A Pledge for Ada Lovelace Day

Not so long ago I pledged to write a blog entry about a woman in IT that I admired. Bearing in mind my ability to keep my blog up to date I saw this as a good opportunity.

The ladies whom I want to talk about I met when I was just 21 years old. Starting out in my career in IT and working on the IT Help Desk at NTL answering the calls and dealing with technical user issues. It was by a turn of fate and an office move that our internal IT help desk was moved to be closer to the then Microsoft Windows Server Team. This team consisted of two women one who managed the architecture and design of the Microsoft Windows Servers and the other who managed the architecture and design of the then MS Mail environment.

Through this move and the fact there were only 3 women in the whole IT department we started talking. I expressed a desire to move away from the help desk environment and get more involved with desktop and server support and they mentioned a role within there team that was opening up to support the migration of servers to NT 4 and MS Exchange 5. I think I literally jumped at this chance to work with these two ladies.

They taught me how to build a server (Compaq in those days), install memory, rack mount these servers, backups, fault fixing etc. I learnt about the MS Mail and Microsoft Exchange Server from the beginning. I was taught how to interact with the user and deal with customers.

Most importantly I was taught how to be a women in IT. If it weren’t for those two women I would not be able to look back over those 13 years and say that I have enjoyed my career so far. They taught me to have faith in my abilities and to be proud of my achievements.

Thank you Trisha Rose and Sue Harper for starting me on my journey and my passion for IT.

To learn more about today’s pledge please go and visit  http://ada.pint.org.uk/

Nice to be in the top 10!!!

I would like to thank Chase for sending this through to me.

http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tr/downloads/home/dl_10_tech_skills.pdf

Changing my Workspace

By the end of this year I will have a new office area. All to myself, outside of the home environment. Already I am looking forward to this event. With an interest in both the best way of working and the design of such a place I will be spending some time in looking how to improve my current office environment.

I’ve separated these in two categories. Basics to get the job done, and then Comfort to enjoy the environment. So here is my list so far.

Basics

1. A large rectangular desk

2. A comfy desk chair.

3. Two large flat screen monitors at least 19″

4. Laptop, Internet Connectivity, Printer, Telephone, Web Cam, IPod, camera, shredder

5. Paper, pens, pin-board, files, folders (sometimes its good to go back and be traditional when working)

6. Shelving and Storage

Comfort

1. A comfy chair with cushions for reading, researching, long conf calls etc

2. A small coffee type table to enable me to spread out when working

3. Photos of friends and family

4. A dramatic background picture for when on a web-cam.

5. Plants

This will change no doubt. The best part of moving my working environment outside of the house will be the space and obviously the commute.

Technology or People?

Having been researching and working around Unified Communications for just over 2 years I am seeing more and more a disconnect as to what Unified Communications is. It should be simple the two words chosen to describe the harmonious way of working are described as follows:

Unify v.t. reduce (things, or abs.) to unity or uniformity

Communication n. 1.act of imparting (esp. news);information given;paper read to learned society;social dealings access;common door or passage or road or rail or telephone or other connection between places

When talking to customers its easy to get caught up in the hype and the marketing around this solution. Every so often its good to take a step back and look at what you are asking the business to do by investing in a Unified Communication solution. Looking at the words its simple, you are asking the business to challenge the way in which they currently work, by breaking down and choosing the methods in which they communicate.

By asking the business to do this you are actually challenging the employee and person to change there own habits and by doing this you are asking a business to invest time and money into the people they employee to grow the business and its profits. James makes a good point about this challenge with his requirement to reduce email. It would seem that even with the use of IM, Voice, Wiki’s, Portal technology his use of email has increased by 3x as much.

So the real challenge businesses will have when implementing a Unified Communications solutions is not so much the technology and the integration of the said technology, it really is the person, the end user, you and me making use of the UC solution available.

Roles

Following a wonderful weekend with our daughter, I have discovered that the role of women and men in her life is beginning to take shape. Whilst putting stickers into her house sticker book and ensuring that the correct appliance’s (according to her) were in the correct place. Once the house was in order we moved onto putting the male and female figures into each of the rooms.

Following her logic the women were placed in the study, with the computer, printer and telephone, they were also placed in the kitchen. Moving onto the male figures and they were placed in the kitchen and also in the lounge.

I’m sure a child physiologists would have there own synopsis on what this means. To me it pretty much accurately describes where both Mummy and Daddy can be found. I love the fact that both male and female figures ended up in the kitchen with the smaller figures, for me the kitchen has always been the hub of the house, and I guess my love of the time I spend in this room is being passed onto our daughter.

A Unified Communications Cloud

I have been “brain storming”, “idea showering”, “thought thundering” for the past few days around Unified Communications and trying to look at it from a consumer point of view. After reading through my RSS feeds this afternoon, I found a recomendation for wordle.net today on Adam Gartenbergs blog and decided to turn some of the thoughts into a Cloud.

http://wordle.net/gallery/Unified_Comms

  

All in a days work

One of my disruptors as a home worker is the cats, who in the afternoon, feel the need to be close to me. I was contemplating re-arranging my laptop setup this afternoon to allow the Molly the cat to sleep more peacefully. But in taking the photo below Molly the cat has now relocated to the comfort of the window sill (she will be closer to the sun there!!)

 

Roundtable

I have spent the past few days setting up and then holding conference calls with both the MS Office RoundTable Video Camera\Phone device and the Logitech Web Cam I own.  I have been very impressed with the ease in setting up the MS Office RoundTable  device. It pretty much does what it says on the tin. This is providing the back end infrastructure is able to support it, especially the network.

One of the big selling points of the MS Office RoundTable  is the 360 degree camera, which enables the camera to be placed in the centre of a meeting room table in the same way as a conference phone traditionally would. When somebody speaks (the loudest I hasten to add) the small screen will show that person speaking to other video attendees. It will do this for all video attendees regardless where they are located. This means that network bandwidth needs to be good for multiple attendees within a room and outside of that room. Too much movement in the room where the device is can cause the picture to disappear and then reappear which is a very off putting experience to the end user.

Being the first device that Microsoft have delivered with regards to Video Conferencing I do like it, to make it truly effective you need at least one more piece of equipement e.g. LCD Screen or a projector, so for me that removes the adhoc meeting purpose. From my perspective, I have colleagues who work up north and often get together, with this device I could “join” them in person without travelling a 500 mile round trip. By placing this device on the table I could at least see the people and there reactions which would make for a better meeting experience for myself. However I could do this with a room based video suite e.g. LifeSize for not much additional cost, but in this scenario I would still need the web conferencing tool, my laptop etc. I think to truly understand the value of this piece of equipement the team I work with need to use it in its real environment for a period of time. Once I have done this I will add my thoughts again.

One thing I haven’t mentioned is the audio on this device. This is something I think is exceptional, in comparison to a spider phone in the middle of the desk the audio quality and sound detection is of superior quality.

As a first attempt at Video Conferencing this device is very good, as with all advances in technologies and strategic partnerships this device will only improve with time.

One of the things I haven’t commented on is the design of this device. Yes it does remind me of something from “War of the Worlds” and to sum up the impression of somebody who does work in this industry when he walked in to the office his first words were “What the **** is that thing?” If you haven’t seem it yet go take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/uc/images/image034.jpg

 

 

Unified Communications Expo

I attended the above conference at London Olympia this week and was impressed at the wide variety of vendors in attendance. There was the opportunity to attend business briefings ranging from UC and Messaging to VoIP for Business. One theme that stuck out to me during the course of this event was the need of our traditional vendors to start working in a more consistent manor than before. What may be an industry standard for telephony may be implemented and configured differently depending on which vendor solution you choose. This theme continued from the Voice Con conference in Orlando when both IBM and MS said they would work together to produce a solution to allow there products for UC to connect. The results of this will be apparent at Voice Con, San Francisco later this year.

The other theme that was apparent was the need to change how we work together to actually realise the investment that is being made in UC. If you work from home or have plans to in the future take a look at http://www.telework.org.uk and http://www.henleymc.ac.uk/henleyres03.nsf/pages/fwf , both sites offer some interesting information about how to better work from home. This is an area that needs further investigation as many customers start to implement there strategies for collaboration and workers start to make that transition from being permanently office based to being home workers.

For me I don’t think I would consider working for a company that did not allow some level of home working.

The Journey Begins (again)

Once again I am embarking on the blog journey. I have created my account, selected my theme added the widgets I wish to use and now it is upto me to ensure I keep this blog upto date.. This is where I struggle I have many thoughts as with everybody however do I really want these to be public? What thoughts should be public and what thoughts are best left un-written? I’m not going to make this a work orientated blog, or a home only blog as this would be too restrictive for me. Life, Home and Work merge for me.