Intrix Is Bringing Semantic Technology to Enterprise 2.0

July 3, 2009 at 3:05 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Recently I spoke with Intrix founder, Davorin Gabrovec, about his new venture. Intrix is a spin off of Intera, a successful business web application company, where he realized through working with hundreds of small to medium sized businesses in knowledge management, collaboration, and project management, that the next evolution in business tools was bringing semantic technology to enhance the migration of Web 2.0 to enterprise 2.0.

Intera was started two and half years ago with the Intrix spin off starting up earlier this year. Intrix plans to have a public launch in September. It is a cloud offering that uses semantic technology in several ways. The first way is to connect related data without having to manually tag or use other manual means.  The second is to allow Intrix to learn from individual╒s behaviors with the software and infer best practices to share with other users.

In the past most software was used to support transaction. Intrix, like many of the enterprise 2.0 tools is designed to support human interactions. People have learned to appreciate and understand the social side of software from the consumer Web. Now they want this capability in the their business tools. 

Intrix features support user’s ability to collaborate, share, interact and exchange information, data and knowledge easily throughout the enterprise.  As a social Enterprise solution it connects people with information, it merges collaboration, community and social networking tools into a single Web interface. It has also a an adjustable dashboard feature, so users can see and share information how they want to.

People in large enterprises often do not know what their fellow employees are doing.  These interactions need to be made more transparent to make better use of the potential within the organization. Intrix is designed to use semantic technology to further enhance this transparency but adding semantic processing to human content sharing activities.

Davorin gave an example of the added power that semantic technology bring to enterprise 2.0.  An experienced sales manager could use Intrix to manage the sales process, covering such items as sales leads, prospect and client information, and schedules. Intrix will learn how the experienced manager organizes and tracks the information. This knowledge can be passed on to new sales people as a best practice.

Davorin’s first start up, Intera, was selected by the Slovenian Innovation Forum as one of the most innovative and family friendly companies. Most recently, Intera was chosen as one of the best business ideas for 2009 by the National Finance Academy and they also won the Red Herring 100 Europe Award. Intrix also has great potential to do well. I look forward to learning more as it becomes more public. 

Rackspace 7.0 Provides Business Focused Email

July 1, 2009 at 3:54 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Most email clients focus on the broad consumer market. Rackspace, a managed server and cloud hosting provider, offers email designed to address business email needs.  I spoke with Kirk Averett, their Director of Products for email and applications. Many applications are moving to the cloud to save money. At the moment only small percentage of enterprises actually host their email externally. This could be one of the areas where cloud usage expands and Rackspace is targeting this expansion with its new Rackspace 7.0 email offering and its low price point ($1 a mail box a month).

Rackspace acquired Mailtrust in 2007 and rebranded the Noteworthy email platform as Rackspace Email adding new business oriented features. They now have over 1.2 million mail boxes and crossed the 15,000 customer mark this year. Some of the new features include right click for in-context options, a quick reply feature, improved foreign language handling, and improved support for Google Chrome Here is a sample email page.

Rackspace also completely rebuilt their calendar manager. They now offer support for multiple personal calendars and the ability to assign write access to a personal calendar to another user. They also work with iCal Calendar feeds now and have full compatibility with Outlook/Exchange invites. Here is their calendar interface.

You can also manage tasks as shown below.

Rackspace also offers a hybrid model, where companies can purchase hosted MS Exchange for executives who need the extra features and Rackspace Email for those who do not require them.

Kirk said that many small businesses get email bundled with their Internet service. However, they are quickly frustrated with the support and come to Rackspace as it has a reputation for excellent uptime and customer service. They also provide robust spam filtering and support attachments up to 50 MG, much greater than most ISPs.

Kirk said they also made user management easy for the business administrator. It is simple to add and remove users, as well as make aliases. Vacation settings are also handled under the same administration capability. It is also easy to synchronize your contacts on your laptop and mobile phone through the robust web mail capabilities. Here is a contact list.

Rackspace appears to be an excellent option to move your email to the cloud. 

Twitter as a Business Application

June 25, 2009 at 9:08 pm · Filed under Web 2.0

This post is about the consumer Web application Twitter and not about micro-blogging in the enterprise. We tend to use the term Twitter as a brand and as a noun like Xerox for photocopy. There are many excellent micro-blogging tools and many collaboration platforms are implementing Twitter-like status fields in their tools. I have covered both here. Twitter, the consumer Web tool, is also increasingly being used for business. I want to share my own experiences as a Twitter business user in this post.

I was on panel at Enterprise 2.0 Conference on business uses of Twitter, How Twitter Changes Everything. My panel co-participants include Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge (our moderator) Isaac Garcia, CEO, Central Desktop, Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era, and my fellow AppGap blogger, Patti Anklam. Here is what I planned to share at the session. I ended up saying most of it but there was not time or it did not fit the conversation to say all of it.

There have been many creative business uses of Twitter and a lot have been written about them so I will not repeat that stuff here. In these comments I am going to share my own personal experiences of twitter with business. I mainly do two things for business. I serve as a paid journalist bloggers for two blogs on enterprise 2.0, FastForward and AppGap, and I provide consulting to firms and individuals on their business blogs and other uses of social media. I will close with Twitter’s impact on these two business activities.

First, I want to make a confession. I used to make fun of Twitter. I compared the endless stream of 140 character bits to Luis Borges’ Library of Babel where, as the Wikipedia conveys his work published in 1941 conveys that, the “order of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless. Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the inhabitants believe that the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent thought. This glut of chaotic information was leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. But somewhere there was a book, the Crimson Hexagon, that contains the log of all the other books and the librarian who reads it is akin to God.”

When I made fun of the chaotic stream of chatter on Twitter, many of my fellow bloggers rose to its defense and urged me to join their conversations. Finally, I meet with several at a conference in Vegas and they showed me the Crimson Hexagon for Twitter, TweetDeck. Now I could bring some order to the chaos. I could segment the people I am following into manageable and meaningful subgroups. I began to use it more actively and discovered that it served several functions that I will describe. But I had to go to another tool to find value. One study said that Twitter provides the 37th best interface to its own data. This is one of two potentially fatal flaws that may send it to join Friendster.

First, I discover a lot of interesting ideas. I like the human filter aspects. When I first started my blog over four years ago, people knew I blogged and would email me interesting stuff to blog about. I said I had a human RSS feed and rarely had to go to mechanical RSS readers. Now Twitter serves this purpose even better as people I respect tweet about an article or blog post with links. As Dion Hitchcliffe said in a tweet, Twitter can serve as a useful filter as he would rather have info endorsed by people he knows. Twitter has become my main source for blog content but only through tweets that point to longer pieces.

Second, I use Twitter search as an alternative to Google search. It has not replaced Google, just supplemented it. Twitter search is for what is happening right now and Twitter makes it easier to engage the person sharing the content. I find it good for niche topics like agile development or cloud computing. However, Twitter’s range is fleeting and Google is still more comprehensive.

Third, like my blog, I use Twitter as a personal knowledge management system. I retweet interesting links I find from others and tweet things I find myself. Then I can go back to them to read later and perhaps blog on them. However, this is fleeting and exposes the second of the potentially fatal flaws with Twitter. It dumps its data index after three months so you cannot go back and find stuff beyond the rolling three month window. If I tweet about this conference or record links I had better convert the information to another format if I want to save it. In addition, the interface makes it hard to go back more than a few weeks away. Someone needs to do for Twitter archiving what TweetDeck did for immediate use or a better micro-blogging system might take over. I found my blog to be very useful in preparing for what I would say on this panel. Twitter was much less useful and only helped with stuff that happen in the past week.

I also used my blog to record my notes on the excellent conference sessions by Dion Hinchcliffe and Mike Gotta. But I used Twitter to let others at the conference know that they existed and received over 38 RTs of these alerts and a few came with nice additional comments. There was also a spike in page views for the blog with many coming from Twitter. The two channels complemented each other. Twitter does not replace blogs.

Fourth, like with blogs, I meet new people on Twitter and better engage with people I already know. I also can create greater awareness for what I write in other channels, primarily blogs. Twitter does not replace blogs because there is only so much you can say in 140 characters but it is good way to point to more meaningful content.

So how has this affected my business? First, as I mentioned before, it supplies many stories for my journalist blogger role. Second, I now advise my blog clients on how to use Twitter to compliment their blogging efforts. Just as I experiment with blogs to better serve my clients, I have been experimenting with Twitter for the same purpose.

I have learned a lot and that could be another session. But here is one example. With blogs it is important to think in terms of key words as one of the best ways to expand your audience is through search. You need to speak to search engines through these key words but not in a gaming way. You will (and should) get in trouble for this as HabitatUK found out. With Twitter, you can apply the same key word strategy but instead on focusing on choosing the right words for blog titles and other content, you focus on the wording of tweets and use hashtags in a meaningful way. I find that I often get new followers directly related to a hashtag I recently used.

But of course you need to provide some value to the readers you attract or it is a waste of time. I you are just offering another get rich on Twitter scheme you will only attract fellow travelers.

Twitter is currently raising the slope of unrealistic expectations for business and consumers. It has great potential but it needs to continue to improve or someone else will take micro-blogging to the next step.

CubeTree Releases Innovative Enterprise Collaboration Platform

June 21, 2009 at 2:39 pm · Filed under Web 2.0

Here is a robust entry into the enterprise collaboration market in some very innovative features that take advantage of the social potential on the Web.  I recently spoke with Carlin Wiegner, CEO and co-founder, Ross Fubini, CTO and co-founder, and Gita Gupta, VP of Marketing at CubeTree. They each come from a strong enterprise software background. Carlin and Ross were together at Symantec where they saw the need for strong enterprise collaboration tools.

Collaboration is where the value is generated and until recently we didn’t have good tools for this. I mentioned the classic McKinsey article because they were aware of the next revolution in interactions.  It stated that the real value of the organization is in its interactions between people, and yet the IT investment until a few years ago had been almost all on transactions. CubeTree is designed to address and correct this issue.

Employees today are more aware of the possibilities and value of online collaboration. In the 90s this awareness often had to be trained. Now people expect and demand it. Ross, who came from a portal background, mentioned that portals were often under used. The goal was usually driving usage. Now the goal is supporting users. In the 90s IT had the money and power and now the power shift is back to the business users. I have seen this transformation firsthand, as I moved from enterprise portal implementations to enterprise 2.0, and certainly agree with his view.

The emphasis on users makes the social network and each individual user the logical center of a collaboration system. This is what CubeTree has done. Each user has  a profile with background information. It includes  blog posts, chat rooms, documents, info on following and follower, goals, groups, links, photos, polls, wiki pages and trips with the ability to drill down on each of these activities. Here is a sample.

There is also a Wall, similar in many ways to a Facebook profile. In the Wall, there are Twitter-like status feeds. The status feeds can be both user generated and auto-generated. The user can select the applications that will auto-generate activity status feeds. You can also send emails to the status feed or have the system send you an email on periodic basis asking for a status update which gets put into the feed. Here is a sample feed.

I like that the status feeds occur within the context of the collaboration platform. As I have mentioned before I think that within the enterprise Twitter-like applications work best within the context of a large collaboration platform as CubeTree does. However, on the consumer Web I think they work better as a standalone feed as Twitter does.

Users are able to vote on content in the system. This enables crowd sourcing. There are a variety of metrics on people, their activities and the voting around feeds as shown in the dashboard below.

CubeTree uses this feature from UserVoice.com to gather users’ feedback for product enhancements. Every week they post potential ideas for the next weekly release of CubeTree. Then they harvest this feedback and incorporate it into their next releases. At the same time they look at user actions through data warehousing to supplement their read on user opinions through voting. This is walking the talk in terms of both using the platform and what you do with it.

The way CubeTree conducts the polls helps spread the questioning. Using a Twitter-like asymmetrical follower/following model, you can see the votes of all the people you are following and then share this along with your vote to your followers. You can vote right on the feed item to enable this. This enables the viral spread of issues, and promotes both engagement on the issue at hand but future engagement as people expand their networks by seeing what others are doing.

A full suite of collaboration tools is built on top of CubeTree’s social networking platform, and includes micro-blogging, wikis, blogs, polls, goals management, travel-itinerary sharing, file sharing, link sharing, search, and more. However, the core is the social networking platform that builds collaboration into all the features and serves as the common ground for sharing content, ideas, and everything else. For example, you get all the collaborative updating and other social features in the wiki.

A robust feed architecture allows users to broadcast their activities from within CubeTree, as well as from other collaboration tools. CubeTree integrates with more than a dozen consumer and enterprise products including Twitter®, Google™ Docs and Google™ Reader, Salesforce.com®, meetings from WebEx™ and Adobe® Acrobat® Connect™ Pro, and project management updates from Basecamp®.

CubeTree is private and secure, ensuring a company’s proprietary files, images, updates and internal communications remain confidential. Only employees with the same email domain can access their company’s CubeTree network, and every page request is securely served via HTTPS. The standard version includes basic security features including SSL and community user disable; for companies requiring greater policy controls, CubeTree offers premium versions that provide additional security features including access restrictions based on IP addresses or browser, password policies and the ability to turn features on and off for all users.

There are three levels of functionality to choose from. The standard level is free. CubeTree states that this version will always be free. Then there are two levels of premium functionality. The Professional level is designed for groups and the Enterprise level for entire organizations. Within an organization you can have people operating on different service levels. CubeTree is totally cloud-based and deploys a new updated version to the cloud every week.

One of the initial CubeTree investors is Mitch Kapor, of Lotus fame. I think they are well positioned to be a significant player in the growing field of enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms. The team understands how online collaboration works and is drawing on some of the best features of the consumer Web but adapting them for business use. 

SelectMinds Provides Secure Social Networking Platform for Enterprise Use

June 16, 2009 at 6:34 pm · Filed under Web 2.0

SelectMinds has been providing social networking platforms for employees to support innovation and engagement and increase productivity, and for former employees to enhance recruiting and business development since 2000. I recently spoke with their CEO, Anne Berkowitch.  We discussed both best practices for creating social networks (see Launching Social Networks for the Enterprise in FastForward) and the capabilities of the SelectMinds platform, which is the focus of this post.

SelectMinds provides a comprehensive member profile that has three main components: who you are & what you know – your expertise, who you know – your network, and what you are doing – an auto generated activity stream of what you are doing within SelectMinds and other applications that are integrated with SelectMinds. These profiles are searchable and a directory of profiles is provided. The user has control over what is seen and can opt for privacy on any aspect. Here is a sample profile.

Groups can be created by members or by administrators. There is a comprehensive permission management system that was created in response to a number of client implementations. Groups can be completely open, semi-private or private. In the semi-private groups, non-members can see content but can only contribute with permission. Groups operate as mini-networks and possess all the functionality of the system as a whole. SelectMinds can be integrated with other applications such as Confluence for content sharing. Here is a sample home page.

There is robust event management with the ability to post events and manage the RSVP process. Members can send messages to each other without the email address displayed to maintain privacy. You can create different user experiences across groups based on permission levels so individual members see different content and even different branding if desired. Here is a sample forums page. 

The administrators can maintain activity logs on members beyond what members see and run reports on usage stats. There is strong security and many clients are in very regulated industries than demand this security. SelectMinds is very scalable in terms of both numbers of members and groups. It is Java based and pure SaaS.

SelectMinds began by offering employee alumni networks in 2000.  Companies found workforces can be fluid and wanted to maintain contact to increase the potential of rehiring talented former employees. These former employees can be a good source of recruiting referrals and business development. The latter is especially true for consulting companies who often lose employees to clients. I have experienced this myself in my past work life.

Companies are now also using SelectMinds to host networks inside the enterprise.  Anne said that there are three main reasons. First, they can enhance productivity as expertise becomes more visible. Second, they can be used to support innovation. New research and development can become more visible and ideas can be more easily exchanged. Third, they can help employee engagement. Anne noted a recent increase in this third goal because of the current downturn in the economy. Companies want to stay connected with their employees so they do not leave once things turn around. They also want to give them an outlet to deal with the crisis issues.

Grant Thornton LLP provides a good example of uses both inside and outside the enterprise. Grant Thornton is one of the Global 6 accounting organizations with operations in 100 countries. They recently launched a new employee social network. It is designed to cultivate relationships with current and former partners and employees and provides a forum for collaboration and the opportunity for knowledge sharing inside and outside the firm.

Grant Thornton’s new network includes an Executive Team blog where employees can discuss a variety of topics with executives, and other discussion forums for women and diversity groups, new hires, and others. The network also provides direct access to the firm’s Microsoft SharePoint system with additional integrations planned for the future.

Grant Thornton also launched its alumni social network with SelectMinds five years ago as way to remain in touch with retired partners and former employees. Now, retirees, alumni and employees can all connect for the purposes of business development and general networking.

I think that social networks will continue to play an increasing role within enterprise 2.0.  As I have written before, these applications should not be implemented with consumer tools, as they require business tools such as SelectMinds to be successful (see Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0 nor is it an Oxymoron).  SelectMinds provides a comprehensive set of tools developed through years of enterprise engagement to serve this need.

Drive eRazer™ for When You Need to Make Sure Your Data is Really Gone

June 15, 2009 at 1:49 pm · Filed under Web 2.0

We often talk about the new transparency in enterprise 2.0. However, there are times when we need to go the other way and eliminate any access to information. Perhaps you believe the system messages and think that anything put in your trash folder and deleted goes away. Not so. You might need some expertise to find it, but is still there.

I recently spoke with Jon Johnson of WiebeTech, a subsidiary of CRU-DataPort. Jon said that as a test, they bought twenty used drives on eBay and recovered everything from corporate data to email conversations to financial data to legal documents. To correct this problem, WiebeTech’s new Drive eRazer™ hardware solution erases all data from a hard drive quickly and easily.  You simply plug it into the hard drive and it does the rest. Here is one of the drives.

Drive eRazer is like a shredder for electronic data, and there is even an incinerator model. Drive eRazer writes over every bit of a drive. Even after one pass, there can be ‘”ghosts” of data that experts can piece together. A second pass approach is available that takes this stuff out completely, even the ghosts. After it’s done, there’s nothing left to recover.

Jon explained that there is a secure erase function on almost all hard drives. It was developed as a standard by the industry. However, it is very hard to access and use as the industry experts did not want people easily able to accidentally delete stuff. Drive eRazer takes advantage of this utility to do its job.  This can be important in a variety of contexts and is essential when you want to sell or donate your hard drives.

I certainly learned something. Drive eRazer is compliant with the Department of Defense requirements for “clearing” a “Non-Removable Rigid Disk.” The specification requires destruction of a hard drive containing government classified data.

Founded in 2000, in addition to erasing data, the focus of WiebeTech is delivering high performance portable storage solutions for consumer, business and government markets. WiebeTech also offers computer forensic devices which are critical tools used by criminal investigators collecting suspect data. In 2008, CRU-DataPort acquired WiebeTech to complement its line of data security and data mobility solutions.

Caspio Provides Fast and Flexible Online Database Development for Business Users

June 11, 2009 at 10:45 am · Filed under Web 2.0

The cloud has opened up enhanced opportunities to store and access data. However, for enterprises to take full advantage of this new power, database development tools need to be accessible to self-service by the typical business user without limiting any of the database’s flexibility or scalability. Caspio was designed to meet this need and I recently spoke with their CEO, Frank Zamani.

Frank said Caspio was founded in 2000 before the cloud hype started, as he saw the need to enable the development of Web apps by business users. It was his second tech startup. Frank took the first, Autoweb, an online car purchasing platform, public in 1999. While Frank wanted to speed up the process of moving databases from the desktop to the cloud, he decided to keep the familiar look and feel of desktop applications. Caspio uses AJAX to give its users a development environment that is intuitive to users of traditional desktop databases such as Microsoft Access.

Caspio Bridge is their flagship fully-featured product. It covers the entire end-to-end process of setting up and maintaining an online database. Frank took me on a tour. You can set up as many tables as you want either by importing data from an existing tool such as Excel, or by creating your own data entry forms. Caspio uses Microsoft SQL Server as the backend so it is highly-scalable and reliable.

Caspio Bridge “DataPages” allow you to create application interfaces to your data using step-by-step wizards and you can embed these DataPages directly in your Web pages. This feature means that you do not have to go to the Caspio site to launch your application. Frank showed me a number of examples where Deloitte, Equifax, and Fitness Magazine created Web applications that they embedded in their own sites. This is very useful for enhancing company Web sites.

Many newspapers have picked up on this and Caspio is the platform-as-a-service provider for over 75 percent of major US newspaper sites, including my home town’s Boston Globe. They enable the Web site embedding through JavaScript rather than the less productive means of using i-frames.

I especially liked an application by the Indianapolis Star that promoted citizen journalism. Anyone can file a story. Once the story is approved by the paper, it goes online. Through a mashup with Google Maps, you see where stories are breaking.

Frank quickly demonstrated how you can set up a database, create Web forms and search interfaces, and then embed the apps in any Web site. You can also pick any of the fields in the database to serve as search filters and allow for a drill down into the details behind a search result. There are a number of styles available to customize the design and a localization feature allows you to apply a large number of languages.

You can make fields editable and/or required and you can require a password for access to the DataPages. They created the sample database and set up the password protection in a Web site in about 5 minutes with no coding. All of this is done through point-and-click selections in Caspio’s wizards.

Caspio also provides APIs and you can extend it through any programming language so there are no special learning requirements. Additionally, Caspio’s embedded deployment makes it easy to syndicate apps across multiple Web sites. For example, one newspaper set up a restaurant violations database on its Web site. This same search form is easily syndicated on other Web sites as a widget.

There appears to be a nice combination of flexibility, power, and ease of use. I can see how it is popular, especially with enterprise and media Web sites. Frank also writes a Caspio Highlights blog to provide more context for the product and his experiences as CEO.

See other reviews from this series on online, shareable databases: TrackVia, Zoho, and QuickBase.