Archive for January, 2011
by Bill Ives
January 29, 2011 at 5:34 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Digital Reef provides scalable and open software for eDiscovery and digital information governance. It addresses the identifying, analyzing, collecting, and reviewing of electronic documents in place within the enterprise. I spoke with David Butler of Digital Reef about changes in the field and their most recent moves.
Digital Reef looks at eDiscovery in a broader sense and includes it as part of information governance. This moves the coverage of eDiscovery beyond traditional reactive legal roles to encompass compliance and more proactive legal strategies. To support these moves Digital Reef provides a platform that can be configured based on corporate policies. For example, it can help determine if a recent SharePoint implementation conforms to records compliance requirements. In this sense eDiscovery can go across the organization and not be confined to a single legal issue.
Digital Reef creates a Virtual Governance Warehouse (VGW) to support the three stages active file governance: visibility, insight, and control. You can understand and track all file sources and content across the enterprise, apply analytic metadata to create a relevant structure to the content, and then more easily apply control measures for legal and compliance needs. The Data Collection Report shown below supports the visibility stage.
VGW not only discovers and analyzes unstructured content; it makes that information actionable with rich governance control services. File governance actions can be fully automated using the VGW ActionFlow™ policy service, as shown below by the Action Flow Editor and Action Flow Monitor, respectively. Policies can be scheduled to run daily, weekly or monthly, or even executed on-demand.
Digital Reef is also partnering with other firms to address the front and back ends of legal process. It integrates with Exterro Fusion for legal hold notifications. After Digital Reef has gotten the content house in order, users can now generate and automatically load native exports and files for use with review platforms such as kCura Relativity.
David also discussed their new Portable Collections capability that enables users to quickly create large case-specific portable matters that can be easily distributed between eDiscovery data centers of legal service providers, enterprise companies and law firms. The Digital Reef eDiscovery Portable Collections feature creates a “package matter” containing virtual indexes, complete search meta-data and tags, analytic collections and views, and selected files within a case. This package may then be archived and restored later or moved into another Digital Reef environment for continued processing and review. Enterprise companies can now better partner and collaborate with legal service providers to establish proactive early case assessments (ECA) and establish risk strategies without costly infrastructure and expertise investments. Law firms benefit by having review-ready collections.
Another recent Digital Reef partnership is with ViON Corporation, a specialist in designing, delivering and maintaining storage and server solutions to government and enterprise data centers. ViON File Services allow firms to have a comprehensive view into the files currently residing in their network attached storage (NAS) appliances and more intelligently migrate massive collections of unstructured files. The joint ViON and Digital Reef offering is a pre-configured appliance combining hardware, software and training/implementation services.
ViON File Services approaches NAS migrations using three processes: file discovery, file management and file migration. During the discovery phase, companies can see what files are stored, their type, when they’ve been accessed and if there are duplicates. There can be a lot of heavy lifting during legal and compliance activities with the massive amount of content handled during eDiscovery so this partnership can make these processes more efficient.
With rapidly expanding volumes of content through social media and the increasing higher bandwidths increased use of formats such as digital video, legal costs have the potential to explode. The solutions that Digital Reef bring to the market have the capacity to mitigate this risk. It seems to be a growth market and I like their approach.
by Bill Ives
January 25, 2011 at 12:52 pm · Filed under
Web 2.0
Clarizen provides applications to support work tasks within the enterprise and I first wrote about them in 2008 (see Clarizen: Collaborative Online Project Management for Small-Midsize Businesses). I commented in my first post that project management is one of the killer apps for web 2.0 within the enterprise. It was one of the applications that first excited me about the business potential of web 2.0 (e.g., An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department). This thought still holds true from my perspective. Since I last spoke to them, Clarizen has undertaken some innovative moves to extend this class of applications.
I spoke with Sharon Vardi about their new moves. Clarizen felt that while many project management tools adequately addressed the planning part, the work execution part was not properly addressed. In addition, some of the tools make project planning too complex. I would agree with both of these points based on personal experience. In response Clarizen has adopted a design approach of what they term “robust simplicity” and extended functionality beyond the planning phaseTo address what they refer to as the work execution phase, Clarizen has combined some of the features found in project management tools with those found in collaboration tools. They also have designed these features to be easily used by all types of project teams members and not just the program management experts. This includes such capabilities as resource management, scheduling & planning, budgeting, time and expenses, issues tracking and email integration.
The implementation process has been simplified so they can both sell and deliver via the phone and the Web. On the ground implementation services are not necessary. They simply run two webinars and most firms are good to go. This has allowed them to adopt a “land and expand” strategy. With one client they sold 90 seats and within a month they had expanded by hundreds of additional subscriptions.
In the past many work processes tended to be static and fixed. This allowed for a greater focus on planning since once the work started it often did not change. Now the work situation is much more likely to change quickly and a work execution tool needs to be flexible to accommodate these changes. I can remember about ten years ago having to take the top four people on a project off the work execution to spend three months re-planning the project using one of the very complex project management tools. We felt it was a huge waste of time. Today it would be even more of a disaster.
Clarizen also developed email integration so team members could work where they tend to spend much of their time. You can see all of the emails related to a project through a single click. You can also have Clarizen receive updates through email. They have extended this integration to apply to many of the commonly used enterprise apps such as Salesforce.com, Google Apps and Intacct. For example, this allows you to go from Salesforce.com to Clarizen once a deal is closed and the related work needs to start. You can also go from the popular help desk application, Zendesk, to Clarizen when more complex issue resolution is required.
Clarizen is promoting transparency with their cross-application integration and the features within their tool. To demonstrate some of this transparency, Clarizen created a road map widget that allows you to share project status with others. To practice their own approach, they have made the status of their own tool updates available on their website. Here is a sample of the road map widget looking at their own efforts.
You can see this for yourself at their site. I like what they are doing and the market has responded. Sharon told me that they have achieved 40% growth for the last six consecutive quarters. Clarizen also received the Codie Award for best project management software for 2010. I look forward to seeing their next moves.
by Bill Ives
January 18, 2011 at 9:05 pm · Filed under
Web 2.0
Much has happened to bring social applications into the enterprise in the past few years. I recently spoke with eXo CEO Benjamin Mestrallet who shared his observations on this trend. First, a bit about eXo. Their new release, eXo Platform 3.0, provides a foundation for portal-based enterprise apps. It describes itself as a “user experience platform” for creating modern, user-centric Java applications that can be deployed on premise or in the cloud.
Benjamin said it has three main components. You can manage web sites. It is an application development platform and it can manage social interactions within the enterprise. We focused on this last capability. It provides what can be called a social portal. You can set up activity streams within it to integrate enterprise communicationTo enhance the interface for these streams, eXo recently launched an eXo plugin for Seesmic. The Seesmic desktop client works like Tweetdeck to set up columns to bring order to your activity streams. I think this is a great move as it took the use of Tweetdeck for Twitter to work for me and now I am a fan and heavy user. While eXo has microblogging features, these columns can aggregate more than the microblogging content. In addition to the microblogging capability, you can follow people as you do in Twitter and get feeds from objects such as sales leads or projects.
Benjamin said that they are seeing a new type of client. In the past most of their clients were large enterprises. Now much smaller companies are looking into the social aspects of company portals. There are also many government organizations looking into social tools within the enterprise. These new clients come with an awareness of social tools from the Web. They are comfortable with these types of tools. Benjamin said he is seeing a migration from work communication through email to activity streams. These streams are becoming the new online work place.
I find this migration interesting and encouraging. Many of the new social collaboration tools are enabling email integration as they feel that that is where workers are more comfortable. If the trend that Benjamin is seeing holds, this integration may become less necessary. I can certainly see the benefits of operating within a social tool versus email. It also makes sense that people who are familiar with Web tools like Facebook will choose to work within more social tools such as activity streams. I also know that this migration can be difficult for some who are very used to email.
Benjamin said that making an intranet more social increases adoption and engagement. Workers feel like they have greater ownership of the intranet and its content as they are providing more of it. Managers are able to more easily monitor what is happening within the enterprise and take action. Benjamin said that software vendors should be aware that social capabilities need to be at the core of content and collaboration platforms and not simply features. I can agree with this.
Activity streams can also be easily pushed through mobile devices, increasing their adoption and expanding their use cases. Putting work content into activity streams – rather than offering it through email – allows you to better track it, share it, and find it again. Benjamin closed by saying the advent of social capabilities is just the beginning and many more use cases and impacts remain to be uncovered. I would certainly agree here, as well.
by Bill Ives
January 11, 2011 at 3:12 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0, social media
Operating in real time, the Darwin Awareness Engine™ allows for the efficient scanning of content to find both breaking news and underlying casual patterns in the topics of your interest. Rather than using semantic technology to attempt to enable understanding by a computer, their approach to awareness is based on Chaos Theory and allows the content to self organize. This approach eliminates the need for a predetermined taxonomy or the ability to use SEO techniques. It provides a visualization of results that enables a person to make more informed decisions about where to look next.
Darwin Ecosystem has recently announced a series of themed Darwin Editions™ powered by the Awareness Engine™ that focus on specific topics to better demonstrate its capabilities and as a service to our readers. These can each be accessed at no cost through a brief registration process. As a disclosure I am part of the Darwin Ecosystem team.
The initial themes for the Darwin Edition include: general news, social media on the web, social media in the enterprise, and oil and gas industry news. There is also another free version through their partner, Twortex, which uses aspects of the Darwin Awareness Engine to provide a Twitter search tool.
These Darwin Editions provide a way to monitor the conversations within several focused areas. They offer many of the user capabilities that come with the complete Darwin Awareness Engine. Darwin looks at targeted content rather than spidering the whole Web. This targeted content approach provides greater control to define relevant content and can be focused within the Web or within the enterprise through such applications as SharePoint, Domino, and many of the other collaboration and content management platforms.
Determining and curating the target content is an administration function that comes with the commercial versions. In this free Darwin Edition series Darwin Ecosystem has picked the content sources and will continue to refine them.
As a user you have a number of capabilities for looking at this content and making adjustments to your discovery process. First, there are the two visualizations: the Buzz Tape™ and the Scan Cloud™. The Buzz Tape runs across the top of the screen as seen below and displays themes of rising (green) or falling (red) interest within the target content. The Scan Cloud shows the top themes within the target content. Running the mouse over one theme highlights the others that are related to it. In the right column the actual content connected with themes is displayed. Clicking on this content will take you directly to the source.
The photos come through two sources. Some RSS feeds provide pictures. We also link to relevant Flickr images. You can also choose to collect videos through YouTube by choosing videos when you select sources as described below. The YouTube videos are listed under the informal sources in the right column.
You can either simply look at the general buzz within the targeted content or create attractors, that serve as queries, to further refine you content discovery. For example, you can look at how your brand or some other topic of interest is being discussed. To create a new attractor, you fill in the attractor field in the top right. For example, I put in Boston, my hometown, in the attractor field and received these results shown below.
Then you can further edit your attractor by clicking in the edit space next to where it appears in the upper left. An edit field appears, such as the one shown below. You can adjust the time period for content collection up to 200 hours by using the slider. You can select which feeds to use by choosing from the drop down or simply allow for everything by not making a selection. It is best to start this way. You can also select if you want to only see more formal (traditional news sources) or less formal sources (bloggers). Not selecting either provides all content sources.
Once you have refined your attractor you can save it in the lower right corner of the edit field. Then when you click on the plus sign in the upper left all of your saved attractors will appear for you selection.
The Awareness Engine is a Web browser application (Scan Cloud™) or it can become a custom solution through API access. It is delivered through a Web server with services and a database correlating the different Web 2.0 sources. For the enterprise there is an on-premise solution running on Ruby on Rails and making use of RSS feeds. Its Virtual Cortex™ database can be set on Oracle, MS-SQL or mySQL according to scalability needs.
by Bill Ives
January 8, 2011 at 1:05 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, social media
According to a recent survey by The Amanda Group over 60 percent of respondents in the mid-size business space say they are ready to look to the cloud. Many are already using virtualization but only 4 percent are using the cloud now to back up data. In addition, 63% say they are using 10% or less of their applications on a SaaS platform. So this projects a major shift in the mid-size business IT architecture.
Are these companies prepared? It seems that there is work to be done as 79% do not have a plan for their move into the cloud. Many see the advantages as 63% feel that the cloud offers cost savings and 29% feel that the cloud offers more flexibility. At the same time, only 8% believe there is no advantage to the cloud.
Many of the vendors reviewed on this blog operate on SaaS platforms so there is challenge here for them to further penetrate the mid-size market. The good news is that the desire for the cloud is there, the caution is the lack of strategic planning in place.
Social media is generally operates on a cloud platform. In the large company space I have seen studies that indicate over 80% of companies plan to use social media in 2011 but in other studies less than half have a strategy for social media use. This parallel between social media and the cloud is not surprising. In both cases vendors need to avoid prompting tools and services because they are the latest thing and help clients address planning and strategy requirements to make sure their applications are kept for the long run.
by Bill Ives
January 3, 2011 at 3:33 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
I have covered Zoho a bit here (see Zoho Project 2.0 Enhances the Social Side of Project Management, Zoho: A Suite of Many Online Apps for Small to Midsize Business and Zoho Apps Go Mobile). Zoho aims to provide the complete suite of online office and productivity applications for small to midsize businesses (SMBs). It is part of AdventNet, a private company that has been around for 12 years. Zoho wants to be the IT department for SMBs. In 2005 they launched their first product, Zoho Writer.
They continue to grow and now have nearly 4 million users worldwide – adding 150k new users per month. They added three new products in 2010. Zoho Support gives users a web-based customer support and help desk. Zoho Assist lets users provide on-demand remote support to their customers. Zoho Calendar provides an online calendar for managing meetings and events. The suite now includes 24 products.
There were several product upgrades. Zoho Wiki 2.0 gives users individual workspaces and fine-grained access controls. Zoho Invoice 2.0 upgrades with new features including expense module, multi-user support, email history, and open APIs. Zoho Projects gains the Zoho Bug Tracking Module to help users submit, track and fix software bugs. Zoho Search now allows users to search across the entire suite of Zoho applications with this unified, actionable search engine.
Along with new products, their top priority for the year was integrating their apps along with other technologies including Google Apps, Quickbooks, Go-Daddy and PayPal. Integration will continue to be an area of focus in 2011 as well.
Thought...
