Make Outlook Better

brucelynn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:04:56 GMT

Came upon www.makeofficebetter.com from Steve’s post,

“I had a look at MakeOfficeBetter.com over the weekend and was actually a little surprised to see it go live today – basically a crowd sourcing site along the lines of Dell’s Ideastorm to solicit feedback on Microsoft Office. It’s not an official site but if this is what our Redmond bods can do in their spare time then I’m impressed.”

So, I had to add my long desired Dynamic Work enhancement (“Where We Are Available”) to Scheduling Assistant in Outlook to help determine not only ‘when’ people are free to meet, but also ‘where’ . Check out the submission “Add Geographic Proximity to Scheduling Assistant”.

If you like the idea, be sure to give it a ‘vote’ by clicking ‘+ me’ at bottom next to ‘people like this idea’ or give it a comment if you have some further reflections.

Community Productivity

brucelynn — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:04:00 GMT

Microsoft has been talking about the ‘New World of Work’ for several years now and as time and conditions have progressed so has the vision. An updated presentation came from Katherine Randolph, Josh Henretig and Nicole Brown in a partner blogcast called ‘Enabling Telework Through Unified Communications. Good for Business. Better for the Earth’.

I particularly liked Katherine’s opening line, “The office is no longer a physical place, but more an environment where they can collaborate whether they are face to face or whether they are remote.”

For me the NWOW represents a natural progression in Microsoft’s ‘productivity’ vision. At the outset, Microsoft was all about ‘personal productivity’ and the cornerstone product was Office. But the ‘XP’ generation introduced capabilities that were less about the tool itself and how an individual user used it and more about how the software was used in a context of a team or organisation. At this point, the vision of ‘productivity’ really expanded to one of ‘organisational’ productivity and paralleled the rise of Microsoft tools as an Enterprise standard not just on the desktop, but also on the server with products like Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL Server.

Now I think Microsoft’s vision is expanding even beyond the walls of the organistion. The benefits to the new approaches to work accrue not just to the bottom line of the P&L, but also to the broader social welfare, environment and economy. Sort of a ‘Community Productivity’ if you will.

Above and below are a few of my favourite slides from the presentation (click on the slide graphic to see expanded, easier to read version)...

Dynamic Work : Office

Make Outlook Better

Community Productivity