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February 09, 2006
Beautifully small solutions
We hope this isn’t going to put anyone out, but would it be too much trouble if those big IT companies stopped providing us with solutions? Just for, say, the next five years or so, could all those product managers and their engineers and programmers go away and mind their own business, and allow us to solve our problems by ourselves?
The reason we ask this is that we’re tired of what you might call big solutions. Left to our own devices, the average person chooses small solutions, rather than big ones. Solutions Inc., however, favours the larger variety, simply because they generate bigger profits. And big solutions, unfortunately – subject to the laws of unintended consequences – tend to magnify the size of any problems.
Take, for instance, the simple matter of communications and collaboration. When Solutions Inc. – and specifically Lotus – got their hands on that idea, it led to a whole new class of software called “Groupware”, led by a program called Lotus Notes.
Using software agents and self-replicating databases, it was supposed to “close the gap between the overwhelming volume of information and users’ ability to filter and manage it”.
What we eventually learned about groupware and collaborative software, after the expenditure of more than $US1 billion dollars, was that it led to a dramatic blow-out in IT budgets, for little increase in collaborative productivity. The only tool that did boost collaborative output, it emerged, was the one we’d all started out with at the beginning of the networked society: e-mail.
Now the inventor of Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie, has moved to Microsoft, and Microsoft is flogging a service called Groove for these tasks. And Zimbra Collaboration Suite is taking a more open source approach.
Neither alternative appealed to a Melbourne software developer, Pete Yandell, when he was working as a volunteer with West Melbourne-based Asylum Seeker Resource Centre Asylum, trying to set up group emailing for 500 voluntary workers.
His first response was to give them some online discussion forums. The workers regarded them as something else they had to learn, and refused to use them. Even Yahoo! Groups, a couple of which Bleeding Edge uses, tend to be a problem to administer, and in many cases, people tend to lose both admin and account passwords.
Yandell also works with the email spam service Alien Camel, and he found himself going back to e-mail to provide the – ahem – small solution: something called 9Cays Conversations.
We’ve been playing with it over the past few weeks, and we like it a lot. If you need to set up an ad hoc link with several people – a reading group, perhaps, or a club, a small business or work group – you could find it very handy.
In our view, it works because it uses the simple method of “type and send” that makes e-mail both popular and simple to use. People tend to shy away from anything that requires them to fill in forms, or learn a completely new interface.
Once you sign up for an account (free), you start a conversation simply by emailing one or more participants, and including go@9cays.com in the email. The software immediately sets up a Web page to record all the contributions, and allocates an e-mail address for the conversation.
To include someone new in the conversation just add their e-mail address in the To or Cc field when you reply to a conversation e-mail. They’ll receive an invitation from 9Cays. They can join the conversation by clicking on the URL of the Web conversation page. If they’re not interested, they can simply ignore the e-mail.
The participants can continue the conversation by e-mail, using the conversation address, or via the Web page, or by an RSS feed that they can pick up from the Web page.
We like the Web page interface. It’s very tidy, and it automatically truncates each email to remove duplicated text. It includes a list of all the participants and invitees, in the form of links.
If you attach a JPG image to an email, it will automatically appear on the Web page. That makes it an ideal photo blog.
It’s not the sort of place where you’d post confidential information, but the unique Web address makes it relatively secure, and the software has built in defences against spam.
It’s much more democratic than Yahoo! Groups, largely because there is no moderator. We’re in one particular journalism group where the moderator gags conversations that he feels might embarrass him. The debate would be a lot more fair and free on 9Cays.
There are probably other interesting uses for 9Cays. You could use it, for instance, as an archive of conversations you have with people you don’t particular trust. Let us know what you think of it, and how you use it. We think you’ll find it admirably concise.
Tiny URL: Regular readers of the column have probably noticed that a lot of the links we publish use a domain called tinyurl.com. It’s a free service that turns long URLs, or Web addresses, into very short ones. That can save a lot of space in a newspaper, but it can also prevent mis-typed characters. In the case of this newspaper, for instance, the character translation software routinely turnes underscore characters into hyphens. If you’d like to be the soul of brevity, you might try it out. All you have to do is insert the long URL, and copy and paste the tinier version. And TinyUrl sensibly includes a link to test the address.
Posted by cw at February 9, 2006 09:15 AM
Comments
Ray Ozzie and Groove were in synch long before Microsoft. Workgroup Collaboration tools span the gamut - Lotus Notes is a famous/infamous example because it is well known, requires server infrastructure and admin and is corporatised. Server centric collabs are good if everyone belongs to the same org or if tedium of password/authentication is easily sorted out every day. However server centric collabs disempower the participants - many Lotus Notes users are disenfranchised from the tool - it just becomes another SAP where they don't initiate or innovate since they have to pass through the gauntlet of guardians of money and bureaucacy.
Groove when I saw it last, can work with a directory server, but it is essentially peer to peer and could be used without administrative or server infrastructure. And there were enough plugins to make it versatile. However, it's a user support user scenario because initially, you have to get it installed on each Windows PC and get the accounts right by yourselves. I really liked it
There are many other flavours of collab tools. Since email has become a natural for end users (but a nightmare for server admin because it is essentially unstructured text and BLOBs, ever increasing in storage needs), email centric or bulletin board flavours also abound. Beware aware that one day over use, your email could become like the Enron dataset:
Posted by: anandasim at February 9, 2006 01:22 PM
Sssh... Groove 12 is wrapped tight in a Microsoft NDA.
Groove 12 is part of the upcoming Office 12 suite and the first time it will be launched as part of this suite.
Has Microsoft beaten the Google/Sun partnership to bring out the first webified version of a complete mainstream Office Suite.
I love a good rumour... But really is this just a rumour?
9cays is a very good application that does what it should do and that is to display a conversation without the clutter and duplicated data that is usually associated with large and/or long e-mail conversations.
Posted by: Stephen at February 9, 2006 03:42 PM
I preferred the Bleeding Edge articles before tinyurl appeared. tinyurl might be newspaper friendly but it's not user-friendly. If the full URL is published, readers can remember the name of the particular website and can then track the specific page on that site. If something interests me, I'll file it in the back of my memory for when I need it. For example, today's post mentions Alien Camel which I'm likely to remember in 3 months' time. In 3 months' time tinyurl is not going to help me find anything.
Posted by: PH at February 9, 2006 05:46 PM
Who knows what MS is up to Stephen . Groove coupling into MSO would enhance MSO laterally - we've had years of lateral improvements from what was originally standalone apps (Word, Excel, PPT, Access). There must be corporates using those features (DRM, collab features, Sharepoint integration, HTML and XML kludges galore) but for the poor old faithful, Word 2003 is no better a tool than it was as Word 2.0 (the styles management is now horrendous and mailmerge UI has changed for the upteenth time).
We've been waiting forever for MSO to morph from COM based objects to .NET objects and that doesn't even look delivering RSN. There has been uh, too much richness built into those classic apps. To morph MSO to thin client, web/Ajax UI - IMHO - you would have to ditch the functionality and produce buggy Ajax apps with no macro language (which is what MSO is infamously/famously known for).
Either produce two parallel teams within MSO to produce classic COM based, fat MSO and another to produce Web 2.0 app based thin MSO. Oh, wait, Web 2.0? What the hell, why waste resources and re-invent the wheel? Just buy readymade Web 2.0 apps from Isreal or India and call it Office Lite / Office Xtreme / Office 2oh / Office NG, Office Vista / Office on Demand.
say... wasn't this a Ray Ozzie scripted event at Live? http://www.flickr.com/photos/niallkennedy/58614088/
Posted by: Anandasim at February 9, 2006 07:03 PM
From what I have read is that the the front end of Office 12 is C++ code and the server back-end products are all managed code(C#). As Groove I am unsure but have heard it is getting a full re-write.
Oh Microsoft are pretty good at Ajax web sites. Take Outlook Web Aceess on an Exchange Server for example. They have had Ajax'y things for over 6 years, they practically invented it for use with webmail. Not many issues have come up with that over the years in breaking or browser compatability.
Posted by: Stephen at February 9, 2006 08:31 PM
Oh, yes, I've seen OWA. It is quite rich but I would not think that it has full Outlook win32 rich client functionality. And that's just the interactive stuff. Not many Outlook users embrace the Add-Ins that we do nor does Outlook functionality come up to the depth of functions that real Word, Excel, Access have now morphed into. In terms of doability, Outlook then Powerpoint could very well be thin clients but IMHO the only way to make Word, Excel, Access become thin clients is to wind back the clock and discard a lot of the features.
Posted by: anandasim at February 9, 2006 09:58 PM