Drupal started in 2001 as a bulletin board and it has continued to integrate new functionality as web 2.0 emerged. It is now on Version six, soon to be seven. Drupal is a internally hosted platform which provides significant flexibility in design and functionality. Not all community requirements fit into the categories of blogs, wikis, forums, etc. Because of Drupal’s many add-ons, it can go in many directions. For example, a bicycle community is focused around rides. It needs to provide easy ways to provide the general data on rides such as titles of rides, their distance, difficulty, comments and reviews, ability to upload pictures, Google map integration, etc. It also needs to cover specific instances of the ride such as organizer, start time, variations in route, etc. See the screen shot of a bicycle community home page below.

This does not easily fit into a standard community format but with the Drupal components, the specific requirements of this community can be more easily constructed. Here is a page on a specific ride.

Here is the page to set up a ride.

This rich functionality was, until recently, only available to the technically accomplished, leaving out many potential users, including me. It is being used by such web sites as Fast Company, the Onion, Amnesty International, and the AOL Developer Network but these sites have excellent technical resources. For the rest of us, Drupal was not only hard to get started but it was also difficult to find the right add-on modules from the many options. Acquia was formed at the end of 2007 to solve this problem and make the rich functionally available to all. They have developed a commercially supported version and selected and certified the best modules. They also offer documentation and technical support for the version and modules they support. There is an installation package with additional documentation. If difficulties arise in the supported version or add-ons, Acquia will fix them. They also offer hosted network services such as automated updates and spam blocking. You still do not pay from Drupal, itself, just the Acquia services. These will become available second half of 2008.

Acquia has an excellent blog with many contributors. In fact their web presence started in a blog format. They now have expanded to a more traditional web site while retaining the blog as an active communication channel. Every new employee is expected to introduce themselves on the blog within a few weeks of joining the firm and the blog draws good traffic. Acquia uses the term social publishing to describe their offering since it integrates many aspects of social software. I think Acquia will be a welcome addition to the both enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0

Web 2.0 has changed the workplace considerably, so it’s no surprise that even the hiring process is evolving. There are now new tools and techniques when it comes to hiring, making the process easier and more convenient for both applicants and employers.

Background research. Many employers are using social networks for background research. It wouldn’t be a surprise if an applicant’s Facebook profile would have more weight than what his or her references have to say. This is probably because researching an applicant through social networks is incredibly easy. Also, these profiles tend to give you a more honest look of what your applicant is really like.

Networking. Social networks such as LinkedIn and GuanXi focus on business relationships rather than personal ones. This makes referrals much easier, if you’re looking to hire someone who is just a step away from your trusted business circle. Testimonials and recommendations are also an important feature of these social networks, allowing employers to read the opinions of an applicant’s former colleagues and supervisors.

Unlike personal social networks like MySpace, the profiles on LinkedIn look more like a curriculum vitae. For job applicants, this means that you can instantly update your online resume and send it to others without consuming paper. For employers, the online resume gives them a quick look at the applicant’s history, allowing them to decide beforehand whether this person is worth an interview.

Interviews. One of the local job offers I looked into requested an online interview before a face-to-face one. They had two reasons to do this. First is that they want to be sure that I’m familiar with communication tools they use within the company. Second, it was much easier to arrange due to our conflicting schedules. Online interviews may not be the norm, but they’re certainly more popular, especially for internet-based work.

LinkedIn is such a versatile tool that you can also use it to research the associates and colleagues of your job applicants. What type of people or businesses has he worked with? You can even set an informational interview with them to learn more about an applicant, if you’re interested enough. It’s like these people serve as his unlisted references.

Another noteworthy web 2.0 tool for job interviews is NotchUp, which is still in its beginning stages. Basically, the premise of NotchUp is that sought-after professionals will be paid by companies for an interview. It sounds a little unusual at first, but I can see how it would work. From the business’ perspective, it’s a more affordable alternative to recruiters and online job boards which, frequently, attract less than stellar applicants.

If the success of NotchUp and LinkedIn are indications of what the web can add to the interview process, then other more versatile, more innovative interview tools are out there, simply waiting to be developed or discovered.

Hiring globally. Unlike more traditional hiring processes, you don’t have to limit your search for a new employee locally. This is where the concept of geoarbitrage comes in: you can lessen business costs by hiring from countries that provide the same quality at a lesser price. However, this only works if you have an efficient telecommuting system in place. Off-shoring has been a profitable experience for some, but a disaster for others. Consider your businesses needs before you take this route.

Incorporating Web 2.0 tools into the hiring process eliminates nuisance applicants, time wasters, and expensive advertising methods. Although we’re far from a fully-fledged Web 2.0 hiring system, we’re off to a great start.

Here is the first in a series of demo videos on Connections. This video “focuses on the Activities service, and it goes into some of the new features we’re releasing in the next version of Activities! You can also use this and future videos as training tools on how to get started and learn to use new features.” This is a nice example of video blogs to combine dialog with pictures to provide a more comprehensive message. Thanks to Tomoaki Sawada for pointing out the video through our Facebook connection

Omni’s business is focused on “personal productivity improvement, facilitation, cultural anthropology, and design and communication skills development services.” Managing the rich flow of information available via blogs and RSS feeds is core to Omni’s work; for itself and its clients, it digests, interprets, summarizes, and offers recommendations on the immeasurably large flow of raw information now available. Omni has “abandoned” their traditional website in favor of a its collection of blogs and interactive directory of people.

This is obviously a vision of the future of work for a small slice of the population, but it also triggers thinking about the importance of rediscovering (as Dave says) the value of information intermediaries, and this need will apply in many business and work scenarios. RSS was supposed to help us filter and customize, but Pollard supposes a legion of these intermediaries like the Omni professionals described in the scenario.

What a great conversation that must have been! Wish I’d been there. Now I wonder if future applications will allow us to enable eavesdropping via podcast…

Now you can now add files in three ways: by emailing them into the site, adding them to a discussion, or uploading them directly. Once the files are in the system, GroupSwim provides:

- Tagging and indexing for easy discovery using search
- Capability to managing multiple versions of the document
- Suggestions for related files and discussions based on what you are reading
- Previewing from the web so you don’t need to download in order to see what is there

These are all useful features for the business user. When a file is added, GroupSwim applies their underlying semantic analysis engine to auto-generate tags and complete the indexing. They also auto-generate the related files and discussions through the same engine. A page is generated for the file that includes:
• Document preview and search
• Upload new versions
• Start a related discussion(s)
• Review auto-generated tags and add more
• Identify top contributors to the file
• Browse related content

The screen shot below shows a sample file page. It begins with a description of the file, the previewed file is shown under that and related discussions below the previewed file. The many other actions are available on the right column.

Jason mentioned a high-tech company that started using GroupSwim as the shared collaboration site and knowledge base for their sales force. This client has a complex product and a geographically dispersed sales force. The head of sales was constantly answering the same questions. Now, there is common platform for handling these issues. It was so well received in sales that the rest of the firm is adopting GroupSwim for their internal collaboration and will be rolling out the external Forum product for their customers. This is a great example of an Enterprise 2.0 success story.

One of the GroupSwim’s core features is its semantic engine for understanding and conveying content relationships in a variety of ways. They enhanced their semantic search to automatically check spelling, stemming, and suggest terms to help broaden or narrow your search. Jason showed me an example of all the features. You can see a sample search screen below. Under the search field, you can see the suggestions for narrowing the search. The icon in front of the results glows green to represent content that has high traffic and importance. You can link to other content with the tags on the right side, as well as team members who are experts on the terms you are searching. GroupSwim correlates the tags, the people that post the content, and the group’s reaction to the content to automatically determine experts by topic.

I liked the screen layout and the simplicity of the system, as even I could grasp it quickly. Here is another great example of a tool that started on the consumer web and evolved into an enterprise application. There is more in store. They plan to offer a wiki capability soon. It will come with all the features described for file pages. A future thought is a decision page. You could certainly use their discussion pages for this now but this enhancement would be a new page type that is optimized to support a the decision-making process. It would include features such as reminders, time lines, and voting. I think it could be a very good next step to make GroupSwim even more useful within the enterprise. They have a GroupSwim blog, The Diving Board, to provide more details on current and next steps.

I recently visited the USA for a conference and had to keep in touch with my work projects back home in Australia. The main problem, of course, were the time differences. To work effectively, I needed were a few tools to keep track of the different time zones back in Oz — Canberra (home), Melbourne and Adelaide — as well as the local times where I was staying as I travelled around — Miami, Florida, Anaheim and Honolulu.

Here’s the tools I used for roaming the globe:

• iTouch: Like it’s big brother, the iPhone, this MP3 player has the ability to add a number of different city times and includes an alarm to let you know when you’ve got appointments. It’s also good for flights with its fairly good music and video capabilities — especially good when you get stuck on long domestic flights without personal in-flight entertainment
• Google Calendar: A part of the Google Office suite, this Web 2.0 app is great at handling and keeping track of different time zones and the events and appointments that go with it. It kept the times as I needed them, but when I viewed my calendar as a widget through the iTouch, Google detected I was in Honolulu and change the time zones to Honolulu time
• Motorola Razr: It’s now an old phone, but it is quadband GSM, meaning with global roaming I can take it just about anywhere in the world. Global roaming tends to be very expensive, so I just bought a pre-paid SIM card from AT&T and a telephone card. It made the difference between $2 and 12 cents per minute calls from the USA to Australia. Obviously, the downside is the number of digits you need to enter before you actually get to listen to the person on the other end of the phone! I would have preferred to use Skype, but I wasn’t always confident that I would have internet access during the four weeks I was travelling.
• Dual time-zone watch: While it’s not uncommon, having a wrist watch that could display two time zones at the same time was incredibly valuable. I just changed one time to reflect the local time and at a glance I could also see what time it was back home in Canberra
• Toshiba R400 tablet PC: I’ve been using a tablet PC for about 6 months now and I’ve not picked up a paper notebook since. Weighing only 1.72kg (3 pounds 7 ounces … note that the Apple MacBook Air weighs 1.36kg or 3 pounds), and with all flavours of WiFi you could want, it’s the perfect travelling companion for those on the move who want to take all their stuff (paper and electronic) with them

It’s an array of tools that works very well for me. I might not have given up all my desktop software just yet — I still have a need for Microsoft Visio for creating workflow diagrams, Mindjet’s Mindmanager for creating mind mapping, and Axure’s RP for prototyping great user experience web app designs — but I can see that one day soon all I will need is an internet connection and I’ll be able to work from anywhere around the world.

What tools do you use?

M

Last year watching the buzz around Enterprise 2.0  in a blog post titled: “Enterprise 2.0 “Tips” Not Enough: wikiNOMICS, Chariots of Fire Velocity & Net Work” I wrote:

“…it occurred to me one could globally replace “KM” in most of the “Enterprise 2.0″ posts and you would see the same exchanges pioneers had striving to implement KM in organizations…”
 

Recently researching an article to be published in  Effective Executive Magazine’s June KM edition, I’ve had the privilege of an exchange with Robert H. Buckman whom Infoworld 2003 called “KM’s
 father figure”.  My interest in Buckman’s work grew reading his March 6 2007 post to the AOK Yahoo Group that included:

“Jerry, thank you for the kind words, but I never did try and manage knowledge. What I really tried to manage and nurture was a culture that would encourage and expand the flow of knowledge. It was because economic value could only be obtained in our environment when knowledge moved across the organization in response to a need.”  ~ Robert H. Buckman

We’ve folded every rich nugget of our recent Bob Buckman exchange into our article but suffice to say his focus remains as per the quote above on creating an organization that supports knowledge flow.  He told us:

“If you look at it from the standpoint of how much effort it takes to achieve and effect knowledge sharing across an organization, you will find that the technology piece is about 5 to 10 percent of the effort, changing the way work is done is the 90 to 95 percent of the effort. You can define the effort as time or as money, it still comes out about the same” ~ Robert H. Buckman

IBM’s just released CEO survey points to technology being a factor in causing change. Still as mentioned by 37% of CEO’s it ranked behind market forces and people skills, both 48%, as leading external change forces. 

 ~ Jenny Ambrozek

Now, 24/7 support isn’t a necessity unless you have clients coming from a wide variety of timezones. However, the point of offering client support is that whenever your clients have any questions or concerns, someone has to be there for them as soon as possible. The sooner they receive replies, the more confident they are about the money and time they’re investing in your product or service.

Real-time progress reports. You can use online collaboration tools or even a shareable to-do list to let your client view your progress on a certain project, anytime they want. Doing this also lessens the amount of two-way communication between you and your client. Instead of calling or emailing you asking about the status of your work, they can simply look up the status online and see for themselves - wasting less time for both you and them.

Getting feedback. You can use online questionnaires as client surveys so that they can give you feedback on your performance. Services like Survey Monkey and Response-O-Matic are examples of such tools.

Another way to get client feedback via Web 2.0 is through social network testimonials. If your company has a Facebook or LinkedIn page, encourage your clients to leave a recommendation or testimonial. You can do this at the end of the project, asking your client upfront that if they can take a few minutes to create a short testimonial for you, you’d really appreciate it. (However, make sure that you also return the favor and leave a testimonial for them as well.)

With these new tools at your disposal, there’s no excuse to leave a client high and dry - no matter how trivial or small their requests might be.

First, Capgemini and Serena will offer clients a free boot camp with training on how to use mashups to address their everyday business problems like mashing together data and processes from Salesforce.com and SAP. Capgemini refers to this program as RAIN (short for RApid INnovation). Through this program, Capgemini’s RAIN engagement team will offer a one day training session to be conducted in Cupertino, Calif. to its clients, helping them take advantage of mashups and enterprise 2.0 to solve specific business issues using Serena’s Business Mashup tools. Andy Mulholland, the CTO of Capgemini is co-author of Mashup Corporations: The End of Business As Usual. He was recently quoted, “Companies need to become faster and more responsive to changes in the marketplace. This shift will only happen if the organization from the ground up adopts rapid innovation approaches and Web 2.0 technologies.” I can agree with this.

RAIN business analysts will then take the education process a further by creating a mashup for their client that addresses a specific problem for their enterprise. They then leave the new application for free, following the Lay’s potato model, “You can’t just have one.” I think this is a smart investment, as Capgemini will learn an extensive amount of information about the client while demonstrating the power of mashups. Both of these factors will make them a more valuable business partner for further work.

In their second move, Serena is launching a public Mashup Exchange where companies can buy and sell mashups. Using HiveLive technology in the Mashup Exchange, Serena will also able to create private MicroExchanges™ for companies as well where they can swap mashups with colleagues. For example, IT can help business users by publishing Mashup-enabled access to an internal SAP system in a secured, private MicroExchange. Companies can then choose to make their mashups available on the public exchange. Unlike some exchanges, Serena offers this platform to third party developers at no cost, allowing many niche providers entrance to a larger marketplace.

I found it interesting that Serena has found that some companies start their internal mashup exchanges at the division level. This allows for pilots with division specific data and more control over the process. In some cases, the mashup may stay at the division level to avoid irrelevant data or data that has a different vetting process. This will especially appeal to the many large enterprises have multiple CIOs. In other cases, the mashups may go enterprise wide once it is tested and refined at the division level. The flexibility is very useful here. In one example, a European military purchasing group has created mashups across their supply chain to help with the bidding process. At the same time they developed other mashups for internal use of sensitive information.

The guiding principle in the Mashup Exchange is similar to their Mashup Composer, where companies can use a visual design tool to build and test mashups without coding at no charge. They also made a set of pre-packaged mashups available for free beginning in Q4 07. Serena wants to lower the barrier to mashups use and provide a preferred platform for innovation in enterprise 2.0.