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.
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.
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!
3/2/05
New Free Gilbane Report “Blogs and Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications?” Now Available
Contacts:
Evan Weisel
Welz & Weisel Communications
703-323-6006
evan@w2comm.com
Jeffrey Arcuri
Lighthouse Seminars
781-821-6634
jarcuri@lighthouseseminars.com
Cambridge, MA, March 2, 2005. The Gilbane Report and Lighthouse Seminars today announced that the Gilbane Conference on Content Management, taking place April 11-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California, will offer attendees an early look at how today’s growing trends of blogging and wikis should be considered for use in enterprise applications. Also announced today is the immediate availability of a new Gilbane Report titled, “Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications?”
Taking place at 8:30 a.m. PST on Wednesday, April 13, the conference is hosting a session titled “Blogs, Wikis, and RSS as Enterprise Content Applications.” The session will offer attendees an opportunity to understand and consider how to use these technologies as enterprise applications or as components in these applications. Today, companies are using these technologies for collaboration, knowledge management, and publishing applications in corporate environments. Do these companies only represent the experimental fringe, or are they early adopters of technologies that will soon be part of every IT department’s bag of tricks? This session will look at the suitability of these for corporate use and hear from both skeptics and proponents.
The conference session will be moderated by Lauren Wood, Consultant, Textuality Services and views will be presented by Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext, Inc. and Peter Quintas, Senior Vice President, General Manager, SilkRoad Technology.
https://gilbane.com/San_Francisco_05_program.html
Blogs and wikis are flexible practices and technologies that are increasingly being used within companies and organizations to ease the creation and dissemination of information, as well as making it easier for companies to communicate effectively with customers, partners, and the public. “Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications?” discusses some of the salient features of blogs and wikis and provides examples of companies who already have implemented one or more of these systems. The report, written by Lauren Wood, is available at https://gilbane.com/artpdf/GR12.10.pdf and is available at no charge.
“IT and business managers need to take a closer look at how blog, wiki, and RSS technologies can contribute to their content and knowledge management and collaboration needs,” said Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair and Editor of the Gilbane Report. “They are bound to be surprised how these technologies are already being used by companies with great success either on their own, or in conjunction with other content technologies. In fact, they might find they are already being used in their own organizations ‘under the radar’, as many early web applications were.”
The Gilbane Conference on Content Management is unique in that the majority of its conference sessions are delivered by industry analysts and researchers to offer attendees a neutral and balanced market perspective related to content technologies and trends. The program is organized into five technology-specific areas: Content Management, Enterprise Search & Knowledge Management, Content Technology Works (case studies), Document & Records Management & Compliance, and Enterprise Information Integration.
Full event details can be found at:
https://gilbane.com/San_Francisco_05.html
About Bluebill Advisors, The Gilbane Report
Bluebill Advisors, Inc. serves the content management community with publications, conferences and consulting services. The Gilbane Report administers the Content Technology Works(TM) program disseminating best practices with partners Software AG (TECdax:SOW), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW), Artesia Technologies, Atomz, Astoria Software, ClearStory Systems (OTCBB:INCC), Context Media, Convera (NASDAQ:CNVR), IBM (NYSE:IBM), Open Text (NASDAQ:OTEX), Trados, Vasont, and Vignette (NASDAQ:VIGN). www.gilbane.com
About Lighthouse Seminars
Lighthouse Seminars’ events cover information technologies and “content technologies” in particular. These include content management of all types, digital asset management, document management, web content management, enterprise portals, enterprise search, web and multi-channel publishing, electronic forms, authoring, content and information integration, information architecture, and e-catalogs. http://www.lighthouseseminars.com
There’s been at least one very public war story from the field in terms of enterprise blogging sans corporate policy – and this one has a fatality. Seems that Mark Jen’s foray into blogging on his experiences as a Google employee went awry pretty quickly. Despite a single-day record of 60,000 unique visitors, Google was not amused by the inclusion of “sensitive information about finances and products.” Here’s the full story.
Jen is no longer a Google employee, fired on Jan 28th after 11 days of work. He maintains that Google gave him no reason for the termination. He continues to blog at 99zeros with a subhead of “Life After Google.”
Although many may remain skeptical about blogging’s potential impact on enterprise collaboration and productivity, the evolution of use should spur enterprises to take a look at P&P development sooner, rather than later.
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