Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Social Media Tail Chasing

Blogger: Larry Cannell

First it was Paul Boultin at Wired saying “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004” and now Steve Gillmor is telling us “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter.” A couple of years from now the next big thing will obsolete Twitter and so on, and so on. For an IT strategist these are the types of headlines that give you heartburn. Not only because they are trashing an existing technology (that you may be trying to justify) but because it hypes a new “next big thing.”

From a journalist’s perspective I suppose they are correct. For Boultin maybe the blogosphere is getting a little crowded:

“Today, a search for, say, Barack Obama's latest speech will deliver a Wikipedia page, a Fox News article, and a few entries from professionally run sites like Politico.com. The odds of your clever entry appearing high on the list? Basically zero.”

But, do you think the 70+ million blogs are all competing for attention on stories about Barack Obama? Not a chance. Many of these people could care less about building an audience that competes with Wikipedia or Politico and are simply sharing ideas with people who have similar interests or ideas.

It’s a little more difficult to understand Gillmor’s reasoning about the death of RSS at the hands of Twitter. He points to RSS feeds that do not carry the full text of a blog post as something that “carved out a large percentage of the value of the day’s news.” Gillmor then goes on to wax poetic (seriously, he quotes Bob Dylan) about the “race for realtime” where Twitter can get news out quicker than an RSS feed. Well, OK, for a journalist I suppose realtime news is important. But does it make that much difference if you read feedback about the latest Obama news conference a few hours later?

I am not saying any of these technologies are bad or that the next big thing isn’t, well, the next big thing. But excitement for many of these emerging social tools can start building from these same journalists. As an IT professional, what can you do with this social media tail chasing? First, you can be skeptical of anything that is over hyped (or anything that is totally trashed) as much as these technologies have been. Second, you need to stay focused on understanding your enterprise’s needs better than anyone else. Only then can you truly assess whether the next big thing can make a difference.

By the way, my report “Making Smart Choices for Online Workplaces” was recently published. It provides a framework and approach for assessing how these and other technologies can improve online work environments and knowledgebases. I’ll also be talking about this subject at Catalyst North America in July. I hope to see you there!

ODF Spreadsheet Bickering: What It Means to an Enterprise

Given that Microsoft's recent release of Office 2007 SP2 includes native support for the ODF file format, it was only a matter of time before Rob Weir (IBM) would find something he didn't like about it. On Sunday, May 3, he wrote a blog post entitled, "Update on ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability," saying that Microsoft had coded to the wrong behavior. He notes, "But I cannot fail to notice that the same application -- Microsoft Excel 2007 -- will process ODF spreadsheet documents without problems when loaded via the Sun or CleverAge plugins, but will miserably fail when using the "improved" integrated code in Office 2007 SP2. This ain't right."

Doug Mahugh (Microsoft) issued a returning salvo on Tuesday, May 5, in the form of a blog post entitled, "ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability." When Doug walked through Rob's documented steps, he found that Office 2007 did a better job of rendering the OpenOffice.org-created spreadsheet than Lotus Symphony (e.g., Days to Go equals "102" [Excel] rather than "of:B4-B3" [Symphony])."

I recommend that you read both blog posts, in that they highlight the complexities of coding to an ever-evolving open standard. However, look at the blog posts as an educational exercise--try to understand the arcane details, but don't get taken in by them. While the vendors would like you to believe that, "We're right--and they're wrong," the takeaway is the larger picture of, "ODF interoperability isn't here yet." Let me explain.

Oracle Enters Beehive in Collaboration Tournament

Blogger: Craig Roth

Oracle announced its release of Beehive 1.5 today.  They are hoping that a technology refresh of the Beehive collaboration assets (along with additional assets acquired along with BEA) can give Oracle another shot at the collaboration market after the moribund Oracle Collaboration Server has fizzled. 

The announcement comes at a good quiet spot between IBM's collaboration announcements at Lotusphere in January and Microsoft's announcements on SharePoint 2010 that will probably come to a peak at their conference in October. Likewise, its most attractive feature is that its platform and standards offer an alternative to a Microsoft stack (Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint) and an IBM stack (Notes/Domino and/or Quickr+Connections with WebSphere).  Beehive offers more standards than you can shake a stick at (although I don't recommend shaking sticks at beehives generally): WebDAV, IMAP/SMTP, JSR 170 for content repository access, XMPP for IM and presence, LDAP or AD for directory, and JMX for management.  You can use Solaris, Windows Server, or Linux for the serve and any development tool desired.  From a technology point of view its appeal is likely to be based on architectural decisions about what standards and stack an organization wants to embrace (or stay away from).

But technology aside, the key for Oracle (as always) is whether they can utilize their channel to sell this stuff and whether organizations can be persuaded to pay real money for it after previous false starts.  In the past, Oracle hasn't had much voice left to talk about collaboration and portal after yelling about database and ERP.  But since the Stellent acquisition, content management has been a bright spot for them and I think it has changed some minds. 

Personally, I want to see the collaboration market stay competitive.  End users win when vendors compete hard on features, quality, and pricing.  Lately it seems like Microsoft SharePoint has gotten a lion's share of attention from organizations.  Microsoft has been the main attraction at this tournament  and I'm glad to see Oracle showing up to play.  IBM Lotus still feels to me like they haven't shown up to the tournament and are setting up a parallel exhibition match for the same sport in another part of town.  They didn't mention SharePoint by name in the Lotusphere main tent (although it was clear who they were talking about and Jive got a mention). But as an analyst I'm like an unaligned spectator at a sporting event - you just want to see a diverse set of skillful challengers compete really well and bring up the level of play.