OneStop Secret Sauce

Disintermediation is the Friend of a Good Website

2009-09-18T11:22:11-07:00

dis·in·ter·me·di·a·tion [dis-ˌin-tər-ˌmē-dē-ˈā-shən]
According to Wikipedia, disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain: "cutting out the middleman".

This morning I ascended the bully pulpit and gave our team a speech as to why our OneStop pages are an order of magnitude more popular than other pages we produce. (We produce pages for different sites/user communities including the public, partners, and sales people.)

As I've written about, prior, people like OneStop because the content is complete, accurate, up to date, and is in a consistent format. Easy enough, right? Not really. The question is, what ingredients are necessary, in the secret sauce, to produce this quality content?

Ownership
The page(s) need to be owned by the content expert, or minimally some who is well versed in the content AND in the needs and expectations of the users. On OneStop we have the person's name, picture, and country flag on the page. The quality of the page is a direct reflection of the author.

Disintermediation!
Most of the sites our group works with are based on a structured update process. The content creator needs to submit a request with the update. It then goes through a couple of people for approval on correctness and completeness, and then goes to a web person for posting. This process can be time consuming, and often something is lost in translation. On OneStop the owner does the actual posting. The corollary to this rule is that it Needs to be Easy.

The owner needs to be a user
The best pages are the ones that the owner uses every day. This is the only was to get a gut feel for whether the page works. Are the items in the right order? Is it easy to find the highest priority items? Are there bad links? Is response time fast? Is the page always available? Many of the best pages on OneStop are authored by SEs. As SEs talk to customers every day, and use OneStop to look up information to support these customers, they can do an optimal job of creating a page that is useful for other SEs.

Needs to pass the what's in it for me test

It can be a decent amount of work to maintain a popular OneStop page. Having an author's name and picture featured prominently on the page gives credit where credit is due. Note that in a intermediated site the content contributor is often invisible.

Working feedback loop

I'm a glutton for feedback. [Particularly positive feedback. ] Bloggers are heavily reliant on comments and stats, often via google analytics. Internal content contributors often aren't so lucky. On OneStop we make a big effort to make as much data as possible easy available. I think of it as positive reinforcement.

Ask the users
On OneStop it is necessary to login, so we know who views, updates, and comments on a page.
In my experience, users love when you reach out to them. It shows you care and want to increase the quality and effectiveness of the page. There is always what I call a gem in the responses, a really good idea that you can readily implement.

As a closing thought, I like to emphasize people over tools and mechanism. It's not that I don't like mechanism, I'm a huge google fan (search, gmail, talk, reader, docs, etc.) However, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the developers use almost all the tools - on a daily basis - to do their jobs. See owner needs to be a user above.

Wiki Gardening in the Enterprise

2009-08-28T10:38:54-07:00

Web heads refer to the term wiki gardening. This is basically controlling the content in your wiki. Wiki gardening is easily manageable for wikis that are internal to an enterprise, but is more challenging for wikis that contain company content that is shared with partners and customers.

Sun has a large and vibrant website for partners, called Sun Partner Advantage Membership Center or Partner Portal. Partners can utilize the Partner Portal for everything from pricing information, to training, to product and program information. "The Portal" , in general, utilizes the walled garden approach. The Sun Partner team both accepts and solicits content, massages it appropriately, formats, and publishes it. The advantages are obvious. The content is consistent, reasonably up to date, and only the appropriate content is shared.

But wait! There are occasions where more and better resources are available to employees, than partners. This is because publishing content to an internal wiki (yes, I'm referring to OneStop. This is the OneStop Secret Sauce blog after all.) is easier. It's much faster as there is no process or approval involved, and there are no worries about confidentiality or appropriateness of content. There are no forms or mechanism, it's basically WYSIWYG and update in place. It enables Self publishing so that the content expert is able to make the changes directly. Nothing is lost in translation, as compared to content making it's way through the process.

With our PartnerSpace project we hope to offer the best of both worlds. The goal of PartnerSpace is to make appropriate partner ready content that is behind the Sun firewall easily available to partners. The core of PartnerSpace is an easily consumable (by content providers) set of publishing guidelines. These guidelines include:

Publishing Rules, including privacy and confidentiality guidelines.
Content traits, as we need to happily coexist with PartnerWeb.
Style suggestions, for consistency.

Perhaps the most important part of PartnerSpace is the definition of roles. Each wiki page, or family of wiki pages, that are made available to partners has a moderator. Content creators and owners stage a page in a Sun only area, and only when it is scanned and approved by the moderator does it become available to partners.

OneStop for Partners is the first instance of the Partner Space project. We are already seeing interesting phenomenon that we didn't expect. It turns out that some of the low hanging fruit is content that doesn't fit easily into the existing Partner Portal or Sun organizational model. Two examples thus far are the Partner HPC Resource Center and the Solutions area. We are moving aggressively to complete OneStop for Partners with the traditional core of product, technology, and program information.

Technocrat for Partners

2009-08-05T15:51:39-07:00

The Technocrat is an internal Sun newsletter primarily targeted to customer-facing engineers. The goal is to make them feel plugged in with respect to products, technology and tools. As of June, the Technocrat is available to Sun Partners.

Aren't newsletters so 90s?
Yes and no. Newsletters certainly don't offer the virtues of social networking and collaboration. What they do offer is a push mechanism that enables us to highlight current news, what's working with our tools and communities, and snapshot summaries.

The most popular regular feature in the Technocrat is Interesting Stuff You Might Have Missed. It comprises interesting bits (white papers, feature articles, etc.) from various websites including sun.com and BigAdmin. The majority of items are links to good blog postings.

People are busy and it takes a long time to scan the latest and greatest on web sites, blogs, and wikis. The world is getting there with better search, feed readers, and the Semantic Web, but as of now there really isn't a great substitute for having a human with similar interests do this for you.

Lightweight is Good
The Technocrat offers a lightweight mechanism to share content. The editorial review is quick; the main rule is that the content be relevant and interesting to customer-facing engineers. If a contributor wants to spend (substantially more) time on a more formalized vehicle, BluePrints, White Papers, or writing a book is the way to go. You can always do a blog posting, but unless you've spent the time to acquire an audience, not many people will see it.

Most articles are between 500 and 2000 words. Does anyone remember Jeff Goldblum's character, Michael Gold, in the 1983 movie The Big Chill? Michael was a writer for People magazine. He stated that articles were never longer than you could read during the average bathroom stay.

The Brand Means Something
We've been publishing the Technocrat for seven years, and internally at Sun it is acknowledged as valuable. If your article is included, there is a good chance people will see it. To receive the Technocrat, you have to subscribe -- we don't spam mailing lists or aliases out of principle. The subscriber base is currently around 2000.

To Come Full Circle
My heart was warmed when I received an email from Trevor Pretty, a Partner SE in New Zealand. He was a Sun employee for years, and was regarded by many as a star. The Subject of the email was Technocrat for partners - Feels like I've never left . I'm truly excited to be able to provide a mechanism that helps our customer facing engineering community share their considerable knowledge and expertise with our partners.

Crossing the Services Chasm

2009-06-18T06:31:07-07:00

Sun has a large and vibrant services organization, but historically the communications channel between Services and the Systems Engineering Organization has been somewhat limited. SEs tend to think in terms of products and technologies first, and services second.

It is of course good for Sun, and good for customers, if services are included along with a product or solution sale. Unless the sale is driven by a Professional Services engagement, services attach tends to happen at the end of the process.

So how does this fit with OneStop? Most SEs utilize OneStop to get help gathering information about a product, technology, or solution - and find the links to the appropriate sales tools, communities, etc. As Sun's roots are as a product company, that's how people think, and that is where people start the investigative process. It's not terribly clear to people where to find information about services, for a given product or solution.

As it turns out there is an excellent, but now well known, internal site that maps services to products. Our Eureka moment is that via a web service we are now able to dynamically populate a Services section of each OneStop with the services for that product.

Now, hopefully, the sales teams will be thinking about services earlier in the cycle, as the information will available with no friction.

Search: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff with Information Equity

2009-03-14T05:03:12-07:00

Search on corporate intranets is difficult, often because algorithms based on page rank don't work particularly well. In short PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A popular document on the corporate intranet may have very few pages linking to it. Without page rank the search results are ordered largely by frequency of key words, meta data, and currency. This makes it almost impossible to find a given page with a popular or overloaded term in the title such as Solaris 10, Cloud Computing, Identity Management, etc.

SunSpace, Sun's internal enterprise wiki, with an integrated document repository, is based around the notion of Community Equity. Each person, and each document is assigned an equity value. A document's Information Equity is mostly based on:

Hits or downloads.
Updates.
Number of different people accessing/updating the page. (very important in a collaborative wiki!)
Currency. The equity decreases over time.

So how does this fit into search ... ?

SunSpace search has a 3 tier architecture. The back end is a commercial search engine that indexes the content (wiki pages and uploaded documents) and delivers the search results. We spend a lot of time tuning this engine so that the optimal weighting is given to titles, urls, keywords, and various meta data.

The middle tier is a set of feed readers that monitor all the updates on SunSpace. The feed readers create "stubfiles" for every document that contain all the meta data, which includes equity, tags, creator, and last updated date. The feed readers run continuously and notify the back end whenever a page is created or updated. A big advantage is that new pages and updates are added to the search index immediately, no more waiting days until the crawler finds the new documents.

The front end is where most of the action is. When a user types in a search query it is submitted to the back end and 100 results, in xml format, are returned. The stubfile for each result in then read. The initial results ordering is directly from the back end search engine, but the user is given the option to Sort by Information equity, or Sort by Date. We also display other relevant information such as tag clouds and communities for these 100 results. Each document has a creator, who is generally a primary contributor to the page. We assemble a list of the creators for the results, then credit each creator with the Information equity of the result they created - and display a list sorted by sum of information equity.

A few simple use cases:

Find a new document. I am constantly creating documents on SunSpace, and generally am not careful with the titles. Two hours later when I have forgotten the title and need to forward the URL to a colleague, I simple search for myself, then Sort by Date.
Find a popular document. The second case refers back to the beginning of this article. Let's say a colleague mentions a cool wiki page on Solaris 10 that's all the buzz. I'd search for "Solaris 10", then sort by Information Equity.
Find the expert. I have a big presentation on Cloud Computing, and need to seek the advice of a knowledgeable colleague. I search for Cloud Computing, then refer to the right of the results page for the people with the most Information equity. (for that particular search.)

OneStop, A Trusted Community in Sunspace

2009-01-21T07:34:59-08:00

I continue to hear that people are confused about the positioning of OneStop verses SunSpace. (for people who haven't read this blog, OneStop is a managed community within SunSpace.)

Peter Reiser, the architect of SunSpace, recently posted the blog entry Trusted content through facilitated communities. It's an awesome post, but I'm still struggling a bit with the word "trusted".

We are finding that the the need for OneStop has increased, rather than decreased. With Communities and wiki sites all over the place, people don't know where to look. Will a random community page be up to date? Will it be in a useful format? Will it contain the info SEs need? Will it be easy to find, either via browse or search?

I'm not sure the combination of the above = trusted, but I don't have a better word! Any suggestions appreciated.

The Value of Moderation

2008-11-04T16:23:50-08:00

Good news! SunSpace is a raging success. Thus far 20,000 users have logged into the system. It is full of a variety of content, great, good, bad, irrelevant - and in a myriad of formats!

OneStop is now part of SunSpace. Users find this very confusing. Is OneStop dead? Has OneStop been subsumed by SunSpace? I'm hoping that referring to OneStop as "OneStop on SunSpace" might help clarify.

The success of SunSpace has amplified the need for (Sun internal users)to have an easy way to find information on Sun products. If you search for Identity on SunSpace you'll find references in several dozen spaces. As we had hoped, we are seeing communities form around technologies, often based in geographical areas, many organizationally based.

Where should a user go to find information on Sun's Identity products, perhaps OpenSSO? What if you don't know the name of the product itself?

The answer is "OneStop on SunSpace". Here you will find a list of menus on the homepage that are convenient for browsing, particularly useful if you don't know the exact name of the product. You'll be directed to a OneStop page that contains the information you are looking for, which is in a consistent and familiar format. The page has an author (or moderator) so you can count on the fact that it is reasonably up to date. The OneStop team continues to work behind the scenes to help ensure content completeness and currency.

We're finding that useful search on SunSpace is challenging, just by virtue of the myriad of references to product and technologies in the different spaces. The implementation we are currently playing with segregates the results that link to pages in the OneStop space and displays them at the top of the results list. Google of course uses page rank to help determine relevance. SunSpace computes Information Equity per URL based on ratings, downloads, edits, etc. We'll be enabling search users to search for keywords, then sort those results by Information Equity.

Moving forward, perhaps we should simply create new tags that will imply that a SunSpace page is moderated and in a consistent format. Search could read those tags, then group the results accordingly. With the judicious use of tags we could also generate a useful browse mechanism so that the menus would not be necessary.

At any rate, the need for page ownership (moderation), and overall OneStop ownership (to help ensure content breadth, currency, and accuracy) continues to exist.

OneStop is not dead!

2008-08-29T06:35:10-07:00

I've been hearing that people think OneStop is dead! This is not the case. OneStop is simply better and runs on a more modern platform. I try and describe what OneStop is in the blog posting What is Onestop - next ?. In short, users can continue to go OneStop and find a set of pages that are:

owned and moderated.
adhere (loosely) to the OneStop format. The familiar categories are in the same order.
are up to date and accurate, or at least there is framework (people and tools) in place that tries to ensure this.
are there. In other words the breadth of OneStop space is complete and controlled. Products , Technologies, and Programs of interest to Sun CEs (Customer Facing Engineers) will be there.
are easy to find and navigate. It's a limited universe (~500) pages so we can make the menus, search, and a-z work well.

However, OneStop pages are now Wiki pages that support commenting and voting. There is also a WYSIWYG editor (albeit not a great one) that makes simple edits an order of magnitude easier.

SunSpace now has 200 communities and the number is growing rapidly. We're seeing a significant need for communities to have a OneStop page for "non community" members. No content redundancy is required thanks to macros like {include} and {simplelisting}.

We will take action very soon to ensure that a page looks like a OneStop page at a glance. Currently all SunSpace pages have a similar look.

What is Onestop - next ?

2008-04-16T10:02:53-07:00

Great news! We are now live with 5 OneStop pages on CE 2.0. Anyone on the SWAN can now, optionally edit a page, in place, using a WYSIWYG editor. We've maintained our model of the author owning a page, with the new ability to control access.

We envision 3 general categories on CE 2.0:

OneStop pages. These pages will live in the OneStop space, and each will have a primary author. The fact that it is branded a OneStop page means several things. The page:

has an owner and is a moderated.
adheres (loosely) to the OneStop format. The familiar categories are in the same order.
is up to date and accurate, or at least there is framework (people and tools) in place that tries to ensure this.
is there. In other words the breadth of OneStop space is complete and controlled. Products , Technologies, and Programs of interest to Sun CEs (Customer Facing Engineers) will be there.

CEpedia. This space will be very similar to the existing CEpedia, as anything goes. It is not controlled. Users can create or update any page in the CEpedia space, in any format, at their leisure.
Communities. The community area is really the thrust behind CE2.0. CE 2.0 communities have been described as a mashup -- Facebook meets LinkedIn with a content-management system thrown in for good measure. Historically email has been a primary communication vehicle inside Sun, so we offer the option to build a community, with membership and access control based on an email alias.

We're hoping for interesting synergy between OneStop and communities. A user might go to the OneStop space to find information on a product. While they are there they might notice there is a community built around that particular product or project, and actively engage in a discussion or forum. Finding the expert will turn into a non issue. We can do things like dynamically populate sections of a OneStop page based on how documents or pages are tagged in a particular forum.

Now, what do we call this new beast that we've been referring to as CE 2.0? (CE 2.0 has been our project name.) Onestop or Onestop2 doesn't seem to work as the OneStop brand implies all the stuff listed in section 1, but not social - web 2.0 community as we know it today. Users are tired of the new brand, or tool of the day. Maybe we should just stick with CE 2.0.

OneStop and Community Equity

2008-03-08T06:37:11-08:00

My colleague Peter Reiser has been making great strides forward with his notion of Community Equity. For a detailed write up see his blog post. He was even interviewed by Scoble on the subject!

(Heresy, heresy) but I have mixed feelings about Community Equity in the context of OneStop. I like the notion of community, and I really like the notion of encouraging participation. Having our users easily rate and comment on OneStop pages should prove invaluable. Ratings will supplement our current metrics of downloads and currency to give users a good solid indication of page value. Comments will evolve into discussions, where as we currently only offer page feedback. Discussions will then move into forums. All great stuff!

I'm a little more skeptical on the Community Equity front. I not sure our users will be motivated to participate (more) if their Personal Equity rises. Historically the lion's share of OneStop accesses has been from people looking for answers, and secondarily browsing for information. I don't expect that to change any time soon.

The big question is "What's in it for me?". We're asking our users to spend their limited time, rating and commenting. In my experience people need a recognizable return on investment to participate. Is a high community equity rating, and being listed in the top 10 on the homepage enough? I don't know; I hope so. I do anticipate arguments about the formula in how CE is generated. Is it fair that a person who (perhaps without a lot of thought) rates 50 documents, gets a higher rating than someone who moderates a couple of OneStop pages that aren't popular products, or a person that has submitted one "white paper" or Technocrat article?

OneStop Kicks Butt in User Survey!

2008-01-16T08:31:51-08:00

The results are in! If you are on the Sun Network check them out.

We got 776 responses, an incredible number. Users feel very strongly about OneStop. We asked the question "How would you feel if we pulled the plug on OneStop?. (We don't plan to do this, but the question elicits great comments.) The results were:

I'd be totally irate!	538
I'd get by	153
Don't care	11
It's about time	10

A typical comment was "That would treble my workload and response time".

We contrasted OneStop to other sites the SEs generally use and found that people almost always look to OneStop first, and give very high ratings (4.3/5) when asked "How useful is OneStop to doing your job? (1 low -> 5 high)".

A primary motivator for the survey, aside from understanding utility, is getting a feel for user priorities. Are social networking features important? Should we accelerate our move to an enterprise wiki?

Our users were very clear in expressing that the top priority, by far, is accurate, complete, and up to date content. They like the fact that content is easy to find on Onestop, and that the site is simple and consistent.

My conclusion is that moving forward with CE 2.0 we need to not break what's working. We need to be careful about adding complexity. Social networking features that enable community are cool, and will hopefully help us deliver even better content, but not at the expense of expedient access to information.

My feeling is that the majority of the users are not planning on being direct contributers, so we need to make sure we optimize that path. The browse experience needs to be robust, search needs to work, response time needs to be fast. Information should be no more than 3 clicks away.

Make sure you watch this space (follow on posts) for a discussion on how we hope to leverage Community Equity to help raise the bar on content quality.

OneStop 2 Conundrum

2008-01-08T06:13:35-08:00

We are planning on moving OneStop on to a new Confluence based platform, called OneStop2, by the end of our fiscal year. (June 30.) The Confluence platform is being extended with many new features including:

Contribution Equity, measured from contributing and rating content.
Robust, integrated document repository
Tagging Services
Expanded XML feeds (ATOM, RSS)

The Confluence platform (an enterprise wiki) is exciting in it's own right and will provide us functionality to move OneStop into the world of Web 2.0. The integrated features I am most excited about are WYSIWYG, access control, and a commenting service. This will enable a OneStop page to be easily updated (via WYSIWYG) by either anyone, or people specified on an access control list. Our model of primary page ownership (or perhaps moderation) will continue.

The conundrum is the mapping of OneStop pages into Confluence. Confluence supports the notion of spaces. Each space has a home page and child pages.

Should each OneStop page be a space, or should OneStop pages all exist in a OneStop space? Unfortunately Confluence doesn't support the notion of space hierarchy, so for example, we can't set up a hierarchy on the order of OneStop -> HPC -> ClusterTools.

We also intend to move CEpedia on to this new platform. Should there be one CEpedia space, or several?

Currently the 5 most accessed OneStop pages are

I don't think many of these should be spaces in their own right, but perhaps should be children in other spaces. If you have thoughts on this, please comment.

CEpedia OneStop CE 2.0 - what's this all about?

2007-08-01T15:37:52-07:00

There are @3200 CEpedia users, @2500 OneStop users and many of them (you?) want to know what's happening with those 2 systems and what is CE 2.0.

Right about now most non-Sun employees may have tuned out, but just bear with me for a moment here and it might be worth your while (and if it isn't, what a wonderful opportunity to flame me, or whatever the current term is!)

Basically CEpedia and OneStop are 2 different systems we use at Sun to try and improve the information sharing within our customer-facing technical community. There's alot of information in most of their heads and/or laptops, and we are constantly trying to help them share it with each other so that our customers benefit - better answers to their questions such as "how would I..." or "have you ever...?"

OneStop today is a typical website - a collection of html pages which are editable by their owners. Terrific content because of the passion and knowledge of their owners/authors, but sometimes a little out of date because those authors are either busy solving customer challenges or else working on new Sun products/services/solutions.

CEpedia is a wiki we established a year ago to support our Customer Engineers (CEs) - kind of like Wikipedia (do i need a tm here?) for CEs. It has the advantage of wikis - easy to update by anyone who can access, so it can be kept very much up to date.

Now if I haven't lost the non-Sun audience, here's where I think it gets more interesting. Our plan is to:

merge OneStop and CEpedia into a wiki with access control so that not just anyone can edit everything (after all, you wouldn't want me to be updating anything remotely approaching technical content - trust me on this), but updates are easier and therefore more frequent.
We also want to host this outside of our intranet so that initially our partners can also have access, including update capability where appropriate. Over time we would like to share as much as possible of this information with everyone, but that will take more "cleansing" of what information should be public knowledge and what needs to be restricted
Additionally, we are introducing various Web 2.0 concepts - tagging, RSS / Atom aggregation, AJAX, voting/comments to drive search results, etc. so that we obtain the benefits of this more participatory technology (aka the Wisdom of Crowds) at the same time as understanding how to leverage this technology better for our customers.

This future vision we are calling CE 2.0 - basically a Web2.0 experience for our CEs, partners, eventually customers, developers and others. Stay tuned.

Moving Forward With Confluence

2007-07-02T14:34:17-07:00

This is not yet a done deal as we still have small things like licensing () and more functionality testing still to work through, but as Maverick says in Top Gun, "Things are looking good so far".

We asked the OneStop authors to play with our Confluence test instance, read about the functionality, and provide us feedback. The response was uniformly positive, a first with this vocal group of 300!

Kemer Thomson, the guy who runs the Sun Blueprints program had some excellent feedback worth sharing:

Confluence seems to address not only the challenges in creating wiki content, but makes it a pleasure and opens new possibilities. I have played around with great success. Everything seems to work. I ran into no problems ... nothing crashed. Cool features, like creating an RSS and adding tags worked intuitively. I could recreate my entire OneStop content quickly and without any concessions to the content and structure. Indeed, the ability to add plugins and control access to pages opens up many possibilities.

I find it truly compelling that we can combine an almost seamless transition with features and functionality that will enable solutions we haven't even considered yet.

I can't wait to see what our smart motivated group of authors will do with this truly enabling platform.

Our Wiki story evolves ..

2007-06-27T08:26:50-07:00

Sometimes your first choice isn't always the right one - you learn through experience... and indeed I've talked about our wiki challenges before..

Our first choice for our internal wiki was mediawiki. For several reasons, it's stable, proven and continues to evolve and we could implement quickly without worry of license restrictions.
We've found over time though that even though there are lots of extensions to mediawiki they often do not meet what we need in an Enterprise environment - a robust tagging infrastructure, Enterprise Level access control with fine grained granularity, wysiwyg editing or that the plugins are not portable across mediawiki releases as the codebase continues to evolve.

You may have already seen wiki.sun.com is coming. It's currently still in Beta and will not open to the world at large for several weeks but we're hoping to leverage the fact that our DotCom group decided to go with Atlassian's Confluence and possibly move to confluence.

Confluence has more of the pieces we need for an "Enterprise wiki" -a nice plugin architecture (with a good list of existing plugins) better editing, fine grained access control etc. plus it was good to find yesterday (amongst others) the Universal Wiki Converter so hopefully we will be able to move most of our existing content into confluence without too much hassle. I think it's time for some scalability testing and to double check the UWC works correctly ... maybe play with some plugins too.

The Information Overload of Social Networking

2007-06-20T05:53:33-07:00

I have been exploring, along with many of my friends and colleagues at Sun, the value and use of social networking applications. There is definitely a lot of potential and value with tools such as Ning, Twitter, Facebook, Second Life, Delicous (aka Swanlicous for Sun employees) and many others.

My question or challenge is this: with so much information already available and difficult to find within Sun and on the open web (a challenge we have been trying to address with Grokker, Goolge Search Appliance, good information architecture and organization, tagging, etc.) - how are we going to ensure that these new high value tools that hold high value content are organized and the content findable within the organization (see The Magic of Findability blog entry by my friend and colleague Soctt Brown)?

A specific challenge for me are my Ning communities - there is nothing alerting me in any way when there is something new. Sorta like the beginning of static websites where you'd have to go to the site daily to see for yourself if there was anything new. I'd don't want to see us facing information and social networking fatigue.

If some things could be pushed at me via RSS/ATOM or email or IM or text message - that would be great and help with ensuring I don't miss the things I need to know on a daily basis. It would allow me to decide where I want the information and how I want to receive it. Then there is the discovery and findability of all that content - we need to be sure we are thinking about an approach so that 1-2 years from now we are not struggling to "find" the information we need to do our jobs, communicate, innovate, discover, and collaborate.

RSS/ATOM is certainly allowing me to aggregate some of the information from some of the tools. However, I don't have that one site where I can aggregate all the things that I'd like to - maybe this is the ultimate mashup and intranet for an organization. An interesting exploration is the Facebook Platform (see Facebook's app feeding frenzy) where developers can develop tools to integrate with Facebook - this alone has helped me to keep up on my Facebook connections as well as messaging from folks via Twitter.

At the end of the day, we are at a really interesting and booming time for social tools. I've learned so much already from our experiments with tools like these - things about colleagues opinions, interests, projects, skills, etc. that I would never have known otherwise. It's all really valuable and the heart of the information world - creating, sharing, collaborating, finding, discovering, exploring, using and accessing critical content and people - when, how and where I want.

Hey - maybe my avatar, Violet, can help me keep up?

Communicating 2.0

2007-06-17T11:57:26-07:00

My morning routine is to sit in my recliner, read the paper, and browse through email on my laptop. Being a baby boomer I still like the hard copy newspaper, but find myself mostly reading the local sections, and getting national news from Yahoo!news on my computer. I get a daily email from feedblitz with postings of all the blogs I follow. It's that dinosaur thing again, I prefer email to feed readers and consolidators.

This morning my feedblitz email was full of juicy nuggets. A nugget to me is an idea, tool, or technology that I can maybe apply toward our Web 2.0 efforts at Sun.

My first thought when I get an idea based on a nugget is to communicate with people who might care, either as an FYI or recommendation for action. The good news is that there are now many ways to do this, the bad news is that there are now many ways to do this. I found myself doing three different communications for each of three ideas. The sequence was:

Twitter. I generally hope other people are listening and will respond to me in real time. These are mostly FYIs.
Email. This is where I'll expand on an idea, and possibly recommend further action. Some are emails to a group, others to a person.
Blog posting. Actually I'll probably combine all three ideas into one blog posting, so it's really seven communications, not nine.

The next part of my Sunday routine is to walk my dogs to Starbucks. We've been considering a new puppy and are scouting breeders. We ran into a woman who highly recommended a breeder in San Diego. I asked my wife if she had pen/paper to make a note of the breeders name. It then occurred to me that my phone was in my pocket. I had never recorded a memo on my phone before, but it seemed like the right time. I couldn't figure out where the "Voice Key" was on my new phone, I had to settle for a text message to myself..

I wonder if my communications will be more consolidated in the next few years.

The Twitter Life Cycle

2007-06-12T13:13:53-07:00

I found this image in a presentation given by Cole Camplese and Jim Leous to the 10th Annual Penn State Web Conference, June 12, 2007. [pdf slides] It came from a posting Alan Levine made to his blog. (Links included not just as a courtesy, but as a jumping off point for further exploration.)

Non Anonymous Search

2007-06-11T13:27:43-07:00

On OneStop we have always resisted forcing users to login. Since it's mostly a read only vehicle a login doesn't add much value, and people find it annoying.

On CEpedia (our mediawiki based wiki) we insist that people login if they are going to edit a page. We find that at some point most users do login.

We host our own search using the Ultraseek search engine. It started out as OneStop Search, and has been extended for our other properties, CEpedia, IC Create, and AIM - to name a few. Since we started with OneStop search, the assumption has always been we had no user information to work with.

We have recently extended CEpedia with a registry that is hosted elsewhere, and while doing so figured out how to pass login information back and forth. All of a sudden we can know who is using CEpedia search!

We can now start saving a user's queries, combine that with organizational info from our corporate LDAP database, and their profile info from the registry - and perhaps offer a much enhanced search experience. While using CEpedia I tend to search for the same pages over and over. As a first step, having a quick interface to my last few searches will be a big time saver.

the death of email continued

2007-06-08T09:31:28-07:00

Mike's been needling me to post ... I've been traveling - it can be hard.

One of the joys of traveling is undisturbed time to think, that and the cool pictures you can take from a 747's window - 2 favorites from this week included - SF downtown and a great view of the Golden gate bridge taken as we came in to land Tuesday lunchtime.

But seriously Mike's posting about "the death of email" got my mind a whirling .. .

We're currently in the process of moving most of our properties to being edge based - outside the corporate network / firewall - secured using SSL and strict access control mechanisms, completely locked down only allowing ssh and scp for us to access them. The objective is to make them more easily accessible to field engineers as they travel to customer and partner sites.

So the thought crossed my mind - if the forum for conversation is moving from email to twitter, IM, blogs and forums this is surely in part because the 'standard access device' is also changing.

So we'll also need to be target delivering our content to mobile devices -- so what will our wiki or OneStop look like from a variety of PDAs / devices - how will you navigate them, how will we make information such as staroffice docs available to people who only have pdas / phones - and should we be postprocessing to pdf for people ?

more to come ...

As an interesting side note I was also blown away to find this site on the Design of the Upcoming Boeing 787.

It continues to prove to me that computing and material science are changing the planet and the things we do in revolutionary ways.

When will email be obsolete? part 2

2007-06-06T08:55:53-07:00

Got a great comment from Jay Neely on my last post. (When will email be obsolete?) See his thoughtful Innovation In E-mail posting. I have to admit that my feeling is mostly coming from the gut. I'm confident that future versions of email will address all the shortcomings. It will be secure, include guaranteed delivery, and will even include archiving and search with appropriate access control.

What I'm wondering is if the train has left the station. Mind you, I would love it if email continued to be the killer application. I grew up with email. I've always liked it because it is an efficient way to message. However, I can't get by that nagging feeling that we'll be moving toward a framework that will enable me to operate more productively.

Unfortunately I'm not close enough to Generation Y. Do college students consider email to be indispensable, or it mostly a way to communicate with their parents? Do people tend to send email from their cell phones? I'd think, not. I'm guessing that high schoolers and younger don't care about email all that much. Email is certainly a fundamental part of doing business today, but will that change? I suspect so.

When will email be obsolete?

2007-06-05T14:40:03-07:00

I asked my thirteen year old son why he wasn't wearing a watch. His response was "I can get the time and date from my phone". This made me feel a bit like a dinosaur

I feel even more like a dinosaur when I use email as the framework for my day. I use it to communicate with peers, ask questions, and even to send notes to myself. It's a really awkward as it is not at all convenient to compose, archive, or search email - or integrate it with my calendar or phone.

We do have an email archive and search mechanism that works quite well, but it has no notion of access control. As most of my more important email isn't suitable for company wide consumption, the only place it is archived is in my mailfolders.

I was looking through my long email queue, and there is very little there that couldn't be handled more effectively by different means. Community discussions are better held in forums. Conversations with my manager or my group should be tagged and stored for only us to refer back to.

Several years ago our group used a product called Intraspect. (now Vignette Collaboration) This product is chock full of good ideas. It has excellent access control, email messages are first class citizens, strong tagging support, discussions, and a robust content repository. The product is now used company wide, but has a few notable problems that are inhibiting further success. The worst gotcha is that it doesn't scale well. It was a victim of it's own popularity. The second issue is that it doesn't communicate easily with other applications. It's difficult to impossible to index the content with an outside search engine. Writing widgets, or jython programs, is an awkward process that usually requires consulting.

Will email disappear as the social internet matures? From my dinosauric perspective it be nice if email were tightly integrated with a social network that supports tagging, search, access control, friends of friends, and content objects. (widgets, live feeds, etc.)

Twitter as a Team Building Tool

2007-06-03T08:15:38-07:00

As I work from home, I interact with people at work on a face to face basis much less frequently than I used to. When I do see them it's usually at a structured event such as a meeting or dinner. I don't ever casually stroll the halls looking for a chat, and don't drop into people's offices. Even if I did, few would be there!

When I had an office at work I had pictures of my son and wife on the wall, model cars on my desk, and various and sundry mementos sprinkled around. These were very useful as conversation starters . When a person I hadn't met dropped in on me, they invariably scanned my office and commented on something.

I'm wondering if Twitter can be a tool to help people build relationships and find common ground beyond their work roles. Yesterday I tweeted that "I was going to the car show in Pleasanton, CA". A colleague that I communicate with fairly frequently, but have never met, was going to the same show!

In a prior post I mentioned that I am not interested in the personal activities of others, but in second thought, I am. It feels a bit to me like a successful team building exercise. I'm getting to know my twitter friends better, and my followers are getting to know me.

Facebook, not just for college students, anymore

2007-06-01T13:35:58-07:00

Some say it's the platform for the social registry of web 2.0+. I recently registered and was able to indicate I was "at a company". It automatically set me up with "Sun Microsystems" in my "Your Networks" section.

I forwarded this around to a group of colleagues and got an interesting response from Matt Stevens, Chief Engineer in Sun Learning Services. Matt noted, "Not looking for dates (if you will) I have not considered exploring FaceBook but I see that there are 1700 folks from Sun there. Compelling that it was easy to be part of the SMC network - automatically really."

Last week, Facebook released a new applications platform and invited other companies to create cool apps that can be used inside Facebook. One app of note is the Twitter Facebook application.

David Sacks in an excellent recent article titled "The New Portals: It?s the Bread, Not the Peanut Butter" mentions:

Facebook has a new answer to the portal question. The “social graph,” or your network of relationships, will push information to you. You’ll learn from your friends. Thanks to Facebook’s new developer platform, the types of information being disseminated now include not just news, photos, events, and groups but also music, videos, books, movies, causes, political campaigns — and the list is rapidly growing into almost every conceivable category.

Somewhat coincidentally our group is now building an internal registry for Customer Engineers. Perhaps we should consider utilizing Facebook for our next version.

Web Surfer Must Haves

2007-05-31T13:39:48-07:00

For the Firefox user ...

del.icio.us buttons - Firefox Add-on. Your bookmarking woes will be gone forever. You can conveniently tag and bookmark any page, then access your bookmarks from any computer. Two buttons are added to your Navigation Toolbar, My del.icio.us and tag this which makes it incredibly convenient. (requires registration)
Adblock Plus - Firefox Add-on. "Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them." It's better than Adblock as it provides the option of a filter subscription that blocks most ads automatically.

StumbleUpon - FireFox Add-on. If you ever randomly surf, this site is the best. Add their toolbar, click the Stumble icon and you are directed to interesting sites. You specify categories you are interested in. I constantly bookmark these sites with del.icio.us tag this button above. (requires registration)

15 Coolest Firefox Tricks Ever. (from lifehacker.org). My favorites are CNTL L to go to the location bar, the tip to shrink the icons on your Navigation bar so your location box will fit a decent length URL, and the Speed up Firefox with pipelining tip.

Collaborating with Twitter

2007-05-30T16:09:21-07:00

My personal jury is still out with respect to Twitter, but the collaboration opportunities are shining bright. As I've mentioned in prior postings I've been quite impressed with the ETS (Educational Technology Services) gang at Penn State. I stumbled on this savvy bunch by surfing around in iTunes U.

They seem to be very enamored with Twitter. I'm not quite sure why at this point, but the best way to find out is to listen in on their tweets. I've set up the four folks who do the ETS podcasts as friends.

I'm not especially interested in most personal activities, but I am very interested in what they are thinking about with respect to collaboration, technology and learning. I was hoping that they might have assembled a list, web page, what have you, of interesting resources, links, and contacts. I wasn't able to find this page as such, but I'm hoping their tweets will send me in the right direction.(Yes, the blogs are a good resource, but more confined in a strange way.)

Many moons ago when I worked with people at Universities it was in the techie sales context. I'm not sure if the ETS gang is interested in what we are working on in our group at Sun, but blogs, associated comments, and maybe even Twitter are an interesting way to expand your information network.

Our group is currently experimenting with Twitter. One real change that we really haven't gotten our arms around is how public it is. Everyone shouldn't be privy to (some/most/all ?) our work related conversations. We need to apply appropriate filtering.

Certainly twitter is more than a this is what I'm doing now vehicle, it's also a what I'm thinking now vehicle, as well as a really light weight group communications vehicle. Maybe there is a convenient way to twitter or IM to a restricted group of people, but I haven't figured that out, yet.

I work from home full time and what I most miss (from working at the office) are the unplanned and informal collaboration opportunities. I tend not to do my best thinking in a structured environment.

Twitter is also fun.

Twitter at the Customer Engineering Conference?

2007-05-25T11:42:19-07:00

I have to admit the Twitter phenomena has escaped me. I understand the draw for teens wanting to extend their texting networks, but not for educated adults. However, ETS Talk 22: Welcome to the Meta Hub has made me reconsider. Cole discussed how Twitter has enabled him to connect with the Penn State community and vibe (my word) to a degree that's never before been possible.

The CEC is a Sun global technical training and employee networking conference. 3500 engineers from the Sales and Service organizations, as well as Sun partners, will descend on Las Vegas in October.

Wouldn't Twitter be a wonderful supplement to the CEC? It would enable groups of like minded people to exchange relevant information in real time on things like:

Hot breakout sessions, great speakers.
Running into unexpected people, colleagues, luminaries, etc.
Impromptu gatherings.

There could also be a primary CEC channel to communicate late breaking news, main tent event changes, and other goodies to create the buzz.

Seems like real win to me. Should the central organizing committee help facilitate the effort? Perhaps a wiki listing all the groups?

CE 2.0 - What's in it for you?

2007-05-24T13:57:24-07:00

We are building a web 2.0 set of services inside Sun for our Customer Engineering community - the field technical folks (hence CE 2.0). The question with something like this is, what's in it for the user? CEs are busy folks with customer- facing responsibilities. They advise on very crucial technical issues that help our customers run their businesses. How will CE 2.0 help them, and how will they find the time to absorb the new technology while still doing their day jobs?

We think the answer is that it's all about community. OneStop is arguably the most valuable information resource for our CE community today, and it's almost entirely volunteer driven. Knowledgeable people sharing information and self-identifying so that others can contact them for more help. We are planning to extend this in several ways:

Enable easier contribution and editing, via wiki interface
Enable easy voting and feedback, so that others can get a sense of what content has been found most valuable
Enable easy tagging of content, regardless of type and where it is stored, to make it faster to find
Aggregate content in several different ways so that users do not have to remember where they (or someone else) put it
Enable dynamic community building based on skills, interests, organization, responsibilities - to make it easier for people to share information with those who are most interested in it
Extend the community outside Sun - to partners, customers, developers, and others over time

There's probably more, but the bottom line is to apply the principles of the Participatory Web (aka Web 2.0) to make it easier for people to do what they are doing today every day. To use the technology to enable community participation and knowledge sharing - we think all of our users will see the benefits.

Penn State ETS Podcasts

2007-05-22T14:46:57-07:00

I got such a kick out of Cole Camplese's podcast of his Web 2.0 lecture that I checked out Penn State's ETS (Educational Technology Services) podcasts. (available on iTunes) This is a weekly round table of Cole and a few peers discussing current tech products and trends, particularly as they have to do with learning, education and PSU.

Back in the 80s and early 90s I used to interact with people at universities a lot. It was the cool deal if you were a prof or grad student to have a Sun SPARCstation 1 in your office. As you might know Sun has it's roots in academia, and SUN is an acronym that stands for Stanford University Network. The Sun founders were all from Stanford with the exception of Bill Joy who was from Berkeley.

As I've been listening to the ETS podcasts I can't help but thinking we have a lot in common with these guys! At least in the Web 2.0 and collaboration space we share many of the same issues, though we may be coming at them from different directions. I'd imagine there is much to learned from both sides of this fence.

My other thought was, these guys are good. I'm a regular listener of the top tech podcasts such as TWIT, ExtremeTech, DL.TV, Cranky Geeks, etc., and think the ETS podcasts are at least their equal. They even broadcast in stereo, a feature I wish the others would adopt.

Web 2.0, collaboration, openness, and transparency are pretty cool.

OneStop on a Diet

2007-05-21T11:44:16-07:00

To some degree OneStop is a victim of it's own success. Content breadth has expanded far beyond the original scope of information about products. This is mostly good news, but effectuates a new set of challenges.

The goal of the site is to be timely, accurate, and relevant. This is straight forward for current and mainstream products and technologies. New information is constantly made available. The OneStop author gathers it, posts it, and lots of people know to go to OneStop to find it.

There are two areas that we struggle with. The first is static content. We classify pages that cover areas (product/technology/programs) that only very infrequently have changes or new information to add, as static. Many static pages haven't been updated in six months, though they are still accurate and up to date.

The second area is low usage pages. The most popular pages on OneStop get about 1000 hits per month. The 100th most popular gets about 300. The 300th gets around 100 hits per month. We classify the pages that get below 50 hits per month as low usage pages.

Historically we've gone for the more is better approach. We tune search so that the more popular active pages appear first in the results. We segregate off archive pages (EOL products are an example) into a second A-Z index. We tend to populate the menus with the most popular pages.

However, people frequently arrive at the site via avenues we don't directly manage, such as SunWeb search. They sometimes arrive at pages that haven't been updated in quite a long time, or cover topics of limited interest. My suspicion is that many users make a judgment on the entire site, based on that one page, or experience.

To quote my colleague Robert, "we want to keep OneStop a lean, mean, fighting machine". However, this runs counter to offering a large number of static and low usage pages!

The bugaboo is that the authors are volunteers, and we try hard never demotivate a volunteer who trying to contribute to the greater good.

What to do? Should we go on a diet?