Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Register for "The Burton Group Guide to Saving Money On Communication, Collaboration, and Content Technology"

There's still time to register for our telebriefing tomorrow with replay and live Q&A on Wednesday.  Anyone facing budget concerns or trying to avoid them in the future with regard to communication, collaboration, and content technology will find this telebriefing valuable.

Here's the details:

7/7/2009 at 2:00 PM EDT / 11:00 AM PDT / 18:00 UTC/GMT / 20:00 CEST

OR

7/8/2009 at 9:00 AM EDT / 6:00 AM PDT / 13:00 UTC/GMT / 15:00 CEST

The Burton Group Guide to Saving Money On Communication, Collaboration, and Content Technology

07 Jul 2009 2:00 PM ET -- With the economy in recession, enterprise IT departments face pressure to trim their budgets and abandon some of what they wanted to accomplish. Cost cutting has a particularly hard impact on teams that are maintaining or seeking additional investments in communication, collaboration, and content management (3C) technology, given that their contributions to the bottom line are often indirect while their costs are easily quantifiable. This TeleBriefing with analysts Larry Cannell, Guy Creese, Bill Pray, and Craig Roth will describe where cost savings can be found with existing 3C infrastructure as well as how to meet new 3C needs with tighter budgets.

 

Clients can register for the telebriefing here.

Four Key Points About Enterprise Attention Management

Blogger: Craig Roth

I'm just putting the finishing touches on a new document on Enterprise Attention Management.  This one will be a short primer on our view of the subject.  It's been over two years since my main document on EAM was published and my thinking has evolved as I've hit questions from people at presentations and in private conversations.  It's also been shaped by the press coverage of information overload and e-mail overload - often by encouraging me to put warning signs in front of some slippery slopes that they wander into: Counting all distractions as interruptions?  Lumping interruptions into information overload?  Using 100% focus and efficiency as the benchmark to compare "cost of overload" to?  Assuming only tips and tricks for individuals can chip away at it?  Yeesh!

After a brief description of what enterprise attention management is and its business context, I describe 4 points that are key for my position on EAM:

1. Not Everyone Feels Overloaded

As strongly as you and a few like-minded people may feel about the impacts of information overload, a lot more people just don't notice or care.  But improving efficiency and reaction time: that's something everyone can get behind.  Get away from having to shake everyone awake about the "problem" and its a lot easier for others to get on board with your efficiency argument.

2. Key People in an Organization Can Take Action to Improve Efficiency of Information Workers

You can try to organize your little information garden and give tips to your teammates to do the same and one small portion of your company will breathe a little easier.  But there are a few people who select the gardening tools and set expectations for everyone's gardens - they have a different set of things they can do to help everyone in the organization.

3. Use EAM as a Lens to Understand Impacts of New Information-based Technologies

Enterprise attention management can be used as a lens to analyze how various technologies and programs will impact the attention of information workers.  One recent example of applying this architecture is the "EAM for e-mail" posting I did here.

4. Influence Process and Culture Selectively

An evangelical approach to "information overload" starts with declaring it "bad" and then figuring out how to force people not to overload each other.  A more practical approach does not see lots of information as good or bad, but rather focuses on efficiency and looks for key moments when processes and culture can be influenced.  These include teachable moments, such as new hire training or rolling out a new technology.  They do not include an e-mail blast or interoffice memo out of nowhere telling everyone how they should now behave.

This is a cross-posting from the KnowlegeForward blog

Google’s Outlook Connector – First Bug of Many

Blogger: Bill Pray

Both Microsoft and Google released blogs this week concerning an issue with Google’s Outlook Connector whereby “Programs that interact directly with the Outlook data file, including Windows Desktop Search and PGP.com's encryption plugin, don't currently work well with Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook” (Google’s take) or “The installation of the Google Apps Sync plugin disables Outlook’s ability to search any and all of your Outlook data” (Microsoft’s take). This illustrates my point in my previous blog that, from my experience, building an Outlook connector is difficult and fraught with problems.

In fact, the list of things that do not work (go to the section entitled “What’s Different from Exchange”) – provided by Google – is rather daunting if you are an enterprise looking to use the connector and want to replace Exchange on the backend. For example, it is a rare enterprise executive who doesn’t have a need to delegate her calendar to an assistant – a feature not available with Google's connector. I expect that this week’s issue with the connector will be the first of many for Google.

How to Improve E-Mail Client Software: 15 Ideas Based On Enterprise Attention Management

Blogger: Craig Roth

The most popular "overload" topic in offices today is e-mail.  But after all these years of incremental improvement to IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, surely there can't be any low-hanging fruit left to pick to help people manage inbox overload.  Or is there?

The Enterprise Attention Management Conceptual Architecture to the rescue!  Rather than relying on a set of personal pet peeves or specific annoyances that have happened in recent memory, a model such as the EAM conceptual architecture provides a systematic approach for analyzing the attentional characteristics of a system.

The EAM architecture is intended for use by organizations to examine individual technologies or whole systems (such as the information worker desktop) that are suspected of causing explicit (information stress) or implicit (poor decision making, slow reaction to new information) information handling problems.  With systems it can be used for gap analysis.  Here I use it as an intuition pump to reveal a set of potential enhancements to e-mail software that would improve its attentional characteristics.

Click on the thumbnail below and scroll around to see the ideas that came out of my informal analysis of e-mail. Also, here is a quick summary of the recommended improvements (going clockwise from the upper-left of the diagram):

• Scheduled delivery
• Maintain whitelists to bypass blocks and delays
• “Move to discussion” greys out “reply”
• Automated routing and prioritizing? Not yet
• Un-bury turning off or freezing of “toasts” (alerts)
• Enable e-mail hyperlinking
• Enable role-based profiles
• Enable sender tagged e-mails
• Stop attachment abuse
• Presence-enable recipient lists
• Enable group-based rules
• Turn e-mail into generic small-content tool
• Manage multiple inboxes
• Provide inbox analytics
• Token systems
• Remind sender if no reply

Caveat: I'm not an e-mail expert.  It's possible that some e-mail systems can already do these things outright, with some configuration, or with simple coding.  If so, great, although they should be no more than one click away.  In the meantime, my inbox is filling up as I wait for these capabilities in the next version of e-mail programs.

Note: This is a cross-post of an entry from the KnowledgeForward blog, where it was named "E-mail Overload: No Cure, but Enterprise Attention Management Can Shed Some Light"

Google's Approach May Doom the Effort

Blogger: Bill Pray

Google announced Google Apps Sync for Outlook recently, which as Guy points out in his blog, allows enterprises to keep the Outlook client on the front end while replacing Microsoft Exchange on the backend. However, having been part of a team that built a connector for Outlook, it is not as simple as it sounds. Google’s approach may doom the effort.

Connectors to the Outlook are not new. For example, IBM and Novell have developed and supported an Outlook connector for years for their e-mail solutions. However, both of these vendors have dropped development of their connectors within the last year. Neither vendor has had wild success with their connectors and, I suspect, both found the engineering effort to be costly. I think a reason why is that these vendors were approaching it as an effort to make their product, each with more than a decade development, work like their product (not Exchange) in Outlook. This is a difficult task and one that requires constant vigilance to insure the connector keeps working as intended with each new patch, service pack, and release of Outlook .

Other vendors have used a different approach with their connectors. For example, Zimbra, PostPath, and Scalix entered the game with the deliberate strategy that they would emulate or work like Exchange – i.e. be an Exchange replacement. Their products were built from the start with the idea that Outlook could be the primary client. This approach seems to have been somewhat more successful, but even these vendors would like to see customers embrace their web clients over Outlook for a better experience.

As Microsoft alters Outlook in releases, service packs, and patches, it becomes very difficult to maintain this kind of integration. A lot of the heavy lifting happens client side in Outlook, so even small tweaks can create engineering nightmares for an integration. Microsoft definitely isn’t incented to be helpful to these kinds of integrations like they are with partner application integrations to Outlook. The result is that customers trying to use the connectors become frustrated with frequent “breaks” and loss of functionality as their vendor tries to catch up to the latest changes in the Outlook client.

Google seems to be approaching it like IBM and Novell have… building a connector to make Gmail work in Outlook. It will be interesting to see if they can really make it successful.  As Guy pointed out, the initial release will be missing features – such as task management, rules, and delegation. This makes it questionable as to whether or not the connector can really permit enterprises to replace their Exchange servers on the backend. Having experienced it first hand, I believe users will be frustrated by the missing functionality. I expect the success of the connector for Google will be as limited as it has been for IBM and Novell. I agree with Larry that more competition would be healthy for this market, but I believe Google’s Outlook connector may struggle.

Google Turns Up the Heat With Google Apps Sync

Blogger: Larry Cannell

In less than two weeks I will be talking about the enterprise SaaS e-mail market at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in a presentation entitled “Is Email the Next Killer SaaS App?” This is based on a report we wrote last year, shortly after Microsoft detailed plans for Exchange Online and the Business Productivity Online Suite.

At that time it looked like a competitive enterprise SaaS e-mail market was forming with the promise of Yahoo marketing a Zimbra-based offering and, of course, Google’s low-priced Gmail getting the attention of many IT managers. Also, when Cisco acquired Postpath last year they announced the software would not longer be available for purchase and become part of a SaaS offering (Postpath is a near drop-in replacement for an Exchange Server). So these moves by Cisco, as well as Google and Yahoo, appeared to be significant attempts to disrupt the enterprise e-mail market.

However, until today Google seemed reluctant to get too cozy with Outlook, always keeping their relationship at arms-length. It also looks like Yahoo is no longer interested in selling Zimbra as a SaaS offering (however, it is still available from one of their hosting partners). In addition, Oracle is now in the enterprise SaaS e-mail market through their Beehive On Demand offering. However, e-mail is only a feature bundled in with the entire Beehive offering, competing with Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite.

So, in thinking about my E2.0 presentation recently I was feeling somewhat dismayed that more competition hadn’t emerged. I’m also a little concerned that Cisco might come to market with a higher-end suite and, like the others, go after the higher margins. It looked like much of the enterprise SaaS e-mail market was being left to the traditional IT vendors (Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle) marketing more expensive offerings, since support for Outlook is critical for many CIOs to accept a new e-mail system.

Well, the Google Apps team just gave a big ‘ole bear hug to Microsoft Outlook with the release of Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook. As I wrote here in the past, Outlook is the most flexible enterprise SaaS e-mail client due to is prevailing use, Microsoft’s publication of Exchange and SharePoint protocols, and the MAPI interface. Google Apps Sync leverages the MAPI interface so Outlook essentially thinks it is talking with an Exchange Server (this isn’t new, Zimbra also offers this, as does Oracle, and others). There are some functions which Google’s MAPI code doesn’t support at this time but these may not be show-stoppers for many companies. Switching an enterprise from Exchange to Gmail does not necessarily require users changing their e-mail habits and giving up Outlook, like they had to yesterday.

However, I think there are still some shortcomings with Google’s current offering. But, you’ll have to come to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference to hear about these :-)

Google Apps: Syncing Outlook with Gmail

Blogger: Guy Creese

Yesterday, Google announced Google Apps Sync for Outlook, which allows enterprises to keep the Outlook client on the front end while replacing Microsoft Exchange on the backend. From an organizational point-of-view, this allows IT to save money (usually) on e-mail administration without disrupting end-user life (since most companies use Outlook on the desktop).

Some comments, stories on the announcement:

• Google Blog: "Use Microsoft Outlook with Google Apps for email, contacts, and calendar"
• CNet: "Google plots Exchange escape with Outlook plug-in"
• TechCrunch: "Google Takes Another Swipe at Microsoft. Enterprise Apps Now Sync with Outlook."
• VentureBeat: "Google Apps syncs with Outlook--a cure for cloud computing angst"

For those paying attention to this market (or reading Burton Group reports), this announcement is not a huge surprise. Actually, the surprise is more that it took Google this long--2.3 years since announcing Google Apps--to figure out that it needed to offer this functionality. (Cisco's recognition that it needed to support Outlook as a client for SaaS e-mail was the driver behind its acquisition of PostPath last year.) In short, this software frontend/SaaS-backend architecture is required to penetrate this market. As we noted last year in the Software as a Service Enterprise E-Mail: Get Ready to Go Beyond the Grind report:

If the SaaS e-mail solution forces users to learn a new user interface, it can be a huge disruption to the majority of employees and the change will be visible to the entire corporation. However, if only the mail server is replaced and business users can continue to work as they have in the past, then a SaaS e-mail solution is effectively just a back end swap out. This makes it similar to installing a new blade server; thus, only the chief financial officer (CFO), rather than the large user population, needs to be convinced of the need for the change.

This solution will undoubtedly help Google sign up more enterprises for Google Apps than it has in the past. However, enterprises that do their homework will still find some gotchas. For example:

• Outlook Tasks and Notes aren't supported: According to the Google blog post, it looks like Outlook functionality is still not fully supported--e-mail, calendar, and contacts will sync, but Tasks and Notes aren't mentioned. For workers wedded to using every feature in Outlook, the Google solution is still insufficient. (Of course, for many workers, supporting only e-mail, calendar, and contacts is just fine).
• The cost of SaaS e-mail varies widely, depending on requirements: Based on some consulting work Burton Group has done, while straight vanilla SaaS e-mail implementations are price competitive, the prices start to skyrocket if the enterprise has customized its e-mail solution. For example, if it uses content filtering to intercept pornography or company secrets, uses special e-mail templates, or has built applications that use e-mail for workflow, then the costs of integrating those capabilities with SaaS e-mail often make the SaaS solution more expensive than the current cost of running e-mail in-house.

To sum up, the availability of Google Apps Sync for Outlook is good for enterprises--it gives them yet another option to consider when looking to decrease the burden of running enterprise e-mail. Depending on an enterprise's needs, it may fit the bill--or it may not.

Note: Cross-posted on Pattern Finder

Exchange to Notes Migrations

Blogger: Bill Pray

The enterprise e-mail market has primarily been split between Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange for the last several years. Changing e-mail systems for an enterprise is difficult because it is hard to justify the migration expense and user impacts. In particular, customers who have migrated from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange tend to not entirely get away from Notes. While they often can move the e-mail functionality, they usually have also developed custom applications and workflows in the Notes environment that they have difficulty replacing.

Over the last few months, I have had several conversations with Lotus Notes customers about potentially migrating to Microsoft Exchange. Many of these conversations are spurred by the use of SharePoint within the organization – raising the question of whether or not the enterprise should migrate to Exchange also. Read more about IBM’s challenge with SharePoint in Mike Gotta’s blog.

A common question asked during these conversations with Lotus Notes customers is - Are there enterprises migrating from Exchange to Notes? Digging through the IBM press releases over the past year revealed the following information:

Gruppo Amadori – 05/21/2009 about 1,000 seats migrating from Exchange to Notes. The migration is shrouded in the story about Linux-based desktops. Also, the number of seats migrating is not quite enterprise size, depending upon your definition.

Continental AG acquired Siemens VDO – 04/02/2009 about 40,000 seats from Siemens VDO migrating from Exchange to Notes. This is a nice pickup for IBM, but is more of a story of a loyal customer – Continental AG – sticking with IBM and moving an acquisition from Exchange to Notes than it is of a competitive win over Microsoft.

Suntel – 02/05/2009 A telecommunications provider in Sri Lanka. While the release does not say on how many seats this represents, it is a nice win for IBM over Exchange in what is considered an emerging market.

A pre-Lotusphere press release (01/15/2009) gave a list of customers that “have chosen to standardize on Lotus Notes over Microsoft Exchange.” The text implies that some or all are migrating from Exchange. No seat counts were given. Some of these are fairly substantial enterprises. The text says:

“In addition, a number of customers worldwide have chosen to standardize on Lotus Notes over Microsoft Exchange, as well as migrate their existing Exchange environments to the latest versions of Notes/Domino 8. They include Minolta, Toshiba, Continental AG, EVONIK, Bank of New York Mellon, Kendle, Kohl's, Constructora San Jose, Banco do Brazil, Hitachi, Freightliner, Manulife, Sherwin Williams, Belden Wire, Ministry Of Finance Belgium, John Hancock, Ton Yang, Air France, Danone, SunTel, INEOS, Werner Enterprises and Payflex.”

Going back to July 2008, an IBM press release touted:

“The second quarter saw the largest historical client win for Lotus in North America as well. A member of the so-called "big six" accounting/consulting firms purchased more than 150,000 seats of the entire Lotus portfolio, selecting Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, Lotus Connections, IBM Lotus Quickr and WebSphere Portal over Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, among other products. Other large companies that chose Lotus Notes and other Lotus software over Microsoft products included several leading banks in the U.S., the United Kingdom and Germany, as well as the Australian government.

Other clients who have recently invested in Lotus Notes and other Lotus software over the competition include consumer goods giant Colgate-Palmolive, chemical manufacturer Ineos of Belgium, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, NutraFlo, Dutch Railways, Rohm Haas, Imerys and the Salvation Army. Specifically moving to Lotus Notes 8 were CFE Compagnie d'Enterprises of France, Virginia Commonweath University, Winsol International, The U.S. General Services Administration, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, Standard Insurance, New York Life, Kentucky Baptist Convention, Verizon, Publishers Printing, Hyatt Hotels, Union Pacific and Nationwide Insurance.”

What is not clear in this press release is whether or not these are migrations from Exchange or other competitors. Based on anecdotal evidence, it appears that IBM continues to struggle with Notes against Exchange in North America, but is winning some new customers in emerging markets for enterprise e-mail, like APAC.

Due diligence by any IT team looking to make a major decision such as replacing the e-mail solution includes finding out what others are doing and why. As Guy Creese points out in his blog, “IBM's product offerings are well understood by its installed base, they aren't known outside of IBM's inner circle. IBM needs to get out more.”

Exchange 2010 Target? Google Gmail et al…

Blogger: Bill Pray

As the Microsoft marketing machine cranks up the information on Exchange 2010, it is interesting to note how many articles are devoted to new productivity capabilities for users. However, user productivity is not what Exchange 2010 is about… Exchange 2010 is about Microsoft competing with Google and anyone else who throws their hat into the ring – Cisco? IBM? Yahoo!? - in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) e-mail market. While there is no question that Google still has a limited presence in enterprise e-mail, Gmail continues to garner fans and install base in the small and medium business market. Microsoft is no stranger to that strategy and must respond by providing a better enterprise SaaS e-mail solution or risk losing future market share.

Microsoft has not made it a secret that Exchange 2010 is intended to become Microsoft’s attack on the SaaS e-mail market, but the Microsoft marketing machine sometimes obscures things in an effort to get messaging to various audiences. However, the press announcement states in the second sentence: “Exchange 2010 is part of the next wave of Microsoft Office-related products and is the first server in a new generation of Microsoft server technology built from the ground up to work on-premises and as an online service.”

Several of the features that have been added in this release are important for a SaaS offering. First, a robust web client is a critical element for SaaS e-mail. Fat client management is a nightmare that no SaaS service wants to tackle. For Exchange, that means enhancing Outlook Web Access (OWA).  Some of the key enhancements are:

• Calendar sharing in OWA – A feature needed to compete against Gmail. Gmail’s calendar functionality is liked by users.
• Multiple browser support - OWA support for IE 7 & 8, Firefox 3, and Safari 3. Having a robust web-client that runs in multiple browsers is critical to competing against Google’s Gmail.
• Rights management in OWA – Making OWA more like Outlook is what is needed for SaaS e-mail and this feature steps OWA up into an enterprise feature that the competitors currently lack.

Just about any improvement to the server side will be beneficial to Microsoft for SaaS Exchange and here are a few in this release that should help:

• Multi-mailbox search – An interface that can be used by a non-administrator for searching through mailboxes. This permits the enterprise to handle HR and compliance issues without involving admins from the hosted service.
• Database availability groups – Redundant copies of mailbox databases with continuous replication and automatic recovery. Insuring availability and recovery is a must for a hosted service.
• Database-level failover – Eliminates clustering requirement and should improve uptime. Uptime is Service Level Agreement (SLA) friendly for hosted services.
• Exchange Control Panel – Self-service for users for tasks that used to require administrators. Very helpful when the admins are working for Online Hosted Exchange.
• Federation – Creating trust relationships between Exchange servers that traverses the firewalls for calendars and presence. This will be needed for mixed deployments where enterprises choose to put some workers on SaaS e-mail and others use on-premise.
• I/O optimization – I/O bursts are reduced. This should make Exchange more server virtualization friendly, which would be very beneficial in hosted environment.
• JBOD support – Replicated mailbox databases can use JBOD instead of RAID arrays. More efficiency = easier for Microsoft as the hosting provider.
• Online move mailbox – Mailboxes can be moved with the user online. Very handy for future requirements of potentially moving users back and forth between hosted and on-premise.
• Page patching – Repairs corrupted database pages automatically. Automatic repairs always make an admins job easier, which is needed when admins are responsible for hosting millions of mailboxes.
• Role-based access control – The ability to delegate administrative roles will could potentially help with enterprises that want some admin control over the hosted solution.

Obviously, many of these features are good for an on-premise implementation also. However, when you start perusing the feature list for Exchange 2010, it is clear that Microsoft is executing on a strategy to make Exchange SaaS friendly. The story line for Exchange 2010 is not about enhancements in productivity features for the enterprise, it is about Microsoft taking Exchange to cloud.

Exchange 2010

Blogger: Bill Pray

The Exchange 2010 beta announcement yesterday became the first in a wave (as Microsoft calls it) of Microsoft Office 2010 (formerly Office 14) announcements for their collaboration products. The announcement highlighted two interesting enhancements for Exchange.

First, Microsoft is claiming rather obtusely in the announcement that they are providing "flexible deployment and management options." What they are really trying to say was better said in a blog by the Exchange team back in January - Exhange 2010 is built to be both an on-premise and a hosted solution. The Exchange team pointed out in that blog that Ray Ozzie's software plus services memo has driven them to attempt to build Exchange 2010 so that a single code base can meet the differing technical demands of the two delivery models.

Second, Exchange 2010 will include an e-mail archive. Adding e-mail archiving as a feature of the e-mail platform has been speculated about and considered for years. Exchange 2010 will finally make that leap, but it remains to be seen how far they will land. E-mail archiving has become more complex over the last few years as enterprise's have struggled with how to handle the legal, technical, and enterprise demands for e-mail content. These demands have been pushing e-mail into enterprise content management from previously siloed e-mail archive solutions.