The Great Web Office Experiment

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Miles Maier is the London Regional ICT Champion and works for Lasa (London Advice Services Alliance). Lasa provides strategic and innovative services to support the provision of expert independent advice for all.

“The Great Web Office Experiment was inspired by IT Redux’s Office 2.0 and the Dot Organize ‘Organizer’s Toolcrib’ of online tools. The aim was to find out just how easy or hard it is to apply online tools to my everyday tasks. This meant no more Outlook for email and calendar, Word or Excel and using only online tools to do the same jobs.

My own perception is that online tools have the potential to allow voluntary sector organisations to more easily exploit ICT and better achieve their organisational goals. However, most of the UK voluntary sector (apart from the largest organisations) are not grasping the opportunities of online tools to connect with their stakeholders.

For me, the key was about showing how online tools could be applied to everyday tasks. David Wilcox and Beth Kanter developed an excellent social media game (http://socialmedia.wikispaces.com/Social+media+game) to show organisations how they might apply online tools or new media to their business.

The question for me was: “Are web 2.0 tools suitable for business tasks like email, calendar, documents and spreadsheets?”

The Experiment

The ‘Great Web Office’ Experiment ran for two weeks, during which I conducted all my business tasks using free online tools.

Web Office tools used:
Address Book: Plaxo - https://www.plaxo.com/
Bookmarks: del.icio.us - http://del.icio.us/
Calculator: Google - http://www.google.com/help/features.html#calculator
Email: Gmail - http://mail.google.com/
Calendar: Google Calendar - http://www.google.com/calendar/
Documents and Spreadsheets: Zoho - http://www.zoho.com/
File Manager: Box.net - http://www.box.net/
Images: Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/
Personalised homepage: Google - http://www.google.co.uk/ig?hl=en
RSS Reader: Google Reader - http://www.google.com/reader/

Findings:

Email: Email is at the heart of all my daily tasks and I chose Google’s Gmail service because it offers lots of functionality and is designed to integrate with other Google services, such as Google Calendar, Maps, and Mobile. Setting up email forwarders from my office Outlook account to Gmail was relatively easy. However, breaking the habit of using Outlook for email was far more difficult than I expected. Gmail’s major weakness is its management of contacts.

Ease of switching: 5/10

Calendar: I had no problem making Google Calendar the centre of my web office as it offers lots of functionality, with the ability to create and share multiple calendars, set reminders and auto responders. After importing my office calendar into Google as a CSV file, I used SyncMyCal to Synchronise appointments between Google and Outlook.

Ease of switching: 9/10

Contacts: I use contacts every day and went for Plaxo because it offers better functionality than the contact management found in Google’s Gmail service, and it automatically synchronises with Outlook contacts, notes and tasks. Plaxo also has a large user base, making it more sustainable than many other online contact managers.

Ease of switching: 8/10

Documents and Spreadsheets: I started out using Zoho, which performed well on short documents without much formatting. However, Zoho struggled on a 40 page document with complex formatting and I soon switched to ThinkFree because it offered better document management facilities, editing and display of complex documents. ThinkFree also offered offline editing, handy working in areas without an internet connection.

Ease of switching: 7/10

What the Experiment suggests…

The Great Web Office Experiment demonstrated that the mainstream take up of web office tools is still some way off. There are a number of reasons for this including:

Reluctance to think about using ICT differently
Microsoft Office use is heavily embedded in voluntary groups
The need to link business tasks to web tools
The need for more examples of what can be done with the tools

The Lessons Learned

The major issue for me was picking, (i) a sustainable service, (ii) services that integrated with each other for ease of use and (iii) tools that integrated and synchronised with Outlook
Certain office tasks – email, contacts and calendar - are well suited to the web office, and can be set up by a small organisation with a little technical knowledge
Take up of editing web-based documents and spreadsheets is likely to remain low whilst Microsoft Office is heavily embedded in office culture and broadband penetration is confined to those who can afford it. However, online document editing may be a solution for the very smallest voluntary organisations, many of whom lack their own ICT resources and operate from internet cafes or shared offices.

A call to action

In theory, all the web office needs is a computer with a broadband connection to access web services, freeing the end user from complicated decisions about ICT hardware and software. However, this ‘nirvana’ is still some way off and issues around the sustainability and security of using online services for organisational use remain to be resolved.

In the meantime, the key to mainstream take-up of web office tools will be to demonstrate the match between everyday business tasks and web tools, like Google calendar, Gmail and Plaxo.

My job as ICT Champion is to start the debate rolling and showcase new technologies. I really like the dot organize tool crib (http://toolcrib.ning.com/) because it gives people the opportunity to assess web 2.0 tools already out there. Perhaps we could also extend the model pioneered by Ruralnet’s I-See-T project (http://blog.i-see-t.org.uk/?p=244) for groups to try out web 2.0 apps risk free?

Summing up

The key to organizational success in the future will be: (i) showing greater accountability to stakeholders, (ii) collaborating and sharing and (iii) embracing new technology - the very elements web 2.0 tools provide.

In my humble opinion, the winners will be those that understand it’s not enough to do the same old things.

Miles Maier can be found blogging away at http://www.lasa.org.uk/ictchampion/

Miles is looking for examples and case studies of successful new media projects. If you have one, please contact him via the link above.