Way off-topic...Dunkin' Donuts or Starbucks

This is not necessarily a coffee related debate. My morning visit to both of these well known coffee purveyors raised many items up for debate in my mind. Among the topics or analogies which can spin from this topic is the economy, what makes companies successful, the two-party system and many more.



Business news of late is one dire forecast or report after another and most if not all place the blame for their poor performance in large part on the state of the economy and in some cases that is appropriate in many others I think it is the easy or even lazy conclusion to draw. In my opinion, Starbucks is one of those cases. All businesses, but in particular retail and service businesses suffer from cycles of up and down service levels. Starbucks has been, at least at the locations I have visited, on a long down cycle. The locations are increasingly unkempt, the employees decreasingly motivated or pleasant. The product selection offered is wider but the product delivered over the counter is less consistently excellent.



We are a split family - I am a DD guy and my wife is a SB supporter. I visited both today and had my usual quick in and out experience at DD, then stood in line nearly 10 minutes to get my wife's drink at SB. Half the people in line in front of me at SB left before ordering. I noted that about half of those appeared to head straight across the street to DD. The others made a beeline for the Metro. Starbucks may be struggling, locations may be closing, unfortunately many will lose jobs - but I would not be so quick to blame the economy. Be skeptical of any company, or state, local or federal government that reduces services, raises fees, or threatens the same based on the economy.

Connected or Distracted?

I work a high percentage of the time from my home office, another percentage from wherever I may be at the time that a message, an alert, a tweet or a phone call hits my BlackBerry. Common wisdom has always been that this is a good thing. As time goes by, I wonder whether the quality of the work done in those what would have in the past been disconnected periods - suffers in quality to such a degree that I would be better served to wait. If I respond an hour or even a day later but I am fully focused and make no conscious or unconscious compromises in my response is my employee, customer or prospect better off with my 'delayed' response. As we develop our business processes and work flows - a prioritization and expectation on response time should be a big part of that. Can we create triggers for those events which can and should wait until the next traditional work day? The following study came out recently on Internet use by our 'always on' workforce and lead me to give it some thought...

Networked Workers: Most workers use the Internet or email at their jobs, but they say these technologies are a mixed blessing for them.... (CLICK HERE for the Full Story)

Sustainable Virtual Workplaces in SharePoint

First of all, it should be noted that I am married to an Architect. In Grad School, she also had a specialization in Urban Planning and worked for a time for one of the foremost New Urbanist firms, DPZ. This is why the analogies drawn between Urban Planning and Object Oriented Design in software, such as SharePoint, resonate so strongly with me. One can find a multitude of planning related quotations from the renowned architect, Christopher Alexander that could just as easily be written about the planning, creation, delivery and support of a SharePoint Environment. We are in many ways designing towns of widely varying quality everyday - some well planned multi-use cities which will flourish, others poorly envisioned, insufficiently regulated and inefficiently zoned masses of sprawl which will stagnate and require enormous re-engineering projects on a repeated basis in the future.

Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice. -- ChristopherAlexander

Only the least enlightened among us would consider our big cities and surrounding sprawl as good examples upon which we should build our virtual workplaces. What I believe CorasWorks has done is to create a system or framework that allows for creative and sustainable solutions to working within SharePoint. Not wider roads(bandwidth and processing), or more tolls(expensive single use consulting services), or high-priced super HOV lanes(higher priced licensing options) - but a truly sustainable and repeatable long term plan for success.

CW Roll-ups bring the work to the user, reducing their dependence on Search. The CW Actions framework allows for the bulk automation of simple business process. CW Navigation webparts provide for the easy, consistent and intuitive routing of users through the workplace. These are the problems which occur over and over in every SP environment and the CorasWorks Workplace Suite allows even the most unsophisticated user to easily overcome those barriers a million times over. The CW Data Integration Toolset extends that same methodology and ease-of-use to all the enterprise data which exists outside of SharePoint but again allows the user to go to one place to find their work - regardless of where the data resides.

Managing a Virtual Team

CorasWorks is a virtual company and with that comes a unique set of challenges (as if anyone needs more challenges these days). I am constantly reminded of the need to be aware of and responsive to these differences in order to maintain a cohesive team. So from time to time I may also post info that I have found useful to me as a manager of a virtual team, such as...

Virtual Workplace Dos and Don'ts: CLICK HERE

There are plenty of reasons to release workers from the confines of the corporate campus. Studies show that virtual workers, when compared to their office-bound colleagues, tend to be more productive and stay with a company longer. Letting employees work outside the office can also help companies save big bucks on real estate. IBM, for example, saves about $100 million a year by letting 140,000 employees work from home, on the road, or at client locations. ...(more)

Document Review and Publishing

Many folks coming through our booth at the SPBPC in San Diego were doing some type of Document Mgmt in SP so this is a timely promotion;

Click link below to view and download -

Document Review & Publishing

CorasWorks Document Review and Publishing is used to manage the process of contributing, reviewing, and publishing documents that are used by a broader audience. The tasks of users are automated to drive the process forward. You have the ability to keep version history and work on new changes in a separate, private workspace (i.e., training manuals, corporate policies, documents on a website, etc.).

Welcome to my Blog

This blog will be primarily used to promote my passion which is my work. I work for CorasWorks a Microsoft ISV which creates solutions for MS SharePoint. We have been in business for more than five years and have customers on every continent. We have recently launched a community to support our users and many of my posts will link to the blogs and forums hosted there as they are proving to be packed with useful information that is not always easily searchable and locatable. We are successful because of both the opportunities and the challenges which SharePoint provides an organization. It has been widely adopted but remains underutilized. We believe we have the solution to overcome most of the barriers which you are facing. Rather than recreate the wheel, please give us a look and feel free to contact me for assistance.