Archive for Web Apps
by Patti Anklam
July 17, 2009 at 3:59 pm · Filed under
AppGap Tips, Change Management, Collaboration, Culture, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Web Apps, social media, social tools
I’d saved a wonderful story by Michael Idinopulos of Socialtext about how moving from a shared space to private offices (What my Granddaddy Taught me about Information Flow). In the days before computers, brokers worked in a large open space in which information moved vary rapidly from one end of the floor to another. When the office layout was changed to give more people private offices and people began focusing their attention on their PCs, people “…lost the ability to communicate, and nobody had the slightest idea what was going on.”
You can’t read the story, of course without catching on that the open office floor in which information moves in waves is a lot like Web 2.0. From our PC (and Mac!) silos, we are finally liberated and can catch the breath of new ideas rolling over our shared spaces. This is happening, outside.
Inside, adoption of Web 2.0 tools is not so much of a wave as a trickle. Inside companies, managers think about technologies in terms of security (bring it inside) and cost (it costs money to maintain something inside, so we can’t let people use free tools. [Hat tip to John Bordeaux for pointing to the irony in this story.]).
Inside, we deal with a series of waves, incremental introductions of technology and Web 2.0 services and look for the best way to encourage adoption. I’m guilty myself of responding to clients’ reason for lack of adoption as “the culture” when it can often be the manner in which the new tool was introduced, or a lack of attention to the user interface/experience.
Adoption and culture being very much on my mind, I was interested to see Hutch Carpenter’s post in the Social Computing Journal Enterprise 2.0: Culture is as Culture Does. He argues that most companies are ready for social software at least to the extent that they acknowledge that employees are their most important asset.
He goes on to put together a wonderful graphic illustrating two paths to adoption of social tool pilots. He anchors the flow chart by two decision points.
- Defined use case? is the determinant of whether adoption goes in an official or a viral flow. This assumes that a well-defined use case has proven business value and that undefined use cases may not. I agree that for a successful pilot in an organization, the defined “use case” must be centered around teams or groups that are engaged in some joint activity that requires flow of information.
- Exceed expectations? is the measurement that occurs when the two flows come back together and employee feedback has been processed. This decision point really implies that there is a funding decision to be made at this point.
Enterprise 2.0: Pilot Deployment Flow
There’s some good stuff in this diagram, and it’s flexible enough for adapting to specific circumstances. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if, at the dawn of the PC era, Michael’s Granddaddy had through to work through the use cases of how PCs would affect the information flow on the trading floor.
by Celine Roque
May 29, 2009 at 3:44 pm · Filed under
AppGap Tips, Web Apps
Unlike desktop applications, web apps run from servers far away from our computers, and to access them we need to use Internet browsers like Firefox. The problem with Firefox is that it was designed for viewing web pages, which it does very well, but not for running applications. If a web app running inside a tab were to freeze, for example, other tabs would also stop functioning and eventually crash, causing you to lose valuable work.
In its own way, Google Chrome was engineered to prevent these types of crashes. Mozilla’s Prism extension for Firefox uses a different approach to make web apps run separately from the browser for added stability. They are treated to work as virtual stand-alone applications, reducing the load on the browser itself and improving performance. Aside from this, Prism takes things even further to make the web app experience feel as familiar as possible.
Accessibility. Shortcuts can be created for web apps on the desktop or the programs folder like other desktop applications. They can also be accessed from the system taskbar or dock.
Start-up. For web apps that you’d like to be always on call, you can use prism to have them run automatically whenever you start your computer.
Minimize to tray. You have the choice between making the applications minimize to the taskbar or to the system tray for a more uncluttered view. Notifications pop up here when you have new emails or other alerts.
Links association. Prism enables special links to treat the web app as a normal application and open it instead of a browser. For example, mailto: links could only open desktop mail clients, but with Prism it can now be set to launch web-based mail clients like Gmail.
Others. Among the nice enhancements brought by Prism are font control and private data clearing for each window.
Mozilla’s Prism comes in two forms: a Firefox extension and a stand-alone program. Each has a short video demo and can be downloaded now for free on the Prism site.
by Celine Roque
May 22, 2009 at 12:11 pm · Filed under
Web Apps
When it was first launched in September last year, Google Chrome made a big splash and got a lot of users curious. Its promise of speed and stability, as well as its focus on web apps definitely caught my interest. As promising as Chrome was, however, Google’s first try at creating an Internet browser left a lot to be desired in terms of bugs and lack of features, specially when compared to more popular browsers like Firefox.
Since then, the company has worked to improve the program and now Chrome 2 is officially out of beta, free for download to the public as a stable release. According to their blog, among its new features are:
Improved New Tab Page: The most requested feature from users was the ability to remove thumbnails from the New Tab page. Now you can finally hide that embarrassing gossip blog from the Most Visited section.
Full Screen Mode: If you’ve ever given a presentation or watched a large video using Google Chrome, you might have wished you could use every last pixel on your screen for the content. Now you can hide the title bar and the rest of the browser window by hitting F11 or selecting the option in the Tools menu.
Form Autofill: Filling out your information in forms over and over again can be tedious. Form autofill helps by showing information you’ve previously entered into the same form fields automatically. If at any point you want to clear out your information, that’s easy to do from the Tools menu.
Increased Stability: Google Chrome is more stable than ever – we have fixed over 300 bugs that caused crashes since launch.
Increased Speed: Making the web faster continues to be our main area of focus. Thanks to a new version of WebKit and an update to our JavaScript engine, V8, interactive web pages will run even faster. We’ve also made sure that JavaScript keeps running fast even when you have lots of tabs open. Try opening a bunch of web applications and then running your favorite benchmark.
Previous tests report a 25-35% speed boost, which is quite impressive. Unfortunately, there isn’t much movement in the add-ons front, with only rudimentary support added for Grease Monkey. If you’ve already installed a previous version of Chrome, it will automatically be updated the next time you use it. If you haven’t had the chance to try it yet, you can download Google Chrome for Windows here. Beta versions are also available for Mac and Linux.
by Celine Roque
May 15, 2009 at 1:19 pm · Filed under
Scenarios, Web Apps
At 7:48am Pacific time on May 14th, I was sound asleep in my corner of the world. Good thing, because if I had been working at that time, I would’ve been among the unlucky ones who, for at least an hour, experienced an Internet without Google. The thing is, today, the search giant is no longer just that. We depend on it so much now on virtually all aspects of our online activities, so a widespread outage involving most of its services is a little unnerving. A post from Geeky Guide said it best:
I have a lot of my life invested in Google’s portion of the “cloud”, I have to admit. I route all my email through Gmail and I collate all my RSS feeds via Google Reader. I schedule events and reminders on Google Calendar and I maintain a decent number of friends on Google Talk. This blog is on the Blogger platform, my domain is supported by Google Apps and my RSS feed is run by FeedBurner (now a Google product). I run AdSense programs, AdWords advertising campaigns and I study all this through Google Analytics. I manage two wikis via Google Sites, I get updated via Google News and I even have a few Google Alerts set to notify of key updates. I maintain a number of documents and spreadsheets on Google Docs, manage a few email lists via Google Groups and I still have some leftover stuff on Google Notebook. Don’t forget watching videos on YouTube and even maintaining links on Google Bookmarks! The list goes on and on… So yeah, a Google outage is a near catastrophe for me. I’m like Google’s primary demographic and it just kills me when any of these services go down, what more all of them.
He’s not alone. Most of us probably use a few of the services mentioned on a regular basis. The outage didn’t last that long, but it’s enough for Google to seriously reexamine its whole architecture to prevent a recurrence on a grand scale. CNET said they got reports of the incident coming in from California to New York, and from as far as the United Kingdom to Malaysia. Urs Hoelzle, Google’s SVP for Operations, wrote the following explanation of what happened on the Google Blog:
Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.
An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and “always on,” so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.
There’s no perfect network and downtimes seem to be a part of life, but when an error (reportedly from GMail) can snowball into a virtual system-wide failure, things have got to change. Trust is a tricky thing, so I hope Google makes good on their promise.
by Celine Roque
May 7, 2009 at 8:28 am · Filed under
AppGap Tips, Web 2.0, Web Apps
Google is fond of keeping things simple, and this reflects in their services like Gmail. They are, however, also famous for being innovators – something that the variety of add-ons available on Gmail Labs would support. For power users who want additional features, try to look up what’s available under Settings > Labs. A few of the most handy ones are listed here:
1. Undo Send
Ever pressed the Send button by mistake? We’ve all been there. The results are often incomplete emails, forgotten attachments, and unintended recipients. By enabling this feature, when you press the Send button, Gmail will delay the transmission of your messages by a short while. A new Undo button will be available near the top of the page for about 15 seconds, after which it will disappear, and your email will be sent.
2. Forgotten Attachment Detector
A common blooper around the office is promising attachments, but forgetting to send them. This feature scans your email for the word “attached”. When you hit Send and it senses that no files were chosen, it will ask you whether this was an oversight or not, allowing you to edit the email further. Simple yet effective.
3. Tasks
Using an organizer is fine, but if you have a lot of email-specific tasks to accomplish, why not keep track of them inside Gmail itself? Enabling Tasks will create a text link in your side menu, and clicking on that will open a simple to-do list. It’s easy to add and delete tasks, set a due date, and create notes for each task.
4. Keyboard Shortcuts
Some of us are more comfortable navigating with a mouse, but others swear that keyboard shortcuts make their work flow faster. If you’re in the latter category, why not enable this feature? Don’t forget that you still have to turn shortcuts ON under Settings > General afterwards, though. Default keystrokes are listed here.
5. Email Addict
As various studies have shown, in order to be productive, you’ve got to take some rest every once in a while. The Email Addict add-on puts a text link near the top of the page that says, “Take a break”. Clicking on it will lock you out of Gmail, to force you to rest your eyes or get some other work done. This is handy for those who obsessively check their emails every minute. It also makes you invisible in Google Chat.
Do you use any of the Google Labs features in Gmail? Which one’s your favorite?
by Jenny Ambrozek
April 29, 2009 at 10:58 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Management, Networks + Networking, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web Apps, productivity, social media, social networks
Subtitled “Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff” the book is a must read, and especially useful as a primer for those still needing to understand the fundamental changes in doing business as the Internet has matured from Web 1.0 to:
“an entirely new level with Web 3.0- an era that is entirely about innovation and collaboration.” (Foreword page ix) 
An excellent overview of the book, in author Clara Shih’s own words, is in 2 parts at the Entrepreneur’s Journeys blog . Not surprizingly the book’s home page is on Facebook and 24 x 5 star Amazon reviews indicate the book’s value.
The book section titles– starting with “A Brief History of Social Media’ through “Transforming the Way We Do Business’ to “Your Step-By-Step Guide to Using Facebook for Business”– reveal the key themes. Reflecting the author’s hands on experience as the developer of FaceConnector and head of Enterprise Social Networking Alliances and Product Strategy for Salesforce, the book is filled with lived experiences of companies using social networking to “build better products, reach new audiences and sell more stuff.”
If there are gaps in the book they reflect the state of the industry. For example, “The ROI of Social” is addressed in half a page (205) beginning:
“Understandably, a large number of you are focused on ROI and might feel frustrated that there has been no clear quantifiable data around ROI”
and concludes suggesting;
“ROI will become much more quantifiable and standardized”.
Have you read “The Facebook Era?” What did you take away?
~ Jenny Ambrozek
by Jon Husband
March 23, 2009 at 11:06 pm · Filed under
Communities, Product Management, Web 2.0, Web Apps, social media, social tools
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… 1) send an email, 2) try to call ( into the hell of “Press 1 for …, Press 2 for …” ) or should I just 3) put it out on Twitter ?
Well, it seems that Salesforce.com is getting ready to bet on Door #3 above.
It’s not too much of a stretch to wonder how quickly this will affect the call-center work force of the future.
Here’s the direct quote from Salesforce.com’s SVP of customer service and support:
“While $20 billion of software is being spent on call centers, the customers are somewhere else,” he said.”
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Salesforce jumps on the Twitter-for-CRM bandwagon
By Caroline McCarthy
“Twitter customer service: It’s the hot new thing that all the kids are doing! Salesforce has added a new application to its “app exchange” so that clients who use its Service Cloud product can better wrangle Twitter for customer service purposes. It’ll be available this summer.
With the app, called Salesforce CRM for Twitter, clients can monitor Twitter messages that pertain to their company, aggregate the replies and conversations around those messages, and then respond to the inquiries and complaints and whatnot.
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Read the whole CNET article here …
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