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.

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

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


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


3. “UC is not even close to mainstream adoption.”


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


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


6. 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.


7. 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.


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


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


10. 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.

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:

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


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


3. 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.


4. 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.


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


6. Email is the #1 competitor to enterprise social computing.


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


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


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


10. 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.

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):

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


2. 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.


3. 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.


4. 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.


5. 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.


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


7. 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.


8. 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.


9. 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.


10. 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?

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.

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?

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.