Looking back through the dadams.co.uk archives I realised that I was a happy BlackBerry user for four years. Upon joining Microsoft they declined to provide me with a BlackBerry, and instead gave me an HTC Mozart sporting the Windows Phone 7 operating system (NoDo). Okay, I didn’t actually ask for a BlackBerry – before joining I’d had a good look at Lewis Turek’s phone, had found out his pass-key, and took great pleasure in changing the theme to pink when he wasn’t looking.

Even that far back (wow, over three months ago), the new generation of the OS, code-named Mango, was public knowledge. A couple of weeks into my Microsoft career I journeyed to Denver for the annual MGX shin-dig, and was treated to more info about Mango and some rather slick demos. Of course, when new technology is dangled before you (but just out of reach) you want it. Yesterday, our mobile phone operator made the update available – and today was my first day as a Mango user.

Okay, I do appreciate that a summary of what’s new is a bit redundant if you haven’t experienced the original OS. But hey, it’s my blog and I get to write what I want. So in no particular order…

Battery saver – have a guess. This option turns off automatic receipt of e-mail and multi-tasking. There are two further options, one to always turn on the battery saver when the battery is low, and another to turn the battery saver off when I next charge it. So far, and I know it’s only one day, my battery has lasted far longer than it would do in an average day without using the battery saver.

Threaded e-mails – like in Outlook (and some other e-mail clients), the e-mails are grouped together and collapsed, keeping related e-mails together and making for a tidier inbox.

Multi-tasking – press and hold the back arrow for half a second, and I can swipe through the applications open in the background. Nice.

Internet Explorer – I don’t think I ever used the browser on the phone much, because the apps tend to give you the info required. But I can see loads of improvements (multiple open tabs, were they there before?), the browsing experience is lightening-fast and the page rendition is very faithful to the original.

Bing finds more things – one of the demos I saw in Denver was the extended capabilities of Bing. The demo guy showed the phone recognising a book by scanning its cover with the camera, and linking straight through to an on-line retailer to buy it. He also showed scanning some non-English text and having it translated into English and Czech (there were some guys from the Czech Republic standing next to me). My personal favourite is getting the phone to listen to some music, recognising it, and allowing you to buy it.

People, and what they’re up to - thank heavens for social networks. How else would I know what you had for breakfast or what you’re watching on television? Using NoDo it was possible to get all of my Facebook contacts into your phone’s address book, but about seventeen seconds after doing so I realised that was a mistake. What I now had was over four hundred and fifty people in my address book (most with no contact details), and somewhere in there were the handful of people I would probably want to call. Mango also allows me to pull in your Facebook contacts… and Twitter buddies and LinkedIn contacts. In a rather neat way it consolidates them, so that there’s one (for example) Lewis Turek who exists in Outlook, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Of course, the world would be a better place with four Lewis Tureks, but I just need the one on my phone. This consolidation of the social networks provides an update for any chosen person, wherever they’ve updated their status recently. I can also get a news feed for everyone from all sources, and I can drill down to one source… just Twitter for example.

However, I still have nearly five hundred people in my address book. No fear, Mango has an answer to this… groups. I’ve created a group for family, a group for colleagues, and a group for friends. Even better, the groups can be pinned to the start screen, so getting to a Microsoft colleague or family member is really quick. This also means that I can see social updates for just these groups rather than everyone.

Me – I can also pin myself to the start screen, giving me another quick way to access notifications and news from my networks, and to post a message to all of the networks at once. I can also ‘check in’ to places and set my chat status.

Messages – I haven’t tried this yet, but I can see the options and how it works. Previously, ‘messages’ just meant ‘SMS messages’. With Mango, a conversation can swap between various sources (SMS, Facebook, Windows Live) but it’s maintained as one single conversation on the phone.

Calendar improvements – basically multiple calendars, colour-coded to differentiate them. I can see that school reunion event from Facebook alongside my Outlook calendar.

More social photos – I always thought there was something lacking in NoDo. It seemed logical to me that I should be able select a photo from the phone and share it via Twitter… but this was missing. Instead, I had to go into the Twitter client, create a tweet and add the photo. No big deal, but it wasn’t really following the premise of doing things in context. Mango fixes this shortcoming, so I can now Twitter-share a photo directly from the camera roll. Another photo-oriented feature is person-tagging – if I elect to share a photo on Facebook, and the phone recognises that there’s a person’s face in the photo, I can tag that person before uploading.

You’re history – sorry, I mean “your history”. Contacts now have a history card, so (for example) I can look at Lewis’ profile, his tweets and his Facebook updates… and then I can view a history of the e-mails we’ve sent, the calls we’ve made and the text messages we’ve sent.

There’s a few hundred other new features, but that’ll do for now.

My previous blog post about Visio focused on integration with SharePoint, but now I’m going to take a look at using Visio for simulating and optimising business processes. Just about everyone knows that Visio allows you to map out workflow and business processes… and it’s also possible to publish workflow processes into a SharePoint site. But how could you work out how many people it takes to complete a process on an on-going basis, how much the process costs, where the bottle-necks may occur, and how you could fix the issues? Visio 2010 Premium edition and Global 360′s analystView solution provides the answer.

One of Visio 2010′s many templates contains shapes and rules for Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). If you’re interested in a detailed overview, visit the Wikipedia page. The shapes that are contained within the BPMN template adhere to strict rules and are fully configurable – there are different types of tasks and gateways (that’s the BPMN name for ‘decisions’). This is best illustrated with a simple example. Click on the image to see the full process.

The example process starts with faulty devices being received by the repair department. The device is assessed and passed to an expert engineer if it’s a major fault or a routine repair engineer if it’s a minor fault. After the repair is carried out, the device is tested, and if it passes it’s returned to the owner. If the device repair doesn’t pass the test, it loops back to an expert engineer to have another go.

Now, this works fine as a basic concept for a repair process, but to simulate it there needs to be a lot of details behind the scenes. This is where Global 360′s analystView comes into play. This Visio add-in allows us to configure all of the necessary metrics:

• Rate of devices received (arrivals) – in my example one device every two hours
• How long it takes to assess the problem (thirty minutes)
• How many will be routine repairs and how many will be major – the two decision points can be weighted, and 70% will be routine
• How long it takes to do a routine repair (two hours) and a major repair (four hours)
• How long it takes to perform a test (one hour)
• How many devices will pass the test – based on weighting 90% will pass
• How long it takes to dispatch the device (fifteen minutes)

What’s missing from this? People. analystView allows us to define roles, assign the people to activities and shifts, declare a cost per hour, and define their effectiveness (e.g. expert engineer 1 may be able to complete the repair in three hours rather than four). So in this example we have two assessors, two expert engineers, two routine engineers, one tester and one dispatcher. Given the rate of arrival, the number of staff on each task, the duration of tasks and the relative weightings, what will happen over a twenty working-day period?

When a simulation is kicked into action analystView will start to generate lots of data. Probably the most important is the number of devices which enter a specific part of the process and how many are completed. In this example you would be able to see after just a couple of working days that the testing activity is under-staffed and becomes a bottle-neck, and by the end of the twenty days has a backlog of over one hundred devices (see image on the right). Major repairs lag a bit, but not too badly. Problem assessment experiences 100% completion, and with activities such as this it’s important to look at the utilisation – both assessors have a utilisation rate of around 33%. Meanwhile the tester is maxed out at 98.8%. See below for the complete utilisation overview.

Based on this information, there’s one obvious thing we could do to solve the bottleneck… we can take Andrea from the assessment team and get her to work on testing in the afternoon (analystView allows us to define and assign people to shifts). Having done this, we run the simulation again. This time, the testing activity is able to keep up with the load (there’s a backlog of twelve, which isn’t too bad), and the assessing activity doesn’t suffer and is able to manage the workload. The utilisation of the participants starts to look much more balanced (although Dave has lots of time to relax with a cup of tea and a newspaper, and still manages to get all of the devices shipped). Overall the completion rate is 92.1% compared to 48.7% on the first run.

The utilisation chart above is one of many data sets created, so there’s enough information to work out where problems are occurring. Given the level of controls within analystView there’s lots of scope for tweaking and playing ‘what-if’. However, if you want to take the lazy and less fun route, you can just press the ‘Optimize’ button and let analystView add a quick solution or guide you through an optimization wizard.

You can find more information about analystView at Global 360′s site (by the way, they’re now part of OpenText) and download a trial version.

While I was having lunch with Eileen and Tim from GSX today (nice to see you both, and Tim, congratulations on the new job) the conversation turned to Visio 2010. There was no surprise about the popularity of the product, there was a bit of surprise over the scale of the Visio business (it’s huge, but I course I divulged no numbers), but there was an awful lot of surprise about what the product does.

This is something I find during a lot of conversations – there is a perception that Visio is that tool for drawing flow-charts, floor-plans and network diagrams. Well yes, it does that, but it does an awful lot more. There is also a perception that it’s a tool for IT people, engineers and people who want to create flow-charts… yes, but there are many other types of user who could make great use of Visio. And remember that Visio is about visualising business content, whether it be people, numbers, or processes.

Most of the conversations I have with enterprise customers include Visio’s integration with SharePoint, which is not only very cool technology but can add a lot value to SharePoint sites and to teams of people.

The simplest type of integration is ‘Visio Services’. A Visio Web Access web part can be added to a SharePoint page, and this allows a Visio file saved in a web drawing format to be displayed in the page. So at it’s simplest level, a Visio file can be shared in a SharePoint page and viewed by non-Visio users. But the integration goes much deeper…

To understand the next usage scenaro you really have to understand Visio’s data graphics capability. Every shape in Visio has the capacity to include data – some of the out-of-the-box shapes (such as a process in an audit diagram) are pre-populated with data fields. You can add data to any shape, and you can add visual indicators to a shape based on it’s data. Imagine a sales manager in an organisation chart… rather than just having their name and title you could also see how well they’re doing against key performance indicators (KPIs). The underlying data that drives the visualisation of their performance could be self-contained in Visio, but it could also be linked in from other data sources such as Excel or SQL Server. The first image here shows a simple view of someone in an organisation chart, with just a name, title and picture.

By simply linking the Visio file to a data source (Excel in this case) and dragging and dropping a row of data onto Maria’s container, it suddenly looks very different. Click on the image to see the full scorecard…

The data graphics have added bars for five KPIs, a horizontal bar for her overall average score, a colour to her container (two less and she’d be amber), and an arrow showing her comparison to average score for last year.

Now let’s imagine that you want to share this organisation chart, which has now become a performance scorecard, with the sales organisation. You can take this Visio file and save it as a web drawing into a SharePoint site – you can also add it to a page as a web part. However, every now and again the data driving the visibility of the performance of Maria and her peers will change… and here’s the clever bit. The Visio web part can be set to refresh at regular intervals – so when the source data changes, the scorecard changes. Provided the source is accessible to SharePoint’s services there’s no need to open the Visio file, refresh it and re-save to SharePoint – it’s all done automatically.

By the way, when we demo this the Visio file is linked to an Excel spreadsheet stored in the same SharePoint site. The spreadsheet can be edited directly in the browser using Excel Web Access, and a few moments later the data graphics in the Visio file will update.

The next piece of integration between SharePoint and Visio also works using shape data. Imagine that you have a flow-chart which visually represents a business process (that’s what flow-charts generally do). Wouldn’t it be great if you could click on a part of the flow-chart and see the documents associated with that part of the process? Well you can, and it’s pretty easy.

The first step is to make sure that each part of the process has a unique ID and exists as an item of shape data. Then you deposit your process documents in a SharePoint library and add an extra field which will hold a process ID which matches the IDs in the Visio flow-chart. Finally, you set the Visio web part to broadcast the process ID and get the library to filter itself based on the incoming ID. Hey presto, you get a context sensitive list of documents everytime you click on a part of the business process. Click on the picture for a larger view.

There are two other ways in which Visio integrates with SharePoint. The first I’ll leave for another time as it’s quite detailed… that being the ability to draw out a workflow process using special SharePoint-ready shapes and using SharePoint designer publish that workflow process into a SharePoint site.

Finally, there’s a very neat piece of out-of-the-box integration between Visio and SharePoint task lists. Above the task list is a tab for ‘List Tools’ and one of those tools is ‘Create Visio Diagram’. Clicking this will suck up the details of the tasks and create a Visio pivot diagram, which allows you to visually interpret and interrogate the status of the tasks. The resulting Visio file has three pages… overall status of tasks, workload distribution, and an overview of incomplete tasks assigned to people. Click on the image above to see one view of the diagram.

Like the second example in this post (integrating a Visio diagram with a document library) you can place this Visio-based task overview on a SharePoint page and link it to a view of the task list. You can then click on a person in the diagram and filter down to see their assigned tasks.

Okay, that’s enough Visio goodness for today… more soon.