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Is That a Blog, a Wiki, or an E-Mail?

One of the things which continues to be a barrier to our adoption of Web 2.0 tools, particularly our SharePoint Blogs and Wiki’s is confusion over where to post something. I really think this fear of being wrong is preventing some of our users from using these tools. I’d like to suggest that we stop worrying about it, and just post. Stop worrying about whether or not you’re correct. It’s not going to be the end of the world is something which is more appropriate for a Wiki entry is posted as a Blog or vice versa. The important thing is that useful information gets posted someplace where it will be preserved.

Unfortunately, we continue to rely on e-mail to publish information which is better served being posted on our SharePoint site, where it can be easily found weeks or months later. The problem is that e-mail is the best tool to use to notify people of a new post. It’s possible to set up alerts, but we don’t necessarily want to have every Wiki entry sent to everyone in the Agency.

There are a couple fairly simple solutions to this problem. First, we simply need to teach our users how to create and send a link via e-mail. When an item of interest is posted in a SharePoint Blog or Wiki, the person posting it needs to copy a shortcut to the item, and then paste the URL into an e-mail telling the appropriate audience about the item. Yes, it’s an extra step, and it’s easier to just send an e-mail, but having the item preserved for posterity is worth the effort.

Another option isn’t in place right now, but we could “mail enable” certain SharePoint items, including Blogs. We also could begin implementing some of the Audience targeting features of SharePoint which would help with Wikis. This would allow people to add an address to an e-mail which would cause the contents of the e-mail to be automatically added as a Blog entry. Audience targeting would allow people to target Wiki entries (and other SharePoint items) to specific audiences (i.e. Agency Wide, Account Service, etc.). This option, however, would require quite a bit of setup and testing prior to implementation.

For now, we’ll focus on education and training. Hopefully, If we can get people to begin posting to our Blogs and Wikis, perhaps they’ll overcome some of those fears and this will become less of an issue.

Vista and the Death of Windows

Ok, who hasn’t read about this one? Since Gartner issued their report last week on the current state of Windows, it seems like everybody has had something to say about this topic. Since this one has a little bit of that “Mac vs PC” edge to it, I thought I might as well chime in with my own Vista experience. I’m one of those who haven’t really experienced the downside of Vista, but I’m also not beating the drums to update all the PCs in my company either.

For the past several years, my company has been fairly aggressive in moving to the “latest and greatest” versions of just about anything. For the most part, our experiences have been good. I think the first thing we jumped on, installing almost on the release date was Exchange 2003. We got caught in a situation where we had to upgrade a server, we knew we’d be upgrading to 2003 eventually, so we decided to bite the bullet and dive in without waiting for Service Pack 1. We didn’t encounter any major issues, and it seems like ever since we’ve been fairly aggressive about upgrading, on both the PC and Mac side of things. We ran into a similar convergence of upgrades on the Mac side of things with the launch of OS-X and our conversion to Adobe Creative Suite. We survived that also.

I’ve read all the horrible reviews of Vista, and it always seems like they are accompanied with a slew of comments by people telling their Vista horror stories. The groundswell of opinion against this OS has been impressive to say the least. But what’s actually concerned me more has been Microsoft’s seeming inability, or lack of desire, to fight back. The anecdotal stories attached to many of these reviews always leave me shaking my head – how did so many people manage to have such a difficult time with Vista?

I’ve been running Vista since the late beta stages. Crashes have been non-existent, and any incompatibilities I’ve discovered have been few and far between. UAC was a nuisance during the initial setup of machines, but once I’ve had PCs setup, it really stopped being a bother and frankly, I’d like to know about it when something (including myself) requests admin access. I had a horrible initial experience with my current Dell laptop which was running Vista out-of-the-box, but as soon as I disabled Google desktop the speed increased significantly. I’ve been happy with it ever since.

Frankly, the biggest anecdotal experience I can relate with regard to Vista has been with my daughter’s laptop. I took a chance and loaded her up with Vista over a year ago when she returned to school for the spring semester. She’s had that machine on a college campus for over a year now with everything that entails in terms of computing danger. I got my hands on it about 2 weeks ago expecting to find a real mess, but instead it was running flawlessly. I’m not sure that would experience would have been as trouble-free with any previous version of Windows.

Just like the comments I read from IT people detailing their horror stories, my stories represent a small sample, and they don’t necessarily prove a thing. To be honest, because of the bad press, the fact that I haven’t been overwhelmed with the features of Vista, and the rumors we’re hearing about Vista’s successor, I’m not racing to upgrade my company’s PCs to Vista. I’m also not buying the arguments that Windows is dead.