Consumer Technologies in the Corporate Environment

Sharon Richardson posted an interesting piece on her Joining Dots blog which took me to an article in the Economist about the impact of consumer techologies (some of Google’s offerings for example) on the corporate IT space.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and noticed when talking to clients.  Business users have higher expectations than ever before, some of which is down to the fact that they are using web applications to find houses, research and book holidays, manage photo albums etc.  So if it’s that easy to do this stuff online at home (or possibly at their desk), they expect the business software that they use to work just as easily and quickly.

This is certainly reminiscent of the early PC days, when what were originally consumer devices started invading the corporate workspace.  Even before the advent of the IBM PC, I can remember people sneaking the odd Apple II with Visicalc into the office (more than one of which replaced an IBM timeshare service).

PS – Sharon’s latest post on creating a SharePoint OurSpace is also worth a read.  I’m interested to see where this goes.

 

Technorati tags: sharepoint, moss 2007, information worker

WebDD Registration Now Open

There is a Web Design and Development conference being held at Microsoft Reading UK on Saturday 3 Feb.  This is a community event in a similar vein to the DDD Days which are already very popular.  You can register for the event at http://www.webdd.org.uk/Default.aspx but don’t wait too long as I think it will be very popular.

Among the speakers are Scott Guthrie who has overall responsibility for a lot of the .Net development products including ASP.Net and IIS.  Dave Verwer will also be presenting on Ruby on Rails for .Net developers.  I saw his presentation at DDD4 and he is is an excellent speaker (first time I’ve ever seen a developer presentation at Microsoft given using a Macbook Pro!).

Technorati tags: webdd

SharePoint UK User Group Meeting 8th Feb

Office 2007 was officially launched on 30 November 2006, so it’s now old hat of course.  You can attend a UK SharePoint User Group Meeting on 8th Feb to hear Lawrence Liu talk about the Office 14 Roadmap!

This event will fill up quickly though so don’t leave it too long…

Technorati tags: sharepoint

Finding Good Demo Data

As someone who regularly needs to find useable demo data I was interested in the data being posted at Swivel, which I found through a post on Chris Webb’s blog.  As he says, unfortunate name though!

While I was looking around on Swivel, I found that one of the datasets was generated via another site I’d never heard of before, FakeNameGenerator.com.  As well as an online generation of single names, they will let you order up to 20,000 fake names and addresses in a variety formats (CSV, Excel, txt etc)  and amazingly the service is currently free if you’re prepared to wait 5-7 days, or $9.95 if you want it in 24 hours.

And for a little light data visualisation relief,  take a look at Jessica Hagy’s Indexed Blog…