Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

This Month In Collaborative Thinking

Blogger: Mike Gotta

Some recent posts on Collaborative Thinking. Follow the citation links to read the full article(s):

For Those Caught In The Wave...

There is a great deal of "irrational exuberance" about Google Wave in the news right now given its current state (pre-beta). While prognostications on how it will derail existing solutions make for good press coverage, such statements should be viewed as part of the natural enthusiasm when something creative and innovative comes along.  This is a ways off... 

IBM Plugging Holes In Connections/SharePoint Integration

...Despite this plug-in, I still believe IBM has made a fundamental and perhaps unrecoverable competitive mistake by not being radically more aggressive regarding SharePoint integration. The window for IBM to have entrenched itself in "SharePoint shops" for social computing is just about closed in my opinion given that Microsoft will begin talking about the next version in greater detail later this year.

Saba Social Left Out Of IBM Deal

...However, there are some nuances in the deal. The focus of the partnership is between Saba's platform and IBM's WebSphere platform, not the Lotus software stack. Specifically, there was no mention of what the deal means in terms of Lotus Connections and Saba Social.

Persistent Group Chat in Office Communications Server R2

In August, 2007 Microsoft announced its intent to acquire Parlano. Parlano's leading product, MindAllign, delivered "persistent group chat". After the acquisition was completed, Microsoft has kept quiet on exactly how it would adapt Parlano's technology and deliver it as part of Office Communications Server (OCS). With OCS R2 launched in February 2009 that mystery has been resolved...

Oracle Beehive 1.5: Still A Work-In-Progress

Oracle makes the case the collaboration has been fragmented across three major domains (Enterprise Messaging, Team Collaboration, and Synchronous Collaboration). This has resulted in tools being deployed that are more costly for organizations to deploy and maintain from an infrastructure and operations perspective. At least that's the argument. There are some key points to consider however (for a brief analysis of Beehive, read the full post):

Google Announces Wave to Much Fanfare

For those caught up in the Google Wave announcement, I just wanted to point to postings from members of the Collaboration and Content Strategies team:

• Mike Gotta: "irrational exuberance"
• Craig Roth: "magician’s hand-waving"
• Larry Cannell: "the audacity of scope"
• Guy Creese: "A+ for vision and market impact ... solution for large enterprises expect Google  a solid D, consumers and SMBs, I wouldn't be surprised if it's in B+ territory"

Is Your Website Irrelevant?

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Robin Hamman makes some really good points in his post “Your corporate website is irrelevant.”

Twentieth century corporate structures, which, to borrow sentiment, if not words from Lee Bryant, put the World's window upon your organisation in the hands of the IT guys in the basement and the marketing department are crumbling under the weight of peer-to-peer recommendations and reviews, consumers tweeting about their experiences, audiences creating their own groups on facebook, and outraged citizens discussing the expense claims of MPs on blogs.

This is similar to what we said in our Burton Group Report “Web Content Management Systems: Managing Web Presence in a 2.0 World.” Thinking your website is the only place a customer can get information about your company may be a very naive position to take.

However, while I agree with Robin that a standalone website is likely to be less important today and enterprises need to consider their entire web presence, I wouldn’t go so far and say all companies need to have a presence on social networking sites. For many companies a presence on Facebook, for example, makes a great deal of sense. But for many others it may not. For example, a supplier whose primary customers are automotive companies might be better off to focus on localization of their web content (in particular provide English, German, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese versions of their content) than to start a Facebook fan page.

I think the advice Chuck Hollis gave in a blog post entitled “Does It Make Sense To Have A Corporate Presence On (insert name of popular social platform here)?” applies well here:

You know, if someone asked me "does it make sense to go to Cleveland?", I'd have to ask the obvious question -- why do you think you need to go to Cleveland?

There's an implied context here of goals and objectives that serve as a framework for any decision we might make about anything. I'd encourage people to think in these broader terms of what we might want to get done, rather than the pros or cons of any particular social platform.

Changing Assumptions About Search

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Unless you been unplugged from the Internet for the past month you’ve likely heard about Wolfram Alpha. Early on (before it was released for public use) and based on the first impressions of many, it was claimed to be a “Google Killer.” Now, we are seeing a chorus of bloggers saying it is something different and will definitely not kill Google.

While Wolfram Alpha doesn’t appear to be a Google Killer, it does kind of look and act like a search engine. So the confusion is understandable. At the very least, Wolfram Alpha is a thought provoking experiment in information retrieval.

However, the fact that so many people first described Wolfram as a search engine (contrary to how Wolfram describes itself in it’s FAQ) is what I find most intriguing. In many ways, Wolfram is causing each of us to re-examine our own definition of search:

• If an application uses a natural language processing (NLP) interface (i.e., just type text in a box and click submit), does that make it search? Probably not. But our use of the simple Google type-and-click experience is clearly coloring our expectations of computer systems. This reminds me of a theme FAST (and now, Microsoft) pushed the last two years at the FASTforward conference: search is a “user experience,” not just information retrieval.
• Many of you may have noticed that Wolfram Alpha contains structured data but search generally deals with unstructured content. So clearly Wolfram Alpha is not search, right? The problem is this statement makes virtually no sense to the average enterprise knowledge worker (“structured data…unstructured…huh?”) who might find a system like this useful. They just want information to make a decision, structured or otherwise. Describing a solution by the type of data it uses is a slippery slope.

This isn’t the first time there’s been confusion around what is and isn’t search. Enterprise examples of this are being sold by companies like Endeca, FAST, and Attivio. These systems are blending structured data and unstructured content in new and interesting ways, with interfaces that allow broad exploration of information, regardless of its source. The blogosphere’s confusion around Wolfram Alpha will be familiar to IT strategists who’ve tried to explain these systems to their CIO.

Maybe these new systems shouldn’t be called search. But how would you describe them otherwise? Let me know by posting a comment below.

Calendars: A Personal Tool in an Enterprise World

Blogger: Bill Pray

One of the challenges with calendaring and scheduling technology in the enterprise is that people’s time is intensely personal. While the tools are used to bring together what is, hopefully, the right people at the right time in the workplace to get things done… they are dependent upon the individual’s time and availability. As David Allen puts it in his book Ready for Anything, “We’re all alone in this together.” Time is part of the equation for workplace, as it is half of what the employee promises to the employer – their time and their efforts.

Because of this, each employee’s needs for calendaring and scheduling becomes unique, because no two employees spend their time in exactly the same way. As a result, technology struggles to meet the needs of every unique situation. This is compounded, obviously, when trying to bring together workers through scheduling using calendar technologies that are unable to show and account for each employee’s unique needs.

Therefore, technology and worker need to meet in the middle. Calendaring and scheduling tools need to improve in their ability to function across collaboration environments and be more intuitive. The information worker needs to effectively use these tools to manage their time. David Allen quotes Peter F. Drucker in the same chapter as the quote above: “This responsibility for thinking through what one’s contribution should be and one’s own responsibility as a knowledge worker rests on each individual. In the knowledge organization it becomes everybody’s responsibility, regardless of his or her particular job.” Calendars are the tool, time management is the responsibility.

“You’re the only one playing your game.” – David Allen, Ready for Anything.

Enterprise Twitter: Fad Or Tipping Point

Blogger: Mike Gotta

If you are a Burton Group client, just a reminder of the TeleBriefing available to you this week. Below are the possible topics and discussion areas we'll cover:

Business Topics

• Why are these tools relevant? What capabilities are driving interest from enterprise strategists?
• Who is the “buyer” (business and/or the IT organization)
• Solutions: general conversation and community-building vs. specific applications
• Business case, ROI, and metrics
• Legal, compliance, and security issues

Technology Topics

• Platform architecture
• SaaS and/or on-premises (appliance)
• Alignment with unified communications (e.g., instant messaging, mobile)
• Integration with existing enterprise infrastructure (e.g., identity, security)
• Integration with enterprise content management (e.g., e-Discovery, compliance)

Organizational Topics

• User experience (and the influence of Twitter)
• Cultural issues / barriers
• Behavior change and social messaging adoption
• Community & social networking dynamics

Futures

• How do these tools evolve?

TeleBriefing Description

Social messaging, sometimes referred to as micro-blogging, has become incredibly popular on the Internet, exemplified by soaring use of consumer services such as Twitter. Twitter’s growing audience has raised questions as to whether such communication models are applicable within the enterprise. Strategists are considering social messaging as a means to improve not only information sharing and collaboration but also facilitate social networking and community building. There are concerns however. How does social messaging conflict with ongoing unified communications efforts (e.g., instant messaging)? What level of security and compliance requirements are there for these tools? Join Principal Analyst Mike Gotta of Burton Group, along with CEO Tim Young of Socialcast and CEO David Sacks of Yammer as they discuss all of these topics and address questions from audience participants.

Presented by: Mike Gotta, Tim Young CEO Socialcast, David Sacks CEO Yammer

Dates:

Tuesday, May 19, 2009
2:00 p.m. EDT/11:00 a.m. PDT/18:00 UTC GMT/20:00 CEST

Wednesday, May 20, 2009
9:00 a.m. EDT/6:00 a.m. PDT/13:00 UTC GMT/15:00 CEST

When You're a Productivity Suite, Everything's a Nail

Blogger: Craig Roth

One of the arguments that many alternate productivity suite vendors have made is that most users of Office are not power users and don't need all the complex functionality it provides.  These basic users just want the ability to create simple documents, spreadsheets, and presentations and the unneeded complexity of Office makes Office bloated, overly complex, and too expensive.  Guy Creese summed it up well:

Both sides of this argument are wrong: Microsoft saying that you need to overbuy because you never know when a worker might need a certain feature (true, but not as often as Microsoft claims); Google, IBM, and Sun saying that you don't need all that functionality (actually, sometimes you do).

In thinking through some common productivity use cases with Guy for some upcoming research he's doing on productivity suites, it occurred to me that an argument could be made that certain complex features should be left out not because they're infrequently needed, but because they don't belong in that tool in the first place. 

Microsoft has given the world three hammers in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and now every content situation looks like a nail to information workers weaned on these tools.  They are very generalized tools and have been expanding in functionality to incorporate many situations that other tools would be better for.

To give just a few examples I often see:

• Excel as a database and reporting tool.  It's not uncommon to see spreadsheets with thousands of rows being maintained and various tricks to get summary data out of them and enable multiple users to input data into it.  Isn't that what simple end-user databases are supposed to do for you?
• PowerPoint as a photo slide show.  I keep getting .pps files with slide shows of funny pictures or inspirational images, one .jpg per slide.  Why?  Just to save the trouble of someone figuring out how to use a zip file of .jpgs?
• Excel as business intelligence tool. Excel is often cited as the #1 BI tool.  Depending on how high-falutin' your definition of BI is (and mine stretches to OLAP), shouldn't you just use a BI tool if that's what you want to do?
• Word or PowerPoint as a page layout tool.  Want to create a greeting card?  Or do fancy layout of a newsletter?  That's why there's a category of software for doing page layout and publishing, ranging from consumer-level to professional. 

While there's no doubt sometimes people stretch tools too far simply because they are familiar with them, it shows forethought and flexibility when new uses for a tool keep cropping up.  Specialized tools can be expensive and require learning yet one more interface.

Ultimately, this is just one facet of the "which tool to use?" problem I outlined previously, and it extends to most tools in the information worker toolbelt, from using e-mail for collaboration instead of a collaborative workspace to collating changes in Word docs instead of using a wiki.

Sometimes Even Google Needs Metadata

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Earlier this week Google announced a number of new features coming to their Internet search engine. The most interesting to me was their plans to start returning a “snippet” about a web page in search results. Here is what they said:

“These ‘rich snippets’ extract and show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that you are used to seeing. For example, if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant's price range:”

Sounds cool. But, the most intriguing line from the post was (emphasis added):

“We can't provide these snippets on our own, so we hope that web publishers will help us by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface.”

Which made me think about how Google has been marketing their Google Search Appliance (GSA), which they sell to enterprises to crawl and index content on intranets. They have been quite vocal about how a GSA can be dropped into an intranet and immediately return great search results, with virtually no effort at all. For example, here is a line from a whitepaper on Google’s enterprise search site:

“A come-as-you-are approach to indexing eliminates the overhead of preparing documents for admission to the body of searchable data. In any case, your data shouldn’t need a laborious makeover for your search solution to provide relevant results.”

In short Google is saying: “Metadata!? We don’t need no metadata! Our search appliance eliminates the need for metadata.” So while other enterprise search vendors are encouraging customers to attach metadata to their documents and web pages, Google is telling the same people not to worry about “preparing documents.” (Although, to be fair, recent releases of the Google Search Appliance have added features that make better use of metadata)

However, to deliver this new Internet search feature Google now admits they “can't provide these snippets on our own” and that they need additional information embedded within the web page. In other words, sometimes even Google needs a little help from…don’t say it too loud…metadata.

Of course, I am being a little tongue-in-cheek here. But all kidding aside this could be an important development. The source for these snippets is communicated to the search engine through its support for microformats and RDFa, which describe how to structure metadata embedded in a web page. This metadata provides information in a way that search engines and any other application crawling a web page can read directly, rather than inferring from a web page. In the example above the four star review for “Drooling Dog Bar B Q” came from this metadata.

Although there has been some skepticism expressed about Google’s efforts here it will be interesting to see if these efforts start getting more content providers to use these standards.

Hole in Browser Security Patch Processes

Blogger: Craig Roth

There's been some lively internal discussion here about the desirability of automated browser updates for security patches.

An article in Techzoom.net called "Why Silent Updates Boost Security" practically salivates at the thought of patches automatically and instantly being deployed.  It praises Google for its 5 hour automated update cycle and states "After 21 days of releasing Google Chrome 1.0.154.48, an exciting 97% share of active Google Chrome 1.x users were using the latest Google Chrome 1.x version."

That excitement wasn't shared over at cnet ("Google issues, then reissues Chrome security fix") where they wrote "Google fixed security holes with a new release of its stable version of Chrome--then released a replacement shortly afterward to prevent a batch of crashes that turned up as well."

I agree with my fellow analysts that the idea of pushing out silent updates does not and should not sit well with enterprise IT.  Still, I understand the other point of view too.  Just creating a patch and putting it on your website isn’t likely to have much impact.  The majority of browser security breaches are targeted at personal PCs who don’t have IT staff to push out updates and don’t even know what a patch is. 

One part of the answer then could be creating separate versions of the product (consumer and enterprise) that have different patching strategies.  Another part of the answer is that vendors need to take extreme caution when pushing updates directly to anyone's browser.  It seems the balance has shifted to quickly trying to close holes rather than the primacy of a personal user's control over their desktop environment.  It needs to shift back.  Lastly, a middle ground between silent updates and passive posting of patches needs to be used.  This includes effective NAGs that let the user know their security patches are outdated (red alert in the titlebar perhaps?), but are not overly disruptive to users.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the KnowledgeForward blog.

Time is Money

Blogger: Bill Pray

In Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748), Benjamin Franklin said, “Remember that time is money.” Economics professor Ian Walker, of England’s Warwick University, took it a step further and created a mathematical formula:  V=(W((100-t)/100))/C, where V is the value of an hour, W is a person's hourly wage, t is the tax rate and C is the local cost of living.

Why is it so difficult to use the existing technology for calendaring to coordinate meetings? There is value in people’s time. However, today’s technologies haven’t yet found ways to effectively overcome time zone snafus, daylight savings time changes, delegation, sharing, updating, resource scheduling, multiple calendars, and multiple devices. While there are stabs at solutions, some of them quite good, it is frustrating that the tools still lag the needs.

Talk with just about anyone and ask them about last time they had a calendar issue. I’ll wager it happened fairly recently and it cost them some time to sort out. My most recent issue occurred two days ago when I tried to change the time for an appointment with a customer and the update failed to register on his calendar. Stories can range from the simple to the tragic as missed appointments lead to missed opportunities or worse. A little over a year ago, the Danish government spent $400,000 to build a web site and connectors for popular calendaring systems to address free/busy search challenges.

E-mail platforms are the main providers of calendaring technology in most enterprises. They are getting better at addressing some of the challenges. The iCal standard is being implemented more frequently, which appears to be helping some. There are even several start-ups trying to tackle some of the issues with web-based services (e.g. Tungle and TimeBridge). However, there is still work to be done to meet the needs, especially as calendaring and scheduling leaves the realm of e-mail and becomes integrated into team workspaces, social networking solutions, real-time collaboration solutions, etc. For some, perhaps, this is an opportunity.

Post or send me your calendaring or scheduling stories.