Traction Introduces New Capabilities and Partners with Team Page 4.2

December 22, 2009 at 6:45 am · Filed under Web 2.0

I have written about Traction Software for a number of years now and always like what they are doing (see for example: Traction Software Releases Team Page 4.1 – Better Enabling the Social Side of Work and Traction Software Announces Team Page 4.0 with Multiple Upgrades). I recently spoke with Greg Lloyd, Traction CEO, about their latest moves that form release 4.2.  They have worked on the platform from top to bottom.

At the top level there is Proteus, a new interface developed through Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Now you can see content in a more flexible manner. They provide status feeds on activities that can be sorted by articles, comments, edits, tags, and moderation. The speed of GWT allows you to quickly move form one view to the other.  The interface is cleaner. Greg compares they prior interface to a Swiss Army knife with all the blades open. This could be intimidating. Now the blades are folded, but they are easy to bring out as needed. Below you can see a permission filtered feed of all articles and comments across all spaces with auto-scrolling to extend the page.

You can click the expand arrow to the right of any feed item to expand to show full content inline. Click the collapse arrow at the bottom of the expanded content. Click the author name to see basic contact info, link to profile (including Activity feed view of that person across all spaces), or click to add that author’s feed to a merged feed of people you’re interested in following (as shown below).

You can also click the space icon or any space name to get a feed view of activity within that spaces as seen below.

Greg said that GWT gives them greater flexibility as a development tool since it just updates the parts of the page that need to change. This provides great speed as I saw in a demo. Traction is one of the first platforms to make full use of GWT, an Open Source tool (Apache license), to improve the quality of the interface. They are also making the Traction related GWT available for customers and third party developers. The TeamPage Software Developer Kit (SDK) allows others to customize and extend the Proteus interface using Traction’s Skin Definition Language (SDL), which has been enhanced to support building Google Web Toolkit interfaces using simple templates.

Google Web Toolkit is very developer friendly as you code in Java and then GWT complies in Javascript to make it compatible with your browser of choice. You do not need to add a lot of code to make adjustments for each browser. Proteus allows Traction to move beyond a hard-coded interface. It becomes a new member of the family of TeamPage user interfaces available at the same time on a TeamPage server and selected by individual preference, server default settings, or automatically based on rules that match an interface to a particular browser (e.g., a Blackberry Web browser versus a laptop’s Windows Internet Explorer).  The GWT Proteus interface and toolkit are available now on Traction’s corporate TeamPage server and as part of the Dec 2009 TeamPage 4.2 Developer Release for customer evaluation. Here is a five minute video by Traction’s Andy Miller on Google Web Toolkit integration.

Traction has also enhanced its search capabilities by partnering with Attivio. I have written about this before from the Attivio perspective (see Attivio Aligns with Traction and Releases New Features). I feel it is a great combination because the granularity of search capabilities with Attivio supports the granularity of content access in Traction.  In addition to high quality search results and flexible content navigation, Attivio provides new capabilities such as customizable entity extraction, sentiment analysis and efficient support for real-time standing queries which trigger whenever a pattern is recognized in new or edited content. Attivio AIE powered TeamPage Advanced Search is in product qualification now and scheduled for general release this quarter.

Going deeper in the architecture we find that Traction has added an Oracle RDB option. The Oracle RDB backend for Traction TeamPage is for customers with mission critical applications where the ability deploy and maintain all TeamPage data in an Oracle 10g or 11g server provides outstanding ease of use for a high-availability configuration on an RDB platform.

I think these are all very smart moves and makes Traction more attractive to large enterprise. There is the greater flexibility of interface through Google Web Toolkit, more robust search through Attivio, and heavy duty data management through Oracle. I am looking forward to seeing what they do next.

Coveo Provides Free Entry Level Enterprise Search With Coveo Expresso

December 17, 2009 at 3:34 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Coveo offers enterprise search technology including their enterprise search modules and search-based applications for such functions as call centers and litigation & compliance. It has now launched a free, entry-level enterprise search solution, Coveo Expresso™ Beta.  Coveo’s new offering provides a basic, but robust, set of search functionality, at no cost, for up to 50 users, 1M desktop files and email items and 100,000 Intranet documents.   I recently spoke with Louis Tetu, executive chairman, Laurent Simoneau, CEO, and Diane Berry, VP Marketing & Communication, about this new offering.

We first discussed the top two of their three levels of offerings to put Expresso in context.  Louis describes their three tiers. At the top are enterprise search solutions that apply their search technology to specific business processes such as call centers, human resource management, knowledge management, e-commerce, and others.  I am especially interested in their call center solutions, as I have tackled this issue from the knowledge base side.  In these cases having good search often was a critical factor. I can certainly see the logic of making search the front end and leaving the content in place. We will discuss these solutions in more depth in a subsequent conversation.

Their enterprise search modules cover such areas as desktop search, email search, CRM search, intranet search and search through mobile devices. A subset of these modules forms the core for Expresso and they are the migration points for people who want to move beyond what the free product offers.

Next, Laurent took us on a tour of Expresso. We began with the email search. You can search your own email account to find both conversations and attachments. You can also filter by facets such as document type, person, date, etc.  In addition, there is an Outlook Sidebar, a search plug-in, which provides related conversations, related people, and related attachments as a side bar item. You can search any indexed content without leaving Outlook. If these results are not sufficient you can launch advanced search with guided navigation through search facets. Here is a sample email search screen below. You can see the search results in the left column and facet related information in the right column.  You can search other’s email account if they give you permission.

I could see the value of this capability from the start and wanted a copy for myself but they have currently focused Expresso on the Microsoft world which makes a lot of business sense as that is over 85% of the market. It works with Exchange Server, Outlook, Active Directory, Sharepoint, and related products. You can get Coveo’s capability for other platforms including the Mac environment, where I work, and Lotus Notes through their advanced search modules.

With the Outlook Sidebar shown below you can select a person and see all the conversations with this person, as well as attachments. They are sorted by date. As I mentioned, if you want to move from browsing these lists, you can still bring up the search box.

Next, we covered the desktop search that looks at all the content on your computer.  Unlike some search engines this tool does not actually process its searches on your computer, taking up processing power. All of the content on your machine is pushed to a server and searched at the server level. You can exclude content from this process for privacy and/or security purposes.  Security can be at the file level so you have granular control over what occurs.  Below is a sample file search.

You can also search your company’s intranet.  These searches can be ordered by relevance or date. The relevance factor is available on most search types. The relevance of a document is determined by a mix of 75 factors. Your administrator can set weights on these factors such as credibility of author, popularity of file, etc. A sample set of intranet results is shown below. Again you see the results in the left column and facet related information in the right column such as document type and author.  The type of facets offered varies by what type of search you are conducting.

We also looked at a people focused search. You can pull information from Outlook, Exchange Server, and Active Directory. If you are using Salesforce.com you can also pull this content into the search process. You can even narrow the search to a subset of your Salesforce.com data such as a particular pipeline, though not in the free version, currently.

There is an administrator dashboard that shows you how much of the free capacity you have utilized (e.g., users, files, etc.) and it conveys how to get more capacity if needed.  I think this free offering is an excellent sales tactic. Since you access this product in a self-service mode, the cost of sales is virtually zero.

There is only upside to getting it in the hands of people who will likely want the additional features and capabilities available at the next tier. At the same time there is enough functionality at the basic level for users to see the value. These users are also not taking a risk as there is no time limit to the free offer so they can continue to make use of the tool and their investment in understanding it even if they do not move to the next level.  I am impressed with what they are doing. Others seem to feel the same way as they recently received $8.2 million in Series B funding led by BDC Venture Capital.

Coveo is based in Quebec City, one of my favorite places in this world. I have been there many times as it is driving distance of Boston. Louis very kindly gave me an excellent collection of great local restaurants to add to my list. I will be covering these on my personal blog in the coming weeks and will start trying them the next time I can get up there.

RightNow Integrates HiveLive to Support Expanded Social and Community Capabilities

December 14, 2009 at 4:45 am · Filed under Web 2.0

I recently wrote about RightNow CX, the customer experience suite. A key component of this expanded social CRM suite is their integration of HiveLive after their recent acquisition of this community platform firm. I spoke about this move with John Kembel, the CEO and Founder of HiveLive who is now the VP of Social Solutions for RightNow. RightNow CX addresses the web experience, the social experience, the contact center experience of customers. With the release of RightNow November ’09, the HiveLive technology has been fully integrated and is now part of the RightNow Social Experience that includes Cloud Monitor, Support Community, Innovation Community, and Social Experience Designer.

Cloud Monitor was first introduced in their May 09 release. It is a web monitoring tool connected to the RightNow platform to benefit from other capabilities within the overall platform and enhance the ability to make a comprehensive response to what is discovered through a variety of channels. For example, you can switch from Twitter to a live web chat when you need more than 140 characters. There is also the Key Contributors function allows companies to automatically identify social influencers on Twitter, those with frequent tweets and a broad base of followers. (for more see my post RightNow Enhances Cloud Monitor and Graphical Workflow Design Capabilities).

The other three components of the Social Experience are derived through HiveLive. The RightNow Support Community is a social environment designed specifically for enabling peer-to-peer support and enhancing customer loyalty. There are discussion forums so customers can cover products and service conversations, share tips, and answer each other’s questions. The Q&A feature [MH1]lets customers pose questions to the online customer community and then mark the best answer and it can be escalated to your contact center if needed. The resource library keeps a searchable repository, including both company and user-generated content. The feature request option invites customers to contribute their ideas for a better product or service, and then vote for the best submissions. Here is a sample community home page.

The Innovation Community supports crowdsourcing and it is integrated with the rest of the RightNow tool suite. It is designed to add customer input into your ideation and innovation processes, so they can help you identify new business opportunities, guide your product roadmap, prioritize and refine ideas. The Ideation Center invites customers to submit ideas and vote for their favorites. The Concept Tester captures structured feedback that can improve the quality of your product, packaging, ads, and other components of your offerings. Here is a sample idea center page.

In addition to these two out-of-the-box communities for support and innovation, you can create your own community using the Social Experience Designer. You can design and construct new community areas from scratch — or use ready-made templates with built-in best practices. You can control who sees what content by defining permissions for every member, group and area of the community. The configuration tool offers a point-and-click interface for ease of development. Analytics and reporting are also provided for one-click data export, integration with Google Analytics, and an administrative dashboard for monitoring results.

I have been impressed all along with the comprehensive and interconnecting nature of the RightNow product suite. The addition of these community capabilities makes a lot of sense. With social media, companies are no longer in control of their messages. It is better to build the arena for social media discussions about your products than leave this to others.

Here is an interesting blog post by John Kembel on this topic, Social Done Right, which was posted after our conversation. He wrote that, “Deloitte’s 2009 Tribalization of Business study found that 94 percent of its respondents (companies hosting an online community) plan to maintain or increase investment in their communities, even in the current economic climate.” This is consistent with similar studies that show social media as a growth sector.  I look forward to seeing where RightNow goes next.

Imaginatik Helps Enterprises Tap Thousands of Minds Within and Outside their Organization

December 8, 2009 at 3:46 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Crowdsourcing has become a hot trend and Imaginatik was one of the early players in this space. They recognized from the start that it takes more than technology to properly harvest, evaluate, and implement the ideas generated by large groups of people. I recently spoke with Mark Turrell, CEO and co-founder of Imaginatik, a software and services company specializing in tapping into the brainpower of thousands of people to solve problems. It is traded on the London Stock Exchange.

Mark’s original Ph.D. research at Cass Business School investigated the use of collaborative technologies, and he initiated the study of software server log data to track actual usage, rather than relying on interviews and survey data.  Mark said that fifteen years ago companies were primarily deriving insight out of data. Now they also look to groups of people and this is the focus of Imaginatik.

Imaginatik provides a flexible platform and many of the implementations have been co-developed with their clients including Chevron, Pfizer, Whirlpool, and Xerox.  They now have an out of-the-box product called Chembioconnect that was co-developed with chemists. It makes use of visualizations from CambridgeSoft that are specially designed to handle chemical data.

Mark provided an example of how crowdsourcing can help. CSC was faced with a challenge in its financial organization as they had a cash flow management issue. Instead of getting together a few insiders and perhaps hiring a consultant, CSC turned to see what they could get from a broader perspective. They invited 1000 people to offer their suggestions and within a week they had over a 100 solutions to sift through.  They discovered that the invoice date significantly effected payment backlog. A simple change in their invoicing process has resulted in an improved cash management at the rate of over $1 million (US) a day.

In another case, Cargill, a large private food processing company is using Imaginatik in over 40 divisions. They have achieved improvements in many areas. For example, they have been able to significantly reduce rodent infestation through several solutions. They have also been able to share the solutions that did not work so others do not waste time trying them over again.

Imaginatik is a web-based platform. The majority of clients used the cloud but not all.  The core system is their Idea Central. It supports the harvesting of ideas, manages comments and offers evaluation and tracking.  There is also rewards and recognition. I asked Mark about this latter component. He said that the key is fitting rewards and recognition to the culture of the organization. For example in one family owned food company, contributors received points. These points turned into money for the charity of their choice.  Some other companies offer gift vouchers for the employees’ use and a letter from the President.  Here is a sample contribution harvesting screen.

Mark said the real challenges are not technical. In addition to proper reward and recognition, you need user and leadership engagement. In the past few years the volume and quality of contributions has increased. Mark and I both feel that the increased transparency and participation in the Web contributes to this increase.  Here is a sample rating screen.

Imaginatik is working on improvements in the process side to better handle the increased volume.  They have implemented a semantic analysis component that can build word clouds on the fly to help sort through contributions. They already have manual tagging. They are also doing more work with metadata to link people to types of content.  Mark said they also do a lot of experimentation on processes and incentives. Transparency increases participation. This has been my experience, as well.

Mark is committed to making change on a global scale, and is driving Imaginatik’s initiative to work with nonprofits and NGOs to tackle world problems, such as water, energy, poverty and waste. For some of these efforts, Imaginatik has received an award of Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum.

RollStream Provides Supplier Community Management and Collaboration

December 4, 2009 at 3:09 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Here is a good idea. Why not go beyond the many general, and useful, enterprise 2.0 collaboration suites and create one devoted to a specific business function. This is what McLean, VA-based RollStream has done by applying the collective supply chain experience of a number of its senior execs with their deep IT knowledge and expertise to the creation of its supply chain community management and collaboration tool.  I recently spoke with two of the RollStream execs, Nick Parnaby, Chief Operating Officer, and Kerry Lenahan, Director Product Management & Marketing to get an understanding of what they are doing.

RollStream was founded in 2005 to facilitate the management of enterprise communities, specifically suppliers and trading partners. Nick said in some ways it is like the mirror image of CRM.  I would agree as RollStream allows you to establish company and contact profiles for all your business contacts and then let your partners maintain their own contact information via the Web or email. However, it goes much further than CRM, as RollStream is an enterprise 2.0 application that supports collaboration between members of the supply chain in a number of ways. In this sense it more like a mirror of the newer social CRM tools that are emerging. Here is a sample RollStream contacts screen.

They are different from most enterprise collaboration tools as they are very domain specific.  For example, one of the tools is focused on Credential Storage. This allows you to store trading partner credentials in company profiles. You can track or import other trading partner capabilities, such as EDI certifications, expiration dates for liability certificates and payment terms. Nick mentioned an example in the US consumer drug industry where retail drug stores need to be able to offer testing certificates on demand to inspectors for many of the drugs and other products they sell.  This CPSIA Certificate Exchange Network simplifies that requirement.

You can also create B2B projects with proper security. These projects allow you to define activities with due dates and dependencies and assign them to members of your community. This facilitates accountability for task completion to your trading partners. There is a dashboard to view detailed information about who in your community is receiving, viewing and acting upon critical project information. You can track individual, company, and community progress via the centralized dashboard and view response times and completion status for key activities. An action center connected to the dashboard provides the ability to generate new communications, reminders or simply send alerts. Here is a sample activities screen.

Here is a sample conversation around a set of actions.

RollStream provides a platform and then sells additional applications like the iPhone app store. Some of these applications include: Registration, Change Management and B2B Workspaces.

RollStream is being used by a number of enterprises with large and complex supplies chains such as grocery stores and drug stores.  I am familiar with the needs of at least one of their clients, Sainbury’s, as I did work on their initial enterprise portal a number of years ago. I can appreciate how the capabilities with RollStream can help. Other clients include Walgreen’s, Ahold, and Tesco. I think this is a very smart approach that should also reduce some of the adoption challenges associated with more general enterprise 2.0 tools. It comes already aligned with a key business process.

PBworks Now Provides Various Flavors of Real-Time Collaboration

December 1, 2009 at 3:36 am · Filed under Web 2.0

I have written about PBworks before (see PBwiki Adds Four New Features and Changes Its Name to PBworks) and recently caught up again with Chris Yeh, their VP of Marketing.  We discussed their new Real-Time Collaboration Update. It includes integrated instant messaging, live notifications, live editing, and voice collaboration.  We went over each one but first I asked about their micro-messaging capability that was part of the prior release.

I have seen many collaboration suites move to integrate Twitter-like capability and think this is a good trend so I was interested in their version.  Moving micro-messaging inside the enterprise raises new options and PBworks takes advantage of this. There is one universal message stream but you can choose to filter it by selecting followers (Twitter-style) or follow the whole stream.  This supplies real time awareness and near real time connections.  Here is a sample personal home page with the micro-messaging status update field.

If you want to engage in more direct and real time connections with a limited audience, the IM function addresses this need. It is like traditional IM except that it is integrated into the PBworks collaboration suite. IM Collaboration allows users to see who else in their organization is actively using PBworks at that moment, and enables them to send them instant messages from within the product. It is not designed to replace an organization’s current IM but instead provide messages in context and allows for sending links to any pages being discussed within PBworks.  This is a good transition to live editing.

Live editing provides real time communication of editing like Google Wave. I asked Chris if they introduced this before Google Wave. He said they had been thinking about it before they learned of Google Wave but it was released after the release of Wave. This actually worked to their advantage as it made it easier to convey the capabilities by saying it was like Google Wave. Some of the differences include holding an IM session during a live editing session. You would not want to have comments appear on the edited document during the editing session, as that would become part of the document. This way you can have a side channel for discussion while editing that does not impact the editing itself.  You can also hold a voice collaboration session during the live editing as an alternative side channel. I really like this integrated capability. It speaks well of collaboration suites as opposed to separate applications. Here is sample screen showing live editing in progress.

Voice collaboration allows for audio web conferencing. The difference from traditional web conferencing is the integrated capability. You can easily start a live audio session from with PBworks without going through the usual startup activity associated with most web conferencing tools. This means it will likely be used more often and for small incremental sessions as a project evolves. Traditional real-time collaboration tools are generally standalone products for “appointment” collaboration. The PBworks voice collaboration serves a different function for ongoing discussions. There is also automated recording and storage of recorded sessions. Here is sample voice collaboration startup screen.

Live Notifications alerts users to activity within their organization in real-time, rather than requiring them to await an asynchronous email notification. Users can select which notifications they want to receive, based on their preferences (known as “starring” or “following” particular pages) and other users, and the system will stream relevant notifications to whatever page a user is viewing. Here is a sample live notifications screen.

I think this a great collection of real time collaboration tools to complement their other asynchronous tools.  I only wish these capabilities were around when I was managing large-scale efforts.