Knowledge Work

…for the reduced volume of blogging over here.
I’ve been working hard, but also taking a lot of training lately.

Last month, I sat for (and passed) the ITIL Foundation certification exam.
I’ve made a couple of quick (and very pleasant) trips to the Bay Area of California for administrative classes conducted by BMC Software, who produce the […]

Dan Geer is an extremely well respected security expert. When he worries about something, people listen.
One of the things he has worried - and warned - about is the danger represented by IT ‘monocultures’ - the situation that arises when everyone uses the same software, for example, and therefore everyone shares the same vulnerability […]

From the latest issue of New Scientist magazine (subscription required) comes an article entitled “Change the way you see the world” (and it will):
We love our maps. At first glance, people are shocked by them: the shapes look familiar, yet everything is absurdly distorted. Without even thinking, they have learned something about the world they […]

The OpenDocument format has become an ISO standard.
OpenOffice 2.0 fully supports this standard.
Go download it now.
Related:

Free/Open Source Software Toolbox for Knowledge Workers (at Campbell-Online.com) 

Solveig Haugland has just posted a brief primer on how to use your word processor, and it should be required reading for anyone who writes as part of their job.
It’s cleverly masked as a article about how to format your documents so that they will be easier to share between word-processsing platforms, but it […]

Copyblogger is all about “how to sell with blogs, e-mail and RSS.” It looks like an excellent resource for small businessses and consultancies looking to leverage the power of the Web to market themselves.
Copywriting 101 is a set of articles about persuasive writing for the Web:
Copywriting skills are an essential element to the new conversational […]

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 as a public beta.
I’ve downloaded and installed it without difficulty. Still kicking the tires, but so far I haven’t seen anything that would make me leave Firefox.
Internet Explorer 7: downloads (Microsoft.com)

Robin Yearsley serves up two terrific posts this morning at the IT Service Blog.
One of them is a pointer to a white paper (in PDF format) called Root Cause Analysis for Beginners. (In a former job, I had to develop and teach a root cause analysis class to our problem resolvers, and I wish that […]

If you’re a frequent Googler (and who isn’t?) then you’ll definitely want to grab the newly-updated, two-page PDF version of the Google Cheat Sheets (Version 1.02).
Print them out, stick them in a plastic sheet protector and keep them near your PC.

NASA project manager Jerry Madden, the Associate Director of the Flight Projects Directorate at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, was a legend in his field. He began collecting and assembling a set of rules for project managers early in his career; after Jerry retired in 1995, others maintained and updated […]

“If you do not assume responsibility for breaking the system in the way you want it broken and then integrating it to a better plateau, it will break by itself to a worse plateau. So inaction does not save you; it gives the power of your demise to outside forces.”
Ichak Adizes, Managing Corporate Lifecycles

Meet Steven Sinofsky. He does Windows.
Steven Sinofsky is a rare bird on Microsoft’s Redmond campus — a manager who actually delivers software on time. As head of product development for Office, he’s known for meeting release deadlines.
He’s now been put in charge of Microsoft’s Windows group, which has seen endless delays in the release […]

Lifehack has a short, interesting essay on office politics, and on what conduct is both ethical and realistic in the modern workplace:
Too often [office politics] smack of dirty tricks and the use of personal influence in the interests of a few, powerful individuals, conjuring up a picture of secret deals in back rooms and pay-offs […]

Google just went into the web-based office software business, acquiring the startup Writely.com. Writely produces a word processor that runs in a standard web browser:

Share documents instantly & collaborate real-time.
Pick exactly who can access your documents.
Edit your documents from anywhere.
Nothing to download — your browser is all you need.
Store your documents […]

Half of all malfunctioning products returned to stores by consumers are in full working order, but customers can’t figure out how to operate the devices, a scientist said on Monday.
Product complaints and returns are often caused by poor design, but companies frequently dismiss them as “nuisance calls,” Elke den Ouden found in her thesis at […]

How many people think they’ve missed their opportunity to be a musician, or an expert golfer, or even a chess grand master because they didn’t start when they were young? Or because they simply lacked natural talent? Those people are (mostly) wrong. According to some brain scientists, almost anyone can develop world-class (or at least […]

With this add-in you can permanently remove hidden and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Word 2003/XP, Excel 2003/XP, and PowerPoint 2003/XP files.
When you distribute an Office document electronically, the document might contain information that you do not want to share publicly, such as information you’ve designated as “hidden” or information that […]

Rod Boothby at Innovation Creators has some thoughts on the next wave in web-based productivity tools; the MBA class of 2006 will be using blogs, wikis, web-based collaboration software for project management, and social networking tools.
Perhaps the best idea for knowledge workers in Rod’s very useful post is the implementation of these technologies to create […]

Think you can’t open Office documents without paying hundreds of dollars for software? Think again. Just visit ThinkFree Office Online and you can open, edit, and create Office documents with this easy and convenient online service, new from ThinkFree.
With ThinkFree Office Online you can:

Create Microsoft Office-compatible documents from the Web
Open and edit your Office documents […]

The promising web startup SiteAdvisor, which we’ve blogged about before (over at enrevanche) is finishing up their beta period and announcing a three-month-long Free Preview today.
SiteAdvisor’s mission is simple: they trawl the web, 24/7, looking for “unsafe” sites (sites that will attempt to load spyware or other software badness on your PC, or that will […]