Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Universities Grappling with Blogging

Blogger: Guy Creese

There’s an article in The New York Times this morning (”M.I.T. Taking Student Blogs to the Nth Degree“) that discusses how colleges are using student blogs to publicize life at the college and entice prospects. It notes:

Dozens of colleges — including Amherst, Bates, Carleton, Colby, Vassar, Wellesley and Yale — are embracing student blogs on their Web sites, seeing them as a powerful marketing tool for high school students, who these days are less interested in official messages and statistics than in first-hand narratives and direct interaction with current students.

It's an interesting read because it's a nice encapsulation of the fine line organizations must walk between (1) going for the PR angle and (2) reflecting reality. An admissions officer at MIT says,

“You want people who can communicate and who are going to be involved in different parts of campus life,” he said. “You want them to be positive, but it’s not mandatory.”

And not all posts are positive. Ms. Kim once wrote about how the resident advising system was making it impossible for her to move out of her housing — expressing enough irritation that the housing office requested that the admissions office take her post down. Officials refused, instead having the housing office post a rebuttal of her accusations; eventually, the system was changed.

In the past, the way to deal with the problem would have been to sweep it under the rug; today, the solution--with some help from blogging--is to actually fix the problem.

What Microsoft Office 14 Needs: A New, Separate SKU

Blogger: Craig Roth

Recently I posted some guesses as to what features Microsoft will put into Office 14's content creation tools (the productivity suite consisting of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote).  But those were guesses about what Microsoft would do, not what they could do or should do. 

There's a lot of interest in O14 since professional pundits (and swivel-chair pundits in fuzzy cubicles everywhere) want to speculate about whether the 800 pound gorilla known as Microsoft Office can be brought down by plucky upstarts like Google or Zoho, or free options like OpenOffice or IBM Symphony. But this speculation is misplaced.  I start the NextGen authoring section of my content creation seminar with a prediction:

If Microsoft is ever dethroned in the content creation market, it will not be because they were beat on features or marketing … it will be because of a fundamental shift in the content creation market for which they failed to adapt.

In other words, it is not Vendor X that will beat them by being cheaper or more feature rich.  It's Suite X that will beat them with a different set of technologies that addresses a unique but growing subset of content creators.  There is a fundamental shift in how content is being created.  It has bubbled up from old concepts such as collaborative editing and been picked up by web 2.0 and its Gen Y adherents who think in rapidly produced, hyperlinked, searchable content chunks instead of ponderous, static, e-mailed documents. I introduced the NextGen content creation trends here (with further description here).  This is how I see the content creation environment today:

Note that I chose to visualize this as a central core being expanded by these new needs rather than a versioning depiction such as 1.0 ---> 2.0.  That's because the core needs will always exist in enterprises, but we need to acknowledge a new set of needs that is not well met by the core authoring tools and that will account for an increasing percentage of content creation as Gen Y'ers enter the workforce and information workers get used to authoring in new ways via blogs and wikis.

We are at an inflection point in the way content is being created.  Microsoft would be unwise to pass up this opportunity to segment the market.  Microsoft may be able to get through one more major version of Office by stretching traditional document-related technology to fit.  But this anchors their attempts to address new content creation needs to a 1990's document-centric mindset.  By carving out a new target market, they build incremental revenue (most buyers of this suite would still have needs for core Office as well), plant the seeds for a new franchise that would be small but grow more rapidly than Office, and compete better with innovative vendors that are unencumbered by entrenched bureaucracy and sunk costs.  And all while helping to mitigate the bloat and complexity of Office by separating out features that will be unused or confusing for many core Office users. There's a chance that this would cannibalize Office 14 upgrades, but my instinct is that it would make no or a minor short term loss (since the new target market is small) and pay for itself within the next two versions of Office. It could be rolled out on half-cycles with Office to help avoid cannibalization and steady the famously spiky revenue stream and attention that Office releases garner.

Accordingly, I argue that Microsoft should create a new product (a SKU in industry parlance) for the NextGen content tools rather than continually trying to bolt onto Office Pro.  It could be called Office Extended, although some more thinking would elicit a more clever term.  Here's how I would start:

• OneNote would shift over to anchor the new suite.  With new branding and development, it can finally stand up as a new type of content platform that allows for content components, real-time collaborative authoring, and improved linking rather than just being a productivity add-on aimed at students and meeting notes.  OneNote will only be truly understood to represent a different paradigm when it breaks the chain it has to the Office Home and Student suite
• The Live Writer blogging tool would finally get a real home here
• Microsoft would have a place to create a real wiki rather than the SharePoint template that stands in as the official "Microsoft wiki" for lack of anything better.  No one - not even SharePoint folks - asserts that SharePoint's wikis are in the league of any best of breed tools, and I can't think why Microsoft would not want to compete for a best of breed wiki any less than they want to have a best of breed browser.  And remember the pain that being too slow to recognize a "good enough" 80/20 browser wasn't enough caused them.
• Microsoft would take an 80/20 swipe at the XML content creation market with a new Xmetal-like tool, much as they grabbed a new low end of the records management market with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

And that's just a start.  Part of the idea is to give this new market segment a new matching suite to grow with.  This idea fits Microsoft's software+services direction since a few of these products (wikis and blogs) are not purely client-based, so services are needed.  I guarantee the evolution of content creation is not over, so the new SKU provides a place with plenty of room to stretch and grow new creation mechanisms the market demands without having to add a 14th pound of flour to the 10 pound bag of Office.

Secured RSS versus E-mail

Blogger: Larry Cannell

A recent post on Samuel Driessen’s blog posed a question sent in by Peter Verhoeven regarding the use of secured RSS feeds in enterprise RSS products such as Newsgator or Attensa (secured RSS feeds require a the user to be authenticated in some way, often with a username and password). Peter is working on a project to consolidate RSS feeds, reduce network bandwidth, and enable collaboration to take place around them.

The problem is secured RSS feeds have challenges that are not obvious when using RSS feeds from unsecured sites (like a public news site or a blog, like this website). Peter reports that Newsgator has capabilities to handle secured RSS feeds, but are implemented in a way that is unsatisfactory. Attensa’s handling of secured RSS seems broken in many ways (read the post for more details).

RSS, Not Just For Blogs

Often times people assume the source of RSS feeds can only be content sites, like blogs. However, RSS can be generated from any application, including enterprise applications. So, when RSS feeds are secured it can be dangerous for an aggregator to make assumptions about the feed.

Here is a key point about secured RSS feeds: the same RSS feed URL can produce a different list of feed items based on the identity of the requesting user. For example, assume a CRM system produces an RSS feed. Persons "A" and "B" both have access to the CRM system but cannot perform the same functions. "A" can look at all outstanding leads. "B" can as well, but is also able to see all closed deals. Therefore, if the CRM system uses the same feed URL "A" will not see some items that "B" does (closed deals). Clearly, this is a very different scenario then monitoring a blog for new posts.

So, the reason secured feeds should not be easily shared is because they may contain different feed items per user. Secured RSS feeds can also be personalized RSS feeds.

This doesn’t have to be a difficult concept to understand if you strip away some of the mystique which can be assigned to RSS feeds. Ignore the fact that RSS feeds are formatted in a special way (or course, they are in RSS format). Instead, think of them as simply web pages served up by a web server (which may be fed by an application generating the web page). They are also accessible using http. So the only difference between an RSS feed and a web page is the format of the text (one is html, the other is RSS).

In the example above the CRM system is producing a different RSS feed based on the identity of the user. This is no different than the behavior of the same CRM system when it is used interactively as an application. But, instead of producing a different page of html per user, the secured RSS feed produces a different list of RSS feed items.

Secure RSS Feeds Are Personalized For You

The most obvious difference between unsecured and secured RSS feeds (besides requiring authentication) is that secured feeds can be personalized. So if we start thinking about scenarios where an enterprise application provides different RSS feed items per user some interesting scenarios come to mind. An obvious use is notifications; maybe a part as been released to manufacturing, a payment has been made, or some other event happens that the application feels is important enough that you should be notified.

Today, these notifications are usually sent via e-mail. In some cases these messages occur infrequently enough that the user notices them in their inbox. But, it may also be the case that these messages overwhelm the user who then simply turns them off or ignores them.

Another Option

In the case where numerous notifications are overwhelming inboxes, an option to consider is an RSS feed consumed by a “river of news” aggregator (this assumes, of course, the application can produce an RSS feed). For example, the Google Desktop Web Clips gadget monitors multiple RSS feeds and displays new items in a sidebar on a desktop display. It also happens to support Windows single sign-on which means it doesn’t need to store a username and password for secured feeds, if the application providing the secured RSS feed also supports Windows single sign-on.

The “river of news” aggregation model assumes that if the reader misses some items it isn’t a big deal but one of them may catch their attention. So, imagine having a stream of updates coming from enterprise applications showing up in a sidebar. Although there may still be an overwhelming number of notifications coming they no longer clog up the inbox and the person monitoring these may be satisfied knowing messages are flowing at an expected rate.

I’m sure there are many options that could consume secured RSS feeds and present them to individuals or teams in useful ways. If you have an interesting example please share it below.

Update: Greg Reinacker posted a response and says NewsGator Enterprise Server 3.x will implement a feature that will address Peter's issue with secured feeds.

The Auto Industry and Enterprise 2.0

Blogger: Larry Cannell

A recent post from Andrew McAfee, the Harvard professor who coined the term “Enterprise 2.0,” speculated on what he would do to turn around an auto company in which the new management “will fund and fully support whatever initiatives I propose.” As someone who spent 23 years in the auto industry, the last ten of which were in developing and deploying collaborative technologies, and having been involved in the Enterprise 2.0 industry for several years, I feel compelled to respond.

It may be fruitless to comment on advice that is based on a “complete fantasy” (McAfee’s words, not mine). But, McAfee is an influential figure and many reading his post will certainly take it as practical advice for the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 in large companies. It is not.

If you are looking for principles of Enterprise 2.0 solutions then McAfee’s post is a reasonable starting point. However, if you are looking for advice on Enterprise 2.0 adoption within large companies then McAfee’s advice falls well short.

To summarize McAfee’s advice:

1. “I’d roll out as quickly as possible a single integrated suite of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) to all employees of the company.” (he also provides a set of requirements for this platform)
2. Make the use of these tools mandatory. He would accomplish this “by announcing on the 'go live' date of the new E2.0 suite that participation will become part (10-20%?) of everyone's performance evaluation, starting in six months.”
3. He would start an internal blog of his own.
4. He would “work to create an environment in which people feel safe and free to speak the truth".”
5. Deploy a prediction market to learn which projects will be late, predict sales volumes of new vehicles, and speculate on what moves competitors are making.

I can’t argue with starting your own internal blog and I kind of like the idea of using prediction markets in large companies. But, it’s McAfee’s first two pieces of advice that are unrealistic in non-fantasy situations. Other critical pieces are missing as well.

So please allow me to follow in McAfee’s footstep and tell you what I would do if I were the new CIO in this fantasy.

In the short-term I would learn of and support current Enterprise 2.0 efforts going on within the company, whether they were company-sponsored or not.

1. Find the people in the company who are using and promoting the use of Enterprise 2.0 solutions. Perhaps this could be the topic of my first post on an internal blog (but, at least for this one, I’d send an e-mail message too). Although I think McAfee overstates the amount of experience the average person has with these tools (especially their application within enterprise situations) there is likely some people already promoting their use. Most importantly, I would look both inside and outside of IT for these champions of change.
2. I would then listen to what these people are doing, learn what has worked, and what challenges they are facing. Of course, we would form a community within the company to share our experiences and support each other.
3. Given the dire situation, these could be the people most likely to be axed. They need to be protected, supported, and eventually given the resources they need to be successful.
4. The Enterprise 2.0 solutions most likely to make the biggest difference will come from this community. Best of all, they will give me a head start and build credibility.

Longer-term I would:

1. Look for opportunities to leverage Enterprise 2.0 solutions that stand the best chance of success and plan how to develop this as a capability others can use. Stories sell change. We need stories, fast.
2. The best opportunities integrate Enterprise 2.0 solutions within the natural flow of work (as McAfee says). This may mean focusing on technologies that are less commonly used among consumers but are more appropriate for enterprise use. The community we formed when I first became CIO will help figure this out.
3. My first priority is getting something that can make a difference and is easily understood. A platform approach is something to strive for but won’t matter if these initiatives fail. Applications sell change, not platforms.
4. Most importantly, the CIO needs to build a strong relationship with other senior executives in the company. This is necessary to get their buy-in on an appropriate IT governance structure that can ensure a coordinated effort between both the business and IT sides of the company. Grass-roots adoption works (I’ve seen it and creative governance structures can allow that to happen within reasonable limits) but the home runs that make a difference also require top-down management support to ensure change gets baked into every day work processes.

In short,McAfee falls into a classic “White Knight” trap by assuming no one in the auto companies is familiar with emerging concepts like Enterprise 2.0 or has tried to implement this or similar types of change before. He also ignores the tough adoption issues that cannot be solved through mandates or technology alone.

Liferay Social Office, Another Supporter of SharePoint Protocols

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Liferay, the makers of the popular open source portal, will soon be releasing a new product called Social Office. This is collaborative workspace product that consists of newly developed features combined with capabilities that were previously offered as portal add-ons. A Liferay Social Office site provides document libraries, team calendars, activity tracking, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, message boards, and announcements.

However, what I find to be the most interesting new feature of Social Office is its support for Microsoft Office. Liferay Social Office will support (as other open source vendors have called it) "the SharePoint protocol.” Specifically, Social Office will support two protocols used by SharePoint: MS-DWSS (Document Workspace Web Services) and Microsoft’s version of WebDAV. Documentation for these (and other) protocols used by SharePoint and desktop Office applications were released by Microsoft earlier this year. I blogged about this a few weeks ago (“Cloning SharePoint” and “What the heck is a SharePoint Protocol?”). In short, support for these two protocols facilitates the use of the “Shared Workspace” pane in Office applications. This enables management of document workspaces from within desktop applications like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

Two new vendors supporting a protocol does not make for a trend, but I will be on the lookout for others to follow. Maybe then the argument could be made that MS-DWSS is the POP3 for collaborative workspaces.

Acquia Drupal

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Yesterday Acquia, the commercial open source company started last December to serve the Drupal community, announced they are “now open for business!” Specifically, Acquia announced the availability of:

• Acquia Drupal – a distribution of the popular content management system (previously code named “Carbon”) which provides core Drupal functionality as well as support for over thirty additional modules that were previously only supported by a community.
• Acquia Network – a set of network services Drupal site owners can hook up to their website to improve their operation. These include software update management, spam blocking, heartbeat monitoring, and site usage statistics.
• As part of the Acquia Network site owners also receive technical support for their Drupal installation.

Drupal is kind of a WCMS/Web 2.0 toolkit/application framework all wrapped up into one. It is a flexible solution capable of supporting a number of types of dynamic Internet-facing websites while also providing the basis for a functional intranet. Acquia likes to calls this combination “Social Publishing.” But whatever it is, there is clearly a large community that like building solutions on the product. Conservative estimates place the number of Drupal Internet sites at over 250,000.

One of the reasons for this is Drupal’s ability to be extended with new functions. This has resulted in the creation of “sub-communities” within the larger Drupal community that develop these extensions (called modules). Two of the most popular modules, CCK and Views, are included in Acquia Drupal. At last count, there were over 1,900 of these contributed modules whose functions range from the extremely cool to the incredibly narrow.

Drupal was mentioned in our recently published Burton Group report “Open Source Communication, Collaboration, and Content Management: Cutting-Edge Innovation, Low-Cost Imitation, or Both?” as one of the few projects that has seen an open source project ecosystem (OSPE) form around it. In the report we describe these ecosystems as self-reinforcing cycles of activity made possible through motivated integrators, low-cost Internet resources, and strong open source projects.

Acquia network services and technical support for Drupal should further strengthen this ecosystem, benefit existing Drupal integrators, and open new opportunities for enterprises previously hesitant to use an open source product that isn’t commercially backed. The challenge for Acquia is to maintain leadership in the Drupal community while finding ways to make a profit. No doubt, serving two masters (the Drupal community and Acquia financiers) is a tough balancing act but is not a entirely new path for a company to take. Acquia’s approach is very similar to Redhat’s.

All Acquia-specific modules as well as improvements to the additional modules included in the distribution are being contributed back to the Drupal community (which, of course, means they are licensed under the GPL). Acquia likens this to the relationship Redhat (along with the Fedora distribution) has with Linux. However, the Acquia/Drupal relationship is much tighter since Dries Buytaert, the project leader of Drupal, is Acquia’s CTO and Co-Founder.

Providing technical support and network services for Drupal is a good start for Acquia. There is probably a significant number of website owners waiting for a service like this to come online. In addition, this should help Acquia get a foot in the door of many enterprises. Technically, Drupal is capable of fitting in well with just about any IT environment. For example, the product has long had hooks to support external authentication, which can be exercised by add-on modules to integrate Drupal with single sign-on systems. However, the modules required to get Drupal working with a single sign-on system are only supported by a community and are not part of the Acquia offering.

To further strengthen Drupal’s advance in the enterprise market Acquia should embrace more enterprise-focused extensions, like a single sign-on module. But, for now, this looks like a good start for Acquia. It will be interesting to see how they progress and how their relationship with the Drupal community evolves.

More on the Top 5 Trends for NextGen Authoring

Blogger: Craig Roth

I had a request in my posting on the top 5 NextGen authoring trends for some more explanation of these trends.  I mostly wanted to set up the context for these trends - where they come from and how they relate to traditional forms of authoring.  But I'm happy to elaborate with an elevator pitch on each of them to show where I'm coming from in my research.  So, if you don't mind riding up the elevator 5 times with me, here goes:

Collaborative authoring

Content is increasingly being created in a collaborative fashion, with multiple commenters and sometimes multiple authors for a given document.  Perhaps a fallacy was that there ever were authors working alone. Document creation has always been social and what is happening now is that increased collaborative capabilities and web 2.0 heightened awareness of social work are feeding back to the way in which documents are authored. 

Content reuse

Few business documents start with a blank page and even fewer finish without having copped at least a few pieces from prior documents.  But despite the prevalence of content reuse, organizations have mostly muddled through using copy/paste or by saving existing, similar documents under a new name and hollowing them out.  As with programming, creating reusable content takes discipline in componentization, tagging, and storage that can be difficult to instill in authors.  However, more comprehensive content reuse approaches are becoming feasible for the average author, decreasing the time needed to create documents while increasing consistency between them.

Living documents

Business documents have always been subject to an iterative, open process.  "Living documents" that are continually under construction and go through more iterations are increasingly common and intentional.  Document production is a moving target in many cases, with quick changes required before and after initial publication.  Rather than publishing a "final" document, authors are using wiki-like tools to create content that can be improved incrementally while still maintaining a single version of truth for the reader. 

Freshness preference

Content publication involves an implicit balance between speed/freshness and readability/accuracy.  We are moving from an era when transaction costs for correcting or updating content were high to one in which content can be quickly fixed and readers can be quickly notified (if they need notification at all).  This has shifted the balance towards freshness, and encouraged the use of technologies such as blogs and XML syndication.

Dangerous findability

Other NextGen trends point to an explosion of content in its many forms; this is the one trend that's holding it back.  Quickly published and discarded thoughts, early iterations of documents, rogue wiki and blog postings, and inadequately protected sensitive content have long (perhaps infinite) lives and lay in wait to later embarrass or legally implicate the authors and all those around them.  This causes some organizations and authors to avoid NextGen content creation.  Fear is greatest around the rapidly produced, informal sorts of content that evade traditional records management processes of classification and control.

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

KM and Attention Management: Wine and Aspirin?

Blogger: Craig Roth

Hola!  I'm just back from our conference in Barcelona.  It went very well and I got to meet many interesting customers from a broad spectrum of international companies and agencies.   And if that wasn't enough fun, the sangria and architecture walks would have made up for it.

One interaction that sticks in my mind is a question I got during the Q&A after my session on Enterprise Attention Management.  I spoke after two Enterprise 2.0 presentations that talked about wikis, blogs, social software, and personal web pages.

The question I got (which I'll paraphrase a bit) was "First you tell me about all these new mechanisms for content creation with Web 2.0, then talk to me about attention overload?  Do you guys plan these presentations together?"

It does seem a bit contradictory at first: two presentations on how to publish more content through new channels and then a presentation on how we have to deal with so much new content.  It's like selling bad wine on Saturday and aspirin on Sunday - you're creating your own demand!

Well, it's not quite so clear cut.  First, my papers and presentations are on Enterprise Attention Management, not information overload.  Information overload is a driver, but if I was to stop there I'd just be joining a chorus of people complaining about something with no solution.  Enterprise Attention Management is the study of the processes and technologies used by information workers to determine which information and messages will be read, allocated time, and acted upon.  And EAM is what I was really talking about.

I don't believe in muzzling anyone as a way to deal with information overload.  From a creation point of view, anyone should create what they want and exercise constraints due to common courtesy and policy.  Enterprises need to spend more time on giving information workers the tools they need to pull important messages forward and push unimportant messages back.  It is the gold nuggets of information that will be created that are of value, despite the amount of silt that they are in.  To continue the gold prospecting anaology, the proportion of gold nuggets to silt has decreased and will decrease over time.  But with proper discovery techniques, those nuggets can be of great value.  That one time that an engineer decides to blog about a problem they solved may save a huge hassle in a few years, long after they have left the company.  Until it is needed, that information isn't harming anyone if your disk storage costs are reasonably low and discovery and attention shielding capabilities are up to the task.