The team here at Elsinore has spent quite a bit of time this past week reviewing how workflows should look and feel to users.  We thought it would be great to hear our customers’ and visitors’ opinions on workflow design usages.

For the purpose of this blog we will focus specifically on business processes, though the principles could apply to any type of organization. A typical workflow diagram will have geometrical elements (such as rectangles, diamonds, and triangles), each representing or describing some action, activity, or decision that has to be made during the process. Most of these elements will typically have a one or two word label to help observers keep track of the flow. These elements are however only a few of the possible graphical and text representations available.

The amount of detail provided by a workflow diagram is determined by the workflow designer. Workflows can be designed at a high level, only outlining the general scope of the process and keeping the layout simple. On the other hand, workflows can be very detailed, showing exactly what activities are being performed, to whom the emails are sent, what divisions are doing the work, who is responsible for scheduling a meeting, etc. The information is all available but the key is balance. When we consider these and other elements that could be represented, are they useful or do they add clutter to the workflow canvas? What elements do you think are important?  And should workflow designers err on the side of simplicity, or should they strive to display as much information as possible?

It’s a difficult philosophy to capture in a single blog, so in the next installment we’ll capture a few of the most common design elements of a workflow and discuss some of their pros and cons as graphical representations on a workflow.

I always look forward to the new Microsoft Office releases; I look for those cool new features that will make my work life easier or my presentations cooler.  Wow ok I guess I am a bit of a nerd but I also look forward to football season and UFC fights as well!

Debra Shinder did an article for Techrepublic, I assume she was one of the privileged few with access to the alpha testing of Office 2010 and she has some screen captures and a list of her top 10 favorite new features.  Make sure you check out the deleting conversations in Outlook and the linking to documents in OneNote.  I always thought OneNote was a joke and not very useful but lately I have found some really good applications for the tool and I’m really looking forward to it seeing some love from Microsoft for OneNote in 2010. http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=900&tag=nl.e103

So in keeping with our review of Microsoft Outlook Plug-In solutions we decided to setup a little experiment to compare one of the brightest stars in the industry Xobni and another product we had looked at once before Lookeen.  The heart of both products is Outlook productivity through Search.  So we setup 3 test sets where we had emails, attachments, contacts, appointments, and tasks.  We did not try multiple .pst files maybe we will try that experiment at a later date.  The results were interesting, but not surprising both products index your email folders keeping track of what you receive and send so expectations were that both would perform equally well.  Both products presented basically the same information and the speed was almost identical, so this required us to look at more subjective matters such as aesthetics and personal opinions.  We stayed away from price but the two products are only separated by about $10.

Xobni - Their integrated model with Outlook and fashionable user interface won them a lot of points among the staff here.  They had nice features such as analytics and well organized information window that quickly displayed contact information, conversations, and files exchanged.  On the downside they did miss one email in our tests that Lookeen caught and the integration does take up a bit of room in an already busy Outlook window.

Lookeen - The product seems to find the emails, appointments, and tasks as fast as Xobni and the results are displayed in a separate window that can easily be displayed alongside Outlook or on a second monitor(even better).  This product is not as pretty as Xobni and it is missing some nice features most notably the analytics but if you are just looking for search capability it is a good product.

At the end of the day we have mixed reviews internally but the majority of people are using Xobni free version currently with a few looking to upgrade to pro.  Lookeen hasn’t disappeared but with pricing being similar most people went with Xobni at least for now.