We’ve posted our results in time for the conference session on Blogs, Wikis, and RSS as Enterprise Content Applications tomorrow morning. Keep in mind this is an informal survey and only has 43 responses so far. We will keep the survey going and update the results.
Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 66 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.
Our survey on enterprise blogs, wiki and RSS use was out of commission for a few days because the vendor of the survey service upgraded their software and broke a few things. The short survey is back online now. We’ll be posting the results next week during our conference in time for our session on the same topic. BTW, we are going to open this session (Wednesday morning 8:30 -10:00am) to anyone who is there, even if their badge is only for the technology demonstrations on Monday and Tuesday. So come by and blog it!
Just found this CEO Blogger’s Club group blog. It looks like it is managed by a PR firm, but it has some good stuff on enterprise blogging. For example, the entry on Ten Ideas for Corporate RSS Feeds.
Dan Farber raises the issue of Longhorn adoption and quotes a Jupiter analyst who claims the challenge is that XP is “good enough”. There is actually a more fundamental reason the question of adoption is interesting. What is that and what does it have to do with content technology?
I’ll start the answer with a little history. In 1994 at our first Documation conference, I moderated a debate between Tony Williams, Chief Architect of COM at Microsoft, and Larry Tesler, Chief Scientist at Apple. The Microsoft COM and OFS/Cairo and Apple OpenDoc efforts both recognized the need for operating systems to provide more support for the richness of unstructured information than is possible with the primitive file systems we had then.
Before the debate I preferred the OpenDoc approach because it seemed more consistent with my view that new operating systems needed to be able to manage arbitrary information objects and structures that could be described with a markup language (like SGML at the time). However, Tony convinced me that OpenDoc was too radical a change for both users and developers at the time. Tony agreed with the ultimate need to make such a radical change to file systems to support the growing need for applications to manage more complex content, but he said that Microsoft had decided the world was not ready for such a shock to the system yet, and defended their strategy as the more realistic.
Eleven years later and we are still stuck with the same old-fashioned file system in spite of the fact that every modern business application needs to understand and process multiple types of information inside files. This means that database platforms and applications need to do a lot more work than they should to work with content. I am no expert on Longhorn, but the file system that will be part of it (although maybe not initially), WinFS, is supposed to go a long way towards fixing this problem. Is the world ready for it yet? I hope so, but it will still be a big change, and Tony’s concerns of 1994 are still relevant.
As we reported in our news pages today, Socialtext has added functionality and repackaged their product line to appeal to a range of small to large enterprises. One of the things we are collecting in our survey on enterprise blog and wiki use is size of enterprises using them. We don’t have nearly enough data to say anything meaningful yet, but so far it is a fairly even spread based on company size. We’ll be keeping the survey open for awhile, and it is very short (5 multiple choice questions), so tell us what your organization is doing or planning with blog, wiki, and RSS technology.
There is some additional detail on what blogs and wikis don’t do for you from somone who is using them in an enterprise environment that Lauren interviewed for her report at Corporate Blogs and Wikis: Benefits and Limits.
It is to early to tell anything from our ongoing survey on the use of enterprise blogs, wikis and RSS, but so far it is surprising how low the use of RSS is. Speaking of RSS, there is a fairly new blog focused on enterprise RSS that looks worth tracking.
Both are good background reading for our upcoming conference session in San Francisco.
Joe Kraus has a post that applies the now famous long tail argument to software. He admits that the argument applies to software like his own company’s JotSpot, and plugs it in. But if he is right, his argument applies to other products including JotSpot’s competitors.
It is easy to agree with the premises:
- the vast majority of business applications require customization
- most enterprise solutions focus on a few large semi-well-defined application areas because the economics don’t reward small (long tail) opportunity harvesting, and
- there is opportunity here for software entrepreneurs.
Joe argues that a combination of Excel and email are being used to fill the long tail gap, but that they are inadequate. This may be true, but it is a bit of a leap to an implied conclusion that one piece of “blockbuster” software could better meet the needs of the long tail of business requirements in all their diversity.
This is not to say that there won’t be more blockbuster successes that help with long tail business needs — Excel, email, and web browsers are all examples of such a wild horizontal success — and Groove of one that didn’t catch fire (see Bill Trippe’s comment on the Microsoft acquisition), but will some combination of enterprise blog and wiki software be equally successful? Well… maybe. In any case, Joe’s post is thought provoking and his analogy might be richer than he, or any of his commenters to date, realize.
Lauren’s report on enterprise blog and wiki use has been getting phenomenal attention. We have decided to probe a little more into actual corporate use of blog and wiki technology with a survey. We’ll pull the complete results together for our conference in San Francisco in April, but will also publish some of it on our site as it comes in. Take the survey!
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