Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Officially Launch

Blogger: Craig Roth

The U.S. SharePoint launch was held yesterday morning at Saturday Night Live’s studio at 30 Rock, NY, NY. It was an appropriate location as they put on a good show that was webcast as it happened to many more locations (Tuesday Morning Live?).

We have a quite a few reports coming out on SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 so I won’t go through even a brief analysis here. There will be one each on the BPOS, portal, content management, social software, and security aspects of SharePoint from the Garter IT Practitioners (née Burton Group) analysts and much more from the classic Gartner analysts including a First Look. And one on co-authoring.

But I can say that 1) Microsoft is right about the tons of great enhancements they’ve made to SP2010 and 2) I’m hard pressed to find any of these enhancements that weren’t in competing products for years already. I know - but now it’s all in one package, or with a familiar UI information workers trust, or leverages the synergy of other aspects of the Office suite. Whether it is operational improvements (more ability to spread services across servers, sandboxing), content management (metadata-based policy management), social software (real wikis, social “wall”s), or co-authoring, one should ask anyone interested in them “if those features are so cool and useful why you didn’t pick them off the shelf from other vendors years ago”?

Still, SharePoint is growing up and that’s good for organizations of all sizes that are implementing it. Better stability, multi-tenancy, scaling architecture, automated compliance features, and reporting all point to a more mature environment. And having all these new features under a single umbrella means no separate business cases, ROI calculations, evaluations, and purchasing approvals that would prove difficult for cool services whose exact usage and value is difficult to predict.

I don’t think any vendor or product is capable of ushering in a new age of collaboration and productivity. Rather it is something that happens by fits and starts. The same technology needs to be re-wrapped and re-presented several times before it finally hits an audience that is receptive and ready to adopt it. This takes time and trial-and-error. Maybe SP 2010 will be that re-wrapping and re-packaging needed to capture the interest of frazzled information workers that need to collaborate. If so, it won’t be a killer feature of the new release, but resignation to the idea that it’s finally time to let go of e-mail, shared folders, and solo authoring and accept a new collaborative interaction model in its place.

A Lesson From Open Source: Make Time To Collaborate

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Earlier this week I was listening to the Drupalcon keynote “State of Drupal” presentation given by Dries Buytaert, project lead for the popular open source content management system. I wanted to hear Dries discuss any interesting new capabilities (Drupal providing the basis of WCM “distributions,” kind of like Linux distributions, is intriguing to think about) as well as project metrics (3,000 Drupalcon attendees, 6,700 add-on projects, some other big numbers). However, to me, neither of these were the most interesting parts of the presentation.

At one point in the presentation Dries said the following:

“The key message is, as we grow we need to stick to our core values and core culture…It's a culture of sharing and collaboration and it is absolutely key to everything that we do.”

He said this while showing the slide below:

Open source projects can be great examples of successful collaboration. Although it sounds simple, expecting your people to make time to collaborate (and to put it on their schedules), I think, is a big deal. Many executives have outlined, in some form, the same challenges (we are growing, stick to our culture, collaborate). However, I suspect far fewer of them took it the step further and told their people to put collaboration on their schedules.

When was the last time you reserved time on your calendar to collaborate? Outside of meetings (where someone else reserved time on your calendar) have your ever reserved time to collaborate?

Volcanoes and Web Conferencing

I never thought I would be saying this, but volcanoes are a good use case scenario for web conferencing.

The eruption of ash from Eyjafjallajökul in Iceland is shutting down air travel and driving travelers to alternatives. For businesses, there are potential negative impacts if the appropriate meetings and conversations are unable to happen. Hence, web conferencing to the rescue. In the past, major events that have impacted travel spurred interest in web conferencing. The good news for businesses today is that there are a plethora of choices for web conferencing solutions and many of them are in place in the organization already.

From a technical point-of-view, web conferencing has steadily improved and, generally, has become more intuitive, fast, and feature-rich.

Most enterprises already have two or more web conferencing solutions implemented within the organization. It is not uncommon for the enterprise to have software-as-a-service (SaaS) web conferencing contract in place (usually purchased by the marketing department), as well an on-premise solution that is part of a larger collaboration platform.

The major vendors for web conferencing all offer SaaS and on-premise solutions – Adobe, Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft – but, you need to be wary of differences in features and capabilities and map those to your use cases.

So, while the volcano blows, fire up your web conferencing.

Enterprise Virtual World BOF

Blogger: Craig Roth

Please let me know if others out there are interested in a "birds of a feather" teleconference on internal business use of virtual worlds.  I've had a request from a client (in the financial services space) to host such a session to hear what other companies are doing, thinking of doing, or are prevented from doing in virtual worlds.  This wouldn't be a presentation, but rather a facilitated meeting where we go around the virtual room and ask what each participant's company is doing with regards to enterprise virtual worlds and then go into more details.  One potential topic could be the importance of regulatory issues.  I believe we could handle anonymous participation.

Just reply to this thread or email me if interested.

Should Rich-Text Web Editors Be Separate Products?

Blogger: Larry Cannell

I had an interesting conversation this week with Ephox, makers of a rich-text editor used within web content applications (e.g., web content management systems, collaborative workspaces, blogs). Their product, EditLive!, provides the rich-text editing within CrownPeak’s WCM, Oracle’s Universal Content Management, EMC/Documentum’s Webpublisher and others. In addition, they also sell EditLive! directly to enterprises for use within their own applications. Longer term they are planning to extend support to SharePoint and Drupal.

If you aren’t familiar with web rich-text editors, here is how they work: instead of a web application prompting the user to enter text with a simple text box, a rich-text editor replaces the text box with a small embedded browser-based application, which is based on rich Internet application technology, such as Javascript or Java. The editor application looks similar to Microsoft Word or WordPad. It provides buttons for bolding or underlining text, creating bulleted lists, left/center/right justification and many others.

The end result is the user enters and formats text in a familiar interface and the web content application receives HTML returned in the form. The application may not even recognize the HTML, but when the text is returned (e.g., a web page or blog post is displayed) the browser formats it as the user intended. Other rich-text editors that you may be familiar with include Telerik’s RadEditor (popular among SharePoint developers) and the open source products TinyMCE and FCKeditor (popular among many open source projects).

To me, rich-text editors seem to be in one of those “can’t win” positions in technology (like Rodney Dangerfield, they can’t get any respect). Bad rich-text editors can be downright frustrating to use (and can impact user acceptance of an application), but good rich-text editors never get the recognition they deserve. Many of us have come to expect usable rich-text editing capabilities and the editor only gets noticed if it is frustrating to use.

Ephox thinks there are opportunities to provide value beyond simply bolding and bulleting text. Of course, many web rich-text editors provide advance features, such as spell-checking and smart-pasting of text from Word. However, Ephox is betting you will also need features such as:

• Checking against web accessibility standards. These standards ensure people with disabilities can access information on the website (e.g., WCAG 2.0 recommends always having alternate text to support someone who cannot see an image)
• Support for tracking changes (similar to Microsoft Word) to enable multiple authors to see each other’s changes and to approve or reject them
• Support for adding comments or annotations (also similar to Microsoft Word) to enhance scenarios provided by tracking changes (e.g., someone may add a comment saying “I deleted this sentence because…”)

Checking against web accessibility is something that should get the interest of IT strategists supporting a large global enterprise. However, what about support for tracking changes and commenting on text? To me, these are features I had not considered the province of rich-text editors before. Shouldn’t these be features of the web application itself? I can see arguments either way.

What do you think?

• Is there a market for rich-text editors that are separate from the web application vendors? (So far, based on the success of rich-text editor vendors and open source projects, the answer seems to be “Yes”)
• Should rich-text editors provide capabilities beyond what might be expected by a web application (such as tracking changes and adding comments)?

Lotusphere 2010: Does Lotus Know?

Blogger: Bill Pray

The theme for IBM Lotusphere 2010: Lotus Knows.

The lead speech in the opening keynote by William Shatner was entertaining.

It has been an interesting year for the IBM Lotus folks – the market has become more crowded with new and significant competitors (often, who are also partners – e.g. Cisco, VMWare) entering the communications, collaboration, and content technologies market via acquisitions and the software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model. IBM has responded, albeit the market perception is that they have been a bit slow in their response.

A few observations from today’s opening keynote:

• The keynote to Lotusphere led off with the IBM’s assertion that since the release of Lotus 8.0 in August 2007, IBM has garnered 18,378 new customers. It is not clear how this translates to market share. Burton Group does not perform specific market share research, but other research firms have been quoted as saying that Lotus Notes market share has declined over the past two years, especially in the North American market. However, Panasonic’s debut as a new reference account for LotusLive.com heralds IBM’s viability as an enterprise SaaS communications and collaboration vendor. 
• There is a new general manager for Lotus – Alistair Rennie. I overheard a comment from someone in the crowd that the GM position for Lotus seems to be a revolving chair.
• Much of the keynote was, to quote a colleague, “underwhelming.” The direction and efforts announced are expected, given current market conditions and enterprise requirements. For example, demonstrations of the ongoing development of mobility and Lotus showcased features needed for Lotus to remain relevant in the current market when compared with competitors. The good news is that IBM is doing what it needs to do to keep up with market requirements, however, nothing jumped out as extremely innovative. 
• A promising “Lotus Knows” message was that IBM clearly understands that the hybrid environment for the delivery of communications, collaboration, and content (3Cs) is the new model for enterprise’s leveraging the SaaS delivery model and requires work by IBM to better enable the interoperation between the services in the cloud and those that remain on-premises.
• SaaS delivery of the 3Cs by IBM is clearly strategic to IBM now. Much of the effort throughout the next year will be centered around enabling and enhancing IBM’s SaaS 3C offerings.
• In the reference account / customer presentation from Sylvia Steinmann from Zurich Insurance Company, Ms. Steinmann articulated the question that I often hear asked by enterprise customers: “Should we stick with Notes?” The answer for Zurich Insurance Company was to stay with Notes and upgrade to 8.5.1 because they “could not make the business case to move 60,000 employees” to another solution. This is precisely how enterprises should answer that question - through a strategic business case.
• Kirk Gutmann from General Motors arrived in style for his reference account / customer presentation in a brand new yellow Corvette convertible. One of the more interesting statements he made was “virtualization of the backroom is essential – a mandate for GM” in reference to cutting costs and creating more efficiency for the 3C infrastructure.
• Project Vulcan is IBM’s answer to Google Wave for the IBM customer. I am not sure about the name – it makes me think geek instead of collaborative. However, conceptually, (like Google Wave, Novell’s Pulse, and Cisco’s Inbox-Centric Collaboration) project Vulcan shows real promise for evolving the inbox into a virtual work environment that intelligently aggregates the information needed with the tools to communicate and collaborate.

Countervailing Wisdom for SharePoint Revealed

Blogger: Craig Roth

OK, in a previous posting I listed several points of countervailing wisdom for SharePoint. I just listed the teasers, and now is when you get to judge whether I'm really insane for saying things like "Trying to squeeze the most from your SharePoint investment is probably not good for the company" and "Driving adoption" is a band aid for poor demand management".

I posted the more full descriptions at the KnowledgeForward blog.  Here they are:

Trying to squeeze the most from your SharePoint investment is probably not good for the company

What could possibly be wrong about trying to get the most return from your investment in SharePoint?  What matters is the ROI of the company, not the ROI of a product.  Just because SharePoint can do something doesn’t mean it’s the best tool the organization has to accomplish that task. As a parallel, the ROI on my $40 cordless screwdriver would increase if I used it for drilling all the drywall holes for my basement remodeling since it’s squeezing more benefit for the same investment.  But that’s still silly if I have a corded electric drill nearby that’s much more efficient.  When organizations get too excited about SharePoint, they risk cannibalizing value from other systems to the detriment of the overall collaboration portfolio.

Value is different than ROI

Conventional wisdom has convinced many SharePoint implementers that no metric can prove its worth better than the return on investment (ROI).  After all, it’s actual dollars made compared to dollars spent – how much more real can it get?  However, ITIL’s approach reframes the value equation quite elegantly by avoiding common SharePoint ROI problems (like the difficulty of proving the numbers and the distortion that perception introduces).  What ITIL reveals is that SharePoint service providers need to focus on the portfolio’s combination of utility (what it provides) and warranty (that it is available to provide it) to ensure that value is achieved.

Management is different than governance

Governance is very important.  I’ve dedicated significant portion of the last 6 years instructing everyone from Microsoft to government institutions to large corporations on how to apply governance to SharePoint.  But management represents a separate pillar that is just as important.  Executed properly, governance will provide the organizational and procedural structure that management requires to succeed.  While practitioners conventionally blend management guidance into governance docs and use the terms interchangeably, there is a clear line separating them and two distinct efforts are required.

Offering SharePoint as a business service is fundamentally different than offering it as a set of technological capabilities

SharePoint demos like an app and it is tempting to treat it like an app, but more organizations are finding it’s really infrastructure.  Steve Ballmer at the SharePoint conference finally used the “P” word: platform. So SharePoint is collaboration and content infrastructure.   But users use applications. A service delivery methodology bridges that gap by packaging technical services into business services.

Users of SharePoint shouldn’t know what SharePoint is

Why does a business user need to know what SharePoint is?  Conventional wisdom pushes the importance of “lunch and learns”, training plans, and rollouts.  These are all fine as long as they are not for SharePoint.   Proper service delivery will yield business services carefully crafted for particular uses.  Those services are what the users need to understand.  If an end user is asked if their company uses SharePoint in my ideal service delivery organization, they would answer “I don’t know.  Never heard of it.  But we do have a great Lab Research Tracking tool …” (where the tracking tool is a customized SharePoint list and template).  Even though end users should be able to help themselves with SharePoint, that can mean end users initiate their own instance of the Lab Research Tracking workspace, not that they create it from scratch. And the service delivery methodology can stretch to include local service delivery points so that business services can be provided without having to contact IT or wait in their queue.

“Driving adoption” is a band aid for poor demand management

Conventional wisdom touts the importance of driving adoption before, during, and after rollout of SharePoint.  “If you don’t drive adoption, you’ll fail to achieve the full potential of SharePoint”.  Nonsense.  A study of ITIL’s demand management process forced me to rethink this wisdom and realize that it is all backwards.  If you took the time upfront to understand what the business needs and deliver it, you wouldn’t have to convince, cajole, or lure them to use your system.  And the education required would be less as well since it would be targeted to business services rather than general purpose usage. End user self help can work once you attract users with specific business templates, after which adoption comes naturally rather than require “driving”.

Internally, SharePoint always has competition; users always have a choice

ITIL demand management recommends evaluating competition as a best practice.  While it is written to apply to other external service providers, reframing it as internal competition yields important insight.  E-mail will remain a substitute good for much of what SharePoint does.  Competing – but disconnected – SharePoint installations can occur.  And SaaS options abound. 

The process of applying a service methodology has value for the organization beyond just the end result

Conventional project plans have governance and management as “something that needs to be done”, when actually they are “something that needs to be learned”.  The process of implementing ITIL has many side benefits including better communication with the business, higher value, and knowledge that can help with other domains.

Does Google Have Enough Patience For Wave?

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Last week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference I attended both the Google Wave keynote and break-out sessions (the keynote on the main stage was a shortened version of the full break-out). In each session, Greg D'Alesandre briefly introduced Google Wave and then speakers from Novell, SAP, and ThoughtWorks took turns showing us how their products integrate with Wave.

The Google Wave breakout session took place on the last day of the conference and was in the last time slot (east-coasters leaving San Francisco Wednesday night or early Thursday morning missed out). Nevertheless, the room was filled with a standing room-only crowd, eager to learn more.

Unfortunately, my sense was that attendees were generally underwhelmed. I left the session thinking that Wave’s honeymoon with the public may be just about over. As you would expect, most everyone in the room was unfamiliar with the Novell, SAP, and ThoughtWorks products being demonstrated. So it was especially difficult for the speakers to get their points across in the few minutes they were allotted because they had to introduce their products (which have unique capabilities all their own) while also explaining how they integrate with Google Wave. The problem: very few people understand what the heck Google Wave is.

For a collaboration and content management geek, such as me, Google Wave represents a huge potential. But, for most everyone else, ehhh…what’s the big deal? Of course, Google has its many fans and any product introduced with this much fanfare comes with high expectations. However, I have yet to hear a good elevator pitch for Google Wave.

Google is not alone. Many vendors and open source projects have a hard time explaining their collaboration products. The problem is people have no frame of reference from which to work. By comparison, introducing people to e-mail was relatively easy. It is an electronic form of mail, something that has been around for a long time. In the United States, mail has been around at least as long as the Pony Express (over 150 years).

So, Google is learning what collaboration vendors (and many IT strategists) have known for years: selling collaboration technologies is difficult. I am not saying that Google Wave will fail. However, I do not expect Wave to be as successful as GMail, for example, for a long time (if ever).

Perhaps one day this may not be an issue. Maybe Wave, or some other product, becomes synonymous with Internet-based collaboration and people can reference it in the normal course of a conversation. However, that day is a long way away. In the meantime, will Google’s management have enough patience for Wave to have an impact?

Countervailing Wisdom for SharePoint

Blogger: Craig Roth

In April of 2008, we released our advanced SharePoint workshop that describes how to offer "SharePoint as a service" by applying ITIL v3 to SharePoint.  Alas, it's taken a while to start publishing this methodology in document form, but I just submitted the first paper on this subject.  It's called "ITIL for SharePoint: Defining SharePoint as a Service using ITIL Service Strategy" and is due out in January.

Writing this document forced me to dig deeper into ITIL's best practices.  Many of them transfer directly to SharePoint (like much of the operations and service desk parts), so I didn't waste time restating them with the word "SharePoint" in front.  And some don't really apply at all, since SharePoint isn't the type of service that ITIL was originally created for.  But by picking carefully through the best practices (and sometimes reshaping them to fit) a few real gems emerge.  Those are the ones I concentrate on in the paper and workshop.

In the process of writing my paper, several points became clear that go against the countervailing wisdom I've seen among SharePoint implementers.  I'll just give an encapsulated list in this entry so readers can have fun seeing if they can figure out how I justify these statements.   I'll give my description of each item next week.

1. Trying to squeeze the most from your SharePoint investment is probably not good for the company
2. Value is different than ROI 
3. Management is different than governance
4. Offering SharePoint as a business service is fundamentally different than offering it as a set of technological capabilities
5. Users of SharePoint shouldn't know what SharePoint is
6. "Driving adoption" is a band aid for poor demand management
7. Internally, SharePoint always has competition; users always have a choice
8. The process of applying a service methodology has value for the organization beyond just the end result

Social Distancing, Web Conferencing, and Adobe

Adobe's announcement of the release to market of Acrobat Connect Pro 7.5 comes on the brink of the flu season in the northern hemisphere. H1N1, commonly called the swine flu, potentially means the closure of facilities and offices in affected geographic locations and the illness of a large number of employees at the same time. One strategic measure that local governments will implement is social distancing — limiting contact between individuals through closures of public and private gathering areas — as a measure to combat the spread during an outbreak:

“If severity increases, public health officials may recommend a variety of methods for increasing the physical distance between people (called social distancing) to reduce the spread of disease, such as school dismissal, child care program closure, canceling large community gatherings, canceling large business-related meetings, spacing workers farther apart in the workplace, canceling non-essential travel, and recommending work-from-home strategies for workers that can conduct their business remotely.” Source: CDC Guidance for Businesses and Employers To Plan and Respond to the 2009-2010 Influenza Season

The Public Health Department of the County of Santa Clara puts it plainly in a flyer on social distancing: “The Health Officer has the legal authority to order social distancing measures.” Enterprises may have no choice regarding closures of offices or facilities if H1N1 outbreak becomes severe in areas.

Use of web conferencing grew after the Dotcom bust, and it became popular again after 9/11 and SARS because of the designed capability to enable real-time collaboration for physically separated teams and employees. Web conferencing is a key technology to keep telecommuting employees connected with the work environment. It also permits enterprises to reduce travel by employees to other work sites for meetings, training, and conferences. In the case of closures caused by social distancing, web conferencing can help the enterprise to stay connected with employees and enable employees to continue to function in their jobs.

Adobe’s Acrobat Connect Pro stacks up well against the three big enterprise web conferencing players (Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft). Customers can purchase Adobe’s solution as software-as-a-service, on-premise, and as a managed service. The 7.5 release provides an interesting new capability called “Universal Voice” by Adobe. Adobe has created a Flash Media Gateway that transcodes audio codecs to enable the streaming of any phone-based audio into a Connect Pro meeting, thereby permitting the streaming of the audio over the meeting’s built-in VOIP and permitting the recording of the audio through the meeting’s recording capabilities. The bottom line to this capability is that an enterprise can use one or more telephone conferencing providers with Connect Pro and get audio integration with the Connect Pro web conference meetings.

Adobe's challenge is getting enterprises' attention over Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft - since many enterprises already have those vendors' solutions as part of their collaboration platform or as a contracted service.