"The torrent of unwanted, unsolicited, and sometimes fraudulent email is eroding our trust in technology, costing businesses billions of dollars a year, and decreasing our collective ability to realize technology's full potential." 

We'd all agree that, for the most part, this problem has not gotten better in the seven years that have passed since Mr. Gates' statement.  If anything, business communications have become more complicated with the advent of new, often disparate communications tools available to knowledge workers.  As a result, we see many companies wrestling to create private communications networks for employees, customers, and partners.

Fortunately, corporate planners simply need look to a business process integration platform, such as Microsoft's SharePoint 2010, to address this challange.  A toolbox like SharePoint makes it relatively easy for organizations to implement secured text and instant messaging, content management, collaboration and telecom tools, which not only support the desired communication channels and devices, but also provide much needed management and auditing mechanisms.  These private networks help knowledge workers stay focused on business related tasks by filtering out frivolous content and making valuable data easier to find and share.

Technology news publication CRN.com recently posted the related obituary: 

E-mail is dead. It died surrounded by friends, family, corporate networks, hackers and users from all over the world.

Its survivors include SMS Text Messaging, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, BlackBerry messaging, iPhone's Facetime and dozens of collaboration applications.

Born in research labs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961, e-mail rose to prominence in the late 1980s through the late 1990s with services including CompuServe, AOL (nee America Online), as well as client/server computing. It reached adolescence with the growth of Microsoft Exchange and Outlook and Lotus Notes.

Often described during those years as a "killer app," e-mail solved business and communication problems encountered by far-flung national and international organizations. It eventually expanded into areas including contact management and calendaring, becoming a staple of communication.

While e-mail technically remained a strong, must-have piece of software, problems began to emerge by the late 1990s with the advent of the "Nigerian Prince" scams and emergence of "reply all" abuse. E-mail often began to find itself as a weapon of choice by office weasels everywhere, who sought to build audit trails to prove that co-workers did, in fact, read the memo at 4:57 p.m. on a Friday.

E-mail's future, however, began to come into serious question with the issue of spam. Then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, in 2003, told the U.S. Senate in testimony:

"The torrent of unwanted, unsolicited, often offensive and sometimes fraudulent e-mail is eroding trust in technology, costing business billions of dollars a year, and decreasing our collective ability to realize technology's full potential."

After the dot-com meltdown, U.S. government prosecutors found that they had a treasure trove of potential evidence against companies contained in their e-mail archives--and the federal government enacted the Sarbanes-Oxley law to force public companies to protect and save e-mail. Microsoft, for example, was almost required to break itself into smaller companies because of evidence antitrust investigators found, ironically enough, through e-mail exchanges by Bill Gates and Microsoft executives.

Elsewhere, businesses found their e-mail systems hacked and customer and corporate data either stolen, destroyed or lost, costing untold millions of dollars. Other businesses found themselves spending untold billions of dollars on e-mail-specific security.

Late last month, Facebook announced it would integrate various aspects of messaging--including e-mail--into its social networking service to provide enhanced communication. E-mail could never recover.

A memorial service for e-mail will be held, continuously, on Twitter at the hashtag, #email.

With representative companies supporting work forces between 100 and 10,000, the study compared the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions equated to on-premise and cloud versions of regularly-used business productivity applications, such as email, content management, and CRM.  Findings show that smaller businesses can reduce their effective carbon footprint by as much as 90%, while large corporation should see around a 30% reduction.

Likening a company’s data infrastructure to an urban freeway system, cloud computing would be taking the bus to work or joining a carpool, only without the sacrifice in convenience or performance.  This analogy is based on the consideration that the average server, in the average company, utilizes about 10% of its capacity.  The on-premise server therefore is the single passenger car, which would expend the same amount of energy if it was full of coworkers.

Further citing economies of scale created by higher utilization of servers, dynamic provisioning, and multi-tenancy, researchers conclude that cloud computing is an opportunity for organizations of all sizes to create efficiencies and energy savings not possible with their current information management infrastructures. 

Read more at Forbes.comand download a detailed whitepaper from Microsoft Environment.

For those looking to develop and implement horizontal portals, Gartner has recently published its Magic Quadrant report, which amongst other things, shows that with a shift towards Web 2.0, cloud and consumer facing portals, the number of viable vendors has dropped from more than 50 in 2003 to less than a dozen in 2010.

According to Gartner, there is increased pressure on enterprises to improve employee productivity and collaboration, as well as extend business processes and applications to wider audiences.

There is also pressure to generally improve business visibility and responsiveness, which is driving demand for portals that can manage all the different channels and all the different information they contain.

Portals and UXP

Increasingly, they span both cloud and on-premise deployments pulling together disparate information sources, as well as offering the possibly of scaling-to-needs to ensure agility.

And already, Gartner says, horizontal portals are providing the foundation for user experience platforms (UXP) that provide integration of technologies used to deliver portals, mashups, RIAs, Ajax-enabled websites, web content management and mobile applications.

Furthermore, portals are evolving with new web 2.0 technologies and while they still contain ‘traditional’ portal technologies, they also include new capabilities including social computing, analytics and business process management.

All the portal products covered in this Magic Quadrant are inherently "cloud friendly," and most are able to produce and consume Web services through portlets, widgets and r(REST)ful approaches.

Magic Quadrant Portal Leaders

So who made it into the top five? Here they are in alphabetical order.

1. IBM

IBM has an extensive presence across all regions and industry segments. It complements its primary product, WebSphere Portal Server, with a variety of related technologies, including Lotus Web Content Management, Lotus Connections, IBM Mashup Center and Tivoli Access Manager/Identity Manager.

Strengths

WebSphere Portal Server has the widest set of portal capabilities of all the product vendors with deployments across all verticals. It has a long list of complementary technologies so there is little that can’t be done with this.

Caution

It has a very heavy software footprint and needs WebSphere Application Server as its platform. Used with other complementary products it also has a substantial code set that needs to be deployed and integrated. It can also be quite pricey for some enterprises.

2. Liferay

According to Gartner, despite the fact that Liferay Portal is very small it is the subject of a huge number of Gartner inquiries reflecting not just its positive attributes, but also the fact that many enterprises are not happy with other commercial products that come with high costs, complexity and less-than-hoped-for business value.

Strengths

Incorporates new features very easily because of its open source base including social networking and support for CMIS. Its standards-oriented, Java-based portal offers rapid time to value.

Cautions

It is competing in a well established market with big players while still only employing 200 people. It has limited enterprise experience and is self-funded, which also limits the company’s ability to grow. However, this also gives it independence to grow along its own lines.

3. Microsoft

What new can be said about SharePoint? SharePoint has a large and expanding range of capabilities across portal, collaboration, content management, enterprise search, business process management and business intelligence disciplines.

SharePoint 2010 promises numerous improvements that better equip it as an enterprise portal framework and as an environment for creating and delivering composite applications.

Strengths

Built on a unified and consistent architecture, it has found its way into enterprises through a wide range of business and IT initiatives, not all of which are identified as portals.

It is the only large portal vendor with a multitenant, elastic cloud portal with a focus on office productivity and collaboration.

Cautions

Using SharePoint as a portal framework means a long-term commitment to Microsoft's agenda, with organizations employing SharePoint forced to invest in the .NET platform and the skills needed to support it.

It has also grown in many enterprises outside the scope of the reasons for its original deployment so there are also often governance concerns.

4. Oracle

Its portal products revolve around the WebCenter Suite with WebCenter Framework providing the base line technology for its portal software. While it provides a portal platform, it also includes social networking capabilities and content management. It also serves as the front end for Oracle BPM Suite, as well as a composite application platform.

Gartner says it is still receiving inquiries about portal-related offerings from Stellent and Siebel, but that as the products converge into a single platform they are all being marketed and sold as part of the WebCenter Suite.

Strengths

Oracle is established as an application and infrastructure provider and has a strong motivation to provide a complete UXP.

Its portal technology is up and running in many companies and shares its base with Oracle's business applications (including PeopleSoft, Siebel and Oracle E-Business Suite). It can also serve as a unifying interface for its Middleware stable.

Cautions

Gartner says that queries indicate that many companies are confused as to Oracle’s strategy as they see anything between five and eight different approaches to addressing portal needs. Its ecosystem of system integrators is still in flux largely as a result of its acquisitions into many different spaces.

5. SAP

Mainly used as a web enabler and delivery mechanism for SAP business apps, Gartner says SAP is looking to make SAP NetWeaver Portal a business workplace in itself.

The new Enterprise Workspaces will allow organizations to develop personal and team oriented sites, enabling users access to SAP and non-SAP information into the environment.

Strengths

SAP NetWeaver Portal has a strong foothold amongst businesses and is almost mandatory for users that rely on SAP applications for ERP, supplier relationship management (SRM), business intelligence, CRM, product life cycle management (PLM) and human capital management (HCM).

Recent developments in v7.3 are extending its usefulness, while SAP is looking to improve the user experience right across the board.

Cautions

NetWeaver Portal's role has become obscured as a growing number of user interaction technologies have been released including SAP GUI, the NetWeaver Business Client, Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP.

Many SAP customers limit SAP NetWeaver Portal's role relative to more-open, flexible and user-friendly portal frameworks.

There is a lot more in this report, including the top challengers in the market, and is well worth a look. If you want to read the report in full you can download it here.

Via CMSWire

A picture is worth a thousand words and the following one tells it all: mobile technologies and work habits will shake things up in the enterprise:

Are you surprised that mobile leads with 40% of the vote and that social media tools only captured 14%? Both are critical elements to how we communicate and collaborate today. And the reality is that more and more people have a mobile device of some kind. Even more importantly, as Billy Cripe, VP of Marketing at Fishbowl Solutions, a consulting firm focused on content management solutions, puts it:

"Mobile devices are hyper-ubiquitous. It’s not just that everyone has them, it’s that everyone has one WITH them."

This fact alone presents organizations with a huge opportunity, and a huge challenge. First of all, to be competitive, many organizations have gone global, which means they are sending their employees across the country and across the world. This means they need to provide access to their information to a broader mobile workforce than ever before. Second, we are living in a world of virtual offices, with employees spread across the global in some instances.

The fact that employees have their own mobile devices removes the need for organizations to both supply and support the hardware and technology, but it also means they need to support information access on a broad array of devices, and they need to be aware of the security and compliance issues that could arise from employees using their devices for both personal and professional needs.

Apoorv Durga, an analyst from the Real Story Group adds this:  "…i do believe mobile will be big, especially in developing countries where mobile penetration is more than computer penetration. Orgs will need to think beyond Blackberries and iPhones and think about more broadbase support of delivery to different handsets."

Why Is Mobile Suited to Information Management?

Cripe says mobile devices shortcut access to information,

"Mobile devices shortcut the access to information. – fewer clicks / keystrokes to get to the info I need/want. This means accessing information, even tangentially related information is much less disruptive than access on a laptop/desktop/netbook."

He also believes there are a number of content centric business requirements that are well suited to mobile ECM, like Sales enablement, as opposed to traditional email. 

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.net, a cloud based content management provider, sees mobile as the next big disruptor for enterprise content management (ECM), saying

"…[mobile] is an incredible opportunity to rethink and redesign how content is presented and consumed. Across software categories, the mobile phone's form and inherent size limitations are helping to accelerate a broader shift from cumbersome, overloaded platforms to more streamlined, user-friendly and sexier business applications."

Cheryl McKinnon, CMO of open source Enterprise CMS vendor Nuxeo, agrees that mobile presents big opportunities:

"The information worker of 2010 and beyond is desk-bound no more. Mobile is what we are, and agile is our goal in this fast-moving and competitive world of work. … we need to be able to create, edit, consume and re-use content from inside and outside our formal corporate systems wherever and whenever the need to work presents itself."

But What About Social Media?

It may not be seen as the leading disruptor for information management, but it's still seen as important. As more and more organizations look to integrate some social aspects into their business systems and provide Enterprise 2.0 technologies to support effective collaboration, we may see this percentage increase in a later poll.

According to Dion Hinchcliffe, Senior VP at social business consulting firm Dachis Group:

"Even as organizations have strategically started to embrace social business, the global changes driven by widespread social computing are still ongoing. A confluence of large scale behavior change and co-evolutionary Internet-based technological progress are driving important new trends in 2010. While some of these are somewhat early stage, a few are more advanced and nearly upon us. By and large, most of these are still under the radar of enterprises today."

It may be that many see integrated social media capabilities as a natural enhancement to enterprise content management whereas mobile is about the accessibility of information in a way that helps us respond more quickly.

In fact, one of the social business trends that Hinchcliffe speaks of in his article, Six Social Business Trends to Watch, is "mobile experience as the primary social channel". This makes the point that mobile is about the channel, not the information.

Final Thoughts

Organizations will face significant information management challenges over the next few years. Staying competitive will demand that leaders take them on. Getting out in front will require more — brave experimentation, broad cultural adaptation and a willingness to invest in the future of enterprise information management.

Advancing information management strategy via integration of mobile and social media tools and practices looks like it will be one of the keys to success. The road ahead will cross these new ways of working and collaborating with search, knowledge management, business intelligence and compliance. That's not going to be simple, cheap or smooth. On the upside, it sure won't be boring either.

Via CMSWire

By Jeff Carr  

The rules of the game are changing, and they’re changing faster than ever before. You’ve seen the signs because they have been there for quite some time. Yet, if you’re like many organizations out there, you’re not sure how best to engage or even where to start.

You know you can’t afford to wait much longer and you’d like to develop a comprehensive strategy but that takes time, expertise and resources, all of which have become a scarcity in today’s harsh economic environment.

Are We Wasting Time?

With more than a billion users now online, every minute of every day millions of people participate in online conversations that take place across a multitude of social networking sites, blogs, discussion forums, wikis and topical communities. Included is the exchange of information and opinion around well thought out and researched articles, shorter more concisely written blog posts or 140 character tweets on services like Twitter, plus everything in between.

The collaborative architecture of today’s social technology has rapidly become a key enabler in providing users with the capability to publish any thought, idea, feeling or opinion on any topic at any time, for free. As a consequence of the inherent nature of these participatory social systems, average users have gained an increasingly higher level of leverage due to the ease with which their perspectives can be virally spread from person to person and community to community with little or no effort required on their part. As the number of users continue to grow, so too will their involvement, further compounding the already exponential growth of information being generated.

What if the messages dispersed are of detriment to your organization? How long will it take for you to hear about them and how will you react? Alternatively, what if they represent an opportunity? Will you be ready to take action by being first to respond?

The real challenge for any organization becomes how best to filter through it all and place it into a context that’s not only relevant but actionable. If done correctly, it has the potential to offer a gold mine full of insight into your industry derived from those that matter most, your customers.

The Importance of Restraint

As simple as it is to just jump into the social infrastructure and get started, the best approach is to use a little restraint. Starting with the technology and approaching social media with a mind-set of “let’s just get out there and be a face in the crowd” is sure to result in a disastrous outcome.

An earlier report by Gartner predicted that by the beginning of 2010 more than 60% of fortune 1000 companies will have had participated in some form of online community for the purpose of building customer relationships. At least half of these they said, were expected to fail due to an inability “to establish mutual purpose, ultimately eroding customer and company values” (see A Chronology of Brands that Got Punk’d by Social Media for a list of some examples where this has come to fruition). There’s a lot at stake with arguably the most important being reputation.

Consequently, as a first step, it’s crucial you take time to gather, document and gain a clear understanding of your goals and ultimately, what you’re trying to accomplish through social media. How will you know if what you’re doing is successful unless you first define what that success is going to look like?

There are typically many internal stakeholders with oftentimes conflicting perspectives and it’s important that you make every attempt to break down those organizational silos to get the right people, from the right groups, in the room to ensure everyone works from the same basic set of fundamental principles with respect to the organization’s overall goals, marketing objectives and key messaging. The wisdom of the crowds, as they say, need also apply internally as well. Successful strategy is a cross-disciplinary responsibility.

Listen, Engage, Measure and Enhance

Once you’ve got your cross representative team in place and overall objectives defined, market research will help to identify where your customers, associations, vendors, suppliers and competition are actively involved online. What communities are they in? Who are the key players? Who has influence and who doesn’t?

The purpose here is to ensure you are going to where the meaningful conversations are and not wasting valuable time and resources in places where they are not. Survey the landscape to determine where the best opportunities for entry exist and begin to outline approaches that commence the process of connecting with the people and groups that matter most.

Four key actionable areas to consider as part of your social media implementation include:

• Listening - Observing and monitoring the voice of the industry as it is being expressed by participants in their everyday communications. The goal is to establish an understanding of overall sentiment by listening to what customers are saying. Also note what your competitors doing and try to determine if are there any opportunities to partner with vendors or suppliers that might already be engaged.
• Engaging - Becoming an active participant in the conversation by connecting with customers through the appropriate channels. Look to contribute value based on insight captured throughout your monitoring activities. Try not to be too ambitious by tackling all avenues at once. Start small, establish a connection and then look to expand on your success. Keep in mind that it’s not a race; it’s about listening, learning and evolving.
• Measuring - Establishing a metrics program that uses hard data captured through analytics and other feedback mechanisms to measure if what you are doing is moving you toward your goals. Perform an analysis on a recurrent basis and review and evaluate the results with the overall team to identify both positive and negative trends.
• Enhancing - Keep in mind that it’s an evolution that requires an iterative approach. Leverage the results of your measurement to make incremental improvements to your methodology based on the things you learn as you go. Don’t be afraid to be creative, flexible and constantly adjusting in an effort to create contributions that offer value to the community as a whole.

Bear in mind that as you develop out your strategy, transparency must be a key component. Make certain that you clearly identify who you are, what you do and why you’re there. Social media, although centered on a person or organization, is truly about building relationships, the most important part of which use trust as the foundation. Unlike traditional marketing, it shouldn’t be viewed as a medium for pushing your message out to your audience but rather treated as a conversation or a two way street for sharing information, listening to concerns and developing mutual solutions to common problems.

Success Starts at the Top

Lastly but definitely not least, without the support of your Executive team you’re likely doomed for failure from the start. As the voice for your organization, it’s your responsibility to ensure senior level leadership clearly understands not only what the goals are, but how and why social media are the vehicle for attainment. Implementation and management are an iterative process requiring sustained care and attention and as such, you will need ongoing support in the way of budget, time and dedicated resources.

While your organization and the communities you represent are unique in your own way, addressing each of the areas outlined above as part of an overall strategy will be sure to get you moving in the right direction and on to building better quality relationships with those that matter most. Ultimately, your strategy will be to uncover issues, identify opportunity, produce market intelligence and develop deeper, longer-lasting relationships with industry stakeholders by understanding their voice as it is expressed by them in their own words. Your success depends on your ability to listen and add value.

Via CMSWire