Document Workflow

We all have to deal with paper. Not everything comes into the email inbox, so we work out workflows of how to deal with all that paper… moving from envelope tray to inbox, to work-in-progress, to completed and for file. However there is the new way of dealing with this that many larger/medium size companies have been using for several years using relatively expensive hardware/software combinations for scanning on entry and then using expensive groupware/workflow software to move around to required processor. Now however this can be done cheaply and on a budget with the right process.

How complex you make it depends on scale, as the single person operation can get away with a looser workflow than the 20+ person operation. The most important piece is getting the paperwork scanned into the machine and this can now be done using a simple all-in-one printer/scanner or standalone scanner available for less than £50. HP (and I am sure many others) offer the F4272 Printer/Scanner/Copier which comes with their own Solution Center software which can be simply configured to scan multi-page documents into PDF/Searchable PDF files, for less than £40. This is a quick and effective solution for the very small office, or you can go up a gear and obtain a device with an autosheet feeder such as the HP Officejet 5610 Printer/Scanner/Copier/Fax for £54. Once you have the document in PDF form, then the whole document handling and filing process becomes oh so much simpler.

After the hardware/software solution, all that is really required is the central document storage location and/or email distribution tied to a simple filing system (how about Year Folder/Month Folder) and a fixed file naming convention (such as YYYY-MM-DD Subject Matter.pdf).

I have found this a very effective method of dealing with incoming paperwork for many years, although I have not had the benefit of the low cost of entry that today we have. So what is the mobile aspect of this? Having access to all of your company documents online in PDF form from wherever you happen to be, and with the use of the modern USB powered Scanner such as those from Canon, you can make use of the same ingest process ending up with PDF files of all your documents wherever you are, as those scanners are really small and light.

Netbooks for the enterprise

There is now a steady flow of netbook class devices coming through from many suppliers (HP, Toshiba, Samsung et al), with the new HP Mini 1000 being HP’s second generation device correcting the major problems with their first generation (using the C7 processor rather than the Intel Atom, using XP instead of Vista Basic). Notebook.com (via Digital Home Thoughts) have a review of this latest unit, and a fair review it is although it makes what seems to be a throwaway comment about netbooks not being ready for business use. This is something I cannot agree with.

The main driver of this seems to be a belief about build quality being poor or ‘soft’ compared to the business market’s requirements. Now I have been using laptops since before they were even that (having made use of the Toshiba and Compaq machines since before they were even called laptops, and were called transportables), and have come across all manner of machines, but I have not noticed anything deficient in the build quality/robustness of the netbooks I have used (admittedly Asus and MSI only), and would certainly not warn the business user off of these devices. In many respects they are the ideal business machines as they focus on basic functionality, portability and not high performance games and video handling. This is pretty much what all businesses want of laptops. In fact, the performance capability that modern netbooks offers generally exceeds the capabilities of most standard build laptops in mainstream business, simply because these machines are specifications that have lasted three years or more for standardisation purposes, which generally means circa 2002-2004 hardware builds. Certainly it is also true that machines since 2004 have also only grown in capability via more RAM and Hard Disk space. Netbooks also offer business features without the gloss of high speed graphics that can be used for fanciful needs, combined with a level of standardisation we have not seen in a long while (most netbooks are the same processor, RAM, motherboard and graphics chipset configuration as each other now the C7s and so on are dropping out), and also making use of the OS of choice for the modern business – Windows XP (although upgrades to XP Professional may be needed for the more corporate business user).

On top of this netbooks offer another advantage – the basic hardware is extremely low cost. Not much of an advantage when the support costs of a user can be upwards of €600 per year, but a slight advantage in these challenging times is important.

So, when are we going to see a mass adoption by a major company of a Corporate Netbook? Or is this something that Microsoft wants to fight against, simply because that would mean underlining the Vista Failure? Certainly the software licensing agreements for ‘netbooks’ as I have seen outlined, do seem to be against the concept of a business netbook.

News Clipping Service

Recently I was contacted by a company who wanted to sell me access to a news clipping service. I have no idea why or how they selected me, but they did the hard sell and in response to my rejections threw a free trial at me and they promised to call me after a week to see if I had found it useful. They would then sign me up – at least they hoped they would.

Now those who read this blog know that I value the capabilities of Google Alerts for obtaining live information about whatever subject I want. So it was interesting to compare the service with the ‘freebie’.

Well I can say now that newsclipping services are on the deathlist with the availability of Google Alerts and that pretty much all news and other information is now being published online. The service just provided me the same links that Google Alerts provides with the addition of fancy graphics, a different interface and a bill. I never checked how much the news clipping service would cost me, but frankly anything more than free would have been too much.

These services can only survive in the future by providing something else of value but I cannot identify what that something else could be – certainly correcting for the odd false positive is really not worth the money. Google Alerts is the thing.

Real long distance working

Stephen Fry has produced a wonderful post where he kicks about various mobile/cell phones, but it has a wonderful description of his approach to real long distance working…

Get a coffee, sit back and read it through. Lovely.

Standard App Screens

I recently blogged about how when you are at home you should have the most screen real estate as possible to make that experience great. However I now want to take a look from a different perspective and that has more to do with the fact that just because you have a huge screen does not mean you have to use it.

Now I had to buy a 22” screen recently purely so I could run an app that had the temerity to require a minimum of 1024 pixels in the vertical. Now they did not have to do this, and it is pretty much bad screen design to require such an outlandishly high pixel count in that direction and not offer a scalable experience down to the more normal levels. What is more normal levels though? Is it 768 pixels or 600 pixels in the vertical?

There used to be a time when applications were designed to work in 640×480 pixels, but I do believe we are now past that. Then they moved on to 800×600, just about the time when the Internet stated to get real big and so design aims of websites also began to assume that the lowest common denominator was 800×600 as well. In more recent times many app vendors and websites have begun to assume that they can have 1024×768 pixels and this was fine until 15 months ago.

This was when the first netbooks began to appear, and those first EeePC 4Gs were 800×480 pixels with scrolling/scaling software to cope with up to 800×600 pixels, which is where I started to really notice that the 1024×768 pixel screen size was pretty much assumed by so many. That Asus though was a bit of a one off, and since the beginning of the year with the 9xx series machines, the MSI and Acer machines it has been pretty much standardised that netbooks have 1024×600 pixel screens.

When running a number of applications, I have received a number of pop-ups when starting applications like Google Earth that state that I will have a ‘reduced experience’ because of my screen resolution. In addition, the number of websites where I basically see only the main banner, adverts and navigation bar and about 2 or 3 lines of content have is many. So what will happen now? Will the availability of netbooks with screen sizes of 1024×600 pixels roll back designers of applications and websites to assume that is the lowest common denominator now?

I certainly hope so, as to assume that you can use the large screen resolutions also gets into the way of some of the best bits of having a multi/large monitor setup – laying out the screen so I can use multiple applications to their fullest.

The Desk (cont’d)

I followed my own advice yesterday and upgraded to a 22 inch screen from my 19 inch. My reasons were specifically to do with bad software that requires at least 1024 pixels in the vertical, but the extra screen real estate of 3 inches, 150 pixels vertically, and 210 pixels horizontally does come in handy.

If you needed any other reason to do this, you should just look at the prices. Now I do not promise that these screens are the highest speed and quality in the world, but you can now acquire a 22 inch screen for £130 inc VAT in the UK – which compares very favourably to my first 15 inch LCD at £349 inc VAT back in 1999.

You know you need it, and hey I am looking now at USB-Display Link adapters to see if I could drive a 3rd screen of this resolution.

The Desk

Do yourself a favour, make your desk as comfortable as possible for your computing. Here you are with a laptop or netbook, and you are scrunched over looking at the 10”/15” screen and using that 75-95% keyboard, and that trackpad which you have never gotten used to. No, it does not have to be this way.

1. Clear the desk area

2. Get yourself a big monitor, a full sized keyboard and a separate mouse.

3. Get yourself a laptop cooler/docking station with a USB hub (separate or built-in)

4. Plug the big monitor into your laptop/netbook and set it up as an extended desktop, keeping the primary as the laptop screen. Save this as a quick select option, taking care to position your external screen as you need it – in other words so you move your mouse off the right edge of the laptop screen and it appears on the left of your second screen which is to the right of your laptop! You have more than doubled your desktop in pixels and you have created a huge screen real estate to do all that work, and you will notice how much more productive this sort of setup is within hours.

5. Plug the USB hub in and get the full sized keyboard and mouse plugged into it, and onwards plug the USB hub (if it is separate) into the docking station, and get working with those. All of a sudden, you are not crouched over the little machine looking like the hunchback of Notre dame.

6. Make sure the cooler is on, to ensure that you have the maximum life out of your laptop and its components when you are using it at full pelt.

7. Make sure that you have plenty of light (natural and artificial) on demand and that you can fully control it.

8. Have you still got an area where you can write? Good. If not, then make one as you will use it – paperwork still exists.

9. Now all you need to do to move off and onto your desk is plug in the USB, the monitor maybe and do a keypress/mouse select and you are docked/portable in seconds. This is the model of the Long Distance Workers Desk.

So you got a Netbook, what now?

You take it home, do the unboxing, get it powered up and running and now what?

1. Get comfortable with the Linux install that you may have inherited or swap it for Windows XP. If it came with XP, then settle in.

2. Get Firefox 3.0 running, OpenOffice 3.0 onboard, get hooked up to WiFi, and get yourself a 3G card unless it is already built in.

3. If you have a netbook with a 2 or 3 cell battery – get out and buy yourself the 6 cell battery as quickly as you can – you do need it.

4. If you have the HP2133, scour the Internet for instructions on how to get it running Linux or Windows XP because that beast is damn slow with Vista.

5. Get yourself setup with Delicious from Yahoo and add its plug-in to your Firefox or Internet Explorer install so that you can have all your cloud bookmarks tagged and running with you and/or get Foxmarks with the password sync – now you will have your bookmarks and passwords synchronised across all of your machines as long as you spread the love a little.

6. Migrate your email over to IMAP4 based services unless you already have it…or better move the whole domain over to Google Apps and use their facilities. This way, your email is always going to be available and not locked to a single machine.

7. Get yourself some web storage like box.net.

8. Sign yourself up to Skype – with that webcam in your machine, you have an ideal tool for getting into VoIP/Video Conferencing and this is on most of the netbooks by default. Share your Skype ID out.

Now assuming that you have progressed to Windows XP on your netbook…

1. Do all the above but in XP of course.

2. Think about Hosted Exchange for business use…it is slightly better than IMAP4.

3. Get Microsoft Mesh on the netbook and all of your other machines, and share the important folders across all of your machines in Peer-to-Peer mode.

4. Make sure that you setup that Skype install.

5. I know it is my preference, but get yourself a Google Reader setup running and make sure all your textual RSS feeds are setup there.

6. Install Juice for podcast downloads and Miro for vodcast downloads, I always find it comforting to have my text/graphics RSS separate to my audio and video feeds, but you could have it all in Miro.

7. Download Windows Live services such as Live Messenger, Live Photo Gallery, and of course Live Writer for blogging.

8. Optimise your netbook setup to maximise battery life when on battery, and run as fast as possible on mains. Use additional power management tools like Notebook Hardware Control to manage the switch automatically.

And then scour the internet for sites that service the optimisation of your particular netbook for those interesting new tweaks.

Oh, and stay with this blog.

Netbooks are not just for Christmas, they are for life

I use my netbook as my primary machine ALL THE TIME. I believe you can never have too much screen real estate but it is a tradeoff on so many things.

When I am running around I find the 10″ screen absolutely great, particularly as anything bigger would be a storage problem in my case/bag and also would not fit on the little tray table on the train/plane. The only time limit I have is the battery.

In terms of the home base however, it would be great if I had as much screen real estate as possible and I get this by plugging in and extending my desktop to a 19″ LCD. This is purely a comfort thing and would happen whether I had a 10″ netbook or a 15″ laptop – you can never have too much screen real estate. In fact, I would love to get a 30″ screen and connect the netbook to it – it can do that fine and look forward to when I do have one.

External keyboards and mice are the same on a netbook as for a laptop.

The netbook is just a multi-purpose processing device that scales to what you need it to do for standard information processing requirements.

Originally posted as a comment by nocky100 on Scripting News using Disqus.

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Monthly Archives: December 2008