May | 2014 | #OpenCIO

Here is an article on the Surface Pro 3, by By Steve Ranger in Tech Decision Maker, May 29, 2014, 6:29 AM PST // @steveranger A number of CIOs and IT Directors give their views on this technology.

My position?

Florentin Albu, CIO at the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, said whether Surface will make a breakthrough depends on the type of work being done. For example, workers who are information consumers – such as executives – have already made a move towards iPads and to a lesser extent Androids. In contrast workers who need to do heavy document editing, Excel processing, desktop-publishing and the like are unlikely to be convinced, he said, while for staff involved in data entry the cost of the hardware will be the main barrier.

He said: “I believe that unfortunately the Surface tablet needs to catch up with iOS and Android ones, and it is not the hardware but the application ecosystem that will win this war. The Surface banks on the significant number of applications that come with the Windows heritage (well at least the ones running on Windows 8). Most of these however have been designed in the pre-cloud era.

“Looking at the iOS or Android ecosystem, mostly everything is designed to use the cloud – for storage, processing, integration etc. Clearly this will change as Windows apps are catching up. Will the change come in time though?”

Albu added: “In a BYOD era, the question is which device is more appealing to the end user? I have not seen the Surface generating much co-worker envy, like the iPads or – to an extent – the Galaxys have done…we will definitely see an uptake of Surface in the enterprise, it might not, however, be to a point of domination.”

Read the full article here:

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-decision-maker/microsoft-surface-nice-hardware-but-wheres-the-roadmap/

This is the Spring 2014 list of what I consider to be the iPad/iPhone must-have digital tools.

Let’s face it: You are a busy executive; you might want to spend time trying out some of the myriad new apps, but time is a luxury you don’t have.

Here is the list of what I think are the best. It’s probably subjective & not scientifically proven. At the same time, it will save you time, and make you more productive.Over the past years I have used and assessed a lot of apps for personal use, and I thought that the results might be useful to others.

Please note that I do not have an interest in, nor am I connected to the companies producing these apps.

If you choose to use any of them, you do so at your own risk. Some of them are free, for others you have to pay, so make your own decision.

If you know of some other apps that you think are worth being included, please mention them in a comment, maybe they will be on the next list.

Calendar management

– Fantastical

Office suites:

– MS Office (if you have a 365 subscription it allows edits as well)

Presentations: Note – if you do a lot of presentations from your iPad, you might want to get the iPad to VGA or HDMI connector from Apple, so that you display content on larger screens/projectors)

– Keynote – if you install it both on iPad and iPhone, you link them together by Bluetooth and control the presentation from your iPhone;

– Powerpoint (part of the MS Office suite – see above)

Note taking:

– Evernote (main repository of info, quite a few other apps integrate with it)

– OneNote (in theory notes can be synced via Sharepoint but I did not managed yet to do this)

– Drafts (very good at integrating with other tools, “always ready” type of app)

ToDo/Action Tracking

– OmniFocus

– Beesy (good for note taking and action tracking with deadlines etc; syncs with beesy.me)

– Nozbe

Training slides/explaining:

– VideoScribe