Topic: Office

Open Office (Not The Software Version)

Noel Rappin, Friday, April 4, 2008 @ 2:10 pm

Here's another episode of using another blogger as an excuse to write about something I'm interested in. Dan Benjamin wrote about office layout, specifically the advantages of being by yourself for getting in the Zone.

Here at Pathfinder Central, most developers are in an open setting, in blocks of four desks placed with two facing the other two. Frankly, I thought I was going to hate it. Most of my previous experience has been in cube farms of various shapes and sizes, and I had many of Benjamin's concerns about an open developer area.

I have to say that for the most part, my concerns haven't been borne out -- I like the layout, and I think that the overall effect of the setup on team productivity is positive.

Now, there are some things we do here that help that out. One is a strong sense that the open area should be kept quiet when possible. It's not unusual to have more than a dozen people working in the open area and have it be absolutely silent. It also helps when there are a few places for people to go to have conversations without disturbing the open area.

Most of the time, I don't find getting into "The Zone" to be much of an issue in this setup -- or at least not any more of an issue then it was in a typical cubicle setup. Cubicles don't really mask noise, and I actually find it less distracting when I can see the people making the noise then when it's a disembodied voice coming from the cube down the hall. In that sense, cubicles are the worst of both worlds, the isolation of an office with the distractions of an open bullpen.

On the flip side, there are a lot of benefits to the open setup for working in teams. The most important is the ease of supporting pair programming. Most of the cube layouts I've been in made it very difficult to pair, generally because the either the desk space or the amount of chair space in the cube wasn't conducive to having two people looking at the same screen. In our setup here, it's trivial for two people to pair. The overall layout is more flexible -- it's easier for developers to move from desk to desk to support changing teams. It's also easier for a small team to share knowledge and ask questions of each other.

In this setup, anything that makes it easier for developers to move around and work with each other is a good thing. Wireless networking, or at least multiple, easy to reach network plugs helps. Laptops with a lot of external monitors that are easy to plug in to helps. Desks that have enough open foot space to allow a second char to be pulled up. About half of my team (including me) works from home at least one day a week. My own experience is that there are some tasks that are easier at home (most notably, technical writing), it's nice not to commute, but overall, I don't find myself significantly more focused when at home. It's a mixed bag.

Which isn't to say that the setup is perfect. It's still possible for arguments passionate discussion between two people to be heard and distract across our space. Ease of asking another team member questions can quickly become ease of distracting another team member with the lasted xkcd strip. Or so I've heard.

I don't think there's a perfect setup, but I've been surprised at how much benefit there has been to an open layout for my team.

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Product Watch – Nusearch.com and Zohoshow

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, June 23, 2006 @ 2:12 pm

Two new AJAX flavored products launched today: Nusearch.com, a search engine with AJAX whizbang, and Zohoshow, the last piece in the Zoho Office Suite, a replacement for MS Office that includes Zohowriter.

As of this writing, it looks that Nusearch, with all it's AJAX innovations, has succumbed to the first day onslaught. I'll try and update this post when I manage to get through.

As for Zohoshow, it's basic, allows you to import existing Powerpoint files. Don't expect to do any charts or graphs or animations, though.

I've said before that presentations are just about the last thing for which I would want to depend on network connectivity. How many conference rooms have you been in that didn't give you access to the outside world?

Update 1: Nusearch came back up. Yes, there's some AJAX there, but in my opinion it's rather annoying. The search engine will let you preview their cached version of a page just by mousing over it's entry. It's so twitchy, though, because the table rows are close together. Also, the preview is really no better than a frame or iframe. Snooze. From a pure search perspective, it doesn't seem to do a very good job of sifting and ranking. The search results have a somewhat spammy feel to them.

I like dzone's little popup screenshot much better.

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Google Spreadsheet Available for Limited Test

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, June 6, 2006 @ 11:21 pm

Holy collaborative spreadsheets Batman! Looks like Google is getting on the killer app bandwagon with their new spreadsheet offering. It's only available in their lab environment to select invities. From the announcement and the google blog post, it looks exciting. I especially liked this bit:

Real-time collaboration: Google Spreadsheets can be
shared, updated and edited by several users at the same time, in
real-time, saving users from the hassle of manually consolidating
multiple spreadsheets from others. Users can also chat while editing or
viewing the same spreadsheet and control who may edit and view their
shared spreadsheets by listing the specific people by email address.

This has me feeling almost prophetic. If google comes out with a private label version, I may never use Excel again.

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Quick Update: Collaborative Spreadsheet

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, June 1, 2006 @ 9:00 am

Ajaxian alerts us that Jotspot has partnered with Salesforce.com to produce a collaborative spreadsheet-like application.

Check out the inner popups, formulas, security selections, etc. This
really shows how you can build an application that looks like a desktop
app but also has the mashup ability shown off too.

In this case the Salesforce.com application provides the backend model for the collaborative spreadsheet application. It does more than just provide a spreadsheet, however. It includes task tracking and calendaring.

What are Jotspot's plans for the application going forward? From the original article:

The salesforce.com/Tracker partnership is a good example of Jotspot's
strategy to "embrace and extend Microsoft", which Jotspot CEO Joe Kraus
and I spoke about previously in my post in March.
With JotSpot Tracker integrated into salesforce.com, there is no need
to download Excel files to the desktop - because everything is
available on the Web via the Salesforce service. Which of course is one
of the steps towards a Web Office suite!

Embrace Microsoft? That had better be a massive bearhug. Good luck.

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Collaborative Spreadsheets: The Killer AJAX App?

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, May 3, 2006 @ 9:00 am

Management abhors a vacuum. That's why when there are no workable information systems in place, spreadsheets and email chains spring up to fill the gap. Anyone who has tried to tame one of these organic sneaker-nets knows how hard they are to uproot.

One of the reasons they are so resilient is that they work pretty well for the users involved. The user interface is familiar to all of them, and writing a spreadsheet is a heck of a lot easier than writing reports in crystal and entering data in a disconnected and unwieldy forms interface.

The downsides for the larger business are, of course, the reason why senior management typically tries to eradicate theses ad hoc systems is that their business data is stuck, unversioned and unverified, in employees inboxes and file-systems. They break down as they grow and as spreadsheets are invariably modified, often in incompatible directions, in response to changing and growing business requirements.

The response is to implement a variety of replacement solutions: Knowledge Management Systems, data entry and reporting solutions, work-flow and OPM systems. These solutions tend to be expensive, slow to implements, and ultimately unsatisfying replacements.

Why not embrace the spreadsheet and integrate it with the KM/work-flow/reporting systems? Collaborative spreadsheets, with roll-ups, entitlements, work-flow -- the killer App of the AJAX era? There are already a few AJAX spreadsheets -- Num Sum has a good one -- and in a blast from the past, Dan Briklin, one of the creators of VisiCalc, is working on WikiCalc. Don't get too excited. WikiCalc doesn't have any of those necessary things -- work-flow, roll-ups, reporting -- that would make this a killer app.

Bit even if the perfect solution comes along in a few months, that's no guarantee of success. One secret to implementing information systems that are successfully adopted is this: eliminate the competition. In the case of a collaborative spreadsheet system this means eliminating email attachments, desktop spreadsheet applications, shared file-stores, etc. The AJAX collaborative spreadsheet may be a little ways away from being able to replace the current desktop solutions, but their time may come.

At any rate, these office apps are unlikely to be Microsoft's Pearl Harbor or anyone elses.

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Software Development

Zohowriter – an Ajax based word processor

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, April 3, 2006 @ 9:00 am

These word processors are springing up like weeds. YAAWP (Yet Another Ajax Word Processor) is Zohowriter.  By only beef so far is that it has a few defects and doesn't seem to behave quite like a desktop Word Processor. In particular, the text properties in the formatting bar don't always change when selecting text in the document.

So, are all of these word processors actually useful, or is the word processor to Ajax applications what the chess program was to AI, aka "the drosophila of AI?"

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