*
Due to a few administrative bork-ups at a higher level, it's been decided that my team at the office needs to move to another building. That's a real shame, because the building we've been in for years is absolutely wonderful. Not only in an architectural and culinary sense, but also in the sense that there's a lot of cool people over there.
Due to some more bork-ups in the delivery of the new/old building we were asked to temporarily move to yet another building. After a lot of hassle and moaning and groaning today's finally the day. We moved to a lovely
art deco building in The Hague, whose interior faintly reminds me of my dad's office buildings from the early eighties :)
There's been some griping among the veterans who really, really wanted to stay at the old building. I understand where they're coming from, but personally I don't really mind. I go where the customer wants me to; that's what they pay me for anyway. And $DEITY knows where I'll be in a month or two ^_^
My new desk + chair suck though ;_; They're decrepit and falling apart.
Posted in:
moving
,
musical chairs
,
office
,
switching
,
work
*
Xobni is an Outlook add-in that basically adds search, conversations and profiles to Outlook. When I first heard about Xobni, I was really excited to try it and was ecstatic when I got an invite a few months ago (I still have a few invites left, if anyone wants one).
That said, I'm about ready to give it up. The search, while better than Outlook's default search, is still no match for anything Google or Apple offer, and almost painful to use since while in "search mode" almost a quarter of the sidebar is covered in a completely out-of-place Yahoo web search. Conversations are also nice, but limited in usefulness due to their being restricted to the sidebar. Further, since I deal with only a limited amount of people via email, the profiles lack utility (though the auto-discovery of phone numbers is nice). To top it all off, Xobni often makes Outlook unresponsive (though responsive enough to tell me that it's not responding).
I still like the product, and despite it's flaws, I'm still using it since it's features (ever so slightly) outweigh its drawbacks, and was glad to hear that Microsoft may buy Xobni. This can only be good since proper integration into Outlook would likely fix any performance issues and enhance Xobni's feature set. As a lukeworm fan, I can only hope that Xobni continues to see improvements and a Microsoft acquisition looks to be one pretty sure way of making that happen.
Technorati Tags: Xobni, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Outlook, email
Posted in:
microsoft
,
office
,
outlook
,
plugins
,
productivity
,
software
*
The Anti-37signals (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin
This Official Google Docs Blog post title ("We can't stop adding features!") struck me as the complete opposite of the 37signals/Getting Real philosophy.
Now granted, I'm sure the title was tongue-in-cheek and caters to the general populace's "more features = better" mentality, AND the three features they added are actually quite useful (Save to PDF, better printing options, and vector shapes), but the title just struck me so much that I wanted to comment on it. Still, I think it's worth mentioning that I hope they can stop adding features, lest Google Office become too much like Microsoft Office.
Technorati Tags: Google, Office, Microsoft, 37signals, Getting Real, feature bloat, software development
Posted in:
development
,
google
,
microsoft
,
office
,
software