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Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 35 of 97)

This category is focused on enterprise / workplace collaboration tools and strategies, including office suites, intranets, knowledge management, and enterprise adoption of social networking tools and approaches.

Should you fly without a pilot?

Last week Andrew McAfee wrote a blog post entitled Drop the Pilot wherein he discusses the challenges associated with piloting Enterprise 2.0 tools, and then arrives at the conclusion that we should abandon pilots altogether for such implementations and go as broad as possible right away.  As much as I hate to, I respectfully disagree.

Call me a cynic, but when I hear suggestions which go against my gut and break some very fundamental principles, such as the need to proactively manage change as well as risk, I tend to stand back and watch others jump off the bridge to see what happens before i even think about stepping to the edge. As technologists, we are innovating at a rapid pace and paradigms are constantly shifting around us, but we need to be cautious about

I do agree that E2.0 projects pose unique challenges, one of which is that their effectiveness is often [but not always] tied proportionally to the number of users in the ‘system’ (e.g. with microblogs…try launching one with only 100 diverse people in your test group and see well it takes off. Hint: it won’t). I also agree that it’s been universally accepted that “pilot” = “small”, and that this characterization, by definition, hinders the chances of success for an E2.0 pilot. But the ‘aha’ here should not be that we should start throwing caution to the wind and launching new tools across our organizations.

Alfresco Community 3.3 Offers New Content Services Platform for Developers

Alfresco Software, today announced the immediate availability of Alfresco Community Edition 3.3 for download. This release includes a range of content services for developers, including integrations with IBM Lotus Social software and a preview of an upcoming Google Docs integration. With LGPL licensing and enhancements to document and web content management (WCM) functionality, Community 3.3 is also the first ECM tool to enable developers to deliver content-rich business applications leveraging CMIS 1.0 open source standards. Significant enhancements to Alfresco Community Edition 3.3 include– Providing core content management capabilities, in a free-to-distribute CMIS runtime; CMIS 1.0 Compliance; Online Content Editing Services. Alfresco Community 3.3 also provides a Web Editor Framework (WEF) – a JavaScript client side framework rendering a toolbar and associated controls designed to allow developers to extend any in-context functionality that may be required. The WEF also enables developers to easily create and package plug-ins and extensions for simple management and interoperability. Content Repurposing – Automated content formatting functionality allows developers to build solutions to repurpose content for the web. Developers can use automated rules and existing FreeMarker and XSLT templates to format content for multiple delivery channels. Repository Replication & Web Deployment – Alfresco 3.3 builds on current rich deployment facilities with the introduction of the Transfer Service. Integrations – Designed to meet the needs of developers looking for industry standard platforms that provide content services, Community 3.3 extends Alfresco support to IBM Lotus and Google Docs. New enhancements to Alfresco’s collaborative content management platform, Alfresco Share, include– Repository-wide content access, Automated Content Rules, Collaboration Lists, “Google Like” Search, Open Source License (LGPL). http://www.alfresco.com

Adobe introduces Acrobat.com Workspaces

Adobe introduced Acrobat.com Workspaces, a new collaboration space that lets teams inside and outside of organizations work together on projects. With Workspaces, team members can store and organize project content online, and share and manage team access to files helping to eliminate the need to continually e-mail updates. Acrobat.com is a set of hosted services that facilitate internal and external collaboration between individuals and teams. In a few clicks, people can create Workspaces, store and share documents, and convert files to PDF. Teams can also meet in real-time and share their screens using Adobe ConnectNow, or create documents and tables with online office applications, such as Buzzword and Acrobat.com Tables. As with all of the Acrobat.com services, Workspaces are built on the Adobe Flash Platform and operate inside a web browser. Apart from the Adobe Flash Player, no additional software installation is required. Teams can create Shared Workspaces to store and share a set of files related to a project, letting distributed team members work together across times zones and firewalls, with no special file sharing software or IT involvement necessary. Users simply access an online Workspace to review and collaborate on documents. Workspace administration privileges can be assigned to specific team members, to help maintain control over who has what level of access to each project’s documents. Each individual also has their own Personal Workspace on Acrobat.com to store and work on documents before they are ready to be shared with a broader team. Acrobat.com users can create one free Shared Workspace, while Premium Basic subscribers can create 20 Workspaces and Premium Plus subscribers can create an unlimited number of Workspaces. http://blogs.adobe.com/acom

Adeptol Partners with VersaPAC

In a move to strengthen reach in the Asian market, Adeptol announced that it has signed a partnership agreement with VersaPAC, a solution provider of information management systems and reseller of HP TRIM records management software.  With the partnership VersaPAC is moving from a legacy viewing system to Adeptol’s document viewing technology embedded in its Saffron web front-end application for HP TRIM. Saffron is available through VersaPAC resellers in Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, North America, and the United Kingdom. The integration allows Saffron to support viewing of over 300 file formats including documents from Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, various image files, and Adobe PDF.  Users will have access to the latest features such as document search, annotations, and document conversion to PDF – all from the viewer. Adeptol Document Viewer is a web-based viewer using Ajax technology, and is a built-in Information Rights Management (IRM) module that allows users to protect content by assigning policies to control the viewing, printing, navigating and saving of documents. http://www.ajaxdocumentviewer.com/ http://www.versapac.com.my/

More on Microblogging: Evolution of the Enterprise Market

Following my post last week on the need for additional filters in enterprise microblogging tools and activity streams, I participated in an interesting Twitter conversation on the subject of microblogging and complexity. The spontaneous conversation began when Greg Lowe, a well-respected Enterprise 2.0 evangelist at Alcatel-Lucent, asked:

“Can stand alone micro-blogging solutions survive when platform plays introduce the feature?”

I immediately replied:

“Yes, if they innovate faster”

Greg shot back:

“is microblogging autonomy about innovation, or simple elegance? More features usually leads to lower usability?”

And, later, he asked a complementary question:

“is there a risk of Microblogging becoming “too complicated”?”

Is Greg on to something here? Do more features usually lead to lower usability? Will functional innovation be the downfall of stand-alone microblogging solutions, or will it help them stay ahead of platform vendors as they incorporate microblogging into their offerings?

One of the commonly heard complaints about software in general, and enterprise software in particular, is that it is too complicated. There are too many features and functions, and how to make use of them is not intuitive. On the other hand, usability is a hallmark of Web 2.0 software, and, if we make it too complex, it is likely that some people will abandon it in favor of simpler tools, whatever those may be.

But that dichotomy does not tell the entire story. Based on anecdotal evidence (there is no published quantitative research available), early adopters of Web 2.0 software in the enterprise appear to value simplicity in software they use. However, as a colleague, Thomas Vander Wal, pointed out to me yesterday, that may not be true for later, mainstream adopters. Ease-of-use may be desirable in microblogging (or any other) software, but having adequate features to enable effective, efficient usage is also necessary to achieve significant adoption. Later adopters need to see that a tool can help them in a significant way before they will begin to use it; marginal utility does not sway them, even if the tool is highly usable.

Simple may not be sustainable. As I wrote last week in this post, as enterprise use of microblogging and activity streams has increased and matured, so has the need for filters. Individuals, workgroups, and communities want to direct micro-messages to specific recipients, and they need to filter their activity streams to increase their ability to make sense out of the raging river of incoming information. Those needs will only increase as more workers microblog and more information sources are integrated into activity streams.

In the public microblogging sphere, Twitter provides a solid example of the need to add functionality to a simple service as adoption grows in terms of registered users and use cases. As more individuals used Twitter, in ways that were never envisioned by its creators, the service responded by adding functionality such as search, re-tweeting, and lists. Each of these features added some degree of complexity to the service, but also improved its usability and value.

In the evolution of any software, there is a trade-off between simplicity and functionality that must be carefully managed. How does one do that? One way is to continuously solicit and accept user feedback. That allows the software provider and organizations deploying it to sense when they are nearing the point where functionality begins to overwhelm ease of use in a harmful manner. Another technique is to roll out new features in small doses at reasonable intervals. Some even advocate slipping new features in unannounced and letting users discover them for themselves. Hosted deployment of software (whether on-premise or off-site) makes this easier to do, since new features are automatically switched on for people using the software.

So back to the original question; can stand-alone microblogging solutions fend off the collaboration suite and platform vendors as they incorporate microblogging and activity streams in their offerings? My definitive answer is “yes”, because there is still room for functionality to be added to microblogging before it becomes over-complicated.

Based on the historical evolution of other software types and categories, it is likely that the smaller vendors, who are  intensely focused on microblogging, will be the innovators, rather than the platform players. As long as vendors of stand-alone microblogging offerings continue to innovate quickly without confusing their customers, they will thrive. That said, a platform vendor could drive microblogging feature innovation if they so desired; think about what IBM has done with its Sametime instant messaging platform. However, I see no evidence of that happening in the microblogging sphere at this time.

The most plausible scenario is that at some point, small, focused vendors driving microblogging innovation (e.g. Socialcast, Yammer) will be acquired by larger vendors, who will integrate the acquired features into their collaboration suite or platform. My sense is that we are still 2-3 years away from that happening, because there is still room for value-producing innovation in microblogging.

What do you think?

pTools Adds Social Media Content Distribution

pTools, a Content Management Software (CMS) provider, announced the addition of a range of embedded social media and networking features to its software. From within the pTools CMS, social media content can be re-distributed in many formats to other social networks and sites. A key feature is ‘TwitterDocs’, which allows users to post to Twitter as they publish content through the CMS. There is no need to separately login to Twitter, and the content-related Tweet is controlled and managed within the CMS and its workflows. In addition to Twitter, content can be presented on Facebook, LinkedIn, and indexed in live search engine results with no tweaking required. http://www.ptools.com/

Filtering Microblogging and Activity Streams

The use of microblogging and activity streams is maturing in the enterprise. This was demonstrated by recent announcements of enhancements to those components in two well-regarded enterprise social software suites.

On February 18th, NewsGator announced a point release to its flagship Enterprise 2.0 offering, Social Sites 3.1. According to NewsGator, this release introduces the ability for individuals using Social Sites to direct specific microblogging posts and status updates to individuals, groups, and communities. Previously, all such messages were distributed to all followers of the individual poster and to the general activity stream of the organization. Social Sites 3.1 also introduced the ability for individuals to filter their activity streams using “standard and custom filters”.

Yesterday (March 3rd), Socialtext announced a major new version of its enterprise social software suite, Socialtext 4.0. Both the microblogging component of Socialtext’s suite and its stand-along microblogging appliance now allow individuals to broadcast short messages to one or more groups (as well as to the entire organization and self-selected followers.) Socialtext 4.0 also let individuals filter their incoming activity stream to see posts from groups to which they belong (in addition to filtering the flow with the people and event filters that were present in earlier versions of the offering.)

The incorporation of these filters for outbound and incoming micro-messages are an important addition to the offerings of NewsGator and Socialtext, but they are long overdue. Socialcast has offered similar functionality for nearly two years and Yammer has included these capabilities for some time as well (and extended them to community members outside of an organization’s firewall, as announced on February 25th.) Of course, both Socialcast and Yammer will need to rapidly add additional filters and features to stay one step ahead of NewsGator and Socialtext, but that represents normal market dynamics and is not the real issue. The important question is this:

What other filters do individuals within organizations need to better direct microblogging posts and status updates to others, and to mine their activity streams?

I can easily imagine use cases for location, time/date, and job title/role filters. What other filters would be useful to you in either targeting the dissemination of a micro-message or winnowing a rushing activity stream?

One other important question that arises as the number of potential micro-messaging filters increases is what should be the default setting for views of outgoing and incoming messages? Should short bits of information be sent to everyone and activity streams show all organizational activity by default, so as to increase ambient awareness? Perhaps a job title/role filter should be the default, in order to maximize the focus and productivity of individuals?

There is no single answer other than “it depends”, because each organization is different. What matters is that the decision is taken (and not overlooked) with specific corporate objectives in mind and that individuals are given the means to easily and intuitively change the default target of their social communications and the pre-set lens through which they view those of others.

Alfresco Announces Beta of Cloud ECM for SMB

Alfresco Software announced a Beta program for Alfresco SMB Edition, a cloud-based appliance designed for Amazon EC2. This new version of Alfresco Software’s ECM and social collaboration product is designed for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). The Alfresco SMB Edition will offer a pre-configured Alfresco Cloud appliance that combines the Alfresco server, Explorer and Share modules into an on-demand offering aimed at SMBs with up to 100 users and 200GB of document storage. These appliances are hosted on Amazon EC2 and made available as paid Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Alfresco has partnered with JumpBox, who specialize in building software appliances, to develop Alfresco SMB. Initially the beta will be restricted to US based subscribers with EU access to follow within two weeks. The program includes access to the Alfresco SMB paid AMI, although testers are expected to pay all relevant Amazon EC2 hosting fees. The Beta program will run from March 15 through May 20, 2010. http://www.alfresco.com

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