Collaborative Thinking

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?

Understanding Cisco's Collaboration Strategy (Part 2)

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

The following is Part 2 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco.

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

What is Cisco announcing?

To understand and decipher what Cisco is announcing, it is important to break the information down into four distinct areas: Strategic Pillars, Reference Architecture, “Extend Current”, and “Enter New”.

Strategic Pillars

Interoperable, Open Architecture: Given the strategic focus on inter-company collaboration, Cisco plans to leverage open source, open protocols, and modernized methods of interoperability (e.g., SOA, Rest) to enable any device or application to leverage a consistent set of core of collaborative services.
Flexible deployment models: Cisco intended to offer application and infrastructure services for different computing models including SaaS/Cloud and on-premises, or hybrid combinations of both.
Enterprise social software: Cisco plans to deliver the type of social tools and applications popular in the consumer world, but with the necessary foundation expected from enterprise organizations (e.g., security, availability, quality of service, and reliability).
Video communications: As stated earlier, conversations and visual communication are now viewed as collaboration from a business perspective, rather than the tooling viewpoint so long adopted by IT. Cisco believes that communication-centric and people-centric interaction models are the basis for next generation collaboration platforms and solutions.
Secure inter-company: Boundary-less computing that allows internal and external collaboration across employees, partners, suppliers, and customers. Externalization trends are resulting in companies needed to collaborate as easily externally as they do today internally.

Reference Architecture

Infrastructure: At the lowest level, the Virtual Computing Environment effort would be leveraged here (compute, storage, and network).
Collaboration Services: In the middle layer, Cisco’s assets related to presence, location, unified communications, collaboration, and content management are situated at this tier of Cisco’s model.
Communication & Collaboration Applications: conferencing, blogs, wikis, customer care, e-mail, telepresence and other people-facing applications are at the highest level.

“Extend Current”: Upgrades To Existing Assets

Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage: One-button start of a combined and integrated Telepresence and WebEx meeting (improved user experience, productivity).
Video-enabled Cisco Unified IP Phone 8900 and 9900 Series with Cisco Unified Communications Manager
Cisco Intercompany Media Engine (IME): simplifies high-definition audio and video across organizations (common user experience internally or externally)
Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory: opt-in directory for companies to list endpoints, rooms, etc.
Cisco WebEx Connect IM: The product moves from AIM to an XMPP-based IM network based on the Jabber. WebEx Connect C6.0 begins with federation across all XMPP based clients and the AIM network and will federate across other networks such as IBM SameTime, Microsoft Office Communications Server, and Yahoo!. Integration with Cisco Unified Communications and WebEx Meeting Manager. There are additional policy management capabilities as well.
Cisco Unified Presence and Cisco Unified Personal Communicator 8.0: Combines presence from SIP/SIMPLE, SIP (PBX phones), and XMPP sources. Federate and exchange messages with clients like Microsoft Office Communicator, IBM Sametime, Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, Cisco WebEx Connect, and GoogleTalk. Support for server-side IM logging. B2B federation support (native for XMPP, via third-party products for non-XMPP Public IM. Presence interfaces for application enablement as well.
Any-to-any Cisco TelePresence HD interoperability with Cisco Media Experience Engine 5600
Cisco Unified Communications Manager Session Management Edition

“Extend New”: New Entrants

Cisco Show and Share: Digital Media System 5.2 introduces an updated Desktop Video portal (Show and Share) – a social collaboration platform that mimics YouTube that includes many collaborative functions (e.g., commenting, polling, ratings, tagging, user-generated authoring and publishing, usage reporting, multi-language support, content subscription, advanced search, and TelePresence playback). Speech-to-text transcription allows intelligent viewing experiences (skim for relevant points in the video).
Enterprise Collaboration Platform (ECP) is based on open source components (search, semantic web), standard interfaces ( Java and document APIs), intellectual property added by Cisco, and a leading open source portal that includes social tools and applications. It includes a wide variety of features such as a personal dashboard, social & networking-based auto-tagging, click to call/meet/IM, people and communities, information search, content management, a directory profile, social graph, blogs, wikis, forums, teamspaces, video support, a UC-enabled browser as well as micro-blogging and activity streams. Search is also included (search faceting, rating, semantic search, time-based search results, related content, user-defined notifications).
SaaS e-mail: Corporate-grade hosted email, native support of Outlook; up to 25G mailboxes, high availability and mobile support for all users, Web 2.0 client, delivered by WebEx Collaboration Cloud with IronPort; US and Canada
Cisco Pulse: Pulse is a search platform that performs dynamic tagging of content as it traverses the network, offering a real-time, cross application view of the entire organization. Pulse helps people locate and connect with the best available experts and information. State-of-the-art search and deep-packet analysis enables automated tagging of content and media in real-time (any content in motion across the network, including video and audio). Pulse integrates with Cisco collaboration solutions (TelePresence, WebEx), as well as with other social applications and custom mashups.
Cisco Media Experience Engine (MXE) 5600/3500 (Real time media transformation, including speech to text, HD Interoperability with Cisco TelePresence)
Cisco ISR G2: Medianet-ready router, optimizes video performance in the branch

Understanding Cisco's Collaboration Strategy (Part1)

2009-11-09T15:37:23-05:00

The following is Part 1 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco.

What is driving Cisco into the collaboration market?

There are many reasons driving Cisco in this direction (revenue opportunities, growth needs, and customer demand). Cisco believes that the collaboration market is in transition – that there are structural changes in the market that opens the door for Cisco to leverage its assets (voice, video, and networking) in ways that will enable it to take a leadership position. This should come as no surprise to market followers or competitors – Cisco is a company that strongly believes that its ability to grow and innovate is dependent on how well it:

· Understands the emergence and evolution of market shifts and the repercussions of those shifts to Cisco (pro and con)

· Formulates strategies, adjusts its own business model(s), and arrays resources to capitalize on market opportunities created by those shifts

· Continuously listens to customers and other stakeholders along the way

· Restructures its organization and channels to best leverage its relationship capital in ways that establishes market leadership

· Iterates and executes on those strategies in a manner that times Cisco’s entry and growth into those market adjacencies

What major changes in the collaboration market is Cisco exploiting?

Cisco is exploiting three “wedge issues” as it moves into the collaboration market:

· Virtual Computing Environment: The deal with EMC and VMware enables Cisco to catch-up to a transition that matured more rapidly perhaps than Cisco expected. Market expectations and competitive needs combined to make a partnership necessary. Cisco can leverage this alliance as it attempts to influence/control its role and infrastructure solutions in the SaaS/Cloud market.

· Video Networks: It should come as no surprise that Cisco fixates on video. However, it is a lever that Cisco can exploit given consumer trends (YouTube) and social computing trends where conversations and visual communication are now viewed not from a tooling viewpoint but as “acts of collaboration” at the people and process level. Capitalizing on video trends keeps Cisco on a necessary business trajectory. Video is a competency Cisco can claim as its unique heritage compared to Microsoft and IBM as well.

· Collaboration: Converging UC (voice, conferencing) and collaboration trends make this a crucial market adjacency for Cisco to enter. In some ways, it had no choice. Cisco could not allow a key rival (Microsoft) to encroach in the UC market without a response. So on the one hand, its move into collaboration is defensive to protect its UC assets. However, more importantly, given the structural shifts within the collaboration market – it is very opportunistic for Cisco to move into collaboration regardless of Microsoft. The move into collaboration is enables Cisco to transform its voice and video communications solutions into broader solutions and adjust its business model to deliver additional solutions specific to collaboration.

Summary

Cisco sees value in a network-centric approach that will unify collaboration activities across multiple silos. It's embedded capabilities in the network enable it to perform unique services such as auto tagging all forms of media. As collaboration moves in the direction Cisco believes will happen, the sharing of knowledge transitions from a text centric model to include voice and video (on-demand, Podcasts, etc) where it (Cisco) brings unique value relative to other approaches.

The combinatorial opportunity arising from these wedge issues enable Cisco to target SaaS-based email to gain short-term customer traction and establish longer-term market credibility as a collaboration platform and solution provider. Simultaneously, Cisco hopes to build momentum (via WebEx Collaboration Cloud and Enterprise Collaboration Platform), to solidify its collaboration story. Its new portfolio component, enterprise social software, positions Cisco more broadly across multiple market segments associated with collaboration (content management, search, and portal). Overall, becoming the market leader for inter-company collaboration appears to be the primary focal point for Cisco. However, it will end up competing head-on with traditional collaboration vendors (i.e., IBM, Microsoft) as well as up-and-coming new entrants (e.g., Jive).

Cisco Broadens Foray Into Collaboration Market

2009-11-09T12:01:36-05:00

Highlights of Cisco's press release is below (with a link to the full release). Additional blog posts will come out later today (starting around noon PT) that will include my early thoughts. I would recommend attending the virtual launch event (webcast).

ANNOUNCEMENT DETAILS

New telepresence and unified communications solutions deliver rich business-to-business communications across organizational boundaries

Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory is a Cisco-hosted directory of endpoints, organizations and people with access to Cisco TelePresence endpoints. The directory features a virtual assistant to assist with scheduling meetings between the more than 1000 rooms and 75 customers on Cisco TelePresence exchanges.
Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage is a simple, one-button initiation and scheduling solution with video integration between Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx conferencing. Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage, combines the ease-of-use and broad reach of Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx Meeting Center
The Cisco Intercompany Media Engine gives end-users business-to-business communications over any IP network, maximizing network efficiency and reducing costs. This new solution, submitted today to the Internet Engineering Task Force for standardization, includes features such as business-to-business wide band audio, voice and other collaboration capabilities, including video, with multiple levels of built-in security, and will add additional capabilities in the future. Service providers will benefit from the ability to offer new business-to-business communications services, differentiated network capabilities, and expanded managed services.
With Cisco Unified Communications system 8.0, Cisco extends support for a wide range of endpoints including new video- and WiFi-enabled Cisco Unified IP Phones and additional smartphones via Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator. Cisco UC 8.0 also offers customers a choice of deployment models – whether on-premise, on-demand, or hybrid.
Further details about today's Unified Communications 8.0 news are available here.

Mail, messaging and presence tools

Cisco WebEx^TM Mail is a new corporate-grade, hosted email solution from Cisco with native Microsoft Outlook interoperability, optimized mobile device support, and browser-independent AJAX web 2.0 access. Using technology acquired from PostPath, Cisco WebEx Mail has a highly scalable infrastructure that overcomes the limitations of traditional mailbox size. Cisco WebEx Mail is on-demand, highly available, and designed to free IT departments from the burden of email infrastructure management and operation.
Using technology gained through the acquisition of Jabber, Cisco today announced it has integrated the XMPP standard to provide secure, federated presence across its collaboration portfolio, starting with Cisco WebEx Connect Instant Messaging and Cisco Unified Presence 8.0. This announcement showcases Cisco's commitment to deliver standards-based solutions to drive greater interoperability across clients, devices and applications. The XMPP open standard allows presence federation among presence systems, both business and consumer, as well as support for third party enterprise instant messaging clients and applications.

Cisco breaks new ground with enterprise social software offerings
Cisco is introducing enterprise-ready social software solutions that allow customers to dynamically form teams and communities in a highly secure manner. Cisco's technology helps enable teams to be formed based on expertise and relevance, regardless of location, and brings experts together with both asynchronous tools and real-time voice and video.

Cisco Show and Share is a social video system that helps organizations create and manage highly secure video communities to share ideas and expertise, optimize global video collaboration, and personalize the connection between customers, employees, and students, with user-generated content. It allows organizations to record, edit and share video with comments, ratings, tagging and RSS feeds, and speech-to-text transcripts can be uploaded for easy video search and viewing.
Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform is an enterprise-class social software portal that features a corporate directory with social networking capabilities. It allows users to create team spaces and community environments 'on the fly' and also offers a customizable framework for integration of legacy business applications and web 2.0 content. Unlike today's document-centric portals, the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform is people-centric, facilitating real-time voice and video communication to connect people, communities, and information to make faster business decisions.

Cisco offers customers new medianet-ready devices that optimize networks for video, voice and collaboration
Cisco introduced three new, network-based devices that help customers evolve their IP networks to medianets. In combination with the recently introduced Cisco Integrated Services Routers Generation 2, customers can now enrich their existing collaboration capabilities with new, network-based functionality.

From the Cisco Media Processing family, the Cisco Media Experience Engine 3500 and the Cisco Media Experience Engine 5600 provide real-time video transcoding, allowing any content to be shared across the network to any end-point device. Innovative features such as speech-to-text transcription of videos will help enable video on the network to become as searchable and accessible as text and web pages today. The MXE 5600 also facilitates standards-based interoperability across many video endpoints, allowing for Cisco TelePresence to interoperate with video conferencing devices from other companies.
Cisco Pulse is an innovative search platform that performs dynamic tagging of content as it traverses the network, offering a real-time, cross application view of the entire organization. This intelligence allows people to accurately locate and rapidly connect with the best available experts and information they need.

Cisco Breaks Down Barriers to Business-to-Business Collaboration -> Cisco News

Collaboration 2.0 Inside Electronic Arts

2009-11-03T18:55:56-05:00

Notes from a collaboration and social computing session at Enterprise 2.0 conference:

The presentation will provide insight into EA's internal social collaboration strategy, successes and failures, solution, insights, best practices. Specifically, we will look at our integrated social networking, knowledge management, community and search solution.
Speaker - Bert Sandie, Director - Technical Excellence, Electronic Arts, Inc.
Bert is a key contributor to Electronic Art's (EA) dynamic culture. His technical and leadership background in the high-tech industry has helped him drive sharing, social connections, collaboration and innovation at EA. His current projects include knowledge management, social networking, and learning and development solutions at EA.

Notes:

Bert: Efforts driven by HR, focused on KM and social networking for a few years
Know more about employees from external information that info available internally
EA has 9,000 employees, global company, employees all over the world,
Games are highly instrumented so consumer experience can be improved
Multiple YouTube channels including one for recruiting, Twitter for EA and commercial products, multiple branded web properties, forums for customer feedback - all these things influence employee experiences
Best guess. 3/5 employees on Facebook, maybe more - used at home and at work (not blocked)
Very visual company, YouTube also not blocked
Three years ago not much blogging but not certain levels of employees all blog on games
How does this all influence collaboration? KM, blogging, streaming, social networking, communication, image management, notifications...
Doing all this internally, 9 year journey, beginning with a "knowledge portal" that included user profiles
"Knowing your users" as important internally as externally
Products have too many features - overwhelming users - giving someone a user manual means you have failed
Think of collaboration as a lifecycle - including face to face communication - face to face builds relationships and trust, personal insight
Why do people participate? learning, competitive, socializing, recognition, sharing, collaborate, affinity, validation, altruism...
Note: salient point - identifying participation models is important when trying to understand collaboration
Defining the user experience: Aesthetics, Functionality, Usability .... design is important - design includes how it works
Knowledge portal, social network, enterprise search key pillars - built on top of SharePoint - in a year with 2 developers
Principal: Usability: fast and responsive; easy to understand, simple to use
Principal: Features: user profiles (role, team, skills, interests), content management (articles, blogs, videos), communities of practice (groups), unified search as well as team specific solutions (sites and wikis)
Principal: "The Look": typography, layout, color palette, graphics and images
About 5000 views per month on knowledge portal out of employee base of 9000
Have internal YouTube capability but no ratings (ratings might discourage contributions - all content is valuable).
EA has multiple skins for MySite profile ... gives every team or part of the organization a group social identity (e.g., around games)
About 25 skins, teams build them - they want that affinity, community - (social identity)

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

2009-10-22T23:47:58-04:00

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)

Building An Enterprise KM Solution in SP2010

2009-10-21T17:17:12-04:00

Notes from session w/Sean Squires and Lincoln Demaris

Case Study: Knowledge For The Field - one of several systems for KM at Microsoft, repository of high-quality of field-ready content, intitial phase focused on content publishing and discovery
80K Microsoft employees might access the system to learn about a product, 45K sales/marketing/field might want to know how to sell the product, 1K subject matter experts might use the system as well
Challenges/key takeaways: user experience (tough to cut across different processes), collaboration (different groups manage information differently), Info Discovery (search results are difficult to refine and validate)
Wikipedia held up as very good KM solution
Key Component: Publishing Site:
- Pages as storefronts
- Consistent wiki-like user experience
- Implicit structure
Key Component: Document Center
- High-value managed content
- Not a walled garden
- Submissions can come from anywhere
Key Component: Shared Services
- Enterprise consistency, taxonomy and folksonomy
- Content type, metadata, content analytics, social feedback
Planning for on term store for all of Microsoft, one feed store (?)
May have multiple term sets and taxonomies but centralized management and sharing
Demo
- Prototype Site: InfoPedia
- Search results include lots of metadata
- Refinement pane on left side - pulls metadata to be used as filters
- Custom control for Digg-lke voting
- Document center is a stylized content query web part out of the box
- Managed keyword control also shown
- You can use tagged filters relevant for a page to send into the content query web part of show different documents in the doc set based on the page and the tags on the page (if I heard the speaker correctly) - contextual content query then.
- Workflows associated with topic areas that are assigned to pages so participant contributions can be routed to page owner, subject matter expert etc.
Tagging is relied on extensively and works with content query web part - social tags and/or authorized tags - tags drive navigation, discovery, etc
Pages as storefronts vs nested subsites
Wiki editing and social features can help with user participation and contributions within a governance model to have contributions checked.
Document Center is strictly managed
Demo
- Document set can be thought of as a better folder model for collections of content
- Content Organization - folders, rules, poilicies
- Can now attach policies to location - location-based retention
Content Organizer ensures permissions and policies applied correctly
Overall impression: very well done for content-centric KM approaches.