Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

The Roadmap of SaaS: That Is, the Map of Roads

Blogger: Guy Creese

Today I was in Rotterdam, where I discussed the roadmap and vision of SaaS at the first European SaaS Conference. I must admit that as I was putting the presentation together several months ago I was a bit stumped on how to talk about the SaaS roadmap--it sort of wanders all over the place, with different application arriving at different times. For example, SaaS-based web conferencing and SaaS-based web analytics came out in 1995 and 1996, and so have now been around for over a decade, while SaaS-based document sharing solutions arrived only several years ago. All of a sudden, it came to me--while the destinations were all over the place, the roads weren't. I needed to describe the roads themselves: the map of roads. Once I thought of the problem that way, it became very clear. There are three stages of roads:

• Gravel Road: 1993-1999--During this time, hardy pioneers were blazing new trails--startups were looking for a way to break into a market and SaaS (called ASP at the time) was an attention-grabbing hook. Meanwhile, on the customer side, enterprise departments were looking for a software alternative. However, there were no real customization/configuration capabilities.
• Highway: 2000-2006--At this point, SaaS started to go mainstream. Departments (e.g., HR, Sales, Marketing) began using SaaS because sometimes it was a better solution than software and they could buy it faster than software. At the same time, the vendor attitude of "You can have any color you want as long as it's black" attitude started to soften, with suppliers starting to allow some customization via configuration settings.
• Superhighway: 2007+--Today, SaaS is accepted as a delivery model and being exploited. Large vendors are buying up SaaS providers and enterprises are starting to look at migrating significant portions of their business to SaaS (e.g., e-mail). Also, SaaS is now being viewed as a platform.

The conference had some big players in attendance--IBM, Iron Mountain, KPMG, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com were there; Google was supposed to present, but backed out at the last minute.

SharePoint Zeitgeist: Caution Before Proceeding

Blogger: Craig Roth

Here's a quick pointer to a good article on the status of SharePoint in the enterprise by J. Nicholas Hoover of InformationWeek.  Over the past year there has been a noticeable shift in the SharePoint zeitgeist.  Before that SharePoint mostly flew under the radar while word of mouth and Microsoft events and press releases touted its ease of use and popularity.  Now it's been picked up on radar and is being examined more closely.  I have had several conversations with the IT press writing articles such as Hoover's that describe pros and cons, question its abilities, or warn against wandering into it without thinking.  Another good example is "Microsoft SharePoint popularity comes with issues" by John Fontana of NetworkWorld. Our SharePoint workshops at Burton Group continue to be filled by attendees that want a more objective view of SharePoint's good and bad points than can be found in inexpensive seminars by Microsoft partners.  And our clients continue to ask us these questions on a regular basis.  All of this points to a shift in the way SharePoint is being examined.

I want to point out these articles are cautionary in tone, not negative.  The frequency with which you see common sense advice being applied to SharePoint (understand it, plan, manage your resources, pay attention to governance, avoid or shore up its weak points, etc.) reflects the hurried, ad hoc approach that SharePoint is often deployed with.  I'm glad to see that SharePoint is now being tracked by the IT radar so its benefits, of which there are many to go along with its faults, can be exploited by the organizations that are desperately in need of collaboration support.  And I hope that the extra introspection and examination step being introduced before deployments encourages organizations to perform due diligence against alternatives from other vendors, some of which they may already have in house, before assuming that the end users cry for SharePoint isn't just a general cry for a simple web-based collaboration or content management solution.

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

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.

Microsoft PDC: It Comes Down to Promise vs. Reality

Blogger: Guy Creese

I'm observing Microsoft's PDC Conference at a seven time zone distance (I'm on vacation in London ["on holiday" as they say in the UK] while PDC is taking place in Los Angeles). Microsoft so far is saying the right things--for example, that part of Azure's purpose is to blur the line between software and services. However, the devil is in the details. For example, how seamless will the experience be: for developers, for end users, for buyers (e.g., licensing), and for IT (e.g., monitoring the online and in-house services from a single, unified dashboard). In short, the announcement is heartening for enterprises and their IT departments; however, how Microsoft delivers the reality (e.g., seamlessness and pricing) will make all the difference in the world. Microsoft's current offerings are not seamless (e.g., partners at the moment can't significantly customize SharePoint when it's hosted by Microsoft) and in some cases expensive (e.g., Office vs. every other productivity suite), and continuing along the same lines just won't fly with the clients I talk to.

The announcements I was pre-briefed about under NDA take place today (I think). So I'll have to wait to offer commentary about them. Nevertheless, I would urge you to monitor what Microsoft is saying at PDC. This appears to be the largest coming out party to date for Microsoft's future direction.

SharePoint: It's Not a Gap, It's Room for An Ecosystem

Blogger: Craig Roth

There's an old coding joke: when presented with a bug in your program you try to pretend it is intentional by saying "It's not a bug, it's a feature!"  I'm reminded of that when told about the rich ecosystem Microsoft has nurtured around SharePoint 2007.  More information is coming out about the parts of SharePoint where a sophisticated enterprise has to look outside of what is in the box, such as our half day of sessions at Catalyst entitled "SharePoint: Fixing a Hole Where the Pain Gets In" or this article today in InternetNews.  And the more that information comes out, the more I think back to that old coding joke, except now it is Microsoft saying "It's not a gap, it's room for an ecosystem!"

Now, I am not saying that all gaps in SharePoint are mistakes.  Honestly, I don't know how many of the gaps filled by the ecosystem are due to intentionally leaving some portions of SharePoint to communities, developers, and vendors and how many simply happened because Microsoft didn't forsee common needs that it should have.  It's probably some of both.  The best way to determine that for yourself is to look at the feature sets from the long and growing list of partners filling gaps in SharePoint (not just integrating, but filling gaps) and determine if those are niche needs that a vendor should correctly leave to the ecosystem or basic needs that should be included to fit the way the vendor advertises its product should be used.

Too many SharePoint implementations wind up causing pain because a promising demo or proof of concept led planners to underestimate the difficulty of the full solution.  The same implementation might have been considered a roaring success if time and resources were understood upfront and did not follow a winding path with multiple failures before completion.  If you're in charge of an enterprise-wide SharePoint plan or a specific SharePoint site, you don't care if a gap in SharePoint is intentional or not. The task for you is to quickly assess what users will need from SharePoint and to set expectations up front that SharePoint out of the box may not get them there.  Determining what combination of built-in SharePoint capabilities, partner products, community-provided bits, and custom in-house coding will be required to deliver the expectations of the users will help paint a realistic picture of the time and resources needed. 

To summarize, perhaps a cartoon (from our Catalyst track) will help:

SaaS: Driving Simpler Licensing

Blogger: Guy Creese

A side effect of enterprises moving towards Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions is that it whets their appetite for simpler licensing. Think about it. You can pay Google $50 per user per year for Google Apps Premier Edition (and complete the transaction within minutes), or you can spend days, weeks, and even months negotiating with Microsoft on an enterprise license for Microsoft Office.

OK. If you also buy MOSS 2007, we can give you an additional 2% off of the price of Office. Oh, you also want to buy OCS? Let me see how that will effect the deal we can give you [clicking of keys in the background].

This is a purely hypothetical conversation, but you get the idea--it's long and complicated, and in the end you aren't really sure what you've paid for each product. Now just because licensing is easier with Google Apps doesn't mean large enterprises are flocking to it--but it does make them wistful for a simpler licensing life.

All of the big software vendors--IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle--will have to get over the idea that licensing software has to be complicated. If you have a large direct sales force, complicated pricing is tolerated and even welcomed. That's why byzantine enterprise software pricing (e.g., bundling, discounts, and special deals) has been the modus operandi for years, and enterprises haven't had another option--until now.

Therefore, a huge question is how the large software vendors will alter their pricing practices going forward: will they keep their old and increasingly outdated habits, or will they simplify licensing to save their customers time and aggravation? I must admit I remain skeptical that these behemoths (1) will figure out that they need to change and (2) be able to act on that realization. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that at least one Microsoft division is moving in the right direction with Small Business Server 2008 (a packaging of Windows Server 2008, Exchange Server 2007, Office Live Small Business 2008, Windows SharePoint Services [WSS], and Windows Server Update Services for small businesses).

You can read the InfoWorld article here; in terms of licensing, the article notes:

Microsoft SBS Client Access Licenses (CALs) can be assigned to users or machines, a nice option if you're running multiple shifts or have users with intermittent access requirements. CALs are available in 20-packs, 5-packs, or, in a hat-tip to the realities of small-business life, single-CAL packs. In addition, SBS comes with five "temporary CALs" that you can borrow against to get a new user up and running immediately. The idea is that you set up a new employee with a temporary CAL and then buy the regular license, returning the temporary CAL to the pool. This way, you don't have to wait until you've had a chance to buy a CAL before you can bring on a new user, and you don't have to buy more CALs than you need. In many ways, the new licensing scheme may be the most important change to the product.

While not as simple as Google Apps, this is a start in the right direction, and recognizes that licensing is going to be more dynamic in the future. Companies don't know how many employees they're going to have in the future--especially in these tough economic times--and so a more dynamic licensing model is a good thing.

So the next time you see your IBM, Microsoft, or Oracle sales rep, ask him or her how they're going to make your licensing life easier over the next year. They'll probably look up at the ceiling, shift from foot to foot, or try to change the subject. But if enough customers ask, the large software vendors will recognize that this is a problem that they need to fix.

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.

Things IT Can Do to Get Through the Downturn

Blogger: Guy Creese

Yesterday the U.S. Congress failed to pass the "bailout" bill and the Dow plunged 778 points. Given those events, it's fair to say that IT managers everywhere are going to be asked today, "OK, what can you do to help us [Company X] get through this downturn?" Although every company's response will be different, CCS (and Burton Group at large) started posing that question at the beginning of this year. We saw the economic storms brewing and figured now was the time to revise our coverage to look at "save money/get more productive" strategies. Everybody always wants to save money; the question is whether those strategies are viable or just knee jerk reactions that make things worse.

Reports that came out of that viewpoint are:

• Google Apps in the Enterprise: A Promotion-Enhancing or Career-Limiting Move for Enterprise Architects? -- An updated version of the 2007 report on Google Apps Premier Edition. The Conclusion notes, "Google has caught the attention of enterprises with its inexpensive Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) product: available at $50 per user per year. However, the seductive price can spell trouble for enterprise architects and their companies if they don’t do their homework: the solution’s rudimentary feature set means that large enterprises need to pick carefully and implement slowly."
• Open Source Communication, Collaboration, and Content Management: Cutting Edge Innovation, Low-Cost Imitation, or Both? -- The first paragraph of the report's conclusion: "Open source communication, collaboration, and content management (3C) solutions are beginning to offer the combination of cutting-edge capabilities and lower operating costs. While immature in some ways (e.g., providing minimal training and documentation), they are enterprise grade in other ways, such as being highly scalable."
• SaaS Implementation Survey: Where, When, and How to Use SaaS -- A survey done in conjunction with Ziff Davis Enterprise that looks at enterprise experiences with SaaS. The high-level takeaway is, "Burton Group found that a majority of organizations have had a positive experience with SaaS, with many experiencing significant financial benefits. But organizations will have a better SaaS experience if they control the risk that is in IT’s purview, mitigate the risk in the vendor’s hands, and validate the remaining risks that the business must accept."
• Software as a Service Enterprise E-mail: Get Ready to Go Beyond the Grind -- The report notes, "SaaS e-mail is an opportunity for IT organizations to get away from the e-mail operations grind and focus their attention and money on higher-level applications that offer competitive advantage."

And we aren't stopping there. This quarter I'm writing a report on alternatives to Microsoft Office (e.g., Corel WordPerfect Suite, Google Apps, IBM Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice.org, Sun StarOffice, ThinkFree, and Zoho). Microsoft competitors such as Google, IBM, and Sun have saved millions of dollars in license fees by diminishing their use of Microsoft Office; the question is whether it makes sense for large enterprises who don't have a Microsoft axe to grind to make the move as well.

Finally, if you're interested in a relevant document that looks beyond the CCS horizon, I suggest you take a look at Gearhead's Guide to a Down Economy.

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.

Top 5 Trends for NextGen Authoring

Blogger: Craig Roth

I’ve been researching trends in next-generation (NextGen) content authoring since the spring and I just ran across a fun blast from the past. It’s a review of the very first version of Microsoft Word for Windows in Software Magazine. The article quotes Bill Gates saying that Microsoft Word is "the word processor designed for the 1990s".  Now, here we are within sight of the 2010s and the 13th version of Microsoft Office, and the question that comes to my mind is this: are we still using the word processor of the 1990s? Or more accurately, are we still caught in the paradigm of the tools of the 1990s (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, email), even though needs for collaboration, reuse, living documents, and quicker authoring cycles have evolved?

Well, from the title of this post you can guess I think there is something more: NextGen authoring.  The core authoring suite has certainly evolved and will continue to play a major part in the lives of information workers.  But I have identified several trends that point out how much further these tools have to go and how valuable some categories outside the core suite can be. The trends are:

• Collaborative authoring
• Content reuse
• Living documents
• Freshness preference
• Dangerous findability

To a large extent, organizations haven't tackled these needs head-on because they are not a pain point. Indeed, they have become a numb point. Authors have become used to clumsy workarounds such as e-mailing files around for comment, creating a new request for proposal by copying an old one then hollowing it out, or click-and-dragging sections of slides from one presentation into a starter template to generate a new presentation (thereby leaving multiple fragmented versions of slides scattered and out of sync across enterprise file stores). They are so used to this by now they don't generally think of tools to make this better.

But some information workers have decided not to sit waiting for the organization to give them new tools. They've applied new methods of collaborating, finding, and reusing content with existing productivity suites, collaborative workspaces, and web conferencing. They've also begun using tools that have evolved along with NextGen authoring needs such as wikis, blogs, XML authoring, mind mapping, concept mapping, and note management. These tools have proven that authors don't mind authoring collaboratively, in small chunks, and doing a little bit of metatagging if it gets them something in return.  And once authors are primed for granular reuse, the standard productivity suite can evolve into something much more useful than Bill Gates could have conceived when praising that first Windows word processor in 1990.