OK, this is pretty far removed from the norm of an IT blog, but it is the weekend so I feel it's allowed. The topic has some technical (practical) aspects, and is something I've been talking with a few people about lately.

I've seen various techniques on how to cook steak properly, but I came across one individual's website (which, frustratingly, I can no longer find) a few years ago, which summarised everything beatifully and set me trying out a few different ways from the norm. In a nutshell: cook the steak from room temperature, oil the meat and not the pan, use a pan as hot as you can, and let the steak rest for at least as long as you cooked it.

It's all about heat

I used to work in a professional kitchen. Well, I was a waiter in a nice restaurant, which meant I spent a bit of time in a pro kitchen (generally on the "other" side of the hot plate). Professional chefs seemingly have a duty to verbally abuse their waiting staff, which mine did with gusto if not applomb.

Several years later, I was being shown round a call centre (as The Client), when I recognised one of the chefs who'd been giving me verbal, was now trying to sell software over the phone. Presumably, the world of cooking hadn't worked out for him quite as he'd hoped.

Anyway, one thing I learned about cooking steak back then was, it's all about heat. Now the trick to cooking a good fillet steak (and that's pronounced fill-it, not fill-eh, unless you currently live in France), is to try to get close to restaurant kitchen heat levels in a domestic kitchen. It can make for a lot of smoke, but it's very effective. Here's the deal...

• Take your fillet steak out of the fridge at least 20 minutes before you want to cook it, to allow it to get to room temperature. Taking a cold steak and throwing straight onto hot metal won't do anything for the tenderness of the end result.
   
• Pat the steak with kitchen roll to remove any excess moisture (if the meat is wet, when you put it on the heat, that water will vapourise and only form a barrier between the steak and the heat source).
   
• Once patted dry, rub a little sunflower or vegetable oil into the steak, with your fingers (don't use olive oil - it burns at too low a temperature), and leave to sit for a few minutes. Season with salt & pepper if you like.
   
• Put a small, dry, frying pan on maximum heat on the biggest ring/burner on your hob. Leave it there for a least a couple of minutes. In the meantime, go and open some windows. Things are likely to get smokey. I've heard of some people leaving the pan on heat for as much as 10 minutes, but you might struggle to see the cooker by the time you're ready to put the fillet on.
   
• When the pan is as hot as you can suffer, gently place the steak onto the surface. After 30 seconds or so, move it so it doesn't stick and burn. Now it's a straight function of how hot your pan is, how big the steak is, and how you like it cooked, which will determine how long to leave it there. I tend to find 2-3 minutes each side will give a nice medium-rare on a decent sized fillet on a pan that's been on heat for a few minutes.

There's a trick to being able to tell when the steak is properly cooked, and it involves prodding your own hand. Pressing on the surface with your finger, you'll feel the flesh give way a little, and it should be about the same firmness as if you press with the finger on the fleshy part of your hand when pinching thumb and fingers together. It's easier to show than describe:

So if you touch thumb and index finger, the firmness of your hand will be about the same as a rare steak, while thumb and little finger will be more like well done. Experience and practice will help you out here, and don't be scared of cutting the steak to check it's cooked as you'd like - better a well-cooked dish with a cut in the middle, than an undercooked but nicely presented one.

I can't really understand wanting to cook a lovely fillet of beef to "well done". You might as well save a bit of cash and buy a cheaper cut. In fact, according to Anthony Bourdain (and I've heard this of other chefs too), the skankier bits of beef get set aside for serving to restaurant customers who like their meat good 'n burnt - with a label on the meat saying "SFWD", or "Save For Well Done".

Finally, take the steak off the heat and put on a warmed plate and just let it rest for 10 minutes or so, before serving. You might want to deglaze the pan with a little red wine and maybe a knob of butter, to make a nice sauce. Mmmmmmmmm.

 I just discovered how to modify presence states in Office Communicator 2007: it's documented in the Office Communicator Deployment Guide (page 21, if you're interested), and allows for either  the managed deployment of Communicator with additional corporate-set presence states, or if a user is savvy enough to do it themselves, they could have some fun...

The custom states appear like shown in this screenshot (the one in the deployment guide seems to be in error - it doesn't actually show any custom states), and you can have up to 4 of them and set which of the coloured statuses you want to apply to each of your defined presence states.

I'd originally noticed this was possible when I glanced down at the beautiful screen on my newly-acquired "Tanjay" phone (as shown on Gurdeep's desk here, along with a bunch of other UC devices, and akin to the LG-Nortel 8540), and I saw Adrian's status was "Delivering ..."

... which set me off to find out how he'd done it. Note my own status is also displayed on the Tanjay, and updates in real time...

In late 2005, to prepare for Exchange 5.5 going out of support (and to help customers understand what was involved in moving up to Exchange 2003), we did a really well received tour of the country arranged around the theme of "Exchange Unplugged".

We all wore "tour T-shirts" (in fact, every attendee got one), and keeping with the theme, I even carried my acoustic guitar and provided musical accompaniment at the start of each session. The nearest I'll ever get to being paid to play music, I don't doubt.

Anyway: we're doing it all again! With 8 "gigs", session topics titled:

• Warm up act & welcome
• Architecture Acapella
• Migration Medley
• Email & Voicemail Duet
• Mobility Manoeuvres in the Dark
• Y.O.C.S. (that's about Office Communication Server).

... it's clearly no ordinary event. Come along and see Jason try to squeeze into the tour shirt without looking like Right Said Fred, or find out if the YOCS session is presented wearing a stick-on handlebar moustache and leather hat.

Dates:

• 24^th October 2007, London: Exchange Unplugged in association with BT
• 25^th October 2007, London: Exchange Unplugged in association with Dimension Data
• 26^th October 2007, London: Exchange Unplugged in association with Fujitsu
• 30^th October 2007, Sheffield : Exchange Unplugged in association with Lynx
• 31^st  October 2007, Manchester: Exchange Unplugged in association with Lynx
• 1^st November 2007, Maidenhead: Exchange Unplugged in association with Nortel
• 2^nd November 2007, Warwickshire: Exchange Unplugged in association with Post CTI
• 5^th November 2007, Glasgow: Exchange Unplugged in association with Capito

 I spend a lot of time talking with customers about what Microsoft is doing with various new technologies, mostly involving or revolving around the Unified Communications stuff with OCS and Exchange. It's really interesting to see how many people just "get" the point of UC technology, whereas others are either blind to its potential, or even doing the fingers-in-ears, shut-eyes, repeating "no, no, no" denial that a lot of this stuff is coming whether they like it or not.

I don't mean that software companies are somehow going to compel everyone to adopt it, more that end-users themselves will be expecting to use technology at work which they have grown used to at home. For several years now, it's been typical that people have better IT at home than they'd have in the office - from faster PCs, bigger flat screens, to the software they use - it's exactly this kind of user who has driven the growth of services like Skype, and possibly helped shape the way enterprises will look at telecoms & communications in the future.

Various pieces of research, such as Forrester Groups' 2006 paper on "Generation Y" types (as reported at TMC.Net), predict that people who were born in the 1980s and beyond, are adopting technologies into their lives faster than previously... and as those same "Millenials" are making their way into the workforce, they're bringing their expectations with them, and possibly facing the "Computer says no" attitude that some, er, older, IT staff might still be harbouring.

Instant Messaging concerns

It's already been reported that teens use IM more than email so it seems inevitable that IM will come to the enterprise one way or another. Some enterprises have turned something of a blind eye to "in the cloud" IM services such as Windows Live/MSN Messenger, AOL, Yahoo, Google Talk etc. Others have actively shut down access to these services by blocking firewall ports. Both of these approaches will need, at some point, to be re-evaluated or formalised through acceptable use policies etc - just as businesses in the past didn't give users internet access or even email, due to concerns that they'd just waste all their time chatting, or the threat to security of opening up to the world.

In reality, users will waste time on IM initially, just like they'll possibly spend worktime surfing the web or playing Solitaire on their PC, but sooner or later they'll get over the novelty and start using the technology to be productive, and even if they still "play" during working hours, the net effect will be positive.

IM as email reduction strategy

Many people agree that they get too much email, and that culturally, email is used when it would be better to pick up the phone or talk to someone face-face. IM can reduce the volume of email sent, not just for the disposable communication (the "have you got a minute?" type) but for the fact that people who are not online at the time, don't tend to get IM. It's all too easy to blast an email out to a group, asking for help - now, when the people in that group who've been out of the office next log in, they'll get your request ... even though your problem may well have been solved by now. That just doesn't happen with IM, and some customers I've talked with estimate that adoption of enterprise IM sees a >50% drop in internal email volumes.

Presence is the magic ingredient

What makes IM useful is the "presence": the knowledge of who, in the company (even, possibly, people you haven't ever added to a contact list like you'd need to do in the public services), is available and in a position to respond to you. Cliff Saran of Computer Weekly wrote a blog post recently which was scathing of presence, but illustrates a fundamental lack of understanding of what it "is":

Yes it's fine to be able to know that someone is free, but it relies on the user having to update their Presence each time they walk over to the coffee machine, have a chat and a laugh with a colleague, go to the toilet, leave for the train, get home, go to the pub, have dinner, watch TV and go to bed.

-- "Microsoft's unified productivity killer", Cliff Saran, 28th August 2007

Sorry Cliff, but you're about as far wrong as it's possible to get without changing the subject entirely. The whole point of presence is that it's something the user shouldn't have to worry about. And if they want to, they can. Culturally, some people won't want to use the technology at all, which is fine... though sooner or later they may realise they're losing out, and come back to the party.

I start my PC up, and if it finds a network, Office Communicator logs in and sets me to be online. When my Outlook calendar says I'm busy, my presence changes to "In a meeting". When I pick up the phone, it's "In a call", all done automatically.

When I lock my screen (as I'd do - WindowsKey+L - any time I'm away from my desk for more than a few seconds), my status goes to "Away", and restores when I log back in. If I just walked away without locking, after 5 minutes, I'd be "Inactive" then 10 minutes later,  it would be "Away" (at least that's the default timeouts and behaviour... they can be tweaked). And all the while, by clicking that big coloured button in the top left, I can over-ride the automatically set presence and do it myself. Or even sign out.

As well as controlling what my own status is (and by extension, how phone calls will be routed to me and when), I can also set what level of information I'm prepared to share with others - from allowing select people to interrupt me even when I've set "Do not Disturb", to blocking people from even seeing that you're online altogether.

Presence and UC telephony

Look at the strategies of any IT or telecoms company who's involved in this space: finding a user (based on some identity, probably not just their phone number) and seeing their presence is a key part of the value of UC. Making it integrated into other applications and devices the user is working with, and giving the user the choice to use it or not use it as they see fit, is vital to the success of presence being adopted and embraced (rather than rejected by users as big brother-ism or invasion of privacy).

Here's an interesting book on a business force which is changing the way that the US economy works, if you believe what the author is saying. Wal-Mart (which owns ASDA in the UK) has been growing like crazy in recent years, to the point where they're big enough, supposedly, to have a direct impact on the inflation rate in a economy the size of the US.

One startling aspect of this exposé, is the effect that a company as powerful as Wal-Mart can have on its suppliers... normally reported as a bad thing, but there are good things too. An example of the latter was of one company who was shipping goods into the US, which were then taken to its own distribution centres, repackaged and sent out to Wal-Marts distribution chain, and then on down to the stores.

Once the two companies started sharing more detailed information with the other, Wal-Mart revealed that it was sending empty trucks back to its regional centre, from stores all over the country, which could be used by this supplier - so the supplier started importing its goods bound for Wal-Mart into Florida, and using Wal-Mart's own trucks to ship the merchandise straight to their own distribution centres, thereby cutting out waste & expense.

It's an interesting read - there may even be some parallels between Wal-Mart and Microsoft, some positive and others not. Microsoft's Chief Operating Officer used to be Wal-Mart's CIO, responsible for (among other things) one of the largest databases in the world, where Wal-Mart's suppliers could see into the sales of their products across the entire distribution chain, as they happened... Quite some system...