Collaboration Tech

Social Search #SPC09

2009-10-21T22:04:00.000-07:00

These are my session notes from the SharePoint Conference 2009:

Presenter: Jessica Alspaugh, Program Manager, Enterprise Search Group, Microsoft
Business problems: Hard to find the right person; People working on redundant work; Enterprise search doesn't adapt.
Social search is about connecting people to people, as well as, adapting dynamically based on usage patterns and available metadata.
People search supports phonetic and common nickname match.
With OCS, SharePoint supports contact card mouse-over.
View recent content option opens AJAX window containing links to the most recent documents created by the person.
Knowledge Mining provides keyword suggestions from Exchange 2010. Uses phrases that the person uses often in email. Person has complete control over what items are added to their profile page.
In SharePoint 2010 colleagues are indexed for ranking purposes.
Encourage photos. It makes a big difference in enabling interaction. People are less likely to engage with someone who doesn't have a profile photo.
Microsoft makes it easy to add custom properties to the profile.
Use the Managed Metadata Service to ensure consistency of terms. Manages metadata fields support dynamic type-ahead suggestions.
Check out the "Go behind the Search Box" slide for a list of social search features.
Vanity Search helps users build a profile and create search terms that other people find them in a search.
Default search order was changed from relevancy to social distance, though you can override.
If you add a new column and index it, SharePoint Search will automatically create dynamic pivots on the left navigator of the results page.
If search quality is good, people have more confidence, which leads to increased usage, which further increases search quality.
Pre-Query Suggestions are built from high click-through queries, and appear dynamically before the search button is pressed.
Post Query Suggestions appear on the right side of the result set page, under Related Searches.
Social definitions - "what people are saying about..."
Check out Social Tag slide - Social tagging will improve search quality.

Building an Enterprise Knowledge Management Solution on SharePoint #SPC09

2009-10-21T22:01:00.000-07:00

These are my session notes from the SharePoint Conference 2009:

Presenter: Sean Squires, Program Manager, Enterprise Content Management Group, Microsoft
Lincoln DeMaris, Program Manager, Enterprise Content Management Group, Microsoft
Microsoft Case Study: 1TB of knowledge data, ~100K documents. Used across Microsoft.
"Microsoft isn't doing [their own] internal knowledge management very well."
Need to balance two opposing forces: Discoverability and authority versus empowering users to contribute. (See KM on SharePoint 2010 Goals slide.)
Microsoft's KM solution architecture: Publishing site + document center + shared services for content types, managed metadata, analytics, and social feedback. (See Key Elements of Our Solution slide.)
An explicit page owner is critical. Microsoft assigns owners to specific topic areas.
Use tagging/categories and the Content Query web part to automatically surface related pages.
Anyone can edit a page. However, it is stamped "unapproved" until the owner approves.
The owner receives a task when someone edits their page.
Documents must be strictly managed, yet may come from anywhere.
In SharePoint 2010 you can set policies (such as workflow, retention, and permissions) on a folder basis.
Folders are available to meet business needs. They are no longer needed to get around scalability limitations.
See the "Wrap Up" page for a good summary of features and takeaways.

Customizing Enterprise Wikis in SharePoint #SPC09

2009-10-21T21:57:00.000-07:00

Theses are my session notes from the SharePoint Conference 2009:

Presenters: Gail Giacobbe, Principle Program Management Lead, Microsoft; Ted Pattison, SharePoint MVP, Critical Path Training
People see wikis as yet another place to store information. They say, "Please don't give me another place!"
Microsoft used a wiki to enable 400 people to create 15,000 pages of documentation in four months.
The SharePoint Publishing powers the Enterprise Wiki.
You can customize the enterprise wiki using SharePoint Designer.
The relevant content within wikis comes to you through the social networking features of SharePoint's news feed.
Enterprise wiki: Easy page editing, wiki-linking with auto-complete, cross-brower rich tect editor.
Features: Page templates (content types & page layouts), Categories (managed metadata), Ratings (web analytics), Tagging and Comments
Contrary to my earlier understanding, SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Wiki does not include an out of the box table of contents feature. It is something that Microsoft says can be easily customized. (Ugh!)
The enterprise wiki is designed to be customized and scalable.
Anything available within SharePoint is easily integrated into the enterprise wiki.
Leverage SharePoint's compliance (policy, records management) and content management (workflow, approval) capabilities within the wiki.
You can easily integrate web parts into a wiki page.
Edit in place, live preview
Support for "reusable content"
Insert images and media files directly from your computer. You do not need to upload them to a SharePoint library first.
When you start a link by typing "[[", a list of all the existing wiki links appear, so you can quickly select the one you want or create a new one.
The My Site news feed is a critical part of the power of the enterprise wiki, since that is where you are notified of new relevant content and activity of the wikis you visit. (I wonder how you control being inundated with news feed items when you are associated with a very busy enterprise wiki.)
Working with CSS is "much easier" than it was in SharePoint 2007.

Using Enterprise Content Types and Managed Taxonomies in SharePoint 2010 #SPC09

2009-10-21T21:53:00.000-07:00

The following are session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009:

Presenter: Daniel Kogan – Sr Program Manager, Microsoft
Metadata and management content types are really about governance, management consistency and standardization: Is it the same, what is it? Where is it? What happens to it?
Content types are no longer trapped in a site collection. In SP210, they can apply to the entire enterprise.
Example: If all blog posts use the same content type, and there is a retention policy applied to the blog post content type, that retention policy will automatically apply to all blog posts across the enterprise.
Any errors associated with site collection being unable to consume a published content site will be aggregated at the content type hub.
The Enterprise Metadata Service publishes enterprise content types and the managed enterprise taxonomy.
You can tag content through the browser, rich Office client, or through custom/3rd party applications.
The Managed Keyword field dynamically checks existing terms, makes suggestions, and may allow for adding new terms.
Example: You set a managed metadata field for months of the year, to ensure that the month format is consistent throughout the enterprise. The managed metadata field is created, and associated with the enterprise month default label. You can also associate "other potential labels." Now, when a user is filling out the Month field, they could enter "3" or "Mar" or "March." However, the managed metadata field will ensure that the value is consistent set to "March" across the enterprise. You can also enforce the sort order of metadata so that March is always listed before August.
Microsoft provides an Excel-based schema that so you can easily import your term set into SharePoint.
You may distribute ownership of portions of the enterprise taxonomy – term stores.
The taxonomy hierarchy is available in the column filtering dialog.

Adoption Strategies for Social Computing #SPC09

2009-10-20T21:39:00.001-07:00

Session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009:

What do end-users care about? Personalization, easy access, ease of use, clear objectives, and management buy-in.
Think about adoption strategies from the beginning and throughout a social computing initiative.
Identify and leverage champions.
Engage HR, legal, compliance, and security.
Don't force people to use social computing. That will usually backfire.
Brand and market your social computing solution. Get people excited. Use posters, multi-media, etc.
Used a phased approach. Don't overwhelm users with too much. Introduce new tools one at a time.
Take feedback into consideration and implement improvements.
Social computing is not a fad; it is the evolution of collaboration.
SharePoint will mine Exchange email messages propose additions to your profile (Interests or Ask Me About fields).
You can declare blog and wikis items as business records.
Deloitte: A name that appears in the enterprise is no longer just a name. It is linked to a profile, IM, and email. This creates a much richer sense of connectedness.
Accenture: If someone views a profile that doesn't have a picture, an e-mail will be sent to the owner and let them know that someone checked their photo-less profile.
Deloitte: 45% profile creation. Focus on first year was on profile creation. Goal for year 2 is 75%.
Deloitte: Measure the number of colleagues per end-user. The goal is a minimum of four colleagues, and membership in at least two communities. They also measure the number of profiles views.
Both Deloitte and Accenture have social computing advisory boards.

The Business Case for Social Computing #SPC09

2009-10-20T21:35:00.000-07:00

Session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009:

Knowledge Management Issues within the enterprise are still looking for a solution, and social computing might be part of it: Rapid response to problems, capturing knowledge to ensure business continuity, and reducing transition costs. Although social computing may be part of the solution, it is not THE solution to knowledge management.
If we manage by commitment, and employees meet their commitments, do we really care when, where, and how they do it?
The evolution of Social Computing: Facilitated Knowledge Management, to collaborative workgroups, to social enterprise.
We do social things regardless of whether we have social computing tools or not.
If you're not measure ROI of social computing investments, you're not alone. No one else is either.
See the "What's the ROI" slide for a great list of social computing benefits.
Work life is very different than personal life. So, the way we use social media in work life is very different than in personal life. How work differs: Time constraints, negotiated priorities and commitments, processes, functional silos, physical and virtual spaces, regulatory and legal requirements, document centricity, legacy systems, performance evaluations, productivity, control, and knowledge retention.
When all of your economics come from the industrial age, everything is measured like a factory.
"Six Sigma almost killed 3M."
Knowledge work is an iterative process.
The reason you cannot calculate the ROI of social computing (or telephones, or e-mail), is that you have no idea how people are going to use them. You cannot know who will communicate with whom, what they will talk about, whether they will talk about business, or how much time they will spend communicating.
Social computing increases the frequency of "knowledge accidents" within a company – which is a good thing.
Take look at the "Future Vision" graphic slide.
Plan for success: Create a organizational social media charter, understand how people are using or want to use social computing, determine how social computing can augment existing processes and systems, create awareness, document and share successes.
Be strategic. Align the social computing goals with the business goals.
Check out slide on measuring social computing effectiveness.
Experiment – Monitor – Learn
If you don't build it they will go somewhere else.
Social computing is really just a shift in communication channels. It is not something to justify, but something to navigate through, embrace, and leverage as a new capability and manage as a new risk.
"The anti-social organization is ultimately non-productive." – Chris Howard, Burton Group.

Unified Communications in Action #SPC09

2009-10-20T21:33:00.000-07:00

Session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009

"Enhanced presence" goes beyond just availability. It encompasses location, skills, capabilities, and other attributes that help people and applications find the right person at the right time.
Microsoft is not sharing anything about Office Communicator Server 14 yet.
The contact card feature is a summary of a person's info. It appears when you hover over a presence enabled name. It is available throughput Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. However, it is dependent on OCS.
From Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC), you can launch an HD video chat. (Cool, but I wonder how much bandwidth that uses.)
Virtually any UCC functionality available in MOC, is available through an API for developer to embed communication capabilities into business applications (Communication-Enabled Business Processes - CEBP).
Exchange 2010 voice mail is auto-transcribed into email message. Not perfect, but you get the gist.
OCS is nicely integrated into Outlook. One click to join a meeting from the invitation.

Records Management Strategies in SharePoint 2010 #SPC09

2009-10-20T21:27:00.000-07:00

Session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009:

Key Tenants of Records Management in SharePoint 2010: Integrated governance across variety of SharePoint objects, familiar and easy to use, and flexible.
Records Management feature Set: Recordization, eDiscovery and hold, auditing and recording, and retention and expiration. See feature set slide for detail of "what's new in 2010."
Business problem #1: Preparing for Litigation and eDiscovery
Recommendation: Use the same search technology for enterprise search and eDiscovery.
The custodian approach to eDiscovery does not work well with collaborative content. You cannot assume that all relevant content will be created/edited by custodians.
Create retention stage policies within SharePoint 2010 that govern end-to-end life cycle of documents within a library.
New Hold and Discovery settings are available on any list/library.
You can keep hold documents in their native store or move them to a special repository for documents with a hold.
Audit reports provide clear and detailed history of who has accessed a document, and when.
Microsoft doesn't claim to provide deep eDiscovery forensic analysis with SharePoint 2010.
There are also retention and discovery features integrated within Exchange.
Business Problem #2: Protecting the most important data in the enterprise.
Visual queue signals documents within a library that have been marked as a record.
Managed records provide a limited set of feature options to the user in the ribbon menu.
Even pages in a wiki and posts in a blog can be marked as business records. They do not need to reside in Records Center.
Create a workflow that automatically declares and classifies records. Requires SharePoint Designer.
The home page of Records Center is a tool for records managers.
The Content Organizer is a set of rules that the records manager sets up. It uses document metadata, including content types, to determine how to apply the file plan. Rule hand priorities to avoid conflicts.
The Content Organizer rules can be used to mine SharePoint sites for documents that meet rule criteria, and mark and move the record, or a link to the record, to the Records Center.
Site and document content types are a critical component to successful auto-classification.

SharePoint Conference 2009 Opens

2009-10-19T22:16:00.000-07:00

The big news of the day was that the public beta of SharePoint 2010 would begin in November. There's a lot to look forward to. The new SharePoint is a significant move in the right direction.

In the spirit of sharing information quickly, I'm posting my unedited personal notes from each of today's sessions. I apoligize for the length.

Keynote - Steve Ballmer

Open beta of Office and SharePoint 2010 to begin in November. No specific date offered.
Microsoft market SharePoint to the consumer market someday.
SharePoint vision is to eliminate the need for dedicated search, ECM, BI, and social computing solutions.
Key strategy changes for SharePoint: From end-user application to composite applications and Rapid Application Development; from on premise solutions to cloud-based computing; and from internal intranet sites to public Internet sites.
New developer dashboard makes it easier to troubleshoot SharePoint sites.
Deploy "sandbox solutions" to isolate developer coding.
Over a million users are signed up for SharePoint Online.
Glaxo-Smith-Kline and Ingersoll Rand were mentioned as SharePoint Online references.
SharePoint Online supports "almost" all of the end-user functionality as the on-premise version.
Use cases that may justify the cloud: Not wanting to build new infrastructure; needing to collaborate with an external partner.
Pfizer, Ferrari, Kroger, Kraft, Volvo all use SharePoint for their public Internet sites.
The new SharePoint Server for Internet Sites is licensed to make it cost effective to deploy public Internet sites.
Cut and paste formatting fidelity between SharePoint and Office.
Skinable, Sliverlight media player web part.
Built-in link and spell checking.
Query-less search leverages FAST Search Server 2010.

SharePoint 2010 Drilldown - Jeff Teper

What makes SharePoint unique? Tight office integration, web based site design.
SharePoint balances the developer, end-user, and administrator experiences.
Big focus on improving usability: Ribbon UI, edit in place, AJAX, fewer page refreshes.
Integrate Office online components with SharePoint.
Richer blogs and wikis.
Social tagging, folksonomy support.
"We think of ourselves as pioneering enterprise social computing."
SharePoint 2007 showed up on Gartner Magic Quadrant for first time, and “did well.” Expect that SharePoint 2010 will do even better.
Support for millions of items in lists and libraries.
Controls for managing taxonomy, both top-down and bottom-up. Define and enforce consistent content types and taxonomy across all SharePoint sites.
Built in media streaming.
Search improvements: Federation, relevancy, wildcards, thumnailing, inferences from people profiles and mailboxes.
Powerful new data visualization features.
Support for [[wiki link]] syntax outside of wiki.
Upload images directly into the SharePoint editor. No need to upload to image library first.
Ability to multi-select items.
Create and manage document sets, which are groups of documents consolidated into a single work product.
Note board is like the Facebook wall.
Microsoft did usability testing of SharePoint Central Administration UI for first time ever.
Rich PowerShell support. Over 500 commands will be shipped with public beta of SP2010.
Improved admin reporting and analytics.
New, streamlined upgrade model should protect existing sites, while allow control to enable new functionality when it makes sense.
Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is now called SharePoint Foundation Server 2010.

SharePoint 2010 Overview

All SharePoint pages are now like wiki pages. They live in their own page library and can be edited in place.
Edit list and library settings from ribbon menu.
Apply PowerPoint themes to SharePoint sites. (Looks like the admin might have to add the theme file to sever before it shows up on the list of available themes.)
SharePoint Communities are what Microsoft is labeling their social and collaboration tools.
The "enterprise" wiki is built to resemble Wikipedia, and is more feature rich than their "standard" wiki. Includes table of contents, rating, templates, sections, categories, tagging.
Tag, rate, and add notes to any item in SharePoint, when enabled.
Any list/library may contain a managed keywords column that integrates with managed taxonomy service.
My sites include "status", like the Facebook status. Other colleagues’ status messages will appear in the news feed on the My Network tab, if enabled.
Tabbed My Site user interface.
Access everything you have tagged, noted, commented, or rated from your My Site. All of these items also show up on the news feed.
My Network tab displays the activities of your colleagues.
Every site supports document routing now, not just Records Center.
Create rules to route content based on tags. Users simply save to "drop off library." Pop-up provides URL to final location.
Insert web parts within content, in line.
Media streaming supports look-ahead and bit throttling. You can create an internal YouTube with out of the box functionality.
Enhanced people search can mine email (Exchange only). Supports phonetic and wildcard search.
Insert a tag cloud anywhere, even outside the site collection where the content is stored.
SharePoint Insights refers to the SharePoint Business Intelligence features.
Publish Access data to SharePoint, in other words, webify Access.
Business Data Services (BDS) replaces the Business Data Catalog (BDC). Supports read/write.
The data in SharePoint "external lists" live in backend data sources.
SharePoint 210 Scalability: Terabytes of data with multi-million item lists.
Microsoft.com/SharePoint is running SharePoint 2010.

Overview of Office 2010

Striving for a consistent experience across PC, phone, and browser.
Outlook: Mail thread mgmt (cleanup and ignore), Reply with meeting, "Backstage"
Excel: Show little trend charts for each row of data. High fidelity between app and web published spreadsheet. Real-time co-authoring within web app embedded in SharePoint.
The Note Board is like a wiki or discussion. Any document or list item can have an associated Note Board.
"Backstage" is a feature available within each of the Office suite applications. It is accessible from the file menu. It contains all the information about the document, and is programmatically extensible to meet specific business needs.
Open Word documents within SharePoint using the embedded Online Word applicatino. It is a rich editor, not just a reader.
The rich Word application indicates who else is co-editing with you. Paragraph-level locking prevents save conflicts. Changes are queued up in the Upload Center. An indicator show when changes are pending and can be applied. Co-authoring eliminates the need to check-in/out.
In-line image editing within Word, such as background removal.
Word and PowerPoint support client-based co-authoring. Excel is browser-based co-authoring.
OneNote supports both web and browser co-authoring. All co-authoring is enabled through SP2010.
Awesome new PowerPoint transitions.
Video editing within PowerPoint, for example color correction, trim, bookmark, special effects (reflection, frames).
Embed internet video into PowerPoint.
Ability to compress embedded media files in PowerPoint.
Office is available in both 32- and 64-bit clients.
Unless you're creating very large Excel files, there is probably no need for 64-bit version of Office, yet.

Overview of Social Computing in SharePoint

Social computing lowers the cost of sharing and collaborating. It surfaces knowledge and networks, and increases employee engagement.
SharePoint let you control the speed and breadth of your social computing deployment.
Company demographics, hierarchy, policies, and culture skews the normal social computing patterns we observe on the Internet.
The My Home tab is replaced by the My Content tab.
New My Network tab shows you the blended news feed of your colleagues’ activities. This replaces the Colleague Tracker web part. It tracks for a lot more activities than SharePoint 2007. Appears to be more granular.
Subscribe to a tag so that you get an update to your network news feed every time someone else in the company uses that tag.
New "Ask me about" field on profile, which has higher relevance than tags in other profile fields.
New organizational structure browser graphically illustrates employee, team members, manager, and direct reports. Requires Silverlight. There is an HTML version too.
Store content on My Sites that doesn't fit in any team site. It is intuitive for people to look for documents in My Site. They seem to easily associate work products with their respective author.
There is no evidence that memberships work differently or better than SP2007.
Eliminated most ActiveX within SharePoint, and replaced it with AJAX, making the UI operations much smoother.
It is really easy to add graphics to a blog.
A SharePoint web page is a basic wiki; they just don't call it a wiki. They just want people to think of it as simply an easy way to edit a web page.
The enterprise wiki is based on the publishing portal template. Embed web parts, such as libraries or video player within an enterprise wiki page.
Apply records management and legal hold policies within social computing tools to content.
Showed a custom developed "Join" button for a community site that adds a user to the list of site members.
Showed custom thumbs up, thumbs down voting web part.
Let me know if you need me to elaborate on any of these items.

Catalyst Top 10: Virtualization, Productivity and Content

2009-08-20T13:21:00.000-07:00

This is my final Top 10 learnings list from this year's Burton Catalyst conference. This list relates to desktop virtualization, productivity suites, and enterprise content management:

It will be 2012-2014 before companies do wholesale desktop replacement using virtual end-points.

Licensing can be an issue with virtual desktops, especially with Microsoft and Oracle.

Productivity suite options: 1) Stay with MS Office, 2) Give an alternative to disenfranchised users only, 3) Use an MS Office alternative - mostly, 4) Wait to dump MS Office until XML support improves, 5) Replace current productivity tools with collaboration tools.

If you ever see Microsoft Office dethroned, it will be because there has been a fundamental shift in the content creation market.

When you don’t treat content review like a project, you get all the same problems as a poorly run project.

Content is the currency used by businesses to make decisions.

Why isn’t there more use of digital rights management? Not perceived as having enough value, yet. However, it will grow in importance.

One big gap for the non-Microsoft productivity suite vendors is their lack of integration with SharePoint.

Think of structured and unstructured content as different views of corporate information.

Don’t assume that all corporate information is inside the firewall.

So that concludes my coverage of Catalyst. Overall, it was an interesting four days filled with timely insight. I would definitely consider attending again.

Catalyst Top 10: Unified Communications

2009-08-17T09:57:00.000-07:00

Here is the next Top 10 list of things I heard at Catalyst 09. This list focuses on Unified Communications(UC):

Mobility is a critical enabler to the business and increasingly a critical part to selling UC to the business.

Be patient. Allow the UC market to continue to mature before making major UC investments.

“UC is not even close to mainstream adoption.”

Cloud-based services will likely play an incremental role in UC strategies.

Video conferencing is becoming much more integrated with web conferencing and telephony.

Integrating video conferencing between businesses is still problematic, due to lacking standards. However, some federation services are emerging. However, they require that the parties use some of the same platforms.

Communications-Enabled Business Process (CEBP) is nirvana. Standards, integrations, and ecosystems don’t yet exist to support rich CEBP. Recommendation: Make CEBP the goal and push your vendors to enable.

UC moved us from device centric, disjointed communications to person-centric, presence-aware, device-agnostic communications.

User access to UC functionality should exist within the applications where users live (email, business applications, UC platform interfaces).

The desktop is increasingly extended to mobile devices – Don’t forget mobility in your UC client strategy.

Look for one more post to wrap up my Catalyst learnings.

Catalyst Top 10: Social Computing

2009-08-13T10:33:00.000-07:00

This my the second top 10 list from the Burton Catalyst ’09 conference. Here are my Top 10 take-aways from the various Social Computing sessions at Catalyst:

Encourage networking relating to both professional expertise and personal interests to create stronger accountability and engagement.

Networks happen. Social networking technology makes it easier to build and sustain larger, more diverse networks within a hierarchical structure.

Benefits of Internal Social Networking: Accelerates communication and problem solving, creating peer-to-peer communication capability. Captures individual worker know-how for reuse by many, creating collective intelligence. Creates peer-to-peer communication in context, deepening understanding for decision making.

People are used to just asking someone if they don’t know the answer. However, you need to know who to ask. With social networking you can throw a question out to the community. In most cases the answer will come from someone you don’t know.

Teach people when to use the tools or they will latch on to one tool and use it for everything.

Email is the #1 competitor to enterprise social computing.

Everyone thinks they are behind with social networking. The fact is that everyone is still trying to figure it out.

Employee rating can surface disconnects between what the boss/peers think and what the “public” thinks. This is a good thing.

Relationship on-boarding is a continuous process. Social networking can help improve the efficiency of this process.

The best practice is to get the seed money for the first social networking initiative on faith, and use that experience to justify additional investment.

Are you involved in an enterprise social computing initiative? Let me know if you agree/disagree with any of these findings.

Catalyst Top 10: Software-as-a-Service

2009-08-11T08:29:00.000-07:00

I’m finally getting around to publishing my notes from Burton Group’s Catalyst '09 conference. I had intended to live blog each session. However, for various reasons, some technical and some logistical, that just didn’t work out. Now as I comb through pages of notes I struggle with how to best publish them. I’ve decided to publish a series of brief Top 10 lists that boil down my learnings on specific topics. This is the first list and it focuses on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS):

Enterprise IT and the vendors are both too immature to leverage SaaS today.

Be strategic when planning an SaaS pilot. Focus on the “underserved” users, since SaaS functionality will be perceived as limited compared to current enterprise solutions. Email for call center employees is perceived by many companies as low risk and a good opportunity for early SaaS.

To prepare for SaaS, companies should be working toward making their internal services more modular, so that pieces can be easily moved to the cloud in the future. We need to really understand application interdependencies. A mature Configuration Management Databases (CMDB) will improve the likelihood of succeeding with SaaS.

Don’t think that issues that have challenged enterprises for decades (such as performance, availability, maintenance, capacity, etc.) just magically go away for the SaaS vendor. They have these same challenges. However, they’re success depends upon their ability to hide challenges from you, the customer. Just because the vendor isn’t talking about them doesn’t mean they’re not experiencing them. If you’re not careful you’ll just end up with the same mess you have today, just in someone else’s data center.

Instead of SLAs, some cloud vendors are instead opting for full discloser of availability and performance. Customers can then decide whether they can accept the risk. They can always fire the provider if requirements are not met.

Records management functions are not very good in current SaaS solutions.

SaaS has shown enterprises that there are much easier licensing models. However, venders still need to figure out how to make it easy for companies to buy on premise and hosted services with a single pricing model, and with flexibility to move users between on premise and hosted without breaking the pricing model and requiring new contract negotiations.

We are conditioned to do large releases that require user training. However, with SaaS expect to see releases of one or two features at a time, but on a much more frequent basis. At this rate of change, training is not necessary.

Businesses are still concerned about what is out of their control with SaaS. For example, there is really no case law on SaaS, making it impossible to access risk. No one wants to be the test case. Let someone else be the first.

Google is building a connector to Outlook, so companies can continue to use Outlook on the desktop, with Google in the cloud.

What do you think? Do you disagree with any of these assertions? How is your company approaching Software-as-a-Service?

What's New in SharePoint 2010?

2009-07-16T14:53:00.000-07:00

The technical preview for SharePoint 2010 starts today. A technical preview is when a small group of Microsoft customers and business partners get early access to the new bits. The public beta will follow later this year. Along with the technical preview, Microsoft has launched a new SharePoint 2010 web site that is open to everyone. It contains three short videos and an FAQ. I watched the overview video. Although they only scratch the surface on what is coming, there are some interesting new features:

New form factors allow connecting from any device

Many social computing enhancements (though none of them are shown in the demo)

Ease in connecting across boundaries

New emphasis on SharePoint as an application development platform

Robust content life-cycle management

FAST search technology is built into SharePoint
Enhanced people search help people make connections with each other

Contextual ribbon menu interface (like Office 2007)

Multi-select makes it possible to simultaneously apply actions to multiple list items

New message dialog boxes appears to display over the top of a grayed-out site, instead of as a separate page

User interactions are much smoother since server post-backs have been eliminated - Example: Checking out a document happens immediately and does not cause the screen to refresh

Edit content in place, including text, images, and rich media (The ribbon menu dynamically presents the relevant options.)

Live preview formatting changes prior to publishing

Out-of-the-box Silverlight web part for rich media support

Ability to theme SharePoint using Office themes. For example, apply a PowerPoint theme to a SharePoint site

Support for several non-Microsoft browsers, including Firefox and Safari

Publish Visio diagrams directly to SharePoint. Using SharePoint 2010 and Video 2010, dynamically maintain diagrams by connecting to back-end data sources

Business Connectivity Services (BSC) replaces the Business Data Catalog (BDC), and is greatly enhanced, including the ability to write changes to back-end data sources

BCS data can also be exposed through the Office 2010 clients

SharePoint Workspace (formerly known as Groove), provides off-line reading and editing features

One of the most common criticisms I hear from end-users regarding SharePoint 2007 is that simple operations take too many clicks. I'm encouraged by the demo of SharePoint 2010, which appears to streamline end-user operations and make SharePoint look and work a lot more like a real Web 2.0/Ajax application.

The demo videos don't contain a preview of SharePoint 2010's social computing tools. Expectations are running high that Microsoft learned a lot since MOSS, and that SharePoint 2010 will have real blogs, wikis, bookmarking, and profiles.

I suspect Microsoft will keep quiet on most of 2010's new capabilities until the SharePoint conference in October, which should be quite a show.

Internal Employee Blogs: Interesting Use Cases

2009-06-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

We began our pilot of SharePoint My Sites almost two months ago. Of the more than 400 people we invited, 320 created a My Site. For many of them, however, this was the last time they used their My Site. To put it bluntly, they don't need a My Site to do their job. So, many perceive that time spent working on their My Site is frivolous, or worse, wasteful. At the same time, there are a few pilot participants who, for whatever reason, have the vision that their My Site will improve the way they do their job, and will make them more valuable employees. It's not easy being a pioneer. They have to figure out how to do things on their own, often on their own time. In this post I will share some of the interesting business-related use cases for internal employee blogs that have surfaced in our pilot.

Of the 320 people who have created a My Site, 20% created a blog site. However, when you take a look at how many people are actually posting to their blog on a regular basis that number drops to only about a dozen. Here are some of the creative ways they are using their blogs:

A knowledge worker shares job-related information with colleagues, such as summarizing articles from the Internet.

A software developer shares code snippets with other developers.

A software developer uses his blog like a personal notebook to keep track of how to do routine tasks, such as calculating time-zones and zip codes from address data.

A knowledge worker writes entertaining stream-of-consciousness posts about a project that he is working on.

A summer intern keeps a daily journal of what he has learned, observed, and accomplished.

So, even though only 4% of the pilot users are blogging regularly, we are seeing tremendous creativity and resourcefulness among the My Site bloggers. As we deploy My Sites to the enterprise, we don't expect the percentage of active internal bloggers to grow beyond 4% for a long time, and we are comfortable with that.

Have you seen any other interesting use cases for internal employee blogs?

Don't Discard Corporate Knowledge Assets

2009-06-09T18:22:00.000-07:00

Social Computing Enables Knowledge Capture and Sharing
One of the primary benefits of Social Computing is that it enables knowledge capture and sharing. Unlike e-mail, social computing platforms, such as blogs and wikis, places content in an environment where other people can find, access, and use it. Consequently, it’s often better for people to post to their blog than send an email. Granted there are still times when an email is the right medium. Before sending an email, we should all ask ourselves whether the content has potential value to people beyond the original distribution. If it does, put we should put it in our blog. Likewise, we should use a wiki instead of creating a word processing file whenever possible. It is easier to collaborate with a wiki and then be assured that other people see the most current version. Again, there may be times when a word processing file is necessary, such as when special formatting is necessary. However, in most instances it is just as easy to capture content using a social computing tool so that they can be leveraged as knowledge assets later.

Protecting Knowledge Assets
Social computing is new to the enterprise space and it demands a new approach to protecting shared knowledge assets. Traditional approaches of deleting terminated employee content do not apply well to shared social computing content. Take this example: Bill accepts a position with another company. Shortly after leaving, a termination process reacquires his computer, and deletes his mail file and personal network drive data. Within days or weeks of leaving, Bill’s personal content is purged from the enterprise systems. With data on computers, personal network drives and in e-mail, this probably makes sense. After all, no one else in the company had access to this content when Bill was around. Social computing knowledge assets, on the other hand, should be treated differently. They are shared. Bill’s blog, for example, does not necessarily become less valuable when he leaves. It may contain pertinent information about his role and responsibilities that could be invaluable to the people who remain after Bill’s departure. In fact, Bill’s blog may be more valuable to the company now that they no longer have access to Bill the person. Therefore, companies need to put some thought into how they manage the knowledge assets of terminated employees.

Recommendations
What is the best way to protect the knowledge assets of terminated employees? Here are some ideas:

Don’t automatically delete content of terminated employees – The content produced by a terminated employee is an asset that belongs to the company. Separate the termination process from the retention policies relating to shared knowledge assets.
Don’t expect managers to review the content of terminated employees – Not only are managers usually too busy to review the knowledge assets of terminated employees, they also cannot necessarily judge the potential value of the assets on their own. Expecting managers to take the time to isolate and protect knowledge assets of terminated employees is unreasonable.
Do approach the challenge like a project – Identify stakeholder (including legal, compliance, and human resources), gather requirements, and design an approach that will best meet the requirements.
Do gather metadata when knowledge assets are created – This metadata will help you determine the value of the knowledge asset. There will probably be a point in time when each knowledge asset loses its value and needs to be purged. Knowledge assets located in social computing platforms should adhere to a company’s electronic data retention policies, just like information in any other repository.
Do flag the knowledge assets of terminated employees – If I were to find the knowledge asset of a terminated employee, it would be helpful to know that it was created by someone who no longer works for the company.
If nothing else, delay deletion…as long as possible – For most companies, accurately assessing the value of social computing knowledge assets is difficult. This makes it impossible to apply a retention period independent of the termination process. So, if saving everything forever is not an option, consider preserving knowledge assets for a predetermined period after termination, preferably 12 months or longer.

In conclusion, take care when deleting social computing knowledge assets of terminated employees. Implement a retention process that protects content based on its value the company, and don’t just delete it because the creator of the content has left.

Gartner Webinar: "The Real Truth About Cloud, SaaS and Saving Money Now"

2009-05-28T19:12:00.000-07:00

Like a lot of people in the collaboration and communication space, I'm extremely interested in the Software as a Service (SaaS). Here are my notes from a recent Gartner webinar on SaaS and cloud computing. It was originally broadcast on May 27, 2009, from 1:00 – 2:00 p.m. EST. The presenter was Daryl C. Plummer, Managing VP & Gartner Fellow.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing definition: "A style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities are provided 'as a service' to external customers using Internet Technologies"
When you say "cloud", always include another word, like "computing", "storage", "services." "Cloud" by itself really doesn't mean anything.
The customer doesn't have to understand how a service works. They are "abstracted from provider concerns through service interfaces."
For the most part IT thinks they need to know how a service works, mostly because we've trained them to do that. Instead, focus on outcomes, measurements, and contracts that mitigate risk.
Focus on the outcomes you need, not on whether or not the service included the "cloud" label or not.
Cloud computing is a provider-consumer relationship, instead of a vendor-user relationship.

Cloud Computing models

Acquisition model: Service – "All that matters is results. I don't care how it's done."
Business model: Pay for use – "I don't want to own assets; I want to pay for elastic use, like a utility."
Access Model: Internet – "I want accessibility from anywhere from any device."
Technical Model: Scalable, elastic, sharable – "It's about economies of scale with effective and dynamic sharing."

Risks of Cloud Computing

Availability, capacity, and performance
Security, privacy, disaster recovery policies and procedures
Service metrics, reporting and analysis
E-discovery and investigations
Data ownership, recovery, and migration
Integration with on-premise systems
Commitment requirements (terms, minimum use)
Setup, training, and integration fees
Difficult to customize
Switching costs
Governance of sourcing process
Data/process location and isolation
Regulatory requirements
Transparency to provider operations
Hidden supply chain impact

Common cloud computing use cases

Prototyping/Proofs-of-Concept
Web application serving
Email / Collaboration
Application appliances
Application testing resources

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

A "form" of cloud computing in almost all cases.
SaaS is misnamed - It should be called "Application"-as-a-service, as opposed to "Software"-as-a service.
Delivers an application based on a single set of common code in a one-to-many model.
Uses a pay-for-use or subscription licensing model.
Beyond simply "bleeding edge" and "good enough", it is now viable and ready for consideration.
Almost all software vendors will have an SaaS offering

Upsides to SaaS

Use operating budget instead of capital budget
Only pay for what you use
Platform homogeneity
Lower Total Cost of Ownership(TCO) in mid-term; Long-term TCO is yet to be determined
Faster implementation
Increased innovation

Downsides to SaaS

Governance issues
Release management dictated by provider
Limited 3rd party tools
Vendor management
Security
Long-term TCO
Integration between on premise and SaaS

Four things you can do today

Savings: Compare your cost of capital expenses versus cloud services
Portfolio: Find three workloads which you can experiment (Move workloads, not applications)
Migrate: Move existing apps into cloud (Served from the cloud, versus cloud services)
Use: Consider cloud email and collaboration (Get immediate feedback)

Gartner Bottom-Line Recommendation
Now is the time to consider cloud computing model for delivering services to employees, as well as customers and business partners.

What is a SharePoint My Site?

2009-05-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

A SharePoint My Site is a central location for you to view and manage documents, links, colleagues, and other information. It is also a way for coworkers to learn about you and your expertise, projects, and work relationships.

A My site consists of two tabs: My Home and My Profile. Additionally, it is possible to create various sub-sites:

My Home is a personal, private web site. You have control over which components (web parts) you include on your My Home page. Some web parts provided initially. However, you can move them around, remove them, and add new ones. Configure it to meet you personal needs. No one else can see your My Home page. However, depending upon how you setup access control, some content within your My Site may be accessible by other people through your Profile page. Examples include shared documents, shared pictures, blog, and wiki.

My Profile is a "public" profile page. All Progressive people have a profile page by default. The entire company shares a single layout for the profile page. You do not have access to change the way your My Profile page looks or works. Using the people search capability in SharePoint, you can locate the profiles of other people. The profile is prefilled with information such as name, location, phone number, etc. Additionally, you may decide to add other optional details, such as your picture, text that describes you, projects, and areas of expertise and interest.

Below your My Site, you can create sub-sites, providing you are within your 100MB storage limit. Common sub-sites include a blog or wiki. However, you may also create sites using one of several site templates. Templates give you a starting layout and web parts that you can configure to meet your specific needs. With sub-sites, you have a high degree of control over the way they look and function, and who has access to them.

I created the following diagram to help illustrate the relationship between My Home and My Profile:

SharePoint My Sites: My First Impressions

2009-05-18T09:12:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago we started piloting SharePoint My Sites. Although I’ve been using My Sites in a sandbox environment for several months, it was really nothing like using My Sites in the production environment with real security limitations and real people. Here are my first impressions:

People do not understand the differences between the My Home and My Profile tabs

For starters, people don’t understand that no one else can see their My Home tab. The My Home tab of the My Site is a personal workspace. You have the ability to add, remove, and configure web parts. However, any web part on the My Home page is inaccessible to other people. You can think of the My Home page like you would My Yahoo or iGoogle. You decide what the page looks like. It’s for you. We have implemented a 100MB quota on the size of a My Site. List, libraries, and sites must fit within that limit.

The My Profile tab, on the other hand, is what everyone else sees. Think of it as detailed listing within the corporate directory. All of the profile pages take their look and feel from a single site definition. So, our end-users don’t have the ability to change the look and feel of their profile page. However, people do have the ability to control access to some of the information and resources that are exposed through their profile page. Given our current state of a My Site immaturity, maintaining the profile is more important than maintaining other parts of a person’s My Site. The profile is the key to expertise location. In our pilot we have seen broad participation in adding photos and updating the profile fields, such as interests, skills, responsibilities and about me. Far fewer people have been uploading documents, creating lists, and creating sub-sites. I don’t see this as a problem.

The out-of-the-box site definition for My Sites is inadequate for most people

For the pilot, we intentionally left the My Site site definition as it is out of the box. Consequently, people get a My Site with an Outlook calendar web part that doesn’t work in our Lotus Notes environment, and an RSS reader web part that is not pointing to a feed. The initial My Home page is more or less blank. Although this blank My Site has potential for being configured to meet the individual needs of the user, most people do not have the skills, time, or desire necessary to do that. We now believe that a custom site definition for My Sites is critical to adoption. The initial My Home page should contain functioning web parts that deliver immediate value, without configuration by the end-user. Then, if someone wants to further personalize their My Home page, they can always do that. We are looking at providing the following web parts as part of the initial My Home page: email inbox, today’s calendar, company news, stock price, personalized weather, and an external RSS news feed.

It is not helpful to market MySites as internal Facebook

People like Facebook. They understand Facebook. So, it is very tempting to compare My Sites to Facebook. It’s not a good idea to do that. First, it builds an unrealistic expectation. Facebook is a Web 2.0 application designed from the ground up as a social networking platform. My Sites are built on MOSS and WSS. Facebook is relatively intuitive. Probably very few people feel the need for Facebook training. On the other hand, My Sites are about as easy (or hard) to use as any other Microsoft application. Frequently functions are hidden deep within complex menus. Seemingly simple functions, such as deleting a list or library throw people off. They invariably come away thinking a My Site is nothing like Facebook.

The second reason that comparisons to Facebook are problematic is that the feature sets don’t align. Sure there are some slight similarities. However, there is nothing in My Sites equivalent to status updates, the comment wall, or friend activity tracking. (No, the colleague tracker web part doesn’t even come close.) That’s fine. My Sites do a lot of cool business-related stuff that Facebook cannot do, like document management, approval workflows, and lists. So, the point isn’t that one is better than the other; it is that while there may be some loose similarities, they are two completely different tools, designed for different uses. It is better to market My Sites for what it is, a document-based, personal workspace with some basic social networking capabilities.

People do not understand the idea of My Site sub-sites

It’s clear that people are confused by the idea of sub-sites. When they create a blog, they expect it to be part of their My Site, instead of a completely separate sub-site. They don’t expect it to have its own settings that work independently of their My Site settings. It is probably a good idea to not communicate a lot about sub-sites to the masses.

It’s okay if most people never leverage My Sites

For some reason, there are a lot of people worried about what will happen if people don’t create a My Site. “How do we get people to create a My Site?” “How do we show them how to get value from their My Site?” I’m not sure it makes sense to put a lot of effort into forcing My Sites down the throats of our end-users’. My Sites are a cool capability that some people will understand and be able to leverage very quickly. However, most people may not need a My Site any time soon. That’s fine. Most people don’t need all of the capabilities within the Microsoft Office suite either, and that doesn’t keep anyone up at night. Instead of focusing on My Sites, focus adoption efforts on updating and maintaining personal profiles. The usage and value of profiles is more intuitive than that of My Sites. Make the My Sites capability available. However, let it grow organically, at least at first.

Most people are not going to leverage training and support resources

Before we kicked off our pilot we made sure that we had web-based training, and a support site with FAQs and other resources. We found that most pilot participants don’t utilize these training and support resources. Instead, they expect to learn My Sites as they play with them. Truthfully, this is how people in our company learn most applications.

In summary, we should focus on getting people familiar with using the profile page well. We can allow people to create a My Site, if they want. However, we should provide them with a My Home page that is instantly useful and that doesn’t require training. Microsoft tells us that only 8% of their employees use My Sites extensively. Most of their employees utilize Team Sites far more than My Sites. Now that we’ve started our own pilot, the reasons for this are clear.

Microsoft Announces SharePoint 2010

2009-05-12T06:54:00.000-07:00

Well, it's official, Microsoft has announced SharePoint 2010, which was formerly known as "MOSS 14." Here are some highlights:

The "MOSS" accronym is dead. MS has decided to remove "Office" since the term means Office client to most people. A this point, it will be known simply as "SharePoint."

Even though "Office" has been removed from the name, there will continue to be tight integration between Office and SharePoint.

SharePoint 2010 will be 64-bit only and require 64-bit Windows Server 2008 and 64-bit SQL Server 2005 or 2008.

SharePoint 2010 will require MS Internet Explorer 7 or 8. (MS IE 6 support expires in July 2010.)

Sources: Microsoft SharePoint Team blog

Click here for the information about the SharePoint 2010 annoucement.

Click here for the preliminary system requirements.

Excellent Enterprise 2.0 Presentation

2009-04-29T06:26:00.000-07:00

This is the Enterprise 2.0 presentation that I wanted to create, but now I don't have to. It was created by Oscar Berg and Henrik Gustafsson at The Content Economy for a seminar they have been doing. It is an excellent overview of what Enterprise 2.0 is, why it is important, and how it is changing the way we work. Great job guys!

Enterprise 2.0 - Efficient Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange

View more presentations from Acando Consulting.

What's New with IBM Lotus Notes 8.5?

2009-04-28T06:16:00.000-07:00

There's no shortage of Lotus Notes haters out there. If you believe what people are saying on Twitter, you'd think Notes was akin to an annoying rash that just won't go away. However, its also clear that most of these people are still using an older version of Notes and Domino. IT shops are just now starting to upgrade to the latest 8.5 release.

I have to admit that I'm a fan of Lotus Notes. I have been one for a decade. It has not been the best email platform. However, it is so much more than email. Its one of the best rapid application development platforms ever conceived. Its replication, security, and integrated address book where ahead of their time. The applications may not have been pretty to look at or even the easiest to use. However, for better and for worse, it let the business power create a quick application that would solve a business problem in a matter of days, without the involvement of IT.

With release 8, Notes and Domino received an extreme makeover. This time around IBM put real focus on usability and end-user functionality, an area that Microsoft traditionally excels. The resulting Notes 8 client is built on the Eclipse framework. Its well-appointed interface not surprisingly looks a lot like the Microsoft Outlook client. Indeed, many of the new usability features that Notes users have been asking for have been found in Outlook for years.

The purpose of this post is to list and describe my favorite Notes 8.5 enhancements. Actually, these are enhancements since Notes 6.5. I'll not attempt to identify which interim release between 6.5 and 8.5 included the new functionality. Just know that it was not in 6.5 and it is in 8.5. I've been using the Notes 8.x client since it was released nearly two years ago.

Please note that my list only contains major enhancements that end-users should notice. It is not meant to catalog every minute change. You can go to IBM for that. Here they are in no particular order:

News Reader - A news reader is available in the new Notes right side-bar. It supports any RSS or ATOM internal or external feed, providing it does not require authentication.

Integrated instant messaging "buddy list" - The instant messaging "buddy list" is now integrated into the Notes interface, instead of floating over it and getting in the way. The "buddy list" is part of the new right side-bar feature in Notes.

Instant messaging history - You can now enable a feature that will save your instant messaging conversation to your email file. You can access prior instant messaging conversations in the Chat History folder.

Day-at-a-glance - Now, no matter where you are in Notes email, you can see a day-at-a-glance in your right side-bar. For example, from your inbox you can see what meetings and appointments are scheduled for the day. This also makes it easy to look up a specific date without closing your current email message. You can even update your calendar entries from the day-at-a-glance view.

Improved search interface - Search has an enhanced look in the toolbar, as well as a new Web-style user interface. I now run off a local, full-text indexed replica. The search feature is accurate and fast!

Message recall - If you've ever sent an email, only to wish you hadn't, then message recall is for you. It lets you retrieve a message even though you sent it, and even if it was already opened by the recipient. The feature generates a report that will tell you whether it was successful and whether any of the recipients had already opened the message.

Conversation view - It can be a challenge to keep track of a complex email message thread. Now, from the inbox folder or all documents view you can see every message that is part of a conversation, all grouped together. It automatically replaces the subject line with the first line of the body making it easier to find the message you are looking for.

Improved address type-ahead - The Notes client now keeps track of the people with whom you interact the most. When you begin typing a name in the To:, Cc:, or Bcc: fields of an email, the more frequently used names display at the top of the list. This makes it less likely that you will send an email to the wrong "John Smith", since the John Smith you communicate with most will appear on top.

Thumbnail viewer - With one click you will see a small thumbnail of each of the current Notes applications you have open. This makes it easy to quickly move from one application to another.

In-line spell check - Notes will now tell you immediately when you have misspelled a word by underlining it. Right-clicking the misspelled word lets you choose the correct spelling, ignore the word, or add it to your dictionary.

Collaboration history - The collaboration history lets you see every interaction you have had with a specific person, including common meetings, instant messages, and emails.

Calendar ghosted entries - Before you accept a meeting, it appears on your calendar as a "ghosted" entry so you can visually see which meetings are pending your review. This helps prevent the problem where you are invited to multiple meetings at the same time, and accept a less important meeting before you see the invitation of the more important meeting.

Calendar clean-up - Calendar items have always been a challenge to clean up, since repeating meetings will break if the original meeting is deleted. Consequently, we tend to leave calendar entries in our mail files indefinitely. Over time, these entries consume a lot of storage. With Notes 8.5 you will be able to clean-up old calendar entries without fear of breaking repeating meetings.

Notes/Windows password synchronization - Although there was a feature to synchronize Notes and Windows passwords in Notes 6.5, the password synch feature in the new Notes 8.5 client is much more robust and user-friendly.

Domino Web Access 8 - The new web client for Notes email has been completely redone. It supports most of the features present in the rich Notes client, including instant messaging integration. A new "lite" version of the web mail client can be used over low bandwidth connections. There is even an "ultralite" version for the iPhone.

Overlay other public and private calendars - In addition to seeing your own calendar entries, you can overlay the entries of other calendars to which you have access. This could be very helpful for an administrative assistant or a team that works very closely together. Additionally, you can overlay public calendars from Google Calendar. A checkbox makes it fast and easy to choose which calendars are visible.

Remember, this is my list, and it is probably incomplete. If you have a favorite feature of Notes 8.5 that I missed, let me know.

Reconciling Enterprise 2.0 and IT Governance

2009-04-06T06:31:00.001-07:00

Today we emphasize both Enterprise 2.0 and IT governance, which can appear to be at opposite ends of a continuum. On the one side we have IT governance which promises to introduce order, discipline, and accountability. There are many frameworks designed to support this level of maturity, including the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), ISO 20000 – IT Service Management Standard, Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT), ISO 9000 – Quality Management Standard, and many others.
On the other end of the continuum we have enterprise 2.0 and social computing principles and tools, which threaten to break down barriers, flatten the organization, and reduce human latency. Enterprise 2.0 tries to breaks down bureaucracy. It is bottom-up, agile, and flexible. The benefits include faster speed-to-market, decreased cost, and increased innovation. So, how do we resolve IT governance and Enterprise 2.0? Are they mutually exclusive? Or can they coexist?

Mixed Messages
Today we receive mixed messages from management. We can hear about the merits of prescriptive processes from the same person who is telling us we need to adopt Enterprise 2.0 practices and tools. We are told that we shouldn't be working on anything except approved initiatives that follow the perscribed process. At the same time we are deploying tools that will make it easy for people to find and engage experts in ad hoc interactions. Do we have a split personality? Can we ever have an open collaborative workplace if resources feel constricted by IT governance?

Ideas for Reconciliation
Here are my ideas for reconciling the seemingly incompatible perspectives of IT governance and Enterprise 2.0. They depend upon top-down management endorsement and communication of how we employ social computing principles and tools within a disciplined work environment.

Be clear about why we believe Enterprise 2.0 is important. This message needs to be succinct and repeated often. Tie it to business benefit. This message needs to be part of the earliest communications regarding the upcoming social computing capabilities.
Communicate management's endorsement of an open, and collaborative work environment. Acknowledge that this is a cultural shift. Set the expectation that it will take hard work and that we will make mistakes. Introduce performance objectives that encourage collaboration and hold people accountable for achieving them.
Communicate that certain collaborative activities are not only allowed, but expected, as part of our new culture. For example, we expect people to enable instant messaging, ensure that their status is accurate, and make themselves available. We expect people to populate and maintain their personal profiles. We expect that anyone can engage with anyone else - no boundaries. We expect people create a personal blog and use it as a knowledge repository, a virtual notebook for meeting notes, and for status reports. We expect people send links to content, and not to send file attachments via email. (There are obviously many others. These are just a few examples to get started.)
Determine how to incorporate social computing principles and tools IT governance processes. Look for ways to leverage social computing technologies to reduce human latency and to promote a more open workplace, within the boundaries of good IT governance. For example, are their ways to eliminate some of the governance meetings. Instead of holding in-person review meetings that can throttle progress, leverage a virtual workspace for managing asynchronous discussions and approvals?
Make it okay for people to interact with anyone. We must be clear that we expect people to make themselves available for knowledge sharing, even when it is not part of an approved initiative. Get over the idea that when someone wants to tap into your knowledge that it is a negative thing. Calling it a "virtual mugging" or even just annoying discourages the open interaction and trust necessary to succeed with Enterprise 2.0.
Sharing knowledge should be allowed and expected, and a measure of one's value to the company. Find ways to reward and provide incentives for sharing knowledge in real-time or by capturing it within a virtual workspaces, such as a blogs or wikis.

The bottom line is that most people will not adopt social computing on their own, despite the personal benefits. You cannot rely on grass-roots adoption alone. People need social computing to be officially integrated into their IT governance processes. Then, from their perspective, they're just following the process. Otherwise, Enterprise 2.0 appears to be something extra, or in addition to their real job. In that environment, Enterprise 2.0 will fail.

What do you think? Do you have other ideas on how to reconcile IT governance and Enterprise 2.0?

Does everybody need a blog?

2009-03-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

We introduced blogging within our enterprise nearly two years ago. It has been an excellent way for senior managers to connect with people at all levels of their organizations. The executive blogs have been extremely popular among individual contributors who enjoy the opportunity to interact directly with their senior leader. They see it as a refreshing move toward transparency and breaking down traditional hierarchy. Based upon the number of comments, these blogs are generate a lot of interest and passion. At this point, there are about a dozen senior leader blogs across the enterprise. However, as we look to the future, we would like to enable any person within the enterprise to publish their own blog. The response from some executives is, "Why does everyone need a blog?"

Given that we have only used blogs for a single purpose to date, namely for senior executives to communicate, share, and interact with their large organizations, it's no wonder they're not familiar with other use cases. Here are some use cases that support the idea of giving everyone a blog:

Knowledge Management - Blogs can be used to capture and publish knowledge that someone else can later find and use. A personal blog can replace a paper notebook or diary and contain ideas, best practices, and lessons learned.

Personal Branding - Blogs can be a platform that individual use to sell their personal brand. It can highlight skills, accomplishments, and results. This information is searchable to those who are looking for people with particular experience.

Meeting Notes - Blogs are a great repository for meeting notes/minutes. People with a wireless laptop can "live-blog" during the meeting and publish their notes in real time, for the benefit of others who will be able to search them later.

Status Reports - Status reports for individuals or projects can be stored within a blog. This makes it easy to view a series of status reports in context. Managers can subscribe to the feeds of their employees' or projects' blogs so that they are kept informed, with minimal overhead.

To be successful, blog technology should be accompanied with specific process change that incorporates blogging. These process changes must be driven from the top-down. For example, a manager might mandate that going forward all status reports must be recorded within a personal blog, and not in email. This type of mandate provides the necessary impetus to begin changing the culture. You cannot expect most people to voluntarily adopt new technologies if the technologies are perceived as being separate from their work processes.

In most cases, blogging replaces functions that are performed within email today. However, a blog has tremendous advantages over an email message. A blog has single instance storage. It is sharable and searchable. A blog can be tagged or categorized, to make it easier for people to find content later. A blog is linkable. (Try linking to an email.) You can syndicate blog content using RSS or ATOM. Blogs maintain context and allow people to comment on posts and other comments.

What are some creative ways that you are using or plan to use blogs within your enterprise? What are you doing to encourage blog adoption among the masses?

MOSS 2007 Is Not An Enterprise 2.0 Solution - So What?

2009-03-25T07:32:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of anti-SharePoint buzz in the Enterprise 2.0 blogosphere as of late. Most of the negativity is based on the fact that MOSS 2007 is seriously lacking with respect to social computing features. Not even Microsoft debates that point anymore. The following is an excerpt from a blog post by Oscar Berg of The Content Economy that summarizes this position very well:

"SharePoint / MOSS 2007 is designed for the (Windows) desktop and for collaborating on office documents inside the corporate firewalls. It is not designed for collaboration in broader terms - not even for simple file sharing if it goes across corporate firewalls. Furthermore, it is not designed for the web, it has only rudimentary Web 2.0 features and tools (such as blogs and wikis), it is not built with Web 2.0 technologies, and it lacks core Web 2.0 qualities such as ease-of-use. Despite all this, SharePoint is platform with a lot of capabilities which can be extended and leveraged through customization, third-party tools and complementary products and services. The key problem is just that many of the companies that have bought SharePoint 2007 believe they got more than just the basic capabilities out-of-the-box. They might not be ready for additional investments. This will most likely hold back the value they can get from their original investment in SharePoint."

Oscar's position should not come as a surprise any of us who are familiar with both Enterprise 2.0 and MOSS 2007. Here are my thoughts:

MOSS 2007 is not a good choice for an Enterprise 2.0 platform. It is a good choice in meeting much broader collaboration and content management requirements. So if you're looking for the latter, either accept SharePoint as a weak Enterprise 2.0 platform or plan to augment SharePoint with best-of-breed Enterprise 2.0 add-ins and tools.

The Enterprise 2.0 features in MOSS 2007 (i.e. blogs, wikis, profiles, etc.) they are infinitely more than what a lot of enterprises have today. Therefore, MOSS 2007 may still represent an important step in the right direction toward Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 is really more about a cultural shift in the way we do work than it is about implementing a specific set of technologies. This cultural shift is necessary regardless of the technologies we implement. Based on the maturity level of most companies, SharePoint may adequately support their Enterprise 2.0 cultural shift.

While MOSS 2007 is a weak Enterprise 2.0 platform, I hold out hope that future versions of MOSS improve significantly. While I don't expect MOSS 14 to be perfect, I do expect that it will meet our Enterprise 2.0 requirements for the next few years.

Although my preference is to use MOSS 2007 out-of-the-box, there are times when 3rd-party add-ins make sense. The MOSS wiki, for example, is particularly bad. The Kwizcom WikiPlus add-in is a good example of what Microsoft partners are doing to take advantage of MOSS's current shortcomings.

Are you concerned about MOSS 2007's social computing limitations? Or do you agree with me that it is good enough for where most of us are at right now?

Is Software-as-a-Service Ready for You?

2009-03-10T08:56:00.000-07:00

Gartner predicts that by 2012, 20% of the commercial email market will shift from premise-based to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). This is up from only 1% in 2007. Of course, email is only the beginning. Instant messaging/ presence, team workspace, productivity tools, and more are starting to be offered as SaaS from the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Google, and others. If you talk to the vendors, they're ready for you today. They have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into new data centers. They have tweaked their software to support an SaaS model. And, they are actively recruiting customers to make the switch from on premise to SaaS. Are you ready to go? How will you know when the timing is right?

While I am convinced that SaaS is real trend that will eventually pay-off. I'm not convinced that it is right for everyone, not yet. Beyond the hype, each SaaS opportunity must be evaluated on its ability to reduce long-term expense while sustaining quality and compliance. Every company must define what quality and compliance is for them. SaaS is not fully prepared to meet everyone's definition of quality and compliance for a price that is less that what they are paying today.

Here are five actions we can begin now to help us prepare for SaaS in the future:

Transition to "Out-of-the-Box" - The reason that SaaS vendors can offer communciation and collaboration services at a lower cost than many premise-based solutions is that they can recognize massive scalability. This can only be accomplished through shared, multi-tenent infrastructures. It also assumes that all of these tenents are using the same "out-of-the-box" software. If you have customized your on premise solutions to meet your company's special business requirements, it will be difficult to upgrade, let alone migrate to SaaS. Make "out-of-the-box" a design principle going forward. It may require altering some business processes. However, it will ultimately position your company for future cost-cutting options such as SaaS.

Know your cost - It is impossible to know whether SaaS provides value unless you understand your current cost structure. SaaS vendors can assist you in developing a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model that incorporates all of your platforms costs. Remember, that acquisition and implementation are usually a fraction of the cost of ongoing support and maintenance. As you track your costs against that of SaaS, you will be able to forecast the point at which SaaS may be viable, from a cost perspective. However, cost is only part of the consideration.
Understand Your Requirements - Besides cost, you must know what requirements must be met to consider SaaS viable. Here are some questions you should ask: How will you integrate your applications? Do you need encryption? Do you need directory/security integration? How will you manage single sign-on? Do you have legal hold and discovery requirements? Do you have records retention requirements? What are your message hygiene requirements? Do you have special regulatory requirements? Are you able to use a shared infrastructure? How will you manage storage limits? What are your service level requirements? How will the support structure work? How will you coexist between on-premise and SaaS solutions? There are probably many more. Devote plenty of time to understanding the minimum requirements that SaaS must deliver to be viable.
Monitor the Marketplace - The SaaS vendors will provide you with an impressive list of customers already using their services. However, you will quickly notice that there are few if any government agencies or financial services firms represented. Most of the large early adopters have been from the manufacturing industry, which is often early at realizing cost benefits. Manufacturing is also less regulated than government and finance. Keep a close eye on the marketplace and when you start to notice the regulated industries jumping aboard it will signal that SaaS vendors have reached an appropriate level of maturity for most industries.
Start a Small Pilot - The best way to start to experience the benefits and drawbacks of SaaS is to start using it. Ideally you could identify a small number of people who could switch completely to a SaaS-based solution. However, there are some potential challenges for these people. For example, will they be able to access your corporate directory? Will they be able to do a free-time search? Will they be able to IM people on the on-premise platform? If the pilot people are separated too much from everyone else, they will not be able to effective evaluate it. The lessons learned around coexistance will be directly applicable to your future rollout. Coexistance may even be your long-term strategy if you opt for a hybrid approach where some users connect to premise-based services and others to SaaS solutions. You may need to do a small pilot every year to get a sense for how SaaS is evolving to meet your needs.

Although we're starting to see some companies make the leap to SaaS, it is still relatively immature. By following the guidelines above, you will be better positioned for making the SaaS decision when it truly benefits your company. For some of you, that could be many years from now.

Are you considering SaaS? What have you done to start preparing?

My Personal Collaboration Rules

2009-02-27T08:36:00.000-08:00

Recently, I started keeping track of my personal collaboration rules. Although I hadn't written them down previously, these are principles that I try to live by. This list is probably not inclusive of all the rules I subconsciously and consciously live by as I try to be good collaboration citizen. However, they are the ones that came to mind:

Capture once - There's nothing more wasteful than capturing the same information multiple times. Copy and paste makes that easy within the electronic world. However, what about when you're in a meeting and collaborating on a whiteboard or flip chart? Someone has to recapture that content electronically. This is wasteful. What about taking meeting notes on a paper notebook prior to distributing them electronically? This wastes time too. While there are some situations when you have to capture information more than once, you can eliminate most of them by making some minor changes to the way you work. Instead of using a physical whiteboard in a meeting, use an electronic tool on a laptop that can be projected. Or ask everyone to bring a laptop to the meeting and collaborate over a web conference, even though everyone is in the same physical conference room. Instead of carrying around a paper notebook, take your laptop to your meetings. Store meeting minutes and other sharable content in a blog or wiki, and then email the link.

Process once - How many times have I looked at an email just to defer action a little longer. Each time I have to reread it, I'm wasting time. If an e-mail requires action, and you do not have time to complete it immediately, copy the e-mail to a calendar entry, and schedule an appropriate amount of time in the future. Include some brief notes at the top of the calendar entry to quickly remind you of exactly what is needed, so that you don't have to reread the entire email.

Resist printing - Okay, we all know that printing kills trees. Paper documents tend to accumulate, take up space, and increase the amount of refuse for which we're responsible. Paper cannot be easily secured. It can fall into the wrong hands. There is no log to know who else may have seen the paper. There are really very few instances when printing to paper is a good idea. Resist printing an agenda or other meeting materials that end up in the trash within minutes of being created. Ask yourself whether this document, if printed, will remain useful and relevent for more than a week. If the answer is no, then figure out a way to meet your need without printing.

Don't use email to collaborate, use it to communicate - Email is a terrible collaboration tool, but an excellent communication tool. When it comes to collaboration, email tends to create more work, and lacks critical context. Take this scenario: We are working as a team to write a proposal. Someone writes a first draft and emails it to the rest of the team. Each member of the team marks up their copy and emails it back to the original sender. That person is now responsible for integrating the individual input from each person on the team. This is inefficient on multiple levels. Obviously it is for the person who compiling the feedback. However, it is also inefficient for the other people who are providing feedback without knowing how their team members are responding. It's very possible that they are coming to the same or similar conclusions. It is much more effective and efficient to work as a team on a single, shared copy of the content. Wikis are perfect for this use case. So, next time your about to send an email, ask yourself whether this is a simple, isolated commnication, or a collaborative effort that would benefit from having a dedicated virtual workspace.

Send links, not attachments - Nothing eats up disk space on email servers faster than attachments, especially if you're not sharing a single-copy message store. Think about it, everyone person on the distribution received their own copy of the attachment. What a waste! Instead, store your attachments in a place accessible by others and send a link. An additional benefit is that you can update the document and ensure that anyone who later follows the link from an email is getting the most up-to-date version.

Store in a searchable, linkable repository - Unfortunately, most people use email as their personal content store. The problem is that I may have some content that someone else could really use. However, if they don't know me, they will never find it. We simply don't allow other people, especially people we don't know, to search our email. A better approach is to store content that has value to more than just yourself, in a location that is accessible and searchable by others. A good solution for this is the public area of your SharePoint MySite.

Be a sharer, not a hoarder - Times are certainly changing. We used to value people because they knew stuff that no one else knew. They were the experts. Now, the more we share, the more we are valued. As we share what we know, others can become co-contributers. This results in a product that is better than any individual could have accomplished on their own.

Use real-time communication, instead of email and voice mail, to reduce cycle time - Voice mail and e-mail are slow. It usually takes at least 24 hours to hear back from someone. If you end up going back and forth for several cycles, you could waste days or weeks. Instead, leverage presence to see if the person you need is available right now. If so, use instant messaging, or ask if you can call her on the phone, if that is more appropriate. You can even setup an instant web or audio conference if there are multiple people that need to suddenly work together. Be the one to stop the email/voice mail tag game.

I'm sure there are other rules I'm forgetting. Do you disagree with any on this list? Do you have other rules of your own you would like to share? Let me know.

What about Twitter in the Enterprise?

2009-02-17T10:33:00.000-08:00

First there was email, then instant messaging, and now its micro-blogging. The most famous micro-blog, of course, is Twitter. This platform is primarily a messaging service for sending and distributing short (140 character max) to your social network. In Twitter lingo, these short messages are called "Tweets." People subscribe to (or become a "follower" of) the tweet streams that interest them. What started out as a simple and novel application, has turned into a powerful platform.

Wired Magazine's Michael Calore recently wrote about new and creative approaches to exploiting Twitter. He cites examples such as having your washing machine send you a tweet when it completes the wash cycle, controlling light switches from a mobile device, and being alerted when your plants need water.

What could the enterprise application of Twitter or micro-blogging be? Here are some ideas off the top of my head:

System availability monitoring - Receive information about system availability, performance, and capacity.

Business process monitoring - Receive process metrics and alerts.

Project status reporting - Receive notification of changes in project status, issues, and changes.

Emergency broadcast system - Notify employees of emergencies and provide them with instructions and updates.

Internal communications - Provide employees with motivation, encouragement, announcements, and brand messaging.

What ideas do you have? Do you know of any companies that are using micro-blogging in the enterprise?

Top UCC and Social Computing Conferences 2009

2009-01-30T14:37:00.000-08:00

Here is a list of conferences that look interesting to me. I've attended AIIM, Gartner, and Enterprise 2.0 in the past. Right now I'm leaning toward attending Enterprise 2.0 this year. Am I missing any? Let me know.

The Benefits of Attending Conferences

2009-01-23T12:03:00.000-08:00

Given the current economic climate, companies may try to save money by cutting out conferences. While it is certainly prudent to scrutinize requests to attend conferences, it would be a mistake to simply eliminate them all together. Here are five unique benefits of attending live conferences:

Assessing the Marketplace - Conferences are an efficient way to learn about industry trends across the breadth of the conference scope. In less than a week you can pick up a good sense of what's hot and where things are heading. Most of us simply don't make the time during our regular jobs to research and think about the breadth of where the marketplace is going.

Networking with Attendees - Most companies of similar size share the same struggles. And yet, they are all at different places on the maturity continuum. It's highly likely that you will find other attendees who have successfully solved the problems you're working on right now. Similarly, you may be able to help someone else. It's great to build a list of peers whom you can tap on occasion. Social tools are making it easier than ever to maintain connections after these brief encounters.

Interacting with Industry Experts - Only at a conference will you find lots of experts in one place, and willing to share their knowledge for free. Make a list of all the big questions you would like to ask experts at the conference. Attend sessions that align with your questions. Ask your questions in the session, or after the session, if they are not covered in the presentation.

Connecting with Vendors & Solutions - Say what you will about vendors at conferences. However, I always walk away having learned about a few companies and offerings of which I was not previously aware. I've been able to solve real problems with solutions I found only as a result of attending a conference.

Thinking Creatively - When I'm at work, I'm focused on completing quality deliverables by their deadlines. My creativity increases exponentially when I'm at a conference, away from the normal office distractions, and surrounded by new ideas, new people, and a new environment. I always come away from a conference with pages of new ideas.

Lately, I've been wondering whether the current economic and environmental challenges will make live conference a thing of the past. Have conferencing, social networking, and virtual worlds matured to the point that a virtual conference can deliver the benefits above? I have my doubts.

Enterprise Conferencing: My Wish List

2009-01-02T13:57:00.000-08:00

Having just gone through an RFP for hosted audio and web conferencing, it is obvious there is a gap between what vendors can deliver today and what I would like to see. Here's my wish list:

Integration between on premise and hosted conferencing platforms - At the end of the day, our end-users should not have to decide whether to use the on premise conferencing tool or the hosted conferencing tool. From their perspective, there should either be a single tool or a seamless integration between the on premise and hosted solutions. My vote is for the latter. Of course, we could architect an on premise solution that could meet our peak utilization requirements. However, that would result in too much unused capacity. Alternatively, we could switch to a 100% hosted conferencing model. However, that would cost a lot and may not integrate well with our other unified communication and collaboration platforms. That's why my preference would be for a hybrid approach that leverages the best of on premise and hosted conferencing solutions. The on premise solution would handle "normal" meetings, and the hosted solution would handle large meetings, or those with special requirements. The problem is that I still want it to be seamless for the end-user. I don't want them to have to decide when to use on-premise versus hosted conferencing. In a perfect world, a unified interface would allow me to schedule a meeting, and based upon the size of the meeting and other factors, the system would know whether it should be scheduled on premise or "outsourced" to the hosted platform. Unfortunately, today's on premise solutions do not know anything about the existence of a hosted solution, and visa versa. Surprisingly, even vendors that sell both on premise and hosted solutions, such as IBM and Microsoft, do not offer such integration today.

Integration between conferencing platforms and SIP-based presence - Conferencing platforms are a critical piece of the Unified Communication and Collaboration puzzle. Nonetheless, many vendors still position their conferencing platforms as stand-alone applications. For example, conferencing platforms do not currently have the ability to exchange SIP-based presence information in a federated model. My real-time communicator client should tell me when someone may not be available because they are attending a conference. I should not have to rely upon the person to remember to change their status. Additionally, I should be able to see a person's presence information within a web conference meeting room.

True VoIP integration - Most web conferencing solutions require that you simultaneously employ a separate audio conferencing solution. In many cases the vendors have made this interaction relatively seamless. However, there is still a dependency up a separate, and in virtually all cases, analog audio conferencing system. The separation between the web and audio components complicates authentication, recording, and reporting. Additionally, it results in having to pay a carrier on a per-minute basis for usage. Some day, in the not too distant future, I would hope to be able to leverage VoIP-based conferencing across the internal IP-network or the Internet. Sure I know that several web conferencing platforms support some number of VoIP sessions natively. However, nowhere near the capacity necessary to meet an enterprise's audio conferencing needs. I would also like to see a much tighter integration between audio and web conferencing, to the point that we no longer feel a need to distinguish the two, and just call it "conferencing."

What's at the top of your list? Do you know of any solutions out there that can already realize my wishes?

Communications vs. Collaboration

2008-12-26T09:09:00.000-08:00

Anymore, it seems that communications and collaboration are inseparable, as well they should be. Unfortunately, this close association has resulted in some confusion about how the two terms differ. It has even caused some to wonder whether they my be the same thing. The fact is that communication and collaboration differ widely from each other. However, they are complementary: think peanut butter and jelly. Neither communications nor collaboration are new concepts. Both predate the modern computer era. In this post, I will attempt to clarify these terms and their relationship to each other.

Communication is simply the act of exchanging information. People have communicated by voice, and written word for thousands of years. Communication implies a two-way interaction. This is contrasted with a broadcast which is one-way. Within in the last 150 years or so, new, electronic channels of communication have been developed to overcome the time and distance limitations of voice and written word, such as the telegraph and the telephone. The Internet age brought new communications channels, including email, instant messaging. The concept of channels is critical to understanding what communication is and is not. A channel connects two points and enables the flow of information, or communication. Information travels from one point, through the channel, to another point, just like two cans connected by a string. It is not enough, however, for the information to reach its destination. It must arrive in a form that can be comprehended by the recipient. Today, the sender and the recipient of a message could be a human or a computer.

Collaboration is simply two or more people, working together toward a common goal. For most of humankind's existence, collaboration has required meeting in the same physical location. While it may have been possible to collaborate in the early 1800's via pony express, the "latency" inherent to that system would have undoubtedly complicated the process of working together toward a common goal. It was not until the arrival of the telephone that collaboration across space became viable. However, the telephone was not without its flaws. A telephone conversation is ethereal and lacks context. If you really wanted to work as a team toward a common goal, you needed a common meeting room, or workspace. So, for decades we have been flying people all over the world to meet in common workspaces and work toward a common goal. Although modern air travel makes this easy, it is still relatively slow and expensive. In some cases, people are using communication channels such as telephone, email, and instant messaging to avoid travelling as often. Ultimately, however, communication channels cannot adequately replace the need for a common workplace. A workplace provides critical context that is not present otherwise.

Today, virtual workplaces may be supported by real-time communication platforms, such as audio, web, and video conferencing. However, to overcome the obstacle of time, we need persistent virtual workplaces. They provide context and access to the content and tools necessary to achieve a common goal. This is where collaboration platforms such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft SharePoint come in. Collaboration platforms enable a framework that supports working toward a common goal. Collaboration platforms by themselves are not the solution anymore than a physical conference room is a solution of itself. Instead, collaboration platforms provide a common workplace within which teams interacts, manages relevant content, and accesses enabling tools.

Collaboration without communication is not possible. On the other hand, communication without collaboration happens all the time. When there's no common goal, communication without collaboration is to be expected. Unfortunately, people with a common goal attempt to collaborate using communication tools only. Perhaps they are using the only tool available to them or understood by them. We all know what it is like to be part of a project that relies solely on email. It's hard to find the project artifacts among all the other email. It's also hard to find the right version of a particular artifact. Compiling input from multiple people into a single piece of content is time-consuming and prone to human error. A communication may be misunderstood because it doesn't contain adequate context. A common workplace attempts to address all of these issues by delivering a common workplace built around a common goal. A workplace where the content, tools, and members come together for the purpose of reaching a goal.

Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) provides an integrated set of technologies that enable people to work toward a common goal across time and space constraints. As a society we are maturing rapidly toward leveraging communication channels and tools within the context provided by common workplaces. Where do you see communication and collaboration going over the next decade? Are there any disruptive technologies on the horizon that could substantially change the way we communicate and collaborate?

Gartner: Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications

2008-12-17T07:41:00.000-08:00

In a recent Gartner article entitled Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications (16 Sep 2008 - G00160464), they identify eight critical UC capabilities: Telephony, Conferencing, Messaging, Instant Messaging, Clients, Communication-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), Consolidated administration, and SMP products. Here are some of my take-aways:

Is your focus primarily on enhancing telephony or collaboration? The answer may direct you to one vendor versus another.
Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft are the only vendors with "excellent" ratings overall. Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, NEC, Nortel, and Siemens are all rated as "good."
IBM and Microsoft score the highest overall, but have a bias toward the collaboration use case.
Microsoft rates slightly higher than IBM in terms of the "Clients" capability, 5/5 compared to 4/5, due to usability.
IBM rates higher than Microsoft from a "Telephony" use case, due to its extensive partner ecosystem
The Avaya "Clients" capability is rated a 2/5, due to limitations with the Avaya One-X solutions.

Bottom line:

Preserve value of existing investments – i.e. don't forklift IBM and replace with Microsoft
Determine areas where UC investments provide most value and solve most urgent needs – i.e. instant messaging/presence and conferencing
Plan to leverage more than one UC vendor – no single vendor offers a complete UC solution

The full article is available to Gartner members or for individual purchase.

Overview: The MOSS Slide Library

2008-12-02T11:30:00.000-08:00

Companies are addicted to PowerPoint. It's hard to imagine how anyone ever sold an idea or proposal prior to digital presentations. This has resulted in mountains of bloated slideware files clogging our email and file servers. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 now includes a slide library feature that goes a long way toward improving the way we work with PowerPoint presentations.

The out-out-of-the-box slide library leverages all of the standard content management features inherent in MOSS, including as check-in/check-out, versioning, alerts, and workflow. The difference between a slide library and a standard document library is that when you upload a presentation from PowerPoint or MOSS to a slide library each slide becomes a unique SharePoint item, which is managed independently.

The real magic begins when you create a new presentation from the slides stored in the library. First, you select the slides to include. You have the option of creating a brand new presentation or importing the managed slides into an existing PowerPoint presentation, providing it is already open. You also have a choice whether or not to keep the formatting. Finally, you can choose to be notified if the managed slide in the library ever changes.

Think about it. As you open a presentation, it automatically checks the authoritative source of record to see whether any managed slides have been updated. That's powerful! If there have been updates, you can decide whether to replace the old slide or simply append a copy of the updated slide. Obviously you can ignore the update all together, if you wish.

So here's an example: We maintain an overarching Unified Communication and Collaboration (UCC) Strategy presentation. In addition, we have several sub-strategies for specific services within UCC. There are some redundant slides and some unique slides across each of these presentations. By using the slide library we can manage a single copy of each unique slide. Then, when we open a presentation it checks to see whether each slide is current with the version in the slide library. Before, if we needed to update one of the redundant slides, we would need to remember to replace the old version in each of the presentations. That takes time and is prone to human error. The MOSS slide library results in a much more efficient means of managing PowerPoint slides.

Although the advantages of using the MOSS slide library are clear, there are some things to keep in mind:

The MOSS site type must be a 'team site' or 'document workspace.' Other site types may not support slide libraries. Slide libraries cannot easily be added later unless you create a new sub-site based on the 'team site' or 'document workspace' site type.
All slides should be uploaded to the root of the slide library. It too difficult to create a new slide show from slides scattered across different folders in the library, since you lose your selections when navigating between folders.
Whenever you create a new, unique slide it should be uploaded to the slide library so that it will be managed.
All slide edits should be done on the managed copy stored in the library. Do not edit slides directly in the presentation. This will ensure that every presentation using that slide will be kept up to date.

The MOSS slide library is valuable to any team that manages a large number of dynamic presentations. I hope that Microsoft will continue to develop and enhance the slide library. Here are some most wanted improvements:

Larger thumbnail graphics - The tiny thumbnails in the main slide library view are so small it is impossible to read the content. Unless you are very familiar with the content, you will need to click on the slide to see a larger image or perhaps even open the slide in PowerPoint.
More safeguards - There are not any built-in safeguards to ensure that a presentation made from slides in the library will stay in synch. Someone could easily break the link with a slide in the library and not know it, resulting in the Presentation becoming stale.
Support for templates - A document template based upon slides in the library does not maintain the connection between the slides in the template and the slide library.
Deletion support - If you delete a slide in the library, you should be prompted to have it removed when you open presentations containing that slide. This would make it much easier to retire an obsolete slide across all presentations that contain it.

Have any of you used the new MOSS slide library? How does it work for you? What improvements would you like to see?

KM versus Social Media

2008-11-21T12:22:00.000-08:00

I came across an article in Social Computing Magazine by Venkatesh Rao which asserts that there is a war between traditional knowledge management (KM) and the new social media (SM). Rao sees SM as the Gen-X solution to the problems that boomers were trying to solve with KM, but failed. Boomers and Gen-Xers come from complete opposite approaches. KM stresses strict order, hierarchy, taxonomy, and content. SM stresses openness, collective knowledge, folksonomy, and people. Regardless of whether you buy into Rao's thesis or not, he raises some interesting observations. Who will win? Rao believes that SM will prevail quietly by default as the boomers slowly retire from the workplace.

In a companion piece by Jeff Kelly, Rao's position is refuted. Kelly not only doesn't believe there's a war, he thinks that SM actually represents a logical evolution of KM. Kelly accused Rao if trying to instigate a war that doesn't exist.

Personally, I've struggled to reconcile the relationship between KM and SM. I'm old enough to have experienced KM and find that a lot of my boomer colleagues still use the term. However, you never hear a Gen-Xer refer to KM. Rao's article made me realize, in a way I had not previously noticed, that KM and SM are diametrically opposed in many ways. At the same time, KM and SM have so much in common, especially in terms of the goals they strive to achieve.

What do you think? Is there a war? Or just a quiet evolution? Does it matter?

WikiPlus Overcomes MOSS Shortcomings

2008-11-21T05:37:00.000-08:00

A little more than a year ago we learned that people in our company were standing up wiki solutions on their own because IT did not have a wiki standard. At that point we identified three wikis, all built on a different open source platforms, including OpenWiki, MediaWiki, and Flexwiki. Clearly we missed the opportunity to anticipate demand. However, it wasn't too late to limit our risk.

In less than two months we identified stakeholders, gathered requirements, evaluated wiki solutions, and selected a standard. The goal of the standard was to prevent (at least going forward) the proliferation of disparate wiki platforms. We selected Screwturn Wiki because it was open source, built on Microsoft .Net and SQL Server, and met our functional requirements. However, due to our need to establish the standard quickly we did not have time to operationalize it. This meant that there was no centralized infrastructure, no internal support team, and no guidance on how to implement a Screwturn wiki to work well within our company. Development teams were basically on their own to build and support their Screwturn wiki instance.

While the Screwturn wiki standard met our goal of building new wikis on the same platform, the way we implemented the standard did not meeting the needs of our end-users. They wanted a standard that was fully supported by IT and on a centralized infrastructure. Self-provisioning of wiki sites was also an important requirement. They didn't want to engage IT people to create a wiki. They wanted to simply push the "new wiki" button.

As all of this was going on, we were in the process of implementing Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) 2007. We had heard that MOSS included its own wiki out-of-the-box. This was intriguing to us since it would mean that we could leverage our MOSS infrastructure and support structure. It also would meet the self-provisioning requirement. However, we immediately learned that the MOSS wiki is a really a WINO: Wiki In Name Only

The out-of-the-box MOSS wiki lacked many features that had become standard in today's open source wikis, including table of contents, sections, sectional editing, and intra-page linking. This perplexed us. It was as if Microsoft had thrown their "wiki" into MOSS at the last minute so that they could check the wiki box on the feature comparison chart. While the MOSS wiki may have some value for people who had never used a wiki before, those who had find it utterly lacking.

So, we had a problem. Do we try to use the MOSS wiki for the masses and allow people that need a real wiki to continue to use Screwturn? This would require us to address the operational shortcomings of our Screwturn standard, which would take time and money. It would mean that we would need to operate and maintain two separate wiki solutions, which is complex and redundant. We needed a better solution

Our research revealed very few full-feature wikis built on MOSS. In fact, we only found three possibilities: Kwizcom WikiPlus, Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS) from Codeplex, and WikiPoin t by Neoworks. We ended up dropping the CKS from consideration because it lacked sectional editing and intra-page links. We also eliminated WikiPoint because it appeared to only be supported on WSS 2.0. That left WikiPlus. If that didn't work, we were prepared to do what was necessary to operationalize Screwturn wiki.

Our initial evaluation of WikiPlus was not great. While they did add a few interesting features, such as reporting, lifecycle management, and an enhanced editor, they were missing critical features, such as a table of contents. We contacted them and learned of a new release that would not only include a table of contents, but sectional editing and intra-page links. Over the next several weeks we worked closely with Kwizcom to address our unmet requirements. They were very responsive to our needs. The result was a feature-rich wiki solution built on MOSS. Our people who evaluated WikiPlus liked it better than Screwturn, primarily due to the WYSIWYG editor.

Someday Microsoft's wiki may grow up and eliminate the need for a 3rd party solution like Kwizcom WikiPlus. Until then, its nice to know there's a viable alternative.

Enterprise 2.0 Trends

2008-11-14T10:25:00.000-08:00

Check out Lauren McKay's article at destinationCRM.com which summarizes some recent research by Forrester. Not surprisingly, they find that blogs, mashups, RSS, and wikis are experiencing the most growth, in terms of enterprise adoption. The part I found most interesting was the assertion that enterprise podcasting and social bookmarking have run their course, failing to take off as predicted. I'm not sure I would be so quick write them off. They may simply follow blog and wiki in terms of enterprise adoption, as this is where the big enterprise vendors are focusing right now. Our end-users are asking for podcasting and social bookmarking. However, we're telling them to wait. We beleive that the future enterprise 2.0 suites will include this functionality out-of-the-box. What's your experience with enterprise podcasting and social bookmarking?

Why Wiki?

2008-11-14T08:58:00.000-08:00

Ray Sim's Learning Connections blog posted one of the best wiki use case lists I've seen. In addition to those on Ray's list, I thought of a couple more. I came away from the exercise with the sense that it is possible to do almost anything in a wiki, whether it was the best tool or not. It goes back to the idea that if there's nothing in your toolbox other than a hammer, then you'll try to fix everything with a hammer. That being said, I think the following list has some creative and interesting use cases:

The Wikipedia use case: "community creates consensus-based truth regarding a particular topic."
Documenting a business process (step by step instructions) — either as an initial draft for what is later to be "locked-down" in a document form (e.g. as required by government regulations), or not.
Sharing tips and personal experiences related to a business process that is documented elsewhere.
Creating a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) to support a software application or business process.
Creating a glossary of terms that are specific to the project or company.
Creating a "portal" to commonly used resources within a team or community, e.g. frequently used URLs to applications, documentation, contact information, etc.
Creating a bibliography of team/community member's reading that they found valuable for the project or topic.
Preparing for a face-to-face or virtual event. Gathering participant input (e.g. proposing and finalizing agenda topics) and defining logistics for the event (e.g. when participants flights land, arranging car-pooling to the venue, selecting dinner locations, etc.)
Supporting weekly (or other periodic) face-to-face meetings. For example, conference room(s), phone numbers, facilitation assignments, agenda, minutes, etc.
Augmenting live conversation, e.g. taking jointly visible notes during a virtual meeting — either as part of a web conferencing solution, or independently.
Maintaining a "lab or project notebook" to share across shifts (teams working different hours on the same project) and/or physical locations.
Collaborative writing - For example, user documentation, proposals, policies, etc.
Collaborating on product or solution development including design, features, and technical specifications.
Disaster management site – Real-time communication and coordination of recovery efforts.
Strategic Marketing / Competitor Information - Document marketing strategies, results of market research and comprehensive information and analyses of competitors and link them to supplementary information – before, during and after the product launch.
Knowledge-base or support site – support questions, issues, solutions, how-to guides. comprehensive documentation of so-called ad hoc expertise to assemble a network of unstructured knowledge, for example, of specialist knowledge about corporate processes, guidelines, recurring organizational processes, checklists, etc.

Let me know your thoughts on these use cases and if you've encountered others.

Risks of Internal Employee Blogs

2008-11-07T07:17:00.000-08:00

In my last post I listed nine benefits of internal employee blogs. In addition to the potential benefits, internal employee blogs may pose some risks, including the following:

Potential disclosure of false, personal, sensitive, or embarrassing information that could put the company at risk – Assuming these blogs are only accessible inside the firewall, this risk is somewhat decreased. However, when you give every person the ability to publish content that could be accessed by every other person in the company, there is good chance that someone will eventually post content that should not have been published. The biggest deterrent to intentional abuse is to ensure that the name of the author is always clearly visible. The lack of anonymity assists most people in making the right decision. Additionally, a strictly enforced policy with real penalties is a good practice. Many companies today have adopted the simple policy of "don't do anything stupid. And, "if you do, you will be fired." Then they follow through on that threat quickly and decisively.
Difficult or impossible to monitor or control blog content – The old model of having a corporate gatekeeper edit and approve any content that it published to a large audience cannot support the scale required by social networking technologies. It remains to be seen if automated, rules-based content scanners will be able to flag and perhaps quarantine risky content. Making authorship explicit and having an enforced policy should sufficiently mitigate this risk.
Loss of productivity – Of course the big fear from many managers is the potential loss of productivity. Are people going to stop doing their "real job" in favor of posting to their blog? It's unlikely. This sounds like the worry that employees would abuse telephone or internet access. Most companies at least seen clear to allow every employee to have access to these technologies. In reality, only a small percentage of employees will consistently write to their personal blog anyway. Of those, an even smaller percentage will develop a following beyond their immediate team. In the end, every person's performance should be measured against quantifiable job objectives. Effective performance and compensation systems will help ensure that people do what is in the best interest of the company.
Increased support costs – With any new application there are ongoing support costs. That is also true for internal employee blogs. In addition to looking for a solution that is supportable and robust, consider the offsetting benefits and base your decision on the total value of the technology, not just the cost. In my current company we plan to leverage the blogging functionality built into Sharepoint (MOSS 2007), which should keep the support costs in check. When you compare the relatively low cost of internal employee blogs with the potential benefits outlined in my previous post, the decision should be clear.
Content will become stale – With any content repository, one of the greatest risks is that the content will lose its value over time. It is difficult to automate the process of assessing content value on any basis other than age. We assume that the older the content is, the greater the potential is for being stale. While that may be true, it is equally true that some content is stale within hours and other content retains its value for years. This risk should be considered as part of an overarching content and records management strategy. Of all the risks, this one may be the most difficult to mitigate adequately. To date, the most common approach is to accept this risk or enforce a draconian retention rule to the entire repository instead of basing retention on the content itself.

While there are some risks related to internal employee blogs, most of them can be successfully mitigated with an effective risk management strategy. Can you think anything I missed?

Benefits of Internal Employee Blogs

2008-10-31T09:30:00.000-07:00

I work for a Fortune 500 company with nearly 30,000 employees scattered across the U.S. We have been experimenting with internal employee blogs for a couple of years. However, to date only senior business leaders have been allowed to have a blog. These popular sites have gone a long way toward improving transparancy and providing a way for the masses to provide feedback. We’re now on the cusp of deciding whether or not to open up internal blogging to every employee.

To be clear, these are internal blogs. They would be accessible only to employees and contractors inside the firewall. Although the capability would be made available to all employees, we assume that a large majority would never actually make the effort to create a personal blog. And, of those that do, only a small percentage will ever attract much of a following. Even so, there are a number of people, mostly business leaders, who have a hard time grasping why we would even consider letting any employee write his or her own blog. After all, how is letting our employees blog going to reduce expense or increase revenue?

Publish content instantly and efficiently. Sure, there’s always email. However, email lacks context. Whether it is a line manager who needs to get the word out to his team or a thought leader who wants to float a new idea while its fresh, there is power in self publishing.
Capture and search knowledge that would otherwise only exist in the heads of our people. There’s a lot of knowledge burried in email. Unfortunately, it is completely useless to everyone except the person who happens to have a copy. Even for them, its unlikely they will find it when they need it. Email retention policies and quotas result in deleting messages that still have residual value. When an employee leaves a company, his or her email account is deleted within days of their leaving, and a long with it, the embedded knowledge. Blogs, on the other hand, are accessible to and searchable by everyone in the company. The knowledge contained in a blog could remain as long as people are accessing it regularly, even when the original owner has long since left.
Provide a communication platform for thought leaders, regardless of where they are in the official corporate hierarchy. As I mentioned, only a few leaders at the top of the food chain have the privilige of blogging in our company today. This sends the message that we have a traditional, top-down hierarchy. To our people, it can appear that we don’t value the thoughts and ideas of people unless they happen to be an executive. By opening up blogging to the masses, that all changes. Thought leaders will emerge from any level in the corporate hierarchy. What matters is the value of their ideas, not the size of their pay check.
Build internal, business related communities of interest that would not otherwise exist. People naturally converge around known likenesses. In a large organization, even the most unusual interests are shared with several other people. Until now, finding those people has been next to impossible. In my own experience there are people scattered throughout our company who are passionate about collaborative technology. Most of them have no idea what’s happening in this space and who is on point. If they had an idea, they wouldn’t know who to contact. By writing a blog, I could begin to biuld a community of interest around collaborative technology. I could share ideas and expect truthful feedback from people were previously invisible to me.
Allow people to market themselves internally, demonstrate the value they have to offer, and gain status and exposure. We all have the responsibility of marketing ourselves. In the past, each person’s potential sphere of influence was limited by their position in the corporate hierarchy and geographic location. With a blog, smart people can market themselves and their successes much more broadly. However, they need to be careful. No one likes a self-promoting bragger.
Allow people to subscribe to the blogs that interest them through an RSS reader. Thanks to syndicated content, we don’t need to visit our ten favorite of blogs looking for new posts. Instead we can monitor our favorite blogs efficiently through a single RSS news reader.
Create an efficient feedback loop between the blogger and readers/subscribers. A blog is not a broadcast, it is a dialog. Blog feedback is a gift. By putting an idea out in the open, a blogger opens herself or himself to feedback from the masses. Almost all feedback has some value, even negative feedback.
Support openness and transparency when any employees are empowered with the ability to publish content. The executives in our company who post to their own blogs have received extremely positive feedback from their staffs. Employees feel like they now have a direct line to the business leader instead of waiting for messages to trickle down and morph through the management layers. They know that the business leader will read and respond to their comments in public. Almost no front line employee would dare send an email to a CxO. However, commenting on that CxO’s blog feels much less threatening. This sense of openness and transparency grows exponentially when all employees are allowed to blog. Suddenly I’m able to benefit from the ideas of a person across the country who happens to be in a completely different business unit.
Encourage people to blog internally instead of externally, where the risks to would be much higher. Okay, I know. I’m blogging externally. Ideally, however, we would always prefer employees to blog internally, as opposed to on the Internet. We want to secure our intellectual capital and ensure that our best interests are protected. Most employees will find that an internal blog will satisfy their need to share and build a following. Without an internal option, however, more people will turn to public blogging.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. I’ve still not answered the question of how letting our employees blog will reduce expense or increase revenue? I can’t do that, at least in terms of hard dollars. In my experience, however, the costs and risks are low enough to stand up to soft benefits.

Are there benefits I missed? Have you been built a business case for employee blogging on hard benefits?

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2008-01-01T11:51:00.000-08:00

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