The program for our annual Boston event is about 98% complete. We have a great keynote line-up with more to come, 30 additional conference sessions, 6 pre-conference workshops, and 12 product labs. Other useful links are sponsors & exhibitors, speakers, registration, and hotel. Note that we moved from the Westin Copley to the Waterfront Westin this year to be in the new Boston Innovation District and fast-growing Seaport / Fort Point Channel neighborhoods.
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Outsell has just published some fascinating new research on smartpens, 2011 Smartpen Landscape Report. Outsell defines a smartpen as "any handheld device that digitally captures text and drawings while they are being written or drawn, and either renders them immediately on a computer or saves the data for later transfer."
As our colleague & author, Ned May says, "The smartpen epitomizes the changes ahead as computing is embedded into everyday objects, enabling us to generate and share information and content all at once, rather than as separate events".
Outsell conducted a short web-based survey in March 2011 to examine smartpen adoption and general note-taking habits of 428 physicians, educators, and students. This report examines the results of that survey, including the note-taking needs and behaviors of the survey respondents. It also explores the potential market demand for smartpens and examines some of the leading providers of these pens. This report contains:
- Ownership data for smartpens from Livescribe, Wacom, IOGear, Solidtek USA, Dane-Elec, and LogiPen;
- Analysis of note-taking habits, digital note usage, audio vs. handwriting capture, and note-taking surfaces;
- Discussion of smartpen market penetration, price sensitivity, and potential demand;
- Exploration of the most desired features in smartpens.
Outsell’s research indicates that the market for smartpens could explode the way the e-reader market has. Sixty percent of those we surveyed had heard of smartpens and seven percent had used them (more than the usage figures for e-readers at this time last year). Among current owners, usage is extremely high with nearly half (48%) indicating they use these devices “all the time”. We see the smartpen market tracking the e-reader market, which is now experiencing significant demand.
Additional information on the report content and ordering information is at:
http://www.outsellinc.com/it_telecom_research/products/991
I just published a new white paper, Social Publishing with Drupal, sponsored by Acquia and also available here. We forget that publishing and blogging (including this post) are stove-piped operations. But what would happen if we could intelligently keep track of all these disparate threads, combining the authoritative content from trusted sources with insights from friends and colleagues, organized contextually around the ways we think about things and make decisions? Social publishing is a new lens for delivering business value.
Here's the executive summary for the white paper. Click the link above if you'd like to learn more. What's the future of social publishing? Let's start a debate. /geoff
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Social publishing combines groomed and authoritative content, produced by an organization and emphasizing its core messages, with user-generated content that customers contribute via blogs, wikis, and social media tools. Drupal is an example of a social publishing platform, developed and maintained as an open source project, and delivered at an affordable cost.
Drupal is now deployed in major media companies, high technology firms, universities, magazine publishers, government agencies (including the White House), research groups, and non-profit organizations. Whether it is in a commercial, non-profit, or government setting, organizations rely on Drupal to project their presence over the web and to channel the interactive experiences that foster communities of contributors.
By leveraging Drupal’s capabilities as a social publishing platform, organizations are able to reinforce their branded experiences and deliver relevant content to their customers and stakeholders. By exploiting Drupal as an open source project, developers supporting these organizations can easily enhance and extend Drupal’s capabilities, and introduce innovative modes of interactivity that meet specific business requirements.
Drupal is an attractive investment with substantial business benefits. Organization can keep their license and support costs modest by building on an open source project. Organizations can leverage the collective expertise of Drupal developers to solve immediate publishing problems. By relying on Drupal, organizations can stay abreast of the rapid technology changes when building competitive solutions for the digital age.
Box.net announced today that it has integrated its cloud-based document storage and sharing solution with Salesforce.com. Current Box.net customers that want to integrate with Salesforce CRM can contact Box.net directly to activate the service. Salesforce.com customers may now download Box.net from the Salesforce.com AppExchange.
Box.net services will now be available in the Lead, Account, Contact, and Opportunity tabs of Salesforce CRM. In addition, the Box.net native interface and full range of services will be accessible via a dedicted tab on the Salesforce CRM interface. Users can upload new files to Box.net, edit existing files, digitally sign electronic documents, and e-mail or e-fax files. Large enterprise users will be given unlimited Box.net storage. The Box.net video embedded below briefly demonstrates the new Salesforce CRM integration.
While Box.net started as a consumer focused business, today's announcement marks the first tangible manifestation of its emerging enterprise strategy. Box.net intends to be a cloud-based document repository that can be accessed through a broad range of enterprise applications.
The content-as-a-service model envisioned by Box.net will gain traction in the coming months. I believe that a centralized content repository, located on-premise or in the cloud, is a key piece of any enterprise's infrastructure. Moreover, content services -- functionality that enables users to create, store, edit, and share content -- should be accessible from any enterprise application, including composite applications such as portals or mashups created for specific roles (e.g. sales and/or marketing employees, channel partners, customers). Users should not be required to interact with content only through dedicated tools such as office productivity suites and Content Management Systems (CMS).
Other content authoring and CMS software vendors are beginning to consider, understand, and (in some cases) embrace this deployment model. Box.net is one of the first proprietary software vendors to instantiate it. Adoption statistics of their new Salesforce CRM integration should eventually provide a good reading as to whether or not enterprise customers are also ready to embrace the content-as-a-service model.
We'll be rolling out the complete program for this year's Gilbane Boston conference over the next couple of weeks, but the overall conference schedule is now available. Note that it is subject to change, although it seldom changes very much.
My friend Sameer Patel wrote and published a very good blog post last week that examined the relationship of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and enterprise social software. His analysis was astute (as usual) and noted that there was a role for both types of software, because they offer different value propositions. ECM enables controlled, repeatable content publication processes, whereas social software empowers rapid, collaborative creation and sharing of content. There is a place for both in large enterprises. Sameer's suggestion was that social software be used for authoring, sharing, and collecting feedback on draft documents or content chunks before they are formally published and widely distributed. ECM systems may then be used to publish the final, vetted content and manage it throughout the content lifecycle.
The relationship between ECM and enterprise social software is just one example of an important, higher level interconnection -- the nexus of defined business processes and ad hoc collaboration. This is the sweet spot at which organizations will balance employees' requirements for speed and flexibility with the corporation's need for control. The following (hypothetical, but typical) scenario in a large company demonstrates this intersection.
A customer account manager receives a phone call from a client asking why an issue with their service has not been resolved and when it will be. The account manager can query a workflow-supported issue management system and learn that the issue has been assigned to a specific employee and that it has been assigned an "in-progress" status. However, that system does not tell the account manager what she really needs to know! She must turn to a communication system to ask the other employee what is the hold up and the current estimate of time to issue resolution. She emails, IM's, phones, or maybe even tweets the employee to whom the issue has been assigned to get an answer she can give the customer.
The employee to whom the issue was assigned most likely cannot use the issue management system to actually resolve the problem either. He uses a collaboration system to find documented information and individuals possessing knowledge that can help him deal with the issue. Once the problem is solved, the employee submits the solution to the issue management system, which feeds it to a someone who can make the necessary changes for the customer and inform the customer account manager that the issue is resolved. Case closed.
The above scenario illustrates the need for both process and people-centric systems. Without the cludgy, structured issue management system, the customer account manager would not have known to whom the issue had been assigned and, thus, been unable to contact a specific individual to get better information about its status. Furthermore, middle managers would not have been able to assign the case in a systematic way or see the big picture of all cases being worked on for customers without the workflow and reporting capabilities of the issue management system. On the other hand, ad hoc communication and collaboration systems were the tools that drove actual results. The account manager and the employee to whom the issue was assigned would not have been able to do their work if the issue management system was their only support tool. They needed less structured tools that allowed them to communicate and collaborate quickly to actually resolve the issue.
We should not expect that organizations striving to become more people-centric will abandon their ECM, ERP, or other systems that guide or enforce key business processes. There is a need for both legacy management and Enterprise 2.0 philosophies and systems in large enterprises operating in matrixed organizational structures. Each approach can provide value; one quantifiable in hard currency and the other in terms of softer, but important, business metrics (more on this in a future post.) The enterprises that identify, and operate at, the intersection of structured process and ad hoc communication/collaboration will gain short-term competitive advantage.
There are only 4 more weeks until our annual San Francisco conference. If you haven't already made plans to attend, you should check it out. We have more content than we have ever had in San Francisco, so whatever kind of enterprise web or content application project or responsibility you have, you'll find learning and networking opportunities.
Our marketing group has been posting updates on our announcements blog and on Twitter. But for those of you who only read this stream, here is a quick update:
- The early discount rates have been extended to May 8th.
- Gilbane conference room rate of $220 at the San Francisco Westin includes complimentary daily guest room internet use, valued at $14.95 per day.
- There are 46 conference sessions, workshops or product labs, 90 expert speakers, 36 sponsors/exhibitors.
- Keynotes from Microsoft & Adobe on the future of web platforms and customer engagement
- Keynote analyst panel with Forrester, IDC, Gilbane, and WelchmanPierpoint.
- We'll be using #gilbanesf as the hash tag.
See you there.
The first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, was created 14 years ago today, by Ward Cunningham. Since then, the wiki has become one of the most widely deployed collaboration tools available. One might even call the wiki the catalyst of the Social Software movement.
Why is the wiki so popular? There are several reasons, including ease of use, structured navigation, and the ability to track changes to wiki pages and roll back to previous versions. The democratic nature of the format, in which anyone who has access can edit the wiki, is undoubtedly a major contributor to its success as well.
The primary reason for the wiki's success is its flexibility. Wikis have been used for everything from collaboratively authoring a document, to managing a project, to establishing a corporate knowledge base. We are seeing the same phenomenon today in Twitter, which is being used in ways that its creators never imagined.
So, at age 14, what has the wiki taught us? That collaboration tools should be designed for flexible, yet intuitive, use. Complexity is kryptonite to collaboration. Let's remember that before we build and deploy enterprise collaboration software.
I always took footnotes for granted. You need them as you're writing, you insert an indicator at the right place and it points the reader to an amplification, a citation, an off-hand comment, or something -- but it's out of the way, a distraction to the point you're trying to make.
Some documents don't need them, but some require them (e.g., scholarly documents, legal documents). In those documents, the footnotes contain such important information that, as Barry Bealer suggests in When footnotes are the content, "the meat [is] in the footnotes."
The web doesn't make it easy to represent footnotes. Footnotes on the Web argues that HTML is barely up to the task of presenting footnotes in any effective form.
But if you were to recreate the whole thing from scratch, without static paper as a model, how would you model footnotes?
In a document, a footnote is composed of two pieces of related information. One is the point that you're trying to make, typically a new point. The other is some pre-existing reference material that presumably supports your point. If it is always the new material that points at the existing, supporting material, then we're building an information taxonomy bottom up -- with the unfortunate property that entering at higher levels will prevent us from seeing lower levels through explicitly-stated links.
To be fair, there are good reasons for connections to be bidirectional. Unidirectional links are forgivable for the paper model, with its inherently temporal life. But the WWW is more malleable, and bidirectional links don't have to be published at the same time as the first end of the link. In this sense, HTML's linking mechanism, the '<a href="over_there">' construct is fundamentally broken. Google's founders exploited just this characteristic of the web to build their company on a solution to a problem that needn't have been.
And people who have lived through the markup revolution from the days of SGML and HyTime know that it shouldn't have been.
But footnotes still only point bottom up. Fifteen to twenty years on, many of the deeper concepts of the markup revolution are still waiting to flower.
Gilbane Boston 2011
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