Will Kelly

New WWD Post: Blogging With OneNote 2010 Beta

Now that Microsoft Office 2010 is in beta (as I noted here), I’ve been spending more time using the applications, especially OneNote 2010 beta. I have long used OneNote for capturing project information when I am working on one of my Windows machines, but its potential as a blogging tool has been on my mind recently.

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New WWD Post: 4 More Tips for Using Google Wave on Your First Project

After writing “6 Tips for Using Google Wave on Your First Project,” I’ve been learning more about Google Wave as my client and I use it for document collaboration and communication. Since I wrote the initial post, we’ve gotten a better handle on the features that are helping manage our Waves and related communications.

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New WWD Post: Project Management Tools: Beyond Gantt Charts

In my career as a contract technical writer, a project management pain point I’ve seen time and time again is in the communications of project schedules and status. The venerable Gantt chart is a project management staple, but stakeholders without formal project management training may find them difficult to understand.

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WWD Post: The Web Worker’s Client Site Survival Guide

While many of us love working in our home office or other alternative venue of choice there will often be times when your projects take you to a client site for an extended period of time. I’ve spent time on and off client sites for a majority of my career, and know it can be difficult for some workers who are used to working from home.

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WWD Post: 3 Tips for Learning Google Wave

I’ve been pondering how new users can get up to up to speed on Google Wave since writing “6 Tips for Using Google Wave on your First Project.” Learning Google Wave right now is going to require a “hands on” approach, because the platform’s still at an early stage, leaving its users to chart their own direction and usage scenarios.

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WWD Post: Implementing a Successful Corporate Microblogging Strategy

It can be very difficult to get an organization to accept corporate microblogging as a means of facilitating closer collaboration. However, while I am the first to say that changing an organization’s communications model can be a challenge, it’s not impossible.

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WWD Post: Distraction-free Writing is Distracting to Me

Like over 300,000 other Mac users who downloaded the MacHeist nanoBundle (as covered by Simon), I received WriteRoom as part of the package’s bevy of software. This lightweight word processor promises distraction-free writing. Having read about it and the productivity concepts underlying it in the past (here’s an old WWD post from Leo about distraction-free writing tools, for example), I was interested in giving it a spin to see if it could help me.

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WWD Post: Acrobat.com Revamped--Better Interface, New Features

Over the weekend, Adobe launched a revamped version of Acrobat.com, its web office and collaboration suite. This is the first major upgrade to the service since it left beta last summer (as covered by Thursday) and provides some much-needed productivity enhancements to this service.

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WWD Post: Trillian for the iPhone: Mobile Multiprotocol IM Goodness

I came to instant messaging (IM) late by many web worker’s standards. Spending time on some locked-down client sites meant that IM was never part my communications toolbox. However, when I started working with ISP and telecom clients, everybody wanted my IM details. At the time, I settled on Trillian because it supported multiple IM protocols, so I didn’t have to keep switching clients to communicate with clients and project team members.

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WWD Post: My Google Wave Wish List: The Document Collaboration Edition

My previous post “6 Tips for Using Google Wave on your First Project” was really about the initial experience a client and I had with Google Wave, and some the early lessons we learned. While I would rank both of us as web-savvy early adopters, suffice it to say my wish list for Google Wave features has been growing fairly rapidly.

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WWD Post: Microsoft Office 2010 Enters Beta

As of today, Microsoft Office 2010 has officially left Technical Preview and is now in public beta, meaning that anybody can download it and take it for a spin. I was able to get an early look at the beta and want to relay some of the changes you can expect in this upcoming release. Microsoft is really stepping up its game with this release, and even though there are scattered reports of performance issues, I am not seeing them on my Vista test machine.

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WWD Post: Microsoft Office 2010 Web Apps Beta Available to SharePoint Users

To coincide with the release of the desktop Office 2010 beta, Microsoft is finally embracing the web office with today’s release of Microsoft Office 2010 Web Apps beta, a web version of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that augments or even replaces the desktop version of Microsoft Office.

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WWD Post: ShoveBox for the Mac and iPhone Helps Keep Your Stuff Organized

Perhaps the greatest treasure in the recent MacHeist nanoBundle (which was covered by Simon in a recent post) is ShoveBox. It’s a clippings organizer that lets you capture, view, organize and edit data that is elegant in its simplicity. This very usable application resides in the menubar, making it accessible at all times regardless of what application you are using.

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WWD Post: Taking Corporate Microblogging Mobile

Corporate email is becoming increasingly less effective for project communications in today’s geographically dispersed work teams. It’s gradually being displaced by solutions like Microsoft SharePoint, instant messaging and even social media tools.

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WWD Post: iPhone Blogging Tools Roundup

When I made the jump to the iPhone 3G it was most definitely a platform play for me. As a web worker who can be on and off client sites all day, I still want access to my personal web properties, especially my blogs, which serve as a professional face for me online.

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WWD Post: Compare Multiple Documents With CompareMyDocs.com

One of the banes of many writers’ existence (including my own!) is inheriting a slew of documents where the people working on them previously haven’t paid much heed to document versioning, leaving you trying to make sense of a mishmash of documents. On more than one occasion, I’ve been left hoping for a tool that would enable me to compare documents in bulk so I can get a mess of a documentation library under control before I can begin the real work on a project.

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WWD Post: 6 Tips For Using Google Wave On Your First Project

As Google is issuing Wave invites in a steady trickle, those fortunate enough to have an account are trying to figure out how this new tool might fit into their workflow and help them better communicate and collaborate with their teams and clients.

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My latest WWD post is based upon using Google Wave for the first time on a client project. While Google Wave still has some rough edges, but the new model shows great promise. I am really liking how Google Wave is managing our conversations on the project.

WWD Post: Book Review: "97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know"

I think project management books should be on every web worker’s reading list because — like it or not — even if your job title isn’t “project manager,” you still have to manage your own portion of the projects you participate in. Even some informal grounding in project management can be helpful for those “rare” times you are pulled into help bring a failing project back to life.

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WWD Post: GoToMeeting On the Mac

Citrix’s GoToMeeting, part of the Citrix Online collaborative suite, is one such service. It also meets one of my other prime requirements — the client is easily installable by users of all levels. One thing that will spoil a web conference before it’s even started is when participants have a hard time installing the local client so they can’t join the conference. This issue can happen to even the most experienced web worker, not just the technology neophyte.

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WWD Post: 5 Web Office Considerations: Beyond the Buzz

Recently, we covered the release of the Microsoft Office 2010 Web Apps Technical Preview. While it was great to get a first look at this release, it was even more interesting to pull back and read the flurry of blog postings, pundit pontifications, tweets and articles that were all over the web, ranging from those stating that this was the end of Microsoft Office, to those saying that Microsoft Office 2010 Web Apps is going to wipe Google Apps and Zoho off the map.

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I am a regular user of Google Docs (in fact I wrote this WWD post in Google Docs) and have experience supporting the roll out of Microsoft Office in a major government agency. Additionally, throughout my career, I've had to resolve a number of document publishing issues rooted in Microsoft Word and templates.

Web Office suites do have their place and are examples of innovation in my opinion. However, organizations have a lot of things to consider before implementing a Web Office solution that is beyond the current buzz surrounding these services.