Remember Email?

[Brian O'Hanlon]

I was taking a quick look at the 'blogs' over at AutoDesk today. I remember the time when my Outlook 2000 application used to fill up with all sorts of newsletters from various 'communities'. It seems like that is gone the way of the 56k modem these days.

 

I read this blog entry at Cooperation commons a while back. I know that CG visualisation artists can have a lot of heavy and chaotic email usage, so I decided to post this here in 'general' forum, rather than further down in 'off topic'. I haven't used the product mentioned in this blog entry, but I read it and thought it might provoke some interesting thoughts for some of you.

 

http://www.cooperationcommons.com/cooperationcommons/blog/mdangeard/478-how-to-manage-communication-within-your-company-the-end-of-the-email-nightmare

 

P.S. I still receive a hard copy magazine through my letter box here in Ireland which contains all sorts of reviews of how AutoDesks products were used in Ireland. I think it must be published and mailed out by the main AutoDesk reseller here in Ireland. I used to work at an office which received the Bentley MicroStation magazine also, and it had great articles in it, which had their own unique slant. It's a long time since I have visited the Bentley website, or the FormZ website, or even the Sketchup website now.

 

Always well worth the effort though. It's nice though to receive a good old fashioned magazine through the mailbox once in a while. Anyone else here still read paper trade literature and magazines?

Edited May 20, 2010 by Brian O'Hanlon

[ihabkal]

not anymore, I get everything online, news, tutorials, software, porn, everything.

[Jeff Mottle]

I was all excited when I read that article as I have often thought about declaring email bankruptcy as well. I HATE email as it consumes upwards of 50% of my day. But that app does not really look that intriguing to me. In a nutshell you turn your internal email into a forum and invite your clients to join. Other than ensuring people stay on the same page, I don't know how this really helps anything. Now you get to read your mail in the context of a thread and are forced to stay up to date on 100's of other conversations that you would otherwise not have cared or wanted to be involved with. Maybe I'm missing something.

 

If anyone knows of a solution to overrun inboxes that often have messages go unanswered for 2-8 weeks, please let me know!

[Jeff Mottle]

Always well worth the effort though. It's nice though to receive a good old fashioned magazine through the mailbox once in a while. Anyone else here still read paper trade literature and magazines?

 

I think I'm going to put an email auto-reply that asks people to send me a letter by mail.

[Brian O'Hanlon]

Glad to hear you gave the application a try out Jeff. The last thing I got excited about (which I never followed up on properly) was a long number of years ago. It was something called 'scopeware vision' I think. I did a search for it not so long ago and it turns out the company is gone out of business. Basically, I found the file explorer interface on most personal computers to be a let down. In the sense, that several things may demand my attention and working at the one time on my personal computer. But the trouble is I open a software application, and then I open a file in that application, and then I do work. I get caught up in working on that one particular task, and forget totally about the several other tasks that demand my attention on a particular day.

 

What I was hoping to have with Scopeware vision was some kind of 'interface' that would allow me to have a specific 'dashboard' for each project I was working on. That is, when you flick open the 'dashboard' for a specific project you are working on, you would see the folder containing the site photographs, the email corresondance, the legal directives from the local authority, the CAD files that other members of the teams are working on. In other words, my computer interface, would let me know very quickly where I am at - in total - with a project, and I could quickly understand how I needed to manage my time, to hit the major things required. Instead of that sinking feeling, after spent a days working and you realise, oh, now if only I had gone back to that original email and re-checked it.

 

I was also thinking of the way, a project can go cold for a number of days or weeks, and then suddenly the client phones and it is all go again. So you have to jump back into it and try and recall where everything associated with that project was 'on the system'. So you spend one whole day (because you don't have this dashboard I described) simply trying to open all the digital files you need associated with that clients requirements. What a waste of a day. Anyhow, I thought there might be some way that this 'dashboard' could be used to set out a time schedule for work which needs to be done, and even fill out an invoice and your timesheets etc. Pie in the sky, Flash Gordon, Star Trek sort of stuff - but I often hope it will work like this some day.

 

The notion of an 'operating system' really doesn't go quite far enough in my opinion for the way businesses use computers to get their work done. I remember in the olden days we had filing cabinets and stuff, where all the folders and files were stored. That kind of thing is too fragmented in the digital world I believe. It is too easy for a project to drift, because the data associated with it, is fragmented across too many hard disk drives. It is all there, if only one could access it more easily.

 

Sub note on blogging:

 

I used to do some blogging over at Cooperation Commons a while back, before I went and set up my own personal blog and got that up and running. What amazes me about blogging actually, is I could never have envisaged the sheer variety of people across all walks of life who read it. I am a major fan of reading other peoples's blogs too, and wish there were a couple more hours in each day to do that. I almost added a contact email several times to my blog, but then said nah! Basically, if people want to find me badly enough, they will. Quite a few people did interestingly enough, and you would be amazed at how quickly your phone can ring, particularly the journalist community and such looking to get you for an interview or something. So that is my experience with blogging so far.

 

Sub note on text-ing:

 

Something that does almost remind me of email in the old, old days - where AutoDesk sent you a load of stuff to your newsreader in Outlook or something - is text messaging. I received a text message today, to let me know that a distant first cousin of mine had had a bady daughter. It occured to me as a read the text message (which I was delighted to receive btw), that I must exist on somebodies mobile phone as part of a 'group'. Which means, when important family announcements have to be made, there is very little labour for the person broadcasting the text message to all. This is the kind of world we live in I suppose.

[Brian O'Hanlon]

If any of you are interested in program management techniques used at the larger end of the scale you can read a blog entry I did last year about new airport building works. The works involved over a hundred different 'projects', all of which were happening at different times, involving different people and having different budgets etc.

 

http://designcomment.blogspot.com/2009/06/dublin-airport-authoritys-capital.html

 

I am know expert on operating system or database design - but my simple understand is, that operating systems were the first 'big bang' that occured in the personal computing world. The next 'big thing' that happened were databases. I think the database industry blossomed in the 1990s big time, when all of the processing power and networking behind available across many industries. Today it is something like Service Oriented Architecture which is getting all of the attention - having been developed in companies such as Sun during the 2000s. Of course, Oracle have now bought out Sun.

 

The software the program managers on the airport job used was Primavera P6. I notice, it is owned by Oracle also. So definitely, an interesting company to work for at the moment, I should imagine. In terms of inventing the future etc.

 

http://www.oracle.com/primavera/index.html

Edited May 21, 2010 by Brian O'Hanlon
Add link to primavera webpage

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

If anyone knows of a solution to overrun inboxes that often have messages go unanswered for 2-8 weeks, please let me know!

 

Create a directory called archive, drag all of the emails into that, and wham.... You have no emails in your inbox. It doesn't solve the problem, but it is surprising how good that actually feels. I'm not joking either, it does feel good to have a clean inbox.

 

Someday I will offer good advice on the forums, anymore I feel I just make commentary.

[Jeff Mottle]

Create a directory called archive, drag all of the emails into that, and wham.... You have no emails in your inbox. It doesn't solve the problem, but it is surprising how good that actually feels. I'm not joking either, it does feel good to have a clean inbox.

 

Someday I will offer good advice on the forums, anymore I feel I just make commentary.

 

Haha, actually I have a folder called "IN PROGRESS". I feel great for a few days until I realize there 100 emails in the "IN PROGRESS" folder still awaiting attention....oh crap, look at that there are dozens of emails from 2009 in there too....LOL

[Brian O'Hanlon]

Create a directory called archive, drag all of the emails into that, and wham.... You have no emails in your inbox. It doesn't solve the problem, but it is surprising how good that actually feels. I'm not joking either, it does feel good to have a clean inbox.

 

You guys are getting close to the heart of the problem. My idea with the Scopeware Vision type of 'dashboard' for each 'project', was that you could flag your emails as they arrived as relevant to a specific dashboard. In that way, you didn't have to deal with the emails immediately, but you would still see them straight away, when you decided today I'm going to work on project dashboard A, B or C. Some emails might be so broad in their relevance, they appear on all dashboards you open. More emails might be specific to only one dashboard.

 

My idea then, was some kind of interface, that would assemble together all of the project dashboards in one pie chart or something, or bar graph - and let you see the distribution of your personal and/or company time on each of the different projects. That would be a useful visual to display at a Monday morning project meeting, where you are trying to understand which projects are receiving the attention, and which are not. Then at the same Monday morning meeting, you can look around the table and ask the difficult questions, about who is doing what - and what resources are available to re-orientate in directions that make more sense for the coming week.

 

Everything I describe above could work either at the level of an individual such as Jeff, or scale up to help to manage larger groups. I know it is Star Trek kind of stuff, and might not happen in our life time - but there is no harm in imagining what the tools should be able to do, and where they could improve.

 

I have never used Lotus Notes, or those kinds of products from the olden days. But from chatting to people who worked in that sort of environment, which was collaboration centric, and reading old literature about the Lotus Notes concept - there was a lot of interesting thinking behind that product. The trouble is Lotus tanked, we got left with MS Office suite. Then MS office changed its philosophy, ethos and direction several times over to response to whatever latest fad is going - and the long and short of it is, we still have something called an operating sytem, which just connects software to hardware, inputs and outputs. But what we don't have yet are company wide information and collaboration systems. That could be available to small businesses, even where only two people work together side by side.

 

Brian O' Hanlon

 

IBM,

 

The first release of Lotus Notes shipped in 1989. During the first year it was on the market, more than 35,000 copies of Lotus Notes were sold. The Notes client required DOS 3.1 or OS/2. The Notes server required either DOS 3.1, 4.0, or OS/2. Figure 1 shows the Notes client user interface.

 

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-NDHistory/

 

Wikipedia,

 

Speculation about the decline of Notes was fueled by lingering market confusion emanating from IBM placing marketing emphasis on Websphere and IBM Workplace in 2003 and 2004. IBM Workplace, however, has been discontinued, thus this source of confusion about the future of Notes and Domino has been rendered moot. While the future of any product in the technology sector cannot be predicted, IBM has made announcements that indicate that it continues to invest heavily in research and development on the Lotus Notes product line.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Lotus_Notes

Edited May 21, 2010 by Brian O'Hanlon

[Brian O'Hanlon]

PDF version for those of you on the run with very little time and want to spit out a paper print of my above rant.

 

Brian O' Hanlon

[Brian O'Hanlon]

Just a trivia, which might be of interest to some people here. I remember I read an article by Gary Koah in MicroStation Manager Magazine around 2001. By early 2005 however, the magazine had vanished from the Bentley website. Then thanks to an article at AEC News website, it saved the day for me (See attached the Garry Koah article).

 

http://aecnews.com/news/2005/11/07/1252.aspx

 

(Ironically the link is now broken)

 

Link: Internet Archives Preserves MicroStation Manager Magazine

Posted on Monday, November 07, 2005 3:01 PM

Earlier this year, without notice, Bentley removed the archives of MicroStation Manager (MSM) magazine from the company's public web servers. Bentley was the last owner of MSM, a magazine founded by CAD industry serial entrepreneur Dan Raker for the users of MicroStation and other Bentley (and for a time, Intergraph) products.

 

As the last Editor of MSM, I sometimes need to review what I wrote in years past. Not having MSM online anymore has been a bit of a handicap. After listening recently to the Nerd TV interview with Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archives, I went to the site and typed in the old address for the final archived version of MSM. The site is preserved in its entirety.

 

If you need to reference MSM from 1996-2002, take a look:

 

http://web.archive.org/web/20041010104621/http://archive.msmonline.com/index.html

[Brian O'Hanlon]

Anyone using a virtual server at the moment? In Ireland at the moment our broadband infrastructure is still lagging far behind worldwide benchmarks, and requires colossal investment in the coming years. I clicked on a banner ad today, to get get an idea what price points are like. An Irish based virtual server service offers something like this.

 

http://hosting.digiweb.ie/virtual-servers/

 

But I imagine this price/value ratio is going to improve and improve over time. When you have the broadband infrastructure, I am sure there are all kinds of virtual offices, virtual project servers and all kinds of applications that one can start think about. The institute of International and European Affairs website featured some web/pod casts on the whole subject at this link.

 

http://www.iiea.com/events/creativity-and-innovation-the-european-perspective

 

A side note,

 

This is pretty darn cool. I managed to drag a document onto my Mozilla browser by mistake this evening, and when I did, Mozilla interpreted what I had just done, as my wanting to create 'an index'. Try it, it is sort of odd.

 

Anyhow, it also allows you to 'navigate' from there. You can copy the file/folder structure and paste it into a notepad file or whatever you want. It reminds me of a little batch script that a friend of mine used to use for indexing CDROMs and stuff.

 

Its pretty neat, and would save one a lot of time, you needed to make a quick index of a filing structure. I assume one could make shortcuts and stuff too in the Mozilla browser, to one's own hard drive.

Edited May 27, 2010 by Brian O'Hanlon

[Brian O'Hanlon]

An old chestnut I digged out of the Internet archive yesterday evening, which clearly demonstrates a point in history, when people all believed that 56k dialup internet connections would result in the blossoming of all kinds of new economic diversity and opportunity. I say no more and allow you to enjoy this Sept 1998 MicroStation Manager magazine article.

 

To be fair to the author though, I see on CADalyst he is still writing new stuff. About the desktop supercomputer concept last March for instance.

 

http://www.cadalyst.com/hardware/workstations/arrival-desktop-supercomputer-13183

Edited May 27, 2010 by Brian O'Hanlon