Category: Microsoft

Tip from Dave Winer: this appears to be a new central directory for Microsoft.com RSS feeds. Nice! Wonder who’s responsible for the work. The layout actually looks much better than the Microsoft Blogs page, much as it hurts me to say it.

Paul Thurrott: Where Vista Fails. A long list of major and minor feature and UI issues in the latest (February) community preview of Vista, the next version of Windows. Some of these issues seem minor, but one in particular, the User Account Protection model, caught my eye. It’s good to see that Windows will be moving toward a model of requiring separate point authentications to perform certain actions, but it sounds like they’ve overdone it with the actions that require re-authenticating, not to mention the warning dialogs:

Once Firefox is installed, there are two icons on my Desktop I’d like to remove: The Setup application itself and a shortcut to Firefox. So I select both icons and drag them to the Recycle Bin. Simple, right?

Wrong. Here’s what you have to go through to actually delete those files in Windows Vista. First, you get a File Access Denied dialog (Figure) explaining that you don’t, in fact, have permission to delete a … shortcut?? To an application you just installed??? Seriously?

OK, fine. You can click a Continue button to “complete this operation.” But that doesn’t complete anything. It just clears the desktop for the next dialog, which is a Windows Security window (Figure). Here, you need to give your permission to continue something opaquely called a “File Operation.” Click Allow, and you’re done. Hey, that’s not too bad, right? Just two dialogs to read, understand, and then respond correctly to. What’s the big deal?

What if you’re doing something a bit more complicated? Well, lucky you, the dialogs stack right up, one after the other, in a seemingly never-ending display of stupidity. Indeed, sometimes you’ll find yourself unable to do certain things for no good reason, and you click Allow buttons until you’re blue in the face.

Hopefully this gets adjusted in future builds. Otherwise I think a lot of people won’t get the benefit of the feature—they’ll disable it based on the annoyance factor.

In the software industry, it’s predictable that major releases slip. The more features that get added in, the more ambitious the release, the higher the testing burden, the greater the risk of incompatibility with other products, the more complicated the interaction matrix between features, the bigger the regression risk. More risk = more uncertain schedule.

So the announcement that Longhorn Vista, which was at one time to have shipped last year, is slipping broad consumer availability into 2007 is unsurprising. (The discrepancy between the November delivery date for businesses and January availability for consumers has to do with delivery models. Businesses can get upgrade versions under Software Assurance; the assumption is that consumers will be waiting for new PCs to come pre-loaded with Vista through the channel, which involves a manufacturing delay. I assume that’s the difference, anyway, and not that there are actual code differences between the two versions.)

What is a little more interesting is the level of public griping that is coming from Microsoft bloggers like Mini-Microsoft, who is questioning the apparent lack of accountability in senior management (“Fire the leadership now!”). What is astounding is the level of bitterness and dissatisfaction expressed by various anonymous Microsoft employees in the comment thread. One says that accountability will be seen “this August when reviews are handed out to junior employees.” Another complains about problems on the Vista application compatibility test team: “Cut the number of testers (several times) from approx 50 to now much less than a dozen” and notes that application compatibility measures are hovering at “< 40 percent.”

This is the downside of blogging, for Microsoft the public agency: all the dirty laundry gets exposed, all the internal secrets get aired. Of course it is an upside, too. The anonymous comment thread is actually shedding some light on real management problems at Microsoft that otherwise would continue to be swept under the rug. They might still be swept under for all I know, but the possibility is there of having that discussion.

Of course I can’t resist a little schadenfreude over one gripe aired in the course of the thread: “What’s the difference between OS X and Vista? Microsoft employees are excited about OS X.” That’s a little unfair, of course, but it’s also funny, and as Apple pushes forward toward its fifth major OS release since Windows XP while Microsoft struggles for the first one (and alas, in this game, major efforts like SP2 don’t count as more than point releases), it sounds like the truth.

Disclosure: I am a former Microsoft employee who did not work on Windows, though I have friends who do. While I am a Mac user at home, it is in my professional interest that Microsoft keeps the IT ecosystem healthy by shipping Vista on time.

So far in my ongoing review of implementing the GTD methodology using Outlook XP, I’ve talked about using improved search to make your archives more useful and managing your task views. Today I’m going to take a step back, now that I’ve implemented most of the GTD workflow in my daily routine, and give a higher level picture of how everything has been implemented for me so far and what challenges remain. I will give an outline of my project list implementation but the details will wait for next time.

First: my new strategy to manage stuff in Outlook is simple. The inbox stays clear; I have a list of tasks from which I work on an ongoing basis, and a list of projects that I review daily for next actions. If I’m ever in a place where I can’t make a task note directly, I use my brand spanking new Hipster PDA (a stack of 3″x5″ index cards held together with a binder clip), and transfer any tasks to my task list when I get back to my desk. (The Hipster PDA is particularly useful at the breakfast table, on my bedstand, and other places where the computer should never be.)

That all sounds simple, but the devil is in the details. As I outlined last time, something as simple as how you view your tasks makes a big difference. And the really difficult part, as the GTD methodology attests, is keeping your task list clean and free of multistep projects, which are treated differently. The problem is that Outlook doesn’t provide a good form for project management. So I’ve been running with this recommendation from the Getting Things Done In Outlook page, which provides a modified contact form as a way to track projects together with a customized contact folder and view. Then I build out the project plan in the description field (or, if the project is to write something, I’ll brainstorm the outline right there), and click the “New Task for Contact” button to add the next action for the project to my task list. Doing that adds a link to the project form into the Contacts field at the bottom of the task list, and makes the task show up in the Activities tab of the project form.

So that’s all the major areas of GTD—except that there are a ton of additional details and neat features that I’ve glossed over. Next time I’ll talk about more task tips and tricks, including features in tasks that support the creation of deferred tasks.

I’ve spent another week and change on GTDsince implementing good search in Outlook. I’ve spent it exploring the core concepts: capturing all (most) of the stuff that’s been floating around in my brain waiting to be done or dealt with. Discovery number 1: while it’s a relief to capture all (most) of the stuff into lists so I’m not spending all the time panicking about things I’ve forgotten, I’ve learned that I’ve made a lot of commitments that need to be fulfilled. Hence my relatively light blogging as I regain some balance.

My capture systems are just now starting to get in shape. I spent much of my airplane time between here and Vegas (and back) setting up some of the systems and have some progress to report.

First thing: my new favorite view in Outlook (XP version) is the Calendar view, with the small Task pane to the side. Something about having the task view shrunk to a manageable size is really helpful in preventing it from being terrifyingly unmanageable. But the out of the box view, which features only in progress tasks ordered by no particular mechanism and ungrouped, needs work. We can do this.

If you right click on the view title (“Tasks”), you can edit the view definition. I found it most helpful to group it by status. The out-of-box statuses (statii?) in Outlook are Not Started, In Progress, Completed, Waiting for Someone Else, and Deferred. That turns out to be just about perfect for GTD task organization. I have yet to use the Deferred status; I keep the Completed group collapsed and open it when I need motivation. That leaves Not Started, In Progress, and Waiting for Someone Else. Email “next actions” that need responses go to Waiting and everything else keeps getting worked.

Okay, but what about when you need better statuses? This is where Categories come into play. I did a quick listing of categories that made sense from a “next action” perspective: phone, email, mail, computer, research, writing, errands. Then I went to the main Tasks folder, went down the list adding categories, and grouped the whole shebang by Status and Category. I also set the view to show the long description column when present, so I could glance at the list and see information like, for instance, phone numbers. Advantage: the main Tasks view can become a printable view to bring with you for errands and phone calls.

Next up: project lists and how there’s not a perfect system for tracking them in Outlook… yet. (But how one kind of project list freed me from keeping project names in the Category field.)

As mentioned last week, I’m trying to improve my workflow by looking at the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology and specifically thinking about how GTD applies to Outlook. One of the references I came across recommended some more general purpose solutions to improve Outlook that at first I couldn’t reconcile with GTD—what does a better search tool for Outlook have to do with GTD? Everything, it turns out.

I have long been a “filer” with my email. Both my home and work accounts have dozens of dedicated folders, some relating to projects, some to broad topics like “Company,” “Personal,” etc. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the problem is that of course most emails don’t fit neatly into one category, and it can be challenging to find something after I’ve filed it—which of course defeats the purpose of an organizational system.

The built in search in Outlook (I’m using Outlook XP, but I seem to recall the same problem when I used Outlook 2003 at Microsoft) doesn’t help matters much either. Searching just the content in a single folder is dog-slow, and if you want to search across all the folders in a mailbox you might as well go brew a fresh pot of coffee.

Enter Lookout, a dedicated plugin to Outlook that quickly, efficiently, and quietly indexes the contents of your Outlook mailbox and makes retrieval lightning fast. The software is so good that Microsoft bought the company a while back and uses the technology as the core of the MSN Toolbar Suite to index your whole computer. But the MSN Toolbar Suite (and Google Desktop) have always given me the willies for some reason. I don’t like running system wide utilities and I don’t necessarily see the utility of indexing everything on my hard drive when (a) most of my work is on Outlook and (b) the rest is in relational databases or on network drives. Lookout has just about the right scope for my comfort zone, and it works extremely well.

From a GTD perspective, Lookout increases my comfort with saving items for reference and getting them out of my inbox. It also makes me think critically about what I’m saving and whether I ought to be throwing some of it away (horrors!).

Confession: I am a lapsed Franklin Covey user, a former Palm user, and otherwise the former user of more productivity methodologies than I can count. So I have read Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders, a blog on implementing productivity workflows on a Mac using the Getting Things Done methodology, with healthy skepticism for the last year or so. One big knock is that for some reason Merlin’s preferred tool, Quicksilver, has always run like a dog on my system. But I finally started reading the actual Getting Things Done book and am convinced that I ought at least to give it a whirl. The idea of ruthlessly keeping the mailbox and other sources of angst clean, immediately dealing with, deleting, incubating, or delegating incoming “stuff,” and totally outsourcing your worry center, all sounds really good to me.

Except, of course, the one really good source of tips I have for GTD, 43 Folders, is all about Mac based solutions. And in spite of my long standing Mac userdom, my work environment is still a Windows XP PC running Outlook.

So I’m going to give some Outlook based solutions a whirl and talk about how they work over the next few days. First off, a few pointers to existing resources, since I’d rather not reinvent the wheel:

1. The 43 Folders wiki has a page on GTD in Outlook
2. A great, if old, summary page on setting up GTD in Outlook
3. The official ($10) resource from David Allen Company on GTD and Outlook
4. Managing GTD projects in Outlook
5. Tips, tricks, and other hints in Outlook
6. An actual GTD add-in

For a day or so, anyway. And I don’t have a lot to say, except that untangling someone’s spaghetti SQL code is even less fun to do when it’s been developed in Crystal Reports.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m griping about, thank your lucky stars.

The public beta of Internet Explorer 7 hit today. Reaction: Dave Winer, CNET, PC Magazine/ABC News/Go, PC World, RealTechNews, Ars Technica.

The ironic thing is that the folks at A List Apart posted a new CSS based fluid three column layout today, claiming they had found “The Holy Grail,” a three column layout using CSS and a minimum of browser specific hacks. Unfortunately for them, as promised, the layout breaks on the IE7 beta.

Other notes: the Google toolbar works without complaint; my home page and default search provider settings were honored, even in the new dedicated search field; RSS (or “feeds”) autodetection works as promised; the built-in RSS reader is category aware and provides some nice search and sorting features; and lots of other stuff.

Boy, is it fun to speculate and what-if today. Namely, what if this rumor is true? The one that has Steve Ballmer stepping aside as Microsoft CEO … in favor of Bill Clinton???

For one thing, you’d probably see a lot of red states joining Massachusetts’ ex-CIO in putting policies in place to get Microsoft out of their government. It would probably be the first time that open source advocates and most mouthbreathing conservatives would agree on anything.

Nonetheless, I will say that the only thing that could convince me this rumor is true would be if I looked out my window and saw pork on the wing.

(Via Scripting News.)

As long as I’m shooting my mouth off about the industry: will anyone miss Jim Allchin? The news that he’s retiring next year draws a major chapter in Microsoft’s history to a close. Allchin presided over both high and low points in Windows’s history, including Vista (f.k.a. Longhorn), which can’t decide if it wants to be the coolest thing since sliced bread or the most troubled Windows since version 3.0.

Allchin is known to be a ferocious competitor, and questions about his tactics, including the infamous Burst.com email deletion flap, have surfaced throughout his tenure. The insistence on tying Internet Explorer to Windows and “leveraging” the Windows monopoly into control of the Internet comes to mind as a less civilized moment, as does his admission in Congressional testimony that release of Windows source code would endanger national security due to flaws in the code.

Paradoxically enough, that’s one thing I will miss about Allchin: his willingness to speak up. In an industry where there are too many press release mouthers, his calling open source software an “intellectual property destroyer” was entertaining, if not as entertaining as Steve Ballmer calling it a cancer.

I only ever was in one meeting with Jim Allchin, and all I can say about him is that he was very intelligent and very hard on his people when their ideas weren’t crisply defined and clearly thought out.

I thought it was simpler in SQL Server 2000 than it turns out to be to move a database from one server to another and restore permissions. At least Microsoft provides a stored procedure to map existing SQL Server logins to users in the database being moved.

I seem to be averaging 0.8 laptops per month at this firm, not that I’m complaining. The new machine finally has enough RAM and processor power to run both our OEM’d applications and our core technology servers without breaking a sweat. Of course, there were more than a few minor things to be done in transferring everything over.

The one thing I always seem to forget is to install IIS on a new machine before upgrading to the new version of the .NET Framework. If IIS is installed when the new version of the framework is loaded, it can register ASP.NET automatically. If IIS is not installed, setting up ASP.NET is a manual process.

It’s easy enough to do, fortunately: just navigate to %system directory%Microsoft.NETFrameworkv.1.1.4322 (or whatever) and run aspnet_regiis.bat. And bounce IIS for good measure. Maybe now that I’ve written it down I won’t forget next time…

An Outlook link that popped up while I was writing the previous post, but that didn’t fit the theme, is this list of command line switches for Outlook. Most of it is break/fix stuff—reset profiles, start without extensions, etc., but some of it is useful for integration with other applications.

I was forcibly reminded yesterday that many aspects of software that we consider intuitive and automatic are actually cultural, and have nothing whatever to do with GUI design. My mini-Waterloo? Calendar management and responding to meeting invitations.

I was baptized early in my career in the religion of managing a calendar. Early on it was the Franklin Planner, which really is a religion. Then it was the calendar system in Lotus Notes. At Microsoft, of course, it was Outlook. —Of course, Microsoft takes calendar management to dizzying heights. Invitations are sent to secure half-hour chat times with someone down the hall. People spend hours looking at shared calendars for multiple individuals to find ideal meeting times. Calendars are blocked off with “work time” appointments so that you don’t get pulled away by someone who has observed that you don’t have anything scheduled for the afternoon before something is due. When you can’t find a time for everyone to meet together, you start triaging meeting attendees and making calculated decisions about who can reschedule their conflicts and who cannot be moved. And finding spare time in a conference room becomes an art in itself. All of this is done through Outlook’s interface without ever speaking to anyone.

With that as background, it is perhaps a little more understandable that I forgot that the calendar culture is a culture, and not everyone understands its rules. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when no one RSVP’d for a functional spec review for which I sent out an invitation two weeks previously. I was a little irritated that day when no one showed up, however. I spoke to my counterpart in engineering about it, and he was sanguine: “I don’t use Outlook’s calendar,” he replied. “I view the meeting invitation as a reminder about the time, and then I delete it.”

Computing is a cultural artifact. Things like the “Accept,” “Decline” buttons on invitations only have meaning in a shared context where everyone agrees on how they are used. This is one of the reasons that specs are important, of course—they provide a formal definition of an agreed shared context for how something appears and is to be used. But we can never forget that specs and user interfaces and user scenarios are just the beginning. As William Gibson wrote (several times) and I am continually relearning, “The street finds its own uses for things.” It is how your users interact with the software that defines what it can do, not what is written in the spec.

Others on the Outlook culture of meeting management: Jeremy Gilby on meeting request filtering and Kirk Allen Evans on taking a Microsoft class on using Outlook more effectively. Allister Frost is practically a computer anthropologist’s dream. Read these posts and ask yourself why you would want to filter the Outlook 2003 calendar by labels, think about sending information as tasks vs. calendar items, integrate tasks and the calendar to block out free time, memorize a keyboard shortcut to transform emails into calendar appointments, or use Outlook as a backup brain to remind yourself what you have been doing.