marypcbuk

Simon and I have been writing a series on managing PCs the modern way recently over on The Register; here's a roundup of most of the pieces I wrote, from helpdesk tools to what's different about managing a notebook to whether you really can let users buy their own PCs (fascinating discussion between users and IT admins in the comments on that one).

The challenges of desktop configuration
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/28/desktop_configuration/
Productivity: IT pros to the rescue
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/25/business_productivity/
Windows support tools
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/14/windows_support_tools/
Managing the desktop when it's a notebook
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/12/desktop_management_frameworks/
Automated patch management (I will note this one was edited for length and ends up with an unusually staccato delivery compared to my excessively discursive original)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/30/windows_patch_management/
Your PC our problem
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/19/consumerisation_of_it_what_can_users_buy/

Xobni is this great tool for mining the information in your inbox that gives you structured information about your communications; now it can bring live Internet tools into your inbox as well, which is its best chance to compete against the Outlook social connector and Gmail's people pane. So what can it do?

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/zdnet-uk-first-take-10013312/xobni-gadgets-10022452/

PDF is phenomenally useful, and phenomenally irritating when you need to do more than read it. I wasn't at all surprised when Adobe told me they had user research saying people spent more time looking for features than using them in Acrobat 9; I either have to leave the Tyepwriter toolbar for filling in forms that aren't coded as real forms (so, every PDF I have to fill in) up on screen all the time, or I hide it to get more space to see the document I'm filling in and then spend ages trying to remember what the Typewriter is called and where it's hidden. I spend hours every month making and reviewing comments on large PDFs for IT Expert, wondering why my cursor sometimes is allowed to insert text and sometimes isn't. To be fair, any tool that's powerful is going to be complex. Let's say it's just not a fluid, intuitive experience - and I'm looking forward to Acrobat X next month.

The beta was announced this week: here's what I thought of it.
Acrobat X: a first look
Adobe's Acrobat X offers a cleaner interface and a welcome selection of feature improvements, some of them long overdue

Acrobat X: gallery
Check out Acrobat X's streamlined interface, guided Actions, enhanced Portfolios and other improvements

I've just updated 2007 Office beta 2 with the Technical Refresh. The Outlook offline cache hasn't survived and Outlook is trapped in a loop. Black mark. But Word had crashed just before I updated and I was having trouble getting into the auto-recovery files. I knew I could recover everything from ClipMate because I'd been copying between documents, so I decided to give up and install the refresh. After a rather long time with a very uninformative progress bar the refresh completed, warned me in a rather cryptic dialog that other applications would need updating too and showed the new and tasteful (or is it bland? OneNote is much less visible in the notification area) icons. I started Word - and there were the auto-recovered document in a task pane. Full marks!

And I do like the way the 'pinned' documents on the Recent Documents pane of the Office menu now have the pushpin both coloured green - and pushed in to the menu ;-)

Microsoft's big slogan for the Dynamics software is 'people-centered software'. I caught the TV ad for it the other night: many different people in different countries all getting up in the morning, grabbing breakfast and heading out for the day and all doing it that little bit differently. In fact I looked at the ad and thought 'this is good; Microsoft should have advertising like this'.

But what I noticed on MapQuest this morning (checking out Leigh on Sea where my mum will probably move to) was what I think of as people-centered data. While the label that comes up when you hover the mouse is Zoom Level 3 the labels at the size of the zoom control show me that's actually the most detailed view I can get of this location as a place within a country, before I go down into region level. For the most detail at street level the icon is a person, for the least level at country view it's mountains (topographic data here I come). The icons get wider from top to bottom - a handy visual cue if I haven't spotted the plus and minus buttons - but it's the labels of Street, City, Region and Country that let me get information the way people think about it, not the way computers do. Like Today/Tomorrow/This Week/Next Week in Outlook 2007 or tags on a blog, it's data aggregated into a fuzzy structure rather than a strictly normalized data slice.

The opening keynote at Convergence (the Microsoft Business Solutions show in Dallas, for those confused by our road trip
from state to state) was - once the drumming stopped - all about how Office is the place where people live at work and how the Dynamics products will increasingly live there too. The Dynamics CRM toolbar in Outlook 2007 isn't a click away the way it might be if Office 2007 had the ribbon interface; I wonder if the ribbon interface makes sense for finding features you expect to have in a product (charts in Excel, animations in PowerPoint) and less sense for features you wouldn't expect (opportunity management and sales reports in with your email).

Outlook is where I live when I'm at my desk (on the move it's OneNote) and the more I can get to from Outlook the better. One of the disappointing moments for me at MIX 06 was when Tim O'Reilly suggested using Outlook at the basis of social networking and Bill Gates looked completely blank; Outlook houses the pieces of my social network and tools like SNARF are starting to expose the interconnections between them. When I look at a new networking site I don't want to recreate that network one contact at a time by hand. I want Outlook and the service I choose to collaborate, finding my connections, looking first for the people I'm most in contact with and pulling the most useful information from Outlook and the service from one to the other. And if it could use InfoCard to both prove who I am and who you are and to pull across my reputation from LiveJournal or Amazon or eBay or the FT so you know I'm *that* Mary on all those services...

Service plus software: another theme from the keynote, although I haven't yet seen a Microsoft Live service that's had be jumping up and down. Perhaps the demo I'm getting here at Convergence will fire me up ;)

Entries tagged with software

Cut the price of Windows: managing the desktop several ways

first take: Xobni Gadgets

Acrobat X; now I can use it in less anger

Word file recovery: colour me impressed

People-centred data

Convergence: Software serving

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