lucid vagary

The last year has been a rather jam-packed. The birth of our second daughter opening the third floor in our downtown office and the development and launch of our largest SharePoint initiative just to name a few things. As a result all I’ve been able to fit in was adding links to look up later to this site. I added a Tweet feed awhile back and that is how I expect I will be handling links from now on. House cleaning is definitely in order for this site.

It’s also been a rather professionally monumental week as well. This week alone we launched, as I mentioned, our SharePoint system, I was part of a panel that spoke on the topic of SharePoint to a gathering of the University’s IT campus community, I presented an upcoming product to our Alumni Board of Governors, and a had a requirements discussion about bringing up a blogging system for our Alumni and Friends Web Community with our Interactive Media team,  I worked closely with our Strategic Communications team to send out the emails announcing the appointment of the University of Chicago’s new VP of Alumni Relations and Development and we wrapped up a proof of concept on a new integrated incident, asset and knowledge base management system that I plan on rolling out to our IT & Facilities team then plan to expand to our Operations counterparts. From there I plan to use it as one of the tools that will the basis for a Service Center concept I’ve been working on for awhile now. My Service Center notion is to provide a central point of contact for all of the service groups in our division and provide a support set of tools, protocols, and procedures that will help standardize incident, project and problem management and the resulting collateral data from can then be used to develop dashboards for managers at all levels that are crafted to their perspective.

I have to say, after spending years proving the case for SharePoint in our organization while dealing with a tremendous amount of organizational change (multiple re-orgs, team expansions and growth, moves) it is deeply satisfying to have a SharePoint environment available for the entire Alumni Relations and Development  (ARD) staff on campus. We have many smaller instances but this will eventually pull them all together. I am especially proud of the name: ForwARD. I had named the previous portal DART when we were Development and Alumni Relations and the change to ARD obviate the sense of that name. Beyond that, the President changed the motto of the University to “the Power of Ideas”. The tagline I came up with for the site is “Moving the Power of Ideas”. It’s been deeply satisfying to utilize my creative as well as technical skills on this project and this is really just the beginning. There is already a quickly growing interest to utilize SharePoint to satisfy various strategic needs and I am looking forward (the pun collateral was obvious during planning) to pursuing those discussions.

As a Mac enthusiast and professional purveyor of  Apple technology I decided to be an early adopter and to, at the very least, try the iPad out. Before it came out, my expectations were similar to ones I had about the iPhone: an elegant kludge that is not quite a complete product yet. I stand by my opinion of the initial release of the iPhone and I do so as well for the iPad. It seems like Steve Jobs can something most people wouldn’t even accept from a much smaller and less expensive vendor and that is he can sell an obviously incomplete product and observe it achieve fabulous success in the marketplace. OS X, based on his former company NeXT, was one of his first big wins after resuming the helm at Apple. Its RTM didn’t support writable optical drives!

Just as the original iPhone should have had a video camera, full-fledged texting capabilities, and a variety of other features found in many “dumb” phones, the iPad should have included a camera and an aspect ratio better suited to high definition content. It should also have some sort of stylus option because typing while holding it is absolutely atrocious and taking notes with your fingers is less than ideal. That being said, I can see tremendous use for this device in many situations and it really is an extremely well-designed piece of equipment and the accompanying software is nicely done. For instance, the browser is BEAUTIFUL. It simply renders pages in a crisp and clear fashion. One definitely senses an appeal to the Levenger crowd with this product. The calendar looks like a classic date book and the notes application interface emulates a nice stitched leather look. The photo album is really an improvement over the iPhone’s already impressive Photo app. There are apps to be able to process credit card transactions so I could see this being very useful for events management for on-site registration, check-ins, product sales, etc. I suspect that students are going to love this item. The ability to have your digital textbooks, notes, emails and class podcasts in one easy to carry format is going to be invaluable and it would behoove schools to keep this in mind. Having carried a massive backpack filled with books, notebooks, folders, etc. in my High School and college days,  my back definitely would have benefitted from this device. In in the interest of full disclosure, I am writing this blog post from my Macbook. I would not dream of attempting to write something this long on the iPad. Tweets and quick emails, comments or notes are about all I can see writing on the iPad at this point but I don’t have the sleeve yet and that might help with table or desk typing.