New Blog Design & Domain

Welcome to CollaborationBluePrint.com.au my new blog design and place to talk about what I am doing and thinking! I had been using the older brownblog for the last few years and I decided it needed a facelift. I also wanted to refocus my blogging to what I am really doing which is helping our clients to better collaborate.

I have this idea of a collaboration blueprint. A map or detailed design if you like of what business and people need to enable collaboration. In fact not just collaboration for the sake of it but collaboration that has a positive impact on what we do. Collaboration that improves our work and helps us achieve our objectives. This blueprint isn't about specific industries but rather about the different facets and tools needed by people to work with other people online, offline, in the office, remote, mobile, next to each other, or on the other side of the world. Hence the new domain collaborationblueprint.com.au.

So as these ideas come together I am going to present them here. I am still going to continue to use the blog as a way of documenting or recording some of the more technical work I am doing. I have found this to be a neat way or recording techniques I use so that I can use them again in the future. Hopefully this also has the effect of helping a few other people that are facing similar challenges. And off course I will still have the occasional personal topic or just a comment on something I find interesting.

Blackberry 4 days on.

Well I can't say it has been easy but I am very happy with the Blackberry device. Installation of the Blackberry Enterprise Server was fairly easy and configuring it and testing was pretty straight forward as well.

The catch came when I came to activate my Blackberry Pearl! Basically I spent between last Friday until early today trying and trying.........with no luck. The main problem (that I now know) was the fact that when I got the phone from Telstra they enabled the Blackberry Internet Services for my phone number. Alas what I actually needed was Blackberry Enterprise Services. They did not think I was going to use a Blackberry Enterprise Server and hence they enabled BIS which I now understand to be more for a consumer type service that people want to connect to a pop or imap type email account. After a weekend of frustration I finally called them this morning and asked if they had enabled the phone correctly to use BES and off course they hadn't. They then said they would change my account to use BES and within 2 minutes my phone was talking directly to our Blackberry Enterprise Server and pulling down my email, calendar, tasks, and address book. So lesson is if you want to use Blackberry Enterprise Server make sure your provider enables your phone account correctly and you will save a whole lot of hassle.

Other lesson learnt was that initially I have Notes 8 Beta 3 installed and it seems as thought the Blackberry Desktop Software does not like it. I had to re-install Notes 7.0.2 to get it working and once I had activated the phone I was able to go back to Notes 8.

Things I like:
 - It is just seemless. Emails & Address book synching without having to even think about it.
 - You can do live Address book look ups over the air to your Domino Directory. (I am going to try and see if I can get this connected to our CRM BusinessWorks.
 - The calendar is very intuitive. On most smart phones I have never liked the calendars but using the scrolling capabilities of the Pearl is very easy particularly on the 1 week view of the calendar.
 - The battery life seems to be great. I connected a bluetooth headset on friday and ran it for 4 days (with fairly heavy use as I was still trying to get it connected) and it didn't need a recharge. On my old phone (O2 Atom) Bluetooth would drain the battery within a day.

Things I am not sure about:
 - I am not convinced that I like the 2 letters to a key qwerty keyboard. While it does work well and I would have been happy with it in the past, now that I see how great the email etc is I am sure I will be using it heaps more. So I am going to try out the Blackberry 8800 tomorrow to see if the full qwerty keyboard is worth having a slightly larger device for.

Next up I want to see if I can get Sametime going via the BES server and then I need to figure out what is involved with Synching other Notes databases.

In summary if the ph account had been enabled for BES correctly in the first place I think this would have been a very easy process. For a new Blackberry user I can now understand why people rave. While products like Commontime are excellent as well I think the intuitiveness and seemless synching of the Blackberry is hard to beat. A few years ago the cost was just prohibitive for our business but now it is very reasonable. Already I have a couple of other ISW'ers suggesting they might get one too! 

LinkedIn.com

You really should have a look at linked in. Another great example of social networking/internet collaboration. With little effort I have created 11 direct connections, 200+ 2nd degree contacts, and over 16300+ 3rd degree connections, and it is pretty early days.

It really is pretty amazing concept. Everytime I get another connection I quickly find that I already know quite a few of the people. Combine this with an expertise capability and it is a powerful tool.

http://www.linkedin.com 

Blog Spam

You probably havn't noticed as I was keeping on top of it most days but my blog has been suffering from a bad case on Blog Spam. I have been deleting the spam everyday for the last month or 2 since it started. Well good news, I upgraded to Blogsphere V2.5.5 a couple of days ago and one of the fixes/enhancements was improvements to how it handles spam. It seems to be working great, not a single spam since the upgrade. Well done to the blogsphere team. 

Home Working

I try to work at home at least 1 or 2 days a week. I find that I have a real productivity boost when working at home in particular when doing tasks that need concentrated effort. Even though I normally divert my office phone to home, I seem to find that I get less distracted or if I do receive a call I get back to what I was doing quicker. When I am in the office (which I do need to at least a few days a week) I find that I have many more interuptions. I guess these interuptions are an important part of what I do as well though so its not that I mind. I tend to try and spend at least 5-10 minutes talking with each member of the team just catching up with where they are at and providing input where I see it is necessary. I am a bit of a believer in the One Minute Manager management book and take a lot of my approach for management of the team from this.

As far as working from home though I see there being many advantages:

1) You can skip out on that drive to work. It isn't like it is long (20 mins each way) but by the time you have parked the car etc and got the laptop fired up in the office I have probably wasted an hr. This hr can either be more time for work or more time for me.
2) Ability to focus without distraction. It seems to be way to easy to get distracted in the office.
3) I can spread my day out better. The commute to my home office is obviously less than a minute to walk from say the kitchen to my office. I can also fit in a few personal tasks throughout the day when I feel like a break. Then when I want to get back into it I just start working again. I can easily get 8-12 hours of work out of a solid day at home.
4) My dog Jess just loves it when I work at home. She mainly sleeps at my feet. I also think this is good for my state of mind.
5) I am more relaxed.

One of the key things when you do work at home though is making sure you don't let the work invade on your home time. It is so easy just to keep working. I tend to manage this by keeping it to my office. When I am there I am working, when I am upstairs I am relaxing (although I tend to slip on this sometimes like right now. Doing this in front of the TV).

As far as clients are concerned it really has no effect where I am. They ring(Skype or Phone), I answer. They email, I answer. Office or home is pretty irrelevant. Of course when I have face to face meetings I normally go to the office that day or just meet at the clients office.

All up I would encourage anyone to give it a go. If you do the type of work that where you are doesn't really matter then why not work from home a bit. I know I think it is great.