The Collocator

smart clients ahoy

interesting development at SaaS CRM vendor Entellium - they're discontinuing their browser-based product in favor of a smart client. an analysis of the rate at which their clients closed business with their application demonstrated better effectiveness with the smart client - a finding subscribed in part to better UI capabilities in the client than would be possible with a browser-based app.

i happen to agree with this direction. and one wonders what happened with SAP's Project Muse, an initiative that recognized the shortcomings of the browser UI-wise, and at the same time recognized the incontrovertible advantages of connectivity such as collaboration and portability.

in a post about this move, Phil Wainewright also speaks of a focus on results as a differentiating feature of Entellium's product:

"The entire user experience is built around the core premise of 'How should I spend my time most profitably?' For example, a new analytics module lets users compare key metrics to industry benchmarks to help decide where they most need to focus attention."

this can just as easily apply to an HCM product, like SAP's. E.g. if a learning administrator faces an overload, where will her time be spent to greater effect in the context of her organization's learning strategy: in scheduling the next month's courses, in managing course enrollments for employees with upcoming course expiration dates or in taking care of the frustrated employees waitlisted for more than a month on a populare new course. adding industry benchmark data would be even better.

better UIs allow for better implementation of business processes, which should incorporate metrics where relevant to improve them further. i'd rather try that in a smart client, distribution and maintenance disadvantages or not.

i'm now interested in Entellium - this just seems smart.

rss aggregators and social bookmarking

Haven't posted in a while, picking up the pace again in a festina lente way.

i use netnewswire as my rss reader on the mac at the home, after having used feeddemon for a year or so before that on my ibm tablet. From time to time i philander - albeit halfhartedly - to see what else is out there. But netnewswire is pretty much it for me - there are a great many features i love about it.

This post, however, is about something i wish it was better at, and that's the social bookmarking aspect of it. netnewswire makes it super easy to post an item to delicious, but i find that i simply don't want to go through the hassle of clicking on the save button in the delicious pop-up. i just want to flag the item in nnw and get it over with. the problem with that is those flags are only stored on my mac. i live in constant trepidation that all those thousands of xkcd cartoons, sartorialist pictures, flickr pictures of namakwaland, richtersveld, anini beach (via the smart tag subscriptions) are going to be lost through some unforeseen disaster. i've slowly started tagging flagging blog posts i want to get back to, but i know i'm going to have to go back and delicious them or something.

or something.that something in nnw seems to copy them to a clippings folder and then syncing up with newsgator's online reader. now i love what newsgator's doing with enterprise rss and social sites and i'm a fan of jeff nolan, but frankly this part of it _ _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _ _. i've spent a few hours in 3 different occasions to get clippings to sync up properly, which it could never do. but even if it did, i'd still hate having to copy flagged items, even from the flagged folder to the clippings folder. there's probably a way to do this with a script, but then i'd still have to rely on the newsgator online reader which is just so far removed from the features i have in nnw that i can't see myself using it. for one thing, in nnw there's a feature that i always wanted in feeddemon and that was that i could sort mysubscriptions and folders any way i wanted - so the important stuff - what i find most interesting and read the most often - is at the top. i lose that on newsgator and it may seem silly but it's also turns out to be pretty important to me.

this is certainly festina lente.

i want to be able to flag and tag any subscription item in nnw on my local reader on the mac, and have it backed up and synced up on something decent on newsgator. forget clippings. we call this social bookmarking now - delicious has it right: the url, the description/subject line, an optional clipping, tagging and sharing. that's it. that's what i want. 

i want the exact same features for that on nnw and newsgator online. i might even live with alpha sorting for a while. if i had this, i will never bother with saving my favorite photos on flickr, my favorite links to anything on delicious and my favorite blog posts on nnws. right now this i'm only doing delicious and nnw flagging, but boy am i going to move to something else fast if i find what i want. my truckdriver repartee will be in full force if i ever lose those flickr flags.