Our Catalyst conference in San Diego is just over two weeks away now and I’m looking forward to this annual gathering of my co-workers at Burton Group, clients, vendors, industry luminaries, and users of technology.  Guy Creese and I will be giving our one day, advanced SharePoint workshop there (Tuesday, July 28, 2009) and there are still some slots open (it sold out when we gave this workshop in Scottsdale last year).  This is the first time it’s been offered at Catalyst North America and is separate material (only about 10 minutes of overlap) from the “Understanding Microsoft SharePoint v3/2007 in Context” workshop that we still offer as a private onsite workshop. 

Governance is the largest section of the workshop, but I also want to point out the “SharePoint as an enterprise solution” section which applies an ITIL v3 model to SharePoint to structure our advice on offering SharePoint as a service rather than just dumping raw infrastructure on your users and divisional IT departments.

See the Catalyst website for more details.

SharePoint 2007: The Current Governance Nightmare—and Will It Get Better?

Craig Roth, and Guy Creese

SharePoint 2007 has been a runaway success, offering Office-centricity and ease-of-use to workers interested in storing and sharing information. However, its ease-of-use is also a snare and a delusion, in many cases fostering uncontrolled proliferation of thousands of SharePoint sites that have different navigation, taxonomy, and security models.

This workshop addresses SharePoint infrastructure planning and governance issues as well as the future of SharePoint with these modules:

• SharePoint as an enterprise solution
• SharePoint governance
• SharePoint security
• Deployment pre-work
• Adoption of SharePoint in the enterprise
• The future of SharePoint and a glimpse at Office 14

This just in: All attendees to the workshop will receive a free poster on “Creating a SharePoint Statement of Governance” that provides a handy reference to the section-by-section walkthrough I’ll be doing on how to create a SharePoint SOG.  This handsome poster is about 2.5 by 3.5 feet, full color, on thick paper:

Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.

Oracle’s analyst summit in mid-June provided a good look at their plans for Fusion Middleware 11g and WebCenter (released July 1st for download; see summary of features here).  Now that we’re out of non-disclosure mode (and into “please disclose!” mode) I’d like to share my high-level impressions.  They covered a ton of stuff, but my view is biased towards my coverage area of portals with connections to search, productivity, and collaboration. Other Burton Group analysts were also in attendance from our Identity and Privacy Strategies team and our Application Platform Strategies team (see Anne Thomas Manes’ thoughts here).

First, although Oracle owns 4 portal products, all the portal-related time was spent on WebCenter. Sure, other portals were mentioned in bullets as examples of how they can plug in (or consume WebCenter’s social software), but it was clear WebCenter is the leading actor here (and supporting actor in the stories of the SOA, identity, and enterprise application teams). This confirms what I (and Oracle) has been saying: that WebCenter is the primary portal and that the other 3 (Oracle Portal, WebLogic Portal, and WebCenter Interaction née Plumtree) will be supported and have their die-hard fans but will not be best for new portal projects.

It was helpful to hear Oracle frame its collaboration/portal/search/productivity/social software ambitions in relation to Microsoft SharePoint.  For all its plusses and minuses, SharePoint provides a common point of reference against which to measure.  They described how they line up with SharePoint as an alternative, can coexist with it, and where they surpass it.  This is what IBM should have done with Quickr+Connections at Lotusphere.

As with SharePoint, WebCenter provides an impressive set of functions in one box. There is often better integration between WebCenter and other Oracle assets (like their applications and development tools) than Microsoft where other groups can sometimes get away with ignoring what the SharePoint and Office group does.

There are numerous SharePoint analogies in WebCenter.  From conversations with the execs there I found that some are intentional and in other cases they say SharePoint copied them (well, copied AquaLogic User Interaction)!

• Business Dictionary as a role based catalog of information assets. Seems like SharePoint’s Business Data Catalog.  This should be an interesting battle since SharePoint’s BDC is clearly a version 1.0 work-in-progress and Oracle has a lot of expertise to bring here being a database company at heart.
• Federated search. ‘Nuff said.
• Office integration. Clients I speak with expect Microsoft will always have the best Office integration, but there are cases where Microsoft’s internal silos or some good ideas can expose openings.  Oracle showed a nice Word sidebar for document management that had people, versions, etc.
• Slide sorter. This was a neat feature that SharePoint offered, but Oracle’s version seems to leapfrog it. They demoed picking all the slides for a sales deck. Oracle calls this a “folio” or compound document. Oracle acquired a neat little company called “Outside In” that has sophisticated filters for productivity files.  Blending this into Web Center can provide for some good Office integration.

Oracle did a fine job of acknowledging the need to work with SharePoint and others.  But the meat boils down to their WSRP producer running on .NET, selective metadata consumption, and Ensemble (a reverse proxy solution).  Hopefully this gets beefed up with more programmatic integration, discovery tools, and guidance so it requires less reliance on WSRP.

Of all the competitors, WebCenter is the newest architecture from the ground up.  Being the youngest has its advantages.  Since WebCenter is newly architected it feels like it more seamlessly integrates new concepts like tagging, linking, social connections, and REST services than IBM and MSFT where it’s more bolted on. So they’re better at utilizing these features across the suite that Microsoft and a little bit better than IBM.

But will Oracle – the whole company – give WebCenter the resources it needs to win the marketplace(not just the resources required to be a good and useful product)?  In the Q&A session, Oracle President Charles Phillips said there are “No plans to have middleware broken out in reporting. We have lots of product lines, we’re getting more with Sun… ” This hits at the perennial knock on Oracle’s efforts around knowledge infrastructure – lack of push and commitment.  Oracle did talk about how much revenue Fusion pulled in, the growth rate, penetration, etc.  That would indicate the company would have to care.  But still, Microsoft manages to report on four breakouts (Client, Server and Tools, Online Services Business, Microsoft Business Division, Entertainment and Devices Division).  Oracle sticks to two (Applications, Database and Middleware).  Sun will add at least one more (servers and hardware).  If Oracle is dedicated to the enormous space between enterprise apps and the database, breaking out middleware from the database would be a great way to track and prove this commitment.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog

A bunch of quick news hits from Google:

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt was interviewed on NPR yesterday where he was asked about privacy.

Mr. Schmidt said:

our company makes a commitment to people to respect people’s privacy and their personal information because it’s central to the trust that we have with end users … I don’t think anyone wants everything revealed. That’s why we have doors and shades and so forth.

But Google didn’t seem to care too much about privacy last year when it latched onto a common legal chiche to claim full license (just to promote its services) to anything people submit or even display on Google’s sites. Or when it added an “incognito mode” to Chrome to protect your privacy, but also added a unique id buried in each browser as described in Google’s privacy notice for Chrome.

And Google’s belief in security-through-obscurity hampers its principled standpoint on privacy.  When people granted access to a shared doc in Google Apps can find older versions of the doc’s attachments just by knowing the URL, that’s not protecting privacy. Presciently, a commenter on the TechCrunch blog said “Doesn’t beta imply ‘This thing is buggy. Use it at your own risk?”  That leads to the next bit of news …

Google finally took the “beta” tag off some of their most popular webware, such as Gmail, according to the Google OS blog.

As the commenter I mention above demonstrates, many (most?) people assume beta = buggy.  Or, from the vendor’s point of view, the right to dismiss bugs by saying “well, it’s beta!”  As a former commercial software developer, I can attest that my publisher considered beta to be more about the number of bugs in the system, not features.  The GA version of software was about the same as the beta, but it reliably worked. 

In the Gmail blog, Keith Coleman, Gmail’s Product Director, performs the artful dodge.  He asks the correct question “why Google keeps its products in beta for so long”.  He then evades answering it with a bunch of “some say”, “some people thought”, “others said that” statements, then jumps to “The end result (many visible and invisible changes later) is that today, beta is a thing of the past. Not just for Gmail, but for all of Google Apps — Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Talk.”  Thanks, Keith, for telling me how people not in charge of Gmail would answer the question, but “some say” your answer is the one we’re looking for. 

Mr. Coleman points to a set of great features they’ve added, as if to say “we must have awfully high standards if all these features are needed to get past beta”.  But a product generally comes out of beta when it has the basic administrative features needed to make it usable and a high level of reliability. 

I think Mr. Coleman’s real answer that others said for him is that “over the last five years, a beta culture has grown around web apps, such that the very meaning of ‘beta’ is debatable.”  If the term beta is now useless, that seems to be an argument not to use it rather than to throw it on everything for years.  Just standing behind your product is better than trying to redefine a term to make it meaningless.

Free version of Google Apps gets buried, then emerges

The Google OS blog jokes (?) that “the free edition, … is still available, despite Google’s efforts to make it more difficult to find”.  After TechCrunch reported on Google Apps Standard Edition (GASE) being buried, it partially resurfaced.  There’s now a link to GASE, but without the key word “free” or a comparison of features.  So it’s there, but a bit obscured. This fuels speculation that there’s a split inside Google regarding whether the free version of Google Apps should be pushed, hidden, or hobbled.  I suspect wiser minds will prevail and the free version will emerge into the full daylight again. 

Google launches an operating system

I’m saving the best for last here.  This is the most interesting of the recent spurt of news hits from Google.  As many suspected (and Google openly acknowledged) when the Chrome browser was released, their intent was to create a platform for web applications to run on more than a place to browse web pages. 

Now Google has announced the Google Chrome Operating System, targeted at lightweight devices like netbooks.  Indeed, targeting heftier PCs would ruin the point of the venture, which is to say you don’t need local storage and processing when the cloud is there to serve you. 

The OS won’t be ready until 2010 (does that mean beta in 2010, which means GA in 2017?).  I’m interested to see it.  The lesson Microsoft has learned about operating systems on small devices is that you can’t start with a full-scale OS and start trimming – you have to start fresh and build the OS for light weight from the ground up.  There’s a lot of room for improvement in lightweight OS and Google is in a good position to rethink the problem with web apps in mind.  But please – don’t make it advertising funded!  Sidebars and popups with ads on some web sites I can live with, but not on my desktop.  And the issues behind the news items above – beta (buggy) software, privacy, pricing model consistency – become even more important with an operating system.  Google will have to form a companywide consensus to these 3 issues before plowing into the OS biz.

L. Gordon Crovitz provides an attention management primer in today’s WSJ.  “Information Overload? Relax” is worth reading or pointing others too as a quick summary of information overload, the idea of managing it, and attention.  Best quote:

Rather than pitch our BlackBerrys and iPhones into the sea, imagine the benefits once we have figured out how to manage the chaos of endless data and routine multitasking, a process that will help refine our judgment about information and refocus our attention on what’s truly important.

Mr. Crovitz describes both ends of the information overload spectrum.  I wrote about this previously, saying “There’s no ‘right’ answer in the debate between those that believe information overload will soon cause the heads of information workers will begin to pop like popcorn as they slump over in their fuzzy cubicles and those that believe we’re just adapting to the new flow.”  Mr. Crovitz comes down 100% on the “we’ll adapt” side of the spectrum in this article, but I believe it’s a rhetorical device since he has generally been on the “it’s a crisis” side of the spectrum in previous columns on this subject.

The only minor quibble I have with his article is where he says:

As one data point, a search for “Information Overload” on Google returns 2.92 million results in 0.37 second.

No, actually, if you search on “information overload” with quotes around it Google returns 1.53 million results.  He searched on information overload without quotes which returns anything with those two words close together.  As you can see in the figure below, the noise he’s including in the search results involves iron overload (hemochromatosis), a serious but rather separate issue.  Granted, 1.53 million is still a lot, but using the tool properly trims almost 50% of the noise from the result set. 

The built-in irony of that meta-mistake is brilliant.  Mr. Crovitz misuses a tool that is, itself, a symbol of the overabundance of information at our fingertips – while searching for the term that names that overabundance!  I don’t mean to pound on Mr. Crovitz – I wish to use this instance to demonstrate a point: that while technology cannot solve information overload, it can be part of the solution.  Before getting into fancy R&D projects and algorithms that try to formulate probabilistic estimates of which news items may be of interest or how to automagically prioritize your inbox, people should learn to use the basic features that already exist.  If information overload bothers you, it’s worth the effort to learn basic attentional features of the tools you use.  By “attentional” I mean how they can help you pull important information forward and push less important information back from the reader’s point of focus.  Quotes around words that are only of interest when together is just one example.

Some of the great research work that IBM was doing around virtual worlds has now made it onto enterprise desktops through IBM’s announcement of the availability of the “Virtual Collaboration for Lotus Sametime” plugin for Lotus Sametime 8.0.1 or later.  An OpenSimulator instance runs on the server and connects to Sametime through a bridge. There is a web client, although most users would probably use the SecondLife client.

The plugin provides 3 enterprise virtual world environments that I’d classify as virtual collaboration: collaboration spaces, boardrooms (meeting rooms), and theatres (see details in the slideshow below or the YouTube video).

It looks like neat stuff to me.  And from what I can tell, there’s no cost to Sametime users to add this since OpenSimulator and the SecondLife client are free.  Even though this has moved from research to general availability, I still consider it an experiment.  Now is when early adopters can start playing around with this, find good uses, and report their stories back to start assembling a business case.  I haven’t had a chance yet to read the “Business Value Study” they reference. From my research last year, the best business cases were around rehearsal and training, not virtual collaboration, but I look forward to seeing what they came up with once I get past Catalyst season.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.

I recently posted a set of ideas for improving e-mail from the point of view of enterprise attention management.  It listed 15 ideas that would help e-mail users (which is pretty much everybody these days) to allocate their attention more efficiently to their daily tasks, whether that means more attention to some e-mails or less.

One of the items I listed on was this:

Remind sender if no reply

Avoid “dropping the ball” with e-mails by adding a simple checkbox indicating if an e-mail being sent should alert the sender if no reply is received within a given time (like 3 days). Too often post mortems indicate that a message was never replied to, the sender forgot about it (“fire and forget”), and the task was therefore left in limbo.

I cannot overstate the importance of closing the loop on communications between senders and receivers.  Especially when you combine important messages with “weak” connections (meaning they are unlikely to speak often and are unlikely to have other chances to reiterate the information and check up to see if a message was delivered).  Getting medical test results fits this pattern to a tee.  In fact, when I added this item as one of the 15 ideas, I did so knowing that it had a very personal connection to my life.  Today’s WSJ described why (6/23/09, pD4, “Make Sure You Get Test Results”).  I can’t find the exact article online, but here’s a summary from the USA Today:

No news isn’t necessarily good news for patients waiting for the results of medical tests. The first study of its kind finds doctors failed to inform patients of abnormal cancer screenings and other test results 1 out of 14 times.

The failure rate was higher at some doctors’ offices, as high as 26% at one office. Few medical practices had explicit methods for how to tell patients, leaving each doctor to come up with a system. In some offices, patients were told if they didn’t hear anything, they could assume their test results were normal.

… “If bad things happen to patients that could have been prevented, that will lead to higher costs and in some cases considerably higher costs,” Casalino said.

I can vouch for “considerably higher costs.” At the risk of being overly personal or melodramatic, the issue mentioned in the study was the primary likely contributor of the death of an immediate family member of mine last year.  When the “fire and forget” mechanism I describe involves a communication from a lab to a physician, that message can be important indeed.  In the case I mention, a message indicating a negative result and recommending more tests was sent, but the recipient claimed to have not gotten the message.  By the time the proper tests were run a few years later, the condition had progressed from highly curable (85% chance of survival past 5 years) to terminal (15% chance).

The “confirmed delivery” features of e-mail programs may be of some assistance, although in my experience recipients often do not acknowledge receipt and I’m not sure how consistent implementation is between e-mail systems.  Besides, what I’m recommending is the opposite – a “delivery wasn’t confirmed” response.  In cases like those described in the cancer screening study, “fire and forget” messaging can have very serious consequences.

I’m just putting the finishing touches on a new document on Enterprise Attention Management.  This one will be a short primer on our view of the subject.  It’s been over two years since my main document on EAM was published and my thinking has evolved as I’ve hit questions from people at presentations and in private conversations.  It’s also been shaped by the press coverage of information overload and e-mail overload – often by encouraging me to put warning signs in front of some slippery slopes that they wander into: Counting all distractions as interruptions?  Lumping interruptions into information overload?  Using 100% focus and efficiency as the benchmark to compare “cost of overload” to?  Assuming only tips and tricks for individuals can chip away at it?  Yeesh!

After a brief description of what enterprise attention management is and its business context, I describe 4 points that are key for my position on EAM:

1. Not Everyone Feels Overloaded

As strongly as you and a few like-minded people may feel about the impacts of information overload, a lot more people just don’t notice or care.  But improving efficiency and reaction time: that’s something everyone can get behind.  Get away from having to shake everyone awake about the “problem” and its a lot easier for others to get on board with your efficiency argument.

2. Key People in an Organization Can Take Action to Improve Efficiency of Information Workers

You can try to organize your little information garden and give tips to your teammates to do the same and one small portion of your company will breathe a little easier.  But there are a few people who select the gardening tools and set expectations for everyone’s gardens – they have a different set of things they can do to help everyone in the organization.

3. Use EAM as a Lens to Understand Impacts of New Information-based Technologies

Enterprise attention management can be used as a lens to analyze how various technologies and programs will impact the attention of information workers.  One recent example of applying this architecture is the “EAM for e-mail” posting I did here.

4. Influence Process and Culture Selectively

An evangelical approach to “information overload” starts with declaring it “bad” and then figuring out how to force people not to overload each other.  A more practical approach does not see lots of information as good or bad, but rather focuses on efficiency and looks for key moments when processes and culture can be influenced.  These include teachable moments, such as new hire training or rolling out a new technology.  They do not include an e-mail blast or interoffice memo out of nowhere telling everyone how they should now behave.

In my last posting I listed 15 ideas for improving the attentional characteristics of e-mail (in other words, addressing “email overload” or “inbox overload”).  There are now a couple of efforts underway to describe how these ideas are currently or can be applied to popular e-mail clients.

First, Ed Brill of IBM picked up the gauntlet and summoned Lotus users to describe “which of these attention management issues you’ve addressed in your e-mail environment.”  I’ve been both a Notes and Outlook user and suspect Notes will fare a bit better when measured against an enterprise attention management yardstick.  I’m interested to see what Ed’s readers can tell about their environments.

And Jack Vinson of the Knowledge Jolt blog has created a wiki to track which e-mail products can meet these requirements and which cannot.  I encourage any and all e-mail experts to peruse the table and update it with information on how to accomplish these attention shielding tasks in each e-mail client. 

BTW – I think it’s important to note how difficult it would be to accomplish these modifications: default, one-click (contextual option the user can easily find and select), multiple clicks (buried in option lists; requires some assembly), third party solution, or programmatic.

The most popular “overload” topic in offices today is e-mail.  But after all these years of incremental improvement to IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, surely there can’t be any low-hanging fruit left to pick to help people manage inbox overload.  Or is there?

The Enterprise Attention Management Conceptual Architecture to the rescue!  Rather than relying on a set of personal pet peeves or specific annoyances that have happened in recent memory, a model such as the EAM conceptual architecture provides a systematic approach for analyzing the attentional characteristics of a system.

The EAM architecture is intended for use by organizations to examine individual technologies or whole systems (such as the information worker desktop) that are suspected of causing explicit (information stress) or implicit (poor decision making, slow reaction to new information) information handling problems.  With systems it can be used for gap analysis.  Here I use it as an intuition pump to reveal a set of potential enhancements to e-mail software that would improve its attentional characteristics.

Click on the thumbnail below and scroll around to see the ideas that came out of my informal analysis of e-mail. Also, here is a quick summary of the recommended improvements (going clockwise from the upper-left of the diagram):

• Scheduled delivery
• Maintain whitelists to bypass blocks and delays
• “Move to discussion” greys out “reply”
• Automated routing and prioritizing? Not yet
• Un-bury turning off or freezing of “toasts” (alerts)
• Enable e-mail hyperlinking
• Enable role-based profiles
• Enable sender tagged e-mails
• Stop attachment abuse
• Presence-enable recipient lists
• Enable group-based rules
• Turn e-mail into generic small-content tool
• Manage multiple inboxes
• Provide inbox analytics
• Token systems
• Remind sender if no reply

Caveat: I’m not an e-mail expert.  It’s possible that some e-mail systems can already do these things outright, with some configuration, or with simple coding.  If so, great, although they should be no more than one click away.  In the meantime, my inbox is filling up as I wait for these capabilities in the next version of e-mail programs.

This is a quick apology to readers of my blog who have had poor response or enormous content on the first page recently.  I’ve been doing backups of my blog and my process results in temporary content overload for readers.

For those with a WordPress blog that want to create a usable backup for archival or re-use purposes (like copy/pasting into documents or creating a book), here’s how I’ve done it.

• First, ignore the convenient “Tools, Export” option unless you’re an XML jockey or have found a ready-made tool or schema that can utilize a WordPress WXR file.  I looked and couldn’t find an easy way to consume this file.
• From your admin dashboard, go to Settings, Reading.  Set it to show 1000 blog posts (or however many is needed to cover all your posts), show full text for each article, and select the categories you want to show. Then save the changes and view your blog.
• Now you have everything you’ve written in one big, long web page.  Copy paste it into a text editor or Word, or just use “save as web page complete” from your browser. 
• Also note you can click on one category to create an extract of everything you’ve written on one subject if you’re using categories.

Another fun use for this is to run some content analytics.  For example, I found that to date I’ve written:

• 12,496 words on Virtual Worlds
• 21,264 words on Portals
• 43,248 words on Attention Management (90 full-sized pages or 135 pages in standard business paperback form)

Just an example of the fun you can have repurposing your blog.  I’m sure the same type of process would work for other blogging systems as well like TypePad or Blogger.