The Gilbane Group and Lighthouse Seminars announced that executives from Adobe, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle will participate in the Gilbane San Francisco 2007 keynote panel, “Content Technology Industry Update,” on Wednesday, April 11th at 8:30 a.m. at the Palace Hotel. Taking place April 10-12, the Gilbane Conference San Francisco has greatly expanded its collection of educational programs, including sessions focused on web and other enterprise content management applications, enterprise search and information access technologies, publishing technology, wikis, blogs and collaboration tools, and information on globalization and translation technology. The “Content Technology Industry Update” keynote panel will focus on the most important strategic issues technical and business managers need to consider for both near and long term success in managing content and content technologies in the context of enterprise applications. The keynote panel discussion is completely interactive (i.e., no presentations). With six tracks and 35 sessions to choose from, attendees have the opportunity to participate in a conference program focused on educating attendees about the latest content management technologies from experienced content management practitioners, consultants, and technologists. http://gilbanesf.com/conference_grid.html
Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 57 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.
Dan Farber has nicely pulled together a couple of points in a post that suggest the inevitability of “Enterprise 2.0”.
Dan references a post by Euan Semple that has been picked-up by Ross Mayfield, Tim O’Reilly and others, and a post of his own where he reports on some of Don Tapscott’s research: “…the 80 million Net generation young adults coming into the workplace will want to be part of an engage and collaborate model rather than command and control.”
In addition to the demographic fundamentals, there is some kind of a parallel here with the evolution of information technology where the rigid structured data in relational databases is now dwarfed by the unstructured or semi-structured content in content repositories and websites. And also with the increasingly distributed IT function.
(rigidly) structured data -> unstructured data or content
(rigidly) structured organization -> unstructured organization
Do these parallels make Enterprise 2.0 more certain? Well, the fundamentals (the demographics and the new expectations and behavior) are true in a very real sense already. But of course this doesn’t mean that any particular Enterprise 2.0 products or technologies or best practices or methodologies or organizational reengineering will work. Dion Hinchcliffe has an extended thoughtful response that reinforces the fact that wikis etc. are proliferating behind the firewall, but also cautions that enterprise IT is a complex and controlled environment where enterprise 2.0 tools need to find a post-adolescent home.
I was pleased to attend the inaugural Community 2.0 conference this week. Sponsored by Shared Insights, it was an impressive gathering. Here are some of the highlights:
– John Hegel, the author of Net Gain (and other best sellers) gave his perspective on what has happened in the 10 years since he first wrote on the importance of communities to companies.
His equation for the benefits of communites is as follows: Shared ideas+shared discussions+shared relationships= shared meaning and shared motivation. This leads to higher customer loyalty and feedback that can help facillitate the development of better products and services in the future.
He feels that companies often lack the skillsets required to support successful communities. The key skills lacking are moderating, archiving, and attracting participants. He feels that companies often are afraid to give up the control of the community to the particpants and that is counterproductive.
Like all business practices, communities should be measured. He recommends calculating ROA- return on attention, ROI- Return on Information, and ROS- Return on Skills as the best measures of the impact of communities on the business in general. Space doesn’t permit complete descriptions of these measures. Mr Hagel’s blog and reading list can be found at www.johnhagel.com.
Ben McConnell author of “Church of the Customer” gave a fascinating keynote on the importance of word of mouth in marketing and the importance of communities in generating positive word of mouth. He also reported that only 1 percent of community participants actually contribute entries. However, that can be a large number!! For example, 68,682 individuals contributed to Wikipedia in just one month and 11,420 contributed to Microsofts’s channel nine in a similar time frame. It is amazing how many people are willing to invest their time (while receiving no remuneration) to create information that will be reviewed and scrutinized by many peer reviewers. More examples can be found at ChurchoftheCustomer.com.
Similar statistics were reported during subsequesnt sessions
About.com reports that it has 600 community sites with coverage of over 60,000 topics.
Shawn Gold of MySpace reported some staggering usage figures – They currently have 165 million profiles online that generate 60 Billion pageviews per month. And there are 40,000 videosbeing added to MySpace each day.
The conference finished with a report on the We Are Smarter Than Me project. That will be the subject of another blog entry in the very near future!!
Communities have the potential to help publishers and publishing professionals to create new and different products and to improve the quality of their future products by getting greatly increased customer feedback. Cases and opportunities will be presented at the forthcoming Gilbane Conference in San Francisco from 4/10-4/12.
Blackboard Inc. has launched a new website–Scholar.com. It is an excellent web application that helps communities of people share bookmarks on topics of common interest. It is particularly helpful for high school and college students and their teachers and professors to use when doing projects or research. This is a great example of communities adding value to long established processes.
MindTouch announced that its MindTouch Deki commercial wiki software has received the VMware Certified Virtual Appliance certification. With this designation, MindTouch Deki is deemed compatible with VMware’s entire product line, including VMware Player, VMware Workstation, VMware Server and VMware ESX. MindTouch Deki is a business wiki that installs in minutes, giving corporate workgroups the ability to share information and collaborate almost instantly and securely on their own networks. It is a complete pre-installed, pre-configured application and operating system that runs on any Windows or Linux machine. From small departments to large enterprises, MindTouch Deki runs atop the VMware Player or any product from VMware. It also enables content portability whereby users can move both the wiki application and its content from machine to machine, even to removable storage devices up to 100 Gigabytes. MindTouch Deki is free for the first five users and is designed for on-demand scalability. The free license does not include software updates and fixes, support or certain advanced features, such as Outlook Connector. A full product license (for five users) starts at $995. http://www.mindtouch.com
MIT, Wharton, Pearson, and Shared Insights have developed a very interesting project. They have set up a wiki allowing a community of people to write a business book that will be published by Pearson in the fall. The overall premise is that communities can augment or even replace certain traditional business efforts. Marketing has emerged as the leading area for such efforts. I wrote a short section on the power of word of mouth in service marketing. The preliminary results will be shared at the Community 2.0 conference next week in Las Vegas.
SpringCM announced the availability of SpringCM Version 3.7 which incorporates more integrated collaboration, meeting, routing and transfer capabilities. Users access SpringCM through a Web interface, and use the system to automate work order and invoicing processes, improve access to data and documents, and streamline workflow. The new features in SpringCM Version 3.7 include the following, and are available to current subscribers at no additional cost: Web Publishing Tools – Direct access to public folders enhances Web publishing capabilities; Addressable Fax & E-Mail Folders – Policies and rules associated with the folders allow for the direct submission and processing of incoming documents, such as invoices, expense reports, credentialing documents and contracts; Roles and Permissions – New permissions and metadata capabilities provide more flexibility and security in controlling who has authority to access documents and when; WebDAV Support – Technology enables dragging and dropping of documents to transfer them to specific locations; Web Services for Workflow – Web services provide integrated access to workflow system information; Editing Enhancements – New tools enable quick document markup and editing capabilities. The new version of SpringCM is available now. http://www.springcm.com/
IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that it is bringing Google Gadgets – or consumer-style web utilities – into commercial portal software. Available at no cost to WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0 customers, IBM now lets users create, customize and use rich Internet applications with Google Gadgets directly from within WebSphere Portal so they appear as ready-to-use services. Users can choose from nearly 4,000 Google Gadgets such as language translators, package delivery tracking, Podcast searches, Wikipedia information, YouTube postings and more. These features can be offered through a company’s portal with a click of a button. IBM is also announcing its search sitemap utility, based on a new sitemap protocol, agreed on by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, that will make it possible to optimize publication of portal content for improved search by public search engines. This feature also includes the ability to notify search engines of the update frequency, last modification date, and relative priority of the content that is being published. The end result is an improved content relationship with external search engines so that all of the public content in a portal can be found and crawled efficiently. The IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets will be available in April via IBM WebSphere Portal catalog. WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 customers, including those using WebSphere Portal Express to deploy solutions for Small and Medium Sized businesses and WebSphere Portal Server Version 6.0 are entitled to use Google Gadget at no cost. Enablement for the Sitemap 0.90 protocol will be delivered for WebSphere Portal as a sitemap utility that customers can download from the WebSphere Portal catalog later in 2007. http://catalog.lotus.com/wps/portal/portal, http://www.sitemaps.org/
Subscribe to the Gilbane Advisor
