Year: 2009 (Page 6 of 39)

SharePoint 2010 – The Big Story

November 5, 2009 / Frank Gilbane / 1 Comment

I spent a couple of days at the SharePoint conference two weeks ago with about 8000 others. Many attendees were customers, but the majority seemed to be Microsoft partners. It would be difficult to overstate the enthusiasm of the attendees. The partners especially, since they make their living off SharePoint. There has been a lot of useful reporting and commentary on the conference and what was announced as part of SharePoint 2010, which you can find on the web, #spc09 is also still active on Twitter, and videos of the keynotes are still available at: http://www.mssharepointconference.com.

As the conference program and commentary illustrate, SharePoint 2010 is a major release in terms of functionality. But the messaging surrounding the release provides some important insights into Microsoft’s strategy. Those of you who were at Gilbane San Francisco last June got an early taste of Microsoft’s plans to push beyond the firewall with SharePoint – and that is the big story. It is big because it is a way for Microsoft to accelerate an already rapidly growing SharePoint business. It is big for a large number of enterprises (as well as the SharePoint developer/partner ecosystem) because it is a way for them to leverage some of their existing investment in SharePoint for building competitively critical internet applications – leverage in expertise, financial investment, and data.

The numbers are telling. According to an IDC report Microsoft Office and SharePoint Traction: An Updated Look at Customer Adoption and Future Plans, IDC # 220237, October 2009, of “262 American corporate IT users, just 8% of respondents said they were using SharePoint for their Web sites, compared to 36% using it for internal portals and 51% using it for collaborative team sites.” (the report isn’t free, but ComputerWorld published some of the numbers).

Can Microsoft increase the use of SharePoint for Web sites from 8% to 36% or 51% or more? Whether they can or not, it is too big an opportunity for them to ignore, and you can expect the market for web applications like content management to look a little different as a result. Of course SharePoint won’t be the right solution for every web application, but Microsoft needs scale, not feature or market niche dominance.

There are more pieces to this, especially integration with Office 2010, which will have a major impact on the scale of penetration. We’ll look at that issue in another post.

You can see why SharePoint is a major topic at Gilbane Boston this year. Join us next month to continue the discussion and learn more.

SharePoint 2010 – Get the Full Story

November 5, 2009 / Frank Gilbane

With the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 “The business collaboration platform for the Enterprise and the Web”, Microsoft is hoping to accelerate the already dramatic growth of SharePoint. The SharePoint partner ecosystem is clearly excited, and even sceptics agree it is a major release. But how do you decide whether SharePoint is right for you, or which parts of SharePoint could meet your needs, either on their own or in conjunction with other enterprise applications? Should you use it for collaboration? for search? and what about web content management – a major focus of SharePoint 2010?

With SharePoint 2010 just entering public beta and scheduled for release in the first half of the year, it is time to make sure you know what its capabilities are so you can make informed near term or strategic decisions. And, you need to get the full story, and the way to do this is to see it for yourself, and talk to sceptics, evangelists, and people already using it for applications similar to yours.

Whether you are attending the full conference or just visiting the technology demonstrations at Gilbane Boston, you will be able to learn what you need to know. Get the full story on SharePoint 2010 for content management at Gilbane Boston:

Visit the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Experience on-site at Gilbane Boston 2009 for the opportunity to walk through, learn, and understand the new content management capabilities in Microsoft SharePoint 2010.
Talk to Microsoft product managers, and get an up-close look at new capabilities, and find out what is coming.
Talk to multiple independent analysts and consultants who are both sceptics and fans of SharePoint for a balanced view.
Hear from experienced SharePoint consultants with hands-on experience and get their opinion on what is coming SharePoint 2010.
Visit SharePoint partners in the exhibit area who have been helping companies deploy SharePoint to meet a wide variety of business requirements for many years.
Hear case studies and talk to companies that are using SharePoint.
Attend conference sessions focused on SharePoint, including:

Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 2 Available

November 3, 2009 / NewsShark

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced the availability of Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 2 (ES2), a major software release enabling businesses and governments to build applications to improve interactions with customers and constituents across devices and channels. LiveCycle ES2 provides a rich Internet application (RIA) framework for building customizable RIA workspaces, mobile and desktop access to critical applications, and deployment in the cloud. Adobe LiveCycle Workspace ES2 Mobile offers access to LiveCycle ES2 from iPhone, Blackberry and Windows mobile devices. Adobe LiveCycle Launchpad ES2, an Adobe AIR application, provides easy access on the desktop to kick-start LiveCycle ES services such as Adobe LiveCycle PDF Generator ES2. Adobe LiveCycle Mosaic ES2 is a composite RIA framework for rapidly assembling and engaging activity-centric enterprise applications. LiveCycle Mosaic ES2 provides knowledge workers with real-time, contextual information from multiple sources in a single, personalized view. Developers can extend existing applications by exposing their business logic and user interfaces into application “tiles” that can be assembled to create unified views. Adobe enterprise customers will have the option to deploy LiveCycle ES2 in the cloud, hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing environment. LiveCycle ES2 Solution Accelerators now include‚Äî human capital management, eSubmissions, correspondence management, new account enrollment and services and benefits delivery. LiveCycle Forms ES2 streamlines format-driven business processes and improves data accuracy and LiveCycle Reader Extensions ES2 activates functionality within Adobe Reader, extending document and form-based operations outside an organization. New features allow users to generate RIA interfaces that leverage shared data models. Document and Information Security‚ LiveCycle can now apply rights management on the server to Microsoft Office documents for automated secure document workflows. Adobe LiveCycle Process Management ES2 enables business users to manage ad-hoc content reviews without involving IT. Users can publish content, create a list of reviewers and define approval stages, deadlines and escalation guidelines. The content can then be automatically converted into PDF, enabled for inline commenting, rights protection and distribution. Users can monitor and modify the process at any time. Adobe LiveCycle ES2 is currently available worldwide. The Adobe LiveCycle ES2 cloud deployment option is expected to become available in early 2010. http://www.adobe.com/livecycle

Where and How Can You Look for Good Enterprise Search Interface Design?

October 29, 2009 / Lynda Moulton / 2 Comments

Designing an enterprise search interface that employees will use on their intranet is challenging in any circumstance. But starting from nothing more than verbal comments or even a written specification is really hard. However, conversations about what is needed and wanted are informative because they can be aggregated to form the basis for the overarching design.

Frequently, enterprise stakeholders will reference a commercial web site they like or even search tools within social sites. These are a great starting point for a designer to explore. It makes a lot of sense to visit scores of sites that are publicly accessible or sites where you have an account and navigate around to see how they handle various design elements.

To start, look at:

How easy is it to find a search box?
Is there an option to do advanced searches (Boolean or parametric searching)?
Is there a navigation option to traverse a taxonomy of terms?
Is there a “help” option with relevant examples for doing different kinds of searches?
What happens when you search for a word that has several spellings or synonyms, a phrase (with or without quotes), a phrase with the word and in it, a numeral, or a date?
How are results displayed: what information is included, what is the order of the results and can you change them? Can you manipulate results or search within the set?
Is the interface uncluttered and easily understood?

The point of this list of questions is that you can use it to build a set of criteria for designing what your enterprise will use and adopt, enthusiastically. But this is only a beginning. By actually visiting many sites outside your enterprise, you will find features that you never thought to include or aggravations that you will surely want to avoid. From these experiences on external sites, you can build up a good list of what is important to include or banish from your design.

When you find sites that you think are exemplary, ask key stakeholders to visit them and give you their feedback, preferences and dislikes. Particularly, you want to note what confuses them or enthusiastic comments about what excites them.

This post originated because several press notices in the past month brought to my attention Web applications that have sophisticated and very specialized search applications. I think they can provide terrific ideas for the enterprise search design team and also be used to demonstrate to your internal users just what is possible.

Check out these applications and articles: on KNovel, particularly this KNovel page; ThomasNet; EBSCOHost mentioned in this article about the “deep Web.”. All these applications reveal superior search capabilities, have long track records, and are already used by enterprises every day. Because they are already successful in the enterprise, some by subscription, they are worth a second look as examples of how to approach your enterprise’s search interface design.

How CMOs Are Planning for Social Media

October 29, 2009 / Mary Laplante / 0 Comments

Updated November 24

While preparing for today’s webcast on digital marketing and lessons learned from the publishing indusry, we discovered the August 2009 CMO survey conducted by professor Christine Moorman at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, with support from the American Marketing Association. Moorman’s results include insights into expectations about the role of social media in digital marketing.

The 511 top marketing executives of US companies interviewed in late July expect to increase spending on social media efforts by more than 300% over the next five years, moving budget allocations from 3.5% to 13.7%.

Top investments are pegged for social networking (65%), video and photosharing (52%), and blogging (50%).

The five most frequently projected uses for social media applications are brand building, customer acquisition, new product introductions, customer retention, and market research.

Read the CMO survey press release for details on the research and links to full results. Register for today’s webinar on digital marketing and lessons learned from publishers.

Update: The webinar recording is available here.

Open Text Announces Vignette Portal 8.0

October 28, 2009 / NewsShark

Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTC) announced a new release of its enterprise portal solution, Vignette Portal version 8.0. Vignette Portal 8.0 simplifies the administration and creation of dynamic, content-rich Web sites with the ability to rapidly syndicate portal applications across Web properties powered by multiple systems. Portal 8.0 enables additional social media capabilities that align with Open Text’s development of Enterprise 2.0 solutions. Open Text recently announced that it plans to enhance its ECM Suite with Web solutions powered by technology from its existing Web Solutions and Vignette. Vignette Portal 8.0, together with the user experience foundation of Vignette Community Applications, provides organizations with more than 100 social portlets that add capabilities such as wikis, blogs, idea sharing and event calendars to any portal site. Additionally, Vignette Portal 8.0 provides user presentation services to the upcoming Vignette Content Management version 8.0 release, slated for Q4 2009. Vignette Portal 8.0 is available immediately. http://www.vignette.com, http://www.opentext.com/

The Customer-Vendor Conversation: A key to success in WCM

October 28, 2009 / Scott Liewehr / 0 Comments

Having gotten my feet [soaking] wet with briefings from Web Content Management vendors, I’ve come to a realization: the Customer-Vendor feedback loop is one of the strongest keys to long-term success for all parties. A blinding flash of the obvious? I don’t think so. Let me explain…

I have seen, and written, a lot of RFPs seeking “the perfect” WCM product. The natural tendency in these “quests for the holy grail” is for the tool-seeker to list as many WCM features as one might possibly use […maybe…at some point in the future… if only…] and for the vendors to respond, in turn, by listing all of their capabilities and feature sets. As one might imagine, this scenario typically results in responses which provide the decision-maker minimal product differentiation information. Why? Because like it or not, most WCM products offer similar feature sets, and if they don’t offer a particular feature today, one can be sure it’s “on the roadmap”. [I’ll spend more time in a future post describing how one can craft an RFP to elicit valuable responses which actually help one decide which product(s) align most closely with needs of the author.] But today’s capabilities are tomorrow’s old news, so how can one be sure they’re selecting a vendor whose product will meet tomorrow’s needs? Take a look at the vendor’s track record and approach to collaborating with customers to expand and hone its offering.

As I delve into some of the top-rated [by users] WCM vendors, I see a consistent “customer-is-key” theme being played out in the form of both formal and informal feedback channels. These “conversations” with customers can be either synchronous or asynchronous, direct or indirect, two-way or multi-way…or all of the above. The point is that successful vendors [pro]actively engage their customers, and then respond in a meaningful manner to enhance their offering in a way that ensures that the product’s “roadmap” is *always* aligned with the needs of both current and future customers.

In a recent briefing with a vendor [who I feel has a great approach to managing this feedback loop], the last slide in their presentation listed four of their key differentiators…but all of them were technology-related and failed to mention my aforementioned favorite. Why not? Is it because they aren’t proud of this factor? Absolutely not…they are very proud of it and have worked hard to create such a valuable dialog with their customers. My sense is they left it out because this subject is not yet a key criteria in the minds of decision-makers.

We are failing to ask the right questions. Why wouldn’t customer service and engagement be the key in such a huge purchase decision? It should. Innovation is essential, but I believe it is critical that we, the customers, ensure we have a place at the table to refine the direction of such innovation. After all, innovation without purpose or utility is useless.

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The Impending Enterprise 2.0 Software Market Consolidation

October 28, 2009 / Larry Hawes / 0 Comments

Talk about a trip down memory lane… Another excellent blog post yesterday by my friend and fellow Babson College alum, Sameer Patel, snapped me back a few years and gave me that spine tingling sense of deja vu.

Sameer wrote about how the market for Enterprise 2.0 software may evolve much the same way the enterprise portal software market did nearly a decade ago. I remember the consolidation of the portal market very well, having actively shaped and tracked it daily as an analyst and consultant. I would be thrilled if the E2.0 software market followed a similar, but somewhat different direction that the portal market took. Allow me to explain.

When the portal market consolidated in 2002-2003, some cash-starved vendors simply went out of business. However, many others were acquired for their technology, which was then integrated into other enterprise software offerings. Portal code became the UI layer of many enterprise software applications and was also used as a data and information aggregation and personalization method in those applications.

I believe that much of the functionality we see in Enterprise 2.0 software today will eventually be integrated into other enterprise applications. In fact, I would not be surprised to see that beginning to happen in 2010, as the effects of the recession continue to gnaw at the business climate, making it more difficult for many vendors of stand-alone E2.0 software tools and applications to survive, much less grow.

I hope that the difference between the historical integration of portal technology and the coming integration of E2.0 functionality is one of method. Portal functionality was embedded directly into the code of existing enterprise applications. Enterprise 2.0 functionality should be integrated into other applications as services. Service-based functionality offers the advantage of writing once and using many times. For example, creating service-based enterprise micro-messaging functionality (e.g. Yammer, Socialcast, Socialtext Signals, etc.) would allow it to be integrated into multiple, existing enterprise applications, rather than being confined to an Enterprise 2.0 software application or suite.

The primary goals of writing and deploying social software functionality as services are: 1) to allow enterprise software users to interact with one another without leaving the context in which they are already working, and 2) to preserve the organization’s investment in existing enterprise applications. The first is important from a user productivity and satisfaction standpoint, the second because of its financial benefit.

When the Enterprise 2.0 software market does consolidate, the remaining vendors will be there because they were able to create and sell:

a platform that could be extended by developers creating custom solutions for large organizations,
a suite that provided a robust, fixed set of functionality that met the common needs of many customers, or
a single piece or multiple types of service-based functionality that could be integrated into either other enterprise application vendors’ offerings or deploying organizations’ existing applications and new mashups

What do you think? Will history repeat itself or will the list of Enterprise 2.0 software vendors that survived the impending, inevitable market consolidation consist primarily of those that embraced the service-based functionality model?