Tuesday, September 25, 2007

It's not rocket science, it's SharePoint or google docs?

Is it funny how the simple things in life are often the best. I had a classic example of this last week. We were working in a virtual team on a bid for some work - familiar story?

Let me explain how it worked, there was about 5 of us on the bid team, we used sharepoint as the central file storage and it worked like a treat, no emailing with attachments, no multiple versions. All that we used was one simple document in a sharepoint document library. Versions were kept, the document was checked in and checked in out when being modified and alerts were set by the various team members to know when changes had been made.

I was actually offline for most of the working hours during the week doing jury duty and this didn't even present any challenges or stop the progress of the bid. It was with smooth sailing and we delivered the bid well before the closing date.

The collaboration was so easy, all I could think was finally - this is not rocket science, it was SharePoint at its finest.

That said though, I came across this little video - Google Docs in Plain English which explains the collaboration above and also introduces some friendly competition to this space - so stay tuned.

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Tafiti is very cool, so is gmail spell check

I have just been playing with Tafiti, http://www.tafiti.com/. It's very impressive, combining live search and silverlight technology.

For those who don't know, Tafiti means "do research" in Swahili. Even if you didn't know that it probably doesn't matter - what does matter is we need to do all types of research and information mining on a daily basis. By the end of most days I have at least 10 tabs open in IE 7 and quite often am going back to these for reference. I am also using one note 2007 more and more to store random pieces of content. If Tafiti can help on this front to collect and store my findings then its going to be a winner.

Things are moving pretty fast in the race for the browser to become the new OS and I feel this is another step in that direction.

I also started using the spell check in gmail, ok not as impressive as Tafiti, but it is all good for the user experience.