Collaboration

Apple makes move toward web-based productivity apps

Ron Miller — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:49:47 -0500

This week's Apple keynote at Macworld was a low-key event by previous standards, especially without Steve Jobs there to deliver the news, but one interesting tidbit did emerge regarding Apple's move into online productivity Apps. Apple might not be taking on Google just yet, but it is beginning to build an online presence. For now, it's for sharing and collaborative editing, but this could grow into something more substantial down the road. Article

One company takes employee involvement to the extreme

Ron Miller — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 10:58:37 -0500

Dan Herman reports on the Wiknomics blog this week, about a South American company that has set up complete transparency around all of its decision making. Every employee gets a vote in major decisions, such as a mergers, acquisitions or moves. The employees even get a voice on the board where there are two employee seats available. Herman says they must be doing something right because they are a growing and profitable company and he wonders what other companies can learn from Semco, a Brazilian industrial manufacturing company, where employees set their own wages and even get to choose their own managers. That's taking employee involvement to a new level.

Companies considering using Web 2.0 to simply provide a way to democratize content creation and selection in a company would be wise to look at a company like Semco. Many companies, it seems, are afraid to even let their employees publish to a blog or wiki because they are afraid of giving employees too much power, exposing company secrets or legal liability.

We are more than three years into the Web 2.0 revolution, now. We have seen the power of collaboration and knowledge sharing. There is plenty of evidence and there are case studies galore. If Semco can give all decision-making power to its employees and remain profitable, surely your company's executives can loosen the reins a bit and allow your employees to use to Web 2.0 tools, to improve communication in your organization.

For more information on Semco:
- see Dan Herman's Wikinomics blog entry

Related Articles:
Web 2.0 news from FierceContentManagement

Facebook co-founder, colleague leave for new collaboration

Ron Miller — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:14:28 -0400

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and colleague engineer Justin Rosenstein surprised a few people when they announced they were leaving Facebook to start a new company that will help facilitate collaboration in the enterprise. What that means exactly still isn't clear, but in an email Rosenstein made public that there could be some hints:

"We see this new venture as very complimentary to Facebook," he said. "We hope our products will become to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life. Our software will use Facebook Connect as the default option for identity and authentication. Our user interface will adopt many of Facebook’s conventions, creating a seamless and familiar experience for current Facebook users. And if our new development tools turn out to be useful, we hope the Facebook engineering team will come to adopt them."

If you read between the lines, it sounds to me like they are planning on creating a Facebook experience in the enterprise. If you're wondering why the two didn't just do that at Facebook, Moskovitz explains in an email:

"I wouldn’t have agreed with asking the company to divert significant resources to approach a project so different and so boundless in scope. Every time we introduce something new, we do it at an opportunity cost and this is too large a detour to take when we are already moving swiftly in the right direction."

Whatever the project is, it involves collaboration, seems to use the Facebook platform, and is too different to do in-house (or they were looking for a good excuse to leave, all the happy talk aside). It should be interesting to see what becomes of this project in the coming months. There certainly is a strong technical pedigree behind it.

For more information:
- read this VentureBeat article

Cisco buys Jabber IM tool

Ron Miller — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:18:20 -0400

It was a big week for corporate collaboration. In addition to Oracle's big Beehive announcement, hardware company Cisco bought Jabber, the IM tool that lets you use different IM clients such as Google Talk and Apple iChat from a single interface. Seems like a strange play for a company like Cisco, but if you take a closer look, it makes sense. Cisco, like so many companies, has seen the future and believes that collaboration will play a key role. It can build IM into a number applications and take advantage of presence awareness, the ability to recognize when someone is online and take certain actions based on that.

The only trouble with IM is that it's a bit passé in a world where we suddenly have enterprise-class micro blogging applications like Yammer. Cisco might be better off looking at Enterprise 2.0 tools to help foster collaboration, but as Chris Keal writes in the National Business Review, many companies still don't even allow instant messaging, even inside the firewall. Hard to believe, but many corporations are so hung up on security, they are severely limiting their employee's collaboration options.

IBM recognized this when they announced new Web 2.0 tools for the Web Sphere portal at the Interop conference in New York City this past week. They also announced they were opening a Web 2.0 incubator of sorts in Cambridge, MA to research and test Web 2.0 tools. The question is, does IBM understand the future of collaboration better than Cisco (or Oracle)? Or is the enterprise not yet ready for Web 2.0 tools?

What do you think? Is IM still viable or is Web 2.0 the way to go?

For more information:
- see the NBR article
- read a CRN article on IBM's Web 2.0 announcement

Oracle launches Beehive collaboration platform

Ron Miller — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 08:03:39 -0400

Oracle is hosting its big OpenWorld 2008 conference this week in San Francisco, and one of the big announcements is the new Beehive collaboration platform. Oracle describes the platform as "a comprehensive, open-standards based enterprise collaboration platform" that "delivers integrated team workspaces, calendar, instant messaging, and email." Oliver Marks at ZDNet thinks that at $120 a seat, only large enterprise settings will be able to afford it. Still, IT people should like the security features and the openness, giving them the ability to communicate with systems other than Oracle. Article

Alfresco integrates Sharepoint capability in new release

Ron Miller — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:23:07 -0400

Open-source content management vendor Alfresco released Alfresco Labs (Beta) 3 today, which acts as a seamless alternative for Microsoft Sharepoint. The latter capability is the result of a 2004 EU Commission ruling that ordered Microsoft to publish the Sharepoint protocols. Alfresco appears to be the first company to take advantage of this availability, and provide an identical Sharepoint experience for end users while using an Alfresco repository to store the content. Other enhancements include the new Surf platform based on Alfresco Web Scripts--a light-weight development environment similar to JavaScript--and an interface that enables business users to build small web applications to share content, collaborate and customize their user experiences. In September, they will be releasing a social networking application built on the Surf platform they are dubbing Alfresco Share.

This is a significant announcement. Alfresco has always offered a solid open-source enterprise content management alternative; with its ability to replace Sharepoint, if it works as advertised, it can provide end users with a comfortable experience using familiar Office tools while giving IT the flexibility to build its infrastructure any way it likes. Since Alfresco is open source and the Sharepoint protocol is now published, we should start seeing other companies follow suit with similar Sharepoint competitors. It should be interesting to see how this plays out, and how Microsoft and other competitors react to this news.

For more information, read:
- the CMSWire post
- DaniWeb TechTreasures Post

Web 2.0 transforms enterprise content management

Ron Miller — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:02:35 -0400

Sometime over the last year, we witnessed a transformation where content management became less about storage and maintenance, and more about action and collaboration. At the heart of this change was the emergence of Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise. At the AIIM show back in 2007, John Newton, CTO at Alfresco, was one of the few people talking about the impact of Web 2.0 on content management.

Newton recognized, well before many of his colleagues, that Web 2.0 was about to overtake the enterprise, and that IT departments stuck on outdated content management models were going to get swept aside. He predicted correctly that content production was moving away from the company's servers and onto web-based tools; content management vendors needed to find a way to deal with this.

Of course, by the time AIIM 2008 came around, you couldn't talk to a vendor without hearing about Web 2.0 and collaboration. What's more, Microsoft Sharepoint, a tool built by Microsoft specifically for collaboration, was suddenly seen as a content management system. The concept of collaboration and content management had somehow morphed in a single year.

That's why it's so interesting that Salesforce.com, a customer relationship management company, bought Koral, a content management company with firm Web 2.0 roots in Spring 2007. Tim Barker, senior director/product management for Salesforce Content, says that as the Salesforce content management component has developed, the goal has been to deliver content directly to users where they work using Web 2.0 tools to help them find the best content.

"Users want content delivered into a CRM app to help the sales individuals," Barker said. "As part of this, we use the 'wisdom of crowds' to build up a profile of the content that is most used or highest valued by the users. This helps us guide users to the most relevant content."

Barker adds that when a company places content blindly in a repository, it loses some value. "I think standalone content 'vaults' as a software service will struggle, they are so far removed from the business applications."

Salesforce seems to recognize, acutely, the vision that Newton articulated back in 2007 that there is life outside the firewall and you need to make content available to users where they work. It's important to note that Salesforce, as a CRM tool, is aimed squarely at Sales and Marketing, not the entire enterprise. Still, what it offers has broad implications for ECM as well. If you need proof, look at EMC's announcement last week for Documentum ECM 6.5. The release was peppered with talk of Web 2.0 and collaboration.

If your company is still working on the old model, there's no need to worry. There will always be a long period of transition from one era to the next, but it's clear that the torch has been passed, and that ECM involves more than simply handling storage and maintenance tasks. It also has to enable workers to share and collaborate, or it's not terribly useful. - Ron

Getting started with Web 2.0

Ron Miller — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 11:56:16 -0400

Those of us who are immersed in technology sometimes tend forget that just because we eat and sleep this stuff, doesn't mean that everyone else is so involved. Web 2.0 is a good example of this. While the term gets bandied about a lot, there are still many people who have no idea what it means, much less how to apply it to the enterprise to build an advanced knowledge-sharing environment. That's why Jay Deragon's post this week on Content Management Connection is so relevant. It acknowledges that many people still don't understand this stuff and that's OK; the post goes even further by providing a great video called Social Media in Plain English that explains Web 2.0 in a simple way without being condescending. He also offers a list of questions (written by Gino Cosme) to ask when thinking about introducing Web 2.0 into a business setting. While these questions are geared toward using Web 2.0 as a marketing tool, they are relevant to any company wanting to head down the road of internal collaboration and knowledge sharing. If your company hasn't started exploring Web 2.0 tools, and if you don't know where to begin, this post is an excellent starting point.

For details:
- see Deragon's complete blog entry