Conceptual Clarity

It wasn't just the Lotus aficionados who were excited about Lotusphere this week Orlando, we had a team there as well in support of our EditLive! for IBM Workplace Web Content Management (IWWCM) integration.  Things got even more exciting for us when Mike Rhodin announced that the integration had taken out the Best in Lotusphere Showcase award (at the time of writing the Lotusphere page is yet to be updated with this news).

This is great news for the Ephox team and certainly made my day when I heard it on Tuesday (Australian time).  However, I think it's even better news for all those people out there creating content on the web, whether they are using EditLive! or a competing offering.  To me it signals realization of the importance of rich word processing applications for the web and how these applications can make the task of getting content online so much easier.

Creating compelling web content is complicated, much more so than using Microsoft Word to create a document.  The web's componentized architecture really makes it difficult for your average contributor to write content.  The web adds a whole lot more complexity - as a user I have to work with my style sheet, I need to collaborate with others, I need to upload the images I want or find them on another server…and this is just the beginning!  If I have to do this through an unfamiliar interface, if I can't run a spell checker, if I don't have a thesaurus or if I can't create a list properly then something that's already hard for me just became really difficult.  Sure blogs, wikis and content management systems make it easier today than ever before, but you still might have to explain to someone why their images are on Flickr, why ==Heading== (MediaWiki markup) is a heading, or why they can only see versions in web pages but not as tracked changes.

This is exactly where I believe WYSIWYG editors like EditLive! come to the fore and our EditLive! for IWWCM integration is one of the best examples of this.  EditLive! for IWWCM is the best of "integration at the glass".  There's a lot that has gone into the integration, though from the user's perspective using it is as simple as using Microsoft Word or Open Office.  From the instant that the user opens an item for editing, EditLive! is customizing their experience to be personalized and, most of all, pain free.  To begin, EditLive!'s interface is customized according to their role within the system and EditLive! fetches the appropriate style sheet from the server and presents it to the user in a drop down with built in styles preview.  If the user needs to insert a link or an image they simply press a button on EditLive!'s interface and can immediately browse the content repository for all available content and images they have permissions to use.  In addition to this there is EditLive!'s spell checking support, that is automatically set to the appropriate language for the user, as well as a thesaurus, comprehensive table and list support and all of EditLive!'s other rich editing support.  Finally there is track changes, working just as it does in Microsoft Word with the addition that EditLive! has already been supplied with the user's name and is logging all their changes so they can easily collaborate with their colleagues and work with the changes in the editor.

As we move into 2007 I hope that all this is a sign of things to come.  This year we want to take EditLive! to places it hasn't been to before.  Not only in new content management systems but in blogs, in wikis and in all sorts of other web content systems and in each place we take EditLive! we're going to aim to create rich, integrated user experiences.

In December we started a new initiative at Ephox called LiveWorks!.  It's something that I'm very excited about because I think it has the potential to offer a tremendous amount of value to Ephox and, more importantly, to you!

As I mentioned in an earlier post Ephox follows an Extreme Programming (XP) methodology for our development which delivers us a great amount of value internally.  Some of the benefits we get include:

• Test driven development has greatly improved product quality and code coverage
• Iterations ensure that we can deliver the most valuable features first
• We are becoming increasingly flexible with respect to changes in the market and how they reflect on the product roadmap.
• We can now release software at any time, at least internally.  

The last couple of points have been of great value internally, but there's more to releasing a software product than just developing the software.  When releasing some of the major things that need to be addressed are sales, marketing and support of a product.  Obviously these are critical aspects of releasing any product, but they do increase the time between code completion and release.  Thus, as clients, to date you may not have seen the results of our internal flexibility for roadmaps and release cycles.

LiveWorks! is about delivering this value to you.  LiveWorks! will give you an insight into what we're working on at the moment and provide useful code, integrations and plugins we've developed previously that we can release more easily on LiveWorks!.  All the integrations and plugins available on LiveWorks! come with source code and are free for you to download and use.

LiveWorks! is about hearing from you.  We've provided a community mailing list as part of LiveWorks! that myself and many of the Ephox developers are on.  If you see a project on LiveWorks! that interests you or you'd like to suggest  an integration please let the LiveWorks! community know.  If you'd like to share an integration or some code that you've found useful we'd also love to hear from you.

LiveWorks! is still evolving.  Over time we will be adding more value to LiveWorks!.  In the near future we hope to be releasing more prototype integrations and plugins.  We're also hoping to provide you with a better view of what we're planning by providing development road maps, early access releases and weekly builds so you can monitor the progress of our products and be ready to take advantage of new features.

So I've been tagged by both Andy and Andrew.  Here goes with five things that you may not know about me:

1. I have been known to cling to my inner child.  I still love the Muppets and my workspaces at home and at work are proliferated by desk toys and real toys.  Believe it or not I think this does help keep things creative at work.
2. I played tennis for around 10 years until my younger brother, Adrien (who is now a tennis coach) got better than me, this was around the time I switched to playing touch football.  The crowning moment of my touch football "career" was getting to play against Darren Lockyer in a H-grade social match.  For those who aren't aware Darren Lockyer is the captain of the Australian Rugby League team.  I'm not quite sure why he was there and our team lost by a considerable margin, but it was still a lot of fun.
3. I spell using The Queen's English and EditLive! (or Word/Outlook) corrects it to proper American English for me.  To be honest I prefer the Queen's version - give me "U"s and "S"es - but I know that many reading the things I write would prefer me to Americanize the spelling.
4. The first concert I ever went to was a Ben Folds Five concert in 1998.  The band has broken up but still remain one of my favorites.
5. My siblings and I have rhyming names - Damien, Adrien and Vivienne.  As a child this made it difficult when Mum or Dad was yelling at one of us from the top of the stairs…you'd often mishear which of us was in trouble at any particular time.

Unfortunately, I don't know of five other people who are blogging who haven't been tagged.  As someone who has just started blogging you know that something is at the end of the line when it gets to me.  So here's a super special bonus fact instead:

• I've been known to write a poetic verse or two and I am told that it's actually half decent.  For the record my favorite poem of all time would have to be Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 (also known as Let me not to the marriage of true minds).  If that's not a great poem then I never writ - little Shakespearean humor there.

Tonight I had my first class of the new year for my MBA.  So I'm back into it, at least one evening a week taken up with a class from 6 to 9pm.  However, it does mean that I reprise one of my highlights of the week.

Brisbane, is divided by quite a large river - the aptly named Brisbane River - and every night I go to class I park my car on one side of the river and walk over the Goodwill Bridge to the QUT campus on the bank directly opposite, right next to Brisbane city.  The walk lasts only about ten minutes, but it is one of the highlights of my week, yet I never realized the value of this simple walk until I started my studies (and discovered the cheap parking on the south bank of the river).

Over the course of these ten minutes I get the chance to clear my head, but the undoubted highlight is from the middle of the bridge at about 9:15pm on a weeknight.  It is then that I pause and look out at the myriad of lights that form Brisbane city.  The light glistens on the water and the sounds of traffic are somewhat distant.  On the bridge itself I'm often alone, though sometimes one of Brisbane's CityCat ferries will motor underneath but for the most part it's a serene and beautiful outlook on a city of around a million people (I will take a photo next week so you can enjoy it as well).  The moment passes and I am on my way again having enjoyed one of the highlights of my week.

This simple, little act of taking a moment, just a moment, from my busy week helps keep me sane between the rigors of work, study and everything in between.  Grab these moments when you can and appreciate them as you will, they may not come often, they may not last long, but it helps keep you in touch, after all, not everything is business.

When we first started developing the track changes functionality a year ago we only had an inkling of how useful it was going to be.  Afterall, over the years content applications have found ways around this deficit through various differencing and compare and merge engines and there was definitely a question in my mind as to how our track changes functionality would stack up against these.  Since I've been using track changes in an online editor longer than anyone else out there (all of four months) I thought I would relate my experience thus far for those wondering the same thing.

To put track changes to the test, it was deployed to both our internal wiki and the CMS for the Ephox web site.  This ensured that the functionality received some real world testing.  It took some time for people to start using it on the wiki, but with the Ephox web site the benefits were immediate.  From Australia I was able to work in collaboration with our marketing and sales departments in the USA without several long phone calls or screen sharing sessions.  Everyone could immediately see what had been changed and by whom.  Also, most importantly, changes could be seen in context and worked with immediately in the editor.  This saved hours, days if you include the time delay between the USA and Australia!

More recently I've been doing some planning on our wiki for some new product ideas and initiatives for 2007.  As part of this I've been collecting feedback from people throughout Ephox.  Previously, I would have watched our wiki's RSS feed for changes and read through document comparisons, often re-reading the complete document to see the changes and comments in context.  With track changes, this becomes significantly easier.  I can see who made changes, when and see their comments in color coded text.  Yes, we've had this in Word forever…but in a wiki?  In a wiki I've found track changes really shines!

The other "feature" of track changes that has me particularly excited is the ease of install.  I've incorporated track changes into five systems now, a wiki, a blog, our custom CMS, IBM Workplace Web Content Management and Alfresco Enterprise Content Management.  In each case installation was as easy as flicking a switch.  Once I turned on the configuration options for track changes (about 10 mins work) I was up and running, no more changes and no server-side components required.  Congratulations to our engineers!

The work is not finished yet, already I am finding things that need improvement.  For instance, I really want to be able to right click on the marker in the left margin to accept and reject changes.  Also, I really want comments, right now we are just adding these as if they were part of the document but they need to be separate.  As always I would be eager to hear from you what you would like to see with Track Changes and about your experiences with it in general.

Track changes has saved me hours, maybe even days, of my time by now, if you take that figure and multiply that those savings over a company - well to quote Keanu Reeves "WHOA" - that's some saving!  The feature has enabled me to collaborate much better via our wiki and the content management system on our web site.  Download a copy of EditLive! 6.0 to try it for yourself and within your team.  I think you may well get as much benefit out of track changes as you did from when you first deployed EditLive!.

EditLive!'s Track Changes Markup and Tooltip

Today I had an issue with one of of Australia's telecommunications companies and needed to call through to their customer service center.  This company is not particularly well known for it's customer service and support, but I must say that today I was pleasantly surprised.  They solved my problem quickly and cheerfully and I went on my way a happy customer.

This really got me thinking about the role of client support and service within companies today and how those people working tirelessly in support are the unsung heroes of many companies.  I know quite a few people in this kind of role and I realize that it's certainly not the most glamorous of roles in a company and it can be pretty thankless at times, so let me start by thanking all those of you who work in support and especially those supporting Ephox products, both at Ephox and at client sites.

Computer related customer support has long had a stigma about it.  I am sure many of you have seen parodies of unhelpful technical support staff and maybe even been unlucky enough to have had a bad experience or two.  Certainly in this day and age of globalization and the internet, as consumers it's often the case that we never speak with, personally e-mail or interact with representatives of the companies whose products we are using.  Customer self service has greatly increased - purchasing airline tickets or ordering a Dell PC are great examples of this - and with the introduction of self-service many have been under pressure to further reduce customer support costs, particularly post-sale - after all the money is in the bank right?

However, take a look at support from another angle and it becomes immensely more valuable and more important in today's marketplace, particularly the Internet marketplace.  As social beings people basically want to make connections with people, yet in situations where products are bought and sold online interactions between your clients and your staff can be few and far between.  In fact, its likely that most of those interactions are going to be through your support desk.  It's those experiences of your company that your clients are going to remember and theres a good chance they will tell their friends and colleagues about them.  Indeed, it's those experiences that your company may well live and die by, at least in the eyes of your clients.  Though perhaps even more importantly, these experiences give us within companies the opportunity to learn more about our clients - what do they want, what features they are using, what we can improve, what do they find difficult, what do they wish the product could do or, from one person to another, whether they are having a good day or not.

If I was to look at support in this context I would say that the challenge is not "how do we reduce our support costs?" but rather "how do we make our support more valuable to our clients and to our company?".  The value is definitely there, the challenge is to realize that value!  As a member of the software industry I think we still have a long way to go.  I make support calls to our clients today and often they are surprised that I've called them and that the response is so fast but at the end of the day it is me who should be thanking them, for taking the time to share their experiences with our software and their real-world use cases for it, each call is a valuable learning experience for me (so thank you if you're a client reading this!).  There are glimpses of brilliance in the support field out there though.  An example of a company who is doing this right is Atlassian.  Their promise and delivery of Legendary Service shows that they really understand the importance of supporting their clients.

Finally thank you once again to everyone in any kind of support role out there.  Sometimes it might be tiring, often it may be thankless, but trust me, we couldn't do without you and to some of us you're worth your weight in gold.