E-Presence

Thanksgiving to the Crew

While not exactly written on Thanksgiving, I tried for it to be and I wish it was. Being in the professional side of the blogs, I owe it to give sincere and unreserved thanks to the Crew at LogiLearn.

Each and every co-worker -- the ones from the hit-the-ground-running team in 2000 to the ones who just recently joined our small endeavor -- are showing outstanding ownership and responsibility toward the clients who have trusted us with their assignments both big and small.

I am honored to be part of the effort and I am very, very thankful that you, dear colleagues, are hanging in there, allowing LogiLearn pursue with excellence the valid business goals that no other LCMS or technical content have dared address before.

Free Super Software

While Microsoft is surely having the lunch paid somewhere ... I do compliment them for giving away Photo Story 3 for free. Even after having purchased the old version through both Plus! SuperPack and Digital Image Suite, I still appreciate the upgrade and the fact that everyone now may now join in the fun.

Photo Story 3 is an impressively simple application, yet it solves the problem of large photos and boring shows: Dump your favorite shots in to sequential placeholders, select transition focus, record casual comments, pick the background MP3 and let Photo Story compact the whole thing according to the bandwidth of your intended audience. The end-result is surprisingly impressive. The panning zoom adds attention to image details and the music helps set the stage.

Through carefully selected screen shots, Photo Story 3 may be used professionally for simplified slide shows or software introductions. However, I still prefer dedicated applications like Macromedia Captivate (formerly RoboDemo).

For the personal touch -- between family or in project's cultural settings between colleagues -- Photo Story may add tremendously to the e-Presence! The feeling of being guided through a personally highlighted story easily makes up in information value what the compressed and scaled images looses in resolution.

Phony Reach

Setting up most Instant Messengers implies adding a cell phone to your profile. While that may sound less than pleasant, fearing the world to call you, there are ways of doing it without jeopardizing privacy. You should.

The benefit is to reach the yellow status of being neither off-line or on-line. Being flagged yellow is being near-line, having a device to which the IM client can write directly.

Properly configured a team member can write a quick message directly to your phone's display, allowing you to call back if it truly is important.

Writing to the phone beats leaving voice mails, which are a slow and sequential process often requiring you to listen to the entire thing before realizing there was no action required. Yes, voice mail does work for some -- but I prefer a short message any day; especially if I'm in a meeting.

Being e-Present means new tools for quick decisions. Skip the voice mail, use collaboration tools like IM for short messages instead. Its faster to send, its faster to read, its faster to respond.

Showing Off Any Wall

The biggest limitation to cell phone cameras is the cell phone display. Panning around a couple of hundred pixels of a hi-res image doesn't really do it. OK, if you click your friends it is nice that their faces show up with an incoming call. However, the sense of real presence is still mediocre at best.

But what if the cell phone could go beyond the screen? Literarily...

Mitsubishi Electronics says it can -- they are looking at smart and intelligent ways to add a miniature projector to the cell phone.

Imagine having larger images come down -- either pushed from another phone or pulled from an on-line album -- and be projected on to a wall, say the dimension of four letter-sized sheets of paper.

That would bring information sharing and true collaboration one big step further, allowing the cell-phone based cameras to add to the real communication. Rather than looking for details never available in a stamp-sized original there would be a wall of information upon which the e-Presence could gain additional traction.

Clan Blogging

My brother-in-low, Jesper Berggreen, created a family bulletin board where each household could share a calendar, a gallery and a journal. One account for each house, safe and secure -- and thus a place where all family members truly does speak their minds and drops in with both small and large issues.

Its been live for 3+ years and it ties together a family that is spread across the globe. Birthdays are remembered, achievements complimented and ailments consoled. It covers all and it is the first place to go when time allows for private surfing.

Several professional blogging tools -- like TypePad -- does protect a blog from being public while allowing multiple authors. As a tool for being ever-present, it just may be what is needed for large families and teams to stay abreast while providing a secure place to visit, vent and visualize... You don't have to write, just toss in your pictures and share your thousand words that way!

It works for us -- across countries and continents. Let me know if anyone would like to know more, hear of the personal experiences and share the best practices.

Polite Non-Intrusions

Instant Messaging is key to modern collaboration; an essential tool for getting the right answers fast. Contrary to a phone call you can see the recipients mode and mood up front and select whether to engage or postpone accordingly.

However, do it smarter than merely setting personal status as "busy", "on phone" or "away". The status helps -- but you can do more:

Open you Personal Settings and modify your "Display Name" to describe your situation. Commuting from California to Maryland and back, I frequently update my description along the lines of "Ulrik - CA, Writing article" or "Ulrik - MD, Meeting with Dev Team".

It is just 2 clicks and less than a line of text. It truly adds to the instant information and thus to the ability of your on-line community to behave politely.

Beyond Traditional Goals

Effective e-Presence requires tools going beyond e-Mail and obsolete terms such as Internet, Extranet and Intranet. e-Presence is about secure information sharing based on roles inside and outside the organization. Strong web-aware applications -- Smart clients and robust WebServices -- is, however, only part of the picture. New personal collaboration tools like Blogging, Instant Messaging, free Voice over IP, simulations/games etc. etc. are all providing productive alternatives to the aging, blind and intrusive "phone". However, proper leverage and understanding is often a paradigm breaker that doesn't fly well with traditional IS policies.

As nobody can see beyond a choice they don't understand, it becomes imperative that cross company Advanced Technology Teams are empowered and motivated to look at existing processes and see how these may be optimized using new and often free technology. And, look at the leading vs. bleeding edge in pragmatic perspectives: All contracts are binding -- verbal or written; e-Mail is recorded, phones are not. So, where does that place IM and chats? What can be allowed and what can't?

The real answer will not be found applying only IS nor only Business practices; the Advanced Technology Team must examine, prototype, test and play with the new "stuff" ... and make broader recommendations across traditional barriers.

Headless Headers

Not only is there an ever larger stream of irrelevant junk e-mail, the individual mail is growing larger at an alarming rate.

Ignoring screen dumps send as uncompressed bitmaps like BMP is one thing, all mail users should know that is a no-go. Permanently expanding each and every mail by visual overkill is quite another.

There is a fine line between adding a logo, a frame and a few useful URLs up to the the recent over plastering of e-mails with heavy graphics that makes the very opening an arduous task.

What is worse, many of the nice features are coded wrong and may not show at all. Larger corporations are rightfully clamping down on both size and security, leaving the end-result worse off than a plain but predictable text message. The nice but heavy and potentially dangerous layout is scraped away, leaving an information skeleton that shows little respect for users of more restrictive systems.

Anyone who've seen a plain text reply to a loaded HTML mail knows just exactly how confusing and out-off place the revealed codes may appear. Going from 20k connected graphics to 2k safe text is not pretty...

e-Presence is also a question of effective presence. A presence where sender and receiver have aligned their bandwidth and messages are send in the proper format, size and pizazz.

Collabodrawing

The best feature of today's on-line meeting services like WebEx or Placeware (now Microsoft Live Meeting) is the shared whiteboard. Despite the limited drawing tools these services provide an excellent compensation for the phone's 100 year old limitation of being voice only. On-line shared sketches -- collabodrawing -- may provide the missing eyes and shared visual that truly strengthens complex communication. Many of Web meetings includes decent live video of the speaker too!

With one-click meeting creation it becomes exquisitely simple to add the interactive whiteboard to any live phone conversation -- be that traditional or as VoIP through many of the new super tools like Skype. The whiteboard not only allows for increased collaboration -- true e-Presence -- it also provides an effective capture mechanism for saving important sketches and diagrams. Anything pasted, drawn or otherwise shared may be wrapped in metadata, saved, searched and printed for later reference.

Today roughly 6-10 of my meetings in any given week are entirely Web-based. More importantly more than 90% of all phone calls lasting more than 8 minutes are now being supplemented by an on-line whiteboard as well. Visual is just one click away -- and it does add to an e-ffective presence.

Flying High

Home-bound at 30,000 feet with the minutes being done ... a movie may be in order. Today's laptops certain have the power and the drive. However, too much presence is not a good thing.

Sharing the film on the B-seat's center table may be a nice gesture -- but only if there are sufficient head-plugs for all to jack in!

Cranking the volume above the engine's roar will provide the surrounding 3 seats in front and the 3 in back with more noise than they bargained for -- and the ones behind will likely be distracted by the glimpses between the seats too.

It is very disruptive. Either all viewers wear the headphones or no one listens in at all. Being involuntary present in a chopped-up movie is anything but pleasant.

And, by the way, it doesn't pay trying to hide your photos by turning the laptop. Either you show the screen to the entire aisle or you risk an all to readable reflection in the window! If you need to look at something private, get a 3M Privacy Filter