Offline SharePoint

The current issue of PC Mag is running a big story titled The Well Connected Traveler. They cover all the gadgetry that you’ll ever need to take with you on the road.

But it’s not all about the hardware. More business people rely on being connected to be productive with their work. Emails need to be checked, WSS team sites need to be accessed, and general research needs to be done.

It feels like PC Mag painted an overly rosy picture of what business travel is really like (and maybe that’s what sells magazines for them). They compile a list of:

• The Best Connected Airlines
• The Best Connected Airports
• The Best Connected Hotels

If you read over the charts, you find that none of the major US airlines have wifi onboard, only a handfull of airports give you free wifi, and most hotels are still getting away with charging for internet access.

Tech columnist John Dvorak goes on later in the piece to say:

Hotel connectivity outside the U.S. is generally subpar. It is often unreliable even in hotels that cater to business travelers. I can’t tell you how often I’ve checked into a brand-name hotel to be told that the network connections were down and would remain down for the next few days.

I’m not sure about how well connected the traveler really is.

This is more Barry’s area of discussion, but I was reading Dustin’s Tech Notes this morning and it really struck a nerve.

You may find it funny that in our “wired world” I have two posts in 1 day related to experiencing online applications, offline. Call me old school or just plain lazy but sometimes I don’t want to open my VPN Client and remote into work to edit a document. And course almost everyone has experienced free high speed internet service that performs like dial-up. Hotels will remain nameless here. The whole “take it with you” concept has become a standard for technologies like email and now even collaboration (See Colligo Post). Well why shouldn’t the same idea apply to blogs and other RSS feeds?

Read the rest of the post, Reading Blog’s Offline.

The last two Business trips I was on, in both cases my hotel’s high speed connections were not working. As Dustin mentions these days you can take a lot off line, it’s that last 20% of items, like getting and sending new emails and your RSS feeds that makes it so very frustrating….

Cheers, Tony
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Anthony A. van Houten
Senior Consultant, Applications
Colligo networks, Inc

I just received a brochure in the mail for the “Most Important Technology Event of the Year”. That, of course, is the ever humble CTIA Wireless 2006 show in Las Vegas April 5-7. Attendees, exhibitors and speakers at this show always manage to claim some of the most outrageous mobility myths and, although I’m not going this year, I will try to keep tabs on some of them and report them here. Not that it’s going to be hard as they tend to “over market and under deliver” to the already stressed mobile worker and shell shocked IT person looking for the holy grail.

I noted that on the back of the brochure was a personal message to me… undoubtedly hand penned by the organizers of the event. It said “Dear Barry, Mobile workers are undisputedly more productive than their tethered counterparts”. Pardon me? I constantly hear complaints from mobile workers that feel they are less productive than they are in the office… because most existing applications use “on-line” architectures that rely on full access over the web “anytime, anywhere”. (Of course I’m biased since I think the only way to actually increase mobile worker productivity is by making products that work reliably with or without an Internet connection).

Speaking of “anytime, anywhere”. Try googling it sometime… it’s good for a laugh. For example, I found a quote from this January from Verizon Commmunications CEO, Ivan Seidenberg here. “Looking ahead,” he added, “we are developing the operating systems, applications and next-generation TV experience that will give customers access to all of their digital content on any device, any network, any time they want in a way that’s as intuitive and transparent to the customer as the telephone or the Internet is today.” Hmm, so does that mean I will be able to watch TV on my cell phone over their network in the middle of the Saudi desert (not that I’d want to, but… come on!)?

I look forward to a lot of fun hearing the claims being made by Mr. Seidenberg’s colleague, Denny Strigl, President of Verizon Wireless who will be giving a keynote at CTIA this year.

Shortly after graduating from engineering school in 1984 under the watchful eye of big brother, I joined LSI Logic Corporation as a field applications engineer and started to travel. Way too much at first. Over to Asia many times, throughout the U.S. and Canada, to Central America and to Europe. One year I put over 1,000,000 miles on my AirCanada Aeroplan account. I still travel a fair amount today although thankfully not nearly as much.

One thing I’ve come to realize over my career is that travel is tough. You are away from your family, eating strange food, living in hotels, and are sleep deprived. The expectation to produce results is higher than usual from both your employer and your customer (or partner) because of high costs and finite schedules.

To add insult to injury, your productivity is shot because things just don’t work like they do at your desk. The phone and computer systems are different, you rely on your cell phone, you don’t have any clerical help (not that I do even in the office), computer support is long distance and in different time zones, Internet access is sporadic, security is a concern and your files and applications aren’t always accessible when and where you need them. They’re supposed to be, but let’s face it… they aren’t.

A few years ago I came to the conclusion that people specifying and developing ICT (information and communication technology) products don’t really care about the pressure that mobile workers face. If they did, they wouldn’t release products and make the outrageous claims that they do. And they wouldn’t try to cram a solution designed to work on a high speed network that’s connected 24/7 to the Internet down the throats of mobile workers that are occasionally connected over a thin pipe. And make them look bad… make them miss their son’s hockey game… because things didn’t work right or together or fast enough.

When Brent, Mike and I were looking for the next gig a few years ago, we agreed that these problems needed to be addressed. We asked some of our friends if they had the same problems. We got a resounding “yes”. So we thought we’d start a company that was focused on trying to help people like us find better solutions to their IT problems when they were working away from the office.

This is the essence of what I’d like to explore on this blog. What issues are you facing? What solutions have you found? Who’s “over promising” and who’s actually delivering?

Barry.