Practical Productivity - The Power of "Presence"

Where is he?
Is he at his desk?
Is he on the phone?
Is he even at the office today?
Can he answer one quick question?

Have you ever asked any of the above about a fellow employee? These kinds of questions can become real productivity blockers in today's fast-paced work environment. I've stopped asking those questions since we installed Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) and Microsoft Communicator clients at our office. Our company is now "presence-enabled" with OCS. When I open Communicator, I can see at a glance who is working at their desk by a green button next to their name. If they are away from their computer for 5 minutes, the button turns yellow. If they are offline, their name is grayed out. When a fellow worker is across the building or maybe even in another location this simple list becomes a big help.
 

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Welcome to another edition of Gigabytes.

Apple's iPad
Apple's recent unveiling of the iPad has got gadget and technology geeks champing at the bit again. Apple's track record for device innovation is unsurpassed in modern times. Apple is such an interesting company because they continue to release new devices and market directly to the consumer. These consumer-friendly devices provide functionality which often exceeds that of what you will find implemented within your corporate environment. Think about that. Many of us use our PCs for 8-10 consecutive hours each day to conduct our daily business (read: make money). Then, when we hang it up for the day, we might listen to our iPod on the drive home or call our spouse from our iPhone to see if tonight's dinner requires us to stop somewhere before we get home. As business users, we are provisioned a PC by our employer. But when we get to decide for ourselves what to buy, an overwhelming number of us go with these Apple products. Some say that these $200-$500 Apple devices deliver a more satisfying experience than that of our work PC. But, is that because the technology is superior (read: more feature rich and user-friendly)? Or, is it because those Apple devices address consumers' desire for new and more convenient entertainment and communication?

This product launching finds Apple in unfamiliar territory. With the iPad they are not introducing a superior product to an existing market, as was the case with the iPod & the digital music market or the iPhone & the smartphone market. The iPad is somewhat of a new product category which fits somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop. There's certainly consumer demand for such a device. What remains to be seen is whether the iPad provides enough laptop-like functions to inspire today's knowledge workers to make the trip to the Apple Store and plunk down $500-$800.

My PC seems Boring
Sure, our office PCs may lag behind the Apple devices in the fashion and entertainment departments, but in this month's edition of Gigabytes I would like to call attention to how Microsoft is blazing the trail in development of technologies that enhance company-wide productivity (read: improved ROI on the huge and perpetual payroll expense). On the right column you will see an article from Bill Gates about how he conducts his daily business on three monitors. Three monitors? We just got done encouraging most PCS clients to upgrade to dual monitors. While a third monitor (and the required video cards) for each user still meets serious resistance from the CFO's office, with 19" displays at ~$130 and dropping, it won't be long until even the receptionist is surrounded by flat panels.

Over the years, we at PCS have enjoyed many version upgrades of Microsoft's Office Suite. Office 2010 is set to release in June of this year and we are excited about the latest enhancements, especially for Outlook. However, in the history of Microsoft Office there's not one upgrade to Excel, Word, PowerPoint, or Outlook that has changed the way we PC Solutionites work more than our 2009 implementation of our "Presence" application, provided by Microsoft's Office Communication Server. Tele-presence has affected the way all 34 of us work, every hour of every day. At first blush, many of our clients struggle with how tele-presence would drive value to their company's bottom line. Initially, we thought of tele-presence as a nicety, a gadget that may offer some conveniences. Today, we wonder how we ever functioned without it.

Mark Your Calendars
We've been doing some pretty big changes at our existing facility on East River Road and we would like to invite you over to show you what's new. Please mark your calendars for an evening at PCS Thursday, April 22nd 2010. We encourage you to stop by our newly improved Support Center and see how our engineers use as many as six (yes that's right, SIX!) monitors to conduct their remote support sessions . . .

To your continued success,

Chris Geiser
cgeiser@pcstechnology.com
 

PC Solutions is able to balance the technical stuff with what makes common business sense. Our PC Solutions representative is always focused on return on investment.

Bay West, Inc. is a growing national environmental and industrial services firm. The company's solutions - from environmental investigation and waste management to emergency spill response and industrial cleaning - provide peace of mind to its customers. Bay West expects the same level of responsiveness and assurance from its IT provider, PC Solutions. In meeting these expectations, PC Solutions has earned the trust of Bay West, which relies on PC Solutions to keep the Bay West network running smoothly and help the company make smart IT investments.
 

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If you visit my office, you will probably notice right away that I have three large flat screen displays that sit together and are synchronized so they work like a single very wide display. The large display area enables me to work very efficiently. I keep my Outlook 2007 Inbox open on the screen to the left so I can see new messages as they come in. I usually have the message or document that I'm currently reading or writing in the center screen. The screen on the right is where I have room to open up a browser or look at a document that someone has sent me in e-mail.

I spend the majority of my time communicating with colleagues, customers, and partners. As a result, Outlook is the application that I use the most. I receive about 100 e-mail messages per day from Microsoft employees, and many more from customers and partners.

It's very important that I hear what people think about our products and our company. Yet I need to balance that against the very real risk of information overload from all the e-mail that I receive. The advances we made in Outlook 2007 for filtering, rules, and search folders have made it much easier to manage my e-mail than before, especially because so much happens automatically once I've set everything up.

A great thing is that all my voice mail, faxes, and even instant messages are sent to my Outlook Inbox using our unified communications technology. Another important feature of unified communications that we have integrated into Office applications is presence and identity. That means I can always tell at a glance whether the person I need to get in touch with is available or not.

One change to Outlook that I appreciate is tasks are now integrated with how I view my calendar.
 

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