Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Social Distancing, Web Conferencing, and Adobe

2009-11-04T21:30:52-08:00

Adobe's announcement of the release to market of Acrobat Connect Pro 7.5 comes on the brink of the flu season in the northern hemisphere. H1N1, commonly called the swine flu, potentially means the closure of facilities and offices in affected geographic locations and the illness of a large number of employees at the same time. One strategic measure that local governments will implement is social distancing — limiting contact between individuals through closures of public and private gathering areas — as a measure to combat the spread during an outbreak:

“If severity increases, public health officials may recommend a variety of methods for increasing the physical distance between people (called social distancing) to reduce the spread of disease, such as school dismissal, child care program closure, canceling large community gatherings, canceling large business-related meetings, spacing workers farther apart in the workplace, canceling non-essential travel, and recommending work-from-home strategies for workers that can conduct their business remotely.” Source: CDC Guidance for Businesses and Employers To Plan and Respond to the 2009-2010 Influenza Season

The Public Health Department of the County of Santa Clara puts it plainly in a flyer on social distancing: “The Health Officer has the legal authority to order social distancing measures.” Enterprises may have no choice regarding closures of offices or facilities if H1N1 outbreak becomes severe in areas.

Use of web conferencing grew after the Dotcom bust, and it became popular again after 9/11 and SARS because of the designed capability to enable real-time collaboration for physically separated teams and employees. Web conferencing is a key technology to keep telecommuting employees connected with the work environment. It also permits enterprises to reduce travel by employees to other work sites for meetings, training, and conferences. In the case of closures caused by social distancing, web conferencing can help the enterprise to stay connected with employees and enable employees to continue to function in their jobs.

Adobe’s Acrobat Connect Pro stacks up well against the three big enterprise web conferencing players (Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft). Customers can purchase Adobe’s solution as software-as-a-service, on-premise, and as a managed service. The 7.5 release provides an interesting new capability called “Universal Voice” by Adobe. Adobe has created a Flash Media Gateway that transcodes audio codecs to enable the streaming of any phone-based audio into a Connect Pro meeting, thereby permitting the streaming of the audio over the meeting’s built-in VOIP and permitting the recording of the audio through the meeting’s recording capabilities. The bottom line to this capability is that an enterprise can use one or more telephone conferencing providers with Connect Pro and get audio integration with the Connect Pro web conference meetings.

Adobe's challenge is getting enterprises' attention over Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft - since many enterprises already have those vendors' solutions as part of their collaboration platform or as a contracted service.

Social Media, Search, and Open Source

2009-11-03T13:03:58-08:00

Blogger: Larry Cannell

For those of you attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week, there is a small change in plans for the open source search panel scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. The original title “Is Enterprise Search Ripe for Open Source Disruption?” is still relevant but it is no longer a panel discussion/debate between commercial and open source vendors (like it was in Boston).

Instead, Brian Pinkerton, Chief Architect at Lucid Imagination, and I will be talking about social media, open source, and search. Some of the things you will learn are:

Why you should pay attention to open source search
Enterprise opportunities
The short list of technologies
How search is essential to successful social media sites
How popular social media sites are using open source products Lucene and Solr. A kind of behind-the-scenes look at these sites.

The session is scheduled for 3:15pm, Wednesday, in Room 124. See you there!

How Star Trek Informs SharePoint Governance Models

2009-10-30T13:53:35-07:00

Blogger: Craig Roth

I just got back from an onsite visit to help a client work through their SharePoint governance issues, which includes talking about picking the appropriate spot on the governance continuum. This is almost always some form of federation. My definition of federation is "Groups in an organization recognize a central authority’s right to set high-level policy but retain the freedom to make their own decisions within the bounds of that policy."

I've been asked before if federation can exist without a central authority. I realize in some technical domains the word "federation" is used that way, like with P2P federation. But for this domain, federation does imply a central authority.

When talking about federation and governance, my model is federalism, which the U.S. was founded on. Wikipedia calls federalism "is a political philosophy in which a group of members are bound together (Latin: foedus, covenant) with a governing representative head." That's how I seem to remember it from Social Studies class too, although that was a long time ago.

For final proof, please note the definition of perhaps the best known, most advanced federation: The United Federation of Planets. According to the Memory Alpha Star Trek wiki: "The United Federation of Planets (abbreviated as UFP and commonly referred to as The Federation) was an interstellar federal republic, composed of planetary governments that agreed to exist semi-autonomously under a single central government based on the principles of universal liberty, rights, and equality, and to share their knowledge and resources in peaceful cooperation and space exploration."

BTW - Apparently the UFP had an anthem too. Click here to hear it.

Office Finally Embraces SharePoint in 2010

2009-10-28T05:46:30-07:00

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Many enterprises buy into Microsoft’s integrated vision of collaboration because they assume their products work well together. While in the case of SharePoint and Office this is technically true (more so with the 2007 versions), many of these integrations are either not used by or not visible to the average Office user.

However, integrations introduced in SharePoint and Office 2010 may change this perception because they are exposed in menus and dialogs used by nearly every Office user. Perhaps supporting SharePoint Online and having SharePoint provide the basis of Office Live Workspaces is encouraging the SharePoint and Office planners to take a more user-centric perspective.

In any case, here are some of the new integrations between SharePoint and Office 2010 that you should look for.

The Office 2010 file manipulation functions (e.g., file/open, insert picture/video, save to, etc.) makes it significantly easier to work directly with SharePoint content. In previous Office editions SharePoint content was accessible but was not easy to find. These integrations include:

A list of favorite SharePoint sites is presented to the user alongside of “My Documents” in the file manipulation menus/dialogs. This list is managed on SharePoint. No more cutting and pasting URLs to jump to SharePoint content.
SharePoint becomes a primary source for document templates used in Office applications. Previously, templates opened from Office were mostly limited to the familiar “Blank” templates, downloaded templates stored locally, or the Office Online templates (such as the ever popular Word templates used for creating fancy meeting agendas). In 2010, corporate and group templates should be easier to access through the Office applications.
A document’s properties can be aligned with SharePoint’s new taxonomy and tagging system using a rich, auto-complete interface. In 2007 specific document properties can be required by a SharePoint content type but the new taxonomy/tagging system enables a potentially more valuable user experience within both the Office application (to select a term or add a tag) and SharePoint (to drive navigation of documents based on these terms/tags).

Office 2010 applications cache files opened from SharePoint and will only transmit new or changed information, rather than retransmitting the whole file over the network. This is enabled by the new MS-FSSHTTP protocol, which can support uses cases such as these:

Assume a user opens a 50MB PowerPoint file stored on SharePoint. The browser starts up the PowerPoint application and then PowerPoint transfers the file from SharePoint. The user likely knows it’s a large file and waits, so far so good. However, every time the user wants to save the file (File/Save), even if only a single character is changed, the entire 50MB is transferred back to SharePoint (which can take several minutes, depending on the network bandwidth). This is simply how the WebDAV protocol works and is a major inhibitor to working directly with Office files stored in SharePoint. In 2010, the Office application keeps a local cache of the document and only the changes are transmitted to SharePoint (a matter of a few bytes). In short, the performance of saving files to SharePoint should be similar to that of saving changes to a local disk.
Documents can be simultaneously co-authored by multiple users. In the case of Excel, for example, multiple people can be working in different parts of the spreadsheet at the same time. These co-authoring scenarios are started by users editing files stored within a SharePoint site.

Source: “Multi-user authoring with Office 2010 and the Office Web Apps” (David Rasmussen, Microsoft @ the SharePoint Conference 2009)

In my opinion, teams working together on documents should store and work with them directly in workspaces, rather than keeping a single master copy on someone’s computer and simply use the workspace to periodically share a copy of “the latest version.” By keeping the master copy of a file in the workspace “the latest version” is instantly available to everyone. Office’s use of local caches and the MS-FSSHTTP protocol will make the behavior of these scenarios more acceptable to users.

However, this is a big change in how many people work. Could you move documents from your personal “My Documents” folder to a SharePoint site? Time will tell if these capabilities are sufficient to encourage this mode of working together. If not, then these new integrations may also go unused.

Incidentally, you can also read what I wrote during SharePoint Conference 2009 on my personal blog under the spc09 tag.

Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 – IBM is Ready to Compete

2009-10-27T15:48:48-07:00

Blogger: Bill Pray

With the launch of Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 this month, IBM is ready to take on Microsoft’s pending release of Exchange 2010 in the on-going battle for on-premise enterprise e-mail market. Overall, the 8.5.1 release is a pretty compelling release for current Notes customers – whether or not IBM can market it well enough to non-customers remains to be seen.

From a technical perspective, there is a lot to like about 8.5.1. A detail list of the features and enhancements can be found on IBM’s website here. The newsmaking feature has been the added support for the ActiveSync protocol in Lotus Notes Traveler – which now means Notes supports over-the-air synchronization of e-mail content (e.g. messages, appointments, contacts) to a variety of additional smartphones, including the iPhone.

However, one of the major highlights for Notes 8.5 is the improvements in operational efficiency that, per IBM, can create as much as 40% performance improvement in some implementations. Notes 8.5 was released shortly before Lotusphere 2009 (shipped January 6, 2009). IBM’s focus on cost savings in version 8.5 is a smart move and very well received by IBM Notes customers. IBM stated that numerous improvements contribute to the improved operational efficiency, but two of the improvements are significant and worth noting: Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS) and Domino Configuration Tuner (DCT).

DAOS provides for the single storage of attachments in a separate repository. The attachments are retrieved by reference. This saves space at the file level. For example, in the scenario where a large attachment is sent to thousands of users (e.g., human resources sends employees an attachment containing benefits package information via e-mail), only a single instance of the attachment is stored rather than thousands of instances.

Domino Attachment and Object Service

Another useful tool is DCT, which is provided as part of the version 8.5 Domino Administrator or can be freely downloaded. DCT leverages a catalog of best practices to evaluate the server settings in an implementation to provide a report of issues, suggested resolutions, and references to documentation.

Domino Configuration Tuner

Reaching the service pack 1 milestone for 8.5 removes what is often the last barrier to upgrading for many enterprises who wait for the first service pack. It comes at an opportune time for IBM to stave off potential switching e-mail solutions discussions that Microsoft’s Exchange 2010 will inevitably introduce in many enterprises.

SharePoint Conference Breaks the Bank

2009-10-24T14:15:10-07:00

Blogger: Craig Roth

The Microsoft SharePoint conference in Las Vegas just ended and it was quite an event. They sold out with 7,400 people. Huge by SharePoint standards, a yawn by Vegas standards (at a hotel halfway down the strip I got asked a couple of times if I was with the ATM convention. "Yes", I said).

Here's a guide to my blog posts from the conference over on the KnowledgeForward blog:

Telebriefing: Leveraging Relationships and Managing Identity Two Sides of the Social Networking Coin

2009-10-22T20:50:05-07:00

Blogger: Mike Gotta

Next week, Alice Wang and I will be presenting our research and consulting findings on the intersect social media and social networking has with identity and security for Burton Group clients. This topic has been a major source of client inquires over the past few months as organizations are dealing with employee use of social media tools like Twitter as well as internal tools associated with "Enterprise 2.0". If you are a Burton Group client, I believe you will find this presentation very informative. If you are not a Burton Group client, Alice and I will be presenting this topic again on Thursday, November 5 at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco. For those attending that conference, you can find details on the event web site. If you are not attending - it's still not too late to register!

Telebriefing Description:

Use of social networking to improve information sharing and community-building will transform how organizations think about identity and its relation to collaboration and social media strategies. Social network sites, micro-blogging, activity streams, blogs, and wikis enable employees to construct their own identities via profiles and social graphs. As employee participate and contribute in these social networking environments, internally or externally, they also establish social roles and community reputations. This TeleBriefing by analyst Mike Gotta and consultant Alice Wang will examine the risks and benefits of more open and transparent information sharing on collaboration and identity strategies.
Presented by: Alice Wang and Mike Gotta
Dates:
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
12:00 p.m. EDT/9:00 a.m. PDT/16:00 UTC GMT/17:00 CET
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
12:00 p.m. EDT/9:00 a.m. PDT/16:00 UTC GMT/17:00 CET
Register:

Online (for Burton Group clients)

Microsoft Social Computing Overview

2009-10-19T17:50:31-07:00

Blogger: Mike Gotta

Notes from Christian Finn, Director, Social Computing

13 sessions in "social track"
Microsoft design point is to co-mingle structured collaboration tools alongside social computing tools - it's unrealistic to think of social computing disconnected from collaborations strategies
Back to information workers and productivity ... find knowledge, share ideas, work in teams, feel valued, manage projects, build= a network and use content
Long-term ROI of social computing is helping information workers feel valued (e.g., via comments from peers, ratings, etc)
Microsoft also thinks of the IT Pro ... control costs, provide solutions, maintain security, do more with less, ensure compliance, reduce islands, etc
This situation also causes users experience is fractured across too many tools and silos
The challenge for IT: If you are in IT - they are asking for consumer versions of sites for internal use - but arguments raised re: compliance, security, etc.
The challenge for the Enterprise: Connecting the dots is the challenge of the enterprise ... need to locate expertise, build community between people as a result of mergers, or onboard new employees
Social Computing lowers the cost for sharing and organizing ... surfaces knowledge and networks (expertise) and increase employee engagement
Pitfalls: Demographics, hierarchy, policies, culture, etc
Microsoft believes SharePoint scales to meet as narrow or broad a view an organization has on social computing, you can use it in a very classic way - no MySite etc - keep with basic document libraries, forums, workspaces - or - you can use blogs, wikis, profiles, etc - all in one platform.
Customer examples: Accenture (extensive use of MySite, social distance), skill attributes used for staffing, etc), Electronic Arts (very strong from a user experience and aesthetic viewpoint). Looks more like Facebook, supports skins for different product areas, etc. British Telecom used podcasting kit for just-in-time learning. Supports knowledge retention (interviews, user-generated videos on best practices).
SharePointM social journey began with MySite 2003 (disagree that Microsoft had any clue of social computing in 2003 though - some recasting history here)
Demo
- MySite: much cleaner UI, less form-like, softer blending of UI elements, typical stuff (name, presence, phone, etc), can use Business Connectivity Services to bring in HR data etc, free-form text for entry of ad-hoc information, redesign of middle section of MySite - tabs for organization, colleagues, tags, memberships etc) - supported by privacy settings.
- Note Board emulates Facebook Wall type interface - can have Note Board on documents, sites, not just "wall". can have list of comments ala discussion stream
- Personal tag cloud - when clicked will find people and artifacts
- Tag Profile: way to aggregate all the people who are using a tag inside the organization... can "follow" tag - do a people search and locate all people associated with that tag
- MyNetwork is a running newsfeed - stream, river of news model - activity stream comes close to social messaging (Twitter) but not sure I would go that far - seems more "FriendFeed" like.
- Follow a tag results in event being posted into news stream - way to discover people and artifacts - passive signal model
- Colleagues ... social graph, Facebook friends, can organize colleagues into groups with privacy controls at group level
- Filters for newsfeed
- Organization: org browser is an overlay directory to find people and their relationship to the organization ... not sure who someone works for, where they report in the org structure - Silverlight and HTML version. See digest, direct reports, etc and then can link to full profile - can control delegation
- Content: similar to 2007 version - can share documents, etc.
- Status message shows up in news feed Note: wonder how this works with OCS presence status? Opportunity for integration but doubt that there is any linkage right now. Visa-versa - can OCS/Communicator status be sent to news feed - maybe too much noise (on phone, busy) but maybe not
- Blogs: Much improved UI ... actually looks like a blog ... more Ajax type UI for posting ... maybe not as great as Wordpress or other tools but likely good enough for many situations ... believe you can use Live Writer as well (better choice in my opinion for authoring)
- Note: Wonder if there is a blogs central type catalog - does not sound like it.
- Video streaming built into SP2010 ... natively stream of video up to 2GB from store ... ratings supported ... Silverlight player
- Wikis: two varieties ... team site wiki: as people move from documents to web pages as medium of information exchange, need to support this within team sites - rich text editor ... bar was really low, previous version of wiki really was not a wiki so this implementation is a significant advancement ... oddly, don't use wiki term. Also have Enterprise Wiki (different) - more like Wikipedia - build on publishing model ... page publishing and categorizing of pages (then why call it a Wiki?) ... access controls supported and versioning ... can chose to have workflow aroudn wiki as well (ex: HR policies database). Under the cover all of this are in lists so blogs, wikis can have workflow attached.
- Enterprise Wiki surface is a publishing template so you can put web parts and other artifacts like video.
- Note: people will have to keep close track of team wiki vs. enterprise wiki - different capabilities and different implementations! Will not be able to take a team wiki and promote it to an enterprise wiki for example.
- Records management and social computing: can apply rules (disposition etc) to blogs, wikis, etc.
- Note: I still do not believe there are sufficient data loss controls, audit logs, etc here - Msft needs to prove that the support for security, identity and privacy needs much more thoroughly beyond demoware.
- No iPhone application - too bad :)
Customization: REST, JSON, ATOM, etc.

SharePoint 2009 Conference: Morning Keynotes

2009-10-19T14:47:53-07:00

Blogger: Mike Gotta

Notes from Steve Ballmer keynote...

Vision: seamless experiences across your life
SharePoint is at the center of intranet, Internet, etc
Public Beta in November
Synergies with SharePoint Workspace (Groove recast for SharePoint with improved offline support)
Targeting 1H2010 for general release (note: my guess is May)
What is SharePoint? Collaboration, analytics, social networking, content management, portal, workflow, etc etc
Want to someday bring SharePoint to consumer market
New user experience for SP2010 - ribbon and other office UI elements
Consolidate workloads and costs on a single platform (old argument but more so with this release)
Adding sandbox environment
Additional standards support (REST, JSON, ATOM) Note: Encouraging widespread development of third-party applications (e.g., Adobe AIR) that front-end SP2010 via these standards might be one of the most significant advancements in the release and Microsoft doesn't push this concept strongly enough - look at all the AIR apps around other social tools for instance
Demo
- Business Connectivity Services (next generation of business data catalog)
- Many more templates within Visual Studio specific to SharePoint
- Sandbox solution:enable developers to create applications that can be throttled by IT ... isolate application ...
Note: so far, 45 minutes into keynote, not a single message that would be considered a message to a "business decision maker" - interesting ... pitching to developers and support people in audience, no focus on business solutions, processes, etc (few side comments but nothing in-depth and compelling)
Cloud, discussion on hybrid split between SP online and SP on-premises
Important: Still no parity still between SP2010 in cloud and on-premises - better, but not 100%
Note: When will cloud/SaaS be the primary target environment for SP releases? Seems like on-premises is the target environment creating this lag in terms of parity
Internet-facing SP: SP in cloud for intranet different than customer-facing Internet
First real business scenario: Kraft example, consolidated 200 web sites. Volvo also using SP externally for Internet. Not clear what percentage though in these examples are SP - are they 100% run on SP or other platforms are also leveraged
Demo Internet Facing
- SharePoint Server For Internet Sites
- FAST Search Server for Internet Business
Intranet 2010 Products
- SharePoint Foundation (successor to WSS)
- SharePoint Server
- Fast Search Server
- SharePoint Online
Question on long elapsed-time between releases: Basically, SteveB reply is that it has taken them this long (to the 2010 release) to get to the point where the foundation is at a point where they can release application-level functionality faster. But no insight as to what people should expect in the future - is the next release 2013? No guidance so I'm not sure anyone should believe that cycle times are going to get any better until there is proof...
Question on social computing: SteveB rightly points out the need for social computing to address security and identity aspects of related applications and that IT organizations play a key role to help mitigate risks but no specific insight as to how data loss, identity and security issues are handling in 2010 social computing. Hopefully more to come in this space...

Notes from Jeff Teper keynote

SharePoint 2010: the business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the web
Sites: single infrastructure for intranets, extranets and Internet sites
"Replumbing" of UI, adding ribbon, etc
SharePoint and Groove user experience consistent now - SharePoint Workspace, offline support, better mobile support
Collaboration: wiki, blog, tags, etc etc all improved
Social tagging was a significant focus area
MySite - some rewriting of history on how MySite was positioned originally. Back circa 2003, MySite was an orphan feature that no one seemed at Microsoft was able to clearly position. Was never intended to play the role it is being positioned for today re: social computing.
Profiles - revamping search and finding people
Single metadata store for tags, taxonomy etc
Search - query on experience, people search, KM aspects, social graph, org chart, etc
Social Computing Demo
- Activity feed, tags, tag clouds, recent blog posts, etc
- Can see aggregation of other connections re: activities, etc
- Ratings fro documents
- Expertise location: people search ... displays people and profile information, can view recent content from person, authored content, browser where person is in organizational chart
- Note board (like FB wall) on profile page

Quotes from the SharePoint Conference Keynote

2009-10-19T12:52:54-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Blogger: Guy Creese

Following are some good quotes from the Steve Ballmer/Jeff Teper keynote at the SharePoint Conference:

A questioner asked Steve Ballmer and Tom Rizzo if the company would have a single web page ("sort of like Windows Update") that would list the current updates for SharePoint. Steve Ballmer replied, "The right answer is 'yes'; what's the current answer, Tom?"
Steve Ballmer: "SharePoint Online is helping us understand compliance issues and we can roll that back into the SharePoint software."
Steve Ballmer: "SharePoint, in a sense, is becoming an operating system."
Jeff Teper: The symbiotic relationship between Office and SharePoint was there from the get-go."
Jeff Teper: "SharePoint 2010 includes a replumbing of the UI."
Jeff Teper: "SharePoint is the ultimate Swiss Army knife."

Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Social Distancing, Web Conferencing, and Adobe

Social Media, Search, and Open Source

How Star Trek Informs SharePoint Governance Models

Office Finally Embraces SharePoint in 2010

Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 – IBM is Ready to Compete

SharePoint Conference Breaks the Bank

SharePoint Conference: Keynote Applause Lines

Reflecting on the Winding Path of SharePoint

Free SharePoint Governance Poster

Telebriefing: Leveraging Relationships and Managing Identity Two Sides of the Social Networking Coin

Microsoft Social Computing Overview

SharePoint 2009 Conference: Morning Keynotes

Quotes from the SharePoint Conference Keynote