June 2009 Archives

From the I-had-no-idea-this-existed department: Microsoft has a downloadable Lotus Notes plugin that provides integrated support for scheduling Live Meeting sessions and meetings hosted by OCS 2007. (It doesn't yet support OCS 2007 R2, sad to say.)

Craig Roth has a great blog post up on e-mail overload and how "attention management" technologies can help reduce the burden on us puny humans. I thought I'd take a stab at describing how Outlook, Entourage, and Exchange 2010 implement attention management technologies. (You'll probably want to refer to this map as you read the below points). I've taken Craig's bulleted list and added notes about how Exchange + Outlook support (or don't support) each proposed attention management feature.

• Scheduled delivery: Outlook and Exchange have supported scheduled sending for some time; you can schedule a message to be sent "not before" a certain time, or just in the next send/receive. However, there's no built-in way to schedule receiving. This would be fairly simple to implement via an Outlook plugin (or Entourage AppleScript) that switches the client to offline mode until it's time to pick up new mail.
• Maintain whitelists to bypass blocks and delays: this would be tricky to implement if scheduled delivery were implemented using my crude method of going offline, and I'm not sure how useful it would be anyway.
• “Move to discussion” greys out “reply”: A "move to discussion" feature would be a great addition to Outlook, and (from Microsoft's perspective) would be desirable as a way to drive people to SharePoint.
• Automated routing and prioritizing: this is a wicked-hard problem. Microsoft's solving it by letting you build workflows that manage e-mail, so that organizations can build workflows to handle incoming e-mail, IM, and voice traffic according to whatever rules make sense. This isn't really an end-user-targeted capability, though.
• Un-bury turning off or freezing of “toasts”: I prefer to work with toasts turned off altogether, but I understand that some people want them. Craig's right, though, that it should be easier to toggle this functionality. One easy thing for Microsoft to do would be to integrate "do not disturb" mode in Communicator with the Outlook equivalent. This already sort-of-works (e.g. during a full-screen PowerPoint presentation you don't get toasts) but it could be made better.
• Enable e-mail hyperlinking: does anyone remember the Exchange 2000 Web Storage System? Every item in the store had its own uniquely addressable URL, but this turned out to be pretty much useless in the real world. This is less an attention management issue than an e-mail data management issue; there's little storage penalty to forwarding messages once they already exist.
• Enable role-based profiles: Craig's idea is to provide a mechanism for defining standard profiles that control attention-related policies. Based on my experience, I think this would go over poorly, as most executives insist on having highly personalized workspaces. Regardless of what I think, though, Microsoft doesn't provide a way to do this at present.
• Enable sender tagged e-mails: this is one area where the tools available in Outlook and Exchange far outpace their actual use. I need to do a separate post on message classifications, retention tags, and all the other sender-tagging goodness.
• Stop attachment abuse: Outlook already supports sending documents to a document workspace or shared library, although this feature is buried somewhat (and Entourage doesn't have it at all, sadly).
• Presence-enable recipient lists: Outlook already does this, in spades. The below picture shows a number of Outlook's built-in presence capabilities, including automatic display of presence icons for presence-enabled users, enhanced status (like "away for XXX" or out-of-office messages), and click-to-communicate with multiple communications modes.
• 
• Enable group-based rules: Exchange and Outlook don't currently do this, although you can simulate some aspects of it with query-based distribution groups. Honestly, though, this strikes me as only marginally useful; I'd probably rank it close to last in terms of which features I'd rather see first.
• Turn e-mail into generic small-content tool: Not a bad idea, although I think you could use a much lighter-weight tool like the excellent Windows Live Writer to do this more easily.
• Manage multiple inboxes: this is a tremendously useful feature of Entourage, which has long supported multiple Exchange accounts. Outlook 2010 is reported to support multiple Exchange accounts too; I'll post a more detailed article on this once Microsoft releases publicly-available bits.
• Provide inbox analytics: this sounds like the kind of cool but not-very-practical feature that analysts love :) I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but it's not clear to me that having analytical data is actually going to change anyone's use or misuse of e-mail.
• Token systems: see previous bullet. What if you run out of tokens? Do you just quit work for the rest of the day?
• Remind sender if no reply: I have to do this manually, either through CRM or a manual task, so I'd love a button that would automatically create a task to remind me to follow up if no reply is received by a certain date. This would be simple to script in either Entourage or Outlook.

There are a couple of Outlook and Exchange features that Craig didn't mention that I think fit into his taxonomy. Chief among them is the new "Ignore" functionality in Outlook 2010 and OWA 2010; when you ignore a thread, the client silently creates a server-side rule to automatically delete messages in the same conversation, so that you just don't see them. (An alternate name for this feature, the "mute button", better describes it IMHO). It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft makes a move to include more attention management functionality in future versions of Office and Exchange. I bet they will, given MSR's investment in this research area, but we'll have to wait for Office/Exchange v.Next to see for sure.

[ Updated on 23 June 2009 to fix a couple of mistakes and add a few new tidbits ]

Last summer I wrote a post about the utility of the iPhone 2.0 as an e-mail device for people, like me, who are heavy e-mail users. Now that the 3.0 release of the iPhone OS is upon us, I wanted to post an update to see what Apple's fixed, or not, from the original complaints. I had hoped to get some hands-on time with a Palm Pre as well, but haven't quite made it there yet. However, I have spent some time using the version of Outlook Mobile from Windows Mobile 6.5, so that's now my baseline standard for comparison.

Executive summary: Apple invested a ton of time in the 3.0 release, but most of it went to other aspects of the OS, not into the messaging and calendaring experience.

Policy and account control

I didn't spot any changes here. The big one I was hoping for was the ability to create and manage multiple Exchange ActiveSync accounts. Sadly, Apple didn't include this. The extended policies in EAS version 12 (like forced disablement of the camera or Bluetooth) still aren't supported. You still can't install your own certificates, either.

[Update]: As Chris Haaker pointed out in the comments, you can indeed disable the camera using Exchange 2007 EAS; for a complete list of the policies 3.0 supports, see this doc at Apple's site; and, of course, you can install your own certs by e-mailing them to the device, using the over-the-air configuration utility, or distributing profiles with the utility. In addition, Apple improved certificate support quite a bit: 3.0 adds the ability to provide client certs for authentication, and it now uses OCSP for checking certificate validity online instead of depending on static CRLs.

E-mail

In my initial review, I started with basic e-mail operations. These are essentially unchanged: the look and feel of the Mail application is identical to the 2.0 version for the most part. The annoying automatic expansion of EVERY SINGLE FOLDER YOU HAVE is still there. You still cannot delete messages while the iPhone is offline. Instead of fixing this issue, Apple has chosen to deactivate the "delete" icon on the message toolbar. However, when you're in the message list view, you can still use the swipe-to-delete gesture, or the Edit button, to delete a message... and then you get the same error that the message can't be moved to the trash. Fail.

You can queue replies or forwards while offline, which is a welcome improvement.

One area where Windows Mobile 6.5 really shines in comparison to the iPhone is in the new conversation view for e-mail. There are a number of other WM 6.5 mail improvements that I won't cover here; suffice to say that the new Outlook Mobile extends Microsoft's lead by providing a better pro-level e-mail experience than the iPhone 3.0 does. Apple could definitely improve things just by using the correct EAS verbs for reply and forward, though, which they still don't do

Oh, that bug with not properly sending IMAP EXPUNGE commands to remove deleted messages: still there. I guess Apple thinks it's a feature.

Calendar

If you didn't like the iPhone 2.0 calendaring experience, you won't find much to change your mind here. You can now create meeting invitations for your Exchange calendar (but not for your MobileMe calendar, a baffling omission given that MobileMe is marketed as a service useful for families). I am hopeful that the forthcoming Exchange support in Apple's Snow Leopard OS will force Apple to make iCal more useful, and that those changes will ripple out to the iPhone. Until then, though, Windows Mobile still kills the iPhone in calendaring usability.

Speaking of usability: since my original review I found a few more annoyances:

• meeting cancellation notices show up on your calendar as "Canceled:whatever"; there's no way for you to use the cancellation notice to remove the event.
• If you receive an invitation on the device, then accept it from the desktop or OWA, it will still show up in the calendar app as a pending invite until you try to open it.
• You still can't see .ics files that arrive in IMAP-connected Exchange accounts. Fortunately, Exchange 2010 includes an OWA link in meeting invites, so you can click the link to jump into OWA and accept the invitation there.

[Update] One nice addition that I forgot to mention: when you get an invitation, you can see where it falls on your calendar, and there's a new disclosure chevron next to meetings you create that lets you view the status of the invitees (provided you're using Exchange 2007).

  

Tasks

Nope. This is another promised Snow Leopard feature that will hopefully make an appearance on the iPhone at some point. In the meantime, I've been using imTasks, which works flawlessly with all of my Exchange accounts. I also tried TaskTask, which has a somewhat nicer interface but which hasn't worked very well for me.

Contacts

Steve Foskett summarizes this better than I could. Bottom line: it's like the Mac OS X Address Book in your pocket, with all the good and bad that entails. No support for contact public folders, no way to add a GAL contact to your own contact list, and a 100% chance of getting duplicates if you use Entourage + Sync Services to sync contacts to the device through MobileMe.

New iPhone 3GS features [UPDATE]

Apple says that the 3GS has "hardware encryption". It's not really clear exactly what this means. In the enterprise deployment guide, This blog entry suggests that remote wipe is so much faster on the 3GS because it's essentially a decommissioning operation-- erase the master encryption key for the device and you've effectively erased all its data. I haven't seen any confirmation of that, though, and it's not clear what other value there is to encrypting data on the device given that apps are sandboxed and there's effectively no external storage. (You also can't force encryption on with EAS, as you can on Windows Mobile).

Let me save you the effort of reading this cynical and depressing book: the good guys lose. All of them, in fact: the lawyers who go nearly half a million dollars in debt financing their client's suit against an egregious polluter, the plaintiff herself, a Mississippi Supreme Court justice running for re-election, and even the candidate who replaces her. The only winner is a slimy, money-grubbing billionaire. I don't expect every book I read to be Pollyanna, but I was surprised by the degree of cynical commentary that Grisham slipped in here. Not recommended.

Normally I plan my trips well in advance, but not this time! I went to San Jose to meet with a customer on short notice. How did my routine differ?

First, I packed ultralight. Toiletres and fresh clothes went into my laptop bag, meaning that I didn't need a separate bag.

Second, I went reservationless. I dent reserve my rental car until I was on the airplane. I didn't reserve my hotel until I was parked in its parking lot. This was slightly nervewracking, but it gave me maximum flexibility to accomodate my customer's schedule.

Now I just want to get home!

I mentioned this during my TechEd session (which, btw, will also be the topic of a TechNet webcast in August), but I forgot to link to it. There's a pretty good white paper available explaining the ins and outs of virtualizing OCS 2007 R2. In skimming it I was surprised to find that Microsoft doesn't support virtualizing the update server; I'll have a more in-depth analysis once I have a chance to read it more thoroughly.