Matthew Krieger - I think about IT, therefore I am » Corporate IT

My Blackberry Feature Wishlist

mgk — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:51:11 +0000

The Blackberry has been so successful as a mobile email device in part because it offers good enough completeness of experience and integration with corporate email systems (Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes being the canonical examples). By “completeness of experience” I’m referring to the fact that most of what you can do natively in the email lifecycle in Outlook/Exchange and Notes you can do on the device. There are a number of gaps – gaps which force me to use the native email client to accomplish basic tasks – and I’d like to see them addressed.

In no particular order (and from a Lotus Notes-centric point of view):

Rich text support including the bare basics like bold, italics and support for colored text
Usage of the Notes Drafts folder from the Blackberry, so that the Notes client and the Blackberry have equal access to message drafts
Usage of the Notes Trash folder from the Blackberry, so that the Notes client and the Blackberry have equal access to deleted items. This would support undelete from the Blackberry as well.
Ability to copy and paste attachments between messages, or for a functionally equivalent result the ability to forward a message containing an attachment and then delete all text except for the attachment
Ability to edit portions of existing messages when replying to or forwarding them. The message body is immutable.
Tab, indentation and bullet support

Any Blackberry/Notes experts out there that can comment?

Tip: Viewing Inline Email Images on Your Blackberry

mgk — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:51:14 +0000

I’m using a Blackberry against a Lotus Notes back-end. When I receive an email message with an image pasted inline (vs. as an attachment), I can’t view the image; it’s represented as “<< image >>”. I’m not sure why the Blackberry or the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) don’t present the image as a viewable attachment, but there is a workaround. If you forward the email to your web-based email account, e.g. Yahoo or Gmail and then browse there from the Blackberry, the image(s) will either be viewable directly within the message as HTML or will show up as a viewable attachment. As a quicker alternative, some of the big email services have an applet that you can run right on your Blackberry (I downloaded Google’s Gmail application for Blackberry directly from my device at http://gmail.com/app). With this approach, I simply forward the email to my Gmail account and view it (images and all) using the Gmail app.

Defining the Undefinable

mgk — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 05:50:12 +0000

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 are two concepts that have gotten an incredible amount of press in the past year, both in IT industry media and corporate IT. Part fact, part hype, part buzz, part reality, part theme, part meme, part concept and part tangible, these two terms share one important attribute:

They are very difficult to define.

If you ask 10 different people to define SOA or Web 2.0, you will get 10 different answers. For the most part, all of the answers will be right, and all will be wrong.

For corporate IT shops (and Marketing and Advertising and other departments who might touch the Web 2.0 concept), I posit that you shouldn’t spend time ‘figuring out’ the definitions of these terms. That approach won’t scale – different groups within the organization will end up with very different (and often orthogonal) interpretations.

Rather, I suggest that organizations educate themselves as much as possible on these concepts and then:

Define what they mean to your organization.

These definitions should be developed internally (IT is the best candidate to spearhead) and then evangelized horizontally, across the organization. In the case of SOA, this is important because it is an overarching concept, with integration and sharing at the very heart of the idea (at least in my definition) :). It’s very difficult to build an effective SOA without the organization having a unified view. In the case of Web 2.0, its possible touchpoints extend across IT, marketing, product development and other business areas, making a common definition important as well.

Once these terms are defined, the business can build their Web 2.0 strategies and IT can design their SOAs. By marching in lockstep with your cross-departmental peers, your organization can best take advantage of these powerful yet vague terms.