Collaborative Thinking

Social Networking Platform Evolution: From Destination Site To Networked Services

2009-11-23T20:05:14-05:00

I've used this chart publicly since the E2.0 June 2009 event when I ran a workshop on enterprise social networking, but the trend is true in general (from destination site, to networked services) as platforms create ecosystems (re: recent news on Salesforce, LinkedIn, etc). The roots of this perhaps go back to an old post by Marc Andreessen in 2007 on platforms and ecosystems. My voice over on this slide was that we would not see comprehensive social networking platforms until 2012. I could be too conservative on the timeline (maybe not, lets see how robust and mature these solutions are when they finally appear and gain critical mass).

However, this trend from destination site to networked services around a platform-centric model does not belong to the brilliance of any single vendor, it's inevitable if vendors want to survive. The remaining challenge (well, one of a few) - interoperability (standards at various levels, especially in the social data / graph area). You can have lock in very easy (per points often made by Chris Messina, David Recordon, Joseph Smarr) when it comes to accrual of data, owning of the namespace, and use of non-standard formats should be as much of a concern externally on the public social web as internally within the enterprise.

Evolution of enterprise social networking:

LinkedIn expands platform in attempt to one-up Facebook Connect | VentureBeat
LinkedIn aims to be an even more central part of your professional identity, by expanding its platform today with the site developer.linkedin.com.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based professional networking site already offers a platform for third-party developers, allowing them to build widgets and apps that run in LinkedIn itself. What it’s announcing today is another piece of that platform, one that’s arguably more exciting — the site is allowing developers to access your LinkedIn data from their own external business applications. The idea is that LinkedIn could become your professional identity across applications, in the same way Facebook wants Facebook Connect to be your social identity across the web.
“We’re very opinionated,” said Adam Nash, vice president of search and platform products. “We believe that any business application that someone builds in 2010 that doesn’t integrate with us is going to be an anachronism.”
You can get some sense of what LinkedIn has in mind with already-announced integrations like its Social Connector in Microsoft’s email and contacts program Outlook. LinkedIn is adding new partners today, including Twitter application TweetDeck, simple blogging startup Posterous, and BT-owned voice-over-Internet company Ribbit. Other application-makers can now register at the developer site.

LinkedIn expands platform in attempt to one-up Facebook Connect | VentureBeat

LinkedIn Development Platform Comes to Life
LinkedIn Nov. 23 followed through on its plans to launch a development platform, opening Developer.linkedin.com to let softwareprogrammers put LinkedIn's profile content into their business applications and Web sites. Microsoft is using LinkedIn to add profile information to Microsoft Office 2010 e-mail users with the Outlook Social Connector. Twitter application TweetDeck will support the LinkedIn platform in its next version, allowing TweetDeck users to access their LinkedIn network updates from within TweetDeck, which will add a LinkedIn column.

LinkedIn Development Platform Comes to Life

This morning, professional social network LinkedIn announced that it is opening up its API for developers to build applications around the platform. While LinkedIn has partnered with Twitter, Microsoft, IBM, Research In Motion and others, this will be the first time startups can tap into the platform.
While LinkedIn is releasing 11 different APIs, they fall into three distinct categories. First, developers will be able to let users easily access their information, profiles, connections and messages via oAuth login. The second functionality is to give users the ability to make actionable decisions about information, but letting them message their LinkedIn contacts, post updates, accept contacts and more. And the third piece of the puzzle is search. So developers will now be able to embed LinkedIn search in other applications.

Five Ways Startups Are Tapping Into LinkedIn's API - washingtonpost.com

Facebook Agrees To Set Friend Lists Free. Mashups With Twitter Lists Should Follow.

2009-11-23T16:07:37-05:00

Hopefully, this would be implemented in a manner that provides Facebook members to set controls that determine the level of sharing of relationship connections, including sharing of one's social graph externally not just to FB apps. It's not just Facebook apps I would be concerned about but what might be made available via Facebook Connect. I also wonder who being classified as a "data controller" will influence how Facebook would implement this type of capability. Interesting, I also wonder if any meta data would be shared (e.g., name of the list on which someone is associated with - how many different lists is someone one, etc).

Today, during the Filtering the Stream roundtable at our RealTime CrunchUp, Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur asked why Facebook isn’t giving third parties access to their Friend Lists. Obviously, that’s a good question now that Twitter has starting giving third parties access to its Lists feature via an API. Normally, you’d expect a canned response along the lines of “we may do that in the future” or “we’re thinking about it,” but Facebook’s VP of Platform Bret Taylor was much more candid.
Taylor said that Le Meur’s request seemed “reasonable” and continued “we should do that.” “We’re not working on that. But we should be,” he continued. So there you go, done deal. Great. It would seem that soon, third parties should have access to the list filters that Facebook uses.

Facebook Agrees To Set Friend Lists Free. Mashups With Twitter Lists Should Follow.

openid4.me

2009-11-20T08:52:23-05:00

Interesting ...

openid4.me - an OpenID Server 4 FOAF secured by FOAF+SSL

openid4.me is an OpenID server which allows you to use your WebID to log in to any website that accepts OpenID.
Requirements
To use this server you need

a WebID
and a FOAF+SSL client certificate securing your WebID

If you dont have a FOAF+SSL secured WebID you can get one at FOAF.me

openid4.me - OpenID Server

Community Equity Project

2009-11-18T21:05:07-05:00

Nice to see progress - and integration with Liferay as well - Liferay continues to be an interesting open source project given it's recent direction to build out social capabilities.

Communtiy Equity milestone 1.2 released
I am very happy to announce the availability of the milestone 1.2 of the Community Equity open source project.
Milestone 1.2 release description

activitystrea.ms support - read and process activitystrea.ms enabled sites and feeds

Facebook connect - integrate Facebook status updates
status.net connect - integrate status.net software (this is based on an activitystrea.ms extension for status.net from Olof Tjerngren.
Cliqset.com connect - integrate with cliqset activitystrea.ms feed

Reiser 2.0 : Weblog

Outlook Social Connector: Trust But Verify

2009-11-18T16:55:06-05:00

Lots of new features (see source post for more info and screen shots) - but given how badly I think the RSS engine was built in Outlook 2007 (the first "social" extension to Outlook perhaps), I'll take a "wait and see" perspective re: user experience and performance. User experience is going to be a high bar for me. Interoperability will also be key - how will other vendors integrate with OSC or will this just be great if you are "all Microsoft" re: Exchange, OCS, SharePoint (and don't forget about BPOS parity between on-premises and/or SaaS). Also, how shareable is the social data with other applications (within security and privacy controls). Basically, I wonder how much social data Outlook creates, pulls from other sources, or manages and what social data (or analytics, usage patterns, etc) are sharable with other applications or made available via an API. And what about OWA. I wonder if LinkedIn will share its connector built for Outlook with other applications/vendors or is this an exclusive deal with Microsoft (anyone know? - have not had time given travel and deliverables, last month has been pretty heads-down for me)...

The Outlook Social Connector (OSC) brings social views of your colleagues and friends right to your Inbox. As you read your e-mail messages, glance down at the new People Pane to see the picture, name, and title of the sender. A rich, aggregated collection of information about the sender is included.
The OSC presents useful information including:

Communication history Your mailbox is searched and the recent messages you’ve exchanged with that person appear. Can’t remember the last time you e-mailed this person? A quick look at the OSC reveals the last time you received an email from them, and one click opens up the message.
Meetings When is the next scheduled meeting with this person? The OSC shows upcoming appointments that include you and the message sender.
Attachments Can’t find the attachment that the person is referring to in a message? With the OSC you can quickly review attachments that you and the sender have exchanged. One-click access quickly opens the attachment or you can see the message that it is attached to.
Activity feeds Stay on top of activities involving your colleagues and friends in real time. The OSC connects to business and consumer social networks.
Did you say activity feeds? Yes we did! The OSC makes Outlook 2010 a social networking tool by connecting to the new social experiences in SharePoint

Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog : Announcing the Outlook Social Connector

Sharepoint 2010 and Claims-Based Identity

2009-11-18T15:44:30-05:00

Note: update just to clarify wording: The inclusion of claims-based identity within SP2010 is one of the more strategic advances organizations should monitor and evaluate as the beta moves towards general release. Improving how SharePoint handles identity is one of the most strategic areas for SharePoint 2010 to improve on over how identity is handled in MOSS 2007 (from a social computing perspective):

Sharepoint 2010 and Claims-Based Identity

Posted By: Vittorio Bertocci | Today @ 12:50 AM | 55 Views | 0 Comments
When it comes to identity management intensive applications, it's hard to top Sharepoint. Whether you are signing in a portal, accessing a document or using a webpart for reaching out to external web services, your identity is going to be the factor that drives it all.
Vittorio went to visit Venky Veeraraghavan, Program Manager Lead in the Sharepoint team, to discuss how Sharepoint deals with identity challenges. Venky gives a fantastic explanation of how claims-based identity and Windows Identity Foundation helped the Sharepoint team to deliver on the identity functionalities they needed without getting entangled in low level details such as protocol handling.

Sharepoint 2010 and Claims-Based Identity | The Id Element | Channel 9

Infocomm Industry Forum 2009

2009-11-12T09:32:05-05:00

For those readers who are in the Singapore area, I'll be presenting at the event below later this month:

Date: 30 November 2009
Venue: Suntec Singapore
Time: 8:45am - 7:00pm
Fostering Innovation In The Infocomm Ecosystem
Enterprise 2.0: Leveraging Social Media to Promote Workplace Innovation
Mike Gotta
Principal Analyst, Collaboration & Content Strategies, Burton Group
Organisations are leveraging Enterprise 2.0 applications to develop collaboration strategies within and outside the workplace. Blogs, wikis and social network sites, coupled with community-building practices, help organisations leverage relationships in ways that promote more effective information sharing and innovation.

INFOCOMM INDUSTRY FORUM 2009

Cisco Collaboration Summit: The Right Foundation For Collaboration

2009-11-10T12:11:45-05:00

Joe Burton, CTO, Session Notes:

Why is an architectural approach towards collaboration important? That's a question Cisco wants to answer - point tools are not enough.
- Example1: collaboration-enabled CRM process. Note: Reminiscent of "Collaborative CRM" concept defined by Meta Group years ago which has morphed into "Social CRM".
- Example2: virtualizing key business functions - scaling expertise, customer intimacy via video (Telepresence) just-in-time customer representative or expert.
- Example3: Streamlining complex human processes - follow-me, single number reach... reduce cycle time, coordination, process latency
Reference Architecture for collaboration (logical diagram illustation)
- Devices (desktop, mobile, in-room)
- Collaborative Applications (conferencing, enterprise social software, customer care, messaging, telepresence
- Client Services (client frameworks)
- Collaboration Services (presence/location, tagging, semantic processing, real-time messaging, content services, social graph, etc)
- Medianet Services (transcoding, auto-discovery, auto-configuration, etc)
- Network Services (transport, signaling, QoS)
Simple use case scenarios discussed that exercise architectural components (e.g., reduce travel expenses)
Real-time voice and video
- Service Advertisement Framework: discovery protocol - device can go to network and broadcast/request capabilities ...
- SIP Session Management
- Survivable Remote Site Telephony/Voicemail
- Medianet Auto-Configuration
Context: Presence
- XMPP as presence hub with interfaces and connectors to other presence providers
Context: Network-based Tagging
- Pulse Collect: deep packet analysis (web, blogs, wikis, documents, recorded audio/video - future: SaaS Apps, Conference Calls)
- Pulse Connect: Open Social Web Services API (profile data, presence server, policy engine)
Intercompany Media Engine
Intercompany Cisco TelePresence
Client Services Framework: multi-platform multi-media softphone without a user interface ... can plug-in behind Microsoft Office Communicator, Sametime, etc
ECP platform diagram: MVC framework, BOSH, SIP/SIMPLE, IMAP. SOAP, REST, JCR, CMIS, open social, CMIS, RDF/SPARQL, portlet standards,
Missing on slide: ATOM, RSS but believe it's in there - wonder about Open Search, FOAF and XFN

Understanding Cisco's Collaboration Strategy (Part 4)

2009-11-09T15:40:27-05:00

The following is Part 4 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco.

Is Cisco’s Vision Holistic Enough?

While Cisco does a very good job of navigating market transitions and managing its efforts to move into market adjacencies, that does not mean that it has “perfect knowledge”. The collaboration market is not well defined. Some strategists include content management, search, portal, and Enterprise 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis) within a collaboration domain. Cisco may think it knows the borders of a market in which the borders are in reality, porous and ill defined. Additionally, the two dominant vendors in the space (IBM, Microsoft) have successfully fought off challengers for decades.

There are more reasons for Cisco to fail than to succeed in the collaboration market unless Cisco understands the secondary and tertiary nuances of the market. The obvious tooling segments of collaboration (e-mail, calendaring, discussion forums, and workspaces) are well known. However, there are strongly related segments such as unified communications (a segment Cisco knows well), content management, search, portal and Enterprise 2.0 (blogs, wikis, tags, bookmarks, communities, and social networking). It is unlikely a vendor can become a dominant platform leader without solutions that cover each of these segments to some degree.

As Cisco moves more broadly into social computing (e.g., social networking), a more clear strategy as to where Cisco is going with identity needs to come through more strongly. The intersect between identity and social networking is critical to understand (e.g., relationships, social identity, social roles). As Cisco progresses into social networking, a strong analytics story will be required (e.g., social network analysis - albeit Pulse does SNA at its own level).

Another arena Cisco needs to understand concerns collaborative applications. Developers have been an integral part of IBM’s and Microsoft’s success in the collaboration market. Collaborative applications provide tremendous business value. Cisco need to define what program it will put in place to attract developers and build a community around that program. Cisco also need to consider what developer environments it intends to support.

A thriving partner and third-party ecosystem is another critical success factor for Cisco as it attempts to become a collaboration market leader. Cisco needs to identify (and promote) business models and related services to expand Cisco’s platform and solutions into a sustainable ecosystem.

Finally, and this is a challenge for all vendors in this space – Cisco needs to not only offer a mix of SaaS/Cloud and on-premises solutions but also need aligned strategies that unify enterprise and consumer solutions (social media).

Cisco Collaboration: Bottom Line

What should Cisco do?

Cisco needs to be clear that it is taking on IBM and Microsoft directly – there is no way to avoid this competitive positioning.
Cisco needs to articulate its broader direction concerning content management, search, and portal. It is competing in those markets (whether it wants to or not). Cisco believes that it is not - that it is only leveraging these capabilities to bolster it's own collaboration effort. However - the final vote rests with customers who will likely want to pull Cisco in directions that it had not intended to invest in (content management) or compete (portals).
Cisco will be taking on E2.0 vendors (namely Jive) and must articulate a strategy concerning communities and social networking.
Alignment of Cisco’s social media efforts need to occur with its enterprise collaboration efforts.

Bottom Line

Cisco demonstrates that it has learned a lot about the collaboration market and its related domains
Cisco has identified three areas that it intends to influence and/or control: virtual computing, voice and video networks, and inter-business collaboration
In those areas Cisco will progress and mature over the next 3 years (expect incremental consistency) – people should not expect overnight success – this remains a journey for Cisco
In terms of specific perspectives on certain key announcements:
- Credible hosted e-mail play
- Very strong endorsement of XMPP with the revamping of WebEx Connect
- Missed opportunity (from a media perspective) to point out synergies with Google Wave (given XMPP strengths)
- Strong argument that Cisco is best positioned (vs. Microsoft and IBM) to become the central enterprise presence hub (detached from IM, telephony etc) given its support for native XMPP, SIP/SIMPLE and programmatic interfaces.
- “Corporate YouTube” (Show and Share) enables Cisco to lay an early claim to that aspect of social computing and Enterprise 2.0 trends
- Pulse is an innovative approach but critical issues remain open
- Enterprise Collaboration Platform solidifies how Cisco looks at the collaboration market but opens a “Pandora’s Box” of questions. Cisco will try to position its platform more narrowly than will the market and customers. Cisco needs to pay very close attention to how inter-dependencies across content management, search, portal and application development can adversely affect the collaboration areas it seeks to influence and/or control.
The final vote rests with customers - the more success Cisco attains - the greater the demand from customers to broaden and deepen ECP's capabilities as a Tier 1 collaboration platform.

Understanding Cisco's Collaboration Strategy (Part 3)

2009-11-09T15:38:51-05:00

The following is Part 3 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco.

Note: Update to remove name of portal vendor until official announcement.

Clarifications & Questions

As the launch event and collaboration summit progress, additional information will be provided. Areas where I have questions and will be looking for clarification include:

Hosted e-Mail

Specifics on mail migration support (professional services, tools).
Specifics on hybrid models (some Exchange inboxes are likely to remain on-premises).
Specific details on how e-Discovery, audit, and compliance needs are addressed.
Will there be any calendaring migration concerns (not explicitly mentioned)?
Cisco needs to compare/contrast its approach with Microsoft’s BPOS – not just e-mail but overall to equate synergies from other WebEx Collaboration Cloud services.
Is there a Notes/Domino compete opportunity too?

Show And Share

How are storage and records management requirements satisfied?
Are there any network management concerns?
There will likely raise privacy issues – what are the EU implications for instance? Is there an opt-out or consent (opt-in) capability?
ISSupport for record/playback conferencing systems?

Enterprise Collaboration Platform

What are the specifics of portal deal?
Does the deal include all capabilities of the portal vendor's software?
Will the portal be available for both on-premises and SaaS? Will functional parity be attained between SaaS and on-premises?
Is there Wave support (federation)?
Does Cisco believe that it is now competing in the portal market with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle?
Does Cisco believe that it is now competing in the content management market with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle as well best-of-breed vendors like EMC? Will there be a partnership coming with EMC given the virtual computing environment partnership?
Does Cisco believe that it is now competing in the search market with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle?
Does Cisco believe it is competing in the Enterprise 2.0 market with Microsoft, IBM, Jive, and others (Telligent, Socialtext, Atlassian…)?
Where is the application development story given the SOA, Rest and other interfaces for collaborative applications? Given the portal is open source – how will Cisco interact with that community?
Where is the social media play? What is the touch point between ECP and EOS?

Pulse

Do organizations want this at the network layer vs. other alternatives that are based on activity streams?
How does Pulse honor permission models (authentication, authorization and access controls)?
Are there privacy (EU, labor unions, worker councils) concerns with Pulse? Is there a model that supports opt-in consent?