Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Zimbra For Sale?

Blogger: Bill Pray

Rumor has it that Yahoo! is shopping Zimbra, an open-source e-mail and collaboration solution that Yahoo! acquired in 2007. Yahoo!’s failure to capitalize on the promising technology from Zimbra has been fodder for bloggers, but what is more interesting is what could potentially become of Zimbra. Who might buy Zimbra from Yahoo! and why? In looking at the current enterprise e-mail market, here are some thoughts:

• Adobe – With Adobe code on nearly every desktop and Adobe’s push to achieve the same ubiquity on mobile devices, it is interesting to watch Adobe dive into the collaboration SaaS market with Acrobat.com (leveraging its web conferencing success). However, Adobe is still missing some pieces, including e-mail. Acquiring Zimbra would help Adobe flesh out their SaaS collaboration offering, and give it a stronger on-premise story to complement Acrobat Connect Pro (Adobe’s enterprise web conferencing solution).
• Cisco – A year ago Cisco acquired Zimbra’s cousin – PostPath – but has yet to launch its offering. Buying Zimbra would not get Cisco much more than it has with PostPath, other than some additional customers. However, it is interesting to note that the PostPath solution uses some Zimbra open source code. I wonder if Cisco would have bought Zimbra over PostPath if it had the option a year ago?
• Google – As Google continues its push into enterprise communication and collaboration markets, buying Zimbra could give Google an enterprise class solution that adds an on-premise story - something Gmail currently lacks. Besides, this makes for a great story because Yahoo! bought Zimbra with the intent to take on Google.
• IBM – While it is doubtful IBM is interested, Zimbra could be an beneficial acquisition for IBM. With Zimbra’s open-source underpinnings and code that is not hampered by more than a decade of development as a proprietary, on-premise solution (Lotus Notes), IBM could do what Yahoo! failed to do – turn Zimbra into a robust, enterprise-class, SaaS solution. Currently, IBM is on the same painful path as Microsoft in trying to turn its mature, on-premise e-mail solution into a SaaS solution also.
• Microsoft – While Microsoft was once interested in acquiring Yahoo!, it wasn’t because of Zimbra. Microsoft has nothing to gain by buying Zimbra. Zimbra would not really provide Microsoft with anything that it doesn’t already have in some form – except to put Microsoft in the awkward position of owning an open source based e-mail solution that was designed from the beginning to compete with Exchange. Even acquiring Zimbra for the customer base is not that interesting for Microsoft because most of the Zimbra customers are somewhat anti-Microsoft. Microsoft would just lose them to another solution eventually. Besides, Microsoft has its hands full trying to launch Exchange 2010 as both an on-premise and SaaS solution.
• Novell – Similar to IBM in that Novell has it’s own decade plus old solution with GroupWise - but different in that Novell currently does not have a SaaS offering for e-mail. A bit of Novell history for you – Novell was one of the first major vendors to offer a consumer and enterprise class, web-based e-mail solution with NetMail. Novell chose not to pursue the SaaS e-mail market and sold the solution to a partner. If Novell wanted to get back in, it could buy Zimbra and spin up its own SaaS solution in an e-mail market where they have previously done well as the alternative to Microsoft and IBM.
• Oracle – Interestingly enough, Oracle Beehive currently leverages the Zimbra open source code for it’s web client. Zimbra could beef up Oracle’s e-mail solution in Beehive (as well as some of the other collaborative pieces) and equip Oracle to become more serious about Beehive On Demand, its SaaS offering. 

Virtual World Meetings: Qwaq Becomes Teleplace

Blogger: Craig Roth

In the virtual world, even your name is virtual.  Like a furry reskinning to a businessman's avatar, Qwaq has renamed its product and company to Teleplace.  Good move - enterprise virtual worlds (EVWs) have an unusually steep hurdle to getting taken seriously so a practical, descriptive name is a good thing.

The new version adds business-friendly features such as support for AD and LDAP, archiving sessions as mp4 ("meeting DVR"), and a SaaS model with private options.

My upcoming Quick Start document on Enterprise Virtual Worlds (release date 10/21/09) states that uses for EVWs go far beyond  “people work harder when they’re having fun” or “kids out of college won’t want to work here if we don’t have this stuff.” When applied for specific situations in which EVWs are the best alternative, they can have real business value. And enhanced conferencing - as well as rehearsal and serious gaming - are prime use cases.  Enhanced conferencing has the advantage of being available in a secure, SaaS model so it's the lowest risk way to try out EVWs.

New E-mail Task Management

Blogger: Bill Pray

E-mail task management tends to be anemic in its capabilities to help users track their commitments. Fortunately, new approaches in technology are starting to tackle this challenge. 

In an effort to find ways to improve task management in the e-mail environment, The Science Foundation Ireland and the US Office of Naval Research funded research by Rinat Khoussainov and Nicholas Kushmerick of the Department of Computer Science of the University College Dublin, Ireland. Their research concluded:

“Our experiments demonstrated that: (1) structured features in email, such as message subject and send dates, can be very useful for identification of related messages and grouping them into email tasks; (2) the properties of related messages in the same task can be used to improve the semantic message analysis. In particular, the features of related messages in a task can improve the performance of the email speech acts classification; (3) the semantic metadata in messages can be used to improve the quality of task identification.”

This research was published in 2005 and four years later start-up companies are just beginning to offer solutions that employ algorithms to perform the kind of analysis described in the research. One such offering launched yesterday – Liaise. Solutions like the offering from Liaise are attempting to push e-mail task management to the next level by surfacing the commitments in context of the user’s e-mail environment and, eventually, in any text-based communication.

Online Productivity Suites News Roundup

Blogger: Guy Creese

As I was browsing through Google News this morning, I noticed a cluster of stories about online productivity suites. At Burton Group, we continue to have Dialogues with clients about alternatives to Microsoft Office, so I thought it would be useful to provide a subset of those stories (removing the rants) along with a précis or quote:

• Christopher Dawson, “Google Edu Apps vs. Microsoft Web Apps: Should I have waited?”, ZDNet, September 21, 2009. The Athol-Royalston School District in Massachusetts moved to Google Apps in August 2009: “students are using Apps quite naturally, even if some teachers and staff are a bit more reluctant.”
• Bryon Acohido, “Microsoft takes notice as more people use free Google Docs,” USA Today, September 21, 2009. A story highlighting IDC’s July QuickPoll saying 27% of respondents are already widely using Google Docs or expect to be within a year, and then quoting Microsoft’s Chris Capossela, noting that Office 2010 will have web apps. "A healthy percentage of Google Docs adoption is coming from ad hoc use," Webster says. "It's the classic case of employees making use of free consumer (online) services to get their work done, without asking permission."
• Tim Anderson, “Microsoft's Office Web Apps - a long way from here: Inside the (half-baked) tech preview,” Channel Register, September 21, 2009. A catalogue of the pluses and minuses of the Technical Preview of the Office Web Apps: “The Office Web Apps look great, present a familiar Office-like user interface, and generally render faithfully. The Silverlight-driven previews look particularly good, with smooth zooming and the ability to pop-out documents into a separate window. The main hesitations are around the limited editing features and the poor performance, which we must hope will be fixed before release.”
• Jason Brooks, “REVIEW: Office Web Apps Will Pose Strong Counterattack Against Google Apps, Zoho,” eWeek, September 21, 2009. “Microsoft recently pulled back the curtain on its Office Web Apps in the form of a limited-access technical preview, and according to eWeek Labs' tests so far, the Office Web Apps suite—while studded with its fair share of tech preview warts—signals that Microsoft's counterattack on the online office encroachment of Google, Zoho and others is off to a solid start.”
• Zack Whittaker, “Students vs. Google Apps vs. Office Web Apps,” ZDNet, September 22, 2009. A student at the University of Kent in the UK compares Google Apps with Microsoft’s Office Web Apps.
• Barry Collins, “Microsoft Office Web Apps review: first look,” PC Pro, September 22, 2009. “Although it’s clearly very early days for these online apps, the obvious fear is that Office Web Apps will only be useful for editing documents created in the desktop software, and of limited use when attempting to create documents from scratch. That may be a sensible move for a company seeking to protect its desktop software revenues, but will disappoint anyone hoping the Web Apps would provide an alternative to the regular Office upgrade cycle. Indeed, if you want to make Web Apps part of your company’s workflow - or even your own - you’ll need to upgrade to Office 2007 or 2010.”

Adobe Buys Omniture: The Long View

Blogger: Guy Creese

On September 15, Adobe announced that it was buying web analytics vendor Omniture. This solves some short-term issues for both companies. Adobe’s revenue is down, and Omniture’s annual revenue of $300+ million will bolster that; Omniture wants to call higher and leverage Adobe’s many offices as a way to increase sales.

The financial analysts were all aflutter over the short term implications. Some weren’t quite sure where the synergy was (“OK, explain to me how a company that sells Dreamweaver needs web analytics.”); others felt Adobe paid too much (I’m inclined to agree, but knowing Josh James, I’m not surprised he got a good price); and others said Microsoft, Oracle, and others might top Adobe’s offer.

However, assuming the deal goes through—and I think it will—what does this mean in the long term? It means that we’re finally starting to see some market movement towards content analytics: that is, creating a feedback loop that monitors content creation and consumption as a way to help enterprises create more relevant content at a lower cost.

I discussed this concept in a Burton Group report three years ago: Content Analytics: Assessing the Value of Corporate Content (Burton Group subscription required). In the analyst call announcing the planned acquisition, Adobe said their customers were telling them that while they could monitor what parts of a web site or Flash application users were clicking on, they needed this analytics capability to be better integrated with the content creation process. Customers, Adobe, and Omniture typically discuss this integration work within the context of web site content—not surprising, since both Adobe and Omniture focus on this area.

However, there’s nothing to say that this integration work couldn’t expand to other areas, such as Adobe’s SaaS solution (Acrobat.com), digital images, documents. And in fact, in a call I had last week with Adobe and Omniture last week on the acquisition, they said as much to me. Both companies have a much broader vision of where this will ultimately go than was apparent in last week’s news coverage. This is the real long term value of this deal—expanding the creation/analytics integration work so that all digital content types are instrumented and monitored as a way to deliver the most relevant documents at the lowest cost. Put another way, in the long run, Adobe could use real data to tell you whether it’s worth spending three hours honing this project report—or whether you should spend only  20 minutes on it so you can move on to other work that will have a better payoff. That’s the path that Adobe is starting down, and that’s a good thing for enterprises.

Boston Mayoral Race Highlights the Need for E-mail Retention Policy

Blogger: Bill Pray

There are frequent stories in the news of e-mail messages playing a prominent role in litigation or a scandal. Linda Tucci, a Senior News Writer for SearchCIO.com, covers the latest scandal in the Boston mayoral race from the angle of how that situation highlights the need for enterprises to implement an e-mail policy and technology.

In the story, attorney Edwin Larkin (a litigation partner at Venable LLP in New York) is quoted:

“The takeaway for CIOs is that you need to make sure employees are aware of the email retention policy and they abide by it," Larkin said. "Point two is that CIOs need to let people know that if you don't work within that policy, you run the risk of losing data."

Defining Social Media

Blogger: Mike Gotta (cross-post from Collaborative Thinking)

In an earlier post on social computing, I attempted to illustrate how I look at the topic and break social computing down into several sub-categories (e.g., social media, social networking), and the role social software plays as the tooling component. In this post, I'll offer up a definition of social media based on client interactions over the past several months.

Social Media, Definition V1.0:

Social media enables public and transparent participation models where people and organizations interact as peers. Social media possesses low-barriers to expression, engagement, and contribution to promote exchanges, relationships, and sense of community among its participants. Social media strategies include practices that facilitate behavioral and cultural contexts necessary for social media to be adopted and leveraged by its participants.

Social media itself is not a single technology or set of technologies as much as it is a design point for the application of social tools or leveraging of social platforms. Social media leverages a variety of network and infrastructure services, including end-user devices and form factors, to deliver contextual and situational user experiences that bond people with other participants in a trusted fashion.     

Breaking it down:

Social media enables public and transparent participation models where people and organizations interact as peers.

I do not define what participation models are – which is a valid critique – but I actually prefer definitions that are somewhat open-ended and inclusive of many different implementation patterns. Examples of different participation models could include: online communities, social network sites, and / or Twitter-like systems – but the definition should not prescribe implementations.

I do believe that peer-like participation models are a key foundation for social media. Marketing, sales, or any other single enterprise area does not own social media. Therefore – no single business sponsor can try to grab the strategy – you need a governance model and decision framework. Whether it's based on a conversational model or a content model - the organization does not always lead - and neither to individuals - roles ebb-and-flow based on the type of participation model and context around the solution.

Public does not always been a complete access of any type of permission model (access controls) - but for those authorized - there is a "public" space for participation. Transparency is also crucial to social media. As with "public", transparent does not mean without any level of controls on what is shared. Public and transparent does not always mean that there are no controls but it does imply that there is a high degree of visibility and accessibility by those that have the opportunity to participate.

Social media possesses low-barriers to expression, engagement, and contribution to promote exchanges, relationships, and sense of community among its participants.

I think this is self-explanatory but it does imply the importance of media literacy - media literacies are becoming more crucial for effective participation in social media environments.

Social media strategies include practices that facilitate behavioral and cultural contexts necessary for social media to be adopted and leveraged by its participants.

This statement reinforces the idea that social media may not succeed simply because it is social media. Social media requires a certain level of design and adoption practices that concentrate on the myriad set of dynamics at play when you try to participate with people in a peer-like fashion. This part of the definition also would open a discussion on the practices needed to sustain social media solutions over time - that organizations need to adopt a program-like approach(change management, policies, governance, metrics, etc.).

Social media itself is not a single technology or set of technologies as much as it is a design point for the application of social tools or leveraging of social platforms. Social media leverages a variety of network and infrastructure services, including end-user devices and form factors, to deliver contextual and situational user experiences that bond people with other participants in a trusted fashion.   

This part of the definition addresses those that feel social media is a particular type of technology. Social media is not about blogs, wikis, social network sites, iPhone apps, etc per se. It is a design point for a desired participation model. At some point - when you do get to the level of technology - then sure - sometimes it comes down to a tool discussion or a platform approach (e.g., leveraging Facebook or Twitter). But mostly it is about the participation model and how that participation flow helps the business in some way.  

The mention of contextual and situational user experiences is important because often those elements are forgotten as people chase technology.

The idea of bonding people in a trusted fashion calls out the need to pay attention to underlying identity and security issues that also are not always in the forefront of social media initiatives.

One Way To Look At Social Computing

Blogger: Mike Gotta (repost from Collaborative Thinking)

Lately, over the past couple of months, I have been doing a high number of customer briefings and traveling a lot. The workload increase has been noticeable for those following me either via this blog or through Twitter. One of the slides that has been well-received is one that I use to peel away the different terms associated with social computing. This is not the only way to look at the topic - and not necessarily the right way for all possible situations when you are trying to advise someone on a particular strategy or question. However, Figure 1 below helps with the conversation I have with people on the topic. It seems to add value and remove some of the confusion that people have when it comes to "social everything".

What I've tried to illustrate more than "define" are how different terms and memes relate to one another. Again - it's not a perfect chart. If I had to define social computing more purely, I'd lean more towards definitions used by academic institutions or by social computing research labs of major vendors (e.g., HP, IBM, Microsoft). But in more simple terms - I find people thinking of social computing transition to a conversation on social media, social networking, or social software. Other times - especially when it comes to mobility - the discussion tends to anchor itself around devices and their form factors (e.g., iPhone) as well as what's possible (in terms of application scenarios given connectivity advances (e.g., location services, augmented reality).

But we also need to learn from history and see things in both an evolutionary as well as revolutionary lens - so collaboration, content, communication and productivity discussions - long time initiatives across many organizations are still very credible pursuits with relevant business benefits. Interestingly, these conversations often include debates on the merits of the same underlying social software tooling that comes up in conversations related to other domains such as social media. For instance, blogs comes up in multiple contexts, as do communities and wikis - it becomes a circular discussion as people try to describe these domains by tools ("what is") rather than by their application ("how used"). Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are additional memes that have been kicked around for some time with additional debate as to what exactly is included in those terms when it comes to tools.

For example - if social media includes blogs and communities - then what makes it different from Web 2.0? Or, if Enterprise 2.0  includes wikis, then how is that different than collaboration (joint work)? When you describe domains by tools - you'll never get out of this endless debate - which promted me to create the simple illustration in Figure 1.

Figure 1

And yes, I agree totally that this is not purely a technology discussion but that's not the point I'm trying to convery with this illustration.  What you'll notice (based on the color coding of social software) is that social software becomes the ingredients more-or-less for these other terms and memes to dip into. Social software answers the "what is" while the other terms describe "how used". This does require you to agree with a very broad definition which I have leveraged from Clay Shirky, who made three interesting statements on social software:

1. “It's software that supports group interaction.“
2. Every time social software improves, it is followed by changes in the way groups work and socialize.“
3. "One consistently surprising aspect of social software is that it is impossible to predict in advance all of the social dynamics it will create."

That lead me to the illustration depicted in Figure 2 - that social software has been around for a very long time - and has constantly evolved while being called many different names (e.g., groupware, etc). Again - Figure 2 is not meant to be the only way to look at the topic - just one way to help people clarify the confusion out there so they can formulate what all of 'it" (social media, Enterprise 2.0) means to them, the people they are delivering solutions for, and the organizations they support.

Figure 2

When we think of social software in terms of "waves" (with all due respect to the Google folks), coupled with maturing platforms, infrastructure and networking services - you can actually clear up a lot of confusion that people have when they try to de-tangle all the jargon out there and begin focusing on what is really more important - the people and organizational aspects unrelated to the various technology debates.

Hopefully this helps... I used these slides to level set groups as to what my research focus is here at Burton Group. While I tend to summarize it as covering social computing - the technology aspects are only one component of my research - in reality, what I end up spending more and more time on is exploring how social formations and participatory cultures emerge - and how IT augments relationship structures and behaviors. While somewhat academic - it does better describe where I am right now.

Collaborative Thinking: Catching Up With The Rest Of The World

Blogger: Mike Gotta

It clearly has been a while since I've posted on a regular basis on our service blog. Apologies for the absence (a combination of workload, travel, vacation, workload - rinse and repeat). So here are some posts on my personal blog that might be of interest:

Social Graph Engines Very likely to be one of the next "big battles" for those trying to scale social networking and related tools/applications. Anyone have other candidates to keep track of? The one's below might be the start of a watch-list of sorts...

Enterprise 2.0 Conference: Real Stories From Real People Given the economy, and restrictions on travel in many organizations, the Enterprise 2.0 conference still managed to present many stories from "real people" doing "real stuff" under the banner of "Enterprise 2.0". I did a quick pass through "by day" view and thought it would be nice to call out these individuals (as well as their respective organizations) and thank them for taking the time to come to Boston and share their experiences. Note: The conference is being run again in November - location - San Francisco.

Community Equity, SunSpace, FOAF+SSL, & KiWi If you are following open source developments related to social networks, communities, and/or the semantic web, these three efforts (Community Equity, FOAF+SSL, and Kiwi) should be of interest...

Reading Primer: Augmented Reality A jumpstart to an emerging and fascinating space...

Relationships and Identity: Two Sides of the Social Networking Coin and Part 2 - Relationships and Identity: Two Sides of the Social Networking Coin Identity And Enterprise 2.0: Three posts that offer an in-depth explanation of the intersect between social media / social networking with identity and security concerns.

Online Experimentation at Microsoft

Blogger: Larry Cannell

How do you know if a change to a website will work as intended? This paper from Microsoft provides a number of interesting examples of how online experiments - which measure the impact of various (often subtle) changes to a website - can prove, or disprove, assumptions made by designers. In addition to the formal paper there is also a set of PowerPoint slides available that includes a quiz. See how your instincts compare to the results of their experiments (which changes made a difference and which did not):

“Over the last three years, we built an experimentation platform system (ExP) at Microsoft, capable of running and analyzing controlled experiments on web sites and services. Experiments ran on 18 Microsoft properties, including MSN® home pages in several countries (e.g., US, UK, Brazil), MSN Money, MSN Real Estate, www.microsoft.com, store.microsoft.com, support.microsoft.com, Office Online, www.xbox.com, several marketing sites, and Windows Genuine Advantage. In terms of scale, the larger experiments run with tens of millions of users, one ran with over 100M users when we need a lot of statistical power to detect a very small but critical effect.”

…

“In this paper we share several interesting examples that show the power of controlled experiments to improve sites, establish best practices, and resolve debates with data rather than deferring to the HIghest-Paid-Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) or to the loudest voice.”

…

“Now that we have run many experiments, we can report that Microsoft is no different. Evaluating well-designed and executed experiments that were designed to improve a key metric, only about one-third were successful at improving the key metric!”

Only about a third of their proposed changes had measurable improvements! In many cases, an enterprise would have spent money implementing the other two-thirds (based on instincts, best guesses, or because the HiPPO said too) and would have seen no benefit, or worse.

“The humbling results we shared in Section 5 bring to question whether a-priori prioritization is as good as most people believe it is. We hope this will help readers initiate similar changes in their respective organizations so that data-driven decision making will be the norm, especially in software development for online web sites and services.”

Online Experimentation at Microsoft

Lessons learned:

1. Test early, test often
2. Most experiments fail so “experiment often”
3. A failed experiment is not a mistake
4. “Try radical ideas”