Miscellaneous Updates

Between Intalio, which staff doubled in size over the past six months, extensive traveling around the world (over 50,000 qualifying miles flown so far this year), the occasional extreme productivity seminar, my training for the commercial pilot license, and the time spent with my family (Cf. Father Pride), I found it difficult to maintain a regular blogging schedule lately. I’m hopeful that I’ll find the right pace eventually, but in the meantime, here are some noteworthy updates on various fronts. [Continue…]

On Salesforce.com and Google

Much has been written over the past two days on the Salesforce.com | Google partnership, and as the dust is settling down, it’s time for me to share my first impressions as a user of this pretty cool mashup. Yesterday, Marc Benioff asked me if it made Salesforce.com Office 2.0 worthy, and my reply was a resounding “Yes”. In pure Salesforce.com style, reality does not fully match the marketing hype surrounding the announcement, but this first release is real, works, and is the very best Office 2.0 integration I have seen in a long time. So let’s take a closer look. [Continue…]

Free/Busy Calendar for Salesforce.com

Scheduling meetings is a time-wasting collaborative process that no amount of technology will fix until simple APIs get supported by the most popular calendaring applications. One could use scheduling services such as the newly-released Presdo (awesome job Eric!), but it’s not (yet) integrated with Salesforce.com. So if you’re like me and are using Marc’s platform to get things done, you might be interested by this little PHP script that a couple of friends wrote for me. [Continue…]

Salesforce.com on iPhone

Salesforce.com recently demonstrated the iPhone application it will release on iTunes sometime in June. It looks great, but I really could not wait for it. Furthermore, I expect it to support only a subset of the objects I need, and certainly not the custom ones I have created to get things done. Therefore, my friend Ihab and I have been working on a proof of concept application built using an S-Control and running on the iPhone’s Safari web browser (no hacks required). [Continue…]

Extreme Productivity Seminar Slides

The first Extreme Productivity Seminar took place yesterday, and based on the feedback we received so far, the concept worked. We managed to cover the entire agenda on time, and everybody was able to build some pretty cool custom objects in Salesforce.com, and some basic integration scenarios with Gmail and LinkedIn. As promised, here are the slides we used for the event. [Continue…]

Extreme Productivity Seminar Logistics

The first Extreme Productivity Seminar has been confirmed, and will take place at the Four Seasons Hotel Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, CA (walking distance from home), on Friday, March 28th, from 9AM to 5PM (lunch included). We already got some nice coverage from Mike Gunderloy at Web Worker Daily, and my friend Oliver Starr, who now contributes to GTD Times, will join as an attendee. Here are some more details about what to expect from this day-long working session. [Continue…]

Process Discovery

While I’m putting together the liquid cooling system for my new computer, I’d like to share with you some details about the digital asset management process I am planning to manage with it, using Intalio|BPMS as development platform. Doing what most business analysts do when documenting business processes for the first time, I fired my spreadsheet editor of choice (Google Docs in this particular instance), and started filling cells up with lots of information that only human beings can understand. We’re at the process discovery stage here, and it really does not matter which tool you use for it. Nevertheless, using an online tool such as Google Docs will make it easier to share your ideas and requirements with others, and to track changes over time. So let’s take a look at what we’ve got. [Continue…]

Email Tips

Like everybody else, I have a love and hate relationship with email, and I have felt more hate than love for SMTP recently. Too many emails to keep track off, and too much spam not being filtered by my email client are contributing to spoil our already strained relationship. Nevertheless, a couple of things can be done to salvage it, especially when using Gmail. Here they are. [Continue…]

Pushing the Envelope

If you’re a test pilot, pushing the envelope is what you do to discover an aircraft’s performance limits. I’m just a private pilot, therefore I try to stay away from the boundaries of my aircraft’s envelope as much as possible. But there are other envelopes I can play with, and Office 2.0 is one of them. Over the past two years, I have conducted many experiments, attempting to do everything online. I followed the Rules for Office 2.0 religiously, and eventually made it work. Today, using an iPhone and a MacBook Air equipped with a Franklin CDU-680 3G modem, I can get online pretty much anytime and anywhere. I built an Office 2.0 Setup around Gmail and Salesforce.com, and I must say that it’s working pretty well. So, what’s next? Well, all this works when you’re managing megabytes of structured data and gigabytes of documents. But what about hundreds of gigabytes of structured data and tens of terabytes of documents? Can you make the overall workflow scale by three or four orders of magnitude? This is one of the questions I will try to answer over the coming months, and I will make sure to share my progress on this blog. [Continue…]

Extreme Productivity Seminar

Between Intalio, the Office 2.0 Conference, my flight training as a commercial pilot, and my duties as father of an 11 months old baby girl, I tend to be fairly busy, and many people I meet wonder how I manage to fit all this into regular 24 hour days. In theory, the answer is pretty simple: apply David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology religiously, and use the best tools money can buy. In practice though, it takes a lot of personal discipline, and building a working system took many trials and errors. Today, this Extreme Productivity System is working pretty well, and I have decided to share it with anyone interested. [Continue…]

Office 2.0 Conference 2008

The third edition of the Office 2.0 Conference will take place at the St. Regis Hotel, San Francisco, CA, on September 3-5, 2008. The event’s format will be similar to last year’s, learning from the valuable lessons we received along the way. Please feel free to contact us for details on speaking and sponsorship opportunities.

I Saw the Billboard

Lunarr.com

Marc Orchant

Today is a sad day for we lost a great friend. Rest in peace Marc.

Givre matinal
Avec ma canne je dessine
Le Mont Fuji

Industrial Design

I just received my first Apple Wireless Keyboard, and once again I am amazed at Apple’s mastery of the art of industrial design. This little piece of anodized aluminum is a thing of beauty, from the clean one-piece design (extruded profile), to the machined stainless steel cap for the battery compartment, and to the microscopic laser-drilled holes that make a green LED appear out of nowhere when the device is turned on. Absolutely, positively amazing. [Continue…]

Dock Redux

Now that we have dramatically simplified our design for the Redux Model 1 tablet, time has come to focus on its accessories. Developing the concept for a magnetic keyboard was fun, but it’s not really practical, and there is no way we could bring that to market by September next year. Beside, we’re not convinced that blending the dock and the keyboard into a single accessory is that good of an idea anyway. Instead, we have decided to take a modular approach, and to develop a standalone dock instead, complemented by off the shelf matching accessories, such as Apple’s iPod Touch, Wireless Keyboard, and Bluetooth Headset. [Continue…]

Revision Four

Over the past two weeks, we added many features to our marketing requirements for the Redux Model 1. This gave us a sense for what could be done. Then, we ruthlessly trimmed the feature set down, which allowed us to discover what should be done. Following this process, we researched which alternative chipsets could best support our requirements, and stumbled upon Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon. From the very little information currently available, it looks like we found a perfect match, assuming that we could source the necessary components, and follow an extremely aggressive development schedule. [Continue…]

Who Needs Connectors?

Now that we got rid of all buttons, we’re taking a hard look at the connectors and slots offered by the Redux Model 1, trying to limit their number to the bare minimum, or to get rid of them altogether. This is a pretty radical approach, but our device is a pretty radical one anyway, so why not? [Continue…]

Who Needs Buttons?

Yesterday, we reviewed some questions regarding the design of the Redux Model 1, including how many buttons we wanted to offer. Compared to Apple’s iPhone, we went from 4 to 2, then from 2 to 1. Today, we’re questioning whether we need any buttons at all. In fact, we’re convinced that we do not, and the Redux Model 1 might very well become the first personal computing device designed with no buttons. [Continue…]

Bill of Materials and Open Questions

At Monolab, the company organizing the Office 2.0 Conference, we like to eat our own dog food and put our money where our mouth is. For this reason, the first two editions of the conference were organized using Office 2.0 tools only (more on our setup there). We will do the same for the third edition, but we would like to raise the bar a bit too. Quite a bit in fact, so much so that we have decided to build the Redux Model 1 using the very same tools. That should make for an interesting challenge and a good learning experience, which we will keep documenting on this blog. [Continue…]

Computer on Module

The development of the Redux Model 1 is switching to overdrive. Yesterday, we found a partner for the industrial design and the multi-touch interface. Today, we identified one for the Computer on Module, which is the most complex part of the overall project. Here is what it will look like. [Continue…]