Sumatra Calendar Insight prototype available online

Calendar-minded folks,

We've been working on something we call Sumatra Calendar Insight -- and we'd like you to try it out.

Where are we going with this?

Frankly, we’re looking for direction.  Over years of migrating legacy calendar servers into Exchange we’ve often done analysis on the data and approached mining it in several different ways (usually for resource availability and effectiveness).  

Microsoft MyAnalytics does a good, simple job of helping you get focus time every week or so, and Microsoft Productivity Score promises to give your admin some insight on your global productivity on some schedule with a single score, but missing in all of this is on-demand access to the kinds of detailed statistics power managers and enterprise watchdogs need.  And of course, everything Microsoft does has ignored resources – maybe not an issue now but the pandemic will not last forever.  

Sumatra Calendar Insight is a proof of concept demo – we can get at this data and deliver it to you on demand.  

So we’re asking: what kinds of data do you want to get at?  And why?

Let us know.

Looking for test sites for a new calendar app for Office 365

 Folks,

Having been locked in our houses / apartments / cells / space ships for a few months we started working on a new application that analyzes calendar data for users on Office 365.

We think that calendar analysis should be more detailed than asking "do you think you have enough time set aside for doing real work?"

We're thinking more like "Wonder how your team is spending their time?” and “Too much video and not enough work?” and "We've got a Zoom contract, what're these Teams video meetings doing here?"

Of course we can also do this server-side in Exchange and look at group aggregate statistics,which we think is a lot more interesting in a corporate environment.

A few screenshots follow.

Anybody want to try it out in a beta version please let us know -- we like listening to people.

Metrics for an #Oracle #Beehive Migration to #Office365

Our latest Oracle Beehive to Microsoft Exchange migration tool brings back the "Use Report" capability that allows you to generate an HTML summary of how much data your Beehive server contains.

Clicking the highlighted button....

Will generate a report called beehivemetrics.htm that looks like this:

 

Yes, we had some fun with how we referred to the top volume users.

This is great information for determining how to do a segmented migration across multiple CPU instances (not that we had to enable exactly this over the last weekend or anything....).

Enterprise Calendar Metrics: The View from 10,000 Meters

Our last post was a start at getting at what kinds of time-based information is in Microsoft Exchange / Office 365 calendars that can help you get a hand on what is going on in your organization.

We want to draw the distinction between time management (something individuals either do or not do for their personal schedules) and calendar metrics (something you can read from the aggregated calendar data in your Microsoft Exchange server).

Here we'll start taking a look at some of the global reports you can extract that enable some insight on what your corporation is doing.

Some data we extracted a while ago generated the following results:

Not surprising (to anybody who's worked in an organization with more than fifty people) the number of meetings drops at lunchtime.  We interpret this as people wanting to get some private time, but any anthropologist out there will ask how we normalized our results, set up proper controls, and did double-blind studies.  None of us are anthropologists.  What is more interesting to you the manager are the twin peaks of mid-morning and mid-afternoon for the most popular meeting time.  Plan your resource use accordingly.

The outlying time of midnight - 1 AM we think was either security or manufacturing.

Which hour do people meet leads to the question which DAY is favored.  In the above report we found that meeting frequency peaks on Tuesday.  In LOTS of both legacy and Exchange data we have seen Wednesday and Thursday being the peak, but almost never Monday or Friday.

For the true calendar cartographer a totally nerdy but relevant question is: what kinds of recurrence patterns are established in my organization?  While recurring meetings and appointments are really neat, there data shows that the majority of meeting objects (we'll get to that in the next sentence) are one-time.  But I said objects.  So a weekly meeting counts as ONE object even if it occurs 52 times in the course of a year.

These combined with lists of the top users of calendar functionality are a good place to start to get a handle around enterprise-level metrics.

What can we do about individual resource metrics?

So glad you asked.  Hang on for the next post.

How does your enterprise spend its time?

Linkedin blogs contain interesting thought pieces.  Three recent posts caught my attention – they talk about how to cut down/eliminate unnecessary meetings:

Jeff Weiner (CEO LinkedIn) notes his managers complain about managing their inbox and their meeting schedules in his post: A Simple Rule to Eliminate Useless Meetings, and The Importance of Scheduling Nothing.

Rajat Taneja (CTO, Electronic Arts) wants to Cut Down on Unnecessary Meetings.

I found Rajat Taneja's post most interesting.  He talks about understanding "how we spend our time," and then he tracked how he spent his time.  We think the act of measurement is a critical component that will drive the CEO to force the organization to change the meeting behavior.

Both of these are geared towards the meeting organizer, that is, changing individual behavior.  But both of these being high level executives, the more interesting question they do NOT pose is: can we get a handle on how the enterprise is spending its time?  Are we being efficient or not?  And can we read this out of Microsoft Exchange?


Having been looking at scheduling metrics off and on over the years we've been trying to figure out how to interrogate the Exchange server to derive useful metrics on this for analysis on the organization / enterprise level.

It's easy to use server-side tools to get a handle and do reports on how much email traffic is generated and disk space is in use.  Email analysis has relatively little dependence or significance on job title or function.

But calendars are precisely the opposite!

As a Tech CEO you usually want your engineering staff working on engineering problems and not in any more meetings than they need to be.  But your sales people need to be meeting with clients or they're not doing their job.  In between there's a wide gulf as much dependent on individual corporate culture and goals as on anything taught in a management course at Business School.

We took a cut at that measurement, in our recent Oracle Beehive migration tool.  See "The Oracle Beehive Calendar Metrics" post for a screen shot of the metrics.  Those of you who have been through migrations with us have seen similar reports on your legacy data.

We've learned over years of analyzing data that the top ten meeting users is sometimes a surprising revelation to corporate management -- usually when they find that one of their top users is a conference room.

And this actually is where we made what we think of as our first big break through: that the inanimate objects in the corporation have a lot more importance than you would first think.  

In fact -- since the only major issue with them is "how much are they in use?" it's relatively straight-forward to do reporting on them and we've already sliced that a few different ways for people.

We'll show sample reports in a follow-on post.