Teblog

The truth behind the Google/Microsoft/NHS rumours

Before Monday July 6th, did you know that Google and Microsoft had services for storing health records? Thanks to an article in the Times and some related hysteria in other media, just about the whole country discovered that, "David Cameron was going to replace the bloated and expensive NHS computer system with a free one from Google. Or maybe Microsoft."

Except, of course, someone got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Let's face it, whatever we think of the NHS and its evolving computer system, it's not going to be replaced by a packaged service from anyone. Never mind that Google and Microsoft (and maybe BUPA) are supposedly the front runners.

No-one likes overspends on computer projects. And the NHS one due for delivery in 2014 - four years late and at a cost of £12.4bn - presents a wonderful target for the Tories. This seems to have been what caused all the excitement. From £14.2bn to 'free' at the stroke of a pen. Wow!

Who on earth thinks that commercial organisations like Google, Microsoft or BUPA will do anything for free? And who but the most naive will think that moving shedloads of detailed health records from one system to another is going to happen without horrendous cost and risk?

Still, it was a great headline and it, rather unexpectedly, put 'Google Health' in the frame. Whether involved or not, Rachel Whetstone, Google's Vice President, Public Policy and Communications, must be feeling jolly pleased with the outcome. (Incidentally, she's married to Steve Hilton, one of David Cameron's closest advisors. She dropped out of politics after a spell as Michael Howard's chief of staff during his failed election campaign. Oops, wrong horse.)

So what's the reality? The Google (Health) and Microsoft (HealthVault) systems both manage personal health records, or PHRs. They provide somewhere to create, store and share your personal health information and allow you to find related infomation, engage with health professionals and manage your medications. Both put the user in control of content and both are free to the user. This has little to do with the £14.2bn NHS system. At best it would take care of one element of it, the so-called 'Spine' Care Record Service (CRS) but with less information and more restricted access. Medical professionals need access to all manner of detailed information if they're to do their jobs properly and they're simply not going to get that from the personally-filtered subset of a person's medical information that the PHRs represent.

What's on offer smacks of a, "let's get to know your medical issues so we can fire appropriate ads at you". If not, one has to ask what the commercial motivations of Microsoft and Google are. Maybe it's to flog extra services: "Monitor your blood pressure, madam?" or "Remind you to take your pills, sir?"

With the baby boomers reaching retirement age, the market for health-related products and services is exploding. An increasing proportion are computer literate and have their own PCs and internet connections. And nothing is on their minds more than their health. (Okay, maybe their grandchildren and their pets.)

But let's not get carried away by recent newspaper reports. This is not David Cameron single-handedly demolishing the NHS IT budget. Sure, we'd love to enter what the Tories call a "post bureaucratic age", but let's start by getting rid of all the deeply intrusive information that the government already stores about us first.

Is telehealth coming at last?

Yesterday at Cisco's C-Scape analyst briefing, we were treated to a presentation by one James Ferguson. And what a treat that was. Cisco chose wisely. He was a good speaker, passionate about his subject (telemedicine, which he prefers to call telehealth) and a medical practitioner to boot. It was a real person talking about real things, not some propellor-head from technoland or, worse, a marketeer. This background, of course, made him a devastatingly effective salesman, and it wasn't until the Q&A that some of my (Scotch?) mist of enthusiasm started to clear.

His pitch was essentially simple. Because the coverage of the Aberdeen-based Scottish Centre for Telehealth (SCT) includes highlands, islands and oil-rigs, it faces some rather unusual problems. Popping into the local hospital is hardly convenient. And doctors can't easily get to where they're needed. Not always in time, anyway. So SCT's been working on getting diagnoses done remotely in order to a) help people to get the right treatment locally and b) to identify those who need hands-on professional treatment urgently. The filtering questions are: "Is this time dependent?" (urgent), "Is it experience dependent?" (need an expert) and "Is it facilities dependent?" (need particular facilities).

We saw people sticking their tongues out and waggling their tonsils in kiosks while remote experts tried to figure out what's wrong. Apparently ninety percent of diagnoses can be done by looking at someone, listening to their chest and looking in their ears, noses and down their throats. It's a slightly dehumanising way of doing medicine: in the same way that we all like to meet in person rather than through a computer screen or over the phone. The truth is, when you're ill and you're far away from help, anything is better than nothing at all.

Ferguson was not afraid to mention the dangers of turfing up at hospital. He'd rather sit on a telepresence or videoconference consultation than face God-knows-what in person. And patients eliminate the risk of catching hospital-borne infections if they don't have to go near the place.

The benefits are piling up.

The downside, of course, is that this stuff has to be paid for and the bandwidth has to be there. On payment, Cisco has a cash mountain so this, presumably, is why it's happy to consider spreading payments over time, essentially turning the customer's capital expenditure into operating expenditure. It can still recognise its own revenue at point-of-sale. Although it's a different issue, we're also seeing gradual acceptance this pay-as-you-go approach in the various kinds of cloud-based services.

The harder part of the equation is the communications infrastructure. Covering highlands, islands and oil-rigs with high quality broadband connections is a political and economic challenge, given the relatively sparse populations. Oil rigs have, apparently, been trialling a satellite-based facility called OPTESS. And some of the ground-based services have been using ISDN but, of course, the higher the bandwidth and the further the reach, the more services can be provided remotely.

Ferguson pointed out that medicine is now so good at patching us up when we get a major illness, we keep on living only to get more and more illnesses, until we end up with some chronic condition. All of this puts increasing demands on an already overstretched health service much of which, in theory at least, could be alleviated with some kind of home monitoring and self-treatment service, escalating to the professionals as and when needed.

But that's to get ahead of ourselves. Right now, the SCT has run trials inside hospitals running telehealth 'kiosks' in parallel with conventional assessments, in order to compare the quality of results. (It has a clever way of eliminating bias.) It is extending this facility to multiple hospitals and has started home monitoring trials. All of which are testing the principles of telehealth and capturing feedback from users on the experience.

As with so many things in the computer world, the big question is whether it will be able to scale. And that depends largely on either an appropriate infrastructure or a system which can adapt successfully to lower bandwidth connections.

Screen and voice recording/publishing for free

Any company that makes life easy for its customers gets my vote. And one company that tries hard to achieve this is Citrix Online. It is driven by a desire to simplify the previously complex. It also likes to undercut the prices of its major competitors.

Right now it has a free service in beta, called GoView which lets anyone create a screencast (voice and screen recording). Since the most popular screencast programs are desktop products, its traditional pricing model - a monthly fee - must have presented a bit of a challenge. So its solution was to go for an ad'-supported model. At the moment all the advertisements are for the company's other services and they don't in any way interfere with your own screencast creations.

True, it lacks the sophistication of Techsmith's Camtasia or Blueberry Software's FlashBack products, for example, but this is largely its point. It's good enough for the majority of existing and potential screencasters. A few clicks and your movie ends up online and you have a URL to share. If you prefer the extra control a desktop application gives you, you might want to check out Techsmith's Jing - a mini-Camtasia and screen capture program or FlashBack Express. Both are free, although the licence terms for Express appear to contradict this.

Returning to the GoView service, once the desktop element is downloaded, a couple of clicks start a three second countdown. Anything you then do on the screen or speak into the microphone gets streamed to the Citrix Online server. When finished, you can edit out the bad bits of the end result, add captions if you want, then share the URL with others. As Aleksandr in comparethemeerkat.com would say, "Seemplz."

GoView is currently in beta and some simple improvements could be made, such as being able to select an area of the screen for recording, rather than the whole screen. But the whole point of a public beta is that the developers get tons of feedback like this quickly and more or less for free. I, and many others, have probably spent hours buggering about with the software and the service. This gives the company a fairly massive free testing resource. The other point of a beta approach is that the service provider is more or less forgiven for flaws. It's how Twitter got so successful. Its 'fail whale' almost became a friend in the early days of the service. I had issues with sound and screen size on Vista at first, but it worked a charm on XP. Once underway, GoView seemed pretty robust.

I think the key to the Citrix approach, and that of many other disrupters, is that it realises that part the world needs sophisticated software and services, but a much larger chunk actually craves a simpler life and lower costs. Professional screencasters will still want 'proper' products which let them massage and publish the outputs in various ways. But regular end users who just want to just grab what they're doing on the screen, twiddle with it a bit, then send it off will be perfectly happy with a simple service which automatically stores the recording online and gives the user a URL which they can share via email, blogs, tweets or whatever. Jing, by the way, comes awfully close in this respect.

GoView is just one of Citrix Online's recent crop of disruptive services. It is taking a pop at the lucrative online education market with a new GoToTraining service. Its fairly new HiDefConferencing offers voice conferencing which can mix up to 500 PSTN and IP participants together. As with its GoToMeeting and other GoTo products, the terms for both services are based on unlimited usage per licence. This is the computing equivalent of one of those 'all you can eat' buffet lunches so beloved of certain ethnic restaurants.

While I don't care much for concentrating on single companies, it has to be said that Citrix Online is a bit of a one-off. It's a successful business which relies on simplicity and an absence of financial surprises for its customers. The first appeals to end users and the second to everyone.

Not a bad recipe at all.

Cloud: evolution not revolution

Fed up with 'cloud' yet? You ain't seen nuthin'. It's not going to go away. But, with a bit of luck, it's going to start falling into place.

When Microsoft announced its 'Software Plus Services', many people, including me, scoffed. We assumed that this was just a way of preserving its profitable fat client software business while nicking whatever advantage it could from cloud-delivered services.

Microsoft has sunk its Office hooks deep into the corporate marketplace. But that won't surprise you. For better or for worse, people actually like using the same applications as their colleagues inside and outside the organisation and, in enterprises, the most popular ones are from Microsoft.

It doesn't matter how hard competitors try, the compatibility just isn't there. And, with products like Word, useful capabilities like Track Changes are just not portable. The wiki brigade will point out the nonsense of Track Changes and argue that a single workspace with multiple authors and a proper version history makes so much more sense. And in a pure academic sense, they're right. But, in the main, wiki products are lightweight and alien compared with the richness and ubiquity of Word.

What many organisations really need is concurrent editing of single instances of Microsoft documents. Some companies are working on such things, but that's tomorrow. They will have to climb the curve of evangelist, early adopter and early majority before they get anywhere near mainstream acceptance. By which time, who knows?, maybe Microsoft will have extended Word into a Microsoft-hosted wiki-like environment.

But Word is only an example of what's going on. Plenty of other applications deliver tremendous capability at the desktop and their online cousins less. A long time ago an industry pioneer called Adam Osborne used to claim that, "adequacy is sufficient, everything else is irrelevant." He probably said it in order to foist a portable computer with a five-inch screen on an unsuspecting world. But, for many, especially in the lower reaches of the market, his observation is true. There, OpenOffice, Google Docs and other products/services will continue to steal desktop business from Microsoft.

But, despite claims to the contrary, we're not about to experience a cloud revolution. The world isn't going to suddenly put all its eggs in the cloud basket. We're going to see a wide range of engagements with cloud. We've seen the start with SalesForce.com - a massively popular niche application which can be tapped into from anywhere. The same goes for email, online storage and credit card payment services. These are all cloud-based and require little thought to implement. They sit well with existing business processes.

Other cloud services act as an extension of the IT department, providing physical expansion (and contraction) without wrecking budgets and causing chaos in the data centre. As we move forward and we think of entrusting more of our IT to the cloud, we will need to tread carefully, lest we create hard-to-manage interdependencies between service providers. Nothing new in priniciple, but this is our own business we're entrusting to outsiders. SLAs and responsibilities need to be nailed down carefully.

It seems pretty obvious now that cloud services will sit alongside existing applications and services and be called upon when they provide genuine incremental value. But this wasn't so obvious a little while ago when the evangelists were screaming 'cloud is the future' and Microsoft, in what looked like a rearguard action to save its traditional business, was arguing that 'software plus services' is the future.

It sticks in my craw to say it, but I think Microsoft got it dead right.

Salesforce/Twitter: genuine help or fake sincerity?

Interesting that Marc Benioff (boss of Salesforce.com) should choose to announce the addition of Twitter to its Service Cloud on Monday. Why? Because it won't be available until the summer. Part of me suspects that the reason was simply because Twitter is a very hot topic today and it might be tepid by June. The official reason, I think, is that the deal with Twitter had just been inked.

The news might have passed me by had we (Freeform Dynamics) not received an official announcement from the company. The covering letter said, "...enabling companies to search, monitor and join conversations taking place on Twitter..." Without being a Salesforce.com expert, I was worried that a whole bunch of sales types or, worse, machines would start trying to insert themselves into Twitter conversations.

In fact, the pitch is somewhat more genuine than that. It suggests that organisations can monitor Twitter (a free addition to the $995/month 'Service Cloud' which already provides access to a number of online services such as Google Search and FaceBook) for mentions and, when they relate to problems, do something about them. That something will end up as either a comment to the Tweeter with a link to a solution to their problem or, if lots of people have the same problem, a general announcement-type Tweet. (Or maybe a bunch of direct messages - I don't know if the Service Cloud can do that. Nothing, apart from the tedium, to stop the help desk people doing it though.)

All sounds pretty reasonable, right? Back there in Salesforce.com land, the client organisation will have a whacking great database of customers, prospects, queries and answers. Each can be clothed instantly with relevant Tweet threads. I quite often appeal for help online. If someone were to help me, and I said "hooray, it worked!" or similar, then this thread would be collected for future reference by support staff. A bit cheeky perhaps, but quite understandable. It expands the company's own knowledge base at little extra cost.

Getting a bit more sinister, it would be possible for a sales person with access to the Service Cloud to hoover up personal information about a prospect before making a call. ("Sorry to hear about your recent illness. How are you feeling now?") These things aren't impossible today, but because it's built right into the Salesforce system, it is actually quite powerful. A tremendous aid to fake sincerity.

And this is the point, isn't it? If the service is used for the genuine benefit of the customer, then people will welcome it. If, however, it's used to exploit the Tweeting public, then the backlash will be swift and unstoppable.

But who will the backlash be aimed at? Twitter for allowing access? The Salesforce customer for abusing the system? Or Salesforce itself for providing the Service Cloud?"

Any thoughts on that, Twitter?

Lotusphere mop-up; then I'll shut up

Rather than write a series of blog posts of ever-diminishing interest (for me and for you), I thought a final Lotusphere round up would make sense.

First up, Doug Heintzman. He's the director of Lotus Strategy. We talked about the market for collaboration software, top to bottom. I mentioned the bottom  last week. But, at the top, he talked about the Enterprise Adaptability practice: something that materialised after the last Lotusphere. The most interesting bit, for me, was the toolkit that it provides its practitioners for studying the social networking patterns in enterprise and using it to help build an ROI case. I asked him what parameters were measured, hoping to get a checklist for you, and was rewarded with a verbal finger wag. Something to do with the huge intellectual property value in the patterns that emerge. Drat and double drat. If you're interested in learning more, start here.

Okay. I've given up trying to find the next thing online. It was a brilliant use of the 'Crocodile Dundee in New York' scene where Dundee has headed for the subway to get out of Sue's life. She's dumped her fiancé and wants Dundee. The scene is the one in the subway where she wants to get a message to Dundee that she wants him back. Verbal messages are transmitted up and down the crowded platform until he clambers over the heads of the passengers for a reunion. Aaaah. You can see the clip on YouTube, but it hasn't got the IBM punchline. I tell you, if that's a real ad', aimed at real people, IBM/Lotus has hit a hole in one. Sean Poulley, the host of the session claimed that the nine collaborative tools being offered will be "competitively priced with meeting-only services". Interesting.

I'd wager that Casey Dugan was the most enthusiastic person at the event. She was showing off Beehive - a social networking site where people can reveal stuff about their personal lives as well as maintain professional connections. It has 50,000 users inside IBM so it is clearly of value to this substantial minority. It lives behind the firewall, which is less risky than public services. It's still a research project at the moment but you can grab more details here.

I think that's enough for one year about Lotusphere, except to say that some things made me unhappy. My Linux/Firefox  netbook wouldn't render my agenda properly. And I'd have liked a single sign on to the three different IBM services I was trying to use: the analyst site, the LotusLive site and the Lotusphere site. And, as for responsiveness, getting hundreds, maybe thousands of people trying to hit the access points and networks at the same time was a recipe for disaster. I gave up early and took to wandering round carrying bits of paper and having face-to-face conversations with real live people. Much more fun.

Now I'm taking a break. See you in a few weeks.

Dodging Stockholm Syndrome at Lotusphere

Someone was talking today about the Stockholm Syndrome in which hostages empathise with their abductors. Having just come back from Lotusphere I can understand that feeling.

You're surrounded by hordes of 'yellow blooded' delegates and IBM/Lotus folk who applaud and cheer at the drop of a hat. Sometimes to small nuances that totally escape the uninitiated, like me. I could cheerfully sit there sneering from my analysts' special seating area in the auditorium. But, when it came to talking to these genuinely enthusiastic souls, it was hard to remember that this was an organisation that had a particular job to do: to keep the faithful on board and to secure the interest of the rest of the world.

That it did the former, I have no doubt. The announcements came thick and fast. Given that Lotusphere happens once a year, it will be a while until all of the products and services are on general release. But the overall effect of the event was to persuade the faithful that Domino/Notes is a cracking platform, that it has a future, that it will simplify programming (did I hear by "500 percent"? I think I did) and that it will be possible to integrate all of the social software offerings into existing and future applications, making them a one-stop-shop for work, communication and collaboration.

What of the outsiders? Well, some deals have been put together to increase Lotus' reach and increase the customer's convenience. Salesforce.com, RIM - the BlackBerry folk, SAP, LinkedIn and others are all happily welding themselves to different parts of the Lotus infrastructure. There were others, of course and you can read about them on the IBM website.

But what about the size of organisations that can participate in the Lotus experience, and would they want to? This is where things get a little murkier.

Without question, Lotus is at its happiest with organisations that periodically write large cheques. And who can blame it? But it has ambitions to charge downmarket to hit organisations as small as, depending who you speak with, 1000, 500, 100 or 5 employees. That's quite a spread. But it becomes clearer when you look at the channels to market.

Again, IBM's comfort zones are selling direct or selling through systems integrators. The one thing that you can't miss at Lotusphere is what a massive industry owes its existence to the company's products. Consultants, integrators, third party software suppliers, even hardware makers, are only too happy to drink the Lotus Kool Aid and make money while providing valued services to their medium to large enterprise customers.

But Lotus needs to find a convincing route to the smaller organisations. It has, or soon will have, a bunch of offerings, in the shape of LotusLive Engage (Bluehouse as was) and various other versions of the software - Connections, Meetings and Events. These are variously abbreviated versions of the full blown equivalent on-premise offerings. And, in case you didn't know, all will run in the cloud. IBM's cloud. Again, there's more but that will do for now. The route to market is through intermediaries. Anyone with a bespoke requirement or an integration requirement will probably turn to their local reseller and a deal will be made. But the hoi polloi, assuming they realise the value of communication and collaboration, will go where exactly?

Lotus talks about being in discussion with telcos but we've seen many attempts over the past ten years for these to engage profitably at the low end. They have the relationship with clients through the telephone business but it's a big jump from selling lines and equipment to selling stuff with an intellectual content to a small business. I'm told that selling off the page has been a dismal experience so far. So either the customers will have to mature at their own pace and come knocking when they understand this stuff. Or someone has to get out there and engage with them effectively.

Enter stage left the hosting companies. The good ones are already used to providing high levels of advice and support online. They sell to small businesses. Perhaps this is where Lotus should be looking for salvation. SIs for people prepared to dig deep in their pockets and a lightweight semi-automated service provision for those with short arms.

Or, in the blizzard of information last week, did I go snowblind? Please correct me, if you feel so moved. At least I don't feel I'm suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

The organisational social software paradox

Last week I reported on the shape of the enterprise social networking space with the help of Andrew McAfee's Berkmann Centre lunchtime presentation on the subject. This week I'll get a little closer to home and present you with a paradox you're going to have to resolve if you're thinking of introducing social networking into your organisation.

A few months ago, Freeform Dynamics and MWD joined forces to carry out research among 201 companies on the subject of collaborative computing. The respondents were roughly equally split between France, Germany and the UK. All organisations were at least 1000 employees and half of them were over 5000. Sixty percent of the respondents were IT-centric and forty percent business-centric. All had some responsibility for workforce communication and collaboration.

The research contained all manner of interesting stuff but, as promised last week, I'm going to take a couple of charts out which relate to risk. One of our questions centred around the unofficial use of collaboration software within the organisation. As you can see from the chart below, social software of the kind we were discussing last week has crept into most of these organisations to some degree. Over fifty percent of respondents report wide adoption while almost every organisation has at least some.

In the officially sanctioned figures (not shown), social media is in third place at a little under 25% but instant messaging remains bottom of the heap.

Now, I don't know if I'm being dim here, but if something is unsanctioned, it seems that people would need to get it in by stealth. This is easy enough to do with solo desktop software (if organisational desktop control is lax enough) but social media, by its very nature, needs more than one participant and a shared location in which participants can 'meet', either synchronously or asynchronously.

This being the case, it seems highly likely that at least a percentage of those interviewed must be using public services in order to achieve their social networking objectives. Some, of course, will have an in-house 'skunk works' server - rather as Euan Semple did when he was at the BBC - but this requires some degree of computer skill and, of course the authorisation of the IT department at least.

So, let's take a look at the second chart. This relates to the concerns of the respondents towards the use of public services for this sort of thing. Don't forget it includes the conferencing, communication and screen sharing applications mentioned in the first chart.

Security, compliance, user distraction and support overhead all rank reasonably highly when you aggregate 'major concern' and 'some concern'.

We clearly have a discrepancy between what people are doing and what their organisations would like them to be doing. No doubt the employees have their reasons for behaving in this contradictory way. I'd hazard a guess that they've found the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived risks. Within most organisations, I'd have thought it unlikely that people would adopt social software just so they can chat to their personal friends. (By the way, if you'd like to alarm yourself with a detailed run down of risks, take a look at this new report on Web 2.0 security from the European Network and Information Security Agency.)

I'll confess to a degree of bafflement and, if you are in one of these contradictory situations, I'd love to hear from you. Perhaps you can tell me whether things are as laissez faire as they appear or whether guidelines and controls have been put in place to minimise, or at least balance, risk. And, maybe, tell us how hard it is for your organisation to take social networking seriously and what efforts you're making to articulate the commercial benefits to the powers that be.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Adobe Genesis addresses real needs

Breaking ranks with the 'browser-only' brigade, Adobe is planning to introduces a desktop client to integrate the worlds of web and enterprise applications. Code-named Genesis, it was given its first public airing at last week's Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Private pilot trials will be up for grabs in October.

With Genesis, users are able to create workspaces which contain related clusters of applications and data. For example, for sales, they might have a collection of applications already open for each prospect - business intelligence, company information, relevant web pages, sales history, brochures, contracts and so on.

The user creates workspaces by dragging and dropping 'tiles' for the the relevant applications and documents from catalogues straight into the workspace. These catalogues can be public, published by anyone, but typically software publishers and aggregators. Or they can be private, created by the IT department. Tiles include web browsers and a file repository. The company is working on a viewing mechanism which displays file contents without the need to open the application.

Once the workspace is assembled, the user logs in to each application and navigates to where they need to be. The state of open applications persists so that the next time they return to a folder everything is exactly as they left it.

The Genesis desktop software will be free of charge. Users can create workspaces and just get on with this new way of working. Although targeted at enterprise customers, there's nothing to stop individuals using it.

But, it's likely that they'll want to share information with others and this is where the money comes in. Adobe will run a SaaS collaboration service. Teams can subscribe or the organisation can subscribe. In the first case, it's a credit card arrangement with the users determining who belongs and what permissions they're given. In the second case, it's more closely integrated with the corporate directory system. Outsiders, such as business partners, can also be included.

Workspaces can be shared with others, but their access to applications will depend on their own authorisation level. If they are allowed to update application data, this is reflected to all subscribed users. The system has a locking and check-in system to prevent clashes.

In the first instance, Adobe is pushing the value of the system to sales and legal teams in the 'deal room' environment where projects are on fairly long time-scales. As time goes by, additional people are brought into the team and the workspace enables them to get up to speed and access much of what they need to do their work, whether they're support engineers, lawyers or finance folk. One nice touch is that tiles can intercommunicate - a tweak of a graphic can change the underlying information in the provisioning application, for example.

Once signed up to the collaboration service, things like presence indicators, IM, videoconferencing, screen-sharing and whiteboarding become available. Whiteboard sessions can be saved as workspace tiles for future reference. The instant messaging is based on XMPP which means that chat can take place with users on other IM systems. The SaaS element is restricted to synchronisation and real-time collaboration, which means that all workfiles are available to users when they're offline.

It will be a long time, if ever, before all applications live in the cloud and are delivered to the browser. In the meantime, we will be living in a mixed world of enterprise, desktop and cloud applications. With Genesis, Adobe promises to integrate the three worlds, plus collaboration, into a desktop that reflects its classy values when it comes to user interface design.

If you want to put your organisation up for a trial, write to Matthias Zeller at Adobe.com. His email name is matzeller. He was the man that gave the presentation at Office 2.0.

A desirable and practical digital book?

Nothing is more satisfying, nor more wasteful of resources, than printing out some of the pdfs that land on my digital mat. Yet, if I'm to work on a train, I'll quite often set the printer going while I hop in the shower. There's no way I'm going to sit on the train with a laptop, squinting through the reflections, worrying about battery life and the remote possibility of being mugged. Remote because my laptop is definitely not at the sexy end of the spectrum.

Guilt-filled train trips are part of my life. Yet, I could change things at a stroke were I prepared to fork out a couple of hundred quid for a Sony PRS-505 electronic book reader when it hits the shelves - allegedly in September. Users of the existing model can upgrade their software from Sony and have the pleasure today. By the way, Macintosh users are out of luck, it only couples to Windows PCs

The new machine can hold the equivalent of 160 books. Many more if you add a memory stick or SD card. The device uses digital ink which is bi-stable and requires no energy to retain its state. Sony reckons you can turn 6,800 pages on a single charge. The screen is reflective, rather than back-lit, so can be read in normal book-reading conditions. The device is thinner and shorter than a paperback, but about the same width. The reading area is six inches diagonal with a display resolution of 170 pixels per inch showing eight levels of grey. Controls range along the bottom and down the right hand side and it comes in a tan leather-look cover. Very nice.

After a few false starts with copy protection schemes and lock-in to Sony formats, the company has announced that it now supports a variety of publishing standards: EPUB, BBeB, Adobe PDF, Word, txt, rtf, jpeg, gif, png, bmp and, for audio, MP3 and AAC. Both secured and unsecured formats are handled properly.

Most business readers are going to be very happy with the idea of reading native Word and pdf documents and, perhaps, playing their favourite music while reading. And, apparently, text-based Adobe documents can be reflowed to render them more readable. If, as I suspect, this means no more stupid columns of text then I will be thrilled beyond measure. Pictures get pushed to the end of the text, apparently, so it rather depends on the document whether you'd actually want to reflow. (Scientific papers and, probably, research reports would fall into this category.)

Noticing that Adobe Digital Editions is needed for getting Adobe eBooks onto the device, I installed a copy and what I saw pleased me very much. I could create libraries and folders and bookmark documents, as well as read them without any browser clutter. And, importantly for me, I could still select and copy text to the clipboard. (From whence it is collected by some software that I publish as a mad hobby - I'm not here to promote it, so no names and no links.) Digital Editions is now my PDF reader of choice on the PC. All the PDFs I need are now instantly on tap in the library - complete with mini preview icons. And they're ready for transferring to the PRS-505, assuming I take the plunge.

I'm sure there's a huge environmental angle to all this. The device is a low consumer of energy. My printer would become more or less redundant. All those pdfs can stay in digital form until I lose interest. And, instead of buying printed books, I can get the 'dematerialised' versions instead (yes, I've checked the availability of some favourite authors).

It might take a while to compensate for the embedded environmental cost so it's best to resist getting an upgrade until you've found a genuinely appreciative home for your cast-off, thus extending its life and salving your conscience.