Portals and KM

My Notes from 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: CIO Keynote Panel

Here are my notes from session of the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium session: CIO Keynote Panel -
The Evolving CIO Role in Cloud and Mobile Computing Environment. Participants included: Moderator: David Kingston,
Managing Director, Corporate Executive Board, panel: Anthony D. Christie,
CIO & CTO, Global Crossing, Mark Egan, CIO, VMware, Sanjay Mirchandani, CIO & COO, Global Centers of Excellence, EMC Corporation, and Tasos Tsolakis, EVP & CIO, Iron Mountain. These notes are made real time so please excuse and typos.

David started talking about the “yes but” concerns as they look at what is happening in the cloud and mobility. He wants to focus on the challenges and go beyond the technical ones.  He sees the management challenges as the most difficult ones to overcome. He asked each panel member to talk about an exciting thing they are doing. Anthony provide a story about how they “drink their own champagne.”  They have 60% of their apps in their private cloud and 90% of new work goes there. They put audio conferencing in the cloud and the user experience improved. They saved 25% during the first 6 months. It has also become a platform for other IT services for hosted communication.

Mark said his firm is about speed and agility and that has been their experience with the cloud. Sanjay wanted to know if their internal users would come back to the cloud if they have a choice and this has been their experience. Tasos said they use the cloud for themselves and customers.

Sanjay said that private cloud starts with efficiency of implementation that leads to efficiency in operation. Anthony said that you need to start with the business problem before efficiency. David said that in one situation hardware efficiency was the focus but agility was the outcome. He wondered if agility is more the driver now.  Mark said that you need to take a layered approach: governance, cost, agility.

David asked about whether to start with private or public cloud. Tasos said it depends. In some cases the public cloud can be less expensive and meet the needs. Anthony agrees it is not either but both: public and private. Standards will play an important role.

David asked about the human factor. What behavior changes need to occur? Mark said that we have a much smarter business audience and IT no longer has a monopoly over approaches. Sanjay said we have done optimization and now it is how the business will use what we built.  We need to transform to usage and not just projects. Tasos said that IT has to be more proactive and challenge the business. IT needs to get out from the back of the bus. It needs to lead change.

David asked about the legacy migration challenge. Anthony said that it is situation specific. Migration should be delayed when necessary. Tasos said it does not pay off to migrate legacy apps. However, you want to put those apps in the background. David asked how important are self-service aspects of the cloud.  Sanjay wants to step away from provisioning. Anthony talked about making apps easy to consume.

David asked about where they are placing innovation bets: individual or enterprise? Tasos said it is both, individual and organizational efficiency. David mentioned that innovation in new uses of tools cuts across generations and is not limited to the younger workers.  I agree and am tired of the talk about generation differences when it assumes that only young people understand new technology.  Mark stressed providing device independent apps and allow for the user to select their devices. They also need to have the ease of use found on the consumer Web. Anthony said they are actively looking to have more functional analysts who understand the business and not simply have data managers.

David asked about the future of IT and what new skills are enabled by the cloud. Sanjay said this is great opportunity for IT.  For years there were well defined IT tracks. Now things are more open and are breaking down IT silos. There is more need for business skills in IT. Tasos agrees and the line between IT and Business is crossing over. David said that many IT roles within the enterprise will not require technical skills, especially unique ones. IT will not be the guild that holds the keys to apps. Much more business knowledge will be needed to apply the apps properly. Mark said that we need to be change agents and have consultative business skills. He is looking for people with these skills.

Tasos said the complexity will be worse before it gets simpler as there will be coexistence with the old ways. David asked how we build those skills. Sanjay said you need to find the people who want to do more. Then give them some space to make mistakes. Anthony it is equally hard to bring someone outside the organization and teach them the enterprise and to expand the skills of someone already inside the organization. If you need to go outside use cross-functional teams for interviews. Also, he likes the idea expressed earlier of doing the interview before you read the resume so you form an independent impression.

 

 

The 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is Today

The MIT Sloan Alumni Club of Boston, The MIT Center For Digital Business, SIM Boston and MIT ILP, are hosting the eight annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium today. The event is sold out with over 900 people registered. The 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium's theme will focus on the evolving CIO's role and how the CIO can create strategic value for organizations in a digital business world. I am attending and will be providing some blog posts on the event the blog. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, here is what I wrote about last year’s MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.

The 2010 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Notes: Enterprise 3.0?

The 2010 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Part Two: Solving the CIO Paradox

The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Notes Part There: Positioning IT as an Innovation Engine

 

IBM Covers the Transformation of Business Email

Business email remains big despite some attempts to get stuff out of an overcrowded inbox.  As IBM mentioned, organizations still consider email to be their most important, mission-critical application. In 2009, there were over 800 million business email users worldwide, and that number is expected to jump to almost 970 million by 2014, according to IDC. For perspective, on the consumer side the numbers are almost identical. There were approximately 760 million consumer email users in 2009, with an expected 950 million by 2014.

Recently, I had an interesting conversation with Ed Brill, IBM’s new leader for social collaboration on how email use is changing because of social media. Ed noted that email has been around for almost two decades. I can remember when it was fresh and new.  Then it became the tool for everything and this has become both a blessing a curse. You have a one-stop shop for much of business communication and collaboration but this is a very crowded stop.

IBM is working on ways to transform email and have it better align with the new collaborative technologies within social business models.  Email is reverting to become closer to its communication origins and collaboration is moving to the new social software tools.

At the same time, many of these social tools use email as an alert vehicle. This allows email to become a common dashboard for many tools. Email today has evolved from the static one-to-one exchange, to the inbox for the social framework. Email now includes all relevant updates from your social environment, whether that be a notification of a new activity in your company's enterprise social networking site, a new comment on a blog post that you're following, a file sharing notification, or a connection request from LinkedIn

Email is becoming more focused. Ed said that his own email volume has actually decreased in the era of other social tools. File sharing, for example, has moved to these social tools. However, the email he gets more often requires an action on his part. The concept of an activity stream is getting a lot of play these days. This capability had its origins with micro-blogging when auto-generated updates made an appearance.  Email can serve this same function. Ed said that the activity stream, regardless of location, will evolve beyond simple alerts. It will allow for direct actions.  For example a request for vacation can be approved right in the message with one click, rather than requiring opening another app.  REST APIs allow for this capability and it will be a big productivity booster.

Ed said that IBM is working to embed these actions within email. It is also working to apply analytics to email traffic to determine what might be useful to users. For example, it could let users know who should they talk to about certain issues based on email traffic. They are also working to make the activity stream more pervasive, as well as more connected to other apps. SAP is one example, of this increased connection.

Within IBM Connections, the activity stream serves as the home page as shown below. It is the unifying function to connect other activities and applications.

I saw IBM’s LotusLive Symphony at Lotusphere this year. You can do real time collaborative editing on documents. Ed said that this function will be pushed into the activity stream. It will go to where you are working. I like this direction. I think the connections achieved through an activity stream, whether it is email based or social app based, will be one of the major improvements of social business.

 

Deciding When to Automate Through Computers and When to Leave It to the Human Mind

I saw an interesting blog post by James Taylor, Decision Management in the New York Times, commenting on a New York Times article, Smarter than you think, on e-discovery and the use of computers rather than hordes of lawyers. James notes that the focus of the article was on the reduction in staff to examine documents by shifting some of the work to computers through text analytics. He added that this fails to account the massive growth in documents and data available in these cases.

Without new tools, e-discovery could have been headed for what he called the “telephone operator event horizon. “ In other words there might be a point when e-discovery employed everyone because of the massive expansion in documents being processed.  James said this is named after the famous prediction that expansion in telephone service would mean that half the population had to become a telephone operator – a prediction overtaken by the automated telephone exchange.

He goes on to conclude that, “automation of decisions sometimes reduces the need for staff. Much more often it innovates and allows companies to apply the same staff to more problems by replacing boring, mechanical work with more interesting, more difficult work that is hard to automate or where automation is not desirable.”

Text analytics can reduce the amount of content for a person to scan by ruling our certain irrelevant documents and bringing forward those with relevant content. I have reviewed a number of the e-discovery vendors and they do provide a useful service and can greatly reduce both tedious work and legal expenses. The New York Times article quoted lawyer Bill Herr about the tedious nature of the discovery process, “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t,”

However, in the end a person needs to be involved. In this instance, it is a legal expert familiar with the case. What can we do to allow this expert to make better use of his cognitive capabilities? This is where the Darwin Awareness Engine™ takes a different approach. Rather than trying to get the computer to understand meaning within content, if creates visualizations to allow people to more efficiently and effectively sort through it. Automation based on Chaos Theory takes on the content aggregation and sorting process as the top 100 themes within a set of content is displayed in a manner that allows for easy sorting and investigation. This could be a natural complement to the use of text analytics to narrow the content for analysis. Once narrowed, now a person can best use their cognitive capabilities to know what to look for and where to look next. Here is more on the Awareness Engine.

 

 

How Big is the Cloud?

The global cloud computing market will grow from $40.7 billion in 2011 to more than $241 billion in 2020, according to new Forrester forecast data reported in Sizing The Cloud by Stefan Ried, Ph.D. and Holger Kisker, Ph.D. Based on Forrester’s cloud market taxonomy, this new report outlines the different market dynamics for the three core layers of cloud computing - the public cloud, the virtual private cloud, and the private cloud. The total size of the public cloud market will grow from $25.5 billion in 2011 to $159.3 billion in 2020. The market for virtual private cloud solutions will grow from $7.5 billion in 2011 to $66.4 billion in 2020. The market for private cloud solutions will grow from $7.8 billion in 2011 to $15.9 billion in 2020.

The cloud market will change as we move toward 2020. While the successes of early leaders have prompted many other providers to offer IaaS solutions, Forrester feels that this market will reach a peak of $5.9 billion in global revenues in 2014 and then enter a period of significant commoditization, price deterioration, and margin pressure. SaaS represents the largest and most sustainable growth opportunity, thanks to rapidly increasing demand from companies of all sizes. At the same time Forrester believes that desktop virtualization is reaching the end of its cycle of innovation, while a new set of technologies that allow virtualization of large-scale, server-based enterprise applications are starting to become more important.

The market is not one-dimensional and is maturing at different levels and serves different groups within the enterprise. As the report suggests, cloud value propositions are compelling to individual end users, corporate buyers, and tech providers such as independent software vendors (ISVs). As a result, the benefits of cloud computing range from personal productivity to operational flexibility to cost savings.

Cloud-based solutions and services will continue to be useful in a rapidly changing market as companies can more easily align their underlying operational processes and systems as their business requirements change. I covered several of these trends. On Wednesday I posted, Can Cloud Computing Elevate the Role of IT, Making It More Strategic? I have also written several times on the rise of cloud based apps in a down market.  I was pleased to receive a review copy of this useful report. You can find it at the Forrester site. 

 

The Evolution of Site Search

Site search is becoming more than a means to increase website traffic. Now 40% of content and collaboration professionals see the feature primarily as a tool to improve customer self-service, according to a new Forrester report, Site Search Evolves from Technical Feature to Customer Touchpoint, by Leslie Owens with Stephen Powers and Anjali Yakkundi.  The next objectives were: increased sales conversion 30%, increased search traffic (SEO) 12% and increased page views 10%.

However, the report also finds that most corporate websites provide an inadequate search experience, lacking customer friendly self-service in areas such as speed, adaptability, relevance, content integration and task fit. In fact, 69% of Web sites examined did not even offer searchable self-help for customer service. Asked to rate the overall success of their search initiative, a survey of 188 content and collaboration professionals gave an average score of just 6 out of 10, reflecting a need for better, more measurable value from search. 

The report found that two thirds of search decision-makers are planning to expand their implementation and usage of site search this year. To be successful, according to Owens, IT and marketing teams must collaborate to develop the top three improvement areas in search: better relevance, enhanced usability, and quality content. They need to move the search functionality from a siloed activity to a cross-functional search partnership.  I would add that this business involvement is the success formula for most IT initiatives.

The report suggests that as marketers begin to take a greater role in search vendor selection and administration in the coming years, they may even completely take over tasks like boosting and blocking content, and setting up metrics to gauge growing levels of customer experience.

Forrester sees site search as a key area for investment. My sense of the market and my own experiences with Web sites has be agreeing with them.  Web sites have often replaced people as the face of the enterprise. It makes sense to put your best face forward. I was pleased to receive a review copy of the report. You can see the report at the Forrester site.

 

 

OutStart Mobile Knowledge Solutions Use Case Series

As mobile devices have progressed from being simple phones to becoming hand held computers with multiple capabilities there is increasing potential within these powerful, always available, always connected devices. Here is the six part series from OutStart on the use of mobile to provide knowledge solutions. They cover a range of examples including enterprise alignment, crisis management, learning, learning evaluation, change management, and the real time push of priority communication.

These posts go beyond the concepts to look at how businesses are already using mobile and, in each case,  provide some of the measurable results. Here are the individual cases:

Real-time Push of Critical Information

Supporting Change Management

Handling Crisis Situations in Areas with Limited Internet Access

Employee Motivation and Enterprise Alignment

Reinforcement of Learning

Training Evaluation

 

OutStart’s Participate Enables the Social Side of Enterprise Work Processes

Founded in 1999, OutStart offers an portfolio of inter-related mobile, social, and learning Knowledge Solutions intended to accelerate and broaden access to colleagues and the knowledge they need to respond to business requirements more quickly and make better informed decisions.. I recently spoke with Mike Gregory about Participate, OutStart's Social Business Software. It integrates social networking, collaboration, and knowledge sharing technologies in a secure managed environment. As a disclosure I am now working with OutStart on their social media efforts. Participate is one component of their offerings that also include mobile learning and communications, learning content management, and learning management system as well as a solution that pulls all the components together into a single integrated learning and knowledge suite.   

Participate was acquired in 2006 and they continue to extend its features. Some of the capabilities within Participate include: workspaces, discovery and networking between members, blogs, micro-blogging, wikis, and an web-based interface to publish FAQs and contribute to communities. It integrates with Microsoft Office for the contribution of desktop content. There is also integration with systems such as SharePoint, MS Office Communication Server and CRM. Participate provides granular security and access control.

The micro-blogging feature allows for both manually generated updates such as provided through Twitter and auto-generated updates based on user activity.  You can add comments to the auto-generated updates. This latter feature can be a useful way to keep track of the pulse of the organization. It also reduces email traffic.

There is automated management and capturing of question and answer exchanges for organic growth of the knowledge base over time. If you do not know the right expert for your question, the system determines the most appropriate individuals. It reaches out to the experts through email and the response comes back into Participate.  Hee is a sample expertise exchange screen.

This is much more efficient than the old way of mass email blasts. Answers are then made available through search going forward. The capturing is nice feature and reduces the burden on employees to contribute to the firm’s knowledge capital separate from their normal work efforts. That has always been an obstacle to the effectiveness of traditional knowledge management solutions.

Participate supports both internal and externally facing blogs. Inside the enterprise there can be a community blog, as well as individual blogs. Where needed workflow is available for content review before posting. You can vary the amount of control required. It is used for the Web facing OutStart Knowledge Solutions Blog. Here is a sample internal blog screen.

Team workspaces are available. You can assign tasks, add documents, and perform other projects functions. There are three levels of security: wide open, visible but approval required to join, and completely private requiring an invitation to join. Here is a sample workspaces screen.

You can subscribe to content through email in a regularly scheduled digest where you set the schedule. To fit people’s existing work patterns, email can also be used to send subscription digests, immediate notifications of people, groups, or conversations they are following, and tasks assigned through workspaces. Here is a sample subscriptions screen.

There is RSS capability for all content within Participate. This gives great flexibility to monitoring what is going on within the system. You can track the activity of everyone within the system and provide credit for their involvement. People can also rate contributions. Over half of the features are mobile enabled to provide quick access from anywhere through a mobile interface.

We can see from the feature set that Participate offers a comprehensive set of collaboration capabilities. It goes one step further. Through its integration with OutStart’s learning content management system, Participate can be used to support social learning. This social side of learning has been shown to significantly increase the engagement of in learning activities.  Participate can be the bridge between formal and informal learning.

OutStart has won a number of awards including being named a Visionary in the Gartner Corporate Learning Systems Magic Quadrant since 2004, Top Learning Portal by TrainingIndustry.com, and Best of Elearning! awards for their OutStart LCMS and Hot Lava Mobile. I will cover other components of their offerings in future posts.  The OutStart Knowledge Solutions Blog offers an exchange of ideas on how to better utilize technology to improve knowledge sharing.

 

 

Measuring Economic Impact of Using Cloud-Based Services: Google Apps

This post picks up on the theme from yesterday's post. In May 2010, Google commissioned Forrester to examine the total economic impact and expected return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by switching from legacy email and productivity solutions to Google Apps. The report is now out. As most of you know, Google Apps is a cloud-based messaging and collaboration platform that includes mail, calendaring, IM, as well as Web-based collaborative documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and sites. I have used it on several projects and it seems to work fine as a free SaaS alternative. This is especially true for efforts where a commercial cloud-based collaboration tool is not available for whatever reason. 

I was interested in the report, not just for what is might say about Google apps but for any light it could shed on switching to cloud-based collaboration, productivity, and messaging tools. Forrester conducted a combination of executive interviews and two surveys targeted at both IT and end user groups.

The results were impressive as ninety-three percent of respondents saw positive, tangible IT and user impacts that drove concrete ROI. They also found that users familiar with cloud-based personal email transitioned more smoothly to using Google Apps at work. The business user productivity gains were even greater than IT cost savings. The research suggested that end users were able to use Gmail more efficiently than their previous email solution and collaborate more effectively with Google Docs and Google Sites than with traditional office software.

I have used Gmail a bit and it seams straight forward but not necessarily easier than other email systems. I did not need any training but then that can be said for other systems the first time I used them. However, if you are talking about the use of documents in a collaborative way, then I can see that the use of Google Docs is easier than traditional office software.

They certainly found some impressive numbers in the ROI. The three-year results of switching to Google Apps from traditional infrastructure included a “risk-adjusted” ROI of 307% with a payback (break-even) within seven months. Looking more closely at the details within these results, the IT saving included reduced spend on licenses and infrastructure, as well as reduced IT administrator time spent on system maintenance, upkeep, patching, and upgrades. The totals were savings between 38% and 56%. These seem consistent with the claims for cloud-based saving.

The user benefits included productivity gains around email search, spam filtering, archiving, organization of email, as well as improved response time within the messaging environment. In the collaboration space improved efficiency in terms of sharing and editing documents across teams and within teams, the ability to incorporate feedback more quickly, more efficient face-to-face and virtual meetings, as well pushing more timely and relevant information to distributed teams. There was also improved efficiency in interacting with external partners and suppliers. However, remember the comparisons were with traditional enterprise apps, not against the other enterprise 2.0 offerings. Google provided the customers to interview but Forrester maintained editorial control over the report.

I think the findings are an endorsement of using cloud-based apps. Since the comparisons were not between various cloud-based app providers it is hard to say if they are specific to Google apps.  However, they do look good. 

 

Crocodoc Makes It Easier to Work with Online Documents

Here is a useful tool. To help us better work with online documents Crocodoc provides an HTML5 document viewing and collaboration tool that operates out of the cloud. The new viewer can be embedded into existing web offerings and provides a fast, versatile document viewing experience without the need for Flash or 3rd party plug-ins. I recently spoke with Ryan Damico, CEO and co-founder of Crocodoc, to get a better understanding of their offering.

Ryan explained that there are several advantages of using a cloud based HTML5 document viewer over the traditional options of Adobe and Flash. First, it is faster and does not require large files to be downloaded or plug-ins to be installed​. It is not prone to transmitting​ viruseslike the others and HTML5 will soon be available on many mobile devices.  This latter benefit will become increasingly important as many pundits are predicting a significant increase in the use of mobile devices for business collaboration and content sharing.  There is an app development arms race within mobile and Crocodoc’s ability to work with many tools will come in handy.

Ryan showed me how you can take a PDF, Word, PowerPoint, or other document and place it within Crocodoc for both viewing and collaborative commenting and marking up. You can make comments, as well as add highlights and texts. In addition to these editing functions, you can actually draw on the docs to suggest edits. This is very useful for visual images and formats such as PowerPoint.  Below is a comparison of a document in Crocodoc and in a PDF format.

The drawing capability also provides a great e-signature capability. Signatures are the last vestige of the analog world and they can slow down things. I was dealing with this over the weekend trying to fax a signed document to a client and dealing with bad machines, a wrong number and other challenges. There are a number of commercial tools devoted to this need but now it comes as part of Crocodoc. And Crocodoc is free to individual users. Perhaps we can get rid of fax machines now.

Once you like your document you can share it by sending a link, an email, or embed it in a blog post or web site. This latter capability is useful as Ryan showed me how you can easily put a 15-page document in a scrolling window in the middle of a blog post. Below is a sample embedded document. Here is a link to an embedded version of the Hacker Monthly. 

Ryan also explained Crocodoc’s new partner program. They are working with a number of application providers to embed Crocodoc’s capabilities within their applications.  Yammer has already fully integrated Crocodoc’s viewer and online collaboration tools into its social enterprise micro-blogging application as you can see below.

I like the simplicity of this approach and think that it will catch on.  I am looking forward to trying it myself.

 

 

 

Forrester: Mobile Apps Will Change the IT Market and Drive Software Innovation

Forrester has issued a new report, Mobile App Internet Recasts The Software And Services Landscape: App Innovation On Phones Will Spread To Cars, Appliances And Entertainment by John C. McCarthy. It notes that while the explosion of app innovation started with the iPhone, the rise of the “App Internet” significantly impact the enterprise software and services market. Apple has over

iPhone 350,000 apps, and Android has countered with more than 150,000. They wrote that 33% of people with smart phones, download applications at least monthly. I am part of the majority on this issue but I do enjoy my smart phone. As part of the report, they interviewed 27 vendors in this space. I was pleased to receive a review copy of the report.

According to their survey of over 2,100 North American and European software decision-makers, 41 percent say that increasing the number of mobile apps for both employees and customers was a high or critical software priority. The development of this mobile “app Internet” with hybrid local and cold-supported applications will not only foster huge levels of innovation, but it will also open up new services opportunities around the creation and management of these B2C and B2B apps.

This second wave of innovation will leverage cloud-based services. Forrester believes that three service lines will grow significantly during the next 36 to 48 months. First, building initial apps – projected to be at $5.6 billion/year market globally by 2015. Second, managing apps and devices – projected to be at $3.8 billion/year market globally by 2015. Third, re-inventing the business processes and back-end systems – projected to be at $7.6 billion in revenues by 2015

As innovation continues and services vendors help IT pick up the slack, the app Internet will also accelerate the evolution of the enterprise desktop and business applications markets. Forrester sees four main shifts ahead. First, lower-cost apps will increase pricing pressure. Second, task-oriented experience will drive modular design. Third, the consumerization of IT will promote a freemium model. Fourth, a range of different revenue models will emerge. The app stores have really opened up the market.

Some of the innovations will come as sensors in the new mobile devices unlock the notion of context. For example, the sensors enable apps to limit the amount of cumbersome data entry by auto-calculating your location. In addition, the simpler, purpose-built, task-oriented apps are easy to use. To address the lack of screen real estate, the apps have to be highly relevant and very straightforward. This requires creative UIs.

The report concludes with the suggestion that the boundary between business and consumer that has been gradually eroding since the advent of the initial home PC in the late 1980s will fall completely. With the advent of the Freemium sales model and taking a percentage of the transaction, they predict that that the two worlds will become one.

 

Recommind Supports End-to-End eDiscovery

Recommind provides predictive information management software through search-powered business applications. I last spoke with them in 2009 (see: Recommind’s MindServer Search™ 6.0 Addresses need for More Effective eDiscovery). Recently, I spoke with Craig Carpenter, Recommind’s VP of marketing and General Counsel. I noted the unusual job combination, and Craig said when your main clients are law firms and law departments within corporations, the combination helps. We mainly focused on their Axcelerate™ Review & Analysis suite with Predictive Coding™ and how it impacts eDiscovery.

First I asked Craig to define eDiscovery. It is a term that I have seen used both narrowly and broadly. Craig said it was initially used in a more narrow sense to refer to the process of preserving, collecting, reviewing, analyzing and producing relevant documents after a legal process has begun. Now, it generally extends to include information management in anticipation of possible legal issues, as well as during them, while also addressing regulatory needs. This reflects a more proactive approach that is being adopted by many Recommind customers. This broader approach means that content collection is not an isolated activity but one that is integrated into an enterprise’s total information management system on an ongoing basis.

Cisco is using Axcelerate to take a more proactive, strategic approach to eDiscovery. One of the drivers of increased eDiscovery costs is the explosion of enterprise content, which ironically Cisco is helping facilitate with its technology that simplifies the creation and transfer of large files, such as videos. Cisco wanted to have its own enormous stores of enterprise data easily accessible ahead of any legal issues that might arise. They also wanted greater cost containment and predictability so that legal costs do not dictate when they settle and when they fight a legal challenge.

Axcelerate offers customers like Cisco a powerful, end-to-end platform for eDiscovery management. First, Axcelerate’s Predictive Analytics™ capability automatically categorizes documents and enables deep analysis of the data at the start of a legal process, before major costs have been incurred. This greatly reduces the amount of expensive manual labor by legal experts as they decide which documents are relevant and/or privileged in a case. It can create a taxonomy on the fly based on the content and/or work with an existing taxonomy. Here is a sample Review and Analysis screen.

Here is a diagram of how the entire process works.

Second, Axcelerate’s Predictive Coding™ technology and workflow automatically analyzes, prioritizes and codes all documents in a collection. After a knowledgeable attorney reviews and codes a small number of documents, the software can automatically sort through all remaining documents on its own, in the process flagging all other pertinent documents while setting aside the rest. This dramatically expedites the document review process, slashing eDiscovery timelines and costs by 50%-90%. 

Third, Axcelerate’s Predictive Sampling™ methodology provides metrics on the accuracy of the Predictive Coding process, thereby making Predictive Coding not just the fastest review but also the most accurate and defensible. The availability of a specific accuracy rate makes courts far more comfortable with the process, as it goes well beyond what is considered “reasonable” – far more so than traditional linear review. Here is a sample Predictive Sampling screen.

Craig said Recommind offers both on-premise and private cloud options. The private cloud option has been growing fast (over 500% in 2010) as firms see the cost savings and flexibility of cloud solutions and become more comfortable with them.

Recommind offers other search-based applications as well. We briefly spoke about Decisiv Categorization, which many companies use for information management and governance. It uses Recommind’s patented Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) technology to look for patterns in the text within documents and automatically categorize them. I think that as the explosion of content continues there will be increasing applications for the technology that Recommind brings to the market. 

 

rPath Supports the New Dynamic and Cloud-based Vision for IT

A major transformation is occurring with enterprise IT services. I recently spoke with Jake Sorofman, CMO at rPath, to get his perspective on these changes. Jake pointed out that IT used to have a local monopoly on IT services. Their internal customers were forced to accept poor service levels because they had no alternative. Now the Cloud is fast becoming and alternative channel.  Instead of waiting weeks or months for a critical application, business managers can simply license and deploy many applications in minutes. Instead of incurring massive implementation costs prior to any performance, they can just lease apps on a monthly basis and stop at any time.

Faced with this potential competition, IT organizations are under pressure to transform—to replace bottlenecks and bureaucracy with on-demand IT service delivery models. But this transformation to IT-as-a-Service requires new thinking about old processes. Jake pointed out that the reality is that today's manual and ad hoc IT provisioning and change processes will collapse under the weight of self-service, cloud and other on-demand IT models. Particularly vulnerable are today's practices for constructing and changing system images. Jake added that those IT departments that fail to make this transformation will be outflanked by development organizations and business lines who follow the path of least resistance to the cloud.

The cloud is becoming more versatile. In a blog post, 6 IT Predictions for 2011, the first three that Jake listed were: private cloud proliferates, public cloud thrives, and hybrid cloud emerges. In the latter case, this will first be more likely simple shifts in deployment environments based on lifecycle stage—for example, dev and test workloads only in public cloud. This will set the foundation for the “dynamic data center of the future, where workloads can move fluidly between deployment environments. By enabling application portability, workloads become a liquid commodity and a marketplace emerges. IT can dynamically retarget workloads based on optimizations for price, policy or performance, and they achieve true leverage over service providers.” This makes a lot of sense to me.

To help IT departments become more responsive and operate successfully in the on-demand world, rPath provides capabilities to automate application deployments, updates and retargeting across physical, virtual and cloud environments to allow for the dynamic data center of the future. Their tools help break down the traditional silos between development and operations. It is increasingly important so that when development speeds up it does not hit a speed bump when apps are deployed. Jake said that often when Agile currently meets operations, it can become fragile.

Part of the challenge is to extend the Agile concept into operations. Traditionally, operations views change as evil. Because of all the hidden dependencies within applications, changes can cause things to break.  Now the fast paced changes within today’s business world make constant change a competitive necessity.  rPath provides the infrastructure and environment to support these new change requirements. It helps automate many of the traditionally time consuming IT processes.

rPath is based on a version-controlled repository that acts as a definitive software library for controlled reuse of application, OS, middleware and other system artifacts across development, test and production organizations. From this repository, rPath automates four key functions: automated generation of images for rapid deployment to physical, virtual or cloud, automated updates and rollbacks, compliance reporting and remediation, and controlled lifecycle promotion. You can see this illustrated below.

Jake closed his predictions for 2011 by suggesting that the new architectures that enable dynamic workload portability will also change CIO’s prime focus from operations to sourcing and portfolio management. He wrote that we will see some old-line CIOs cycle out in the face of change. At the same we will see “new stars born on the basis of a new vision for IT, inspired—and not threatened—by the rise of public cloud services.” This is very consistent with what I have heard from other sources recently. The times are changing. 

 

Clarizen Moves Beyond Online Project Management

Clarizen provides applications to support work tasks within the enterprise and I first wrote about them in 2008 (see Clarizen: Collaborative Online Project Management for Small-Midsize Businesses).  I commented in my first post that project management is one of the killer apps for web 2.0 within the enterprise. It was one of the applications that first excited me about the business potential of web 2.0 (e.g., An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department). This thought still holds true from my perspective. Since I last spoke to them, Clarizen has undertaken some innovative moves to extend this class of applications. 

I spoke with Sharon Vardi about their new moves.  Clarizen felt that while many project management tools adequately addressed the planning part, the work execution part was not properly addressed. In addition, some of the tools make project planning too complex. I would agree with both of these points based on personal experience.  In response Clarizen has adopted a design approach of what they term “robust simplicity” and extended functionality beyond the planning phase.

To address what they refer to as the work execution phase, Clarizen has combined some of the features found in project management tools with those found in collaboration tools.  They also have designed these features to be easily used by all types of project teams members and not just the program management experts.  This includes such capabilities as resource management, scheduling & planning, budgeting, time and expenses, issues tracking and email integration.

The implementation process has been simplified so they can both sell and deliver via the phone and the Web. On the ground implementation services are not necessary. They simply run two webinars and most firms are good to go. This has allowed them to adopt a “land and expand” strategy. With one client they sold 90 seats and within a month they had expanded by hundreds of additional subscriptions.

In the past many work processes tended to be static and fixed. This allowed for a greater focus on planning since once the work started it often did not change. Now the work situation is much more likely to change quickly and a work execution tool needs to be flexible to accommodate these changes.  I can remember about ten years ago having to take the top four people on a project off the work execution to spend three months re-planning the project using one of the very complex project management tools.  We felt it was a huge waste of time. Today it would be even more of a disaster.

Clarizen also developed email integration so team members could work where they tend to spend much of their time.  You can see all of the emails related to a project through a single click. You can also have Clarizen receive updates through email.  They have extended this integration to apply to many of the commonly used enterprise apps such as Salesforce.com, Google Apps and Intacct. For example, this allows you to go from Salesforce.com to Clarizen once a deal is closed and the related work needs to start. You can also go from the popular help desk application, Zendesk, to Clarizen when more complex issue resolution is required.

Clarizen is promoting transparency with their cross-application integration and the features within their tool. To demonstrate some of this transparency, Clarizen created a road map widget that allows you to share project status with others. To practice their own approach, they have made the status of their own tool updates available on their website. Here is a sample of the road map widget looking at their own efforts.

You can see this for yourself at their site.  I like what they are doing and the market has responded. Sharon told me that they have achieved 40% growth for the last six consecutive quarters. Clarizen also received the Codie Award for best project management software for 2010. I look forward to seeing their next moves. 

 

Looking at Middle Management’s Role in Business Software Decisions

Here is a report that asks an interesting quesion. In December 2010, inlevel conducted a research on "Middle Management as Business Software Influencer."  They start with an interesting point. Software tended to be sold to senior business management and CIOs. However, because of increased access to the Web, greater use of cloud applications and simpler applications, a growing number of software purchases do not require senior level support nor need to involve IT.  So this study looked at the current role of middle managers in software purchases. They gathered responses from 210 middle managers across a variety of industries in the US.

The research found that 42% of middle managers surveyed said they are actively engaged in the enterprise software selection process and 41% said no one a cared about their views.  They want to talk with vendors about their offerings.  Asked to list obstacles to their involvement, 24% expect that IT people will be against their software ideas, 23% expect senior management to oppose them, 22% said they need a sold business case and 14% said it is hard find information about the software. Only 21% did not see any obstacles and expect that their software suggestions will be accepted. 

Their advice to vendors is enhance the role that middle managers play in the selection process by providing clear descriptions of the functions of their products, more training materials directed at business professional and make the relationship the software and their more explicit.

How do they get information on software now? The respondents said that 24% comes from industry news, 20% from their IT department, 12% from friends, 2% from social media. They largest category of responses came from the 38% who said they did not have such information.

In a related but different question, when asked about where they go to get software information, 52% said they search on the Web, 33% said they talk to their IT department, 16% said they talk directly to vendors, and 21% said they were not interested.

In another related question about their preferred ways to gather information from vendors, the largest category was the 38% who said they do not bother because they do not have purchasing authority. The next in line at about 20% each was phone, email and reading web sites. Only 4% said that never ask vendors because they do not trust them.

This tells me that that middle mangers are somewhat involved in software decisions and some would like to be more involvd and others do not seem to care.  Without a baseline from prior years, it is hard to tell if this role is increasing due to the changing market factors.  I do know that many enterprise 2.0 software firms are trying the ╥seed and expand╙ strategy. They make a very low entry point and then hope to grow the numbers. A future study would benefit from also looking at the price of software purchases as a variable.  I do think they are asking an interesting question and would like to see more work here.

 

Potential Cloud Growth within Mid-size Companies

According to a recent survey over 60 percent of respondents in the mid-size business space say they are ready to look to the cloud. Many are already using virtualization but only 4 percent are using the cloud now to back up data.  In addition, 63% say they are using 10% or less of their applications on a SaaS platform. So this projects a major shift in the mid-size business IT architecture.

Are these companies prepared?  It seems that there is work to be done as 79% do not have a plan for their move into the cloud.  Many see the advantages as 63% feel that the cloud offers cost savings and 29% feel that the cloud offers more flexibility. At the same time, only 8% believe there is no advantage to the cloud.

Many of the vendors reviewed on this blog operate on SaaS platforms so there is challenge here for them to further penetrate the mid-size market. The good news is that the desire for the cloud is there, the caution is the lack of strategic planning in place.  

Social media is generally operates on a cloud platform. In the large company space I have seen at least one study that indicate over 80% of companies plan to use social media in 2011 but another study found less than half have a strategy for social media use.  This parallel between social media and the cloud is not surprising.  In both cases vendors need to avoid prompting tools and services because they are the latest thing and help clients address planning and strategy requirements to make sure their applications are kept for the long run. 

 

Global Tech Spending on the Rise According to Forrester

This is good news. According to a new forecast from Forrester, global tech spending will rise 7.1 percent in 2011 to $1.7 trillion, according to new forecast data from Forrester. Analyst Andrew Bartels writes that while the 2011 global tech market will be similar to the 7.2 percent market growth experienced in 2010, there will be significant differences between the two years in terms of both products and geographies.

Andrew projects that after the computer restocking and replacement boom that propelled the tech market in 2010, hardware growth will slow to 7.4 percent, with software starting to accelerate. Enterprise demand for wireless, unified communications, and videoconferencing is also increasing. The IT services and outsourcing market will be mixed, with growth in some areas (e.g., project services in the US and outsourcing in Latin America) but weakness elsewhere.

It is interesting to note that what is often considering the developing areas (Latin America and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EEMEA) regions) will have the highest growth rates in 2011, both at 9.8 percent. Asia Pacific, at 8.5 percent, and the US, at 7.5 percent, will grow slightly faster than the total global market. This is consistent with general growth in GDP in some of these areas. For example, the report mentions that according to the latest poll of economists by The Economist, both Argentina’s and Brazil’s real GDP will grow by 5.1%, with Chile’s growing 5.9%

After a strong 2010, the Canadian IT market will only grow at 4.9 percent. Western and Central Europe and will have the lowest growth rate, at four percent, with the combination of weak economic growth and a depreciating euro combining to hold dollar-denominated growth down. The weakest markets in this area will be Italy, Spain, Belgium, Greece, Ireland, and Portugal. Best performing will be the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Poland.

The US tech industry will grow about twice as fast as nominal GDP in 2011, at 7.4%, as investments in cloud and Smart Computing solutions provide the IT tools for companies to grow profits despite weak revenue increases. Software sales will be stronger than hardware.  The government market for IT will lag, though, as federal, state, and local governments struggle with high deficits. I can see this as I read about struggling state and local budgets and federal efforts to cut spending.

There is much more detail in the 38 page report which is available at the Forrester site. I appreciate receiving a review copy.  

 

BroadVision Offers a “Social Business Cloud” Through its Enterprise 2.0 Platform - Clearvale

Since its inception in 1993, at the start of the first wave of internet-based businesses, BroadVision has gone through a series of transitions. It began by helping companies do business on the Web and in the late 90s they were one of the firms to bring personalization to ecommerce. The firm survived the dotcom bust of the early 2000s but came out smaller. I recently spoke with their CMO, Giovanni Rodriguez, to get an update on their current efforts.

CEO, Pehong Chenwisely decided to bet on the viability of the native cloud. BroadVision then built a cloud based collaboration platform to provide social networking for the enterprise. Their offering, sometimes referred to as “Ning for the enterprise”, is built with the goal of not requiring heavy involvement from enterprise IT to set up. A future goal is to create a “network of networks”, where companies and individuals can discover new business partners, providers, and clients through transparency across networks.

Clearvale is the name for their collaboration platform and it was launched in May 2010. It contains many of the features found within the enterprise 2.0 concept such as communities, profile pages, blogs, wikis, networks, forums, RSS, and twitter integration, whichcan be customized through drag and drop editing. Here is a sample screen:

In November, they introduced Clearvale PaasPort, which enables companies to host their own installation of the Clearvale enterprise social networking solution. PaasPort hosts can sell Clearvale solutions, as well as premium services, to their own customers. Clearvale PaasPort is a platform-as-a-service solution provided to customers, who can deliver BroadVision Clearvale as part of a large package of services, or as a more specialized solution. One of the initial clients for this service is Softbank Telecom in Japan, which will provide integrated email, IM and voice through this capability. This unified communication will occur through a social network allowing you to store and save voice messages. I see great potential here.

Another major aspect of the new BroadVision Clearvale platform that I especially like is MyStreams, a personalized data stream management and filtering system. MyStreams integrates a wide variety of data streams into one easy-to-use interface. While this includes data from within the Clearvale network -- such as updates to wikis, blogs and forums -- it is also built to include external data streams, such as email, voicemail, social media, IM, as well as streams from consumer social networks. All of these data streams are integrated into MyStreams and can be accessed and managed without ever having to exit Clearvale. MyStreams also allows users to easily share specific data with other users. It generates an RSS feed and allows for filtering along with aggregation. Below is a sample screen:

Overcoming content silos is one of the necessary efforts with enterprise 2.0. We run the risk of creating new silos with unconnected wikis, blogs, forums, etc. A number of firms are looking at micro-blogging status updates that run across applications as one way to avoid this problem. MyStreams goes beyond basic micro-blogging and serves this cross-application aggregation function along with other capabilities.

I like these steps as they extend current capabilities in cross channel communication integration and exploit some of the potential that comes with making these channels; including voice, into data objects. 

 

IT Market Forecast Slows a Bit but Remains Strong

Forrester has released its forecast, US And Global IT Market Outlook: Q3 2010, by Andrew Bartels with Christopher Mines and Chétina Muteba.  They have reduced their forecasts for the year to a still positive 8.1% IT market growth for the US (down from our 9.9% forecast in July), with 7.4% growth predicted for in 2011.  Forrester used data from the US Department of Commerce and the reports of 53 vendors. US business and government purchases of Communications and IT products and services will total $758 billion dollars in 2010.

Breaking down the details shows a divers range across sectors within IT. For example, US computer equipment is set to raise by 19% in 2010, with all categories growing at double-digit rates. US software purchases should rise by 9.1%, with operating system software, middleware, and applications sharing the growth. Communications equipment raise by only by 5.5%, led by enterprise and small and medium-size business (SMB) buying.

On the other hand, IT services growth will lag a bit, with systems integration projects picking up late in 2010 as licensed software buying increases. The laggard of the group is US IT outsourcing and telecommunications services.  Sales here will lag, with the former rising by only 2.8% and the latter dropping by 0.9% in 2010.

I was pleased to get a review copy of the forecast and there is a lot more detail with the report. 

 

The Cloud Moves Forward Privately

While cloud computing continues to increase it is interesting, but not surprising, that more firms are choosing private clouds than public ones. As reported in ComputerWorldUK, Gartner surveyed 1,587 CIOs and other senior IT decision makers about general IT spending trends, with 484 respondents providing answers relating to questions on cloud computing. The survey wnet across 40 countries, from April to July 2010, and found that 39 percent of respondents allocated some IT budget to the cloud.

ComputerWorld quoted Bob Igou, research director at Gartner, “One-third of the spending on cloud computing is a continuation from the previous budget year, a further third is incremental spending that is new to the budget, and 14 percent is spending that was diverted from a different budget category in the previous year,”

The Gartner analysts said that this investment trend shows a “shift towards the ‘utility’ approach for non-core services, and increased investment in core functionality, often closely aligned with competitive differentiation.” In addition some 43 percent of respondents expected an increase in spending for private cloud implementations designed for internal or restricted use of the enterprise compared to 32 percent looking at public cloud implementations. This later trends shows the flexibility of the cloud and a desire to combine utility with security.

The benefits and risks of using the cloud are well known: flexibility, agility, and cost savings versus security and control concerns. Building private clouds seems a logical approach. 

The Cloud Keeps Getting Bigger

The IT Channel Planet reports that Gartner has predicted SaaS revenue within enterprise application software market will jump up 14 percent over 2009, based on convergence with cloud computing models and diminished security and availability concerns among business customers. I heard about this through George Dearing on Twitter.

Three of the growth markets are project and portfolio management (PPM), content, communications and collaboration (CCC), and customer relationship management (CRM). These are all areas I continue to cover on this blog and the AppGap as they are key aspects of enterprise 2.0. It is encouraging to see these numbers,

It is interesting to note that the collaboration market exhibits the most noticeably disproportionate SaaS adoption rates range from 4 percent for enterprise content management to 82 percent for web conferencing. However, I have seen that most collaboration platform vendors are offering a SaaS option. I think this will continue to grow. 

Jackbe Releases Presto 3.0 and Opens Enterprise App Store

A few months ago I covered Jackbe’s preview of this release (see JackBe Provides Enterprise Mashup Platform on the Cloud and Previews Presto 3.0).  Now it has become available and I spoke with John Crupi, CTO and Chris Warner, VP of Marketing about their new 3.0 release.  Two of the main additions are a platform for creating internal Enterprise App Stores, as well as a robust visual toolset for creating secure Enterprise Apps.

First, we discussed the Enterprise App Store.  This is modeled after the very successful and well-known iTunes store but it takes the functionality inside the enterprise as a means of governance more that a commercial distribution channel. I like the use of the App Store concept, as people are very familiar with it. The platform allows enterprise consumers of apps a single source that is well organized and searchable. It also offers the creators of apps a central place to share their efforts within the enterprise.  Here is a sample App Store screen.

There is an App Store Manager responsible for ensuring the Apps have function, documentation and work as advertised. . The review and approval process provides central governance that can be very useful given the ease in which apps can be powered by mashups.  This is a way to avoid the potential chaos of too many apps and redundant apps. You can better get the right apps to the right users with some degree of vetting along the way.  The apps can be out-of-the-box creations, as well as templates requiring further customization.  Here is a App Store Manager screen.

The App Store has an area called ‘My Apps’ where users can place and organize the Apps they want and use. They can provide comments; tag and share the Apps. This information accelerates the ability for other users to find and use the Apps they want. Here is a sample My Apps screen

JackBe has also upgraded their development tools with this release. Their new visual tools make it easier for non-developers to create enterprise apps and deploy them to enterprise destination like portals, SharePoint, iGoogle, and mobile devices. Presto 3.0 includes enhancement to Wires, their visual mashup-making tool, Mashboard, a new App assembly and wiring tool, and Mashup Sites for SharePoint, an advanced SharePoint add-on that mashes SharePoint Lists and publishes Apps as SharePoint WebParts.

They showed me some apps created with these new tools. One set were developed by a non-technical marketing person and covered the World Cup. There was an amusing comparison of goals per capita and goals vs. GDP for the competing countries. These applications took minutes to create without programming using publically available data.

I especially liked the new Mashhboard that allows users to group or link apps along a workflow. The creations can run on any browser, on the iPad, or even within Excel. The approach is to make everything simple: creation, distribution selection, and implementation.  Mashups are one of the key building blocks of enterprise 2.0 and it is nice to see these new features to streamline the process. Here is a Mashboard screen.

JackBe will also be making a cloud-based Developer Edition of Presto 3.0 available to all members of its Mashup Developer Community. Registration in the Community is free and includes tutorials, samples, and support forums. 

What is Next for Desktop Productivity Tools?

According to a new Forrester report, The Next Wave of Office Productivity by Sheri McLeish with Matthew Brown and Joseph Dang, Microsoft Office continues to dominate both in the enterprise and at home to no surprise. However, changes are affecting enterprise productivity strategies, such as Web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, and the consumerization of IT. Many enterprise workers use products like the iPhone and YouTube at home and they have expectations at work for similar functionality either through these tools or enterprise versions. As a loyal Mac. iTunes, and iPhone user who is still attached to Office, I was interested in where all these tools are going and appreciated getting a review copy of the report.

The report indicated that though most enterprises have long-term plans to continue using Office, alternative productivity tools will remain in the mix by leveraging the tools employees access for do-it-yourself technologies, such as those through mobile devices and the cloud. These evolving productivity tools will help enterprises transform to a fit-to-purpose approach to productivity, establishing the foundation for the next wave of productivity that's focused on aligning tools with employee needs. In the words of the report, “The next wave of productivity will see today’s innovations dissolve into expected features, creating integrated touch points for content-related activities tailored to fit a business purpose or workforce segment.”

They pointed out that the recent recession has driven interest in free or low-cost alternatives to Microsoft Office and has slowed upgrade plans. In the past year OpenOffice.org has seen a modest uptake by enterprises and is now supported by nearly 10% of the organizations Forrester surveyed. Similarly, cloud-based email from providers like Google is finding traction as a lower-cost alternative to Exchange. I covered the email wars recently (see: Email Wars Heat Up in the Cloud). Google’e move caused Microsoft to drop its prices.

Another factor is the growing interest business process integration and automation, another topic I have discussed here (see for example: Building Enterprise 2.0 into the Product Development Process). As enterprises increasingly use collaboration platforms like SharePoint and the best of breed players, they will (or should) increasingly seek to integrate business content and processes in an effort to move from simple content storage to content workflows. I see this as what needs to be done to really make use of the enterprise 2.0 approach and tools. In a similar way, the only successful KM efforts were aligned to work processes.

There is much more in the report and I found it very useful.  For example, the majority of people surveyed as a background for the report viewed alternatives to Microsoft Office as complementary, rather than replacements. In this light, many tools, including Microsoft Office 2010, are adding social computing capabilities. Other tools such as those from Google, IBM, and Novell are moving in the same direction. 

MindTouch 2010 Provides Intelligent Product and Services Documentation

I have written about MindTouch several times (see for example: MindTouch 2009 Provides Enhanced Development Platform for Rich Collaborative Applications). I recently spoke again with Aaron Fulkerson, their Co-Founder and CEO, on MindTouch 2010. First we set some context for this latest release.

MindTouch was first released in 2006 as an Open Source wiki-based platform. The initial goal was to attract users and this has been achieved with over a l million users in hundreds of thousands of installations. In 2008 MindTouch began to sell support subscriptions. Then in 2009 they released a commercial version that sits on top of the free Open Source core. They discovered that many users were building product and service documentation with the MindTouch platform.  These strategic efforts were used to engage potential customers, retain them, and increase cost savings through greater self-service.  The decision was made to create MindTouch 2010 to provide greater capability through an intelligent platform for this growing use case.  I think it was a wise decision.

As Aaron describes in a recent Forbes article, The Evolution Of User Manuals, product and service documentation has evolved from a tactical cost center to a revenue generating strategic tool. The advent of online documentation has learned with this transformation.  Now you can apply SEO to the documentation to proactively attract potential customers and MindTouch has done this. You can also track their pathway through the documentation to determine their areas of interest and offer appropriate solutions, another area that MindTouch supports. 

Aaron writes that some companies that he has spoken to report that their documentation brings in over 50% of qualified leads. He also notes that in his own company receives 70% plus of our site traffic from organic sources, and our documentation generates more than half of our overall site traffic. In addition, over half of their lead generation is driven by our documentation.

I can certainly believe this as I have seen similar results. This applies to both self-service documentation and that which supports call center reps. For example, is one company I worked with, the reps who made full use of the supporting product and service documentation were three times more likely to cross sell, moving from a below industry average achieved by the non-users to an above industry average for the documentation users.

MindTounch 2010 has enhanced three major areas to support this major use case. It now provides new capabilities for authoring, discovery, and curation of strategic content:

To support authoring MindTouch 2010 offers a multi-user, XML-driven editing platform that supports all rich media types. Users are able to publish in-a-click from commonly used desktop tools. The Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) ensures data portability. They also offer templates and Aaron walked me through some of these. A tutorial template not only provided short cuts but also offered good instructional format suggestions.  Here is a sample opening page offering templates.

 To support discovery MindTouch 2010 publishes content in a web-based format, dynamically generating navigation from content semantics and including effective search engine optimization tools. The enterprise-ready Adaptive Search engine delivers increasingly high quality results by learning from your users’ behavior.

Content curation is great new capability. To support this MindTouch 2010 introduces some targeted curation analytics. Customers can analyze their documentation by quality, aging and customer behavior in aggregate or by specific topics.  You can use out-of the-box reports can create custom versions. Here are two sample reports covering aging and rating..

Aaron showed me a few client examples. Autodesk provides CAD software. They had a large user base. So they provided a MindTouch powered set of educational services. Based on participants’ interest, they now can cross sell through the educational materials.  The pilot was very successful and now they are rolling the offering across all products. This is a clever approach.

I like what they are doing. It is a great example of a company listening to its users to identify an expanding market opportunity.  They not only listened well but also provided some useful new capabilities to serve this use case.

 

Enterprise Email Wars Heat Up in the Cloud

I recently received a review copy of a useful new Forrester report, Four Giants Compete For Your Cloud Email Business by Ted Schadler, that has a cost breakdown of cloud-based email services from the four leading vendors- Google, Microsoft, IBM and Cisco - and indicates that Google and Microsoft are in the lead for customers. Here is a good overview in Ted’s words from the executive summary.

“Google jumped into the enterprise email market in 2007 with a $50 annual subscription to its cloud email service and turned the market upside down. Microsoft quickly re-evaluated and repriced its Exchange Online offering to $5 per user per month; IBM launched LotusLive Notes and iNotes for $5 and $3, respectively; and Cisco purchased PostPath and opened its WebEx Mail offering with a 5 GB mailbox for $5 per user per month. Each of these big four collaboration vendors has since beefed up and clarified its road map for cloud email and collaboration services. Their email offerings are rapidly approaching feature and price parity — at least on the checklist items.”

Since I became an enterprise of one in 2004, I missed these most recent corporate email wars. My last employer moved from Notes to Outlook but Google had not yet turned the market upside down. Now both Google and Microsoft have bundled in their Web productivity apps, something that IBM and Cisco do not. Cisco allows you to use Outlook.

Over the next five years, Ted writes, enterprises will be re-evaluating their email strategy and partner. For vendors, it will be a tough five years as companies pick a messaging and collaboration partner for the next decade. Ted gives a nice way to estimate your total email costs that appear to be significantly cheaper in the cloud. However, there are migration costs to get there.

Forrester also expects that email will improve it gains features that improve usability and functionality such as: “analytics to perform triage on messages; collaboration features to make it easier to act on a message; in-message widgets to pull information relevant to the message; pushbutton publishing to a team wiki; messages, activities, feeds, tweets, etc., in a single inbox; and so on.”  This is good news and another alignment with the enterprise concept that suggests it is becoming standard. Many of the collaboration platforms already allow you to use them within an email client so this is going in the other direction but likely focused on the tools offered by the email provider. 

PBworks Provides Customer Relationship Collaborative: CRC

PBworks has now launched its PBworks Customer Relationship Edition, which extends CRM solutions such as Salesforce.com by offering shared online workspaces for collaborating with customers and prospects throughout the entire customer lifecycle.  I recently spoke with Chris Yeh, VP Marketing at PBworks about this new offering that they refer to as CRC or Customer Relationship Collaboration. This new term indicate support for collaboration with customers rather the management of them through CRM.

This platform allows for customer communication to more easily move out of the traditional channels of email and telephones to a more productive and transparent collaboration platform.  Now organizations have been using wikis and other collaborative tools for some time to set up shared space to communication with customers. It is one of the more common use cases that go across organizational boundaries. I asked Chris what is different with this new release.

He said that they have recognized that customer collaboration was one of the stronger uses cases of PBworks so they have designed the PBworks Customer Relationship Edition to optimize for this activity.  There are four main new capabilities.

The first is automated custom workspace creation.  The average company may have hundreds or even thousands of customers every year.  Customizing and personalizing each of those workspaces could take a considerable amount of time.  The Customer Relationship Edition automates that process by allowing you to specify "variables" in your workspace templates that are replaced with specific values when a new workspace is created.  For example, your presales extranet template might include "Client Name," "Company Name," and "Account Rep Name" on various pages.  When you create a new workspace for working with a potential customer, you simply fill in those three values up front, and PBworks automatically makes the substitution on any page on which they appear. Below is a sample branded login screen for a workspace.

The second key new capability is customer engagement monitoring.  One of the most frustrating things for any salesperson or account manager is not knowing if the prospect or customer is engaged in the relationship what actions they are taking.  PBworks provides this knowledge by tracking prospect and customer activity for you. It looks at several things: whenever a customer logs into their workspace, PBworks sends you an alert; whenever a customer views content or downloads a file, PBworks records the action. You can view customer activity as part of the overall activity stream, or filter out all distractions and review it in isolation. Below you can see a sample activity notification.

Third is the ability to set up common spaces to make information easily accessible that you want to share across all customers. This allows you to update this information once and provide secure access from every individual workspace you set up. Each customers can only see the there activities and not what the others customers are doing.  There is an associated chat feature with common repository but only people on the same team can see and engage in a chat.

In addition, there is also the ability to customize workspace templates to make it easy to adjust certain types of information while keeping other content constant.  You can create a PBworks workspace from within Salesforce.com and populate it with existing data from Salefcore.com. Then you can launch the workspace form within Salesforce.com. Below is a sample screen showing some of the customization features.

The PBworks Customer Relationship Edition is a nice addition for several reasons. First, it makes it easier to set up and operate one of the most common use cases for collaborative platforms. Second, it is a great example, of a vendor listening to its customers and acting of capabilities they request. I can see more examples of customized collaboration platform editions targeted at high value use cases. 

Electric Gadget Inter-City Challenges

Retrevo does some interesting surveys that I have covered before. Their new Gadget Census study pits the following U.S. cities against each other to see who has the most consumer electronics per capita. This census was conducted online from March, 2010 through July, 2010 and received over 7,500 individual responses from Retrevo users distributed across gender, age, and location.

1. San Francisco vs. New York

San Francisco has more Online TVs (12% more)

San Francisco has more Mac OS computers (94% more)

San Francisco has more iPhones (23% more)

New York has 56% more BlackBerries than San Francisco

New York has 30% more iPads than San Francisco

New York has 34% more e-Readers than San Francisco

2. Boston vs. L.A.

Boston: 44% more BlackBerries

Boston: 43% more e-Readers

L.A.: 11% more iPhones

L.A.: 54% more Mac OS computers

L.A.: 24% more game consoles

L.A.: 16% more Blu-ray players

3. Washington D.C. vs. Chicago

Washington D.C.: 53% more Blackberries

Washington D.C.: 50% more e-Readers

Chicago: 23% more Macs

Chicago.: 45% more people streaming music

Chicago.: 66% more people with more than 3 TVs

So the East coast seems the winner in BlackBerries and e-Readers. The West coast has more Macs and iPhones. LA plays a lot of games and Chicago watches a lot of TV. Now I am counter culture as I live in Boston and have a Mac and an iPhone. 

SkillSoft Takes Learning Platform Further into Enterprise 2.0 with More Social Features

I have covered SkillSoft before as they were moving in this direction (see SkillSoft Introduces More Web 2.0 Features with SkillPort® 7.0 Learning Management System). Now SkillSoft has announced the launch of inGenius, a social learning platform layer that enables customers to securely enable their employees to find, create and share knowledge assets and expertise with their colleagues as they leverage the extensive SkillSoft library of on-demand learning assets. I was very interested in this new move so I spoke with Pam Boiros of SkillSoft about their offering.

Pam first went through several trends that helped to prompt them to make this move.  Learning has become more social and the interest in peer learning has increased. I certainly agree with these observations. I have always been a proponent of social and peer learning through such methods as simulation-based learning going back to the 80s. It is great to see the rise of social computing providing a much richer platform for this approach. 

There is also the move from learning as an event to learning as a continuous process. This was one of the reasons I first got involved in knowledge management in the 90s and now the line between learning and KM is becoming even more blurred for good reasons.

To address these trends and take advantage of the new capabilities that social computing and social networks can bring to learning, SkillSoft’s Books24x7 division introduced inGenius. It enables social learning by extending the value of expert information and infusing it with the knowledge and expertise of an organization’s own employees. Unlike many stand-alone social networking applications, inGenius is built on SkillSoft’s Books24x7 on demand content collections containing more than 25,000 titles -- digital books from leading publishers, analyst research reports, and white papers -- as well as 1,300 videos of thought leaders and practitioners. Below you can see a inGenius home page.

inGenius enhances SkillSoft’s core learning assets with a feature set that enables learners to leverage content assets as seeds of discussion and to add community content (“co-content”) including notes, comments and ratings that add a unique layer of context and relevance, specific to their organization. It further enhances the social learning experience with opportunities to build connections and allow sharing between learners. inGenius also enables learners to discover knowledgeable colleagues by searching social profiles. Here is sample profile page.

inGenius is a free add-on to the Books24x7 offering. People can set up their own profile with recommended titles and comments on works. They also have implemented the following model used by Twitter so people can see the activities of those they respect. The activity stream contains auto-generated updates based on activities such as adding comments, rather than manually created tweets. You can click on a link in the update to see the actual comment in the context of the relevant learning material. I think this is a good approach for their content focused approach. Here is a sample activity stream.

When you do searches for content you now get additional returns on the people who have commented on this content or recommended it, putting a great social context to search, another good move. The addition of social networking capabilities to a learning library makes great sense and SkillSoft has done a great job with this release.

 

OpenSpan Accelerates the Automation of User Processes

Here is a software innovation that is potentially transformational.  I have long been interested in providing support to knowledge intense business processes. This was my first exposure to what became knowledge management in the early 90s and the concept behind many useful enterprise 2.0 implementations. Now OpenSpan is going beyond mashups to provide quick to create interconnections between applications to automate many aspects of business processes. As a result users have more time to focus on the decisions within these processes.  These automations can also create substantial time savings to drive significant ROI.

I recently spoke with Rick Marquardt and Francis Carden of OpenSpan about their offering. OpenSpan's User Process Management software provides an intuitive visual design environment for automating user processes within and across applications without requiring APIs or changes to the application's code. They have figured out a way to get inside the application even if it does not contain an API for this task. Developers have the ability to integrate Windows, cloud/SaaS and custom legacy applications, which enables organizations to improve user efficiency while extending the ROI of existing applications.

With OpenSpan organizations can go inside any application a user accesses, monitor user interactions to understand how power users operate and then automate processes to streamline these actions. Building these automations to connect applications is a drag and drop process as Rick and Francis demonstrated to me. Below you can see an example of making connections between a CRM application and an Order Entry system. This can eliminate the current out dated practice of cut and paste between apps to automate fill-ins.

 
Open Span can also monitor user activity to help determine which processes to automate and what applications to connect. In addition to reducing steps, this can also reduce the number of windows on a user’s desktop. Using the OpenSpan Events desktop monitoring technology, you can record every step in every user’s workflow, 24x7x365. It is no longer necessary to conduct sample time and motion studies or view screen recordings to try and guess what's happening. You can get the user’s detailed desktop interactions in real time for accurate monitoring. This can both help target where to automate and then track the ROI from these efforts. I have been involved in a number of call center monitoring efforts so I have first hand appreciation of the value of this capability. Below is a sample screen.

 
OpenSpan is now offering a free download of their IDE, OpenSpan Studio or the Plug-In for Visual Studio. Built on an embedded version of the Microsoft Visual Studio Framework, the plug-in can be used with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and makes OpenSpan functionality available for the first time via a .NET API. This means that developers can now access all of OpenSpan's runtime capabilities directly from code and mix and match .NET and OpenSpan projects in a single executable. OpenSpan has decided to make the tools available free and focus their commercial fees on providing the run time to support automations the developers create. I think this is a smart move. It reduces any financial risk until a solution is created that demonstrates value.

To further support developers OpenSpan has created the OpenSpan Developer Community. It offers  extensive resources, including a code gallery, knowledge base and forum for collaborating with other developers. This is another smart move as the objective is to empower developers with increased capability to create applications that use the OpenSpan runtime. The OpenSpan Developer Community is seen below.

 
I asked how this goes beyond mashups as they have a similar objective. Mashups generally only draw data from multiple sources. While this is certainly an improvement in application development, OpenSpan also can perform transactions within these applications by getting completely inside the applications. This can even work with third party applications. I watched OpenSpan connect a FedEx tracking system with an internal order processing application with only the requirement of gaining user access to the FedEx Web app, not developer access. Rick said that their clients have seen dramatic improvements in business process execution. I can believe this. As I said at the beginning this could be transformational. 

SuccessFactors Extend Its Enterprise Capabilities Through CubeTree Acquistion

I have written about CubeTree several times. The most recent was Cubetree engages its user community in product development. I also met a number of their executives at the last year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference so I was interested to learn that they have recently been acquired by SuccessFactors, another firm I have covered (see SuccessFactors: Bringing Web 2.0 to Talent Management). SuccessFactors is one of the world’s most widely deployed cloud-based business solutions. It is used by more than 8 million people within over 3,000 companies.

Recently, I spoke with Carlin Wiegner, the CubeTree CEO, about the impact of this acquisition and how CubeTree will fit within SuccessFactors.  First, he said that this move is opening a many more doors for them given the large installed base, new use cases in areas such as learning, and a larger sales force that SuccessFactors offers.  There is also great synergy between the two offerings. SuccessFactors has recently broadened their offering with the BizX performance management system that offers more robust support for knowledge workers.

The addition of Cubetree can take this BizX support to the next level with its many collaboration features. Individuals can quickly create rich profiles and begin engaging with others in their organization to get work done, find co-workers who can help, and share insights as they happen. Teams can make use of workspaces that enable groups to immediately gather around a project, collaborate, share documents and perform work tasks. Ciubetree also provides executive dashboards that offer insights into how a company is executing on a day-to-day basis. 

CubeTree will remain a separate brand as SucessFactors wanted CubeTree’s capabilities to both extend its own offerings and as an independent, but well aligned, offering.  For example, the SuccessFactor employee profile will now have CubeTree’s related communication and collaboration activities embedded within it.  Other aspects of CubeTree will findtheir way into the appropriate SuccessFactors offerings. The CubeTree micro-blogging feature will be embedded within SuccessFactors but also remain a separate free offering. 

Below is a sample screen from the micro-blogging feature. In this case you see a status update "in progress" where an employee is letting his co-workers know that he has wrapped up his current project and where he will be if they need him for the rest of the day. The CubeTree micro-blogging capability also integrates with Twitter. Below we see the same employee sending a notice about the release notes post to a customer who had a question about new features in this weeks release. By adding a custom hash tag (#cubetree) to his Twitter update it is posted to his CubeTree feed. He then adds a comment back that he is pushing it live on the blog.

CubeTree provides micro-blogging as a free feature and the other capabilities comes in a commercial package. I think this is a smart move as micro-blogging is the perfect way to introduce your offerings within an enterprise. It is easy to install and does not require integration with business process to obtain initial benefits. It can then be spread virally throughout an enterprise to quickly demonstrate value.

I also asked Carlin about what new features that CubeTree has introduced since our last conversation. They do frequent releases for continuous improvement but one of the main areas they have focused on is more robust email integration. CubeTree can work with any email client as it is not a plug in. Instead it sends messages that appear to the email client like any other message. This allows users to stay within email for many CubeTree activities. You can also have very robust email alert settings that can be easily turned on and off. Below you can see some of the robust email settings.

To complement the email integration there is also very robust mobile capabilities. Below you can see a message on a mobile device. The user is replying to an instant notification and posting it back to CubeTree

I like this combination as SuccessFactors and CubeTree nicely complement each other without bring redundancies to sort out.  Carlin said they sorted through several possible mergers. I do not know the other possibilities but I think they made a good choice. 

Tech Spending Is Coming Back. And It Might Even Stay

I recently wrote that collaborative applications market remains strong. Here is more good news as Businessweek reports that IDC predicts that global tech spending is set to rise by 3.8 percent, to $1.5 trillion this year after falling by 4.2 percent in 2009. In addition, Gartner predicts a surge in worldwide personal computer shipments—which are on track to rise 22 percent this year.

In my last post on collaborative applications I mentioned the potential success of best of breed players. The Businessweek report suggests that large players, Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, Adobe Systems and others have all reported strong earnings. Microsoft has sold 150 million copies of Windows 7 since its debut in October, making it the fastest-selling operating system in the company's history. Despite this Apple recently pulled ahead of it in market capitalization, at least for the moment.

In another survey by KPMG, tech executives indicate excitement over the newer, high-growth areas such as mobile computing, cloud-based software, and applications that can smartly analyze reams of data. Part of the growth is coming from newer markets. Sixty percent of tech executives surveyed by KPMG said they expect China to contribute more than any other country to their revenue growth over the next year.

Let the good news keeping rolling in. 

Novell Pulse Brings Real-time Collaboration to Enterprise 2.0

Novell’s latest collaboration offering, Pulse, provides a real-time collaboration environment for the enterprise that brings authoring, communication and social messaging together in a single secure solution. Built to work alone or in concert with existing collaboration tools, Novell Pulse uses the Google Wave Federation Protocol to allow seamless integration with other co-editing and collaboration tools, such as Google Wave, as well as new extensions that third parties can build on top of the Novell Pulse platform. It draws on instant messaging, document sharing, social connections, real-time co-editing and enterprise controls.

Recently I spoke with Andy Fox, the VP of Engineering at Novell and Wendy Steinle, Director of Marketing for Novell Pulse about what Pulse brings to enterprise 2.0. I have been intrigued with Google Wave (see My Notes and Thoughts on Google Wave Video Demo).  The Google Wave Federation Protocol allows any organization to build their own wave service that can interoperate with all other Wave providers, including Google. By adopting the Google Wave Federation Protocol, Novell Pulse will let users collaborate across systems, in real-time on a character by character basis.

Key features of Pulse include granular policy-driven controls at the person, group and organization levels. Collaborative editing and document sharing enable users to get work done with other users in real-time, from co-editable online documents to the ability to share, view and comment on traditional office documents in real time. Andy showed me an example of this. A single interface allows users to see, sort, filter and send direct messages, blog postings and group feeds from one place. Document presence shows users in this single in-box when their colleagues are visiting, editing or commenting on a document or message.

I asked Andy about microblogging and he said they have merged blogging and microblogging by allowing messages to start small but expand beyond the usual limits imposed on microblogging. He mentioned that many business messages often relate to documents and need to go beyond tweets. This flexible blogging capability allows users to share, follow and comment on topics and ideas.  You can engage in real time chat around documents or images. Unlike IM, these conversations are archived and become searchable.  Messages are seen by your followers and can be directed at individuals and groups.

The ease of use and ad hoc nature opens up some interesting use cases. For example, a manager can ask for her staff’s travel budgets. Instead of the siloed email option, the conversations can occur real time and in a transparent format.  While this open exchange can occur in a wiki, it is more difficult to set up and does not operate in real time.

In another example, document co-creation becomes simpler. It operates real time like Google Wave. The comments and brainstorming can be easily incorporated on a character by character basis. Collaborative meeting notes can operate in the same manner.

A suggestion system in Pulse allows users to recommend people and groups. There are also customizable personal and group profiles with added fields, sections, tables of content and gadgets. You can visit profiles to connect with other users or groups that a person is following or who are following that user or group.

Novell Pulse integrates with both Novell Teaming (see Novell Teaming 2 Brings a Richer Collaboration Feature Set) and Novell GroupWise (see Novell GroupWise 8 Brings Enterprise 2.0 Capability to Personal Productivity Functions). It is currently being used by over 4,000 customers in a pre-beta format.  Pulse is planned for a release later this year. I think it brings a number of innovations to enterprise collaboration and look forward to its release.

 

Netbooks Getting Squeezed by iPads and Cheaper Lighter Laptops

This should not be a surprise but a recent study by Retrevo confirms that netbooks are getting stiff competition from iPads.  They found that of people currently looking to buy an iPad or Netbook, 78% of them are leaning toward an iPad. 22% are leaning toward a netbook.  They also asked if buyers held hold on buying a netbook after the iPad was announced in January.  Here the results were mixed: 30% said no I went ahead and bought a netbook, 40% said yes but I eventually bought a netbook, and 30% said yes and I bought an iPad.

The study was one of many conducted by Retrevo. The sample size was over 1,000 distributed across gender, age, income and location in the United States. It also found that with laptops getting cheaper and lighter they are squeezing netbooks on the other end. Of those consumers who wrestled with the decision to buy a netbook or laptop, 65% chose the laptop and 35% chose a netbook over a laptop. In a similar way those now considering a laptop or netbook over the coming year 35% are leaning toward a netbook over a laptop and 65% are leaning toward a laptop over a netbook.

My friend Thierry Hubert has an iPad and I am impressed with its innovations. I can see its appeal.

NewsGator Ramps Up Activity Streams and Analytics and Becomes More Mobile

I have written about NewsGator before (see NewsGator Offers Social Sites ™: A Comprehensive Enterprise Social Networking Suite). I have been a fan of NewsGator for some time as they were my first RSS reader in early 2004 (see Finally, I’m Scanning the Web through NewsGator).  I recently spoke with Brian Kellner, VP of Product Management to catch up on their latest moves.

We started with the iPhone offering. NewsGator is offering a native social iPhone client for Social Sites on SharePoint. They have wisely taken a subset of the Social Sites features, picking the ones most likely to be used through a smart phone. The features center around a sophisticated microblogging suite to provide a focused activity stream that goes across applications. The idea is to provide a central place to receive updates of all types, comment, and pass them on.

Brian recently wrote about this concept in a blog post, “The Trojan Horse Battle for Your Event Store.”  He writes that, “in only a few years, a central event store will be a standard part of nearly all enterprises, and that architectural decision currently is being made indirectly at many organizations.” I certainly agree with this and have written related posts on several occasions. He goes on to write that, “microblogging seems to be achieving its greatest value in the context of broader activity streams that serve as a kind of nervous system for the company.”  This broader role for microblogging, as it becomes more widespread within enterprises, represents a great opportunity for both users and vendors. NewsGator has recognized this and is offering an application to provide the unifying activity stream or “event store.”

The latest NewsGator application for the iPhone is a large step in this direction. You can attach updates to an object or a link. You can attach an update to a context such as an event or a project, and you can react to updates from others, maintaining the context. To support these three capabilities, mobile users can use an iPhone to send status updates, videos and photos to Social Sites for distribution. They can comment on and “like” updates they value and see notifications when others comment on or like their updates. Below you can see an example of the iPhone interface.

Participation in community discussions is also enabled and users can target a question to a person or group. They see the updates that are radiating to others, view updates from a specific colleague or community, and look up contact information for colleagues. Below you can see comments on an activity. They can begin threaded discussions to maintain the context.

They are now planning a BlackBerry version to extend their smart phone coverage. The initial iPad client will contain all the iPhone features. NewsGator is also exploring what additional capabilities, such as content creation, should be added to the iPad client.

The enhanced microblogging features are also part of the desktop version of Social Sites 3.1 that is fully integrated with SharePoint. This SharePoint integration provides enhanced security and leverages existing SharePoint features such as the user profile, reducing redundant requirements. Below is an example of a Social Sites workspace within SharePoint. The iPhone version provides the functionality shown in the central column, while the web version offers the broader content in the three columns.

You can also have Social Sites as a desktop client independent of SharePoint and within your desktop as shown below. In addition, you can work with Social Sites through email notifications and replies. You can also get activity digests through email and respond back still within email.

We next turned to the enhanced analytics that Social Sites now offers.  The activity stream sets up a rich opportunity for analytics around the conversations and knowledge work within the enterprise. I think this is one of the major benefits of operating within an Enterprise 2.0 environment. NewsGator has recognized this and has done some nice work with data visualization. For example, you can get a tag cloud (as shown below) of the top 100 themes within the activity stream.

Clicking on any of these terms brings you to the instances of their use. You can also see the top ten experts on each term (as shown below). The person closest to the term in the middle is the most active. Several factors such as content authored, ideas generated, and tag usage weighs into the expertise scoring. You can see specific contributions for each expert in the right column.

This allows you to quickly see who is saying what to whom and stay better attuned to the pulse of the organization.  There are a number of other creative visualizations. For example, you can drill down into the actions of an individual in the chart above.

The enhancements to NewsGator demonstrate some of the exciting business possibilities that are arising as the consumer Web 2.0 tools get greater usage within the enterprise.  I look forward to seeing more.

Socialcast Adds Sharepoint and Outlook Integration, New Features, and Enhanced Metrics

Socialcast was one of the first enterprise microblogging providers (see 2008 post: Socialcast Brings Twitter Style Functionality into the Enterprise) and I have covered them several times since that first post (e.g., Socialcast Adds Broadcasting Capability to Enterprise Microsharing). Recently, I spoke with CEO Tim Young on the latest developments, which turned out to be quite a list.

We started at a high level. Tim sees a major shift in enterprise collaboration happening every twenty years: the business telephone exchange was introduced in the 1950s, the FAX in the1970s, email in the1990s and now activity streams – through tools like Socialcast – are starting to play a major role right on time, in 2010. I think there is certainly a movement beyond siloed email to the more transparent enterprise 2.0. Activity streams may be the tool that carries this transparency throughout the enterprise to reap the opportunity for increased awareness that enterprise 2.0 brings.

Socialcast is focusing its efforts on helping large enterprises, in particular those of 10,000 or more employees, increase their collaboration capabilities. I think this is a smart move given their capabilities and the market. To support this strategy they have made a number of moves, including enhanced features that we will look at: Outlook and SharePoint integration, and increased support for mobile devices. BlackBerry support has been added to their existing iPhone support, with an interface geared to align with BlackBerry features. All of these should appeal to the large enterprise user. They now refer to their role in the large enterprise as providing the enterprise activity stream engine or EASE. This capability can be deployed as a SaaS, a private cloud, or on-premises.

New features include the addition of automated updates to the stream based on user actions. Through their REST API they can mine these automated updates from almost any enterprise applications such as a CRM, data warehouse, or logistics system. Users operating within these systems can also submit manual updates in the traditional Twitter style without having to go into the Socliacast application itself. When someone replies to an update the reply is called a comment and it starts a threaded discussion on the topic.

In addition to the traditional microblogging follow/unfollow capability, there is the option for a universal update stream that users within a particular group can automatically follow using the enterprise’s LDAP. Socialcast can play in the foreground as the common interface to what is happening across many applications. Or it can operate in the background allowing users to stay within those applications. Email is one example of this. You can have Socialcast updates go into the email system, or you can use the email system to update Socialcast.

To further support this email integration, Socialcast has integrated with Outlook. Now Socialcast messages can be part of your Outlook folder and you never have to leave Outlook to use Socialcast. Currently, there is full support for Outlook 2003 and 2007, and 2010 will be supported soon. In the sample screenshot below, you can see Socialcast as part of the Outlook folder scheme and see Socialcast in operation with Outlook.

Tim said that the Outlook integration has proven to be a useful way to get late adopters within enterprise organizations participating in microblogging; people start within Outlook and many migrate to using Socialcast directly to access additional features. The SharePoint integration brings comprehensive microblogging capability to SharePoint and should provide a similar adoption path. There is support for SharePoint 2003, 2007, and 2010.

One of the major new areas is the addition of enhanced analytics that the company refers to as Socialcast Business Intelligence.  Some of its many features include organizational network analysis tools to identify the informal connections between individuals and groups. Socialcast reports on posting, commenting, and “liking” activity over time, offering insight into conversation initiation and response behaviors. There is also lurking and listening activity analysis. The interactivity patterns between users are identified, showing proactive and reactive relationships with others in their social graph.

Moments of transition from passive to active usage are also recognized, allowing you to find people and topics that start conversations. There is interactive visualization of all community discussions, surfacing the most active messages based on user interaction, popular posting times and dates. Here is an example of an activity analysis screen that shows a glimpse of overall network activity and top contributors, active teams and groups.

Here is an example of a deep dive into a user's activity, showing where he or she fits into the social graph.

Here is an example of the measurement of trending topics, important conversations, and influential members.

User roles are identified and defined as follows:  broker: spurs conversations that include input from a wide variety of users form different business units and departments, central connector: spurs diverse discussions from within their business unit or department, and peripheral player: engages infrequently and primarily with people from their business unit or department.  User activity levels are also reported on.

I was impressed with the depth and variety of analytics that Socialcast has conceived. I think it represents a strong step in the right direction of realizing the transparency that Enterprise 2.0 can provide. 

Google Opens Apps Marketplace and Zoho Joins with CRM and Project

Google’s recently launched its online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services. The Google Apps Marketplace makes it easier for more than two million Google Apps customers to discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and related professional services. By integrating with user account and application data stored in Google Apps, these cloud applications provide a simpler user experience that can increase business efficiency and reduce administrative overhead. It is another step in Google’s move to become a player in the productivity software space, especially the cloud version.

Now Zoho recently announced it has added Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects to the Google Apps Marketplace.™ These are two of their most popular offerings. Zoho had previously integrated their apps with Google at the log-in level with single sign-on.  Now, they are taking their integrations deepe using the enhanced APIs for Google Apps.

Users gain a variety of benefits from the integration of the Zoho applications with Google Apps. For all Zoho applications, the integration lets users automatically sign in to the Zoho applications with their existing Google Apps credentials. In addition, Zoho Business applications are listed in Google’s universal navigation, and Zoho application gadgets can be embedded in relevant Google applications, such as Gmail™, iGoogle™ and Google Sites™.

With Zoho CRM ussers can view Gmail emails in Zoho CRM contextually, so all Gmail emails exchanged with a Zoho CRM contact can be viewed. Users can also import contacts from Google Apps to Zoho CRM, view Zoho CRM calendar events in Google Calendar, and more.? 

With Zoho Projects users can view Zoho Project calendar events in Google Calendar and attach Google Docs™ files to Zoho Projects. 

Here is an interesting post, It Is Not About Our App, It Is About the User's Data and Context, by Zoho’s CEO Sridhar Vembu that discusses their integrate with Google Apps.  He writes that an important emerging theme in cloud applications is the one-browser-tab approach to design. In this case there is contextual integration of information across applications, so that whatever app the user happens to be in, relevant information is pulled from other apps and displayed it in the right context. This is a good move by both Zoho and Google. . 

Success Factors in Adopting Cloud Computing from Software AG's Miko Matsumura

Many people have written that cloud computing will become pervasive in the enterprise and I certainly agree. Recently, I spoke with Miko Matsumura, Vice President and Chief Strategist at Software AG and author of the Wiley book “SOA Adoption for Dummies” about how mature organizations can best adopt cloud computing. We also covered some related enterprise 2.0 adoption issues. I liked what he said so I am cross-posting this from the AppGap. 

Miko said he is working on a long paper on cloud adoption and shared some of the thoughts he is working on. He began with a definition of an enterprise as an organization that requires size, and longevity to carry out its mission.  This has implications for IT. First longevity tends to create IT segmentation and silos and this leads to complexity in IT supply. Size and growth create organizational fragmentation that leads to complexity in user demands on IT.  These factors can impact IT strategies. For example, SOA can be a rational response to simplify the complexity of IT supply but it can fail to address the complexity of user demands in not implemented correctly.

Miko puts these complexity factors in a 2 x 2 grid.  Organizations tend to start in the simple supply and demand quadrant. The ideal situation would be a simply IT supply that can meet complexity users needs. However, most organizations have developed a complex IT supply before all of their complex user needs had emerged. So, lacking a green field, this approach becomes difficult. If there is already a complex IT supply, the cloud can add to complexity, rather than simplifying it.

Now I asked Miko how can you be successful in this typical situation. He replied that several factors need to be present. First you need a mature understanding of how the behavior of the organization connects to the mission. This requires strong leadership. Then you need an enterprise IT architect that reflects this understanding. Unfortunately, most IT architectures are limited to IT issues and not business issues. It is not about optimizing IT, but optimizing the business.

This lead us to a discussion of process. Miko said that processes are done at the micro level. Part of the challenge for an organization is to become best in class in the many niches that their processes inhabit. Processes are often done in a silo and not at the enterprise level. The goal should be to align these silos but not to tear them down. Miko said that the goal of enterprise 2.0 is not to break down silos but to align them allow for cross-silo communication and collaboration.

This makes a lot of sense to me. It reminded me of some work I was involved within the early 90s that was done in the spirit of enterprise 2.0 but with the tools of the day. In a property casualty insurance company we created new processes for underwriting, claims and sales. The best practices of the organization where embed in individual applications. Then these applications were aligned and connected.  We were trying to break down silos of communication but not silos of processes and applications. These latter two types of silos were essential for efficient processes and should not be destroyed.  Now alignment of silos along a value chain is an enterprise level task and can benefit from enterprise 2.0 approaches.

This line of thought took us back to the question of cloud computing. To be successful it needs to recognize and deal with the complexity of user needs and the alignment of silos, but not the destruction of necessary silos.  I am sold. 

Mac Operating System Gaining More Business Capabilities

I am a long time Mac user so I was pleased to see 10 Reasons Snow Leopard Is Ready For Business. Now I started using Lisa before it was announced to help develop some of the training for it. Then I used the early desktop Mac. After a long break forced by several employers, I am now back with a Mac as I make the buying decisions for my enterprise of one.

Here are some of the ten more reasons to use a Mac for your business (from PCW) that I like.

In Windows data restored from the Recycle Bin is automatically restored to its original location. With Snow Leopard restoring to the original location is now an option on the Mac as well.

Snow Leopard adds the ability to sort Spotlight search results for more efficient searching. You can sort search data by name, date modified, date created, size, type of file, or label.

When printing Snow Leopard displays the printers that are detected nearby, enabling you to identify and configure the best available device for printing your document.

When a printer is connected Snow Leopard connects to the Internet and downloads the most current driver for the device

The menu bar item for AirPort displays signal strength for all available wireless networks so you can choose the strongest possible connection.

Snow Leopard has native support for connecting with Exchange. No need for Entourage. This last is not an issue for me but I know a number of people who will be pleased with this.

Thanks to Tony Bradley for supplying this overview.

How is SaaS doing within Large Enterprise Collaboration?

The Q3 2009 Forrester Wave™: Collaboration Platforms by Rob Koplowitz is out. It looked at eleven providers in the enterprise collaboration space. There is a lot of useful information there. I was struck that Central Desktop was the only pure software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering in the group. It has a focus on small and medium businesses, as well as enterprise departments. Forrester writes that Central Desktop, “is attractive to organizations and departments that are looking to deploy quickly and easily without IT support. To that end, Central Desktop may lack some higher-end enterprise capabilities, but it’s likely that those areas of functionality are not of interest to its target market. “

Other providers in the group have a SaaS offering but I do not know the percentage of revenue that comes from this option. It would seem that the big players are not betting on the cloud and/or the larger enterprises are not ready for it to handle their collaboration needs. Now on one hand these large enterprises are more equipped to handle on-premise solutions. Perhaps the are more risk adverse or have more conservative IT departments. The cloud is certainly more attractive to the small to mid-size firm as a quick and cost effective solution as Forrester notes.

Does this mean the title of this post should be “What is SaaS Doing within Large Enterprise Collaboration?” Personally, I do not see cloud–based enterprise collaboration as an oxymoron. I just think it may take time as I think it makes sense. I do know that the cloud providers that I speak with are doing quite well in today’s economy, as firms are looking for cost effective solutions that reduce upfront costs and long-term commitments.

Great iPhone Book – Best iPhone Apps from O’ Reilly

I recently bought an iPhone. Actually it was birthday present from my wife who wanted me to have a better cell phone as my ld one never worked right. O’Reiilly had sent me their book, Best iPhone Apps for review so I was now psyched to look it. I reviewed it with an experienced iPhone user, Thierry Hubert, who agreed with their picks while he was helping me set up my iPhone. Since there are over 50,000 iPhone apps to choose from, a little help is appreciated. Thierry really liked their picks and said he was going to get a copy of the book.

I really liked the format and the picks seem to make sense. There are quite a few useful categories and easy to follow format. I marked Air Mouse Control as a remote for presentations. Thierry said he uses it as well as Yelp for local dining recommendations. The book recommends Twitterrific for our favorite micro-messaging tool and Thierry agrees. Shazam allows your to let the phone listen to a tune and name it. Thierry says it works and George Dearing also tweeted to me that he got it to work. The there is Flight Track Pro for tracking flights. This will be useful to know when to pick up my wife at the airport.

I highly recommend the book. What iPhone apps do you use and recommend?

Where Do Old Computers Go To Die?

Here is an interesting story with great pictures, Where Old Computers Go To Die from PSFK. It reports that the old Commodore 64 or Apple IIC most likely wind up in a landfill somewhere (unless they’re collecting dust in your parents’ attic) still carrying a bevy of toxic materials like mercury, cadmium and lead to their graves. However, Western countries are increasingly exporting this problem to places like India.

This is the subject of a photography project by artist Sophie Gerrard titled E-Wasteland. Gerrard writes that “20 – 50 million tons of electronic waste, known as “e-waste” is generated annually worldwide.” When I got my Mac, I keep the PC so I could access to a Windows machine if needed.

Those new “green” light bulbs also have mercury and may cause more problems than they cure.

Post Script: I am getting a number of comments to this on Facebook. One is the need to make sure you erase all you data however you dispose of you computer. See When You Need to be Absolutely Certain Your Data is Really Gone.

Rise of Micro-messaging in Enterprise Collaboration Platforms

It seems like all the enterprise collaboration platforms are adding more features to become a suite. Th emor eI talk to the more they are developing a similar comprehensive suite. This is not a bad thing, It validates the market an these features.

One of the key elements is the addition of micro-blogging or micro-messaging. For example see some of my App Gap reviews:

Yakabod Provides Robust Knowledge Management with a Social Side

BlogBridge Release 6.6 Integrates Twitter with Comprehensive RSS Reader Capabilities

CubeTree Releases Innovative Enterprise Collaboration Platform

Atlassian Announces Confluence 3.0

Traction Software Releases Team Page 4.1 – Better Enabling the Social Side of Work.

I am sure I missed some. At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference a number of others announced this capability such as Central Desktop. I welcome additions to this list through comments.

When You Need to be Absolutely Certain Your Data is Really Gone

I learned something new from this interview about how I was unknowingly leaving data exposed so I want to share my AppGap post on Drive eRazer here. We often talk about the new transparency in enterprise 2.0. However, there are times when we need to go the other way and eliminate any access to information. Perhaps you believe the system messages and think that anything put in your trash folder and deleted goes away. Not so. You might need some expertise to find it, but is still there.

I recently spoke with Jon Johnson of WiebeTech, a subsidiary of CRU-DataPort. Jon said that as a test, they bought twenty used drives on eBay and recovered everything from corporate data to email conversations to financial data to legal documents. To correct this problem, WiebeTech's new Drive eRazer™ hardware solution erases all data from a hard drive quickly and easily. You simply plug it into the hard drive and it does the rest. Here is one of the devices.

Drive eRazer is like a shredder for electronic data, and there is even an incinerator model. Drive eRazer writes over every bit of a drive. Even after one pass, there can be ‘”ghosts” of data that experts can piece together. A second pass approach is available that takes this stuff out completely, even the ghosts. After it's done, there's nothing left to recover.

Jon explained that there is a secure erase function on almost all hard drives. It was developed as a standard by the industry. However, it is very hard to access and use as the industry experts did not want people easily able to accidentally delete stuff. Drive eRazer takes advantage of this utility to do its job. This can be important in a variety of contexts and is essential when you want to sell or donate your hard drives.

I certainly learned something. Drive eRazer is compliant with the Department of Defense requirements for "clearing" a "Non-Removable Rigid Disk." The specification requires destruction of a hard drive containing government classified data.

Founded in 2000, in addition to erasing data, the focus of WiebeTech is delivering high performance portable storage solutions for consumer, business and government markets. WiebeTech also offers computer forensic devices which are critical tools used by criminal investigators collecting suspect data. In 2008, CRU-DataPort acquired WiebeTech to complement its line of data security and data mobility solutions.

What Is the Best Business Model When Data and Content Storage Becomes a Utility?

This post started with a conversation with Paula Thornton (twitter.com/rotkapchen). We were discussing the implications of the cloud for business processes and software and Paula used the term, data as a utility. It got me to thinking about the implications of this. Here, I want to address the business model issue that will either carry forward or compromise the potential with the cloud.

Most SaaS providers I talk with are doing very well in the down economy. Some are having record profits. For example, Jen Grant at Box.net said that as a SaaS provider they continue to exceed their revenue targets. She attributed this to pressure on IT departments and business units to keep expenses down. With Box and many other SaaS tools, it is easy to get started and there are no implementation or systems integration costs. Employees still need to do work. Box and other SaaS tools provide a lower cost way to accomplish many content related tasks.

While Spigit, the innovation management software firm, offers both cloud and on-premise solutions, 95% of their customers are choosing SaaS. SkillSoft, the eLearning company said that an increasing majority of their customers are selecting the SaaS option. GroupSwim has gone to a total cloud offering so they can scale quickly, another major benefit of the cloud and making servers virtual. QuickBase has also seen significant growth for its SaaS based shareable database despite a down market. They feel that companies are seeing this class of applications as a way to both cut costs and increase productivity.

SaaS is an important component of the move to Enterprise 2.0. The analysts seem to agree with the software providers I have talked with. IDC recently issued the report, Software as a Service Market Will Expand Rather than Contract Despite the Economic Crisis. They projected that by the end of 2009, 76% of U.S. organizations will use at least one SaaS-delivered application for business use. SaaS applications are also getting an increasing percentage of IT budgets.

So where will this all go? According to the Wikipedia, electricity was once generated on premise but through a series of technology innovations, the grid and remote sourcing of power became possible. It took a while to get the business models sorted out and FDR won his first election, in part, on the promise to clean up the corrupt electric utilities of the day.

I am not suggesting there is anything like that corruption going on now with the cloud. However, as use of the cloud grows the final business model does remain to be determined. Will it become a utility in the business sense, as well as the practical sense? Will it need regulation? I hope not but how to we ensure its potential is realized?

The cloud players continue to grow. For example, Amazon went from selling books online to also becoming a major cloud service provider. However, it and several of the other major cloud players have not signed the Open Cloud Manifesto. I am not taking sides on this issue, just noting that there is an issue.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a non-regulatory arm of the US Commerce Department, has helped by developing a draft definition for federal use of cloud computing. They are ahead of the private sector here. Let’s hope that those who stand to benefit from the cloud can come to agreement that allows the cloud to reach its potential and helps the users, as well as our economy.

It will take a while for the final business model to evolve as the cloud moves data and content storage toward becoming a utility in a practical sense. Let’s hope we do a better job that we did with electricity.

Forrester: MS Office Still Strong in the Enterprise

CIO Magazine reported that Forrester recently released new research that indicates that despite the advent of heaper alternatives to Microsoft Office, Office remains strong. It continues to mostly shut the alternatives out of the enterprises despite reduced budgets and a struggling economy. However, they did say that as the economy worsens cheaper alternatives may tempt businesses.

I continue to use Office in my enterprise of one for four reasons. First it is what everyone else uses so sharing document sis easily. Second, I am used to it so I do not have to learn a new system. Third, all my old documents are in Office so I do not have to migrate them except perhaps between versions. Fourth, it is already paid for so it does not cost me anything more.

I do find the older 2004 version better for me and use it rather than Office 2007. I only got Office 2007 because my hard drive crashed and I had to replace my productivity software.

The Forrester results found that nearly 92 percent are supporting either Office 2007 or Office 2003 or earlier. Only 3.3 percent use Google Apps; 2.6 percent use Sun StarOffice 8 or 9; and 1.9 percent use Lotus Symphony.

Forrester's also found that “a large majority of companies surveyed have plans to upgrade to Office 2007, with 14 percent planning to do so in the next six months, 27 percent in the next year and 26 percent in the next two years.”

“The primary drivers for upgrading Office suites are that business needs demand new or different tool support (34.2 percent) and also that companies' current tools are no longer supported (23.7 percent) or are no longer compatible with external partners (15.8 percent).”

It did find that many of these plans to upgrade Microsoft Office have been delayed by the economic downturn, 38.2 percent said the economy has delayed plans and 5.3 percent said it has halted plans.

So we have a strong inertia situation. It seems that as long as desktop productivity tools are used, it will take a lot to replace Office. Most of my work is now done in the cloud with Office as the main holdout. Many of the enterprise 2.0 venders recognize this and have means to integrate with Office

Caspio Offers Flexible and Fast Online Database Development for Business Users

The cloud has opened up enhanced opportunities to store and access data. However, for enterprises to take full advantage of this new power, database development tools need to be accessible to self-service by the typical business user without limiting any of the database’s flexibility or scalability. Caspio was designed to meet this need and I recently spoke with their CEO, Frank Zamani.

Frank said Caspio was founded in 2000 before the cloud hype started, as he saw the need to enable the development of Web apps by business users. It was his second tech startup. Frank took the first, Autoweb, an online car purchasing platform, public in 1999. While Frank wanted to speed up the process of moving databases from the desktop to the cloud, he decided to keep the familiar look and feel of desktop applications. Caspio uses AJAX to give its users a development environment that is intuitive to users of traditional desktop databases such as Microsoft Access.

Caspio Bridge is their flagship fully-featured product. It covers the entire end-to-end process of setting up and maintaining an online database. Frank took me on a tour. You can set up as many tables as you want either by importing data from an existing tool such as Excel, or by creating your own data entry forms. Caspio uses Microsoft SQL Server as the backend so it is highly-scalable and reliable.

Caspio Bridge “DataPages” allow you to create application interfaces to your data using step-by-step wizards and you can embed these DataPages directly in your Web pages. This feature means that you do not have to go to the Caspio site to launch your application. Frank showed me a number of examples where Deloitte, Equifax, and Fitness Magazine created Web applications that they embedded in their own sites. This is very useful for enhancing company Web sites.

Many newspapers have picked up on this and Caspio is the platform-as-a-service provider for over 75 percent of major US newspaper sites, including my home town’s Boston Globe. They enable the Web site embedding through JavaScript rather than the less productive means of using i-frames.

I especially liked an application by the Indianapolis Star that promoted citizen journalism. Anyone can file a story. Once the story is approved by the paper, it goes online. Through a mashup with Google Maps, you see where stories are breaking.

Frank quickly demonstrated how you can set up a database, create Web forms and search interfaces, and then embed the apps in any Web site. You can also pick any of the fields in the database to serve as search filters and allow for a drill down into the details behind a search result. There are a number of styles available to customize the design and a localization feature allows you to apply a large number of languages.

You can make fields editable and/or required and you can require a password for access to the DataPages. They created the sample database and set up the password protection in a Web site in about 5 minutes with no coding. All of this is done through point-and-click selections in Caspio’s wizards.

Caspio also provides APIs and you can extend it through any programming language so there are no special learning requirements. Additionally, Caspio’s embedded deployment makes it easy to syndicate apps across multiple Web sites. For example, one newspaper set up a restaurant violations database on its Web site. This same search form is easily syndicated on other Web sites as a widget.

There appears to be a nice combination of flexibility, power, and ease of use. I can see how it is popular, especially with enterprise and media Web sites. Frank also writes a Caspio Highlights blog to provide more context for the product.

More on Tearing Down the Social Media Silos

Yesterday I posted on FastForward, We Need to Tear Down the Social Media Silos. It was partially based on an interesting post by David Chartier, The Future of Social Media: The Walls Come Crumbling Down. He focuses primarily on the consumer Web and writes, “But for the social web to evolve into its final stage and take flight, the walls that separate these services, their users and everything they create will have to come down.”

David then goes on to quote Leo Laporte, a broadcaster who runs the TWiT network. Leo calls the phenomenon "the social silo," and he does not feel it can last much longer. "People are pouring all this content and value into individual sites," says Laporte, "but they aren't going to want to keep dealing with Facebook, and Twitter, and FriendFeed, and whatever is next." I could not agree more. There is more in that FastForward post and I will not repeat it all here. I concluded that the same thing is operating within the enterprise.

In this post I want to offer another Web example and make a request to the application developers. This blog now gets syndicated in a number of sites: Social Media Today, MyVenturePad, Content Management Connection, BlogBurst, my Facebook page, and several other sources including LexisNexis, CanWest, Amazon Kindle, and Newsbank through Newstex. Now most of my posts do not generate a lot of comments. However, sometimes there are comments and they get sprinkled around the different outlets. This last week I got comments on several posts through Facebook for the first time. I make it worse by sometimes cross posting from FastForward or the AppGap to share information with additional audiences.

It would be great to have an application that aggregated all of the comments on a post. This would enable me to see everything in one place and for the commenter to see what others are saying. I am not aware of an application that does this. I think it would be useful and would break down one more set of social silos.

Equilibrium MediaRich Digital Asset Management for SharePoint and Other Platforms

While I still say text is king on the web, the web is moving beyond text with an increasing use of visualizations in many media. I recently spoke with Sean Barger, CEO of Equilibrium, a firm that supports this transition. Sean said that the web and television are moving towards convergence and I would agree. He has been working in the automated media processing space for the past 15 years.

Equilibrium recently released MediaRich® Visualizer for SharePoint. This enterprise-class freeware server software provides instant visual enhancements to any SharePoint deployment, as well as high-volume media processing and distribution. It is a subset of their MediaRich Core product. It automatically creates thumbnails for all Microsoft Office, PDF, images, and videos in SharePoint. It supports more than 300 common file formats and includes a Zoom and Pan function to examine the the details of the file without having to download it first.

MediaRich Visualizer also helps integrate the use of Macintosh computers in a SharePoint environment. It provides batch uploading of assets, including the ability to upload complete folders while preserving their directory structure from both Windows and Macintosh.

Sean showed me how MediaRich Visualizer permits advanced searching on all media asset metadata throughout the enterprise. It upgrades Microsoft Advanced Search with IPTC, XMP and EXIF capability. When you upload media, all metadata is extracted and added to the Microsoft SQL Server database for search. This allows you to extend the search capability for media and have on-demand visualization of the results. Here is an example of search results before MediaRich Visualizer.

Here is an example of the search results after MediaRich Visualizer.

You see the media-related results faster and also see things that were not visible before. For example, in the past you would have to download and open a file to see if it was the right one. Now you can look into the file without downloading it. This is a great speed boost when you are searching for specific files and trying to find the right version.

Equilibrium offers a more comprehensive commercial product, the full MediaRich for Sharepoint, which has the same features offered by the Sharepoint freeware and the ability to turn on expanded API’s for for creating custom applications for web or intranet portal site. MediaRich is used by Disney for its internal content sharing and collaboration between all its business units. It also serves as the visualization platform for the Associated Press ENPS content distribution system which is used by 60% of online news sites.

Sean also showed me the zoom and pan feature that allows you to zoom in on any file in-page on in a popup and enabling automatic resizing to fit the window as you expand or contract it. This is not what happens on normal popups and is a useful feature and apparently very scalable because no pre-processing of the files are required to achieve these capabilities.

As the web, inside and outside the firewall, becomes more engaging, MediaRich becomes an increasingly useful platform. It also helps speed the transition to a more visually rich and self-service environment which should increase productivity.

Future of Search?

Here is an interesting bit from Liz Ruskin, contributing editor of SmartBrief on Leadership taken from a panel on Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles.

“Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun Microsystems, said that now we’re impressed when Google searches a sea of information for us in mere seconds but we should be dissatisfied with this mode of search. In the future, he said, search will be done for us. Every electronic device we buy will connect to a network and our search results will be based on things like our location to our preferences and past behaviors. Search engines will know what we mean, not just the definitions of the words we use to describe it.”

This is an interesting tease. I tried to find more on Google but only found references to his views on cloud computing and open source. He likes them. Does anyone know more about this?

Get Microsoft Word and Excel Functionality for Your iPhone

Here is another app for your iPhone. I like this application. I might be getting an iPhone soon and if I do, I will be sure to get Quickoffice also. Quickoffice has been in the business of supplying productivity software to mobile devices for a number of years with 100 million applications running on the Palm, Nokia’s Symbian, and other systems. They provide native viewing and editing of Microsoft® Office documents in over 47 languages. Quickoffice recently made available their full Office suite for the iPhone with Word and Excel editing capability. It is named Quickoffice for iPhone. I spoke with David Halpin, their VP of Engineering. David said they have applied the code and lessons learned with other systems to create the iPhone application so it is a mature application running on a new platform.

He showed me how it worked. We first looked at Word functionality. Quickoffice for iPhone has an intuitive user interface and supports comprehensive functionality including cut, copy and paste, font formatting, content selection and bullets within Word documents. You often use finger taps instead of moose clicks. You can single and double tap. You can even triple tap to select a paragraph. You can zoom in on text to make your finger taps more accurate by holding your finger down. This is a feature I need with my fat fingers. I like the way the text word wraps so you do not have to scroll from side to side but just scan down. You can vary the text size and the screen redoes the word wrap. Here is a sample screen with some editing functions.

Users can also bring up a wider keyboard to edit and create documents in landscape mode (see below).

Excel functionality is similar to Word but tailored for spreadsheets. It includes extensive mathematical and statistical formulas, with 125 functions. Other useful features include file sharing capabilities via Wi-Fi desktop connectivity and access to one's MobileMe iDisk account. Editing is done while maintaining perfect data integrity, in addition to 'auto-save' to ensure none of your work is lost on-the-go. This auto-save is important on the iPhone, as it can only do one thing at a time. If a phone call comes in, it will quit Word. After you finish the call Quickoffice takes you back to where you where in Word. Here is another editing screen.

I asked David about the main uses of Office applications on a mobile device. He said it has primarily been for viewing documents and making minor edits. Now there are also netbooks, sized between mobile phones and laptops, that allow for more editing. Quickoffice is increasingly providing capabilities for these devices. More editing occurs with these larger devices.

Since Quickoffice connects to the cloud, you can access data in such sources as Apple’s MobleMe. This opens up the future possibilities of adding collaborative features and this is part of the vision for Quickoffice. David said they will not try to rebuild the many collaborative features in the multiple platforms already on the market, but rather allow you access to these platforms. They want you to get to your data from a mobile device and work with it regardless of where it is stored.

Quickoffice for iPhone will also make its functionality available in separate applications to cater to an individual's needs. Quicksheet, formerly MobileFiles Pro, includes only Excel editing functionality and Quickword features only Word editing. Quickoffice Files, formerly named MobileFiles 2.0, enables users to access and view documents.

David said that Microsoft has been opening up access to Office functionality. The 2003 and 2007 releases make it easier to connect with these tools. Quickoffice for iPhone is available through the Apple App Store for $19.99. Many of their other offerings are shipped on Symbian devices. The changing economy is putting pressure on many of these device suppliers and business models in this market are adjusting. However, overall the market remains robust.