The MyOffice Blog

Since releasing the Blackberry version of MyOffice the response from Blackberry users has been tremendous …. so much so that we’re going to continue developing and enhancing the version by adding more functionality.

What they like is the simplicity of the interface, plus the fact that’s it’s online without the need to sync at regular intervals. Being able to add an appointment and have other users see the appointment immediately is a great advantage. If you haven’t logged on using the Blackberry version yet, go to www.myoffice.net/mobile from your Blackberry.

We actively encourage feedback so if you have any comments, good or bad, we’d like to hear from you. Just email support@myoffice.net. We get our best ideas from users!

We’ve commenced work on developing the tasks module and that should be released in a few weeks. Again, it will have a simple interface - a task list containing tasks … making it ideal for recording things to do, while you’re on the move. Personally, I use the task list while I’m travelling, to organise and plan my week ahead. Most people make lists of things to do and I’m no exception. I’ve been using my Asus EeePC on the move and I’m looking forward to only having to take my Blackberry with me when I’m out of the office.

We’re regularly asked ‘Does MyOffice work with a Blackberry?’ or ‘Does MyOffice work with an iPhone?’ and up until now we’ve had to say no … but things have changed. We’ve recently introduced a ‘mobile’ web browser version that will work on any phone that can surf the net. So that includes devices like Blackberrys, iPhones, Gphones, the new Nokia N95 etc.

This complements our existing Pocket PC version designed to run on PDAs.

Virtuall all new phones these days have the capability to access the internet … and the new ‘mobile’ version of MyOffice will workon all of them. The difficulty with mobile phones is that mostly they have a very small screen to work with. Some powerful phones like the iPhone allow you to view normal sized web pages by zooming and scrolling. Software like Opera Mobile gives you the same capability.

Having said that we decided that we wanted our mobile web browser version to be simple and easy to understand and to work within the confines of a small screen. That naturally lead us to designing list views with expandable detail pages.

So, for example, when you log on and view your diaries there’s a drop down selection to let you choose which diary you want to look at. The diary page opens automatically with your default diary and lists appointments for today. We display the descriptive text in the list and if you want to see more information about the appointment you can drill down and view the entire appointment. Because MyOffice lets you configure an unlimited number of fields in the appointment we manage the display of this data by letting the user choose what they see using up and down arrows to explode or implode the additional data. I think it works quite well. It’s intuitive and easy to navigate.

We’ve applied the same interface to all the modules. Currently you can use the Mobile Web Browser version to view and edit diaries, contacts. Tasks are coming soon.

The introduction of the Mobile Web Browser version means that we now have 4 versions of MyOffice, all included in the subscription price.

(1) Windows version - our main flagship product and the one you would normally elect to use on a day to day basis. You can install it on as many PCs as you like.

(2) Web Browser version - designed for use from hotels, airport lounges, internet cafes, etc. It doesn’t have the same functionality as the Windows version but is more than adequate for checking appointments, emails and contacts.

(3) Pocket PC version - which you install on Pocket PC PDAs. It connects online via gprs or wireless.

(4) Mobile Web Browser version - which can be used from any phone that can connect to the internet.

So, where do we go next in development terms? Well, we’ll continue to develop and enhance our main product - the Windows version, and we have plans to improve the Web Browser version over the course of the coming year …. and the new Mobile Web Browser version will undoubtedly be enhanced as we receive feedback from users.

You can connect to the Mobile Web Browser by going to www.myoffice.net/mobile on your phone.

Using different colours is a useful way to differentiate between types of appointments,  and MyOffice gives you 3 methods of colouring appointments.

First and foremost you can simply edit the appointment colour for each appointment (using the Colours tab) and set whichever colour you like. There are plenty to choose from and if you don’t like the set colours you can create your own custom colours.

Then there are 2 automatic methods.

Which one you use tends to depend upon the way you use diaries. You may, for example, have one diary with lots of users having access and adding / editing appointments. If its important to know which user added / edited an appointment you can configure MyOffice to have a different colour for each user. Suppose you have 3 users (Tom, Dick and Harry) and you want to assign Tom = Red, Dick = Green, Harry = Blue. Each user selects the colour they will use by clicking Tools > Options. The colour is configured in the ‘Appointment Colour’ tab. Then when you see a blue appointment in a diary you’ll know it was entered or amended by Harry. The colour applies to all diaries that Harry has access to … so whenever you see a blue appointment you’ll know that it was made by harry.

This technique is most useful when you have 1 diary and you want to put everyon’e appointments in that diary.

On the other hand, you may want to set up individual diaries for users or for other things like meeting rooms and equipment allocation. With lots of diaries its probably more appropriate to have a different colour for each diary. Then, if you overlay them with the ‘Show multiple diaries’ checkbox you can see which diary is which in the combined view.

You set a colour for a diary by editing the diary in Tools > Diary Admin (Details tab)

There’s another colour variation that is currently being developed and that’s to allow different types of appointments to be classified with specific colours. For example, you might want to classify an appointment as ‘Sales’ or ‘Survey’ or ‘Installation’ and have different colours to denote these 3 types. This change is conditional upon the classification of appointments being developed but hopefully we’ll see this implemented in the not too distant future.

There’s a new breed of laptops on the block … ulta light, ultra portable devices called UMPCs (Ulta-Mobile PCs)

I’ve been trying the new Asus EeePC 900 to see how well MyOffice runs on it … and the answer is ‘very well indeed’. My Eee PC came pre-installed with Windows XP so installing MyOffice was simply a matter of downloading the software from our web site.

The best part about the Asus is its size and weight. It weighs in at only 0.92kg and has an 8.9 inch screen making it really portable. Its definitely a competitor to my Pocket PC. Whereas the Pocket PC makes hard work of sending emails, the EeePC is a true notebook with a screen and keyboard large enough for ‘power’ use. And when it comes to travelling it’s certainly small enough to pop into a flight bag whereas I’ve never been happy about lugging a heavy laptop onto a plane.

It also has a solid-state hard drive which means that bumps and shocks are no longer an issue. Connection to the internet is either by wireless or the RJ-45 port.

I’ve been logging on to MyOffice for several weeks now and using it in place of a powerful desktop and I’m delighted to say that’s it’s really usable. I can’t have as many windows open as I would on the desktop but the 1024 x 600 displays all the MyOffice windows adequately. All the main windows (Diaries, Contacts, Emails, Tasks etc) display fully on the screen, making it a genuine alternative to a larger PC or laptop. By now you’ll probably have guessed that I’m impressed with my new toy … except that its not a toy .. its a real notebook that you can use all day.

 That’s the first of the lightweight UMPCs that I plan to test over the next few months. Next on the list is Acer’s Aspire and Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9.

Sometimes you search for an appointment and you know it was there but you can’t find it.  The usual reason it’s not there is that another user has deleted it.

There’s no ‘rollback’ in MyOffice so once an appointment has been deleted it’s gone … period.

There are however a couple of techniques you can employ to minimise accidental deletions. First, you can tell your colleagues to move appointments that they were going to delete to another diary, called something like ‘Deleted appointments’. So, rather than deleting them, you are moving them. This avoids losing the appointment details.

Secondly, you can configure MyOffice to notify you, by email, every time an appointment is deleted. You configure this for each diary so if you’re having a problem with just one diary you could configure the notification for that diary. The notification emails all the appointment details together with the name of the user who deleted the appointment and the time of the deletion.

Hopefully, these suggestions will at least retain the data from any accidentally deleted appointments, enabling you to re-instate the appointments if necessary.

If you’ve been using MyOffice for several years you’ll probably have lots of very old appointments.  When I say lots, I’m talking in thousands, not hundreds. The suggestions in this blog only apply to users with LOTS of old appointments.

At start-up MyOffice does a refresh from the server to your local PC to create an ‘up to date’ copy of your data in case you need to run MyOffice in ‘Offline’ mode.  Typically you would run MyOffice in ‘Offline’ mode if your internet connection went down and you needed to carry on working. Being able to work in ‘Offline’ mode is one of the key advantages MyOffice has over ordinary web based applications.

If you’d like to speed up your start-up there are a couple of techniques that you can use when it comes to appointments.

Method 1 - Create a new diary and start using that instead of the old diary. Set the diary permissions on the old diary so that no-one has access to the diary. You can always re-instate access if you need to go back and view the old appointments. At start-up the old diary won’t be refreshed because you no longer have access to it … but the new diary will … thus speedng up your start-up time.

Method 2 - Simply delete old appointments. To do this search for all appointments in a date range. e.g. 1 Jan 2006 - 31 Dec 2006. Leave the search criteria box empty. In our example, this will list all appointments in 2006. Then, multi-select all the appointments using the left mouse button and the Shift key and delete them.

Which method you use depends upon whether or not you want to keep the appointments. Method 1 will save them. Method 2 will delete them.

In MyOffice there’s a feature called Draft Email Folders. This allows users to save a partially composed email as a draft and finish it at a later date.  Many users have realised that this feature can also be used to create template emails … but for those users who haven’t … this is how you do it.

If you have a standard format email that you regularly send out, just prepare the email and save it as a draft. This will pop the email into the Draft folder. You’ll probably want to leave certain sections of the email blank, such as the TO section.

When you want to send out this ‘template’ email right-click on it (in the Drafts folder) and choose the ‘Edit’ option. Now you can complete the email by entering the recipient’s name in the TO section or you might even want to enter multiple recipients. You can also personalise the email with the recipient’s name, etc.

Once you have your ‘Template’ email ready to send, just press ‘Send Email’. It’s as simple as that.

With practice, you can build up a list of Template emails in the Drafts folder and use them for a multitude of purposes.

We decided a long time ago that it was easier (and better for users) if we enhanced MyOffice on a regular basis rather than having one large release every 12 months or so.  This allowed us to immediately fix bugs that were reported … sometime in a matter of days, and also to incorporate user suggestions very quickly. Of course, some changes are so large that they can only be released in a major version of MyOffice. You’ll often hear us talking of ‘compulsory releases’ and ‘non comp releases’. The compulsory ones are signified by a change to the version no. e.g. Version 4.0.0 to Version 5.0.0.  The non comp ones are signified by a Sub Release no. At the time of writing we’re on Version 5.0.0 Sub Release 26.

The problem that we have is in encouraging users to upgrade to the latest sub release no. We don’t have a problem with major Version releases because they are controlled by another process, but the sub release upgrade is left to the user to decide.

If you visit the MyOffice web site you’ll see a list of the sub releases and the content of each release. See www.myoffice.net/releases.aspx You can also check which release you’re running by clicking Help > About MyOffice.NET in the client application.

It’s certainly not necessary to continually monitor the releases and instantly upgrade to the latest one but we are aware of a large number of users who are quite happy running a sub release that might be as much as a year old. This means that the users aren’t getting the benefits of many of the enhancements that we make to MyOffice on a week by week basis. A good example is the ‘drag and drop’ of appointments which was introduced in Sub Release 18. Anyone running a sub release lower than 18 won’t be able to drag and drop appointments.

The problem is how to advise users that a new sub release is available without being intrusive. We’ve elected to try a simple strategy …. displaying the information at logon in one of the progress windows that pop up to let you know how the start-up is progressing. We’ll display the Version and Sub Release currently installed and the latest version that’s available and let the user decide if they want to upgrade.

Hopefully, those users who are 10 - 20 sub releases behind will see the difference and decide that an upgrade would be a good idea. The last thing we want to do is annoy users who are quite happy with their version but we also want to ensure that they get the most out of MyOffice. Hopefully this change to the start-up process will do just that.

One of the more common questions we find ourselves on the receiving end of here at MyOffice is “I’ve made a new user but I can’t see their diary, help!”. It’s a sensible question because, well, there isn’t a diary there for them to see, because we don’t automatically create a diary for each new user. So why don’t we just create a new diary for each new user? Well…

As you’ve noticed, we charge per user, not per diary. We do this for a very simple reason. Simply put, we don’t want to tell you - the users - how to use the system, and how to organise your diaries, or for that matter, task lists, email folders, file store, or contact groups. Therefore, in MyOffice, users are considered to be separate from diaries, task lists, contact groups, and all of the other things you can use and share within your account. 

Over the years we’ve noticed that businesses like to organise their data in extremely varied ways, with diary data being a prime example of this. Yes, there are those companies who like to have a separate diary for each user. This clearly makes great sense where each employee’s time is allocated separately, and seeing what each individual is up to at a given time is the name of the game. However, there are certainly plenty of companies who adopt precisely the opposite approach, organising their diaries by business function, rather than by who’s actually going to be doing the work.

One absolute classic example of the “Nobody’s Diary” case is the “Staff Holiday” diary. Using a single diary to record all staff leave seems to be very common concept (if our support records are anything to go by), because it’s a wonderfully simple method of keeping the data regarding who’s at work and who’s not in a single, understandable, and easy to locate place.

Going to the other extreme, we have quite a few “Diaryless Users”. Whereas with the “Staff Holiday” diary, we see a resource that’s accessed by all and sundry, but not really owned by anyone, our “Diaryless Users” are users who spend their time working with other people’s diaries, but have no diary of their own. The best examples we’ve come across of these are in businesses where one set of employees book appointments for a separate set of employees. It’s an age-old business dynamic - my chimney sweep’s been working this way for over thirty five years (although clearly not with MyOffice, as that would make the system older than me, not to mention the internet!). In this case, we tend to see office staff set up as users with diaries of their own (they don’t need them, as they’re almost always in the office taking calls, and arranging jobs), but with write access to the staff who actually go out on site and do the deed, whereas the site workers will have their own diaries which they can see, but no access to anyone elses diaries.

The final regularly-encountered example is the “Diary for a Resource” setup. From what we can gather via support, there doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern regarding which businesses do this. However, why it’s done is extremely clear. The diaries are being used to record who’s got access to a given resource at a given time - meeting rooms, classrooms, vehicles in car pools, even floor space in a garage - the list of resource types is pretty endless, and some of the creativity shown by businesses with regards to how they organise their resource booking setups has been both impressive and surprising.

Having said all that, it’s also pretty common to be asked for help when it comes to setting up diaries for each user. If that’s your aim, as in a good few cases it will be, then once you’ve created your new user(s), you’ll have to into the Diary Admin window (in the main Diary window, open the “Tools” menu, then click “Diary Admin”) and create a diary for them. For a fuller description of how to accomplish this, the “How to Share Diaries” page on the main MyOffice should give you a better idea of what to do.

Q) How do you start a fight between the members of the MyOffice team?

A) Point at the screen and say “That, my friend, isn’t a Diary, it’s a Calendar!”.

It works every time, I promise you, so much so that in-house debates as to whether “the things you put appointments in” are diaries or calendars are virtually banned. I therefore present to you the standard in-house arguments. First, in the blue corner, the defending champion…

Diary

A quick dive into the Compact Oxford English Dictionary gives us the following definition :

• noun (pl. diaries) 1. a book in which one keeps a daily record of events and experiences.
2. a book marked with each day’s date, in which to note appointments.

Ah, well there’s the problem straight away. Our friend the dictionary has dived straight in with the “Dear Diary” definition, and quite clearly, that’s not what MyOffice is about. Something tells me that Samuel Pepys wouldn’t have gone down in history in quite the same way had his diary consisted of a series of reminders about meetings in coffee houses, and the annual chore of getting the fire extinguishers checked, just in case, or that Allison Moyet was on about a note to “Meet Ali for a beer after work” in the chorus of “Nobody’s Diary”. No, MyOffice definately isn’t that kind of diary.

It is, however, the kind of diary mentioned in definition number two. Okay, so it’s not a book, but it does provide for the creation of lots “thingies” in which to make a record of planned future events. In that sense, the “thing with appointments in it” is most definately a diary. It’s a diary in the same sense that the black leather-covered A4 sized book that lived in the corner of the office and contained the dates of significant events for the company was a diary, and that my Gran used a diary to make a note of who she was supposed to having coffee with next week. Hers, however, was smaller, had a gold cover, and didn’t come as an annual free gift from the office supplies company. No, the diary module is correctly named, because it does the “stuff” that businesses do with their diaries, and MyOffice is aimed squarely at business customers.

So diary it is.

Calendar

Oh no it isn’t! It’s a calendar. Look in the top left corner of the so-called diary window and there’s even a control that looks like a calendar! Even better, click on the Month View button and two thirds of the screen is taken up by something which any rational English-speaker would describe as “a calendar”.

• noun 1 a chart or series of pages showing the days, weeks, and months of a particular year. 2 a system by which the beginning, length, and subdivisions of the year are fixed. 3 a list or schedule of special days, events, or activities.

Well, it would appear the Compact Oxford’s come out well and truely in favour of the challenger, Calendar. There’s nothing there to suggest a calendar is anything other than a thingy one uses to plan and record future events. Not even a whiff of “What I did at the weekend”, “I’ve just met this really hot girl”, or a vivid account of London ablaze from end to end. Doesn’t get much more conclusive than that, does it? We must have got it wrong. They’re not diaries, they are calendars after all.

But not so fast…

When was the last time someone told you they’d “make a note of it on their calendar”? Quite a long time ago, I suspect. For proof of this one, next time you get your car serviced, have a look at any calendars on the wall. The servicing department don’t keep a list of all the cars they’ve got booked in on them, that’s for sure. No, those lists are, if not computerised, in something which you’d be hard pressed to call anything other than a diary. Try the same with a hair-dressers, or a doctor’s surgery. The receptionist certainly doesn’t lean against the wall and scribble “Mr. Pepys, ingrown toenails, Dr. Smith, 4pm” under next July’s member of the World’s Twelve Cutest Kittens. No, she puts it in the doctor’s diary. The list of real-world examples lined up against calendar, and in favour of diary is endless, so I’ll not bore you any further with bizarre images of driving instructors unfolding A1 wall calendars in their Nissans Micras, or teachers planning parents evenings in half an inch of space by pinching the microscopes from the biology store-room. No, quite simply, they’re not calendars.

Okay, so they’re diaries. Why all this Calendar talk?

Without beating around the bush, quite simply, it’s a “Sales n’ Marketing” problem. Whilst it’s not exactly hard to make the connection between calendars and diaries in the context of MyOffice, and given the way the diary window’s laid out, we could call them absolutely anything within the product and 99% of people would still suss out “it’s a thing to put future events in”, the problem comes when potential customers are presented with the word for the first time.

The problem word is most definately ‘diary’. In the minds of an awful lot of people, it conjours up an image of a blog, and we do pick up and awful lot of traffic from the search engines where the search terms show pretty clearly the visitor is looking for just that.

So, what do you think? Are we right to call “them” diaries, or should they be calendars? Would changing the name cause untold confusion, or doesn’t it really matter?