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Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 43 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.

Second Life Gets an International Life: An Interview with Danica Brinton of Linden Lab

At the recent Worldware Conference in Santa Clara, California, I was delighted to learn about how a high-tech company was achieving great success in internationalizing their software through crowdsourcing. The story gets more interesting. This was not back-room software plumbing but an innovative application, none other than Second Life, a virtual world and a social-networking MMORG (Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Game).  Launched by Linden Lab in 2003, Second Life enables its users, called residents, to interoperate with a virtual world  through software called a Second Life Viewer. Residents can socialize, participate in group activities, and create and trade virtual property.  According to Google, there are over 9 million residents currently on Second Life.

I attended the presentation, “Brave New (Virtual) World,” and had an opportunity to catch up with Danica Brinton, Director of International Strategies and Localization at Linden Lab.  Here’s what she had to say.

Kadie:  When did Linden Lab realize the importance of internationalization?

Brinton: Around the middle of 2008, Linden Lab realized some discrepancies between U.S. and international business.  While 60% of the residents and twice the new registrations were from outside the U.S., revenue and retention numbers, while still healthy, indicated a gap in the localized  user experience.

Kadie: What happened when you entered the scene?

Brinton: I joined the company in June.  When I checked things out, I was stunned.  I discovered that we were paying $40,000 per quarter to LSPs.  What were we getting?  The viewer was translated only partially into 3 languages, and was nearly incomprehensible.  The website was translated partially into 2 key languages.  In both cases there were a lot of localization bugs.  On the flip side, hundreds of wiki-based Help pages were translated quite well into 8 languages, which was pretty darn good.  An interesting trend…

Kadie: So what did you do?

Brinton: Although we were a small company, when I showed my management the opportunity they were very supportive…but with limited funding.  So we had to get creative.  We enlisted the help of power users to translate the application and website.  To ensure quality control, we set up a repeatable localization framework, with translation, editing, testing, and end user review.  We established a tier system of resident translators, drawing on our super-users.   We built and acquired localization tools to manage translation memories and the localization process, and installed a locale-based ROI calculator to manage costs.  Finally, we hired 3 in-house linguists.  So you can see, it was a hybrid of crowdsourcing from the Second Life community on the one hand, and our in-house linguists and contracted translation agencies on the other.

Kadie: How did you divide up the work?

Brinton:  Who did what depended on the language tier.  Let’s look at the viewer, for example.  For tier-1 languages, we developed the glossary, did the translation, and collaborated with the Second Life community on the editing, QA, and some of the glossary.  For tier-2 languages, the Second Life community did nearly everything.

Kadie: What kind of results did you achieve?

Brinton: Less than a year later, I can truthfully say that we achieved some dramatic results.  We now translate the viewer and the website into 10 languages, and expect to reach 16 in May.  The active residents from outside the U.S. grew to 64% of the user base, and new registrations are now more than 2.5 times the U.S.  Even better, international revenues have surpassed U.S. domestic revenues.  Between the Viewer, the website, and the knowledge base, we now regularly localize over 150,000 words per language.

Kadie: What’s next for localization at Linden Lab?

Brinton: Strangely enough, past is prologue.  This new localization program is helping to increase customer satisfaction and bolster an affinity group.  You can even say that community-driven translation is building brand advocacy.  Some of the elite power users are evolving into business partners.  Localization is not only supporting our business, it’s helping to grow it.

The Content Globalization practice at the Gilbane Group closely follows and  blogs on the role of multilingual communication in social networking (see interview with Plaxo).

Vignette Releases Community Applications 7.1

Vignette Corporation (NASDAQ: VIGN) announced an enhancement to its Web Experience Platform – Vignette Community Applications 7.1. This integrated Social Media Solution enables organizations to build communities, encourage online interaction, boost campaigns and provide analytics. Vignette Community Applications 7.1, a key component of Vignette’s Social Media Solution, provides  tools to increase online interaction. In addition to enabling the creation and support of Web 2.0 capabilities such as blogs, wikis, forums, ratings and reviews, the solution allows companies to create unique social sites. These flexible sites combine microsite features with social-centric benefits such as idea management, calendars and events and the sharing of multimedia-rich assets including videos and podcasts. The adaptable social site templates allow marketers to quickly launch campaigns, communities and product sites. Vignette’s Social Media Solution provides a search engine, video technology, enterprise-grade scalability and a flexible, standards-based presentation technology that allows companies to combine social media elements with content from multiple sources. Vignette Community Applications 7.1 is available immediately. http://www.vignette.com

 

Tell Us About Your Favorite Web 2.0 Tool

There sure is a lot of news about Web 2.0 these days. It can be hard to take it all in, and there seems to be new tools every day! So how to make sense of it all.

One way to learn more about these tools is to attend the session I will be hosting at the Gilbane San Francisco Conference (http://gilbanesf.com) in June called “My Favorite Web 2.0 Tool“. It will be organized in the fast paced “Lightning Round” style, with 10 speakers covering 10 topics in 60 minutes (yes, that is about 5 minutes each). This unique presentation format allows for presentation of many ideas at once, encourages audience participation, and tends to be fairly hilarious.

Got something to say about Web 2.0 tools? I would love to hear from people interested in participating in this lightning round. Send me a one paragraph description of why your favorite Web 2.0 tool should be included in this session (send to dale@gilbane.com). We’re open to a broad definition of Web 2.0 tools too. We are looking for innovative ideas, game changers, or even just entertaining or fun apps!

We would love to hear from you!. The slots will fill up fast so don’t wait if you hope to participate.

See you in San Francisco!

Social action in the Arctic

In addition to contributing to the Globalization blog, I will also be blogging a bit about what is happneing in social media in Europe. I will start form my own region here in the north, but will move also southwards!

Although it is still cold here close to the Arctic regions, the social media scene is humming. One site to visit is www.arcticstartup.com, where Ville Vesterinen and his friends blog about social media business in Scandinavia and the Baltic region. In addition to the blog, which tells about the latest news about internet and mobile startups in the Nordic and Baltic region, they are also helping to create a buzzing ecosystem of sharing ideas and growing companies together. Great job!

Another place to get acquainted with Finnish social media companies is www.sombiz.net.

There are plenty of interesting social media companies in Scandinavia and Baltics – some of them even surprising. Muxlim, www.muxlim.com, a global Muslim community, has its roots in Finland. Games are another strong area here; www.playfinland.fi is a great site to follow news about the Finnish game development scene. Max Payne came from Finland, and there are several interesting new companies, such as Frosmo (www.frosmo.com).

In addition to consumer social media, things are happening in the Enterprise 2.0 area, but more on that in next entries!

One of the areas which I will be interested to follow is: how will European social media companies address the question of handling languages in social media? Although many communities will be monolingual, I think there are enormous needs in corporations to handle multiple languages in the various Enterprise 2.0 applications. And with multiple languages, I mean much more than the user interface: all the user-generated content, communicating with customers, open innovations etc. Thoughs or comments on this?

Happy Birthday to the Wiki!

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.

Gilbane Group Twitter Policy

About a month ago, Frank Gilbane posted on Gilbane Group’s use of Twitter. His post lists the Twitter accounts Gilbane Group has established and how we intend to use them. The blog entry also lists some of the Gilbane Group analysts that are active on Twitter and includes their usernames.

We would like to expand on the earlier post by communicating a policy point relevant to the social networking sites on which Gilbane Group currently maintains a profile (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook) and any other social networking site that we may join in the future. First, a brief related aside.

Every organization should establish a social collaboration policy and communicate it — many times over several channels — to all who use enterprise social software provided by the organization. The policy statement should describe expected and unacceptable behaviors related to enterprise social software use. It should include any potential rewards that individual users may accrue by using the software and all consequences of potential misuse. Ideally, the policy statement will also describe the governance structure put in place to monitor and guide usage of the tools. Excellent examples of corporate social collaboration policy statements include those of IBM and Intel.

Right! Back to Gilbane Group’s social software policy specifically. We want you to benefit from our active participation in social networks like Twitter just as much as we want to learn from you. Therefore, you should be aware that:

Gilbane Group will follow all individuals and organizations that have chosen to follow us on Twitter. Additionally, we will encourage our analysts to keep the same practice with their individual Twitter accounts.

Simply put, you follow us on Twitter and we’ll return the courtesy (unless your account is clearly a spambot or inappropriate.) Social networking is all about conversations, and all conversations include two or more active participants, by definition. We can learn as much or more from you as you will from us. So Gilbane Group and its analysts will engage with whomever enters into a social relationship with us.

Below is a list of current Gilbane Group Twitter accounts, including those of individual Gilbane analysts. Please follow any of these that you would like to and expect us to return the favor. Thank you!

 

Twitter Name Description
@gilbane Gilbane Group’s corporate account
@NewsShark Information and content technology industry news reported by Gilbane Group
@gilbanesf Information and dialog related to our Gilbane Conference San Francisco (next event is June 2-4, 2009)
@fgilbane Frank Gilbane, President & CEO
@marylaplante Mary Laplante, VP Client Services & Senior Analyst
@billtrippe Bill Trippe, Lead Analyst, XML Technologies and Content Strategies
@lwmtech Lynda Moulton, Lead Analyst, Enterprise Search
@spaxhia Steve Paxhia, Lead Analyst, Publishing Strategy and Technology
@lehawes Larry Hawes, Lead Analyst, Collaboration and Enterprise Social Software
@Lciarlone Leonor Ciarlone, Senior Analyst, Globalization
@dwaldt Dale Waldt, Senior Consultant, XML, Publishing, Content Management
@nealhannon Neal Hannon, Senior Consultant, XBRL Strategies

 

Content Management Vendors on Twitter

So I have spent enough time on Twitter to conclude that it is useful, indeed very useful, for keeping up with news and trends in technology. Just like the blogosphere, Twitter has its “A list” folks like Guy Kawasaki and many hundreds of interesting people with smaller followings. But I have also found it to be the most useful means I have for following news feeds—from Scientific American (@sciam in Twitter) to Paid Content (@paidcontent) to New England Sports Network (@NESNcom).

Not surprisingly, content management vendors are getting involved as well, and I welcome this. I put out a call ages ago for vendors to alert me to RSS feeds of their press releases, finding them much more useful than emailed press releases in long form. (Few did.) But now I want these things via Twitter. I love Twitter search, and I have begun using TweetDeck to filter and group things. I feel like I can keep much better track of things, read what I want to in long form, and share what I think is especially interesting.

What I would like to see next is an easy way to share groups of Twitter feeds, and even collaborate on them. I have been collecting a list of CMS vendors on Twitter, and offer the start of that list here. Anyone have thoughts about how we could create a useful master list? To start with, I would love to add categories to this—some are WCM vendors, others more niche, some are open source, and so on.

Thoughts?

Twitter User Name Twitter URL Company  
 
acquia http://twitter.com/acquia Acquia  
AlfrescoCMS http://twitter.com/AlfrescoCMS Alfresco CMS  
attivio http://twitter.com/attivio Attivio  
boxdotnet http://twitter.com/boxdotnet Box  
brightcove http://twitter.com/brightcove Brightcove  
coremedia_news http://twitter.com/coremedia_news Core Media  
CrownPeakCMS http://twitter.com/CrownPeakCMS CrownPeak  
daysoftware http://twitter.com/daysoftware Day Software  
Dirxion http://twitter.com/Dirxion Dirxion  
DotNetNuke http://twitter.com/dotnetnuke DotNetNuke  
Drupal http://twitter.com/Drupal Drupal Org  
elcomtechnology http://twitter.com/elcomtechnology elcom Technology  
ektrondave   Ektron  
emccorp http://twitter.com/emccorp EMC Corp.  
EMCsoftware http://twitter.com/EMCsoftware EMC Software  
episerver http://twitter.com/episerver EpiServer  
escenic http://twitter.com/escenic escenic  
EE http://twitter.com/EE ExpressionEngine  
gentics http://twitter.com/gentics Gentics  
google http://twitter.com/google Google  
hpnews http://twitter.com/hpnews HP News  
HP_IPG http://twitter.com/HP_IPG HP’s Imaging and Printers Group  
HylandSoftware http://twitter.com/HylandSoftware Hyland Software  
IBM_ECM http://twitter.com/IBM_ECM IBM ECM  
ibmevents http://twitter.com/ibmevents IBM Events  
Intelledox http://twitter.com/Intelledox Intelledox  
Interwoven_Inc http://twitter.com/Interwoven_Inc Interwoven/Autonomy  
ipublishcentral http://twitter.com/ipublishcentral IPublishCentral  
IronMountainInc http://twitter.com/IronMountainInc Iron Mountain  
Jadu http://twitter.com/jaducms Jadu  
Jahia http://twitter.com/Jahia Jahia  
joomla http://twitter.com/joomla Joomla Org  
Lionbridge http://twitter.com/Lionbridge Lionbridge  
Lotusphere http://twitter.com/Lotusphere Lotusphere  
magnolia_cms http://twitter.com/magnolia_cms Magnolia CMS  
SharePoint http://twitter.com/SharePoint Microsoft Sharepoint  
msoffice_us http://twitter.com/msoffice_us MS Office US  
MSDN_Office http://twitter.com/MSDN_Office MSDN Office News  
NsteinTech http://twitter.com/NsteinTech Nstein  
Omtool http://twitter.com/Omtool Omtool  
openedit http://twitter.com/openedit OpenEdit DAM  
OpenText http://twitter.com/OpenText OpenText  
Oracle http://twitter.com/Oracle Oracle  
papayaCMS http://twitter.com/papayaCMS papaya CMS  
plone http://twitter.com/plone Plone Org  
radiantcmsntcms https://twitter.com/radiantcms Radiant CMS  
ScriptoriumTech   Scriptorium  
sdltridion http://twitter.com/sdltridion SDL Tridion  
squizuk http://twitter.com/squizuk Squiz.NET  
streamserve http://twitter.com/streamserve StreamServe  
tizra http://twitter.com/tizra Tizra  
TYPO3_INFORMER http://twitter.com/TYPO3_INFORMER
Typo 3  
vignettecorp http://twitter.com/vignettecorp Vignette  
webworks_com http://twitter.com/webworks_com WebWorks  
wordpress http://twitter.com/wordpress WordPress  
XeroxCorp http://twitter.com/XeroxCorp Xerox  
XMPie http://twitter.com/XMPie XMPie  
       

 

Management of Content Authored in Enterprise Social Software

Suw Charman-Anderson posted a thoughtful piece with the title Businesses will live to regret their social media ignorance today.  Her main point is that organizations that do not deploy enterprise social software behind the firewall will lose control of information as it spreads through public social media.  This is an oft-heard refrain these days in the blogsphere.

Please don’t misunderstand, I agree with Suw.  If businesses want to retain some control over their information, they should provide secure, enterprise-ready versions of the specific types of collaboration and communication tools that employees want to use.  For example, if the risk of information leakage via Twitter is too high, the organization should deploy an enterprise microblogging application on its own servers (or subscribe to a SaaS offering hosted by a trusted vendor.)

What is especially valuable and somewhat novel in Suw’s post is her recognition of the content management issues surrounding the use of public social media to share corporate information.  She writes,

“…you need to make sure you know how communications using these tools are going to be logged, archived, and made searchable. Mostly, archiving (or logging) is built in, so it shouldn’t be that difficult. Cross-archive search might be a little bit more interesting, but it’s worth your while because more time is wasted in re-finding information than in finding it in the first place.”

Much of the dialog around enterprise social software has rightly been on connecting people to other people and the information and knowledge they possess.  The notion of using software to connect people to unstructured information hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention in the Enterprise 2.0 discussion.  Perhaps content management is a dull topic in comparison to connecting people, but enterprise social software is essentially a content authoring tool and it has fueled growth in the amount of content created within an organization.

Traditionally, unstructured information has been housed in what most would call a ‘document’, but it also may be contained in a message authored in a microblogging, wiki, or instant messaging application.  Those messages must be stored, indexed, and searchable so that users can find valuable information after it has initially been documented and shared by the author.  The same content management principles that we’ve applied to corporate email must also be used to ensure the findability of information generated in and shared via enterprise social software.

What is your view on this issue?  Do you have horror stories or best practices to share?  If so, please do by adding a comment below.

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