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Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 40 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.

Go With the (Enterprise 2.0 Adoption) Flow

People may be generally characterized as one of the following: optimists, realists, or pessimists. We all know the standard scenario used to illustrate these stereotypes.

Optimists look at the glass and say that it is partially full. Pessimists remark that the glass is mostly empty. Realists note that there is liquid in the glass and make no value judgment about the level.

The global Enterprise 2.0 community features the same types of individuals. I hear them speak and read their prose daily, noticing the differences in the way that they characterize the current state of the E2.0 movement. E2.0 evangelists (optimists) trumpet that the movement is revolutionary. Doubters proclaim that E2.0 will ultimately fail for many of the same reasons that earlier attempts to improve organizational collaboration did. Realists observe events within the E2.0 movement, but don’t predict its success or demise.

All opinions should be heard and considered, to be sure. In some ways, the position of the realist is ideal, but it lacks the spark needed to create forward, positive momentum for E2.0 adoption or to kill it. A different perspective is what is missing in the current debate regarding the health of the E2.0 movement.

Consider again the picture of the glass of liquid and the stereotypical reactions people have to it. Note that none of those reactions considers flow. Is the level of liquid in the glass rising or falling?

Now apply the flow question to the E2.0 movement. Is it gaining believers or is it losing followers? Isn’t that net adoption metric the one that really matters, as opposed to individual opinions, based on static views of the market, about the success or failure of the E2.0 movement to-date?

The E2.0 community needs to gather more quantitative data regarding E2.0 adoption in order to properly access the health of the movement. Until that happens, the current, meaningless debate over the state of E2.0 will continue. The effect of that wrangling will be neither positive or negative — net adoption will show little gain —  as more conservative adopters continue to sit on the sideline, waiting for the debate to end.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that E2.0 adoption is increasing, albeit slowly. The surest way to accelerate E2.0 adoption is to go with the flow — to measure and publicize increases in the number of organizations using social software to address tangible business problems. Published E2.0 case studies are great, but until more of those are available, simply citing the increase in the number of organizations deploying E2.0 software should suffice to move laggards off the sideline and on to the playing field.

Assessment of My Enterprise 2.0 Conference Predictions

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference was held last week, in Boston. Prior to the event, I made some predictions as to expected learnings and outcomes from the conference. Today, I will revisit those prognostications to determine their accuracy.

Here is the original list of things that I anticipated encountering at the E2.0 Conference this year. Each prediction is followed by an assessment of the statement’s validity and some explanatory comments:

A few more case studies from end user organizations, but not enough to indicate that we’ve reached a tipping point in the E2.0 market: TRUE The number of case studies presented this year seemed to be roughly the same as last year. That is to say very few. The best one that I heard was a presentation by Lockheed Martin employees, which was an update to their case study presented last year at E2.0 Conference. It was great to hear the progress they had made and the issues with which they have dealt in the last year. However, I was genuinely disappointed by the absence of fresh case studies. Indeed, the lack of new case studies was the number one conference content complaint heard during the event wrap-up session (indeed, throughout the show.)

An acknowledgement that there are still not enough data and case studies to allow us to identify best practices in social software usage:
TRUE This turned out to be a huge understatement. There are not even enough publicly available data points and stories to allow us to form a sense of where the Enterprise 2.0 market is in terms of adoption, much less of best practices or common success factors. At this rate, it will be another 12-18 months before we can begin to understand which companies have deployed social software and at what scale, as well as what works and what doesn’t when implementing an E2.0 project.

That entrenched organizational culture remains the single largest obstacle to businesses trying to deploy social software:
TRUE The “C” word popped up in every session I attended and usually was heard multiple times per session. The question debated at the conference was a chicken and egg one; must culture change to support adoption of E2.0 practices and tools, or is E2.0 a transformational force capable of reshaping an organization’s culture and behaviors? That question remains unanswered, in part because of the lack of E2.0 case studies. However, historical data and observations on enterprise adoption of previous generations of collaboration technologies tell us that leadership must be willing to change the fundamental values, attitudes, and behaviors of the organization in order to improve collaboration. Grassroots evangelism for, and usage of, collaboration tools is not powerful enough to drive lasting cultural change in the face of resistance from leadership.

A nascent understanding that E2.0 projects must touch specific, cross-organizational business processes in order to drive transformation and provide benefit: TRUE I was very pleased to hear users, vendors, and analysts/consultants singing from the same page in this regard. Everyone I heard at E2.0 Conference understood that it would be difficult to realize and demonstrate benefits from E2.0 initiatives that did not address specific business processes spanning organizational boundaries. The E2.0 movement seems to have moved from speaking about benefits in general, soft terms to groping for how to demonstrate process-based ROI (more on this below.)

A growing realization that the E2.0 adoption will not accelerate meaningfully until more conservative organizations hear and see how other companies have achieved specific business results and return on investment: TRUE Conference attendees were confounded by two related issues; the lack of demonstrative case studies and the absence of a clear, currency-based business case for E2.0 initiatives. More conservative organizations won’t move ahead with E2.0 initiatives until they can see at least one of those things and some will demand both. People from end user organizations attending the conference admitted as much both publicly and privately.

A new awareness that social software and its implementations must include user, process, and tool analytics if we are ever to build a ROI case that is stated in terms of currency, not anecdotes:
TRUE Interestingly, the E2.0 software vendors are leading this charge, not their customers. A surprising number of vendors were talking about analytics in meetings and briefings I had at the conference, and many were announcing the current or future addition of those capabilities to their offerings at the show. E2.0 software is increasingly enabling organizations to measure the kinds of metrics that will allow them to build a currency-based business case following a pilot implementation. Even better, some vendors are mining their products’ new analytics capabilities to recommend relevant people and content to system users!

That more software vendors that have entered the E2.0 market, attracted by the size of the business opportunity around social software:
TRUE I haven’t counted and compared the number of vendors in Gartner’s E2.0 Magic Quadrant from last year and this year, but I can definitely tell you that the number of vendors in this market has increased. This could be the subject of another blog post, and I won’t go into great detail here. There are a few new entrants that are offering E2.0 suites or platforms (most notably Open Text). Additionally, the entrenchment of SharePoint 2007 in the market has spawned many small startup vendors adding social capabilities on top of SharePoint. The proliferation of these vendors underscores the current state of dissatisfaction with SharePoint 2007 as an E2.0 platform. It also foreshadows a large market shakeout that will likely occur when Microsoft releases SharePoint 2010.

A poor opinion of, and potentially some backlash against, Microsoft SharePoint as the foundation of an E2.0 solution; this will be tempered, however, by a belief that SharePoint 2010 will be a game changer and upset the current dynamics of the social software market:
TRUE Yes, there are many SharePoint critics out there and they tend to be more vocal than those who are satisfied with their SharePoint deployment. The anti-SharePoint t-shirts given away by Box.net at the conference sum up the attitude very well. Yet most critics seem to realize that the next release of SharePoint will address many of their current complaints. I heard more than one E2.0 conference attendee speculate on the ability of the startup vendors in the SharePoint ecosystem to survive when Microsoft releases SharePoint 2010.

An absence of understanding that social interactions are content-centric and, therefore, that user generated content must be managed in much the same manner as more formal documents:
FALSE Happily, I was wrong on this one. There was much discussion about user generated content at the conference, as well as talk about potential compliance issues surrounding E2.0 software. It seems that awareness of the importance of content in social systems is quite high among vendors and early adopters. The next step will be to translate that awareness into content management features and processes. That work has begun and should accelerate, judging by what I heard and
saw at the conference.

So there are the results. I batted .888! If you attended the conference, I’d appreciate your comments on my perceptions of the event. Did you hear and see the same things, or did the intense after hours drinking and major sleep deficit of last week cause me to hallucinate? I’d appreciate your comments even if you weren’t able to be at E2.0 Conference, but have been following the market with some regularity.

I hope this post has given you a decent sense of the current state of the Enterprise 2.0 market. More importantly, I believe that this information can help us focus our efforts to drive the E2.0 movement forward in the coming year. We can and should work together to best these challenges and make the most of these opportunities.

Bluenog Releases ICE 4.5

Bluenog announced the availability of Bluenog ICE 4.5, an Enterprise 2.0 application development platform built on pre-integrated open source collaboration, content management, presentation and reporting projects. ICE 4.5’s Integrated Collaborative Environment of content management, portal, and business intelligence software now includes an Enterprise Wiki, secure group calendaring features and enhanced centralized administration. ICE 4.5 aggregates functionality from over a dozen open source projects into a single commercial product, with additional integration and features, all supported by Bluenog. This pre-integration helps eliminate the need for developers to manually code features such as security permissions and access to legacy systems across all their applications. Based on the JSPWiki open source project, ICE 4.5 allows users to create and share content through a portal interface. Stored in a secure, enterprise-wide repository, all Wiki pages can be searched, with access permissions defined at the Wiki and page level. ICE 4.5 also introduces an enterprise group calendaring application based on the open source project, Bedework. Bluenog has extended Bedework with secure, restricted access to calendars based on user, group and role. Another feature introduced in ICE 4.5 is ICE Central. This Central Administrative Console includes an improved interface for handling user groups and permissions across ICE’s CMS and Portal components. Additionally, its propagation tool enables bulk import/export of ICE CMS Content Types and Content Data assets. The new release extends ICE’s CMS functionality with an enhanced rich text editor and configurable HTML cleaner. These new features allow for a more customizable, browser friendly Ajax-compatible style. Bluenog ICE 4.5 will be generally available June 30, 2009. Bluenog ICE 4.5 is available via annual subscription and includes 9×5 support. Priced per-server rather than per-CPU or per-user. http://www.bluenog.com/

SimpleFeed Adds Twitter Support

SimpleFeed, Inc. announced customers can now publish any content in SimpleFeed into their Twitter accounts. Customers and prospects increasingly want to subscribe to news, offers and other information via Twitter. SimpleFeed creates, manages and measures syndicated content for large corporations. To create feeds for its customers, SimpleFeed integrates with many sources of content – republishing of existing RSS Feeds, content management system integrations, web services integrations, data feed integrations, HTML scraping and manual content entry. SimpleFeed Enterprise Twitter publishing enables marketers to publish any of this content into their Twitter streams. Features of SimpleFeed Enterprise publishing include:Publish any content in SimpleFeed to multiple Twitter accounts; Publish to specific Twitter accounts based on content tagging;  Control of the publishing process via the SimpleFeed User Management System; Publish once to everywhere – Feeds, Twitter, Web Sites; Custom publish content (not just title and link); Support for tinyurl and bit.ly; and Enterprise level support. http://www.simplefeed.com/twitter.htm

Enterprise 2.0 Conference Predictions

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference begins this evening in Boston. Conference organizers indicate that there are approximately 1,500 people registered for the event, which has become the largest one for those interested in the use of Web 2.0 technologies inside business organizations.

The most valuable part of last year’s conference was the case studies on Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) from early adopter organizations like Lockheed Martin and the Central Intelligence Agency. They presented an early argument for how and why Web 2.0 could be used by businesses.

Here are some things that I anticipate encountering at the E2.0 Conference this year:

  • a few more case studies from end user organizations, but not enough to indicate that we’ve reached a tipping point in the E2.0 market
  • an acknowledgement that there are still not enough data and case studies to allow us to identify best practices in social software usage
  • that entrenched organizational culture remains the single largest obstacle to businesses trying to deploy social software
  • a nascent understanding that E2.0 projects must touch specific, cross-organizational business processes in order to drive transformation and provide benefit
  • a growing realization that the E2.0 adoption will not accelerate meaningfully until more conservative organizations hear and see how other companies have achieved specific business results and return on investment
  • a new awareness that social software and its implementations must include user, process, and tool analytics if we are ever to build a ROI case that is stated in terms of currency, not anecdotes
  • that more software vendors that have entered the E2.0 market, attracted by the size of the business opportunity around social software
  • a poor opinion of, and potentially some backlash against, Microsoft SharePoint as the foundation of an E2.0 solution; this will be tempered, however, by a belief that SharePoint 2010 will be a game changer and upset the current dynamics of the social software market
  • an absence of understanding that social interactions are content-centric and, therefore, that user generated content must be managed in much the same manner as more formal documents

So there are some of my predictions for take-aways from this year’s E2.0 conference. I will publish a post-conference list of what I actually did hear and learn. That should make for some interesting comparison with today’s post; we will learn if my sense of the state of the market was accurate or just plain off.

In the meanwhile, I will be live-tweeting some of the sessions I attend so you can get a sense of what is being discussed at the E2.0 Conference on the fly. You can see my live tweets by following my event feed on Twitter.

Mark Logic Releases MarkLogic Toolkit for Excel

Mark Logic Corporation released the MarkLogic Toolkit for Excel. This new offering provides users a free way to integrate Microsoft Office Excel 2007 with MarkLogic Server. Earlier this year, Mark Logic  delivered a Toolkit for Word and a Connector for SharePoint. Together, these offerings allow users to extend the functionality of Microsoft Office products and build applications leveraging the native document format, Office Open XML (OOXML). Distributed under an open source model, MarkLogic Toolkit for Excel comes with an Excel add-in that allows users to deploy information applications into Excel, comprehensive libraries for managing and manipulating Excel data, and a sample application that leverages best practices. The MarkLogic Toolkit for Excel offers greater search functionality, allowing organizations to search across their Excel files for worksheets, cells, and formulas. Search results can be imported directly into the workbooks that users are actively authoring. Workbooks, worksheets, formulas, and cells can be exported directly from active Excel documents to MarkLogic Server for immediate use by queries and applications. The Toolkit for Excel allows customers to easily create new Excel workbooks from existing XML documents. Users can now manipulate and re-use workbooks stored in the repository with a built-in XQuery library. For instance, a financial services firm can replace the manual process of cutting-and-pasting information from XBRL documents to create reports in Excel with an automated system. Utilizing Toolkit for Excel, this streamlined process extracts relevant sections of XBRL reports, combines them, and saves them as an Excel file. The Toolkit also allows users to add and edit multiple custom metadata documents across workbooks. This improves the ability for users to discover and reuse information contained in Excel spreadsheets. To download MarkLogic Toolkit for Excel, visit the Mark Logic Developer Workshop located at http://developer.marklogic.com/code/, http://www.marklogic.com

Have a question for our analyst panel?

Looking forward to seeing many of you next week at Gilbane San Francisco. Whether you will be there or not, you can suggest questions to ask our analyst panel. Each of the panelists have specific areas of expertise covering web content management, web governance, enterprise social software and social media, collaboration, and enterprise search. The panel is a keynote session after the two keynote presentations from Microsoft and Adobe, so we’ll also be covering reactions to those. You can submit your questions directly to me via a comment, email, or twitter (DM or post using the hashtag #gilbanesf).

Registration for the conference is still open and will be available on-site. If you register in advance you can still get a $200. discount using GILBANE as the discount code. There is no charge for the keynotes or the technology demonstrations or product labs.

K2. Keynote Analyst Panel
We invite industry analysts from many different firms to speak at all our events to make sure our conference attendees hear differing opinions from a wide variety of expert sources. A second, third, fourth or fifth opinion will ensure you don’t make ill-informed decisions about critical content and information technologies or strategies. This session will be a lively, interactive debate guaranteed to be both informative and fun.
Moderator: Frank Gilbane
Panelists:
Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Social Computing, Forrester
Hadley Reynolds, Research Director, Search & Digital Marketplace Technologies, IDC
Larry Hawes, Lead Analyst, Collaboration and Enterprise Social Software, Gilbane Group
Lisa Welchman, Founding Partner, WelchmanPierpoint

DocPoint Solutions and Atalasoft Team Up on SharePoint Solutions

DocPoint Solutions, Inc., a subsidiary of Quality Associates, Inc., focused on providing Microsoft SharePoint to organizations that are looking to expand employee collaboration and increase the exchange of information, announced a new reseller relationship with Easthampton, Mass.-based Atalasoft, Inc. This new partnership authorizes DocPoint to distribute, customize, and install Atalasoft’s Vizit SP software. Vizit SP is a solution for viewing, cleaning up, indexing, and annotating documents within the Microsoft SharePoint Server (MOSS). The product is a zero-footprint document viewing system, which means end users can access documents without installing any software or downloading the files to their desktops. To all clients evaluating the Vizit SP software, DocPoint is also authorized to grant unlimited and free use of the Vizit Previewer. This program provides the user with fast on-screen preview images of any document stored within the SharePoint system. http://www.docpointsolutions.com

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