User help in MS Office

A few weeks ago I upgraded to MS Office 2010. In general Microsoft has done a pretty good job with the 2010 release of office. But one thing remains a problem, namely the help engine. In fact, it turns out that if you ask your search question on Google, you get MUCH better results than going through the Office help system.

Online help is a problem with many products; but it is a little unexpected that Google serves up significantly better results that the native tool. It just shows the power of the community. I have long though that all application help systems should be collaborative (and moderated to remove the inevitable trash that collects). You might call it a "crowd sourced" model for  help. But by collecting and harnessing input from real users, the quality of the application help will rapidly improve for the benefit of all users.

Backup software for the home: A review of Mozy

I consider myself to be an IT professional after spending most of my career in IT. A while ago I realized that my backup strategy on my own home PC was not very professional. Much like security, backup is a layered approach, designed to reduce risk. This means you should not just stop at one backup solution. I have a Seagate USB backup drive, but the problem is that if there is something like a house fire, you can lose your backups. Since we keep all our family videos and photos on the PC, the thought of losing all of that in a house fire was just too painful to bear. After some research, I signed up with Mozy in June 08. One of the appeals of Mozy was the unlimited personal backups for just $5 per month because I have over 800 GB of data.

Fast forward about 2 years. A few months ago my XP home computer required rebuilding because it was the easiest way to resolve problems that had developed. It was also an opportunity to increase the size of the hard disk. Also, although I had two backups, the most prudent approach was to buy a new hard drive, and not reformat the old one. Then the unexpected happened – first the Seagate drive demanded that I create new partitions. It has lost all my data! No idea why this happened, but nothing I could do would get my data back. Then when I set up Mozy on the new hard drive, about 75% of my files seemed to have vanished. Although Mozy’s documentation makes moving your Mozy account to a new PC look simple, it really isn’t. In my case, the old hard drive was installed as a 3^rd drive on the PC, and I was able to copy all the files across to the new drive, and no files were lost. And when Mozy was doing the initial backup of the new hard drive, it found most of these files on the Mozy system. Perhaps they were not lost after all, but they certainly weren’t visible in the recovery pane. My suggestion is that if you are moving Mozy from one system to another; do not delete the old system in Mozy. Rather create a new system on Mozy, and only once you have all your files on the new system, delete the old one from Mozy. It will cost you $5 per month extra, but at least you won’t lose any data. While prudence had paid off (i.e not reformatting the old drive), it was a bit sobering to think that both backups had failed.

Web site legal and usability problems

My eldest is in college, and today she asked me to purchase an online textbook from cengagebrain.com. There were several interesting things about this site...

1. At the bottom of the purchasing page there was a link to their terms and conditions - all 8188 words of it! That works out to 260 words per dollar spent. Can you believe it - having to study an 8188 word purchase contract before you buy a digital textbook? Something is not quite right here, especially when the first assignment was due at midnight tomorrow.
2. The last term on the contract stated that they had the right to deny you access to your account at their sole discretion for any reason what so ever. Wow - so I am paying for this access, and if they are in a bad mood tomorrow, they can just turn off my access. I have no recourse at all.
3. Paying for the text book required my credit cards. When entering the credit card number I had to take care to strip out all spaces and dashes - enter numbers only. This is a pet usability peeve of mine - it doesn't take much JavaScript to strip those things out, but no, you the user, must do the work. But if you type one of those 16 digits incorrectly and there are no spaces in the 16 numbers, it can be difficult to find the error. I am never sure if this is just poor UI design, or lazy programmers, but you so often see it on web sites. My rule of thumb is that if the system can do the work, the then user should not have to do it.
4. The credit card expiry date month defaulted to August, but my expiry month for this card is earlier in the year. So when I changed the month I got an error, because the expiry date was now earlier than today (I had not yet set the year field). But the year field is to the right of the month field; naturally you enter the month first. This is an example of poor web site design, but something that can so easily slip past the people developing the web site, and their quality department. These sort of things really take away for the "quality" of the user experience.

It was quite interesting to come up with so many problems with so little interaction on a web site. This is a good example of why work flow, web site & software development really are so hard to get right.

A little on Evernote indexing from images

I have been using Evernote since about March '09, and have found it to work well (4499 notes as of today). I have always known they analyze images and extract the text in the background to index it, but never had occasion to make use of that until yesterday.

While searching for a particular person's name, I saw that Evernote found it on a screen shot that had been pasted into a note. Now that was impressive, because it was an image of the name; there was no actual text there. Evernote recognized the text and indexed it; in fact the text was even highlighted in the image when I searched for the name.

I also use Evernote to store images of all the business cards I get, rather than leaving the cards in a pile in a drawer. Along with the image of the card I usually a few words about the person and why I have their business card. Now I know that Evernote can find all those names in the business cards. Taking the idea a bit further, if you take a photo of a meeting room whiteboard, Evenote will analyze and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the text, and then index it.

All of this takes Evernote's usefulness up a notch!

Blog move

For some months technical problems have prevented me from posting on my blog; and a lack of time prevented me from fixing them. I have been thinking of using a SaaS (Software as a Service) approach for hosting this blog for quite a while, and these problems pushed me over the edge. After looking at the possibilities available, Google seemed an excellent choice.

I must say I have been very pleasantly surprised by how well Google's Blogger just works.  One example is "After the jump summaries". This is a feature which allows you to create expandable post summaries in your blog posts, so longer posts appear as an intro with a link to "Read More".

There are a few formatting issues that I need to resolve, but that will come later.Once all the articles are moved, I will point the blog's URL over here. The articles will keep their original dates, and if possible I will try to keep the original URLs. Unfortunately the comments probably won't make it across. Once the blog is in its new home it should be significantly easier to maintain, which means I should add articles more regularly again.

Managing information in your personal and professional life

While all of us suffer from an information overload, how we deal with that information is often what separates us on a professional level. This blog entry is a review of my experiences managing this information, leading up to Evernote, a product that works well in practice.

Here at work we are slowly implementing a records management policy, and a probable outcome is that we will be unable to keep email older than one year. As an IT professional this has implications, because my email is full of useful information that I want to keep. After discussing this at length with our records manager, I came to the conclusion that I really need some sort of "personal information manager". In about March 2009 I discovered Evernote, an online service.

Keyword tags and email

In Q2, 2007 I changed companies, which also meant a change to Outlook email. The immediate frustration of Outlook was the inability to put an email message in more that one folder. (You can copy a message to multiple folders, but this duplicates messages). On top of that the Outlook 2003 search is anemic. Upgrading to outlook 2007 helped searching, but the problem of how to file email remained.

Then I discovered an Outlook add-in product called Taglocity which allows you to add keyword tags to messages. After using keyword tags for several months I realized that this approach actually woks better that filing messages in multiple folders. The reason is that you can search on multiple keyword tags. Its a bit like searching for a message that exists in multiple folders. Although that is something I never did with folders, I do it all the time with keyword tags and find it very useful. The only problem with Taglocity is that it is an add on to Outlook, which means that if I use the web interface, I don't have access to my keyword searching.

The interesting thing about using Outlook now for over two and a half years is that it is no better or worse that Notes email; just different. And that although the Exchange back end has been reliable, there are just as many calendar issues with Outlook as there were with Notes. It seems like the calendar is just a very difficult problem to solve.