Mike Schorah

I re-discovered a wonderful analogy from The Economist's ' Babbage ' column dating to 2011: Would you like to live in a gated community where you show your passport or driving licence to a security guard who then walks you to your home and lets you in through the front door? Or would you rather live in a gated community where you get to choose your own door lock and key; with the risk that you might lose your key and not be able to get in? The first is like Dropbox, and pretty much every cloud-based data storage service from major players like Microsoft, Apple, Google and more. And it's like your Facebook account and, probably, your photo storage site. And so on. Even before reading that last paragraph, most of us instinctively would choose the second option. But that's not what we do in practice! In reality, we know that there's normally a fall-back if we do in fact lose our key to the house: maybe we've left a window open, or the back door unlo...

"Private browsing" sounds like a good thing, right? You don't have to be surfing for bad stuff, just have a reasonable wish for less profiling of your interests with the associated targeted advertising. In iOS 6 on iPhone and iPad you can enter the Settings area; find the Safari section; and turn Private Browsing to 'On.' In OS X Mountain Lion open Safari and select "Private Browsing..." from the Safari menu. But wait, the Safari browser on iPad and in OS X Mountain Lion has a cute cloud button a little to the left of the browser's address bar. (Get to the the iCloud Tabs section on your iPhone from within the Bookmarks button at the bottom of the Safari browser.) This great feature will let you see the browser tabs open on your other devices. Find a great article on the iPhone; and continue reading on the bigger screen of the iPad or Mac. The trouble is, you can't have both Private Browsing and  iCloud Tabs. It feels a little counter-in...

I had a good time yesterday at a briefing on SharePoint 2013 hosted at Microsoft' UK campus. The presentation concentrated on the following new features: Social - (My site), including the giving of points to build "reputation" awarded for comments and contributions. Search speed improvements - Continuous crawling Document management - Drag and drop files from PC desktop into a library, across browsers (not just IE). And sync docs with SharePoint using cloud-based SkyDrive Pro. Web content management - Design manager gives a branded veneer over SharePoint and there's Channel support for mobile and other devices (though it took the partner company presenting 6-8 weeks to implement for PC, phone, iPad, tablet!) Apps - There's another Microsoft App Store, for plugins to SharePoint. This'll prove useful especially for larger organisations with in house development teams. Shredded storage minimises disk demands So those were the "major" new points...

Today is America's Thanksgiving Day holiday. Having lived there for a few years we grew to appreciate the helpful significance of this day along with our many American friends who consistently astonished us with their warm and open hospitality. Our very first Christmas saw friends spontaneously run round and jump with us into our hot tub on Christmas morning, knowing that we were missing family back home; others invited us to dinner in their home each Christmas or Thanksgiving and we were made truly welcome. It was through these experiences that we learned some of the practical and helpful significance of pausing on the third Thursday in November and taking a day of Thanksgiving. For many it's an excuse to eat too much; but in the midst of that it's good to focus on what we have  rather than, as so often, on what we're lacking. Today, I'm taking those practices into business as well as my personal life: focusing on what's good and not what I think I want. ...

We had fab feedback yesterday from a customer who is field-testing some of our new technology. She was able to replace paper and work effectively away from her office, sharing data with colleagues back at the base. Two things encouraged me: She immediately wants to extend what we did; with more capabilities and in more areas of her business She says that a colleague who saw what she was doing immediately reacted with, "When can I get to do that? These are encouraging signs that our development is on the right track and a spur to keep pushing through the technical barriers.

I sometimes use Apple's Pages software which makes good use of their iCloud facility to sync documents between devices. And I understand the new Microsoft Word 2013 has a big emphasis on cloud storage too. My question is around the privacy of my text: I open a document in, say, Pages and edit away. When I come to close Pages the software invites me to keep my document or to delete it from iCloud storage. Does that mean my text has already left my computer and been sent to Apple iCloud? If so, how can I be certain that when I delete it that it's not just my access to it that gets deleted and that it's not still out there lurking on some disk space somewhere, out of my control? To be clear, I'm not dealing with anything that sensitive; I'm just wondering how private my business planning documents can be if I use cloud-enabled applications on my own PC. Naturally, I have no expectation of privacy if I use something wholly cloud-based like Google Docs; but it seems tha...

Well, this could be game-changing. A new (internal) release of our software overnight brings some new capabilities that have made me very productive today. From the train while travelling I was able remotely to build the back-end database and workflow system that I need. Then I was able to replicate part of a key business process for one customer and for their  customer so that documents will flow between companies in an automated fashion, taking time, cost and errors out of the equation. Astonishing what we can achieve so quickly and I can't wait to roll it out to the client so they start to get the benefits. Get more like this