Ephox announced the latest version of the company’s rich text editor, EditLive! V7. Integrated with IBM Lotus Web Content Management and IBM Lotus Quickr software, EditLive! allows business users to create content in a desktop word processing environment. With new features to increase user productivity, team collaboration and web site quality, EditLive! V7 is designed to help non-technical users keep company web sites, blogs and wikis up-to-date with relevant online content. EditLive! V7 supports Autosave to preserve content, even if the web browser crashes, or the server session times out. V7 also includes templating functionality, giving content administrators the ability to create reusable content templates for consistent web site styles and standards that can be employed by business users. The HTML editor also improves collaboration for online documents with new context-based commenting capabilities, in which users can comment directly on any text or object in a document and track conversations related to specific comments. For increased quality of content in web sites and wikis, EditLive! adds broken hyperlink reporting. The new version of EditLive! includes enhanced integration with IBM Lotus Web Content Management and now deploys as an application in the portal environment. In addition, performance improvements have been achieved through a series of optimizations to caching, configuration and compression mechanisms. In addition to new functionality in EditLive!, the OEM version now includes several features that were previously only available in the Enterprise Edition. These capabilities include Auto-Correct for automatically correcting spelling errors, the ability to import Word documents, and Thesaurus. EditLive! 7 is available immediately in OEM, Professional and Enterprise Editions. http://www.ephox.com/
Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 37 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.
IBM has unveiled IBM Project Vulcan, which they claim will be the blueprint for the future of collaboration. Building on a company’s existing investments, IBM Project Vulcan enables approaches to reduce personal information overload and improve business agility. IBM Project Vulcan is designed to exploit the convergence of Cloud and on-premise systems; Collaborative Services business applications and social networks; and Desktops, netbooks and mobile devices. Social analytics, by IBM Research, will provide recommendations to locate expertise, relevant content, and critical business events. Designed as a loosely coupled architecture, it is meant to provide flexibility and responsiveness to rapidly changing business requirements and personal preferences. IBM Project Vulcan is designed to allow developers to create new generations of applications powered by collaboration. The capabilities of IBM Project Vulcan will be delivered in future releases of products such as LotusLive, Lotus Notes and Domino, Lotus Connections, Quickr and WebSphere Portal. IBM plans to deliver a beta of a development environment in the second half of 2010 on LotusLive Labs. http://www.ibm.com
Alfresco Software, Inc. announced the availability of Alfresco Content Services for Lotus social collaboration products, an integration between the Alfresco open source enterprise content management (ECM) system and IBM Lotus Quickr, Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal. This integration brings together a combination of the Lotus social collaboration capabilities and Alfresco’s enterprise content management. Alfresco Content Services for Lotus allows access for programmers to extend the integration from Lotus Notes, Domino, XPage and Portal applications using a wide choice of languages, APIs, protocols and services, including Java, JavaScript, JSP, PHP, CMIS, JSR 168k CIFS, IMAP, JCR, WebDAV, FTP, NFS, SMTP, XForms, SOAP, and .net. Alfresco Content Services for Lotus includes an implementation of the SharePoint protocol. This provides users with access from Microsoft Office, while giving companies the freedom of choice in their IT architecture. Alfresco Content Services for Lotus will be available in the spring of 2010, and will be available to download from January 17. http://www.alfresco.com/ibm
Jive announced the acquisition of privately-held Filtrbox, a social media monitoring (SMM) company. Jive will integrate the Filtrbox real-time social media monitoring and engagement capabilities into the Jive SBS platform to help enterprises harness the the social web and change the way they make decisions, develop products, go to market, and engage with customers, prospects and brand influencers. Initially, Jive will integrate Filtrbox technology into the Jive Market Engagement solution, the first solution to combine SMM with the power of collaborative SBS to implement a unified social media engagement strategy. Jive first signaled its belief in the power of harnessing real-time conversations in September 2009 when it announced the Market Engagement Solution. At that time, Jive announced an alliance with SMM provider Radian6. Jive will continue to support customers who use an integrated Jive-Radian6 solution and will continue its alliance with Radian6. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. www.jivesoftware.com/, http://www.filtrbox.com
The 2009 version of the Gilbane Boston conference was held last week. It was the second one I have attended and my first as a track coordinator (I designed the Collaboration and Social Software track and made it happen.) The event was well attended (c. 1100 people) and the number of sponsors and exhibitors was up significantly from last year’s Boston conference. Many of the sessions I attended offered valuable insights from speakers and audience members. All in all, I would label the conference a success.
The Collaboration and Social Software track sessions were designed to minimize formal presentation time and encourage open discussion between panelists and audience members instead. Each session focused on either a common collaboration challenge (collaborative content authoring, content sharing, fostering discussions, managing innovation) or on a specific technology offering (Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Google Wave.) The sessions that dealt with specific technologies produced more active discussion than those that probed general collaboration issues. I am not sure why that was the case, but the SharePoint and Wave sessions spawned the level of interactivity that I had hoped for in all the panels. The audience seemed a bit reticent to join in the others. Perhaps it took them a while to warm up (the SharePoint and Wave sessions were at the end of the track.)
Here are some other, high level observations from the entire Gilbane Boston 2009 conference:
Twitter: Last year (and at Gilbane San Francisco in June 2009) attendees were buzzing about Twitter, wondering what it was and how it could be used in a corporate setting. This year the word “Twitter” was hardly uttered at all, by presenters or attendees. Most audience members seemed to be fixated on their laptop or smartphone during the conference sessions, but the related tweet stream flow was light compared to other events I’ve attended this quarter. The online participation level of folks interested in content management seems to mirror their carbon form patterns. Most are content to listen and watch, while only a few ask questions or make comments. That is true across all audiences, of course, but it seemed especially pronounced at Gilbane Boston.
SharePoint 2010: This topic replaced Twitter as the ubiquitous term at Gilbane Boston. If I had a dollar for every time I heard “SharePoint” at the conference, I would be able to buy a significant stake in Microsoft! Every company I consulted with during the event was seeking to make SharePoint either their primary content management and collaboration platform, or a more important element in their technology mix. Expectations for what will be possible with SharePoint 2010 are very high. If Microsoft can deliver on their vision, they will gain tremendous share in the market; if not, SharePoint may well have seen its zenith. Everything that I have heard and seen suggests the former will occur.
Google Wave: This fledgling technology also generated substantial buzz at Gilbane Boston. The session on Wave was very well attended, especially considering that it was the next-to-last breakout of the conference. An informal poll of the session audience indicated that nearly half have established a Wave account. However, when asked if they used Wave regularly, only about 20% of the registered users responded affirmatively;. Actual participation in the Wave that I created for attendees to take notes and discuss the Collaboration track online underscored the poll results. Most session attendees said they see the potential to collaborate differently, and more effectively and efficiently, in Wave, but cited many obstacles that were preventing them from doing so at this time. Audience members agree that the Wave user experience has a long way to go; functionality is missing and the user interface and features that are there are not easy to use. Most attendees thought Wave’s current shortcomings would be improved or eliminated entirely as they product matures. However, many also noted that collaboration norms within their organization would have to change before Wave is heavily adopted.
Open Source: This was the hot topic of the conference. Everyone was discussing open source content management and collaboration software. An informal poll of the audience at the opening keynote panel suggested that about 40% were using open source content management software. Many of the other attendees wanted to learn more about open source alternatives to the proprietary software they have been using. Clients that I met with asked questions about feature availability, ease of use, cost benefits, and financial viability of providers of open source content management and collaboration software. It was clear that open source is now considered a viable, and perhaps desirable, option by most organizations purchasing enterprise software.
My big take-away from Gilbane Boston 2009 is that we are experiencing an inflection point in the markets for enterprise content management and collaboration software. Monolithic, rigid, proprietary solutions are falling out of favor and interest in more lightweight, flexible, social, open source offerings is rapidly growing. I expect that this trend will continue to manifest itself at Gilbane San Francisco in June 2010, and beyond.
Sitecore announced that its Web CMS solution can now be integrated with Telligent Community, social software designed for organizations to create interactive communities to listen to and engage internal and external audiences. Combining these solutions should give organizations the ability to harness all of their content within the rest of their Web properties. The goal of the Sitecore integration package is to provide centralized security handling and the ability to interchange the content between Sitecore and Telligent Community solutions. With the security integration providing single sign-on functionality, the user signs into the Sitecore CMS and gets simultaneously signed into Telligent Community. The security integration also simplifies the user creation, so users only need to be created in Sitecore CMS and are automatically transferred to Telligent Community upon first login. The content sharing features provide the ability to mix social media applications and Web content within a website, giving users a combined experience of both types of content. The integration module supports content repurposing for Telligent Community forums, blogs and media galleries as well membership information. Social content can either be reused directly or it can be filtered based on the current user’s rights and group memberships. http://www.sitecore.net/ http://telligent.com/
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.
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:
- E15/I12. SharePoint 2010 for Content Management
- E9/I3. Improving SharePoint Search & Navigation with a Taxonomy and Metadata
- E10/I4. SharePoint Strategies for Today & with SharePoint 2010
- E14/C10. SharePoint Case Studies & Strategies
- C6/I8. Microsoft SharePoint 2010: How Will It Impact Your Collaboration Strategy?
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