Is multi-tasking making us dumber?

One of the business blogs I have in my Netvibes is Tim Berry. In a post today he picked up on an article from The Atlantic (via Paul Barsch)which states that neuroscientists have discovered that multitasking actually makes our brains atrophy.

Multi-tasking messes with our brains in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning.

Certain studies find that multi-tasking boosts the level of stress related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction—prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term they cause (our brain) to atrophy.

That buzz you get from Twitter-ing, Facebook-ing, RSS-ing and blogging, all while on Skype and rearranging your iTunes playlists is just your brain telling you to slow down. Sometimes being a Luddite geek is a good thing. :-)

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery - Part 2

Subtitle: Why Development by Collaboration Is A Good Thing

First I borrowed from Notes 8 to update the UI for an app. Now I'm borrowing even more heavily from Ben Langhinrichs to make that application even more functional.

The challenge: Take four databases that have been in development for over five years and slowly grown into one application and provide a single cohesive interface. Provide a compelling UI that is intuitive and, well, prettier.

It's a pretty tall order, and it's something I have wanted to do for years. The core to these records is the workflow section, which was really rather simplistic. It consists of anywhere from two to six steps, with different groups responsible for each phase. The challenge was to present this in a coherent way without unnecessary screen clutter. The previous implementation was like this:

Lots of redundancy, lots of visual clutter. I started thinking about how I could use layers, and I remembered Ben's use of layers to put controls beside a section title. Perfect! It took some work to get it laid out (and a couple of e-mails to Ben), but I finally got it.













I came up with a technique I call section tables. This lets you present a single cohesive table to users, but they break apart to provide more information. I am using it for workflow. Here it is all collapsed...






And with a couple of sections expanded.












Here is a sample database for you to look at while I'm finishing up this application. I'm still pulling everything together to make it cohesive but I'll be doing some posts detailing how I did all this. Without the resources offered by the community I don't think this would be possible in such a short amount of time, and I'm humbled to be standing on the shoulders of giants.

Yahoo buying Zimbra

I got the following from Computerworld this morning. The SaaS collaboration space is getting pretty interesting. I'm not sure I buy into this as a viable solution, but there must be something here. Or it's over-hyped and being fed by a media and analyst frenzy. I suppose time will tell.

September 17, 2007 (IDG News Service) -- Yahoo Inc. has agreed to buy Zimbra Inc., a privately held company whose Web-hosted collaboration and messaging suite is considered a successful example of the software-as-a-service model.

Yahoo will acquire Zimbra for $350 million in a transaction expected to close in this year's fourth quarter, the companies said today.

With Zimbra, Yahoo becomes a competitor to Google Inc., Zoho, Cisco Systems Inc.'s WebEx and others that provide Web-hosted collaboration and communication suites.

Zimbra, like other Web-hosted suite providers, is also considered a rival to Microsoft Corp. and its Office suite and Exchange messaging platform.

Yahoo is buying Zimbra in part to boost the Yahoo Mail Web mail service and leverage Zimbra's client base in universities, small and medium-size businesses, and Internet service providers, Yahoo said.

In addition to e-mail, Zimbra's suite also includes calendar and contact management components, as well as an open platform that allows third-party developers to create mini-applications, called Zimlets, for the suite.

After the deal closes, Zimbra will become a Yahoo subsidiary.

Making sense of Microsoft collaboration

Now that I'm in a Microsoft shop I've been trying to wrap my head around Microsoft's collaboration offering for the past couple of months. Microsoft's marketing says one thing, analysts and experts say something else, and the people I know who actually do collaborative applications with Microsoft tools tell me something entirely different. Then my own research may or may not match up with any or all of the other sources, so I try it out first hand and get a whole different set of results. Yeah, it's been a little frustrating.

During my research I stumbled across an article on Redmondmag.com which really helped. It's from December 2006, but it's still pretty relevant. Here are some interesting bits from the beginning of their discussion.

Microsoft's ambitious collaboration strategy is just beginning to take shape, and it's still confusing. Some products and features are far more ready for prime time than others. IT pros are faced with a portfolio that's voluminous, lacks complete unification and, quite frankly, fails to sidestep a rash of redundancies....

"Being a stack architect is very difficult these days. It used to be so simple to pick the right Microsoft technologies and build a stack," says Tim Huckaby, CEO of InterKnowlogy, a custom .NET development shop. "These days, it's overwhelming."

So what's the scope of the product line we're talking about to implement Microsoft's vision of collaboration? The official list from Microsoft includes:

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Office Communications Server 2007 (formerly Live Communications Server 2005)
• Exchange Server 2007
• Office Communicator 2007
• Office Groove 2007 (formerly Groove Virtual Office 3.1)
• Office Outlook 2007

Note that those are only what is needed for the official Microsoft collaboration platform. Both of the Sharepoint seminars I have attended made heavy use of Infopath 2007 for online forms, and you would be hard-pressed to work in this environment without the rest of Microsoft Office. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Windows Server 2003 with Active Directory are considered infrastructure components and not included in the list. To do any custom development (and you will do a LOT) you need to add Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to the list.

But do you really need all that? Let's get to the root of what collaboration is. According to Merriam-Webster, "collaborate" means:

1. to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor
2. to cooperate with or willingly assist an enemy of one's country and especially an occupying force
3. to cooperate with an agency or instrumentality with which one is not immediately connected

In the business view of collaboration the first definition fits best (although you may also engage in the second and third :-P ). For collaborative business applications this means we need:

• A user interface for collecting, displaying and generally working with data and information
• A place to store the data and information
  
• A rules engine for notifying others about changes to the data
• A delivery mechanism for those messages

Continuing from the Redmonmag.com article:

Herein lies the problem: While Microsoft talks about building a seamless, pervasive collaboration platform, many analysts and users complain that the company has done a poor job of clearly sorting out and positioning the many product pieces that constitute that strategy. They believe there are some pieces that overlap each other in terms of core functions and they don't get an adequate feel for the company's long-term commitment to some components.

...

"They have been dropping the term 'collaborative' for a few years now, but they only talk about it in piecemeal fashion or as part of some point product discussion. [Microsoft] could do a better job helping the market understand what is really a multi-faceted story, and how these different technologies address very different problems," says Dwight Davis, vice president at Ovum Summit Inc., a market researcher in Seattle."

The experts largely agree that deploying the full Microsoft collaboration stack is difficult, confusing and there is overlapping functionality. You can create workflow apps using Infopath 2007, Sharepoint Server 2007, or even ASP.Net. When you look at the punch list of functionality required to do collaboration it quickly becomes apparent that Microsoft's portfolio lacks cohesion, focus and direction.

Okay, so peeling back the layers and getting down to brass tacks, what Microsoft tools do you need to build the same kind of basic collaborative applications that are delivered on Notes and Domino day in and day out? All you need is a form for users to enter data, a view for them to navigate through documents, and some workflow notifications with doc links. It's a surprisingly short list:

• Visual Studio for creating a user interface
• IIS to host the ASP.Net application
• SQL Server to store the data and notify people about the changes
• Exchange to deliver messages and
• Outlook to read them

Once you get those basics in place there is still a lot of work to do. A key benefit of using Notes is the use of document links. Microsoft doesn't have a rich client like Notes (yet) so that functionality is much more difficult to achieve unless you go with an ASP.Net web-based solution. For security you can map Active Directory users or groups to SQL Server security at the object level, and you can create roles in SQL Server that encompass groups and individual users. Something like Readers or Authors fields is more difficult to implement, but it is still doable. With all that addressed then there is offline data access to consider and finally you can start thinking about application deployment and updates.

The online colleague who outlined the above strategy to me said that Microsoft doesn't provide a seamlessly integrated solution because that isn't the business they're in. They are in the business of building up integrators and resellers who will do the hard work of creating the seamless solutions. By Microsoft keeping things disjointed and hard to understand it ensures the BP's have business, and also ensures that MS will sell more product. I can't argue with that logic from Microsoft's perpective, and seeing Connections and Quickr on the horizon I can't help but wonder if IBM might be heading more strongly in that direction, too. That's a topic for another post, though. ;-)

In conclusion, if you ignore the hype and the marketing you can develop collaborative solutions on Microsoft technologies without ever touching anything Microsoft lists in their collaboration portfolio. It can be a tough uphill slog, fraught with difficult architectural decisions that can't easily be changed later, but it is possible. If you do decide to go with a pre-built solution framework then Sharepoint is Microsoft's answer. However keep in mind that Sharepoint is more comparable to Quickr and Connections than Domino. Microsoft has no direct answer to Domino or Notes.