…media perceptions and market hype could not hide the fact that we were not seeing customer demand for Google in the enterprise.

You can read the full blog post here.

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.

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).

• 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.

The IBM Lotus Protector for Mail Encryption software appliance extends Microsoft Outlook and Exchange encryption capabilities to the Internet, making it easy and cost effective for your business to exchange sensitive email with verified third parties, helping to meet regulatory requirements, streamline your processes and minimize costs.

Some content is honest in it’s lack of truth. One of my feeds is NewsBiscuit.com and I know that when I see headlines such as Court awards viewer of new Will Ferrell film 101 minutes of his life back it’s not really true, even though the film probably does really suck. However I doubt if NewsBiscuit will ever improve on BBspot’s spoof classic story Atheist Still Unconvinced After Meeting with God or The Onion’s amazing video about the MacBook Wheel.

So, what’s this go to do with Microsoft Word? Yesterday when my news feed displayed a story entitled Microsoft Banned from Selling Word in the US I assumed it was spoof news… but it wasn’t. It’s true that a Texas judge has ruled that Microsoft cannot sell Word in the United States after a Canadian company, i4i, won an XML patent infringement case. The story was then picked up by a number of other sources such as The Register and Microsoft’s unofficial UK public relations partner the BBC.

Of course, Microsoft won’t actually stop selling Word in the US, or anywhere else…  if Microsoft’s appeal is lost the whole affair will then be settled with a nice fat cheque and i4i will go back to their business of selling XML-based products for Microsoft Word.

It’s also worth noting, as viewers of Mock The Week know all too well, that Frankie Boyle makes a mention of Lady GaGa’s balls every week… so maybe the truth is out there.

Actually it doesn’t make me smile and to be honest I don’t think it’s good news. Winning against Microsoft, taking out Exchange and replacing with Domino, hearing that a company is looking at throwing out Office in favour of Symphony… that makes me smile, and that’s only natural in the market we compete in. Most of the time we compete fairly, and I know many people at Microsoft who I have worked with in the past, and I like and respect them. I bumped into one here at Lotusphere – I shook his hand and spent a few minutes talking about things we were doing (great to see you Tony). We may trade snipes on a blog next week, but we’ll know it’s healthy competitive debate.

When a powerful technology company like Microsoft announces job cuts it’s not a good sign and it’s not good for the industry. It’s also not good for the people effected who have to pay mortgages and support families. So anyone sending me an e-mail expecting me to be smug and punch the air, you’ll be disappointed. IBM posted good results, but we should all be aware how fragile the economy is.

Having been purchased during the Summer the Compaq, as you’d expect, runs Windows Vista. This was to be my first foray into Microsoft’s shiny new operating system. First impressions? It’s okay. I was expecting disasters after the negative press, but it seemed fine. I’ll even give it a few plus points… UPnP connectivity with the Archos has been flakey with Windows XP, but with Vista it’s reliable and fast. Nice.

But as you use Vista more you notice some things that seem a bit unfinished or just plain odd. Example: copying some files from one folder to another… if they already exist, Windows XP’s instructions are fairly simple to understand (overwrite, or don’t overwrite). With Vista I did a double-take on the dialog box, read the instructions, read them again, and was still confused.

Why, when I look at a folder, is there a green progress indicator moving across the address bar, even though all the contents are displayed? And why do I sometimes get a three minute lag when I open a folder before I see the contents.

On Sunday night I was using iTunes – although this is not my computer I’ve had to move my iTunes library onto it as it was taking up too much space on my ThinkPad. Suddenly an indicator popped up on the status bar – I clicked on it and it proudly proclaimed “This problem was caused by iTunes, which was created by Apple Inc. There is no solution for this problem at this time.”

Excuse me? What problem. iTunes was happily chugging along and working perfectly. The problem report also told me “A newer version of iTunes is available for download that might address this problem”. What problem?

I’m now looking at a laptop which is functioning perfectly but the problem report tells me that iTunes “stopped responding and was closed”. Eh? It didn’t stop responding, but it was closed… by me, after I’d finished using it.

On the subject of Windows and Microsoft, I see that the BBC are once again falling over themselves to be Microsoft’s free-of-charge PR machine. Four Microsoft stories on the Technology news page today, covering Windows 7, Azure and working with Google and Yahoo.

Among the new capabilities of Windows 7 are some touch-screen effects nicked from the iPhone. I do believe that users would need new hardware to achieve that, so at least they managed some level of consistency. The computer manufacturers will be most pleased, as will manufacturers of screen wipes.

Then consider this quote from Linux head-honcho Linus Torvalds…

“An operating system should be completely invisible”

Linus actually started off the discussion having a pop at Apple’s OS X Leopard – as the article says “he poured scorn on the modern trend to treat a new version or update of an operating system as a cause for major celebration and marketing.”

And I suppose he’s correct – an operating system is just plumbing, albeit complex and requiring careful handling. This started me looking for an analogy – you wouldn’t have the water pipes in your house on display and so richly decorated, they’re just doing a job and shouldn’t be noticed. Pete Hampton then chimed in with the prospect of Microsoft Pipes needing patching twice a month, and the fact that Apple iPipes would look great but would only connect to an iRadiator and an iTap. Most amusing.

With this in mind, it seems that the knives are still out for Vista (or Vaster as Pete calls it). Ten months ago Dell reconsidered it’s policy of Vista-only on new computers and re-instated XP as an option. All these months later things don’t seem to have changed much. Today it’s 143 days until Microsoft stop selling XP, and it comes to something when someone launches a petition to keep the operating system in the market. That’s what InfoWorld have done.

‘MP accuses BBC chief of illegally championing Microsoft’ – as featured in the site bookmarked by every good IT professional, The Register.

“At last” I thought, “someone has noticed”. However, the story isn’t about the BBC giving so much airtime to Microsoft (oh yeah, that’s the company name I was trying to remember) or worshipping Bill’s every move (or movement) – it’s about the BBC’s iPlayer service. iPlayer allows you to catch up on programs you might have missed… a bit like Sky Plus but cheaper and more reliable.

Liberal Democrat John Pugh MP accuses the BBC (a public body) of “handing a commercial advantage to that company [Microsoft]“. The problem is that the iPlayer is only fully-supported using Internet Explorer on a Windows operating system. Well yes, that does seem a tad Microsoft-centric, doesn’t it?

Pugh continued “What might be a pragmatic choice for a privately funded company becomes deeply problematic for a public corporation.”

Visit the iPlayer in Mozilla Firefox and you’ll see the message “Sorry, downloading BBC iPlayer programmes is currently only available in Internet Explorer”. You can actually play the content in Firefox, but you can’t download it. A link takes you to a page which explains the issue further:

“ActiveX, an essential component in making the BBC iPlayer Download Manager communicate with the BBC iPlayer website, only functions in Internet Explorer which is why you must use this browser.”

Well, balls to that – no-one is going to tell me which browser to use. The Register article goes on to discuss the fact that Linux and Mac users don’t have the option of begrudgingly opening Internet Explorer. If they’d used Java, then all three communities would be given a chance to use the technology.

But remember, the BBC are impartial.