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Back to the (Office of the) Future

Andy McLoughlin — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 20:01:45 +0000

Over the years, there have been numerous articles musing on what the office of the future would look like, but how have those past predictions matched up to reality today?

Back in 1975, BusinessWeek published “an in-depth analysis of how word processing will reshape the corporate office.” In the article, industry experts were divided over whether they would be able “to call up documents” from their files on-screen and connect electronic terminals to each other or if this vision of the future was, in fact, “scare talk.” One of the biggest concerns raised was how word processing would change the traditional secretary-executive relationship.

I think it’s safe to say that the predictions in the article put forward by George E. Pake , then head of Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center, were largely correct. According to Pake, in 1995, there would be a TV-display terminal with a keyboard sitting at his desk and he’d be “able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button … I can get my mail or any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy [printed paper] I’ll want in this world.”

I have it on good authority from Jonathan Howell, Huddle’s CTO, that in the 1990s, everything was networked, all internal communication was done via email on a mainframe and desktop printers (with “desktop” referring to ubiquity rather than size) were commonplace. However, Jonathan was working for IBM in the 90s; what was it like for the rest of the workforce? You could indeed access your files with a click of a button on your computer. Networked desktop PCs were becoming increasingly widespread in offices worldwide, and in August 1995, Microsoft launched its much-anticipated Windows 95. The World Wide Web started to take shape, and Yahoo became one of the largest directories for web content. In short, advances in technology during the 1990s resulted in the “revolution in the office” that Pake predicted. Laptop computers were also becoming hot sellers, so the idea of a mobile workforce, while still a long way off, was starting to develop.

However, Pake’s vision of a world without “hard copy” remains a fantasy. In spite of the increasing popularity of email and the web, the rise of devices such as the iPad and enterprise content management tools, such as Huddle and SharePoint, the paperless office is still out of reach. The desktop printers that became a familiar sight in the office in the ’90s continue to be the worker’s trusty companion. According to the WWF, the average U.S. office worker goes through 10,000 sheets of copy paper per year. People still want to have physical documentation. Whether it’s business records, receipts or utility bills, people continue to feel they need to store paperwork in a safe, physical place for future reference. To drive widespread adoption of new technologies, a cultural shift and change in habits needs to take place. Just as the introduction of word processing and automation to the 1990s office changed the traditional secretary-executive relationship (or “office wife” bond), enterprise content management and collaboration technologies are disrupting the way people work today. Transforming working practices takes time.

In 1987, little more than 10 years after BusinessWeek’s predictions article was published, Apple Computer created a video envisioning how people would use technology to work in the 21st century:

The touchscreen “Knowledge Navigator” tablet device shown in the video could easily pass for an early prototype of Apple’s iPad, while the University Research Network accessed for information on deforestation in the Amazon rainforest looks suspiciously like the web. We are now accustomed to seeing touchscreen devices — according to market research firm iSuppli, worldwide production of touchscreen modules for use in computers is set to hit 117.9 million units in 2014 — but in 1987, mainstream adoption of such devices was still years away.

Another application shown is video conferencing: The professor is seen happily conversing with his colleague on-screen. Now, of course, video conferencing is part of most workers’ everyday lives, whether they are based at home or in an office: another hit for Apple’s vision of the future. While I doubt avatars with bow ties fielding calls and managing diaries will take off (unless Clippy 2.0 is overdue?), but virtual customer service assistants are now a familiar sight: Jenn at Alaska Airlines and Lucy at O2, for example. It may be a while before speech recognition is as seamless as that shown in the video; it is still a familiar (albeit often frustrating) technology.

The paperless office and a diary-managing avatar may not be a reality just yet, but many of the predictions made decades ago aren’t too far off the mark. However, there were some visions of the office of the future that just didn’t come to fruition, such as the short-lived Microsoft at Work (MAW). On June 9, 1993, Bill Gates launched MAW, which was supposed to connect common business machinery, like fax machines and photocopiers, with a communications protocol allowing control and status information to be shared with computers running Windows. It never got off the ground, and by 1995, it had disappeared from view.

Andy McLoughlin, co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter @Bandrew.

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Alternative Word Processors for the Mac

Will Kelly — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:00:48 +0000

Recently, I spent some time reinstalling OS X and the applications on one of my Macs. Before reinstalling Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac (which really isn’t up to the standard of its Windows counterpart), I thought I’d consider the alternative Mac word processors available.

The word processors I’m going to look at in this post all have a short learning curve because they stick to Mac interface standards, so you’ll be able to be productive quickly, which is always a good thing.

Take a good look at the documents you produce and the features you need; one of these word processors might be a ready alternative for you, especially if you are working on an older Mac and don’t want to invest in a costly Microsoft Office license.

Bean. This free word processor has a light footprint which can be important if you don’t need all of the features (and bloat) that Microsoft Word brings with it. It requires a Mac with a PPC or Intel processor running OS X 10.4 Tiger, OS X 10.5 Leopard, or OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, so it can even be an option if you are trying to bring life to an older Mac. This is a great alternative word processor if you don’t need features on the level of Microsoft Word.

Mariner Write. This word processor was part of the last MacHeist offering, and includes a well-designed menu structure, spelling/grammar checker, and support for many document formats, inlcluding Mariner Write (a proprietary format), Stationary, RTF – MS Word, RTF – Mariner Write, Text, SimpleText, TeachText and PDF. While I liked Mariner Writer during my testing, its incomplete support for Microsoft Word — a standard document format for many of my client projects — makes unlikely to adopt it for my professional writing projects. It costs $49.95.

Pages ’09. Part of iWork ’09, Pages is a very capable word processor that includes a wide range of templates, advanced features like table of contents, tables, shapes, sharing via iWork .com (covered by Imran), and the option of saving documents in MS Word format. My testing of conversions to Word format were hit or miss so I recommend testing for yourself through the software’s 30-day free trial prior to purchasing it ($79.00).

Nisus Writer Express. This Mac word processor comes with Nisus Thesaurus as part of the same download package. As a word processor, it includes a document manager, paragraph sorting, document styles, tables and macros. It does not include a table of contents feature (unfortunately, a deal breaker for me). It costs $45 (a free trial is available).

What is your Mac word processor of choice? Share it below.

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Zoho Writer 2.0: A User Interface That's More User Friendly

Darrell Etherington — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:30:13 +0000

There is very little reason to depend on a hard drive-based application for your word processing needs these days. Google Docs provides everything most users will ever need; you already have it if you have a Gmail account, and it works offline, thanks to Google Gears. Another solution, Zoho Writer, which also works offline thanks to Gears, just got a major interface overhaul in its 2.0 incarnation, and now is more poised than ever to provide a complete alternative to Office and other similar programs.

The problem with Zoho, until now, has been one of constant improvement. That may not seem like a problem at all, but when that improvement involves adding more and more features, but keeping the interface the same, it can get a little unruly. The new redesign tries to make sure Zoho doesn’t overwhelm you visually, which in turn makes it easier to work with.

The old Zoho Writer menu

While some liked the old UI, I found it too cluttered, because I normally like to edit in full screen, and like as little chrome as possible in my browsers. The changes to the top menu give you a bit more room, but more importantly, they group and hide a lot of commands so you aren’t left feeling crowded. The new “MenuTab” feature groups similar commands under general headings. You can access these commands either by clicking the tab, which changes the button set available on your toolbar (much like Microsoft’s “Ribbon” UI for Office) or by clicking the little arrow next to them, which opens a drop-down menu without changing your toolbar.

The new Zoho Writer 2.0 "MenuTab" interface

It makes sense, and it suits multiple tastes. You’ll be comfortable if you’re used to working with Office, or if you’re used to working with drop-down menus like you’ll find in a lot of web apps. Zoho plans to use MenuTab in all of its other applications in the future, too, so even if you don’t like it, plan on getting used to it!

I won’t go into detail about Zoho Writer, since we’ve covered it before. It’s not new, but I still love Zoho’s tabbed management of open documents. I much prefer it to Google’s opening of new browser tabs for each document, although that makes much more sense when you take into account Google Chrome’s handling of each tab as a separate process. And I still miss Google’s full-screen edit mode too much to make a permanent switch.

Still, if you’re a Zoho user, or if you tried it out before but didn’t like it because of the interface, Zoho Writer 2.0 gives you ample reason to take it out for a second spin.

Do you use Zoho Writer? What do you think of the new UI?

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DoingText: Easy Collaboration

Mike Gunderloy — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 19:00:00 +0000

You can probably already think of a bunch of different ways to collaborate with your web-working co-workers on editing a piece of text: emailing drafts, wikis, instant messages, online word processors like Google Documents or Zoho Writer. DoingText is a new entrant in this crowded field, hoping to gain some interest by making the process as low-friction as possible.

The idea behind DoingText is simple: you launch a new discussion by pasting a chunk of text to their site. From there, you get a dedicated editing window that lets you make changes. The editing window understands the Textile markup language, so adding things like bold and italic and hyperlinks is simple.

With the discussion you also get a URL that you can share with anyone. You can make the URL password-protected if you want. Anyone with the URL (and password, if necessary) can edit the text too: the system tracks revisions, and allows for comments and color-highlighting.

When the text is in a final state, you can download it as text or PDF, or create an online presentation from it. Things work smoothly, and as long as you don’t mind editing in a markup language, it’s easy to figure out how DoingText works. Currently the site is in closed beta, though it only took me a day or two to get invited after applying.

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10 Ways to Webify Your Word Processing with Google Docs

Anne Zelenka — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:17:59 +0000

The key to using Google Docs (GDocs) document editing effectively is to understand that it’s a web word processor rather than an outright replacement for full-featured desktop word processors like Microsoft Word. GDocs includes features that make it easy to produce content for the web — it understands HTML (though not as well as it should), makes it easy to put in links inside and across documents, allows you to publish online, and encourages collaboration with features like version control and real-time multi-person editing.

If you go to the Google Docs home page, you can create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and folders to organize it all. This article focuses only on the word processing aspects of Google Docs — and looks at features that make it easier for you to get in a web word processing state of mind.

Edit the HTML directly. From the “Edit” page of your document, click on the “Edit HTML” link to the right of the “Revisions” tab. You’ll view the raw HTML of the document — and I mean raw. It’s not at all easy to read, lacking as it is in whitespace. If you want to do anything more than minor tweaks, you might want to take it to your favorite HTML editor to do so.

Use HTML-style headings. Use Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, and Ctrl-3 to create header styles 1, 2, and 3 that will be marked with the HTML header codes h1, h2, and h3 when you publish the document as a web page. Unfortunately, you can’t create your own default styles for headers such as H1 and H2 at this point without creating some custom CSS code.

Create internal document links. GDocs calls these “bookmarks” but you may be more familiar with them as HTML anchors. These are useful for creating tables of contents with links that take you directly to subsections of the documents or for creating frequently asked questions lists, for example. Use the “Change” dropdown menu option “Manage bookmarks…” to create places in the document where you want to link to. Then, to create a link to that location in the document, select the text that will be linked, use Ctrl-K to bring up the “Insert Link” dialog, choose the Bookmark radio button, and select the bookmark that is the destination.

Link to other Google Documents. If you want to reference another GDoc you’ve written, select the text to link, use Ctrl-K to bring up the “Insert Link” dialog, choose the “Document” radio button, and select the document you want to link to.

Publish blog posts. Go to the “Publish” tab in the upper righthand corner of the “Edit” page of your document and click “set your blog site settings.” Now you can specify your blog location, blog name, username, and password. Then just click “Post to blog” to publish directly from GDocs to your blog.

Check the readability. Writing for a web audience may mean ensuring your text isn’t too hard to understand. Use the “Word Count” option on the “File” menu to get a wealth of statistics beyond just the number of words to help you tune your writing to your audience. You’ll see number of characters, paragraphs, and sentences; approximate number of pages; and average sentences per paragraph. You also get three measures of how readable it is; the easiest to use are the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Automated Readability Index that output the approximate grade level someone needs to comprehend what you’ve written.

Share your document with the world. Go to the “Publish” tab on the upper right hand side and press the “Publish document” button. You’ll get a not-very-pretty URL that you can hand out to people for viewing. You can stop publishing any time and also set it to automatically republish every time changes are made, if you like.

Get an RSS feed of document changes. If you are working on a document with other people, you might want an automated way of seeing when changes have been made. Use the “Share” tab of the document’s “Edit” screen where you can
select “View RSS feed of document changes.” That link will let you subscribe to the RSS feed of your document edits in your RSS reader of choice.

Quickly insert comments. You can edit documents in real time, using GTalk to chat as you go, but more likely you’ll be editing at different times. To leave messages right in the text for your co-collaborators, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-M to insert a yellow-highlighted comment marked with author name and date. Comments will not show up in published or printed versions of the document.

Roll back to a previous version. You don’t have to save a history of revisions because GDocs does it automatically, behind the scenes, kind of like a wiki. Click on the “Revisions” tab in the upper left hand set of tabs and you’ll see a list of revisions made, the author who made them, and a brief description of changes. To compare versions, select the ones you want to compare, and click “Compare Checked.” To revert to an earlier version, click on its linked name (e.g., “Revision 12″). You will be taken to a page showing that version where you can click on “Revert to this one” to set the document to that version.

Have you switched to Google Docs for your web word processing? Share your experiences in the comments.

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