using a subjective 1-100 score (or in this case, 1-120, but only so you can clearly see the items that hit “100″ on the chart). That might looks something like this:

So, since I’ve fallen asleep 12 times since I started typing this, I’ll stop. Regardless of if these graphics area dead-on or not, I think they’re at least something that is helpful to look at and think about for a moment. When I presented this, I had many people email me days later saying that the concept stuck with them and prompted them to change the medium they were using to communicate on a few topics.

I, being the clever guy I am, wrote back saying: and your decision to email me that comment was incredible appropriate as well.

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I have a post draft all about the PocketSync application that should, in theory, sync my Mac, Notes and iPhone worlds perfectly. Its a detailed post and yet, its not complete for one reason: it doesn’t work … yet.

I say “yet” because I hope that my 3 open support tickets will be answered by something better than “make sure you have admin rights to install software.” Perhaps my hope should be much less than it is.

And then there’s the promise of some announcement at the upcoming Apple event that the SDK will help bring my iPhone into the enterprise world. I hope so … but I fell for that at Lotusphere and wasn’t all that impressed with the way you have to access the content via the web (and the fact that even though 8.0.1 is out, we don’t have that tool, yet).

But … the next event is an Apple one. And those guys know how to hype and deliver. In the mean time, I’ll keep hoping until I have something more tangible.

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