Capping IT Off
I just removed my office suite since all traditional office suites are time absorbing monsters that reduce productivity to the max. That shouldn’t be news for you, but here is a kind reminder. If you prefer to do less work in more time, please use an office suite that is able to create and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Please use them to create a document on your laptop and please use them to mail the document to your colleagues who can review it on their laptop making their changes in your document (off course with a ‘Track-changes’ functionality enabled) while working with their specific office suite and when they are finished, they mail your document with their changes to you so you can process their changes in your document. If you are lucky you will have some colleagues that will propose different changes on the same fragment, so you can mail them again, asking them to come to a consensus, wait for them, and than process the outcome of their little consensus in your nice document. This will look something like this:
Does this look a bit cumbersome? Yes it does! You are spending too much time on a sychronous commmunication and reworking documents containing changes of others. You are responsible for the master document and worst case, you might forget to process some change or you might even miss an email. I even let out all the issues you could have with different versions and types of office suites and different operating systems on which they are executed.
However there is light at the end of the tunnel, you could save humongous amount of time by using online services (SaaS) such as Google Docs, Zoho, Sliderocket, Gliffy and many others. Using these tools will enable you to be more effective in editing documents and collaborating with others. You can work synchronously with each other on a document and you do not have to have endless mailing sessions while reviewing each others documents. By being able to work synchonously you will save time, and your dependant on ones laptop where the master document is available. Besides that, it will save your licensing costs since most online solutions are free or require a small fee. And even better, you can edit your document always and from everywhere, the only thing you need to have is a browser and an internet connection. Using such tools will simplify above image to something like this:
Since you too want to save time here are some guides to uninstall the most common Office suites:
Off course if you would like to spend your life doing less work in more time, be my guest, however I think you could to better things with your time. Let’s increase our productivity!
About the author
Rick is on a day to day basis working on social media (strategy) cases for several (Fortune 500) clients. He lives and loves social media, helping people and enterprises in using social media in a way that adds value for them. He also gives guest lectures at several universities to make students aware of the impact social media will have on their life in general and on enterprises in particular in the near and not so near future. Is he a geek? Well… yes. A geek with a social life though. Even one with a wife and a young son, who’s first English words were ‘Social media’.
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Now, wouldn’t it be nice if you could subscribe to these sort of services for a certain fixed rate providing you with n GB storage and a number of nicely integrated apps, UMTS/GPRS bandwidth and a free (or almost free) device (or a set of devices in case of a family or business package) of your choice?
Btw, nice post Rick!
Nice Visio diagrams ;)
Good points you raise though.
I know Tom, that is one of the feature requst I will do for gliffy. You cannot do rounded corners in gliffy (or at least it is so hidden so well I cannot find it), therefore I had to fall back on Visio (it’s a pity, since gliffy has much nicer features).
Thanks for your comment.
I think you’re trying to make the second step before the first. There is a solution for your problem without the need to upload for instance secret information “into the cloud”. It’s called DMS (Document Management System) or ECM (Enterprise Content Management) and it’s pretty old. There are mature products available from ECM Documentum, IBM FileNet, OpenText LiveLink to mention just a few. There is also a promising new player from the OpenSource spectrum, Alfresco. And they all do a very good job solving your problem plus hundreds more. And they are reliable, secure and feature rich, all things the SaaS players still need to prove.
I love Google Docs and use it a lot; for private stuff. In a corporate environment I’d better stick to the good old solutions. At least for a while.
If your sat behind a desk I agree. You should mention about those countries where Internet is still not prevalent and even in the modern world were roaming internet, on the road or plane, can cost a small fortune, easily 10x more than a software license.
As for Jon Mulholland… he might have a nice blog but doesn’t he work for Vodaphone? Maybe we should give him some stick about Vodaphones outrageous online fees! Its companies like Vodaphone that need to transform to bring about SaaS as a realistic alternative to products such as MS Office rather than milking the public.
So whilst I think it is a nice idea I predict most of our “follower” clients will stick with commodity Office installations for the next 15 years.
Just to round off, Omnigraffle for the Mac is a leapfrog forward from Visio.
@Björn I do not know DMS’s and ECM’s very well. But as far as I know you can still have the issue with a DMS you’d still have the need for an offline editor (like Ms office, OOo etc)?
@Jonathan you are correct that an internet connection is they key requirement to come to this solutions and high rates will hold back this development. As far as I know there are in the Netherlands (where I live) three or four companies that offer flat fee mobile internet. I do not know how this is arranged at your place, however in the Netherlands you probably won’t be spending a fortune for being online via for example HSDPA.