Gilbane Group Blog: Enterprise Blogs and Wikis Archives

October 31, 2006

Google & JotSpot vs. Microsoft & Socialtext?

Not as manipulative a headline as you might think! Google announced it had acquired Jotspot today, and Socialtext announced "SocialPoint", a wiki for SharePoint, on Monday. The timing of these announcements may be accidental, but Socialtext and JotSpot were very competitive and have countered each other's releases before. In any case this is big news for the enterprise wiki world, and good news for many, including the other enterprise wiki vendors - at least in the short term since the market is so young. This will obviously be a hot topic in our Collaboration & Enterprise Blogs & Wikis Track in Boston at the end of the month, especially in the Enterprise Wiki CEO/CTO Panel where Socialtext, MindTouch, Traction, CustomerVision, and eTouch will debate - maybe Google can join them... Enterprise wiki vendors Atlassian and SilkRoad will also be there. Note we are again hosting an "American Idol" type contest along with CMS Watch, but this year it is an "Enterprise Wiki Idol" instead of a CMS Idol. This is a free event in the demo area. More information including the judges and contestants is here.

There is a lot of commentary on this week's announcements. See what our friends at Between the Lines, Dan Farber and David Berlind have to say, as well as Don Dodge (Microsoft), and Ross Mayfield (Socialtext).

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 7:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 1, 2006

Gilbane Boston session descriptions published - registration open

We have now published tutorial and session descriptions for our Fall conference (November 28-30, 2006 Westin Copley Place, Boston MA) and registration is also now open. Speaker details will be added soon.

Conference track descriptions:
http://gilbaneboston.com/ConferenceProgram.html

Conference session descriptions:
http://gilbaneboston.com/Conference-Sessions.html

Pre-conference tutorial descriptions:
http://gilbaneboston.com/Conference-Tutorials.html

Complete conference schedule:
http://gilbaneboston.com/Conference-Grid.html

Registration:
http://gilbaneboston.com/Registration.html

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 12:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 2, 2006

Forrester on Blogging Platforms

Forrester has published one of their "Wave Evaluations" on blogging platforms. Charlene Li has a summary of the report along with the associated Wave graphic on her blog. The full report is available for sale at Forrester. Note that this report does not cover Wikis, although some of the platforms covered also have Wiki functionality. As we have suggested before, in the enterprise space, the line between blog and wiki platforms blurs in many cases. This is of course truer for collaboration and intranet-oriented deployments than for outward facing, e.g., PR-oriented communication.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 11:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 26, 2006

University of Massachusetts Research on Blogging

Nora Barnes has released the results of research into blogging from the Center for Marketing Research at UMass Dartmouth, where she is the Director and a Professor. This is a welcome addition to the sparse collection of research that has been conducted to date. The published report is free and is available (as a 1.3mb PDF) here, or from the Center, where there is also a link to a podcast of an interview with Nora, and links to comments from others on the study.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 9:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 20, 2006

Government 2.0

Just kidding!

But it was fascinating how much interest there was in blog, wiki and RSS technology at our conference in Washington last week. Just as in the private sector, there is both more use of these technologies than most people realize, and strong interest once people hear about what other organizations are doing with them. See conference chair Tony Byrne's comments on this in his article for Intelligent Enterprise magazine about the conference.

XML, and search were two other areas of intense interest.

This was a very gratifying event: the conference attendees were 90% government, and they were deeply engaged in the use of content technologies.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 1:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 9, 2006

Enterprise Wiki Spreadsheet more interesting than Google Spreadsheets

Ross Mayfield reports that Socialtext has hooked-up with Dan Bricklin "...(inventor of VisiCalc) to exclusively distribute, redistribute and co-develop wikiCalc". The wikiCalc beta has been released as an Open Source GPL distribution, and Socialtext will be releasing wikiCalc "under a more liberal and commercial friendly distribution".

This is potentially very interesting as many existing enterprise wiki users are collaborating on projects where an integrated spreadsheet could add significantly to the utility of the application. We'll be watching to see how enterprises pick-up and use this combo.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 6:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 12, 2006

Blog posting from Word 2007

Looks like Microsoft is adding blog posting support to Word 2007 in a way that not only does not screw up your HTML, but attempts to take advantage of Word features bloggers care about without other features getting in the way. This is more appealing than it may sound at first, and may be useful when building enterprise blog applications where Office is entrenched and familiar. It will be in Office 2007 Beta 2. Learn more from the developers.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 5:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 20, 2006

Late Breaking Updates for Gilbane San Francisco

Here is a quick update on next week's event:

New Sponsors & Exhibitors
Adobe has joined us as a Gold sponsor - their Enterprise Solutions and Developer Group in particular. See announcements on some of the new products and features to be shown from our 50+ exhibitors.

New Debates
In addition to our popular analyst session, two analysts will face-off on 7 topics they disagree on in Content Technologies: A Town Hall Debate. And of course, don't forget CMS Idol.

Keynote Survey
~~The early results from our survey on questions to ask the keynote panel show the topics attendees are most interested in are, in order:~~

(78%) What are the top 3 technologies that must be considered in any content management strategies in the next 12-24 months?

(60%) Are there any breakthrough classification or metadata tagging technologies on the horizon that you should be watching for?

(57%) How will content management lite offerings from Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM affect the content management market?

(55%) How is widespread adoption of RSS/Atom going to affect content delivery? And what does this mean to enterprise content management or publishing strategies?

(55%) What new publishing technologies should we expect to see in the next 12-18 months? Will they make it easier to incorporate better design elements to improve customer facing applications?

(55%) Is there any real breakthrough search technology search on the horizon that you should consider for your intranet or extranet applications?

(49%) How will Blog and Wiki tools be used in enterprise content applications? How are they being used today?

(49%) Are there authoring tools on the horizon that are both user-friendly and capable of authoring for both electronic and print output?

UPDATE: You can see ~~partial~~ final results of the responses to all the questions here~~, and contribute to the survey here.~~

Content Globalization
Also, the top write-in question topic so far is on globalization and content management. This is a hot topic at the event - there are multiple sessions covering it, and many vendors showing related products and services - some of them have even put together a Content Globalization Pavilion.

We have over 100 expert speakers covering these and other topics. Conference program .

And don't forget to look into the Content Management Professionals Association Spring Summit

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 9:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 17, 2005

Structured Blogging - Enterprise Only?

Structured blogging activity has accelerated, and has reached the important milestone where there is debate about whether it will amount to anything. If you are not familiar with structured blogging, the term itself should be enough to give you a good idea - think of structured editing, eForms, and blogging all mushed together. Structured editing has been around since the early 80s when companies like Datalogics, Texet, Arbortext, SoftQuad and others were developing SGML authoring and editing tools (I was involved in the Texet effort). The big problem then was the user interface. WYSIWYG was new, but the real issue was not that the tools were not graphical enough, it was that authors were not interested in tools that forced them A) to use a different tool, B) to use a tool that required them to do more work, and C) to use a tool that they were not convinced would provide significant benefits. Today many of us use eForm, HTML or XML tools and the interfaces are far superior, but A, B are still major hurdles to overcome. C is less of a problem, and maybe appealing applications based on 'microformats' will help even more. Perhaps the blogging tool plug-ins in the works will alleviate A and B, but winning the hearts of bloggers will not be easy. It will be far easier to do in the context of enterprise applications, but the difficulty should not be underestimated. I am a fan of structured blogging and authoring in general, but the concerns being raised are real. To catch-up on the pros and cons of structured blogging see posts from Bob Wyman, Charlie Wood, Paul Kedrosky,

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 4:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 13, 2005

Innovation, Knowledge Management and Enterprise Blogs

In our informal survey of enterprise use of blogs and wikis, the most popular application that organizations are using blogs and wikis for was "knowledge management". While our survey is a far cry from what a rigorous market research effort would be, the results are in sync with what we and others are hearing from companies. I recently heard from Rod Boothby, who is leading an effort with Ernst & Young to build an internal enterprise blogging system to support knowledge sharing, and has written an essay based on his findings while building the business case for the project. I have just read the 37 page essay, Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators, and it is a great tool for describing the benefits of enterprise blogging to senior management. Rod is publishing sections of the essay on his blog at www.innovationcreators.com.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 10:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 6, 2005

Enterprise Blog, Wiki and RSS Debate

We are getting ready for our upcoming Boston conference and hope to see you there. But whether you join us or not, you can contribute to the debate by commenting on this blog entry. Below is the session description with links to the participant's bios and their blogs. Comments and trackbacks are on.

Keynote Debate: Blog, Wiki, and RSS Technology - Are they Enterprise Ready? Applicable? Or a Passing Tempest in a Teacup?

Most of you have probably not seriously considered using these technologies in enterprise applications. Yet there are companies using these technologies for collaboration, knowledge management, and publishing applications in corporate environments, and there are vendors marketing products based on these to businesses like yours. Do these companies only represent the experimental fringe, or are they early adopters of technologies that will soon be part of every IT department's bag of tricks? In this session we'll take a look at the suitability of these for corporate use and hear from both skeptics and proponents of, for example enterprise or group blogs. You will come away from this session able to discuss these issues with your colleagues back in the office.

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair --- Blog

David Berlind, Executive Editor, ZDNet --- Blog
Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext, Inc. --- Blog
Bill Zoellick Senior Analyst, The Gilbane Report --- Blog
Charlie Wood, Principal, Spanning Partners, LLC --- Blog

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 10:14 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 27, 2005

ASIS&T

The ASIS&T annual meeting, which starts tomorrow in Charlotte, North Carolina, has launched both an event blog and an event wiki These should both be worth following as the meeting continues through next Wednesday.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 19, 2005

Enterprise blog surveys

We updated our survey on enterprise use of blog, wiki and RSS technology for our presentation on the same subject to a group of documentation and training managers yesterday. With 91 respondents the results are a little more respectable. The only obvious differences from our earlier results were an increase the use or planned use of RSS, and the amount of support provided by IT for blogs, wikis, and RSS. We are not sure if there is real "hockey stick" growth going on here - our results don't show it - but there just might be. Chris Shipley thinks their numbers show it. Perhaps they do, but we need to know more about the demographics. Our own demographics are very broad and include a sizable non-technical component, which could explain the difference. There was certainly strong interest among the doc and training folks yesterday, but deployment was almost non-existent. The only other sort of relevant survey we are aware of is Technorati's, but that was aimed at bloggers so is a very different animal.

Based on all the evidence, my inclination is to believe the growth is hockey-stick-like. We'll try and come to some more concrete conclusions on this in time for our keynote debate on this in Boston next month.

Almost forgot to mention the new Yahoo! White Paper on RSS (pdf). If you thought most internet users knew what RSS was you had better read this.

Addendum: Here is more info on the demographics and methodolgy we were looking for re the Guidewire/Edelman survey mentioned by Chris Shipley we referenced above.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 3:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 2, 2005

Blogs and Wikis to Disrupt Content Management & Collaboration?

The question is from Charlie Wood's entry where he references a couple of reports by James Governor on Traction beating Lotus out at a European pharmaceutical organization, and Movable Type beating Lotus out at Alcatel. There is a free case study written by Suw Charman for the former on her blog.
Socialtext also has some increasingly interesting enterprise apps at e.g., Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and Nokia, and has recent investment and a new board member from SAP.

We'll be looking at some more detail on exactly what organizations like these are doing with blog and wiki tools in a follow-on report to Lauren's earlier article, so let us know of any interesting case studies.

In answer to Charlie's question, I would say 'yes' to collaboration and 'partially' to content management.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 6:40 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 17, 2005

Dave Winer

I am often guilty of not keeping up with the blogs that are worth reading. I recently took to reading Dave Winer's blog regularly, and it is a real pleasure. He has all kinds of good technical insight, of course, and has been talking a lot about podcasting lately. You could make the argument Dave is the father of blogging, so it is interesting to keep up with where he thinks things are going.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 5, 2005

Enterprise blog, wiki and RSS Survey results

We have published the results of our informal survey on enterprise use of blog, wiki and RSS technologies. We'll keep the survey going for awhile and will update the results every so often. To date there are 58 respondents.

A few interesting tidbits:

Although most respondents are using one of the technologies, only half of them have official IT support.
knowledge management, internal information dissemination (portals!?), and project collaboration are all closely grouped as the leading applications.
Shockingly, only a third use RSS!
Almost a third are using one or more of these for content management. We'll be sure to explore what this means in our upcoming Amsterdam keynote debate.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 2:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 3, 2005

A Few More Thoughts on Onfolio

I remain a fan of Onfolio, which began life as kind of a personal knowledge manager for Web-based content, but has evolved to also handle RSS feeds and provide more publishing capabilities. I have used it for quite a while now to maintain my eForms Resources page, and am currently using the new version, 2.0, which supports Firefox, which is now my primary browser.

I've had some correspondence with Sebastian Gard, who does product marketing for Onfolio. He asked me for some feedback on 2.0 compared to the earlier version of the product, and I offered the following.

In terms of feedback, I really like what you have done. While I haven’t explored it in depth, the publishing seems much more dynamic to me. Instead of producing the entire report whole cloth and reposting it to the Web site, it seems as if the updating is more selective now. In the course of publishing my eForms resources page, I probably published it and republished it 5-6 times in the course of an hour. I added the TOC, added the RSS feed, and played with the linking mechanisms a few times. I am not the type of person who likes to read the manual, so I was glad to just play around with it, try things, and finally settle on what I published. The fact that the updating was fast made my process easier.

A few other very good things I noticed:

* I like the “Publish to the Web” panels, including the ability to include the title, introduction, author, email, bibliography, rss feed etc.
* I like the ability to configure and test the web settings (server, etc) right in the primary publishing interface
* I like that the primary interface for creating and editing collections has stayed pretty much the same. I find it very easy to use.
* Installation went very well. I still use IE for a couple of web sites, and Onfolio seems to work seamlessly on both browsers.

I don’t have any criticisms really. I did the one project, and have only used it lightly since, but I will continue to use it. A few questions have come up in my usage so far.

The “automatically update changes to this collection” intrigues me. As a default for myself, I set my eforms resources to automatically update once a week, but I will give that more thought. This suggests to me that Onfolio can be much more of a dynamic publishing tool than I have previously considered it, but maybe I missed that feature in the earlier version? Again, I tended to think of my earlier eforms page as a “report” that I would periodically—and manually—update whole cloth. This makes me think more in terms of the collection as a dynamic resource. This would seem to have real value in applications such as research, intranets, knowledge work, etc.

I also haven’t played with your tools for managing feeds, but I will at some point. I am still in email world for a lot of my regular news feeds, including ones I am involved with, such as Gilbane.

Thinking totally off the top of my head—and I apologize if what I am about to say is already obvious or stupid—but it occurs to me that Onfolio is inching toward becoming a strong, client-side blogging tool. Ignoring the whole question of comments and collaborators (wiki), it seems like I could do quite a bit of what I need to create my blog content using Onfolio, even if it doesn’t do everything a blog needs to do. I can do all my research, writing, linking, feed collecting, etc, and I now have a more dynamic publishing capability. The editing interface needs some work (a rich text control instead of the plain-text forms), but perhaps that is already/could be solved through integration with Office, InfoPath, etc?

I think of this because blogging is such a two-sided coin. There is what I am writing and what I am interested in (what I also read, what I also cite, what I include in my blog roll, feeds I consult, etc.). The typical blogging tool (I use movable type and blogger, have tried others) solves the editing interface, but they really don’t support the “what I am interested in.” For that half of it, you often manage things by hand, maybe use blogroll, etc—in effect, you have two tools (sometimes even two classes of tools) to do both halves of the blogging. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one tool instead?

Since writing a bit about Onfolio, I have been contacted by another vendor, RichSkills, which has a product kmAnywhere. A colleague has also pointed me to a new product in Beta, EverNote. However, I haven't tried either of these yet.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 23, 2005

Call for Papers: Gilbane Conference - Boston

Reminder: The deadline for submitting speaking proposals for our Boston conference on November 29 - December 1, is May 15. In fact, it helps to send proposals even sooner since we are already outlining the program. We'll be covering our usual range of content management technologies, but will have a special focus on new technologies, and which ones are ready for prime time and what business applications they are appropriate for. Enterprise blog, wiki and RSS technologies will certainly be one major focus. There is some early guidance on this year's topics here. If you are new to our events, you can see our typical content coverage and conference structure at last year's Boston program, or this month's San Francisco program.

See the instructions on how to submit proposals.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 2:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 12, 2005

Enterprise blog, wiki and RSS survey

We've posted our results in time for the conference session on Blogs, Wikis, and RSS as Enterprise Content Applications tomorrow morning. Keep in mind this is an informal survey and only has 43 responses so far. We will keep the survey going and update the results.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 8:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 7, 2005

Survey on Enterprise blogs and wiki use

Our survey on enterprise blogs, wiki and RSS use was out of commission for a few days because the vendor of the survey service upgraded their software and broke a few things. The short survey is back online now. We'll be posting the results next week during our conference in time for our session on the same topic. BTW, we are going to open this session (Wednesday morning 8:30 -10:00am) to anyone who is there, even if their badge is only for the technology demonstrations on Monday and Tuesday. So come by and blog it!

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 8:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 3, 2005

Ten Ideas for Corporate RSS Feeds

Just found this CEO Blogger's Club group blog. It looks like it is managed by a PR firm, but it has some good stuff on enterprise blogging. For example, the entry on Ten Ideas for Corporate RSS Feeds.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 10:44 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 21, 2005

Socialtext adds appeal for enterprises

As we reported in our news pages today, Socialtext has added functionality and repackaged their product line to appeal to a range of small to large enterprises. One of the things we are collecting in our survey on enterprise blog and wiki use is size of enterprises using them. We don't have nearly enough data to say anything meaningful yet, but so far it is a fairly even spread based on company size. We'll be keeping the survey open for awhile, and it is very short (5 multiple choice questions), so tell us what your organization is doing or planning with blog, wiki, and RSS technology.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 8:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 17, 2005

Enterprise blog & wiki limitations; new enterprise RSS blog

There is some additional detail on what blogs and wikis don't do for you from somone who is using them in an enterprise environment that Lauren interviewed for her report at Corporate Blogs and Wikis: Benefits and Limits.

It is to early to tell anything from our ongoing survey on the use of enterprise blogs, wikis and RSS, but so far it is surprising how low the use of RSS is. Speaking of RSS, there is a fairly new blog focused on enterprise RSS that looks worth tracking.

Both are good background reading for our upcoming conference session in San Francisco.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 8:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 13, 2005

Enterprise software & the long tail

Joe Kraus has a post that applies the now famous long tail argument to software. He admits that the argument applies to software like his own company's JotSpot, and plugs it in. But if he is right, his argument applies to other products including JotSpot's competitors.

It is easy to agree with the premises:

the vast majority of business applications require customization
most enterprise solutions focus on a few large semi-well-defined application areas because the economics don't reward small (long tail) opportunity harvesting, and
there is opportunity here for software entrepreneurs.

Joe argues that a combination of Excel and email are being used to fill the long tail gap, but that they are inadequate. This may be true, but it is a bit of a leap to an implied conclusion that one piece of "blockbuster" software could better meet the needs of the long tail of business requirements in all their diversity.

This is not to say that there won't be more blockbuster successes that help with long tail business needs — Excel, email, and web browsers are all examples of such a wild horizontal success — and Groove of one that didn't catch fire (see Bill Trippe's comment on the Microsoft acquisition), but will some combination of enterprise blog and wiki software be equally successful? Well... maybe. In any case, Joe's post is thought provoking and his analogy might be richer than he, or any of his commenters to date, realize.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 9:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 8, 2005

Survey on enterprise use of blogs and wikis

Lauren's report on enterprise blog and wiki use has been getting phenomenal attention. We have decided to probe a little more into actual corporate use of blog and wiki technology with a survey. We'll pull the complete results together for our conference in San Francisco in April, but will also publish some of it on our site as it comes in. Take the survey!

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 2:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 2, 2005

Blogs & Wikis for Enterprise Applications?

This is becoming a hot topic. Perhaps there should not even be a "?" in the title, but it is still very early in the market and adoption stages. In our newest report Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications? Lauren Wood investigates (and finds some happier outcomes than the one mentioned by Leonor!). We'll also be covering it at our April conference in San Francisco. From our intro to Lauren's article:

"... Most of the discussion about blogs is centered around their affect on mainstream journalism, their power as a new communication channel and voice of the people, and how this will impact society. All this is interesting, but what does it have to do with implementing content or knowledge management, or enterprise collaboration applications? IT, business managers, and even analysts can be forgiven for thinking “not much”. In fact, we have been skeptical ourselves.
But, being dismissive of blogs and wikis because of how they are most often used, and talked about, today is a mistake (PCs and web browsers weren’t considered as serious enterprise tools at first either). What is important is how they could be used. They are simply tools, and many of you will be surprised to find how much they are already being utilized in business environments. For this issue, Contributor Lauren Wood provides a straightforward explanation of what they are, describes how they compare with content management systems, and reports on some telling examples of how blogs and wikis are currently being successfully used in enterprises."

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 11:59 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 28, 2005

Enterprise Blogging: War Stories

There's been at least one very public war story from the field in terms of enterprise blogging sans corporate policy - and this one has a fatality. Seems that Mark Jen's foray into blogging on his experiences as a Google employee went awry pretty quickly. Despite a single-day record of 60,000 unique visitors, Google was not amused by the inclusion of "sensitive information about finances and products." Here's the full story.

Jen is no longer a Google employee, fired on Jan 28th after 11 days of work. He maintains that Google gave him no reason for the termination. He continues to blog at 99zeros with a subhead of "Life After Google."

Although many may remain skeptical about blogging's potential impact on enterprise collaboration and productivity, the evolution of use should spur enterprises to take a look at P&P development sooner, rather than later.

Posted by Leonor Ciarlone at 2:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 17, 2005

Blogs for enterprises and groups?

Tim Bray is skeptical of enterprise and/or group blogging. I have also been skeptical, but now think there is something there, though just what remains to be seen. One barrier to enterprise, and group, blogging is the perception that blogging is only for personal journals or a new tool for both professional and amateur journalists. This is understandable given the state of today's blogosphere, but it is a mistake to conflate the use of a technology with the technology itself. Obviously we think a group blog on business and technology issues is a good idea since we started one, but we also suspect our effort will evolve in unexpected (and some planned) ways.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 12:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Gilbane Group Blog

Gilbane Group analysts and consultants on content technologies & trends | Blog Home