I’ve had several conversations with people (friends, ex-colleagues) about Windows Phone, and have argued about them being dismissive of the phone’s chances against Android and iOS. Sure, Windows Phone is going to have to catch up from a long way back – that I recognise – but what annoys me is people who are willing to dimiss the phone without actually having seen it or touched it. Those who do get to tinker with the phone often like the experience. Personally, the more I use it the more I appreciate the way it’s designed, especially now that so many apps boast live tiles.

I hope that yesterday’s announcements from Nokia and the forthcoming awareness campaigns will bring Windows Phone to a wider audience, but in the meantime it’s pleasing to see articles such as this one from The New York Times saying (mostly) positive things about the phone. Yes, they do mention some shortcomings, but the article chooses to focus on the things that Microsoft have done a good job on (most notably the Bing searching and the social network integration into the people hub).

Windows Phone 7.5 is gorgeous, classy, satisfying, fast and coherent. The design is intelligent, clean and uncluttered.

Most impressively, Windows Phone is not a feeble-minded copycat.

Now, if this phone had arrived before the iPhone, people would have been sacrificing small animals to it.

Remember the days when you had a phone with a monochrome screen, just enough of a display to read a phone number or a text message? Remember the days when a mobile phone really was just a phone, when it had less computing power than the control centre of the Apollo moon program? In those days of the distant past, my phone battery seemed to last forever.

Compare that to now… I bet your phone has a large, bright, colourful screen, a processor which five years ago would have graced only the highest-specced laptop (someone nerdy will argue that), and it’ll be processing loads of stuff in the background even when it’s in your pocket apparently doing nothing. All those factors of this bright new world will be chewing through your battery like a plague of locusts at a vegetarian buffet.

As mentioned in an earlier blog post, Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) has a battery saver function. What this actually does is cuts down on then phone’s activity (e.g. turns off multi-tasking, automatic e-mail delivery) from one handy setting rather than having to poke around at many different options… and there’s also an option to turn battery saver off automatically when the phone is charged. But there is more you can do to save that precious electrical juice… turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

If I’m at home or the office, I like to have Wi-Fi on, but Bluetooth off. In the car I have Bluetooth on (to hook up to the BMW’s in-car functionality) and Wi-Fi off. On a train I generally turn both off. So what I really need is a quick and easy way to get to both of those options, rather than having to dig around in the settings. Again, some kindly app developers have come to the rescue. Here’s a few (free) options…

ConnectivityShortcuts – very simply, places icons for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mobile network and flight mode on the start screen. A nice feature about this app is that you can customise the tiles, changing the colour and the icons… having said that, there is something wrong about setting the Bluetooth tile to pink or brown (or green, or red). This app gets a ten out of ten for simplicity.

Connection Tiles is extremely similar – the only difference is that you have a different set of icons to choose from, you can rename the shortcut tile, but you can’t change the colours. Eleven out of ten for simplicity.

WP Shortcut Tiles – this one does a little bit more because it also provides quick-access tiles for creating a new e-mail, a new SMS, sharing your status (to Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn) and the Music Store. The bonus feature with this app is live tile support – the Wi-Fi tile will tell you whether Wi-Fi is on or off. However, curiously, the Bluetooth tile doesn’t. Maybe there’s a good reason – there’s another (not free) app which offers displaying of the state of Wi-Fi and data but not Bluetooth.

And finally Toggle – same basic functionality again, adding tiles for quick access to data, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and ‘Airplane’. It offers a background task to update the tiles with the connection status – nice that it can be turned off, as we started off discussing conserving battery power. But the killer feature is reminders – you can set up reminders to turn vital connections on or off, and the reminders provide a quick-link to the connection in question. It would be nice if you could automatically schedule connections to come on or off – again, maybe there’s a good reason that this doesn’t feature in Toggle or the paid-for apps.

Ever since Windows Phone 7.5 (also known as Mango) was released there seems to have been a marked increase in the number of available apps supporting the live tiles on the phone’s start screen. If you haven’t experienced the Windows Phone interface and don’t know what live tiles are, have a look here and select ‘Start Screen + Live Tiles’. If you’re familiar with iOS, you’ll know that apps like e-mail, calendar, Twitter, Facebook and Words With Friends can display a count of unread items or items requiring attention. Live tiles go one step further – they display a count of unread items but can also display informative text and images.

Out of the box there are several apps providing live tiles – e-mail, phone (showing missed calls and voice mails), messaging (now supporting Facebook and Windows Live chat as well as SMS), calendar and the Marketplace (if any of your apps have available updates). The new people hub and groups also provide live tiles – the group tile in particular, showing people in the group, recent Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn updates and uploaded photos.

But what about the third party apps? There are now tens of thousands in the Marketplace, but here I’ve picked out just a few with the focus on live tiles.

StickyTiles – this is a really simple one to start with, and useful if you want to create a quick reminder. StickyTiles allows you to create tiles to pin to the start screen – select colours for the text and background, type in some text, size it (that’s a bit fiddly), decide if you want a second phase of the tile to flip to, and then push the pin button. I’m using it to remind me of my own mobile number which I’m several months away from learning without looking it up.

Tasks – there are loads of task / to-do apps on the Marketplace, and many of them support live tiles. But the best (in my humble opinion) is named Tasks. Not very original, but does what it says. Inside the app itself is a very rich interface for creating tasks, setting a priority, assigning to a project, setting the due date, and attaching images, voice notes, URLs, phone numbers and e-mail addresses. The live tile support is extensive – the app tile itself provides a count of the tasks, and flips to show the number of tasks overdue and the number due today. But you can also pin an entire task category or a project to the start screen, or an individual task. I have one thing I absolutely must do today, and that task is pinned to the top of my start screen.

Weather apps – we’re British and we love to talk about the weather. The major failing with weather apps and weather services in general is that they’re unreliable at best and tend to all provide different forecasts. Ignoring that, the weather is an ideal piece of info to put on a live tile – and there are quite a few apps which do so. I’ll give an honourable mention to Smart Weather which allows you to build a list of cities and then see the current day and the week ahead. Pressing and holding on a city (I say city, Camberley doesn’t have a cathedral) allows you to pin it to the home screen – the resulting live tile shows the current weather conditions. It’s also worth mentioning Weather4Me and AccuWeather, but I believe the best is Weather (another original name) provided by The Weather Channel. The live tile shows the current weather, temperature and a map of your preferred location.

News – another obvious use of live tiles, and again there are loads to choose from. The Guardian allows you to pick multiple news categories to pin to the start page, and provides live tile updates. The BBC News Mobile app (not actually provided by the Beeb, I should mention) also provides live tile support although it just seems to be one headline at a time. But my pick of the bunch is Pulse – you can select news feeds from various sources (Engadget, Gizmodo, The Onion, BBC News, Time, Wall Street Journal, CNN, USA Today, Boy Genius Report… the list is huge), see these news sources on the app’s main screen, and then pin any of them to the start screen. The live tile then shows the latest headlines and takes you straight into that news source. A great app.

Countdown Tile – I’ll end with another simple app. Countdown Tile provides a countdown to an event  - set the date, select an icon, and pin the app to the start screen. And hey presto, it’s 68 days until Christmas. And being a live tile, tomorrow it will say 67 days. Yes, 67 days, but Argos already have Christmas trees up in the Camberley branch.

It’s worth mentioning some other live tile apps – I’m going to leave the choice of Twitter clients for another time as it’s a blog post all of its own. Foursquare is an extremely polished app (better than the iOS version) and it’s live tile shows your current points and league position, along with the people directly above and below you.

Update: the day after writing this post a new version of the BBC News Mobile app was made available on the Marketplace. It features an improved layout, an improved live tile, and the ability to pin selected news categories to the start page.

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.

After yesterday’s tragic and embarrassing 8-2 defeat at the hands (or maybe I should say “feet”) of Manchester United, I started on a long blog post about money being the controlling factor in football. Note to our American friends at this point, I’m talking about football, a game played by kicking a ball with the feet… not carrying and throwing an egg-shaped object while wearing body armour. After mulling over my thoughts and the content for twelve hours I’ve ditched that blog post. Money is a big controlling factor in today’s game, but there are other important elements. What I’m saying is that if you give two clubs an equal amount of money there’s a good chance that one will do better than the other.

Let’s get a few facts out of the way. A number of English clubs (they’re based in England and play in the English Premier League, although many of their player’s aren’t English) have huge amounts of cash to spend. This has come about from investment from extremely wealthy benefactors (you probably know who I’m referring to) and from selling branded merchandise and shirts to people who live a long way from where the club are based (again, you probably know who I’m referring to). There is an extremely high correlation between a huge cash injection and an upturn in fortunes. If that this point I mention Chelsea and Manchester City, I doubt I’ll get much disagreement. Liverpool were recently acquired by John W. Henry II’s Fenway Sports Group and have spent more than £80 million on players this year. It should be noted that spending loads of money doesn’t equal success, and this has been illustrated in the past… but again I don’t think I’d get many arguments if I said it gave the clubs more chance of success.

The point of this blog post is to examine the Arsenal situation. Before the arrival of Arsène Wenger, Arsenal were a reasonably successful Premier League club… although I do remember a season where there was a mild relegation concern. The turning point was a 5-1 win over Norwich, featuring a John Hartson hat-trick. I remember it well, I was in the jubilent crowd. Following Wenger’s arrival in 1995 Arsenal increased in ability and consistency. From 1997-98 to 2004-05 Arsenal were never outside of the top two, winning the title three times within that period. It’s also worth remembering that in the 2003-04 season Arsenal were unbeaten in the league for the entire season, a feat last achieved by Preston North End in the 1880s. As the t-shirt said “you win some, you draw some”.

Since the 2005-06 season Arsenal have been edged out of the top two by Chelsea (and occasionally Liverpool, and once by Man City) but they’ve remained in the top four (all-important for entry in The UEFA Champions League). Funnily enough (no, not really) Chelsea’s rise into a permanent top four and frequent top two place has coincided with Roman Abramovich’s funding.  Something of a rot has now set in for Arsenal – the last trophy to be lifted by Arsenal, the F A Cup, dates back to 2005. In season 2010-11 Arsenal looked to be getting themselves back into the top two, but suffered a dramatic decline in the closing weeks of the season. They were described as the only team ever to have come fourth in a two-horse race. Second place went to Man City, and Chelsea (after an appalling season by their recent standards) clinched third spot.

As I said earlier, money (and the top-notch player signings that money affords) don’t guarantee success but sure do provide an increased chance. So after a few years of watching the gulf between his club and Man Utd, Chelsea and more recently Man City widen, you’d have thought Mr Wenger would make strengthening his squad a priority before the 2011-12 season. Everyone knew that Cesc Fabregas was going to leave, and everyone knew that Samir Nasri wanted to leave. And everyone knew that Wenger’s policy of optimistically buying bargains in the hope they’d develop into world-class players wasn’t working. He has occasionally had the golden touch in the past, but he’s been no King Midas in the past few years. Yes, I am pointing at Arsenal’s central defence - Thomas Vermaelen is deservedly the automatic first choice, but he needs a world-class partner. Unfortunately Wenger has to choose from Johan Djourou, Laurent Koscielny and Sébastien Squillaci. None of them are good enough. Eighteen year-old Ignasi Miquel from the reserves look better than all three of them put together. So, shopping list item #1, Wenger needs a new solid, experienced, dependable, consistent central defender. Shopping list item #2, he needs another central defender of the same quality.

Rumours were than Wenger had £40 million to spend during the transfer window. Rumours are indeed rumours, I don’t know how true that is. Off trots Fabregas (and good luck to him, it was inevitable he’d return to his home town, and he gave Arsenal many good years of service). Gaël Clichy heads for Man City, and I think Arsenal handled this poorly – if he’s going there to be City’s first-choice as left-back, Arsenal should have asked for and held out for far more than £7 million. Where are they going to find a replacement for that sort of money? And then young Samir also heads to Man City, not for the money you understand (although allegedly tripling his weekly wages to £180,000 may have swayed him). Add this up and you get two things… around £67 million in the back pocket and a severely-weakened squad. That’s a squad weaker than the one that took fourth place last season.

Mr Wenger will point out that there have been signings incoming. Gervinho, a striker – looks useful, but was a striker really the club’s priority? Well, anything that expedites Nicklas Bendtner’s speedy departure is a good thing. That’s £10 million spent. A couple of promising young bargains, Carl Jenkinson (right-back) and Joel Campbell (striker) cost another £2 million, and then the big name signing of promising but inexperienced winger Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain (yep, names don’t come much bigger, except in Russia maybe) which was reckoned to be around £15 million. A quick sum tells us that Mr Wenger still has about £40 million to spend, or £80 million if you believe the rumour of the initial transfer pot. Which leads me to the question…

What the **** has he been doing during the transfer window?

Walking his dog, reading a long book, maybe building a gazebo in his back garden. He made a few half-arsed attempts to sign Gary Cahill from Bolton and Phil Jagielka (had to check the spelling) from Everton. He dallied over the signing of Juan Mata, failed to do anything, and Mata was then signed by Chelsea (and promptly scored a goal during his fifteen-minute debut). Wenger made a comment about buying players if they had the right qualities… well, if they’re good enough to get into the Chelsea side, then they’re probably good enough for Arsenal.

Look at recent signings made by other clubs… Luis Suárez, Edin Džeko, Sergio Agüero, Jose Enrique, Ashley Young… what was Wenger doing while all of these guys didn’t get on his radar? And this isn’t just a recent problem. If Wenger had spotted the opportunity, don’t you think Rafael van der Vaart would have preferred Arsenal to Tottenham?

Rumours of signings continue – apparently Korean striker Park Chu-young may sign today (another striker). But after Nasri and Febregas departing, items #3 and #4 on the shopping list should be two midfielders. And if it’s true that Armand Traore is heading for QPR, Arsenal need more cover at left-back. So Arsenal need five players, and the transfer window closes on Wednesday evening. It’s a public holiday in the UK today, but I hope Wenger is at his desk and on the phone.

But a final thought. I tweeted yesterday that the problem “went far deeper than Arsene Wenger’s inability to work the transfer market and ManUre’s big-time spending”. I hate to admit it but Man Utd have something that you can’t buy and that Arsenal haven’t had for a few years… the attitude of winners. Much as I hate to say it, Man Utd always take to the pitch looking as if they have a God-given right to win. And often they do. Chelsea, Man City and Liverpool look like they’re learning that attitude. It comes from discipline and team-work. It comes from a good manager… and again, as much as I don’t like that miserable old scrote Alex Ferguson (and refuse to recognise his knighthood) he is a great manager. It comes from looking around you and seeing quality dependable players. Arsenal proved yesterday that they don’t have a winning attitude, they don’t exhibit great discipline or team-work, and they don’t have quality dependable players in all positions. They do have a manager who has proved himself to be great in the past – now he has to take responsibility, bring new players in, and create a great team from those new players and the existing players. If he can’t do that, it’s time to go.

During the past week a colleague sent me a link to Campaign Monitor’s statistics on e-mail client popularity. A first glance shows Outlook to be the most popular, Lotus Notes to be absolutely nowhere, and iOS devices to be the strong-performing new kids on the block.

However, it’s very important to look at the way that the statistics have been collected. Campaign Monitor use a request to a remote image in their e-mail, and then can check the type of client that makes the request. Now, this would be accurate if not for three things:

1. Many e-mail clients don’t show remote images by default (it’s a good mechanism for not indicating live e-mail accounts to spammers). Notes 8.x, most versions of Outlook, and Mozilla Thunderbird will block remote images. Typically I won’t load the images if I’m not interested in the content, and I suspect many other people exhibit that behaviour. So many of Campaign Monitor’s e-mails will go unregistered, thus skewing their statistics.
2. The statistics mash together personal and business e-mail accounts. Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, GMail (although Google may argue), Apple Mail, Outlook Express and Thunderbird are predominantly private / personal e-mail solutions. Full Outlook and Notes are predominantly used in business environments. The mobile platforms (iOS, Android) are likely to figure in both sets. All I’m saying is that it would be more illustrative to take a view of the personal and enterprise markets separately. In business Outlook and Notes would outstrip the others, therefore it’s unfair to show Notes with such a small share. For personal accounts the picture would be completely different.
3. Spam filters – are Campaign Monitor’s e-mails getting stopped by spam filters before they get to business users? Maybe, and again that will skew the Outlook and Notes statistics, and probably for the business-used mobile platforms too.

The survey then lists the ‘movers and shakers’ compared to two years ago. The fact that iOS devices have grown most (84.23%) is no surprise, although actually I would have expected more. The fact that Notes has fallen (by roughly the same amount) is also no surprise, knowing what’s been happening in the enterprise market over the past few years. However, I refer to point #1 above – older versions of Notes (and I mean 7 and older) didn’t have the ability to block remote images. Notes 8.x does have that ability. So the same population of Notes users, but with more using Notes 8.x, would show less usage using Campaign Monitor’s method of gathering statistics.

It’s now been five weeks since I became an Outlook user. After nineteen years of using Notes I slipped into it pretty well… yes, there’s a few Notes features I miss, but there’s a big heap of Outlook features that Notes doesn’t have. I’m not really interested in starting a big feature comparison, but feeling the need to blog about something, I thought I’d feature mail tips to start off the Microsoft product blogging.

So what are mail tips? Well, they give you some information about the e-mail you’re about to send.

Have you ever typed out an e-mail, sent it, and then by way of an out-of-office reply discovered that the recipient is away for two weeks? Yep, me too. Mail tip #1 discovers the recipient’s out-of-office status from the Exchange server and shows it to the user, thus informing the user that the recipient is away before they continue to type the e-mail.

Ever accidentally sent an e-mail to a large group? Or maybe you’ve received an e-mail which someone has ‘replied-to-all’ (and thought “what an idiot”). Mail tip #2 informs you that the e-mail is addressed to a large number of people, meaning you (or those other daft users) can be warned in advance about the reply-to-all about to be sent to a vast and probably uninterested audience.

Finally, Outlook and Notes provide e-mail conversation threads, but here’s a really dynamic feature of Outlook. If you reply to an e-mail in a thread, mail tip #3 will warn you if it’s not the most current in the thread. I say this is dynamic because the mail tip will appear even if a new e-mail arrives and joins the thread after you’ve started to compose the reply (thus causing the one you’re replying to to not be the most recent).

Should I have named this blog post ‘Career 3.0′? Today saw me complete my first week at Microsoft, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be heading back to Thames Valley Park for week two. I’ve joined the Enterprise and Partner Group as a Business Productivity Sales Professional in the Specialist Team Unit. Here’s a few thoughts from my first week:

• Thames Valley Park is an inviting place to work – free drinks and fruit on offer, a number of subsidised restaurants, a small Starbucks outlet, and a well-being centre. There’s also lots of informal meeting spaces, including collaboration areas incorporating television screens for projecting presentations.
• I had a new laptop (a Lenovo T420s if you’re interested) and a Windows mobile phone (an HTC Mozart) even before I’d sat down at a desk. By the afternoon (after Orange had worked their magic by activating the SIM) the phone was receiving e-mail, calendar content and contacts.
• The on-line ‘Welcome Experience’ is excellent.
• Along with every other Microsoft employee based at Thames Valley Park I’ve been invited to the ‘fun day’ to kick of the new fiscal year. Get that… a fun day… food, drinks and entertainment provided.
• In one morning I met five Business Partners who have already deployed Microsoft Lync with integrated telephony into customer infrastructures. And I learned about the scale of the Lync business. Say no more.
• A couple of days later, I was fully Lync-enabled. Up until then I’d been able to use VoIP and click-to-call, but now I have a single number (that anyone can call) that will cause Lync on my desktop or my mobile to ring.
• Everyone uses Lync for telephony – there are a few phones in meeting rooms, but none on the desks. Lync (and a headset) is provided for everyone… and everyone uses it.
• There are a number of really good features in Outlook. There, I said it.
• The Intranet provided by SharePoint is quite amazing, particularly the features around the search results. And the Lync integration into the SharePoint content is extremely polished.
• I bumped into a large number of former IBM colleagues – now colleagues again.

Unfortunately, I suppose it’s time to request my removal from Planet Lotus… that was part of Career 2.0.