Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Is Bluenog’s Use of Open Source Sustainable?

Blogger: Larry Cannell

There have been some recent interesting posts discussing Bluenog, a company which sells the Bluenog ICE (integrated collaborative environment). This is a product consisting of a portal framework, content management system, a report generator, a wiki, and a calendar all working within a secured environment using a granular permission model and is capable of integrating with enterprise single sign-on systems. The system looks to be very Enterprise 2.0-ish and may provide a useful intranet environment that brings together the breadth of information needed by knowledge workers. I had a chance to look at the product at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference and talk with the company in an extended briefing. The product should get the attention of many IT managers.

While the Bluenog ICE product itself looks interesting, it is the business model the company uses to develop it that is causing a controversy and, in my opinion, raises some flags. Bluenog advertises itself as an open source company (or, rather, that is what most people walk away thinking when they have seen or read about the company). To be precise, here is what Bluenog says about their use of open source:

Bluenog ICE leverages several open source CMS, open source collaboration, open source portal and open source BI projects. These projects provide the building blocks for Bluenog ICE and allow us to provide tightly integrated solutions at a fraction of the cost of traditional alternatives.

The web page linked above lists a total of 19 open source projects as being used within the Bluenog product so, clearly, Bluenog is a consumer open source software. However, although the distinction may be subtle, the way Bluenog uses open source is different than what most enterprise IT managers may be expecting.

First, let’s be clear, Bluenog sells a proprietary product. Bluenog does not make the resulting source code of their commercial product available via an open source license. Paying customers get a copy of the source code but this offers none of the benefits, such as transparency and choice, that enterprises can gain from leveraging open source. What can you do with a copy of the source code? Open source becomes powerful when it is out in a community, gaining new features, getting security flaws fixed, etc.

Second, the only company that has benefited from Bluenog’s approach to open source is Bluenog itself, not its customers. But the sustainability of that benefit is questionable. Let me explain.

A number of the open source products used, which provide core ICE features, require significant changes to work in the Bluenog framework and these changes are not contributed to any sort of open source community. In essence, major parts of Bluenog are built from forks of open source products that are folded into their proprietary framework. Any enhancements or security patches from the originating open source community would have to be manually integrated into Bluenog because they are now separate products. For example, Bluenog is built with a version of the Hippo CMS that is one major version behind the main project.

So the question enterprises should be asking is this: Is Bluenog’s development model sustainable? Arguably, other companies have used open source this way. For example, IBM’s Lotus Symphony is based off an old version of Open Office. However, Bluenog is different for two reasons. First, Bluenog isn’t IBM. They are a startup and have limited resources. Second, they are creating a whole new integrated product based off of the amalgamation of several open source products, which sounds like a big integration challenge. IBM is re-basing the next release of Lotus Symphony on Open Office 3. Can Bluenog say the same about Hippo CMS? Do they care about future versions of Hippo CMS or are they content with keeping the older code, essentially turning these pieces into their own proprietary code?

If I were an enterprise IT manager considering Bluenog I wouldn’t let their use of open source sway me at all and evaluate them as a proprietary software vendor. I would also start asking questions about how they plan on sustaining the development of the product. Bluenog’s approach to using open source may have helped initially to get the first product out the door faster. However, the enterprise software market is a marathon not a sprint.

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.

Some Un-educated Guesses about Office 14

Blogger: Craig Roth

This seems like a perfect time to post up some un-educated guesses about what will be in Office 14.  It's the perfect time because Burton Group hasn't been briefed on it yet.  Normally we would have been by now, but after numerous scheduling conflicts our briefing has now been rescheduled several times since the end of 2008.    Usually we are briefed by the vendors we cover well in advance of major announcements which helps us prime our content pipeline, but it also puts a freezing effect on guessing due to the non-disclosure agreements.  This leaves me an opportunity to make some lemonade from those lemons.  Since I haven't been officially educated on O14, I can feel free to publish guesses without fear that I'm giving away secrets!

That's a round-about way of saying these are all purely guesses on my part.  My teammate Larry Cannell already posted some gleanings about SharePoint 14 after the FAST conference.  Here are my guesses on the productivity side of Office 14:

• Breaking down some barriers in moving content to/from the web: Copy/pasting from websites to Office and back shouldn't be so messy and linkages should remain.  Again, OneNote has foreshadowed some of this and Microsoft has already acknowledged this will be addressed
• Better leveraging / integration of OneNote: The more you dig into OneNote, the more you see that it is not just a note-taking tool for students and home use, but a quantum leap in content creation from Word.  Microsoft hasn't pushed its value because they have trouble explaining it.  I'm going to place a bet that O14 will lift OneNote's profile, although still not to the level it should be
• Tighter SharePoint integration with the productivity side of Office: I expect the web editors to be leveraged to allow editing of workspace documents in place, much like IBM Lotus Notes does by leveraging Symphony.  I also expect better (think "wiki-like") versioning capabilities when modifying documents stored in SharePoint
• Better use of XML schemas: The OOXML spec allows for some very nice schema usage (tagging document sections, being able to split a document into different pieces) that Microsoft didn’t take advantage of in Office 2007. Making those capabilities more visible will make it easier for enterprises and third-parties to programmatically create and reuse document parts
• Better tagging across the suite: Uses of tagging in web 2.0 tools (blogging, tag clouds, social tagging) has far outpaced the underutilized, weak, free-form "keywords" and "category" fields in the Document Properties pane (quiz: do you know how to get to it in Office 2007?).  SharePoint enabled policies to be linked to the Document Properties panel, but capabilities for shared namespaces, tag clouds, and controlled vocabularies were absent from Office 2007.  I will place my last bet that O14 includes at least some of these tagging capabilities that are commonplace in other domains
• Web editors: Stripped down, Silverlight enabled versions of all your Office favorites.  Includes a mobile experience as well.  Some of this has already been announced or leaked, but the Silverlight part is just a guess
• Real-time collaborative editing: There are plenty of non-Microsoft products that do this now (like SubEthaEdit) and OneNote can already do this (to a lesser extent than the true RCE tools).  I expect more of it in the rest of the Office suite

One final caveat: While I think all of these are good, this is not my list of what could and should be done with Office.  What I've guessed above are more incremental improvements except for the web editors.  I'll leave some more radical ideas on how to revitalize the Office productivity franchise for another posting.

Documents Are Not Files

Blogger: Larry Cannell

In a recent post Stephen O’Grady takes an interesting look at the current paradigm of “documents.” Stephen makes these points:

• Google Docs and blog posts are not documents.
• Documents are not collaborative (“A document, for me, has become a snapshot of the real, living asset, rather than an asset in and of itself”)
• And concludes with:

“The term document, in my view, is a legacy term, and as such, it brings with it preconceived notions of what a document is, should be, and can be. My concern, then, is that these preconceived notions end up predetermining the perceptions of what the assets are capable of.”

• We need to find another word to describe documents authored online since “document” implies a computer file.

I agree with most everything Stephen says. Except, in my opinion he shouldn’t be complaining about documents. He should be complaining about documents stored in files.The source of my disagreement with Stephen is his confusion between document and file. In his blog post, whenever Stephen refers to a document he describes a file. Documents are not necessarily files and files are not necessarily documents.

The analog world counterparts to computer documents and files are considered very different things. A file cabinet holds file folders which hold pieces of papers. Many, of which, are most certainly documents. Have we become so accustomed to documents stored as files that we use the terms interchangeably? I hope not. Instead of finding a new word to describe documents I think we need to stop abusing the word “document.”

At Burton Group’s Catalyst Conference this year I discussed how we need to change our definition of “document.” The practice of storing computer-based documents within computer files has been around since…well…as long as we’ve had computer files (which is as long as we’ve had computers). Microsoft’s choice to store a Word document within a computer file wasn’t a difficult one. A computer file made the most sense because no one could think of another place to store them.

Is a Wikipedia page or a Google Doc a document? I argue, yes, it absolutely is a document. However, that may be difficult to comprehend because no one could ever imagine creating Wikipedia using current desktop word processors.

How would a new paradigm, let’s call it “Document as a web page", behave different than our current “Document as a file” paradigm?

• Documents-as-web-pages are collaborative. Wikis and online documents have version control and most have some form of access control. In contrast, documents-as-files are usually black-holes of information. Rarely do people effectively collaborate when documents are stored in files.
• Documents-as-web-pages are easier to access. Only a browser is required, not a heavy client application (ok, a little diversion for the moment…documents-as-web-pages use the web as a platform, an important component of web 2.0…documents-as-files, on the other hand, uses the web as a transport).
• Documents-as-web-pages focus more on presentation within a browser rather than a printed page.
• Documents-as-web-pages can scale into something much larger than a single document. Look how large Wikipedia has become (10M+ pages…err…documents).

In the documents-as-web-pages paradigm Wikipedia (or it’s enterprise equivalent, let’s call them corporate-pedias) is a document management system. However, this is not your typical document management system. These documents remain relevant and have the opportunity to improve over time. Today, most document management systems are simply dumping grounds for documents before they are deleted to stay compliant with a policy or mandate.

To me, the current documents-as-files paradigm is holding up enterprises from realizing the potential of their “documents.” It keeps information siloed into thousands (even millions) of black holes (called files) on desktop computers.

Do we need a new term to describe a document-as-web-page? Maybe so. But, until I am convinced otherwise, I’ll stay with “document.” Although, I might be convinced to call them “online documents” for awhile. This would be similar to how today’s cameras were once referred to as “digital cameras.” This term was used to distinguish cameras capturing images on digital media from cameras capturing images on rolled sheets of light-sensitive plastic called “film.”

By the way, you may also be interested in another blog post I wrote about this called “I Hate Files.”

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.

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.

Call For Opinions: Office Productivity Suites and Next Generation Authoring Needs

Blogger: Craig Roth

Guy Creese and I are working on research about desktop authoring for enterprise information workers and would like to hear from anyone who wants to discuss what their organization is doing about current and future authoring needs.

I've attached the blurbs about our upcoming papers below, but I'll sum it up as saying that Guy's document is about whether alternatives to Office (like Google Apps or IBM Symphony) are now feasible.  Mine is about whether the core office suite as we know it (spreadsheet + word processor + presentation) is really sufficient at all for the emerging needs of content authors who work collaboratively, want to reuse content in more granular components, value freshness over accuracy, and want to develop "living" documents that continue to evolve over time.

Have you been struggling with these issues?  Are you re-evaluating the content creation tools you're providing to information workers in your organization?  Do you have a story to tell about a proof-of-concept or successful/unsuccessful attempt to use an alternate productivity suite or provide tools that support next-gen authoring (like mind mapping, wikis, or note management)?  If so, please send me an email at craig dot roth at burtongroup dot com.

Content Authoring in the Enterprise 2.0 Age
Analyst: Craig Roth
Content authoring technology, such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, was originally just a tool that enabled the authoring process. However, with functional enhancements in the basic productivity suite, increased interest in brainstorming and mind-mapping tools, and the emergence of Web 2.0 authoring tools, it is now apparent that technology is changing how we write and what we write, even though information workers may not always be conscious of its effect. In this overview Craig Roth, Service Director for Collaboration and Content Strategies, will describe how new content authoring, collaboration, aggregating, publishing, and searching technologies are impacting the writing process, and the challenges on the horizon for content authoring in the Enterprise 2.0 age.
Productivity Suite Proliferation: Alternatives to Microsoft Office
Analyst: Guy Creese
Microsoft Office has long dominated the productivity suite market. While it still "owns" the market, enterprises looking for a product for creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations now have many alternatives to pick from. This overview from Research Director Guy Creese will look at software (e.g., WordPerfect, OpenOffice.org, and Lotus Symphony) and SaaS alternatives (e.g., Google Apps, Think Free, and Zoho) and discuss whether now is the time to heave out Microsoft Office and put something else in its place.

Where Did All The Collaborative Authoring Researchers Go?

Blogger: Craig Roth

My job as an industry analyst sometimes requires me to be a detective.  I'm in the midst of researching my upcoming document on "Content Authoring in the Enterprise 2.0 Age" and uncovered an interesting mystery. 

Most of my day-to-day interactions are with end user clients, with a smattering of vendor conversations thrown in.  But when researching a new topic I like to see what research is going on in academia, which is where I noticed an interesting phenomenon.  One of the trends in content creation I'll be writing about is "collaborative authoring".  This is the idea that more and more documents are being created as a collaboration between many authors, which introduces procedural and technical challenges.  My research uncovered quite a bit of academic work in this area, but the lists of papers I found all mysteriously stopped around 2000.  It's as if an academic meteorite hit the earth at the end of 2000, wiping out all the collaborative authoring researchers without a trace! 

Did humanity solve the collaborative authoring problem rendering further research unnecessary?  Or was a more nefarious hand at play?  I had some theories, but this was just too curious to ignore, so I contacted some of the academics who were involved in this space in the late '90s to find out what happened.  I'm happy to say they are still alive and well.

Dr. Sylvie Noël, an HCI research scientist for the government of Canada, fingered "free collaborative authoring tools such as Wikipedia" as a culprit.  And since quite a few commercial products offering collaboration started coming out after 2000, researchers weren't as interested.  Dr. Noël did point out that work continues under the rubric of "collaborative editing" (more encompassing than just authoring).  Regarding collaborative authoring, she still hopes for "a popular product that meets the large corporations' needs and is as simple to use as email."  Me too.

Dr. Michael Spring, Associate Professor of Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh, pointed out that while the research assumed people author content together, in reality there is generally one owner with others just commenting.  And getting information workers to be a bit more structured and maybe - gasp! - look beyond Microsoft Word is often futile.  Like Dr. Noël he points out a profusion of "good enough" tools like wikis and better reviewing features in Word.  Once theory starts showing up in real, commercial products like word processors and wikis the grants and academic interest dries up pretty quick.

Dr. Spring had another observation that carries over into my research on attention management and improving employee productivity.  After exploring the potential time and cost savings that technology could yield for distributed collaborative authoring for engineering standards, he wonders if "the senior engineers really didn't want to be that efficient."  They liked getting together in first-class global cities to hang out together rather than efficiently exchanging snippets of content using web-based collaboration.  In fact, these efficiencies could threaten the staff and budgets of their departments.

To me, it's unfortunate that this research has died down. Even if the theoretical level is now understood, it hasn't all been turned into practice and technology yet.  Large vendors like IBM and Microsoft do have research groups, but I haven't confirmed they have picked up the research now that academia has handed it off.  It's clear there is still more than enough room for some good ideas.