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Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 53 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.

Notes as the New Mainframe

IBM released Notes 8 and Domino 8 earlier this month — two years in development and “the industry’s first enterprise collaboration solution largely designed with input from its customers.” IBM has devoted a lot of its efforts towards creating an integrated user experience — messages, calendar entries, file folders, and queries to business applications can all appear within a single, tiled window. With customized sidebars and tool bars, application developers can add “peripheral vision” to the user experience, and integrate a variety of plug-ins. While this user interface style is hardly revolutionary, it does cut down on window-clutter and will go a long way towards improving the usability of complex application environments.
IBM has also introduced “message conversations” into Notes email. Rather than messages being displayed as discrete items, they are concatinated into their discussion threads — with the root message and all the replies captured in a single list. This reduces Inbox clutter — 150 messages (the average daily total for a “typical” Notes user) can be reduced to eight or ten threads.
For organizations that made the Notes investment some years ago, there’s no need to consider alternatives or doubt IBM’s commitment to it’s core collaboration platform. Like the mainframes of an earlier computing era, Notes remains a solid messaging platform with integrated calendaring and contacts. It continues to serve as a development environment for ad hoc (workgroup-level) applications.
But I wonder about the growth opportunities for Notes. Many of us are quite comfortable with the “traditional” business activities engendered by this latest version — sending and receiviing messages, scheduling and attending meetings, contacting people. Yet when we have so much information readily accessable at our fingertips, we are continually looking for new metaphors for doing work — bringing people together over the network, restructuring business processes, improving decision making. More is at stake than simply “reducing clutter.” We need to focus as much on the “collaboration services” accessible within the network as on the quality of the user experience itself.

Sharepoint and Search

Sharepoint repositories are a prime content target for most search engines in the enterprise search arena, judging from the number of announcements I’ve previewed from search vendors in the last six month. This list is long and growing (Names link to press releases or product pages for Sharepoint search enabling):

Almost a year ago I began using a pre-MOSS version of Sharepoint to collect documents for a team activity. Ironically, the project was the selection, acquisition, implementation of a (non-Sharepoint) content management system to manage a corporate intranet, extranet, and hosted public Web site. The version of Sharepoint that was “set up” for me was strictly out of the box. Not being a development, I was still able to muddle my way through setting up the site, established users, posting announcements and categories of content to which I uploaded about fifty or sixty documents.

The most annoying discovery was the lack of a default search option. Later updating to MOSS solved the problem but at the time it was a huge aggravation. Because I could not guarantee a search option would appear soon enough, I had to painstakingly create titles with dates in order to give team members a contextual description as they would browse the site. Some of the documents I wanted to share were published papers and reviews of products. Dates were not too relevant for those, so I “enhanced” the titles with my own notations to help the finders select what they needed.

These silly “homemade” solutions are not uncommon when a tool does not anticipate how we would want to be able to use it. They persist as ways to handle our information storage and retrieval challenges. Since the beginning of time humans have devised ways to store things that they might want to re-use at some point in the future. Organizing for findability is an art as much at it is science. Information science only takes one so far in establishing the organizing criteria and assigning those criteria to content. Search engines that rely strictly on the author’s language will leave a lot of relevant content on the shelf for the same reasons as using Dewey Decimal classification without the complementary card catalog of subject topics. The better search engines exploit every structured piece of data or tagged content associated with a document, and that includes all the surrounding metadata assigned by “categorizers.” Categorizers might be artful human indexers or automated processes. Search engines with highly refined, intelligent categorizers to enable semantically rich finding experiences bring even more sophistication to the search experience.

But back to Sharepoint, which does have an embedded search option now, I’ve heard more than one expert comment on the likelihood that it will not be the “search” of choice for Sharepoint. That is why we have so many search options scrambling to promote their own Sharepoint search. This is probably because the organizing framework around contributing content to Sharepoint is so loosey goosey that an aggregation of many Sharepoint sites across the organization will be just what we’ve experienced with all these other homegrown systems – a dump full of idiosyncratic organizing tricks.

What you want to do, thoughtfully, is assess whether the search engine you need will share only Sharepoint repositories OR both structured and unstructured repositories across a much larger domain of types of content and applications. It will be interesting to evaluate the options that are out there for searching Sharepoint gold mines. Key questions: Is a product targeting only Sharepoint sites or diverse content? How will content across many types of repositories be aggregated and reflected organized results displays? How will the security models of the various repositories interact with the search engine? Answering these three questions first will quickly narrow your list of candidates for enterprise search.

Mashing-up the Wikipedia Code

Now here’s an interesting tidbit from the BBC, courtesy of my daughter (who’s a graduate student in London): Wikipedia ‘shows CIA page edits.’ It seems that staffers at the CIA, the Democratic National Campaign Committee, the Vatican, and many other well known institutions (who may be trying to remain nameless) have been ‘caught’ sprucing up various wikipedia articles. (Well of course this is a tarty British take on the matter!)
And the secret sauce that pulls back the curtain? Revealed at the end of the article, a simple mashup that links the IP addresses of contributors to an article (obtained through the “history” page) with a directory of organizations owning IP addresses. Both are publicly available. The results are hardly surprising.
The point is that when information is so widely and freely available, we have to begin to worry about the sources of information and how it is presented. There’s not a lot of anonymity on the public web — and quite possibly this is a good thing. But building community also includes notions of trust, expertise, and terms of reference. For example, when starting eBay, Pierre Omidyar came up with the notion of “rate the buyer” and “rate the seller” as a way of organically building trust within the community of eBayers . . . and the rest is history.
I hate to admit it but perhaps Ronald Regan said it the best. “Trust but verify.” What’s interesting is that mashing-up sources and IP addresses provides a whole new dimension to verification. I wonder what else is possible? Let’s start a discussion — comments?

Movable Type Releases Movable Type 4.0

Movable Type announced the release of Movable Type 4.0. “This is the biggest release of MT ever, a complete redesign of both the front end information architecture and the back end scaling infrastructure.” Movable Type 4 has a broad set of new capabilities, including: a redesigned user interface, more and better plugins, built in support for OpenID, community features, ability to aggregate content from multiple blogs, new support for standalone pages in addition to blog entries, “content management” features, smarter archiving (e.g., by author), more robust templates, and more. They also announced an upcoming open source version. http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2007/08/presenting-movable-type-40.html, http://www.movabletype.com/

I’ve Got Infrastructure on My Mind

It’s been a rough few weeks for infrastructure.
Of course the collapse of the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi in Minneapolis last Wednesday is on all of our minds – how could the inspections fail and the road fall down? Significantly, there’s some videos that capture the moment, which hopefully will provide clues for determining the cause.
Closer to home, we had an eight-hour traffic jam on the I-93 loop in Braintree (a major highway south of Boston) a week ago Monday. A storm grate was thrown loose by a passing truck at the start of the morning rush, and landed on a near-by car. (Fortunately the driver survived.) Reportedly, the Massachusetts State Highway Department spent the rest of the day checking and welding shut all the grates on that highway. The next day, the same loose storm drain problem cropped up on a major road in Newton, near where I live. This time motorists were asked to dial a special code from their cell phones to report problems.
And then this morning New Yorkers awoke to a monsoon and a flooded mass transit system. The official M.T.A. web site could not keep up with the requests for information, and crashed when it was needed most.
You’ve gotta hand it to those hardy folks (and the New York Times) for that snarky, Big Apple attitude. Here’re a few priceless ones that I gleaned from NYTimes.Com during the day.

“Our transit system is not only frail but if it’s this vulnerable to rain attacks, then how vulnerable is it to terrorist attacks?”

“I walked from the Upper West Side all the way to work in Midtown, but thanks to Starbucks was able to stop in and cool myself every four blocks or so.”

(Now there’s somebody with brand loyalty!)

“And only the rats had no transportation problems.”

All this content about our physical infrastructure (user generated and otherwise) has the potential to bring social computing to a whole new level.
This got me thinking about the role of collaboration technologies for supporting our physical infrastructure. It’s great to be able to talk back — and let off a little steam. It’s even better to be able to call-in, and tell the authorities about the problem before there’s another horrible accident. But what else is possible? Could the bridge inspectors in Minneapolis have shared their observation reports, measurements, and perhaps photographs of the bridge’s structure over the past few inspection cycles, and had some semi-automated ways to detect the problems before the disaster? Unfortunately we’ll never know.
While I certainly don’t have it all figured out, I can begin to see some bread crumbs towards the workable solution we all want and need. We can no longer rely on human intelligence alone. Our worlds are much too complex and interdependent. We need to augment our understandings, and our abilities to take actions, by a variety of automated, concent-centric tools, such as semantic technologies. (With my colleagues Lynda Moulton and Frank Gilbane, we’re picking up coverage of this area, the ability to inject “meaning” and “context” into an enterprise environment. Be sure to check out the semantic technologies track at our upcoming conference in November.)
I’ve seen a couple of promising developments this month. SchemaLogic is finally reporting some progress in the publishing space, enabling publishers such as Associated Press to automatically repurpose content by synchronizing tags and managing metadata schemas. While pretty geeky, this is very neat! Now we need to see how this approach to managing semantics within the enterprise will impact collaboration and social computing.
Then project and portfolio management (PPM) systems — heretofore heavyweight (often mainframe) applications that are used to track resources for complex, engineering-driven projects — are being redeployed as Web 2.0 environments. In particular,eProject is now transforming its Web-based PPM environment into a broader collaborative tools suite. Seeking to capitalize on it’s expanded mission of bringing a PPM model to the Web, eProject’s also renaming itself in the process.
Where do these bread-crumbs lead? As a first step, we need to focus on how our collaboration infrastructure (fueled by our information architecture) can augment the work of people responsible for our physical infrastructure (ourselves included). At the end of the day, we need to be able to rely on this collaboration infrastructure to help us sense and respond to the challenges of simply getting from one place to another.

Links and Connections: Finding the Context

A provocative conversation broke out on one of the discussion groups I monitor last week. “I’m curious how you and others you know are using ‘LinkedIn.com.'” the person asked. “For me, I like who’s in my network, [and] keep asking others to join; but overall I find it to be very static.”
A static network — now there’s a new concept! But there’s a good deal of truth to wondering how these links work within the business environment. Sure I too have a modest network; I check out my Linked-in account once or twice a month to see who’s doing what. For me, this substitutes (poorly) for the water-cooler conversations earlier in my career, when I was surrounded by lots of co-workers. There was always the lunch-time gossip and the hallway exchanges . . . did I know that so and so was working on this new skunk-works project? Had I heard that another sales team just surpassed its revenue goals or that a particular key customer now had a new set of requirements?
While linking-in through Linked-in is a poor substitute for the chatter of the co-located workplace, it’s at least the beginning of a business conversation. It maintains its professional aura, boundaries, and rules, in part by continuing to stove-pipe its connections, and not (yet) mashing up its links and membership.
Not so with Facebook, now trying to take the “digital natives” (those who grew up with the Internet ant the Web) into the workplace. This move — blending the power of networks with mashups — is raising a number of eyebrows. “Friend? Not? It’s One or the Other” Rob Pegoraro, the personal technology columnist wrote provocatively in the Washington Post last week.

You could stay in touch with your drinking buddies at MySpace, then schmooze with your business partners at LinkedIn.
But life isn’t always that neat. And when the private and professional overlap at these sites, you can spend more time worrying about your image than building your network.

To be sure Facebook has a slew of privacy setting — at least 135 according to Pegoraro — but having to define how I want to expose some of my activities to one group of friends and other actions to business colleagues adds complexity to what should be cast as a rather fluid interchange.
What’s missing to my way of thinking is not simply privacy but context. We all have our business personas and our personal personas. We have certain expectations when in a business context, others when in a social context, and still others when “being personal.” Many of our social networks are, in fact, rather complex.
To make these networks useful within a collaborative (and online) business environment, we need to be able to add (and manage) our business contexts. We need to be able to describe (and map) the business purposes for our social networks.

Counting How the Game is Changing

Nora Barnes (director of the Center for Marketing Research at UMass, Dartmouth) and Eric Mattson have a new survey report out on social computing — The Game Has Changed: College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media. They compare how universities and companies in the Inc. 500 are using social media — blogging, social networking (whch I take to mean sites like Facebook and MySpace), message boards, online video, podcasting, and wikis. In a nutshell

Social media has arrived in college admissions. The ivory tower is innovating even faster than the elite Inc. 500. And the game has changed forever.

I cannot wait to see their detailed analysis.

Picking through their numbers so far, two things jump out. First, universities are almost as likely to use social networks as search engines when evaluating potential students (26% vs 21%).

Admission offices can find out all kinds of information about their prospects by googling them on the web. Tracking and tracing their social networks is close behind. Hum, I wonder what enterprises are going to be doing, both when reviewing job candidates and business partnerships, and when tracking performance. I can see it now — a new generation of “socially conscious” HR and business applications.

Second, we’ve been talking about blogs and wikis in almost the same breadth (thanks in part to Don Tapscott and Wikinomics and “how mass collaboration changes everything”). But not so fast. While blogging is more widely used in universities than in corporations (33% vs 19%), wikis are more widely deployed in corporations than in universities (17% vs. 3%). So we ought to take another breadth, turn down the hypemeter, and better understand how these different modes of collaboration are used in practice.

Here’s my vote. It’s all about the difference between self-publishing and supporting a business process. Blogging’s easy — I’m standing at my virtual Hyde Park corner (as in this blog), using my own time. Others who want to invest their time can read what I have to say. (Thank you, my readers!) But putting up a wiki is all about sharing information that’s part of a business process — I post, you modify, and our colleagues elsewhere in the world add their two cents. The outcome is a group project, the results of our “collective intelligence.” It’s a bit like co-authoring a report or developing a project plan for a group or . . . . you get the point — we share in the results through an interactive process.

Oh, one other thing. Business processes are tough to implement. They happen not by accident but by design. When the bloom is off the rose, we’re going to have to do a lot more work to make wikis really useful within the enterprise.

WSJ on iPhone and Instant Messaging for Business

Today’s Wall Street Journal has 2 articles that relate to enterprise social computing: Instant Messaging Invades the Office, and iPhone Calls to Some Business Users. Our recent informal poll of Facebook users suggests they think instant messaging will be more dominant than some other “social software” in enterprises in the near future. The WSJ article indicates IMing is invading fast.

It is not surprising that iPhones, with their dramatically improved viewing experience, will find a lot more use in business environments. I love my Treo, but avoid viewing spreadsheets and using it with other web apps. The iPhone will make a huge difference to my interaction with our corporate information when I am out of the office. Of course, there are security issues, and no doubt other technical issues that may get in the way initially, but there is no going back. And if tomorrow’s numbers from Apple are less than expected they will merely reflect the initial velocity, not an inability to reach escape velocity.

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