The MyOffice Blog

More and more users need access to MyOffice on their iPhones and iPads so we’ve decided to develop a full range of MyOffice apps starting with Version 1.0.0 which was released on 2 Dec 2010. This version allows users to access their MyOffice diaries in both offline and online mode.

The app can be downloaded free from Apple’s AppStore and it works on iPhones and iPads.

We’ve chosen to develop our own app for a number of reasons. MyOffice users often configure their own ‘user defined fields’ and having a MyOffice app enables us to display and edit these fields … whereas, if we simply synced to the iPhone calendar we wouldn’t be able to use these fields.

Also, the app is able to mirror the settings that users have configured in their MyOffice accounts so when they log on they’ll see a familiar layout, in a somewhat smaller format.

An app also provides an extra level of security. Even if you lose your iPhone your MyOffice data will be protected because an account/username/password logon is required to start the app.

This app is the first step towards creating a fully featured iPhone app for MyOffice. Future releases will include contact, task and email functionality.

A major new release of MyOffice is now available for download.

Existing users can upgrade by going to www.myoffice.net and clicking on the ‘Downloads’ link.

The release incorporates many new features including:

(1) Categorisation - you can now set up Category Groups containing Categories and apply these to appointments, contacts and taks. You can also associate a colour with a category.

(2) Advanced Search - a powerful new advanced search allows you to construct complex queries to retrieve data based on multiple criteria. Search queries can be saved for future use.

(3) Improved error message handling in emails.

(4) Improved processing of repeating appointments.�

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.