Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, now that is a name that is hard to remember! Maybe if you reached the pinnacle of focus and concentration, you would be in “the zone” and be able to remember it. Alternatively, you might enter a state of “Flow”. If you did the latter then you would have Mr Csíkszentmihályi to thank as he coined the term “Flow State”. Although many cultures have meditation and deep states of focus that allow their practioners to block out the rest of the world, our culture of collaboration very rarely allows us to enter that state, especially, it seems, if we are in a “productive” open office.

It may seem like a strange statement to make and many will immediately deny it and talk about how a software product is not usually something that we consider good for our heath, unless it is re-enforcing our belief that we are doing enough exercise! The reason I believe that this statement is true is based on the following reasons: Creating a task reduces the burden In 1927, Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik published On Finished and Unfinished Tasks, an investigation into how we remember tasks.

You have prepared to go on holiday (See Escape with No Stress) and you have had a lovely time. You told everyone that you would be out but still, they have sent you emails and you have actions as a result. For each email, assess it based on the following process: The aim of this exercise is to categorise the emails and either respond to them or move them so that there are no emails in your inbox.

Going on holiday is something we all look forward to. Making sure that you have no stress when you are away is sometimes a challenge though. It always feels like preparing to be out of the office with no communications can be the most stressful part of planning to be on holiday. It doesn’t have to be that way though! 3 weeks before you go Warn people that you are going to be out of the office.

The modern user experience is a very slick thing! It provides us with a pleasurable, intuitive experience when we interact with the digital world. That is not always true! I can think of web sites and apps that I use (reluctantly it has to be said) which do not provide a good experience, let alone a pleasurable, intuitive experience. These experiences are usually even worse for people with additional visual and non-visual impairments.

Agile on the Beach (AOTB) sounds great. Let’s face it, a conference on a beach, how could that not be great! In its 9 years of running AOTB has built a reputation for having quality speakers presenting useful and engaging content and this year attracted 400 attendees from across the world. And considering that it is in Cornwall, and is not the easiest or quickest place to get to, that really says a lot about the quality of the sessions.

I work a lot with Visio when designing processes and even navigational routes through applications. One the biggest challenges I have is to be able quickly share designs with clients who are not necessarily using Visio. I had this challenge this week and to my delight I found options to export directly to PowerPoint or Word. Export to PowerPoint To export a diagram to PowerPoint is very straightforward. Once you click the Create Presentation button a new side bar is presented and a prompt appears guiding you to create “Slide Snippets”:

I have worked with many clients over many versions of SharePoint and over the years the attitude to folders has evolved quite a lot. I am sure many of us remember certain colleagues who have been quite stubborn in their view that folders are the spawn of the devil! In the beginning, there were file shares, with folder structures to categorise the content allowing to be found. Let’s face it, we are all comfortable with folders if we are managing content in a file share, or on our machine.

Around the world there are legislative requirements that guarantee that services are accessible by those with impairments. In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 and the subsequent Equality Act of 2010 enforce these rights and in the US Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act enforces them. These acts essentially place a duty of “reasonable adjustment” on organisations to ensure that all services they provide are accessible. When services are only available electronically, like intranets and many other web-based systems, the impact can be significant.

There are many links that I find myself going to over and over again for different elements of Office 365 and Azure Blogs Technology URL Office 365 Blog Intune Blog Azure Blog Roadmap For details of the developments that are in progress and being rolled out Technology URL Office 365 Blog Cloud Platform Blog URLs and IPs Any client that needs Office 365 will ask sooner or later what they need to do to allow, or in some cases block, access.