Test
scscascsac
Blog
Cap Gemini teams with Google Apps
I think this is big news...
"Google has linked up with IT consultancy and outsourcing specialist CapGemini to target corporate customers with its range of desktop (er, web) applications, in the search engine's most direct move against the dominance of Microsoft."
The Guardian has the rejigged press release, and Nick Carr has more detail.
I've just posted a fairly long post about this on Participo; I'll pull out some of my key points that I think are pertinent to where I see relevance to ThinkFold.
Massive growth in collaborating outside of the Outlook address book
The ability to collaborate 'outside of the Exchange group' is starting to become a real issue. I see this with clients who've outsourced key business processes, and then hit a wall when it comes to meaningful collaboration with these companies.
More nuanced, 'brainstorming' requirement between employees, partners
Hosting spreadsheets and word processing 'between' these organisational groups is an obvious solution - but that focuses on the 'paper shuffling' bit of the process, what about the less structured, but critical brainstorming and idea generation phase? Being able to rapidly share and manage notes from calls, structure ideas and share initial plans is where I think ThinkFold sits...drop me a line if you agree :-)
Why it might be too late for Google
I've realised that Microsoft's knowledge sharing/collaboration strategy pitch with SharePoint, is to maintain the paradigm of document (i.e. Office file) creation. That makes sense if maintaining the Office suite and Exchange is a massive cash cow (which it is, for MS).
But as an employee, if I'm going to share my documents through the web, I might as well make them web pages? Physical Office has less and less relevance for me, both as a place and a software suite.I've gone into more depth about the demise of tradtional IT and th si shift to pages vs. files over in the original post.
A fantastic list
I've just been watching a great video from TED of the designer, Stefan Sagmeister talking about things that make him happy.
It's a lovely, simple talk, punctuated by some simple lists he's made. I grabbed a screenshot of one of his lists, where he's thought about the things he's learnt that make him happy (click the image to see the full size version).
A list is such a basic thing to do, but can be really profound, as in this case.
One of the things we want to do with ThinkFold is enable people to share the lists they make, with each-other and the public at large. Enabling people to share outlines could be a really simple but profound way to share ideas in an easy to grasp format.
Users as designers
HogBay software (aka Jesse Grosjean), maker of the fantastic WriteRoom, has an idea to build a lightweight Getting Things Done app, called TaskPaper (a brilliant product name, don't you think?).
TaskPaper is interesting for a number of reasons (clutter-free GTD, simplicity and lack of 'SUV' features as product differentiation come to mind), but the thing that really caught my eye was the highly intelligent conversation in the forum between Jesse and his (future) TaskPaper customers.
The people in the forum are basically helping to refine the approach and functions of the application while it's in the design phase - there's a significant amount of careful thought and suggestions, and it really feels like TaskPaper will be imprived because of the time and thought gone into the forum posts. In fact there's one point where the feedback has clearly improved Jesse's ideas (relating to nuances of how text will be stored.)
It's a real inspiration for my personal goal to get our forums up and running when we finally get to public beta, I hope we'll be as lucky to get the level of insight and contribution as Hogbay has from it's interested users.
Off-line outlining with ghosts
One of the really tough problems Matt's had to solve whilst building ThinkFold, is how to deal with the loss of internet connectivity whilst someone is in the middle of typing into a realtime outline. During normal realtime outlining, your text is sent to the server as you type and displayed to everyone sharing the outline. 
But what should happen if you temporarily lose your internet connection whilst typing? We don't want you to lose any of your ideas or flow, or even worse, lose any text that you just typed.
So, we've built a feature into ThinkFold called 'ghosting' that auto-saves your work. (click the image to see a QuickTime movie of auto-save and ghosting in action) If you're unfortunate enough to lose your internet connection while outlining in ThinkFold, you can still keep on typing for a short while.ThinkFold will auto-save your typed text into a small, hidden file on your own computer.
When you're able to reconnect to the internet and reload your real-time outline, a 'ghost' version of yourself enters the outline and types your auto-saved text into the outline.
ThinkFold's 'ghosting' feature lets you use an outline in with a 'patchy' connection, (like a 3G modem), safe in in the knowledge that everything you're outlining will be saved.
© ThinkFold 2007 Terms of Service Privacy Policy