Microsoft's Office Delve wants work to be more like being on Facebook Microsoft on Monday began rolling out its promised social-networking features for Office 365, in the form of a product it has freshly dubbed Office Delve. The tech, which was first unveiled at Redmond's SharePoint conference in March under the codename "Project Oslo," aims to present Office 365 users with the information that' …
If it is optional I expect Marketing will try and get people to use it like they did Yammer. Whined to my boss that I didn't answer their questions posted to Yammer. Once I pointed out that I received email on my phone even if I was not at my desk, but it could be hours (and I made sure it was) before I might be at my desk... no more lame attempts to try and force me to post my working day on yammer.
I don't want any social guff in anything office workers use, we're at work to work and the more we produce the more people get paid.
Productivity keeps going down with each more complex package and OS. Document production has spiralled down since the days of wordperfect with a few key combos formatting a document. MS just use resources for nothing, first being a CPU hog, then memory bloat, disk hogging and then wasting screen real-estate with acres os white space and tiny frames of data , all the while hindering efficient working and causing people to produce less.
MS FO.
Once upon a time we used wikis at work, deployed a little chaotically but with organic uptake (staff saw that they were good and easy and put them to use). But then the company was acquired and New Standards were enforced: wikis bad, Sharepoint good. Each team sacrificed a colleague to compulsory training and back they came full of evangelical zeal. Eve, our rep, sat down with me to try to create a simple wiki page - first barrier, which template style to base it off?
"uh, I just want some free text, link some diagrams, normal wiki stuff" - so off we went browsing the template catalogue, trying to guess what the icons meant, slowly and painfully trying things and backing out. Eventually got a blank page ready for some text, and then the fun really began:
me: Is that an edit button?
eve: I guess so, let's try it
(flicker, jerk, reload, YAY! can type now)
me: Oh, now it disappeared - how do we save the changes?
(clicks on random things)
me: Oh look, now over there's a red cross button. I wonder if that means STOP or CANCEL or DELETE or something else?
(try it, flicker jerk twitch reload)
eve: And there's the page done!
5 minutes later...
me: Eve! I can't find the new page now! all I did was go back to the parent and now it doesn't show as a child!
eve: let's look in the master catalog
eve: that's very odd, let's check your security credentials
eve: hmm, let me try logging in
eve: ok, let's restart the browser and you log in again
eve: maybe it needs to rebuild the index. I think it does that overnight - let's try again tomorrow
Later on a High Priest of IS fixed it, quietly sneering as he did so.
Later yet a Serious Memo was sent to all, noting that recidivist luddite staff were still using private wikis and This Would Not Do
And a little while later the company went tits up - not directly because of Sharepoint, but in part because of the mindset that adopts grand big flaky tools that actually do less for the average user's workflow than what they already had.
I'm sure that in priestly hands Sharepoint can give us world peace and balanced budgets, in exactly the same way that the Eves of the world go misty-eyed at the awesome power of Lotus Notes, but as a mere user of quite humble requirements they simply suck and blow.
I could not agree more. We have had to limit access to particular sites in order to maintain some working discipline in the office. OK, for the average consumer in the street, I can see the point but the last thing businesses need right now is for O365 to be more social. Thankfully businesses have been very resistant to taking up the Cloud and I hope that trend continues.
So, you put all your business documents into MS's cloud, and your information then goes looking for the people who need it most… like your colleagues, contractors, suppliers, customers, competitors, criminals.
Of course, each company is going to have its own silo, but some company data is not supposed to move freely within the organisation (HR, R&D), and some documents are destined to go outside, but a draft letter is not the same as the final copy. So, it will be down to individual users to change the permissions on individual documents as they are created and completed. What could possibly go wrong?
"...aims to present Office 365 users with the information that's most relevant to them by using machine learning to analyze their contacts, activity, and data."
I manage by exception.
The things I try to find out on an Intranet are the things I don't usually deal with.
How does the 'Office Graph' model that?
Let's make one thing clear : if your employees are not the ones who do the thinking, your company is up Shit Creek without a paddle.
For fuck's sake enough with the Magical Computer thing. Computers do NOT fix problems, they are not a substitute for people who know what they are doing.
Please take a cluebat to all idiots who think that a computer can think for them.
Especially managers.
Google 'renewing office 365' for a feast of complaints; trying to add renewal license key to Home Premium Subscription on 3 laptop stole in excess of 8 hours... multiple un-installs and re-installs, running (essentially) Dos routines to remove trace of original (valid/certified) copy - such a messy process; when compared to the Apple experience MSFT botch ups continue to frustrate.
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