Outlook 2007 update – performance improvement on large PST/OST files

Posted on by ewand

I’ve been beta-testing this update for a little while and it seems to make quite a difference to the performance of Outlook 2007 (especially at startup) when you have large PST files, or a large offline cache of a mailbox. The Outlook team released it live, yesterday.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933493

I’d highly recommend giving it a go – it’s one of those updates where you might not really notice much positive improvement after you’ve installed it, but you do notice that there are less of the times where you notice there’s a performance problem 🙂

The day I met Tony Blair, talked about online healthcare

Posted on by ewand

I am feeling under the weather at the moment.

Been off work for a couple of days with what seems to be some kind of chest infection. I finally decided to stop waiting for it to go away on its own, and went to see the doctor – starting by looking at the website of the surgery, since I’ve moved house in the last year and haven’t had a need to register with the new place yet.

Just as a precaution, I went off to NHS Direct to see what was wrong with me – they have a wizard that asks you about the symptoms you might be experiencing, after you give it a steer. So I thought, “Breathing difficulties in Adults”, yep… then filled out the next set of answers… 

Now my lips aren’t blue (as far as I recall), I can talk OK but now and again do have a bit of a wheeze, so that sounds about right..

YIKES. Anyway, I’m pretty confident I’m not in the midst of a heart attack so I’ll ignore that advice for now.

Having a look around my doctor’s website, though, it turns out they are now offering appointments which can be made online. Now that seems like a great step in the right direction for busy people. It set me thinking about the time when the UK’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his wife & entourage, dropped in to see us in Microsoft UK.

 

The Blairs visit

This was in the run up to the June 2001 election, and the Labour Party had asked if Tony, Cherie & co could come and see us on the day they launched their business manifesto. Of course, Microsoft said yes, and went ahead arranging an event in our central atrium where we would do a few demos to the PM and Mrs Blair, on some forthcoming technology (Office XP) and some future directions stuff.

I was asked to do one of the demos, and with a colleague concocted a mock-up of a system that might be imlemented some time in the future, but in this case was using a Pocket PC with Wireless LAN (then a PCMCIA card in a Jacket that clipped to the back of a still-shiny Compaq iPaq).

(that’s me at the bottom in case you haven’t guessed)

The demo was a little app which a health visitor might use if doing a home visit to a couple with a new born baby, notices the baby’s a bit off-colour. The app would:

  •  issue a prescription of the appropriate medicine
  • let the parents chose which pharmacists they’d like to have the prescription details sent to automatically (advising back when the prescription would be ready for collection)
  • arranged a date of a follow-up appointment with a doctor at the surgery, based on their availability and the parents’ preference of time.

SIx years ago, this might not have looked like rocket science to IT people but could really change the way healthcare is delivered. Now, it looks like a straightforward thing to do technically, what with advances is size and power of mobile devices which would be 3G connected or similar.

I stepped through the wizard on the device, which was being shown on Plasma screens all round the place, and the deal was that I’d give the device to Mr Blair at the end of the wizard, so he could sign the prescription (as the parent, obviously – at this point, the Blairs had a fairly young baby themselves, so that scenario seemed plausible).

The trouble was, in order for the signature to be visible on screen, I had to remember to tap in a specific place (to set the cursor at the right point, actually) and in the nerves of the situation, forgot – so I handed the PM the device, asked him to sign, which he duly did with a flourish… but nothing came up on the screen. He did look a little bemused (and smiling) while handing the device back, but said nothing … he’s either a total pro, or had literally no idea what was going on… I’ll leave the judgment to yourselves 🙂 I just mumbled something about the signature being secure etc, and moved on quickly…

Anyway, the visit seemd to go well, and the whole demos were broadcast live on Sky News (where the news presenter said, on coming back to the studio after my piece, that he felt sorry for the PM after receiving “an ear bashing like that”!) There was a little negative commentary from the usual places, but otherwise a day to remember – for me at least, if not for the guests of honour!

The Design of Everyday Things

Posted on by ewand

In part 2 of my book post about design (part 1 was earlier this week), I’ll revisit an old title which is still great reading for anyone interested in cognitive theory or design. It was written by Donald Norman, and first published nearly 20 years ago as “The Psychology of Everyday Things“. The author found that bookshops & libraries tended to lump the book in with all the psychology textbooks, so a later edition was re-released under the modified title of the Design of Everyday Things.

The book itself looks at lots of good examples of where a designer has clearly thought about a problem and taken account of it in the design, but the more interesting (to me, at least) cases are where the usability of a system is so totally shot just because the designer didn’t take a simple thing into account.

Examples of the kinds of scenarios that Norman deals with are cookers where the layout of controls for the burners is different to that of the burners themselves (eg the burners are 2 x 2 but the controls are in a line of 4 – very common) or light switches which seemingly bear no resemblance to the layout of the lights they operate. I’ve lived in houses for years, and still kept getting the switches in the hall round the wrong way, so I know where he’s coming from there. In fact, in my house right now, the left hand switch operates the lights at the right side of the room and vice versa – I really must get round to rewiring that switch one day.

My favourite examples in the book are of the humble door, however. Here are some example photos I’ve taken on a camera phone (my new Orange E600, a version of the HTC S620 which Darren recently raved about).

The first 2 pictures are of a fire door in Microsoft UK’s TVP campus; the point about design here is that there are no instructions on the door about what to do. If you walk up to a fire exit door, for example, and it has a horizontal bar across it, you would be drawn to grab it and do something – quite possibly pull on it, but when it doesn’t move up, you’d push, and the door would open.

Similarly, when you walk up to a door which doesn’t have any handles, the only thing you can do is push, so that’s what you’ll do, right? 

To make it a little easier, a good designer would put a plate of some kind on the door, to underline the fact that there isn’t a handle for a reason (ie it hasn’t fallen off or anything).

Conversely, when you see a handle, you’ll instinctively grab it and pull. So a well designed door will have a handle on the side that needs to be pulled, and nothing (or a plate) on the side that’s pushed.  The only other marks on these fire doors are signs saying that the door is to be kept closed. Interestingly, they was part of the original Thames Valley Park campus which opened in 1997.

Now if we move to a newer part of the campus, there are nicer-looking glass doors, but their design is less clear – there are handles on both sides which look swish, but offer no affordance – ie they don’t give the user any clue which way the door is going to open. Maybe you could look out for hinges or the likes, but it’s very common to see people walk up to a door and pull it when they should be pushing.

To try to avoid that confusion, the door company puts a little sign saying “Pull” or “Push” on the door – something that still evades many people’s attention, a bit like The Far Side cartoon of the School for the Gifted.

Here are just two examples…

Even the old part of campus has plenty of glass doors, but they are designed correctly. Evidence:

There is nothing on this door other than the furniture – a piece of design which looks good, doesn’t have anything superfluous, and yet is easier to use than the more fussily “designed” items.

It’s books like DOET which give you a new perspective on the mundane things you’d not normally notice, and as a result, are well worth a good thumb through even if not an exhaustive read.

When interaction design goes bad

Posted on by ewand

For various reasons, I’ve been testing & driving several different cars lately, a process I quite enjoy – getting to know the foibles of the car’s cockpit, playing with the various toys and gadgets, as well as actually learning how to drive each one according to its size, performance etc. It’s really pleasing to find a well thought out design in some bit of car UI (Audi’s MMI system is just sweet), but even more frustrating that some companies can spend $100ms developing a car but overlook some really basic functions which will just make the driver crazy (like the clock which looks very smooth and lovely but has no obvious way of adjusting the time… I’m currently driving around in a loan car which is 1 hour adrift of real time because I haven’t figured out how to move the clock forward to Daylight Saving Time, and haven’t yet gotten around to RTFM).

Thinking about all of this reminded me of two great books which, if you’ve any interest in design at all, I’d highly recommend. I’ll do this review in 2 parts, this one being, as it is, part one.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity – Alan Cooper

This is a fascinating book which talks about the doom-laden scenario of everything we use being computer controlled (and since the book was written around 10 years ago, shows a fairly decent grasp of the future, some of which has already come to pass), discusses the design of User Interaction, and a model which Cooper has used successfully for a number of years, centred around “Personas”.

Note the use of the term User Interaction as distinct from User Interface (UI)… in this case, we’re talking about the whole way that people interact with a system or device, not just the UI of the software – extending the user interaction model to include only as much information as required, without being stupidly modal (eg the same button doing different things at different times based on what mode a device is in, especially bad when the device doesn’t make it obvious what its mode is).

 

A great example of good user interaction is the iPod – good UI in software, but it works so much better because the device complements it totally. Bad user interaction design is evident in many remote controls – they have lots of identical buttons with confusing labeling (what *do* all those symbols mean?) and the software they’re controlling on the TV/DVD player etc, is sometimes less than intuitive and not helped at all by having a control that needs the manual to be open in front of the user to make any sense.

There’s one great example of good design that jumped out from reading the book – and that was Cooper’s commission to design an interaction model for a new airline video on demand (AVOD) system. Various attempts were made to get something that could display quite a lot of possible options (since there were many films & TV shows which could be watched at the user’s demand), without having to give any instruction on how to use the thing, even to people who weren’t familiar with what they might expect on modern consumer electronics or computer systems.

After selecting and rejecting various ideas, Cooper settled on a simple UI of a rotary dial positioned directly below and in the centre of the screen, combined with thumbnail views of the film/show. Show someone a rotary dial or knob (suitably designed – maybe one with serrated edges and no obvious way to pull it out) and they’ll instinctively turn it before trying anything else. (This is a topic also covered by the 2nd book in this series: it deals with how a device naturally affords itself to the user – eg if you pick up something with a single, raised button, your first instinct would be to press it rather than try and pull it off – it affords being pressed more than being prised).

If the user turns the dial back and forwards, the list of titles pans that way, and if they turn it more quickly, the list moves quickly. When they find something they want to watch, they press the button. End of user interaction model.

Again, note the distinction between user interaction and UI. As far as the user is concerned, they turn the dial and push it to pick stuff. The UI can later deal with minutae like what to do if the user selects something by mistake… how do they go back? How do they control the volume or screen brightness etc? Maybe other buttons or controls might be required for that… unless they got into some modal system where the dial would control volume… but that could just confuse things more than adding an extra button or two.

Alan also introduces Personas as a key way of focusing designers and developers on how to address the specific needs of a specific type of user; rather than being generic (“the users”, or even saying retired people, or young mothers, or teenagers or tech-savvy twentysomething males, is still vague), the concept means they actually embody a persona with characteristics as if it’s someone they really talked to – here’s John, he works in a small business IT provider, so he knows a good bit about technology but lacks the time to do lots of reading about how to implement it, etc etc.

The Exchange development group in Microsoft was one of the no-doubt many who have adopted personas when it comes to designing software – so the needs of a whole group of disparate people can be met, hopefully, by using more holistic design processes, than simply concentrating on making it look and function well to the people who’re doing the designing.

More info on Alan Cooper’s personas

Adjunct: There’s an amusing article courtesy of SAP, on Golden Rules for Bad User Interfaces – if you’re going to sit down and design a really bad UI, follow these rules and you won’t go wrong…

Batch-convert Office files to 2007’s Open XML format

Posted on by ewand

A customer asked me the other day if Microsoft was ever going to build batch-conversion facilities to take old format files that live on a network fileshare, and convert them to the newer XML-based formats – his reasoning was the sometimes considerable reduction in size when saving as .DOCX or .XLSX compared to the binary .DOC and .XLS formats.

<wistful memories>

I remember writing a tool to do exactly this with Word docs, going from Word 2.0 to Word 6.0, using Visual Basic to automatically pump the necessary keystrokes into a Word 6.0 application, using the SendKeys() function… crude and somewhat clumsy, but for a one-off process, it worked fairly well 🙂

</wistful memories>

Coming back to the present, I was pleasantly susprised to discover the release last month of the Office Migration Planning Manager – a collection of tools which allows for scanning of networked files to report on any potential conversion issues, and batch conversion of those documents (either by creating an Open XML format document alongside the old binary one, or by replacing the original with the OOXML format file).

Remember of course that you can consume these formats in older versions of Office, using the Compatibility Pack. There’s a growing movement to adopt OpenXML as an industry standard – ECMA has already given the format its blessing, and the ISO is reportedly amenable to ratifying the format as a standard also. The momnentum is growing for 3rd parties who are building support for OpenXML – even OpenOffice now has a way of consuming and creating OpenXML documents.

UPDATE: Conincidentally, perhaps, Geek in Disguise, Steve Clayton posted last night about an online petition to the ISO to support the Open XML proposals- if you really value open-ness, even if Microsoft is the instigator of the efforts, go ahead and sign the petition…

Hosting of applications – the inevitable future?

Posted on by ewand

I’ve been musing over some medium term IT trends lately and one idea that keeps coming back into frame is the seemingly inevitable trend towards hosting of applications. Take Exchange, as just one example…

Hosted Exchange* has been available for years, from lots of different providers all around the world. The basic concept is that instead of buying the software, you just buy the service from a hosting company much like you buy line rental on your phone, or internet access from your ISP. Why not just have your company’s email sitting somewhere else, and save yourself the hassle of managing it?

*Hosted Exchange is not to be confused with the somewhat confusingly named Exchange Hosted Services, which is all about hosting the route to get mail into and out of your own email environment. EHS was formed by the procurement of Frontbridge, who had established a good name in hosted filtering… ie the MX record of your domain actually delivers mail to their datacentre, they scan it for spam and viruses, and the remaining “hygienic” mail is delivered down to you.

So what’s stopped everyone from adopting Hosted Exchange before? I suppose the cost is one thing – if you had 500 users and it cost, say, Â£10 a month to provide each of them with a mailbox, you’d be seeing £5k going out the door every month, and might think “surely I can provide the same service, in house, for less than £60k a year?”, and you might well be right. But start to dig into the detail, and it could be a lot closer… Think about buying:

  • the hardware (maybe £10k worth of servers, and any amount of money could be spent on storage, but let’s assume £15k),
  • the software (at full price, this could work out at something in the order of £30k for that kind of user population)
  • additional software, like anti-virus, anti-spam (if you didn’t want to just use what’s in the box in the shape of the IMF etc), backup software, archiving systems etc etc

… and then add in the time and expertise required to set it up and keep it healthy long-term, then maybe it is less expensive to do it all in house. But by hosting the application, you could free the time to do other stuff, or just have one less thing to worry about… especially in times when security threats can sap administrator time, and compliance requirements could mean lots more red tape and requirements for recoverability, let alone high availability.

I’ve seen various analyst reports which reckon that 70% of an average IT budget is spent just maintaining the status quo and keeping existing systems running.

As connectivity gets better and better, it seems almost inevitable that a “normal” Exchange deployment in a few years will actually be hosted by someone else. Of course, there are several models which could be adopted:

  • Hosting company just operates your own servers/software for you. I’ve seen this lots of times already, in the shape of IT outsourcing where the “hoster” is just a drop in replacement for an in house IT operation, and maybe even takes servers that were previously operated in house and moves them to their own datacentre for ongoing management
  • Hosting company provides your servers for you. This is a little less common, but growing – namely, the hoster has their own kit but they dedicate a given server/bank of servers just to you.
  • Hosting company just provides “service”. In other words, you get a mailbox of a given size, but don’t need to care how it’s provisioned. This is going to be more appealing to smaller businesses, maybe.

So what else? Sharepoint? Yep, you can do that too, as part of the snappily-titled Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging & Collaboration v4.0.

And what about after that? I could see the day when some companies want IT as a turnkey service just like they look at other utilities – you buy the bit of cable and down that comes whatever services you’re subscribed to, and you can add and remove services at will, just like you can with satellite or cable TV.

Want your phone system to be hosted and connected to by the same bunch of ethernet cables? No problem. Intranet applications and portals? Sure… I wonder where it’ll all end? Hosted desktops?

ZDNet sings praises of Office Communications Server beta

Posted on by ewand

Like probably millions of other people, I get the daily ZDNet Tech Update Today (since long before RSS brought news feeds to the masses…) and was floored a little by David Berlind’s column today. I think David’s a good commentator – normally sails between the points of sycophancy and fundamentalism that some of the other ZDNet columnists sometimes exhibit.

The column today is about the release of beta 3 of Office Communications Server and Office Communicator 2007, which has now gone live. David’s comment on the whole thing:

If there will be an amazingly compelling reason to go all-Microsoft for your office suite … your document sharing infrastructure … your e-mail and scheduling system … your data/voice conferencing … and your instant messaging, then Office Communicator is it.

So deeply and contextually can Office Communicator’s DNA be integrated into the rest of Microsoft’s solutions that there is probably no other glue in all of Microsoft’s portfolio that so elegantly demonstrates the company’s strategic vision for making knowledge workers more productive at what they do.

Wow. I think he likes it!

Windows Live Mail Desktop – replaces Outlook Express for Hotmail use

Posted on by ewand

I’ve been running the “dogfood” version of Windows Live Mail Desktop (WLMD) for a while now, and found it to be really stable and usable. It’s basically a superset of the built-in Windows Mail application from Windows Vista, which supercedes Outlook Express.

WLMD is now available for beta testing (on Windows XP as well as Vista) from http://ideas.live.com and it works against MSN/Hotmail (including the mail from Office Live, so if you sign up for your own free domain name you can pick up the mail without being in a browser), POP/IMAP accounts and other providers’ mail services, such as Yahoo!, AOL and GMail. It seems it’s been available for some time, in fact 🙂

I was prompted about this when Steve Clayton was being interviewed today on TalkSport Radio, and a caller had asked why Vista no longer gave him access to Hotmail… I guess he was meaning that since Outlook Express isn’t the box any more, he was trying to use the supplied Windows Mail program, which doesn’t offer the ability to connect to Hotmail… so the solution is to either stay with browser-based mail or to use WLMD.

Is your email compliant with the (UK) Companies Act?

Posted on by ewand

A semi little-known fact… as of the 1st January 2007, the rules for UK companies regarding business stationery changed. Just like every registered company is bound to include certain information (the registered office, the geography of registration (eg England & Wales) and its company registration number) on all its official letters & order forms, electronic communications now fall under this rule.

As Companies House says:

Whenever an email is used where its paper equivalent would be caught by the stationery requirements then that email is also subject to the requirements.

I can honestly only think of one case where a company includes all this stuff in their email, along with a long-winded disclaimer. I suppose the rules are now in place and people are waiting to see how they’re interpreted… might be worth thinking about including your details on your own e-mail .sig…

There’s quite a good discussion of the whole area on legal eagles Pinsent Masons site, here.

Oh, and did you know that Exchange 2007 now has the ability to include standard disclaimers on all mail that passes through it? For a step-by-step illustration, have a look over on msexchange.org.

Calibri: a font like no other…

Posted on by ewand

Someone asked me a semi-bizarre question today: the new fonts which are in Office 2007 and Windows Vista, especially Calibri (which, I must say, I think looks great)…

 
Can they be installed on older versions of Windows or Office?

I had never really appreciated all the work that goes into generating a decent font, including getting cross-industry support for stuff like building it into printer ROMs etc. It turns out there’s a whole Typography research group within Microsoft – if you’re interested in finding out anything more about fonts, I’m sure you’ll get it there…

Anyway, the answer to the question is two-fold…