The knowledge worker in 3 acts: Microsoft.nl

I spent a day with the team at Microsoft Netherlands - thanks to These Days. In this post, my thoughts are not about web analytics or the future of the industry - visiting Microsoft got me thinking about how we are working today and how we will in the near future.

Act I: the office desk

Every Microsoft employee is empowered with a fully loaded and powerful laptop running the latest Windows 7,  Office 2010 and a slew of other Microsoft (and non-MS) tools. If Microsoft aims to "make it great" it needs to understand the behavior and expectations of its users. Back in my days as a sysadmin and webmaster at Softimage (then a subsidiary of Microsoft), the "eat your own dog food" mentra wasn't an obligation, it was a pleasure! 93,000 employees in 100 countries (Wikipedia) makes for a pretty good test bed.

I used to work on three, sometimes four computers. Now I only use my laptop which I will sometimes hook up to a bigger screen, keyboard and mouse. At any given time only a third of Microsoft.nl employees are in the office - the others are working from home or wherever else.

There is no office desk anymore - it's your laptop, your iPhone, your iPad...

Act II: the office space

What is striking about Microsoft.nl office is... the space! It doesn't even look like an office, it looks like a cozy modern hotel lobby. There are areas for meetings, for inspiration, for open conversations or if you need to be calm and focused you can go into sound proof cubicles. Of course, there are also the relaxing areas, gaming and a Microsoft Surface table. Food is great and drinks are plenty - just like home.

The office is just like home, home is your office, your office is anywhere.

Act III: the social space

A huge part of our work is filled with social interactions that are beyond mere job-related conversations. Being freelance and working from home (most of the time) is great. The negative side is socializing at work is pretty much non-existent. Facebook or Twitter are not alternatives...

The Microsoft.nl office is clearly set up to facilitate formal and informal social connections. For that matter, my little experience confirmed two stereotypes of the Dutch: 1) bicycles are everywhere and 2) there is a vibrant at-work and after-work lifestyle.

The only real conversion of any social media is getting to meet someone in real life.

The finally

People come to Microsoft.nl offices from all around the world - sometimes just to see and understand the evolving workplace dynamics. Over the weekend I spoke to someone who's employer thought "it would be cool to have iPads for everyone" but still requires them to show up at the office from 9 to 5... they don't get it! We, web analysts and online aficionados, are living in a microcosm ahead of the mass - we are lucky but it's a curse - lets not forget it.

For more info about what's so special about Microsoft.nl office, check out "New World Of Work Microsoft Netherlands Case Study" on Slideshare.

eMetrics: Google Analytics now more enterprise sassy!

Right from the eMetrics Washington D.C. floor, Avinash Kaushik just announced new features for Google Analytics. Hold on to your hats, as I said earlier, the wind is changing!

• UI improvements: Minor visual refreshes to “makes it look better” as Avinash puts it (ok... nice)
• Account management: New account management interface, snapshot of all your sites KPIs and easier multiple-account management (quite useful)
• Integration: new Ad Sense integration (just makes sense!)
• Data visualization: bubble motion charts showing 3 dimensions over time! Overall, you can play with 5 dimensions of data at the same time! (this one is really cool!)
• Custome reporting! As Avinash puts it, “web analytics is intensely personal”, so you can now drag & drop any metrics and create your own reports
• Advanced segmentation: just as with custom reports, create live segments on the fly!
• Historical data: everything announced above is available with your historical data
• API: the long awaited Google Analytics API is finally available. Yeah! So obviously, this also includes feeding Google Analytics custom variables

Raising the bar

As the entry-level bar is raising, (and boy! did it raise today!) the mid-product market will get squeezed and will have a harder time competing with “free” and “more powerful”. Without the same level of resources and visibility Google has, and in face of the actual economic situation, lots of players are doomed. In Europe, where there are lots of smaller web analytics vendors, the value offer might include strong benefits such as awesome service and focus on the local environment characteristics. Otherwise, good luck...

Pushing the envolope

At the same time, innovations in the higher-end of the spectrum will be harder to come by, forcing those vendors to expand horizontally. We already see that happening with Omniture’s purchasing frenzy. At one point however, the “suite” approach will tip on the toes of much larger fishes (as Gartner’s Bill Grassman put it during his Industry Insight presentation) and might eventually become to pray to BI, or more likely, top retail engines, portals and CMS’s.

The Big 3

However, Google isn’t alone with a great “free” and “powerful” solution. We have to admit Yahoo! Analytics (formerly IndexTools) will be a contender in the hearts of web analysts. While speaking with Dennis Mortensen, founder of IndexTools, we touched on the difference in approach between the two companies. Just as Google is using Google Analytics hook people on spending more on ads, Yahoo! is also seeking customers who will be engaging with value-added services such as Yahoo! Store. For the 3rd player, Microsoft Gatineau, I must admit I’m not too sure it’s really picking up and what's the strategy there.

Even more Web Analytics Dashboards Fun in Excel 2007!

Update 2010-05-07: If you want to use this dashboard with Google Analytics data, check out "Tatvic enhances immeria's Excel web analytics dashboard".

Attention Internet Explorer users (MSIE)! When clicking on the link to download the .xlsx template, MSIE wrongly try to save it as a .zip file, which it's not. Make sure to rename the file with the proper .xlsx extension (or better yet, switch to Firefox!)

A couple of weeks ago I published "Web Analytics Dashboards: fun with Excel 2007", it got on Stumbled  and became one of the most visited article. A while back I also published Box plots and whisker plots in Excel 2007 and it consistently receives a lot of views.

So here's an update of Web Analytics Dashboard Fun with Excel 2007!

What is it?

I'm glad to release "Web Analytics Dashboard Fun" (Microsoft Excel 2007, 85KB .xlsx), a free Microsoft Excel 2007 template for web analytics professionals. It can be used for learning web analytics, Excel in general or as the basis for more elaborate dashboards. The goal is to use only Excel 2007 features and ease customization of the template and update of the data.

Why Excel?

As a teacher of web analytics and a web analyst myself, I noticed people often struggle to define KPIs and get going with dashboards. My clients use different web analytics tools, be it Omniture, Google Analytics, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Xiti or others. Although some of the tools offer very advanced dashboarding and analysis capabilities, there are a number of reasons why you would want to use Excel:

• Control the information being distributed
• Publish the information in a format people are used to (either Excel or PDF)
  
• Avoid granting access to the web analytics tool itself
  
• Include other sources of data
  
• Ease "month to month" and "year to year" analysis
• Ease analysis of major segments (such as two countries, two sites, etc.)
  
• Include the analyst comments and evaluation

Get Web Analytics Dashbaord Fun!

Based on the feedback I got, and some further tweaking to make the dashboard more generic and easier to modify for your needs, I'm releasing "Web Analytics Dashboard Fun with Excel 2007 v1.1". To get started there are just a few steps:

1. >>> Get the template <<< (Microsoft Excel 2007, 85KB .xlsx)
   (Get the Excel 2003 version - with some features disabled)
   
2. Right-click on the S1 and S2 radio button and "Edit Text" to your licking
   
3. Change "Success Event 1" through "Success Event 3" in all worksheets
4. Update the data in WebDataS1 and WebDataS2
5. Voilà!

Once you are comfortable with the spreadsheet, you can modify the dashboard to add/remove/modify KPIs to your liking. Although this step requires more work, it should become fairly easy once you understand the general pattern of the spreadsheet.

Feedback, comments and contribution

One of the goal of immeria.net is to "make it easy to do web analytics" by providing educational ressources, documented processes and tools that are both easy to use and non-specific to a vendor ("product agnostic"). You are free to use this template, modify it and even redistribute it as long as its not for profit.


Web Analytics Dashboard Fun by immeria.net is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.

KB 261186: Computer randomly plays classical music

Want to see an intriguing Knowledge Base article from Microsoft? Read on!

A while back I posted about the evolution of the infamous Microsoft "blue screen" error. I managed to get a Vista Blue Screen!

But today, a friend sent me a link to a real knowledge base article. A real gem! It states:

During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play "Fur Elise" or "It's a Small, Small World" seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer's BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance.
...
Although these symptoms may appear to be virus-like, they are the result of an electronic hardware monitoring component of the motherboard and BIOS.

How clever of them! I wonder if Microsoft did some A/B test to find out if it was better to play classical music instead of heavy metal...