September 2009 Archives

As I pointed out in my first post (SharePoint: Without the Headaches - A Discussion of What is Available in the Cloud,) you don't necessarily need to host SharePoint in your own organization.  Although I believe that most businesses should focus on leveraging the front end of SharePoint to its full extent, it is important for non-technical users to have an understanding of what it takes to host SharePoint and why one might want to do so.  Therefore, this post provides a discussion of what it takes to host SharePoint and the driving factors for hosting SharePoint.

Microsoft's original intent was to build a tool that was easy to leverage by non-technical users.  Microsoft thought of this as the natural extension of Office to the web[1].  That being said, the complexities got away from Microsoft, and in order to leverage a number of features one needs access to the back end.

Before delving into the SharePoint back end, let me point out that many businesses hire SharePoint development staff, both permanent and on a consulting basis. I think that developing custom SharePoint code should be done only after thoroughly justifying the expense.  It is often a mistake.  Instead, organizations should clearly define their requirements and then leverage a high quality third party add-on.  I will mention some of these at the end of the post.

SharePoint is a fragile product and therefore custom code for SharePoint is very expensive to develop, test, and deploy. Furthermore, custom code often needs to be rewritten when migrating to the next release of SharePoint.  Finally, SharePoint is a rapidly growing product, and chances are good that custom code may soon become obsolete by new features in the next generation.

In my first post, I pointed out that inexpensive SharePoint hosting options are available in the cloud. These options tend to be limited.  For example, the inexpensive rentals do not provide much security, only provide WSS (not MOSS), and do not allow one to add third party add-ins.  It is possible to lease custom environments that don’t surrender to any of these limitations, but they come at a cost.  (Typically starting at $500 per month[2].)  I believe that robust MOSS offerings with third party add-ons will be available at competitive prices within two years. 

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[1] SharePoint is developed by the Office division.

[2] For example, FPWeb offers a SharePoint hosted environment with the CorasWorks Workplace Suite included starting at $495 per month.

Today is the long-awaited day when 100,000 lucky individuals receive access to an early, but working, version of Google Wave. I hope I am in those ranks! Like many people, I have been reading about Wave, but have not been able to experience it hands-on

Wave has been a hot topic since it was first shown outside of Google last May. Yet it continues to be quite misunderstood, most likely because it is such an early stage effort and most interested people have not been able to lay hands on the technology. For that very reason, Gilbane Group is presenting a panel entitled Google Wave: Collaboration Revolution or Confusion? at the Gilbane Boston conference, on December 3rd.

The confusion surrounding Wave was highlighted for me yesterday in a Twitter exchange on the topic. It all started innocently enough, when Andy McAfee asked:

To which I replied:

That statement elicited the following comment from Jevon MacDonald of the Dachis Group:

I am not a technologist. I seek to understand technology well enough that I can explain it in layman's terms to business people, so they understand how technology can help them achieve their business goals. So I generally avoid getting into deep technical discussions. This time, however, I was pretty sure that I was on solid ground, so the conversation between me and Jevon continued:

Now, here we are, at the promised blog post. But, how can Jevon and I both be correct? Simple. Google Wave encompasses not one, but several protocols for communication between system components, as illustrated in the figure below.

Figure 1: Google Wave Protocols (Source: J. Aaron Farr, http://www.cubiclemuses.com/cm/articles/2009/08/09/waves-web-of-protocols/)

The most discussed of these is the Google Wave Federation protocol, which is an extension of the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). However, Wave also requires protocols for client-server and robot server- (Web service) Wave server communication. It is also possible, but probably not desirable, for Wave to utilize a client-client protocol.

Jevon was absolutely correct about the XMPP protocol enabling server-server communication in the Google Wave Federation Protocol. The Draft Protocol Specification for the Google Wave Federation Protocol lays out the technical details, which I will not explore here. XMPP provides a reliable mechanism for server-server communication and is a logical choice for that function in Google Wave, because XMPP was originally designed to transmit instant message and presence data.

It turns out that the Google Wave team has not defined a specific protocol to be used in client-server communication. A Google whitepaper entitled Google Wave Data Model and Client-Server Protocol does not mention a specific protocol. The absence of a required or recommended protocol is also confirmed by this blog post. While the Google implementation of Wave does employ HTTP as the client-server protocol, as Jevon stated, it is possible to use XMPP as the basis for client-server communication, as I maintained. ProcessOne demonstrates this use of XMPP in this blog post and demo.

Finally, there is no technical reason that XMPP could not be used to route communications directly from one client to another. However, it would not be desirable to communicate between more than two clients via XMPP. Without a server somewhere in the implementation, Wave would be unable to coordinate message state between multiple clients. In plain English, the Wave clients most likely would not be synchronized, so each would display a different point in the conversation encapsulated in the Wave.

To summarize, Google Wave employs the following protocols:

• XMPP for server-server communication
• HTTP for client-server communication in the current Google implementation; XMPP is possible, as demonstrated by ProcessOne
• HTTP (JSON RPC) for robot server-Wave server communication in the current Google implementation
• Client-client protocol is not defined, as this mode of communication is most likely not usable in a Wave

I hope this post clarifies the protocols used in the current architecture of Google Wave for you. More importantly, I hope that it highlights just how much additional architectural definition needs to take place before Wave is ready for use by the masses. If I had a second chance to address Andy McAfee's question, I would unequivocally state that Google Wave is a "concept car" at this point in time.

Postscript: The heretofore mentioned possibilities around XMPP as a client-client protocol are truly revolutionary. The use of XMPP as the primary communication protocol for the Internet, instead of the currently used HTTP protocol, would create a next generation Internet in which centralized servers would no longer serve as intermediaries between users. Web application architectures, even business models, would be changed. See this post for a more detailed explanation of this vision, which requires each user to run a personal server on their computing device.

Our Social Media Contest has officially begun, and there will be tons of ways to enter & win! 

Prizes include:

• 1 Grand Prize Conference Plus Package
• Multiple Conference Only passes
• 5 CM Pros Annual Memberships
• 10 USB Flash Drives filled with Gilbane Group Publications!

gilbaneboston.com/socialmediacontest.html

See our new Best Practice Profile Series. They are free to download. The first three profiles include:

• HP
• MercuryMarine
• Symantec

What: Briefing on Open Systems and the Federal Sector

Where: The National Press Club

529 14th Street NW, 13th Floor, Washington, DC 20045
http://www.press.org/directions.cfm

When: Wednesday, September 23, 2009 (9-11am

Doors open at 9am, program begins at 9:30am
Coffee and tea will be served.

Register: http://www.eventbee.com/view/somateng/event?eventid=61845

We have taken the time to compile a list of ~70 twitter accounts of speakers, exhibitors, and sponsors who will be attending Gilbane Boston 2009.  In the event any accounts were missed, please e-mail scott@gilbane.com with corrections!

Gilbane Boston 2009 Twitter Roster

A new TweepML list has been made which includes all of the Gilbane crew who have accounts, enjoy!

I moved our list of CMS Companies and Communities to http://tweepml.org/. Much easier way to share the list!

Maintenance Window:
September 19, 2009 09:30:00 P.M. EST — September 19, 2009 10:00:00 P.M. EST

Our web server is scheduled to have its memory doubled during this maintenance window.  Web hosting services including web sites, FTP, and MySQL databases will be unavailable while the server is down for this hardware upgrade.  Email and WebMail/WebAide services will be unaffected.

The server memory upgrade will serve to increase the performance of our server and everything running on it and will serve as a buffer to help prevent excessive use or bursting activity of some customers from affecting server performance and uptime for other customers on the server.

We are ramping up for our annual Boston conference, and the program is mostly complete. Our tagline this year is "Content, Collaboration & Customers", and as usual, we'll be discussing a wide range of related topics and covering all the important trends. Four areas we are paying extra attention too are:

Managing enterprise social content. This should not be a surprise. The increasing use of social software in business and government environments for both internal and customer communications means more content, of a different kind, to be managed.

Managing enterprise mobile content. Smartphones are replacing noteboooks and desktops as clients  for many enterprise applications, and complementing them for even more. Mobile is another enterprise channel with unique content requirements.

SharePoint & Office 2010 and web content management. As the SharePoint surge continues with the upcoming release of 2010, early signs point to increased emphasis on web content management and integration between WCM, Office and SharePoint. How will this affect the content management market?

E-government & transparency. We are seeing a lot of activity here among both state and federal agencies, and there are special content management challenges that in many (most?) projects mean integrating new technologies and practices (e.g., social software) with established information management approaches (e.g., XML, XBRL).

Stay tuned for updates, or follow the conference on Twitter at http://twitter.com/gilbaneboston.

Conference links:

• Sponsors and exhibitors
• Pre-conference workshops &
• Content Management Professionals (CM Pros) workshops
• Conference Schedule
• Conference session descriptions
• VIP program
• Registration

O'Reilly's Gov 2.0 events took place last week. We've had some time to think about what the current wave of activity means to buyers and adopters of content technologies.

Both the Expo and Summit programs delivered a deluge of examples of exciting new approaches to connecting consumers of government services with the agencies and organizations that provide them. 

• At the Expo on Sept 8,  25 speakers from organizations like NASA, TSA, US EPA, City of Santa Cruz,  Utah Department of Public Safety, and the US Coast Guard provided five-minute overviews of their 2.0 applications in a sometimes dizzying fast-paced format.
• Sunlight Labs sponsored an Apps for America challenge that featured finalists who combined federal content available on Data.gov and open source software in some intriguing applications, including DataMasher, which enables you to mash up sources such as stats on numbers of high school graduates and guns per household.
• The Summit on Sept 9 and 10 featured more applications plus star-status speakers including Aneesh Chopra, the US's first CTO operating under the Federal Office of Science and Technology Policy; Vinton Cerf, currently VP and evangelist at Google; and Mitch Kapor.

A primary program theme was "government as platform," with speakers suggesting and debating just what that means. There was much thoughtful discussion, if not consensus. Rather than report, interested readers can search Twitter hash tags #gov20e and #gov20s for comments.

From the first speaker on, we were immediately struck by the rapid pace of change in government action and attitude about content and data sharing. Our baseline for comparison is Gilbane's last conference on content applications within government and non-profit agencies in June 2007. In presentations and casual conversations with attendees, it was clear that most organizations were operating as silos. There was little sharing or collaboration within and among organizations. Many attendees expressed frustration that this was so. When we asked what could be done to fix the problem, we distinctly remember one person saying that connecting with other content managers just within her own agency would be a huge improvement.

Fast forward a little over two years to last week's Gov2.0 events. Progress towards internal collaboration, inter-agency data sharing, and two-way interaction between government and citizens is truly remarkable. At least three factors have created a pefect storm of conditions: the current administration's vision and mandate for open government, broad acceptance of social interaction tools at the personal and organizational level, and technology readiness in the form of open source software that makes it possible to experiment at low cost and risk.

Viewing the events through Gilbane's content-centric lens, we offer three takeaways:

• Chopra indicated that the formal Open Government directives to agencies, to be released in several weeks, will include the development of "structured schedules" for making agency data available in machine-readable format. As Tim O'Reilly said while interviewing Chopra, posting "a bunch of PDFs" will not be sufficient for alignment with the directives. As a result, agencies will be accelerating the adoption of XML and the transformation of publishing practices to manage structured content. As a large buyer of content technologies and services, government agencies are market influencers. We will be watching carefully for the impact of Open Government initiatives on the broader landscape for content technologies.
• There was little mention of the role of content management as a business practice or technology infrastructure. This is not surprising, given that Gov2.0 wasn't about content management. And while the programs comprised lots of show-and-tell examples, most were very heavy on show and very light on tell. But it does raise a question about how these applications will be managed, governed, and made sustainable and scalable. Add in the point above -- that structured content will now be poised for wider adoption, creating demand for XML-aware content management solutions. Look for more discussion as agencies begin to acknowledge their content management challenges.
• We didn't hear a single mention of language issues in the sessions we attended. Leaving us to wonder if non-native English speakers who are eligible for government services will be disenfranchised in the move to Open Government.

All in all, thought-provoking, well-executed events. For details, videos of the sessions are available on the Gov2.0 site.

Gilbane's Geoffrey Bock was called upon by USA Today to comment upon the trend of start-ups using a SaaS model for business. His opinions are joined with a diverse group of C level executives to offer their insight on this trend. 

http://www.usatoday.com/money/smallbusiness/2009-09-08-online-services-startups_N.htm

Dennis Howlett has once again started a useful and important debate, this time with his Irregular Enterprise blog post entitled Enterprise 2.0: what a crock. While I am sympathetic to some of the thinking he expressed, I felt the need to address one point Dennis raised and a question he asked.

I very much agree with this statement by Dennis:

"Like it or not, large enterprises - the big name brands - have to work in structures and hierarchies..."

However, I strongly disagree with his related contention ("the Big Lie" as he terms it) that:

"Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all."

Dennis also posed a question that probably echoes what many business leaders are asking:

"In the meantime, can someone explain to me the problem Enterprise 2.0 is trying to solve?"

Below is the comment that I left on Dennis' blog. It begins to answer the final question he asked and address my disagreement with his contention that Enterprise 2.0 advocates seek to create anarchy. Is my vision for the co-existence of structured and recombinant organizational and work models clear and understandable? Reasonable and viable? If not, I will expand my thoughts in a future post. Please let me know what you think.

Enterprise 2.0 is trying to solve a couple levels of problems.

From a technology standpoint, E2.0 is addressing the failure of existing enterprise systems to provide users with a way to work through exceptions in defined business processes during their execution. E2.0 technology does this by helping the user identify and communicate with those who can help deal with the issue; it also creates a discoverable record of the solution for someone facing a similar issue in the future.

From a organizational and cultural perspective, E2.0 is defining a way of operating for companies that reflects the way work is actually accomplished -- by peer-to-peer interaction, not through command and control hierarchy. Contrary to your view, E2.0 does not pre-suppose the destruction of hierarchy. Correctly implemented (philosophy and technology), E2.0 provides management a view of the company that is complementary to the organization chart.

Addendum: See this previous post for more of my perspective on the relationship of structured and ad hoc methods of working.