Community developer blogs

Mark Bower

Recent Posts

• Taking a risk

  Posted: 02 Jan 2009 at 17:02 by bowerm

  For around the last year I have been really annoyed with myself for not living up to my full potential. Know the feeling? Perhaps the worst part about achieving some level of success in your chosen career, is that once you have something to lose you are hesitant to gamble it all. Towards the end of last year though, some things happened in my life that now mean that just being ‘comfortable’ is no longer an option that I can live with.  Today is my last day at Microsoft. Thank you t

• You can’t please all the people all of the time

  Posted: 09 Jul 2008 at 17:22 by bowerm

  Or maybe you can if you want to be bland, boring and unremarkable. Seth Godin has been rallying for some time against focus groups and design by committee. Today he has this gem: If you are willing to satisfy people with good enough, you can make just about everybody happy. If you delight people an

• Announcing: The Knowledge Worker Tools Early Adopter Programme

  Posted: 30 Jun 2008 at 13:24 by bowerm

  This week we are kicking off the KWT Early Adopter Programme.  If you work in NHS IM&T and you are about to begin a SharePoint 2007 or Office 2007 deployment then read on...   What is KWT exactly? The Knowledge Worker Tools (KWT) project is part of the NHS CUI Programme. Our aim is to

• What does an information worker do all day?

  Posted: 24 Jun 2008 at 18:11 by bowerm

  Interesting piece in the New York Times on the effect of interruptions caused by email, IM etc.  28% of the day handling non-urgent unimportant things, and 15% of the day spent searching for information.  Some time ago I started switching off email during particularly busy times, like when

• The Future of Groove and SharePoint

  Posted: 22 Apr 2008 at 16:22 by bowerm

  Some hints from Ray Ozzie this week on the future overlap between Groove and SharePoint: "You asked if Groove is the future UI of SharePoint. I might ask the same thing, is SharePoint the future UI of Groove" Microsoft will increase the connections between SharePoint and Groove by tying together spe

• I am a Technology Omnivore

  Posted: 20 Apr 2008 at 19:48 by bowerm

  The quiz: http://www.pewinternet.org/quiz/quiz.asp My results: Based on your answers to the questionnaire, you most closely resemble survey respondents within the Omnivores typology group. This does not mean that you necessarily fit every group characteristic. Omnivores make up 8% of the American pu

• Electronic Forms in the NHS

  Posted: 16 Apr 2008 at 16:58 by bowerm

  Today we held a workshop with some NHS folk on the topic of electronic forms.  The KWT team are planning on putting together an Electronic Forms Resource Kit - a set of tools a guidance for forms authors in the NHS.  I'll share some thoughts from the workshop later, but in the meantime wha

• Slides from NHS CIO Summit

  Posted: 15 Jan 2008 at 16:01 by bowerm

  Thanks to everyone who attended the CIO Summit today.  Everyone I spoke to provided positive feedback.  The real challenge was squeezing a summary into a 15 minute slot.  If you missed the session I have made the slides available here: | View | Upload your own There are some screensho

• Help the NHS get the software YOU need

  Posted: 14 Jan 2008 at 12:13 by bowerm

  My name is Hilary Palmén,  I work for Microsoft UK planning and conducting research with NHS professionals that for the NHS Common User Interface (CUI) project.   More information about the CUI  project is available on:  http://www.microsoft.com/uk/nhs/content/articles/an-in

• NHS CIO Summit

  Posted: 13 Jan 2008 at 19:38 by bowerm

  I'll be speaking this week at the NHS CIO Summit that Microsoft are hosting at Thames  Valley Park, Reading. I only have a 15 minute slot and I am currently trying to figure out the best way to make use of the time available.  Would it be better to talk specifics and show concrete examples

• Office 2007 SP1 Available for Download

  Posted: 11 Dec 2007 at 16:55 by bowerm

  Here's the official blurb... "We have managed to complete the engineering work slightly earlier than we anticipated and are making the download available from OfficeOnline. What can you expect in Service Pack 1? SP1 focuses on the issues that matter most to our customers based on direct customer fee

• Excel Charting to the Max

  Posted: 21 Aug 2007 at 14:00 by bowerm

  Who would have thought Excel could produce charts as good looking as this? I certainly would never have thought this was possible until I discovered this great screencast that shows how it's done.  http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/2007/07/recreating-ny-times-cancer-graph/

• Office 2007 for (almost) Free

  Posted: 12 Jul 2007 at 15:26 by bowerm

  This is such a cool offer!  If you have friends or family who work for the NHS in the UK, go tell them now: As part of the Enterprise Agreement the NHS signed with Microsoft a couple of weeks ago NHS employees are entitled to a copy of Office 2007 for use on their own home PC for just the price

• Better Intranet Navigation: Statistically Improbable Phrases

  Posted: 05 Jul 2007 at 16:12 by bowerm

  On Amazon.com today, I noticed a feature that David Weinberger mentions in his book, but I don't think is yet available on Amazon's UK site.  Books for which they have electronic access to the text have been scanned and effectively auto-tagged.  These tags then become navigationa

• Taxonomy in a Digital World - Part 4

  Posted: 04 Jul 2007 at 11:19 by bowerm

  Concluding my notes on Everything is Miscellaneous...A good read on the whole.  Does a good job of summarizing the information management trends on the web today.  If you are an information architect or consultant working in the field of knowledge management then I would say you should hav

• 5 Steps to a Great SharePoint User Experience

  Posted: 03 Jul 2007 at 08:30 by bowerm

  How many times have you visited a team site and seen this? Or a site where a web part for every list in the site has been squashed into the home page? But helping visitors get the most out of your site needn't be hard work.  Here are five simple tips to make your SharePoint site a pleasure

• The Demise of Email as a Collaboration Tool

  Posted: 01 Jul 2007 at 12:23 by bowerm

  Mike Gotta writes on the demise of email: With all the recent conversations in the media about e-mail, I think the proper way to look at e-mail is that it will not go away or die anytime soon but it will "age out" as demographics within the workplace change and people become generally more comfortab

• Mashup Journalism

  Posted: 29 Jun 2007 at 11:10 by bowerm

  Sometimes I am really impressed by the BBC.  Despite its image as stodgy, old fashioned Auntie Beeb, there really are some very creative and forward-looking people working there.   Right now BBC news are running an experiment in mashup journalism.  As well as regular reports on B

• Download: Arsenal's Vista Gadget

  Posted: 26 Jun 2007 at 07:43 by bowerm

  Looking through my referrer logs yesterday I noticed lots of hits from people looking for Arsenal's Vista gadget.  When I wrote about it, it wasn't available for download.  So if you have come here looking for a download, you can find it over here.  Not to be outdone, I noticed M

• Free Copy of Office 2007 Professional Edition

  Posted: 25 Jun 2007 at 18:22 by bowerm

  Darren is offering a free copy of Office 2007 Pro for the first person with a boxed copy of Office 2005 or earlier they want to swap.