Tools of the Trade

When at work, many of us are using Windows when are hearts might be elsewhere. As I wind down work with my current employer, I'm taking not of the tools I installed over the past 18 months which has significantly boosted my productivity. Here they are in no particular order.

Confluence

An enterprise wiki developed by a very switched on Australia company, company has been a great tool to share knowledge. Since we adopted it, I don't believe there has been a single file stored on the shared drive. Everything in Confluence is searchable, taggable and can be edited without opening Word.

Mingle

I've blogged about Mingle before, but its worth repeating: Mingle is a great tool. Its easy to use and does a very small amount of things reasonably well. Unfortunately, it was introduced into a team which wasn't very disciplined with project management (and our one project manager left several months ago) or time tracking so it didn't transform the way we work as much as I would have liked. However, if anything was going to work, Mingle was it.

ObjectDock Plus

ObjectDock is a Windows utility which mimics the dock on Mac OS X. Aside from the nice looks (it does suprisingly well, even with very low quality icons), it definitely increases your productivity. I have basically eliminated using the Start menu and can quickly open documents with specific applications just by dragging them to the dock. I use the Plus version and it money worth spending. I am able to move my system tray to the top of the screen (like the Mac menu bar) which makes a bigger difference than you would otherwise expect.

Google Chrome

The early adopter that I am, I quickly tried out Google Chrome when it was released. It turns out the speed is the killer browser feature. I've strayed to other browsers on occasion (Safari 4 Beta isn't bad) but I keep coming back to the Chrome. Lots of you out there rely on Firefox and her extensions. I hear you, but that's just not me.

Excel 2007

Nothing has improved my ability to analyse data more than Excel 2007. It seems to crash less than most Office applications, and the way it handles pivot tables is surely the way nature intended. The is extended to how it works with OLAP cubes; Excel is definitely my preferred OLAP client. For added value, impress your boss by using the data mining plug-in to do some incredibly useful tasks.

E

E is a text editor for Windows based on Textmate for Mac. I still prefer Textmate, but E comes close. I was never able to get the Cygwin integration working, but then again, I'm not as big a Unix geek as some. Still, e is a great lightweight text editor that gets out of your way, quickly opens files as text (even if they're not) and is always a right click away.

Jing

Jing is a very lightweight tool that allows you to quickly take screenshots or screencasts. It is free and has almost no features, but I wouldn't use anything else. It sits on the edge of your screen as a translucent sun, waiting for you to click it. When you do, you decide, image or movie, and off you go. You can't edit videos, but you can draw, highlight and annotate screenshots. Its always available, doesn't consume many resources and "just works". Combining Jing and Confluence can create a very simple but powerful platform to document your software systems and create how-to guides for your users.

This is an image taken using Jing that brings it all together: Chrome + Confluence + Jing + ObjectDock.

Microsoft versus Thoughtworks. SharePoint versus Mingle

This past week has been dominated by our portal project. SharePoint is our platform of choice for the portal, and Mingle is the documentation and project management tool that I'm using for this project. As a business analyst (my job title), it makes sense to use tools like SharePoint where I can address business requirements without relying on developers; I can often gather requirements and configure the system in real time if required. This is a tremendous asset.

So yes, SharePoint is a nice tool insofar as it satisfies the 80-20 rule for off-the-shelf-software: 80% of what you need is available out of the box, and 20% is missing and requires customization. Luckily, it seems SharePoint doesn't suck too much at customization, so we are not stuck trying to reinvent the wheel and hack into areas where we shouldn't. Still, there isn't much of an open-source community around this project as I would like to see, and it's difficult to get a grasp of what is an easy customization, and what is nearly impossible. The amount of blog posting from non-Microsoft employees regarding SharePoint, for example, is lacking.

Aside from poor community support and documentation, the other gripe I have is that finding out how do the 80% out-of-the-box functionality very time consuming. SharePoint doesn't actually do much, but finding out what it does and how to do it is quite challenging. Things that would seem natural to be able to do (reference the Now() function in calculated columns, have global lists, changing the link to text for document library items) are nearly impossible. Since you can't easily determine what's possible and the system is so unintuitive, a lot of time is spent searching for options which do not exist but presumably should.

Contrast this with Mingle.

Granted, Mingle does a lot less than SharePoint, although one could argue that there is much overlap. But the learning curve is negligible and the user interface, despite feeling less like a real desktop application than SharePoint, is actually a pleasure to use. Mingles features are easy to find and configure, the documentation and screencasts are well though-out so it's easy to see what Mingle can -- and more importantly -- cannot do, so little time is wasted searching for ways to do the impossible. Mingle comes with meaningful templates that actually show off "advanced" features like card transitions, graphing, and well constructed card properties.

(As a side point, the Mingle concept of "cards" is really not all the different from the SharePoint concept of lists. The both offer custom, typed columns and they both offer different views.)

There are a few lessons here for me:

• ship your application with meaningful out-of-the-box samples. Even better if some sample content could actually be applied to whatever project you're about to begin. (The SharePoint logo as an image web part is not really helpful)
• web applications should not try to feel like desktop applications; the should feel like web applications. This way, when I want to move the location of something on a page, I'll be pleasantly surprised that it drags instead of frustrated I have to click the "Move Up" button on a "toolbar" 30 times
  
• product marketing pages should actually show how to use the product, and relevant scenarios. Otherwise, I can't get started quickly, and I'm not sure what's possible.

Are you using Mingle or SharePoint (or both)? I'd love to hear about your experiences.