Data Bungle to go

Ever suffered from email rage? You know when you hit the send key in a heated moment and then regret ever doing it. What about those ones that were meant to be forwarded to a colleague but accidently went to the client – ooh! How about accidently exposing your CRM data to the public, for a few weeks without knowing it – ouch! It happened recently and the SMH let us know all about it.

Microsoft Popfly – Democratising Development

A small team at Microsoft’s developer division in Redmond have recently developed a Silverlight app for creating mashups. Its called Popfly and lets us visually build social networked, mashed up websites i.e no programming skills. Its free and comes with 25mb of storage. The Popfly team at Microsoft call this “democratised development” – making development approachable to an entire class of people that want to “create” without necessarily having to write code. At the moment all this coolness is invitation only so stay tuned for a Popfly app.

Footnote: How do we* manage to keep coming up with such cool product names – Silverlight, Popfly, Picasa, Skype? Surely we’re due to run out of all options and permutations quite soon :-)

*as in the human race 

AGIMO Web Publishing Guide

AGIMO (that stands for Australian Government Information Management Office) have released a new and updated web publishing guide. AGIMO is an Australian Federal Government agency that “fosters the efficient and effective use of information and communications technology (ICT) by Australian Government departments and agencies”. The new guide replaces and consolidates a number of AGIMO resources, namely:

• Guide to Minimum Website Standards
• Online Information Service Obligations
• Australian Government Design: Guidance for the Online Environment (Branding)
• Guidance on Departmental and Ministerial Websites
• Australian Government Web Guide

The web publishing guide together with the existing AGIMO Better Practice Principles, Guides and Checklists are a fantastic resource, not only for people working in or for Government agencies but also for the wider web design and development industry.

Outlook 2007 Responsiveness

A few months back I upgraded to Vista and Office 2007 and the whole process was quite smooth. I did however encounter a couple of issues, our Firewall vendor hasn’t released a Vista compatible version of their VPN client and the responsiveness of Outlook 2007 has been less than ideal. The good news is that Microsoft Outlook blog announced an update that fixes a known performance issue.

The update fixes performance issues that occur when you work with items in a large .pst file or .ost files.

Find out more and download the update for Outlook 2007

Incremental vs. Revolutionary Improvements…

The guys at Creating Passionate Users love to share their concepts with really simple drawings. I’m a big fan of using illustration for effective communication, in fact two people at a whiteboard is considered to be one of the most effective forms of communication. This one made me think about applications that start out small and simple and then grow quickly into overweight monsters laden with feature set and high complexity. At some point they cross a line from being really useful to really useless. Actually useless is a bit harsh but perhaps unuseful is more accurate. Sometimes a fearless person has the courage to say, “Let’s start over, and make it even better,” but this endeavour is often blinded by commercial reality and we’re left with something which can only be improved incrementally until we take the massive leap over the “big friggin wall”.

Source: Creating Passionate Users

Microsoft Surface

This is the new Microsoft Surface. I’d love one in my living room. In fact I reckon they should go one better and do a wall surface with a Wii style interface.

Coghead

I’ve been participating in beta program for a web based product called Coghead. Their mission is ambitious, allow a lay person to build no-code web based business applications that can be accessed from anywhere. It uses the Laszlo framework allowing “power users” to build timesheets, CRM and issue tracking to name just a few. There’s a large application library which can be used or tailored to suit individual needs. The product has a ways to go particularly with the UX and featureset but despite this I have a huge dose of respect for a company taking on this challenge, not only is it a hugely ambitious task but I’m a firm believer that anyone should be able to create or enhance applications using simple visual interfaces with plain English instructions. Of note during this beta was a personal email and follow up phone call from the CEO of Coghead, Paul McNamara, to find out how my experience with the product was going. It’s not every day that the CEO engages with the coal face for some honest feedback. I think that’s the sign of a company with its coghead screwed on right. J