This is awesome! Exactly what I needed!

Best regards
 -Ismael

Your piece talked quite a bit about W-9 forms… Well, EchoSign has launched a free W-9 signing tool. Now you can get your W-9s signed, faxed back, and PDF’d in seconds.

Could it be that ISO will become the starting point for BPM? There probably are thousands of small, medium and large companies that are ISO certified, but have yet to look at BPM.

Gold mining rush to start anytime now!

This week, I had the amazing opportunity to attend the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I would just like to say a very public congratulations to Ismael Ghalimi and the team at IT|Redux I found the conference to be…

I do not know if this belong here, but here it is anyway:

I have a BlackBerry which serves as my ultimate mobile access, and just the other day I found a great application called SoonR that offers mobile access to your desktop/laptop files, e-mail, calendar and pretty much anything else that you allow it to.

I’ve been using it for a week now, and I think it’s fantastic. Check it out and let me know what you think. If you can find/know of a different and/or better application, let us all know. To me SoonR is really great.

Thanks,

-Ryan

One aspect which seems to have been missed is the opportunity for us to move from the monolithic “Swiss Army Penknife” approach which Microsoft Office exemplifies (and OpenOffice.org is imitating).

It is an oft quoted statistic (though where the original came from I don’t know) that users typically only want or need 20% of Microsoft Office — but different users need different slices.

I personally would like to see Office 2.0 develop along the Unix lines of one tool does one thing well. The concept of a basic tool with plug-ins to allow users to customize is exemplified in Firefox — I can choose which plugins suit my needs and import those — and leave out those I don’t want or don’t like.

I believe that this approach can redusce bloat AND allow everyone to have what they want. Darwinism will work to ensure that popular extensions are added and supported whilst gimmicks, eye candy and less useful bloat is left out.

Come on! let’s stop playing catch-up with an inefficient model, and start leading with a lean, mean and efficient paradigm.

With all due respect, you are correct — nobody will ever win the catch-up game. I humbly suggest we give this game up. What Office 2.0 presents is a paradigm shift — an opportunity for the industry to take a fundamental leap and focus on the collaborative features that make a difference.

I use OpenOffice daily, and I have no idea what the majority of features being cloned are — yet I still get what needs getting done. We are already seeing 2.0 application dump extraneous features in favor of smoothing out critical collaborative features, such as concurrent editing, to name one of many.

As a fellow PM-in-training, I look forward to working with everyone in this space to whittle down the what is on our critical path. What I’d love to see our community draw is the critical path for Office 2.0 — a collaborative matrix of components that constantly shifts, thus resulting in some kind of console dynamically prioritizing, based on our continued input. One such input is what use cases we each envision to make the biggest impact in our everyday projects!

Who’s game?

I’ve done a cursory review of eProject. The way I see it, it is a very IT-oriented Project Management Package based on a subscription business model (Software as a Service or Service Bureau in the old days). It is not an enterprise level Program, Portfolio, and Project Management Package. What I am talking about is a “Product Life Cycle” and Performance based PPBS (Planning, Programming, Budgeting System) that links to Balanced Scorecard, Requirements Management, AB/C/B/M (Activity Based Costing, Budgeting, and Management), and Configuration Management in light of CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration all the way to level 5 — Optimization). I am not sure that eProject can support Critical Chain yet for project buffer management!

Office 2.0 has a long way to go. My experience tells me that Office 2.0 can never catch up with OpenOffice, which in turn can never catch up with MS Office that keeps on evolving with more sharing and collaboration features in all modes of communication. I don’t think extensibility, interoperativity, and re-usable templates are part of the Office 2.0 requirements! Moreover, in it’s current form (AJAX and SOA), Office 2.0 is not yet standard compliant to W3C’s Accessibility and CC (Common Criteria — C2) for security.

I am sure that subscription based software in general is cheaper than owning and maintaining licensed software. There is a catch though. You must have a fault-tolerant connection to the Internet — meaning, no single point of failure ranging from duplexed land-line, cellular, satellite, or a combination of these.

-Francis

I am a project manager (aren’t we all?), and in a previous life I used to design, build, and install chemical plants. As such, like yourself, I find the current Web 2.0 project management tools lacking in features and performance.

Just like you, I run a program (or portfolio of projects), I need to see critical paths and/or chains, I need to to work breakdown, assign and monitor tasks, etc. In my mind, this requires:

- an organization — or PMO
- a PM methodology - PMBOK, Prince, CC, etc.
- PM tools: Primavera, Microsoft Project, etc.
- communication tools: e-mail, phone, fax, meetings, etc.

I think Office 2.0 tools in the project management space are aiming at combining the last two, in order to offer a management/collaboration set of tools that (hopefully) greatly enhances execution.

Think back how many Gantt charts, reports, and memos you did print on average over the lifetime of a project. How many e-mails, phone calls and faxes have you made/sent? How many meetings have you attended where significant travel dollars were spent? I used to work for an Australian company that probably spent well over a million dollars in travel annualy for project-related meetings.

So, while I acknowledge that the feature set is in its infancy, I welcome the collaboration/communication features that point to the future of work. On top of all this, add on-demand, SaaS features, and the lowered IT costs, and you have a winner — hopefully in the not too distant future.

I am sure you know of this already, but I would point you to eProject as a mature tool in that regard, though not exactly Web 2.0 in the strict sense. I feel your pain — try to feel my excitement!

I would give it three to five years. Then it will surpass Excel, for you’ll be able to tap from online computing resources to conduct very complex simulations that a single desktop computer just cannot handle. Accountability of the data manipulated online in such a fashion will also be improved, which will have a significant impact from a compliance and regulatory standpoint.

I sure am a demanding user. In the early 70’s, when conducting large scale studies, I had to use several stand alone packages such as: MPSX (Mathematical Programming System Extended), GPSS (General Purpose Simulation System), and SPSS or Bi-med statistical packages. Preparation of input data and transformation of output from one package to be input of another package consumed a significant amount of time. Don’t forget, keypunch card days! Each package had its own coding language too.

With Excel’s Solver, most of the problems of the 70’s disappeared. Excel is currently the most used package for teaching OR (Operations Research) in most if not all first tier universities, incluing MIT, Harvard, U of T, etc.

Will Office 2.0 replace Excel in one, two, or three years?

OR is one discipline that many large enterprises (e.g. US Government Departments, particularly DoD, DOT, and DOE) rely on to sustain its competive edge or superiority.

-Francis

You’re an Office power user, and Office 2.0 won’t be ready for the type of use you’re making of your office productivity suite before quite some time. But you’ll also find that Office 2.0 can do things that Office 1.0 cannot, especially when it comes to collaboration and mobility. At the end of the day, it’s only a matter of priorities.

I read the capabilities of Projity. The advantages of Projity, as compared to the MS-Project 2003, are that it can run on several client platforms (through JAVA). With MS-Project 2007, which is Office 2.0 compatible, a web-browser is all a user needs, regardless of the client platform (the beauty of AJAX and SOA) to run MS Office Suite 2007.

Moreover, Project Management is much more than those capabilities listed on Projity’s web site. It overlaps with performance management (Balanced Scorecard), portfolio managment, program management, and requirements management — the basis for product life cycle management in Systems Engineering, which oversees all disciplines including IT, from inception to disposal of a product.

I am a very demanding user of all systems, Office Suite included. All my IT projects must meet with stringent user requirments. Perhaps, I am an end-user advocate too!

By the way, Ismael, which version of an Office 2.0 spreadsheet can support Simulation and OR (Operatonal/Operations Research) in Statistical Analyses and Optimizatons (e.g. Analysis of Variance and Mixed Integer Programming)?

Of course, Office 2.0 will evolve overtime. For now, it can do most of the rudimentary functions.

-Francis

Glad to see you back!

Take a look at Projity. It’s getting there. Zoho Project does not have Microsoft Project’s sophistication yet, but it’s plenty enough for a lot of project management tasks, and the user interface is extremely well thought-out. I don’t think it will only take a year for Office 2.0 to catch up with it’s 1.0 counterpart in terms of features, but I don’t think that we need such a thing to happen before Office 2.0 hits the mainstream. It should be fun anyway…

Yes, ISO 9000 should be a great driver for BPM moving forward.

I couldn’t agree with you more that Microsoft Outlook would not cut it to support what you attempted to do. One question remains. Have you tried Infopath by any chance?

There is a good chance that Microsoft will demo the 2007 Microsoft Office suite including all standard packages (Word, Excel, Access, etc.) and other packages such as Visio, Infopath, Project, FrontPage, etc. with collaborative servers (e.g. Sharepoint).

My experience with the latest Office 2.0 suite so far is that they collectively fall short of even Office 2003 in capabilities, let alone 2007! Let me give you an example. Does any of the current Office 2.0 project management applications supports EVM (Earned Value Management — an ANSI Standard) and Critical Chain (a field-proven project scheduling and management tool)? Another example. Can each of the Office 2.0 application embed objects (tables, graphics, texts, audios, etc.) and get updates from the sources automatically?

If Office 2.0 can catch up and surpass the capabilities of Microsoft’s Office suite in a year after the inaugural Office 2.0 Conference, I will be all for it and dump Microsoft Office suite!

Keep up the good work.

-Francis