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September 15 Its All In The ProcessEarlier this week, whilst waiting on other processes to complete I started to play with the Shared Document feature of our team's Sharepoint Services install. We put this in place earlier this year after one of my colleagues in the team played with it and convinced us it was a good idea - a system to help track changes, track what each other was doing (especially as we had a new job share post in the team) and allow us to have internal task lists, and with Sharepoint Services being essentially a free "role" built into Windows Server 2003. I was pretty sceptical but had no better ideas so agreed we should give it a go. Over the past couple of months, my scepticism has been allayed, as I have found it more and more useful. Certainly, the 2 team members in the job share have found the blogging extension to it almost essential to their job, as there is no overlap in their hours.
In the last week, though, I have been looking at how we can use the Shared Documents feature and have been very impressed - not so much by the technology itself, but by how it manifests itself. The Document Lifecycle is, especially in Office 2007, a first-class citizen. You can open, check out, modify and check in content all from within Office. It works almost as smoothly as opening and saving to disk (I say almost because checking in and checking out files is a bit of a foreign concept to most, at least at the start). You can also add the likes of tasks, notifications and permissions which are major requirements for collaboration. On top of all this, in the 2007 version, Office has clarified the process of document preparation, to make processes like mark-up removal, adding data protection, signatures and compatibility checks, more naturally flowing (thanks to the ordering in the new Office button menu).
The point here is not to say anything particular about how good or otherwise Sharepoint or Office 2007 is, but to say, it is a good example of the sort of process we need to be thinking about. At the moment, a lot of Web 2.0 services are based on a very old school method of creating your document/data in your software application and then once complete going to the web site, browsing to where you saved it on your hard drive and uploading. I think it is becoming all the more clearer that desktop/software and cloud/services are not mutually exclusive paradigms, and if we want to get the very best of both, we need to think of the best processes to make the differences between the two much more smooth, to the point where users might not even be able to tell between the two. We also need to be minded towards making sure the services give us the flexibility we need in a two-way direction. It is only then that we will find an approach which fit our needs and allows our users and our systems to be as productive as they can be with these services. TrackbacksWeblogs that reference this entry
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