Starting tomorrow I’ll be commuting into work on the commuter train. I’m giving myself two months of forced exile from my car, to see if I can make mass transit work for me. Now this opportunity was somewhat thrust upon me after my 16 year old totaled my new Volvo (he’s OK — no injuries), but I decided to do my wallet and the environment a favor and hold off on replacing the car for a while.
Are Google Apps ready for the enterprise? How about google as a company? Is software as a service ready? This report from the Burton group leans mostly toward no. They see google as focused on a consumer market, with a style and approach that serves them well in this market. But their contrarian business approach, lack of enterprise-level support, and product update cycle makes them a poor match for business needs. I found their comments on the update cycle of particular interest. As with many web 2.0 companies Google is constantly releasing incremental software updates, with little clear advance notice, and little transparency as to what feature updates are coming. If I was supporting a last user base in our corporate Google apps, I would not be happy to come in one day and be surprised to find all sorts of changes to the application.
I find flow charting to be very helpful for planning out application development, analyzing business processes, and organizing other functional processes. In the 11/12/07 ComputerWorld article Are You The Complete Package? one of the essential skills is an “understanding of business-process mapping tools.” Cool — expect they mention the use of something called a swim chart — new to me. Some digging reveals that this is a different flavor of a flowchart, with lanes set up to depict certain process areas. I’ve started doing something similar on some recent chart projects, but this is a nicer way to put things together.
Zeldman’s lament that many people don’t understand web design certainly rings true to me. Its not that they don’t understand how to use google to search for pages, or to view and read content. Its that when it comes time to create their own content they fall back on old print models, and just don’t get “IT”. The best web sites today allow people to readily interact with their content, and make it their own. It offers things such as RSS feeds, support for multiple devices (printers, mobile browsers), and real internal search. At their best they offer custom content to each viewer, based on past visits, purchasing behavior, or where they came from. It provides real-world information, such as a telephone number and street address. I’m not sure its really possible to describe to someone how this all works — its like riding a bike, the best way to “get it” is to “do it.” But if anyone can provide a description its Zeldman.
If you convert your voice mail to email, does that make it easier to manage? If you think so you should check out this article on several voice - to - text services. I tried experimenting with Spin-Vox a couple of months ago, and couldn’t get it to work. Communication with their tech support never resulted in a resolution to the problem. But he reviews them here, so I guess it works for someone. Personally I’m not interested in converting my voice mails, nor in getting any more email, but I do like the idea of making blog posts via a phone call. Jott sounds like it might be helpful for this purpose — maybe I’ll give it a spin.
Content provided by Randall Rode, a professional technologist based in Clinton, Connecticut, USA
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