Wednesday March 30, 2005

Is iWork dangerous?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the dichotomy between the value of people being able to live and work wherever they want and the idea that teams need to be co-located to be most effective and creative. I was in a presentation yesterday where the lady presenting talked about things that work to make teams effective. Among other points she emphasized the need to keep people working on the same thing together, minimize time zone differences, and budget for travel because face to face interaction is particularly important.

On the other hand the success of Sun's iWork program and the evidence before us says that work is becoming more distributed. More and more people are working from home or from where they choose to live. We get feedback all the time that Sun's policy about employee work environment choice is a big incentive for people to come to Sun and stay at Sun. But there are still managers at Sun who believe that their people need to come into the office every day. Are they wrong or are the people who push for choice naïve in thinking that innovation and collaboration can still thrive when workers are geographically distributed?

It seems clear that connectedness, trust and transparency are key. There are certainly lots of ways to foster these characteristics in a team. But what struck me as I was writing this is that what is perhaps most important is the desire to be connected, to build trust, and to be transparent. It really doesn't matter if your co-worker is in the office next to you or half way around the globe. If you don't value and seek out others to connect with, to have conversations with and to build relationships with you aren't going to build an effective, creative team.

But isn't that what managers are for? It is normal to have brilliant people on a team who aren't great communicators or who find relationship building just plain hard work. Isn't a team going to be more effective when these people run into co-workers in the hall and when they have serendipitous conversations while making coffee? Isn't it up to the manager to make sure people are talking to each other? Is it really a trade off based on communication and relationship skills when you make the decision whether to hire a brilliant but not locally available engineer?

So what tools and skills do I need to work more effectively in my highly distributed team? And what can managers do to foster transparency, connectedness and trust in order to create highly effective, creative teams?

Recently, there was a conversation on an internal Sun alias about using group blogs and wikis to keep teams connected. The concept of using a group blog almost like a lab book was suggested. A blog like this could then be read by all members of the team and everyone would know what everyone else on the team was doing. This would work if everyone would keep the group blog current and if everyone would read it. I am some what skeptical. It all comes back to whether team members think it is important.

A lot of people also see personal blogging as a key enabling technology. There is no doubt in my mind that it is a very powerful tool. But it only works for those who use it. What about all the people on my team or on your team who don't read blogs. I bet that for every connection you have made as a blogger or as a blog reader there is someone who you wish would read your blog, someone who you would like to connect with but who doesn't have time or feel that there is value in reading blogs. So we have to be careful to not measure the value of blogs by asking a self selecting sample of people about that value.

Other enablers I have seen used include team meetings, regularly scheduled 1 on 1s, and even managers urging their staff to consciously take the time necessary to stay connected. But so often those kinds of activities are just not high enough on the priority list. As an individual I believe making the time to build the trust, have the conversations and be transparent are almost a secret sauce for being more successful in my job. The most effective and valuable team members I know are often the remote / work from home people who seem to do this naturally. Even knowing this I don't always make the time. I wonder if others do it consciously or if it just comes naturally.

This leads me to transparency. It seems that if I want to be connected and improve my value to my team I need to be transparent about my work and ideas. I have to be transparent not just about my successes but especially about what I don't know and where I am having problems. That is hard. But I think it is key and it may be one of the things that managers can foster.

So are the managers that want everyone to come in to the office every day wrong or right? How do you encourage the behaviors that are key? How do you develop these skills in managers? How do you get people to value them? Are there things that a program like iWork can do to insure that we are increasing Sun's ability to be connected, transparent and creative across distance and time? If you are part of a distributed team has it hurt your ability to collaborate? Has it hurt your team's ability to be effective. How do you encourage people to value the important skills?

Monday March 28, 2005

Solaris 10 and JDS 3 on my SunRay

Last week another colleague and I presented to one of the groups of SAs who will be converting our infrastructure to Solaris 10 / Java Dektop 3.0 over the next quarter. They already have some machines up and running so I got the instructions on how to try running Solaris 10 / JDS 3 on my Sun Ray. I did a UTswitch and was up and running on Solaris 10. IT is still working on the final details of the deployment and the look and feel but it was exciting to actually be running the real JDS. Gnome 2.6 does look much more together than Gnome 2 which is what we were using for JDS Preview. I think the biggest complaint is going to be that people will have to redo any customization of the desktop that they did with JDS Preview. By having separate configuration files for the two different versions of JDS there won't be any chance of corruption if you go back and forth between the two.

The plans for this week include presentations to two more SA staff meetings, continuing to execute on our stakeholder engagement plan, a change acceptance review on Wednesday and lots more.

Sunday March 27, 2005

Wine Country Weekend

We just got back form a wonderful away weekend up in the Napa Valley and environs. It was Duke's birthday present and the first time we have been away for a weekend in quite a while. We really enjoyed ourselves. We stayed in St Helena in a beautiful bed and breakfast, The Adagio Inn. The window seat on the front page of their web site was in our bedroom and we had wine in the living room both Friday and Saturday evenings. On Friday night we talked to two couple from Atlanta who were out for the weekend. They couldn't get over how lush California is. The hills and fields are very green right now. The fact that the hills will be brown in a few months makes the lushness all the more wonderful right now. The breakfasts at The Adagio, cooked by Polly Keegan, the innkeeper and owner, were amazing. Each breakfast included several dishes and was served on the sunny side porch. I think my favorite dishes were the asparagus omelet and the morning glory muffin.

Friday night we had dinner at Cindy's Backstreet Kitchen. We started with the asparagus soup and the Avocado & Papaya Salad with baby mache, arugula, hazelnuts and papaya seed dressing. For the main course Duke had the Wood Oven Duck with crispy potato croquettes and citrus sauce and I had the Grilled Pork Tenderloin with brussels sprouts, Yukon Golds & whole grain mustard sauce. We ended with a wonderfully rich butterscotch nut pie. It was an exceptional meal. I was especially struck by how the chopped up brussels sprouts with my pork tenderloin just added to the flavor. Brussels sprouts whole can often be over powering. One of the great things about staying in a little town like St Helena is that you don't have to worry about sharing a bottle of wine and then driving. The few block walk after dinner back to The Adagio was just right.

Saturday we did a bit of wine tasting. None of it was particularly memorable and I was struck by how crowded and commercial the wine tasting rooms in the Napa valley are. I was surprised that they pretty much all charge for tasting now. It didn't used to be that way. In the afternoon we headed north. As soon as we got into the Alexander valley the wineries were much smaller and more friendly and the tasting was free. We stopped at a casino near Geyserville and played some blackjack. It was fun but would have been more fun if we had won. I guess you shouldn't expect to always win.

Saturday night we ate in the wine cellar bar of The Martini House Restaurant. We had a late lunch at the casino so we just had drinks and food from the bar menu at the Martini House. I ordered calamari and Duke ordered a mushroom dish that we can't remember the name of. We sat at the bar in the small cozy basement. The people were all very friendly. It was a wonderful end to the day and to top it off as we walked back to the Adagio the full moon was coming up above the clouds.

Today we explored the backroads, walked around donwtown Napa and got home about three just as it started raining.

Thursday March 24, 2005

Change is guaranteed

Robert Scoble the well known Microsoft blogger had a posting today about a church that recently switched away from Microsoft. He highlighted something I firmly believe. Microsoft will not be the dominant player forever.

We all have the tendency to assume that the way things are today is the way they will always be. Back in 2000 very few of us understood we were riding a bubble waiting to burst. Today we tend to assume that interest rates will stay relatively low forever and that Sun stock will never again see 10. Similarly people can't imagine that anyone but Microsoft will ever dominate the desktop. But no company stays dominant forever and especially in technology no platform dominates forever. There was a time when Ashton Tate was the dominant data base company and there was time when nobody could imagine a company like DEC going away. I am not suggesting that Microsoft will disappear but I am saying that I don't believe they will dominate forever.

It is important for all of us to consciously fight our tendency to assume that things can't change. I try to remind myself of the fact that what is today will change. I also try think about how I should factor that thinking into my decisions whether they be financial, technical or personal.

Wednesday March 23, 2005

Customer visit

I was part of a customer visit today at our executive briefing center. The customer is getting ready to convert to StarOffice. We talked about change acceptance and what we have learned about successful change acceptance for groups moving to StarOffice. The person who was presenting talked about how users feel they own their desktop computers, when of course the computers are corporate assets. At Sun I don't think people feel ownership of the SunRay they use but they certainly feel ownership of the their desktop environment. That is why upgrading to JDS is so traumatic for some people. By the way we are now up to 75% of our Sun Ray users running JDS preview.

But to get back to the customer visit, I used to do a lot of visits and I have always enjoyed them. It is so much fun to work with customers and hear real feedback.

Sunday March 20, 2005

I'm Done!

I just finished taking the Certified Financial Planner exam. It was a two day exam, four hours on Friday and six hours with a one hour lunch break on Saturday. I've been studying a lot since the first of the year but I don't know if I passed. It is a very tough exam and the pass rate is only about 60%. Right now I am just glad to be done. I can stop thinking about S corps, QTIP trusts, AMT preference items, SEPs and bond duration for a while. If you are wondering why I'm doing this when I already have a Sun job I like I can refer you to this blog entry from a couple of months ago.

I've got a whole list of ordinary things I get to start doing again like reading, hiking, seeing friends, and playing the piano. I want to finish all the books I put on hold. The three at the top of my list are Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond,and The Book of Salt by Monique Truong.

I read an interesting article by Bill Alpert in the March 18, Barron's Technology Week. The article was titled titled Feeling the Heat from Digital River. Unfortunatly you need to be a Barrons subscriber to read the article online. In essence what Alpert said was that the company Digital River sent a letter to the Minneapolis based brokerage firm of Miller, Johnson, Steichen, Kinnard demanding that MJSK drop coverage of the company forever or be faced with a lawsuit. This happened after the brokerage firm down rated the shares to sell. The article is worth reading in full. Based on the article the actions of the Digital River people were very wrong. But what struck me was that if someone at MJSK had a blog where they discussed the threat, there would probably be an online discussion and in fact a backlash. I think it is interesting to imagine how blogs could help a relatively small company fight actions that are clearly wrong by shining the light of blogdom on them.

Wednesday March 16, 2005

Various Links

As you probably know Bob Lutz the GM Vice Chairman has a blog. In this entry titled "What I Meant To Say Was… " he responds to people who reminded him that there are a lot of Americans who "want a car designed and engineered for European roads and tastes." I'm one of them. My favorite car I ever owned was the BMW I owned 20 years ago. Even when it was ten years old I still loved the way it went around corners.

This blog " Your brain on multitasking " rang true for me. Anyone who knows me knows that whether you call it day dreaming or multitasking, I do it. I am really working on doing a better job of focusing. My piano teacher and I talk about it all the time. I've discovered that you really can't daydream while playing the piano. It is great training.

Sun's very own Eric Richert was quoted recently in an article on virtual offices on the Federal government IT site. Although they did spell his name wrong.

I recently found a very old James Michener essay about the value of constant learning which I liked. It was a link off David Bull's website. He is a woodblock print maker.

Tuesday March 15, 2005

Ajax is good for Sun

In Monday's Wall Street Journal Lee Gomes had an column about AJAX. AJAX is the name for an overall approach for developing fast and powerful web based programs. Tim Bray also referred to Ajax in his perspective on Sun written on his first anniversary at Sun. I have to say that Mr. Gomes did an amazing job of explaining something complicated and making it simple. I am always in awe of people who make writing look easy. It is just too bad it costs significant dollars to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal online to read the article.

I disagree with Mr. Gomes on his analysis of how Ajax impacts Sun. Towards the end of the article he says "Who loses? For one, Sun Microsystems, which has for years talked up its Java programming language for precisely these sorts of jobs. Instead of Java Ajax-style programming uses JavaScript – no relation – which is easier to work with and built free into every browser."

Sun builds and sells computers, especially servers. As Tim says in his essay Sun does it very well. The more that what people want from their computers moves off people's desktops and on to the internet, the better off Sun is. To serve up content and programs from the internet requires servers. It requires lots of fast, powerful servers. That is exactly what Sun builds and sells. The more this web centric model becomes reality and the more people come to the conclusion that they don't need to own or administer a computer to do everything they need to do, the better the Sun Ray stateless client will sell and the better Sun will do.

When I started reading Gomes' article I thought to myself how great AJAX is for Sun and I still think so.

How Sun uses JES to enable mobility

Bill Vass, Sun's CIO has a Sun internal blog. He recently did an entry about how to use a internet enabled mobile device like a cell phone or PDA to read your Sun email or access the Sun Portal. It is a great demonstration of how well Sun's Java Enterprise System (JES) works. I asked him if it would be OK for me to edit his entry a bit and republish it here. He said yes. I have taken out the references to Sun internal web sites. If you are a Sun employee you will find more specifics in Bill's original blog.

One other point I should make, I haven't done this myself yet. Bill's blog has inspired me so that I am thinking about making the investment. It seems like a lot of money though. A Treo would probably cost me around $450 and I suspect I'd have to pay around $50 more per month on my Verizon cell phone service to get reasonable internet access. It is hard to justify spending that kind of money but on the other hand it sure would be fun to do.

From Bill's blog

"When I'm on the road meeting with customers I always try to show them the ability I have to access my Sun email and and Portal using my mobile device. Here's how...

First, you need to have the ability to log in to Sun's wide area network via either via Sun's full portal or our original edgemail pilot.

Second, you need a compatible device. I'm currently using the Sony Ericsson P910. The Palm Treo Smartphones, the Sony Ericsson P900, and the Nokia 6800 also will work well. It will really work on ANY device, including Microsoft based handsets and wireless PDAs, as long as it supports SSL, will run Java, and has an http/https browser such as the Opera Mobile Browser. It works with just the phone's browser too, but it does not have as many features and can be a little slower depending on the speed of your data connection. For Palm Treo users, the built in browser works fine.

Although you can use a Microsoft based device, we don't recommend it since they are not our standard and selecting one may limit the functionality you have in the future, and they are prone to viruses. On that note, always make sure your device's blue tooth and IR communication capability is turned OFF since viruses and hacking have been known to occur using those technologies. Also, always protect your PDA's or phones with a password/PIN whenever possible.

I strongly recommend devices that have a keyboard of some type to really be useful. The keyboard can be on the touch screen, on the face, or in some fold out configuration. Also, you want to select a Phone that has a Java SIM GSM chip, because we will be loading the service providers certificate into our system for seamless authentication. Take the time to look at the features of what ever device you are selecting. If it has a good keyboard, browser, and screen, you may find yourself using it more as a data connection for mail and portal interaction than as a voice connection for talking, as I do.

Third, you will want an IMAP client for direct connection to Edgemail, such as EmailViewer (Installconfig). For Palm Treo users, you can try Aileron, PaPi-Mail, or SnapperMail. Also, Palm's Versamail 2.7 and above will work on devices that support PalmOS 5.4 and above. PalmOS 5.2 has a bug in the SSL library implementation that fails with our SunPKI signed certs. For Symbian devices and MS SMartphone platforms you can use ProfiMail from Lonely Cat Software.

The IMAP client gives you a Rich interface to your mail server. However, without the IMAP client, you can access your mail through the portal's simple interface. Once the IMAP client is installed and configured properly, you will be able to access the Edge and login, as usual, through the browser using your user ID and password.

Wireless Portal
Through the wireless portal you will be able to access all sorts of SMI applications directly from the phone or wireless PDA. Mobile users should watch each new release of SunWeb to see what new applications and features will be enabled through your wireless device. Here is how you can set up your phone to access the wireless portal:

The user has to login to the portal via a regular web browser to configure the access to their calendar and mail account before they can access these applications via the wireless portal with their mobile device. Instructions to set up the mail/calendar account are as follows:
1. Login to the portal via a regular browser
2. Once logged in, a personalized desktop will be displayed with Calendar channel, Mail channel, Address Book channel ..etc
3. To configure your calendar account for the calendar channel,
- Click on the "edit" button on the right hand side of the title bar of the Calendar channel
- An edit page is displayed with the calendar server name and server port pre populated
- Enter your User Name and Password accordingly
- Click on the "Finished" button to save the configuration
- When done, your personalized desktop will be displayed with your calendar appoint shown on the channel
4. To configure your mail account for the Mail channel,
- Click on the "edit" button on the right hand side of the title bar of the Mail channel
- An edit page is displayed with the mail server name, Mail Client URL and Mail ClientPort Number....etc pre populated
- Enter your User Name and Password accordingly
- Click on the "Finished" button to save the configuration
- When done, your personalized desktop will be displayed with a list of mails shown on the channel
After the configuration is done, you can access your mail and calendar via the wireless portal with your mobile device.

Lots of great features are available today... and many more coming, watch the SunWeb portal news and my blog for new features as they become available. Get productive with your mobile device!

I encourage you to share this information with any other employee so they can start using JES (portal, Java, and edge mail/cal) the way the product teams intended.

Next I will show you how to sync your mobile phones off line features like calendar / contacts with the JES server directly through a wireless connection, and how we will be able to use your cell phone to authenticate to the network.

Try it out, and HAVE FUN!"

Monday March 14, 2005

JDS Preview usage up 10%

Last Thursday night we made Java Desktop preview the default Sun Ray desktop environment at Sun. We upgraded more than 600 servers world wide over night. In my mind the fact that we can upgrade more than 30,000 Sun Ray desktops in one night is pretty darn impressive.

In the interest of honesty I do have to tell you that Murphy did strike Friday morning. At our Broomfield campus we had a SunRay outage completely unrelated to making JDS Preview the default. Of course since the only thing users knew to have changed was JDS preview they assumed that we were the cause of the outage. We are doing damage control and even in Broomfield we are seeing CDE usage drop.

In my post last week before we made the change I said I would let you know how much the percentage of users still using CDE changed. Last Thursday it was 45% and when I just check a few minutes ago it had dropped to 35%. That is progress. Over the next week I think it will go even lower.

Our focus is changing now from JDS preview to the Solaris 10 rollout. We are putting the Change acceptance and roll out plans together. After quarter end we will move full speed ahead to deploy Solaris 10 across our Sun Ray environment.It is great that most of our users will already be familiar with the Gnome desktop environment

Thursday March 10, 2005

Desktop access while travelling

Recently I got a question from a Sun user about whether we were going to make it faster to access your Sun Ray desktop when you are traveling. The following response from a colleague in Sun IT may have limited interest for non Sun readers. By the way I am sharing this with his permission.

Remote access to your desktop is one that we've put a lot of time and energy into. Yes, startup times and usability when traveling can be an issue, as we rely upon remote NFS mounting. Right now, today, you can access the Lightweight Roaming Desktop by choosing it before you log into a remote system. Select "Options-Sessions-Lightweight Roaming Desktop" This will bring up a desktop with email and browser capabilities which is very fast, but does not have direct access to your home directory and its preference files.

In the near future (Q1fy06) you will be able to hotdesk to your existing Sun Ray session when traveling to most parts of the world. Your single, authoritative Sun Ray session stays at your home location, but you can access if from any Sun Ray at Sun. The performance needs to still be fully tested out, but it seems to work even all the way around the world over reasonably small links. There is no startup/load time, since your desktop is already there. This feature is variously called Regional Hotdesking, Global Session Mobility, or Automatic Multigroup Hotdesking.

Soon, we will be moving your preference files onto the network by leveraging new features in JDS called APOC. This allows you to startup "your desktop" without even your home directory, and will even enable synchronization between your laptop and Sun Ray. It will also help, tremendously, with remote desktop startup, if that is still a need once hotdesking everywhere gets implemented.

Today is the day

Today is the day we make JDS Preview the default Sun Ray desktop at Sun. Starting tomorrow users will have to explicitly choose CDE if they want to run it. It sure is nice to finally see this happening. We've been talking about it for so long.

It will be interesting to see how much our percentage of CDE users changes. How many people will continue to run CDE even if they have to make the choice every time they log in to a SunRay? Today we have 45% CDE users. I'll let you know what the number is next Monday. One thing that probably will slow down the uptake is that no one will see JDS Preview as the default until they log out and back in. Some users only log out and back in about once a month if that.

Wednesday March 09, 2005

Adding value to Solaris

I found Kathy Sierra's blog because of a link on James Governor's Monk Chips blog. But I really liked what she had to say in her Creating Passionate Users Blog about how successful products make it easy for others to add value to a product. She used the example of how hard it is to compete with the iPod because of all the add ons that have been created by others. At first I thought that this concept only applied to consumer products. But then I realized that in the case of an operating system like Solaris, drivers are a similar example. By making Solaris open source Sun has made it very easy for others to add value to Solaris. Hopefully as she suggests this leads to more passionate Solaris users.

Sun wins an Optimas Award

Sun just won an Optimas award from Workforce Management Magazine. To quote their web site "The Optimas Awards recognize workforce management initiatives that create positive business results." Sun won for Global Outlook. Again, to quote "In an era when companies increasingly battle for talented employees, Sun Microsystems has a powerful and portable weapon: its innovative and highly evolved iWork program, which institutionalizes the virtual office and flextime." It makes me proud to be a part of the iWork Solutions Group at Sun

Tuesday March 08, 2005

Recommended New Blog to Read

I'd like to recommend a new blog that just started yesterday. A coworker of mine, Bob Cook is the Head of Financial Strategy in Sun's Workplace Resources organization. If I want to know anything about corporate real estate and especially anything to do with real estate finances Bob is the person I go to. He is the expert! It should be a fascinating blog.

I used to be the IT manager for Sun's corporate real estate organization. My group put the IT infrastructure in to all of Sun's new offices. When I joined the organization I knew nothing about corporate real estate. Sun's real estate organization is recognized as one of the best so it was a great group to be a part of. The first time I heard Bob present to our vice president it was obvious to me how complex his job is and how well he does it.

Because the real estate organization works with the whole company they have a unique perspective on the company as a whole. On top of that a company's real estate budget is a major part of the total budget so how that budget is managed has a major impact on company results and strategy.

Bob used to teach at the university level, he has lived and worked abroad and he has the kind of analytical mind and business knowledge that makes him a unique asset to Sun. I'm really looking forward to learning from him.

Bob, you asked what we'd like you to discuss. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about how companies can plan for the peaks and valleys of corporate real estate supply and demand. I'd be interested to hear how you evaluate locations for future offices. I'd be interested in your perspective on the impact of Sun's iWork program on the real estate budget. I'd be interested in what you've learned from working at Sun. How's that for starters?