Author Archive
by Bill Ives
July 20, 2008 at 8:49 am · Filed under
Reviews
Spigit offers a number of tools to leverage online social interaction to support
core business activities. One of these is InnovationSpigit, the focus of this post. I found its approach very intriguing and creative in its own right. InnovationSpigit is a community platform that that uses the concept of market dynamics to manage the innovation process and engage employees in this effort. I recently spoke with Padmanabh Dabke, CTO and co-founder of Spigit, who explained it all to me. Padmanabh said the company is 15 months old and he based the concept on both his research in collaborative computing, and his work in financial services and exposure to market dynamics.
InnovationSpigit is a SaaS offering that goes far beyond the traditional static suggestion box or web site where ideas are collected. While it adds the social interactions of enterprise 2.0, it takes it a step further and puts the innovation funnel into a game situation based on market dynamics, adding a level of both fun and incentives. In this context, Spigit doesn’t employ simple popularity metrics like Digg. Spigit quantifies conversations based on reputation, department or title within a company, expertise, community buzz, etc. It provides additional structure in a number of ways. First, Spigit looks at the conversations going on within the firm, such as blog posts, and computes a reputation score for each participant based on their social activity, a type of page rank for people.
This reputation score is used to evaluate employee input in a structured innovation funnel that contains three stages: innovation, validation, and market emergence. There is a home page where ideas get posted and people can rate them. Each idea has its own page where it can be explained, documents can be posted, discussions can occur, and team members can be added. The first two stages have a series of thresholds that an idea needs to cross to move forward. The metrics for advancement include ratings, discussions, and team participation. The reputation score of participants is factored in to these metrics. As individuals participate, they gain social currency that be translated into actual rewards so both people and ideas are rated. Below is a screen shot of an idea home page.
When the idea passes the first two stages it enters a market where individuals can buy and sell shares with their earned social currency and be rewarded if the idea becomes successful and gets implemented. A company can customize and weight all of the metrics, the funnel stages and thresholds, the stock price calculations, etc. They can also make the reputation scores more or less transparent to match their company culture. In summary, InnovationSpigit gives a company all the tools it needs to run an innovation market game to better engage employees in the process. It works best when the participant numbers are in the thousands, rather than the hundreds. This way you get the scale to reap the “wisdom of crowds” effect. Spigit offers a simpler version for companies in the hundreds of employees. There is also lot of reporting of all these metrics. Here is a screen shot of a sample reporting page.
They can also support prediction markets and here is a sample page with examples of prediction markets.
I was impressed with the innovation that went into devising this system. I think games can be very motivating. They also have checks to prevent “gaming” the game. Spigit cross-checks reputation and looks for spam like moves. Known experts need to make approvals at various stages. I think a key success factor is selecting the right mix of employees to participate and making it a part of their job to find the next great ideas for the company.
As an educational psychology by training, I have seen many studies that show people can learn best in game like situations as engagement increases. I also helped build a number of business simulations in the 80s and 90s and saw how motivating they can be. InnovationSpigit takes the business simulation concept and puts it to work doing real work. Spigit has received a number of awards including Best of Interop 2008 and the 2008 Gartner Cool Vendor in the High Performance Workplace. I can see the wisdom here.
by Bill Ives
July 14, 2008 at 8:25 pm · Filed under
Reviews
LogiXML has been in the enterprise business intelligence business since 2000. They offer a comprehensive BI tools set that is implemented by IT departments behind the firewall. LogiXML is a well-established product, now on Version 9.2. It offers Web-based reporting, analysis and data integration software with its latest version.
LogiXML has just started a new initiative to bring the high-powered data visualization tools they have developed to a much wider audience at a very different price point. In fact, it is free for now. Recently, I spoke with Bill Kotraba, Director of Sales and Marketing at Logi OnDemand about their first product, Widgenie. This is the LogiXML group responsible for this new product line. Bill said they will always a free version, but they will soon introduce ads for the free one. Then, they will provide an ad free version with enhanced features for a modest monthly charge. Widgenie is designed for consumer web users, small businesses, and individuals in large organizations.
Widgenie is very new, only a few weeks old. Initial data visualization options include pie charts, bar charts, line charts,tag clouds, and others. Scatter plots are soon to be released and a heat map will follow. Bill said they are going to look to user input for many of the new options. The LogiXML engine has hundreds of visualization capabilities to convert to Widgenie. Widgenie is setting up a community for users to exchange ideas on how to best use the tool. Widgenie is setting up a community for users to exchange ideas on how to best use the tool and provide product input. They will also have a blog soon.
Widgenie allows you to visualize data from a variety of sources such as Excel or even mashups. You can also create customized widgets that embed on any website or HTML page and display real-time, interactive displays. The Widgenie widget can be embedded in Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, and there is a general embed option for others sites. They can also simply host the visualization and provide a unique url for distribution. You can get reports on how many times your widget was viewed and the number of unique visitors. If you have Widgenie on your blog or other site, others can grab it, if you allow them, and have you data updated on their site. Currently, you provide the data for these visualizations. Bill said they are exploring providing connections with existing data sources, both free and subscription services. In the latter case, they would do revenue sharing.
I think this is a smart idea, to take an existing powerful capability from an enterprise tool and adapt it for web use in a SaaS model. It is a new twist on enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0. It will be interesting to see where it goes.
by Bill Ives
July 13, 2008 at 8:57 pm · Filed under
Reviews
Filtrbox is a new service that grew out of a need I can understand. Last week, I spoke with Ari Newman, their founder and President. Ari has been involved with startups for 12 years in both technical and business roles. Like many of us, he found it hard to keep up with everything on the Web. There was nothing between Google Alerts and the expensive business intelligence software. I can appreciate this. While the Google guys are smart, I have discovered many new personal accomplishments through Google Alerts such composing music, being involved in films, and other such talents I did not know I had or activities that I do not remember taking part in. Ari wanted to address this need with a media monitoring system that was not a big ticket item. Their primary focus is the small to mid-size business market but they also have individual users in large firms like Microsoft and Reuters.
It works like this. Filtrbox acts as an intelligent agent, searching for new articles and content allowing users to better understand what is going on in the Web. Filtrbox achieves this using its FiltrRank technology, which gives users sensitivity, scoring and relevance controls over incoming information. Users create custom “Filtrs” that track company names, terms, people and any other specific online information they might be looking for from mainstream media, blogs, RSS feeds, or social media sources. They can even look at Twitter and FriendFeed, perhaps that will get me to selectively sample Twitter in response to those who keep encouraging me to join it. On the other hand, you can also block sources. Filtrbox delivers a Daily Briefing report via email that summarizes key new articles matching the user’s Filtrs. Once the data is collected, subscribers can share results with peers, analyze trends, and generate custom RSS feeds. This allows Filtrbox to be both a personal productivity tool and a collaboration vehicle. Here is a screen shot of a Filtrbox dashboard.
You can construct Filtrs with single words or strings. You can also exclude words. For example, you might want to follow Apple iPhone and Leopard but exclude Apple TV. Daily briefings are provided and can look for spikes in activity around your Filtrs. Filtrbox does ranking and you can adjust the ranking level you want to see to keep the responses down. Filtrbox looks at how you adjust rankings and learns your preferences better over time. They keep 15 days of history and flush out responses unless you name them as favorites. This is a good idea or your responses could get cluttered quickly. Here is a screen shot of Filtrbox reporting on the buzz around a Filtr.
You can search existing content and create an RSS feed on Filtrs. You can even put a Filtrbox feed as a side bar item in your blog. In this case, you will see a steam of relevant titles and summaries. Then you can click on the title to see the rest of the content. It opens a new window so your blog also remains in view.
Filtrbox was founded in Boulder, Colorado in April 2007 and is backed by Flywheel Ventures, True Ventures, and some angel investors. They ran a private Beta from February to June of this year. Now this week, they have announced their first public release. A survey of their Beta users reported that more than 80 percent of respondents found the service more valuable than existing tools, with more than half of those respondents coming from executive management or sales and marketing roles at their companies.
You can get five Filtrs for free but they are counting on the people’s inability to stop there once they see Filtrbox in action. You pay once you want more than five. They claim it is both disruptive and addictive. I am going to give it a try and see if I can resist.
by Bill Ives
July 11, 2008 at 9:24 am · Filed under
Reviews
Planview, a project portfolio management software supplier, has just rolled out a comprehensive new analytics product, Planview Enterprise
Insight Analytics. It serves as an executive dashboard to track spending, progress, and general updates on IT-related projects. Last week, I spoke with Patrick Tickle their Executive Vice President of Products. After we discussed the wonders of Austin, Texas, where they are located and I started my childhood, Patrick first gave me a bit about the company. Planview has been working in the resource management space since 1989. Their original founder, Pat Durbin, is still the CEO. For the first 15 years they ran on cash earned. Four years ago they took some venture funding to accelerate their move to the next level. Their market faced a subsequent wave of acquisitions as many of the big players picked up this capability through the “buy” mode. Planview remained independent.
Patrick said they have now become the largest independent provider remaining in this space. This allows them to be the independent alternative in a growing market and “sit amongst giants in the right Gartner quadrant.” He mentioned that Gartner reported 23% growth last year in their market space, 18% the year before and 14% the year before that. I am not surprised with this growth as the new tools are opening up the enterprise, allowing for greater transparency and accountability. Patrick thinks the market is still ripe for further growth and I agree.
Planview Enterprise
Insight Analytics is built through .Net on Microsoft SQL Server and SharePoint with OLAP reporting functionality. This allows executives to access data sets through a variety of interfaces including SharePoint, Outlook, and Excel. Integration with the Microsoft platform expands the access to portfolio management metrics as people can start from the places they normally work. It also allows clients to drop the Insight Analytics tool into other Sharepoint-based portals within their enterprise. In addition to providing familiar starting points, clients can drop data from Insight Analytics into such tools as Excel and Powerpoint, giving it greater exposure, especially to executives. With Insight Analytics you can find data on such issues as total cost of ownership, resource allocation, work management, vendor costs, and alignment of actual implementation to strategic goals. There is also role-based security. Here is a screen shot of Insight Analytics seen through Outlook.
Here is a screen shot of Insight Analytics embed in a Powerpoint presentation.
Planview’s decision to build Insight Analytics tightly integrated with the Sharepoint platform came though three stages. First, they put their help system in Sharepoint for Planview Enterprise, their flagship project portfolio management system. This created a dynamic help system that allowed them to infuse it with the existing portfolio management expertise they can developed over 19 years, currently offered through Planview PRISMS®, another of their products. It also allowed Planview to integrate their extensive library of computer-based training modules that already existed. Next, they integrated Sharepoint as their content management and collaboration system for their project portfolio management system. Based on the success of these first two moves, the final step was the creation of their new Insight Analytics in .NET, tightly integrated with Sharepoint. Here is a screen shot of Insight Analytics accessed through a Sharepoint portal.
Patrick said are three main areas within companies where Insight Analytics is being used. First, there are the large IT organizations, their traditional base. Product development groups are an emerging market for them. Product development groups across industries face many of the same issues, such as getting things out on time, on budget, and with the best feature set. As a result, Planview has found take up in a variety of industries from complex IT firms to a company that makes baseball cards and has to make sure the right cards are available for opening day. The third area of growth is corporate strategy. The enterprise needs to monitor progress and alignment of initiatives with strategy and Insight Analytics can offer the needed data. Planview reports that the tool is not primarily being used to curb spending but rather to allocate spending towards projects that will deliver the greatest value. Providing greater transparency within the enterprise to the right people is a growing trend in enterprise 2.0. I see Enterprise
Insight Analytics as an excellent and timely move by Planview to enhance their product offerings.
by Bill Ives
July 7, 2008 at 7:25 pm · Filed under
Reviews
I have written about Serena on a number of occasions, the most recent was “Serena Moves into SaaS, Project Management, and Agile Application Development.” Recently, I spoke with Nathan Rawlin, their Senior Director of Product Marketing, and Kyle Arteaga, VP, Corporate Communications to catch up their latest moves. Serena continues to upgrade its mashup offerings and has added two major enhancements since my last conversation.
First, The Serena Mashup Composer, a visual design tool to build and test mashups without coding, now allows you to incorporate widgets, which have primarily been used in the consumer world. Now users simply drag and drop widgets, RSS feeds, Flash components and more into their business mashups. This means that people can now pull in information from any widget on the Internet – details from a Facebook profile, a photo from Google Images or the local weather forecast from Yahoo! Weather — into a mashup. This traditionally consumer information can enhance enterprise applications.
Nathan gave me an example. Suppose a sales rep is preparing for a big meeting with a new customer. The rep might start with the customer’s record in salesforce.com, and have the mashup fetch related information like a photo and details from the customer’s LinkedIn or Facebook profile, external news feeds showing the company’s latest stock price, credit report information from a Dun & Bradstreet Web service, and widgets showing local weather and traffic in the customer’s location. Soon, the rep has all the information needed for the meeting. This mashup can be reused as a template for other meetings, saving the time and effort of rebuilding the mashup, visiting multiple data sources again and again for the same information.
This makes a lot of sense to me. The Mashup Composer remains, free. The charges start after you have built and tested the mashup and need to have it hosted.
Serena has also launched a new Business Mashup designed specifically for the application release process. It provides an automated way for application developers, IT operations, and business users to communicate and collaborate with each other during the release process. Serena’s Application Release Manager combines Web 2.0-based workflow capabilities with ChangeMan® ZMF, a Software Change and Configuration Management (SCCM) application for the mainframe, to manage the application release process, from initial change requests through final deployment into the production environment. Nathan said this is the first browser-based app to mainframe mashup he knows about. This is a positive development, as the mainframe is certainly not going away but the people who can work with it are declining. Enterprise 2.0 will need to get along with it.
There are many large companies that still generate an extensive number of mainframe applications. One of their clients created 484,000 new mainframe apps in the past year. The number of IT people who can sit and stare at mainframe green screens is getting smaller. Now users can monitor and communicate through a browser-based system that is more familiar to the current generation of IT people. As with any Serena Business Mashup, the Application Release Manager includes a visual process designer with out-of-the-box process templates that can be customized to suit individual needs. As a result, all of the project stakeholders can coordinate their activities, including application developers, IT operations teams, and even business users who traditionally had no visibility into mainframe applications. The templates include the following: Issue Tracking, Request to Test, Agile Backlog, Change requests, Hardware and Software Changes, and Demand Management.
These two developments represent nice bridges in opposite directions, to the consumer web world and to the mainframe world. In each case, Serena is going to these worlds for the right business reasons. I look forward to hearing about further developments such as their announced future moves into Agile application development.
One of the Serena announcements mentioned that Forrester projects the enterprise mashup market will reach nearly $700 million by 2013 (see Forrester’s May 2008 report called “The Mashup Opportunity”). If anything, I think this underestimates the total volume as mashups are becoming a major application development mode that underlies much of SOA application development. Perhaps, they are only thinking of the market for specific mashup tools, as the divide in enterprise tools is getting grayer. At any rate, mashups are a big deal.
by Bill Ives
July 6, 2008 at 11:01 am · Filed under
Reviews
I wrote about Tomoye a while back (see Tomoye: Bringing Web 2.0 to Communities of Practice). Ecco is their flagship product. Last week I spoke again with Eric Sauve, their CEO and Co-Founder. We first discussed the June 2008 Aberdeen Group study. Eric said that Aberdeen found that 38% of “best-in-class” companies are using social software for “connecting workers with subject matters experts” while only 20% of the rest are doing this. Here is one more clear statistic on the virtues of enterprise 2.0. This task is one thing that Tomoye enables through its communities of practice platform.
We also discussed their Sharepoint integration. Tomoye was one of nine software companies that announced integration with Microsoft at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Each of these players represent a different aspect of enterprise 2.0. This was good move on Tomoye’s part, as well as on Microsoft’s part. As the Microsoft announcement said, “Tomoye is delivering a SharePoint Server-ready offering to enable organizations to deploy communities of practice using proven process and technology.” Tomoye is built on ,NET, the same language as Sharepoint to make for a tight integration. Here is a screen shot of a SharePoint page showing the ability to upload a file directly to Tomoye Ecco from within a SharePoint drop down menu.
You can search within Tomoye communities using Sharepoint, access both through single sign-on and syndicate content from Tomoye Ecco to Sharepoint through RSS. You can also aggregate content from Sharepoint sites into Tomoye communities, bookmark to Tomoye communities through Sharepoint sites, and reveal Sharepoint sites in the community’s taxonomy.
Tomoye provides both a SaaS and an on-premise offering. Eric said that the SaaS model is the most popular. They now have around 500,000 seats under maintenance. With companies such as Bose, the US Army, National Research Council Canada, Lockheed Martin, the US General Services Administration, UNESCO, and the US Internal Revenue Service. Tomoye has a variety of pricing models and has initiated a 50 seats free forever policy to encourage exploration. Here is a screen shot of a Tomoye community page.
by Bill Ives
July 2, 2008 at 9:07 am · Filed under
Reviews
I have been writing about IBM’s social software efforts for a while and most recently about Lotus Connections in small bits, (e.g., Activity-based Computing Moves Forward at Lotus Connections). So I was pleased to recently have the chance to have an extended conversation with Suzanne Minassian, Lotus Connections Product Manager. As Suzanne writes in Synch.rono.us, Connections was developed from applications that have been in use inside IBM for years (see The story of Lotus Connections). Connections has six major components: Profiles, Communities, Blogs, Dogear (social bookmarking), Activities, and an aggregation component called the Home Page.
We started our tour with Profiles. Suzanne said that it began in the CIO office in 1988 and eventually became the IBM Blue Pages. Each employee has a page with information about their job, location, background, picture, organization, and more. It provides a place to run searches for people based on those attributes, helping IBMers identify those who might be interested in their work, people who could help with their projects, and teams working on similar projects from across IBM. There are over 360,000 IBMers and over 150,000 more related people on Blue Pages, including consultants and partners, so we know this can scale. A version is now offered to the market through Profiles. Here is a Profile page with widgets, including social tags, reporting structure, colleagues, links. View contact information, background information and aggregated contributions. Download vcard and pronunciation.
The Communities function was also initially developed by the IBM CIO office for internal use. It origins came from Community Maps which provided a way to manage communities, email, and Sametime (aka IM). Elements were added such as discussion forums, ways to share blogs within the community, integration with Sametime as a broadcast channel, and integration with wikis. IBM partners with Socialtext and Alassian for traditional wiki functionality. They will also soon offer wiki capabilities within Connections through Quickr (the new version of QuickPlace). The Quickr wikis tend to be primarily used for team workspaces, which is not surprising.
The blog functionality in Connections came from Blog Central, also developed by the CIO Office from an open source tool called Roller. Blogging was introduced as a way to encourage knowledge sharing within the organization. Many IBMers had external blogs, but an internal blog service gave employees the ability to discuss projects and work at a level of detail that otherwise wouldn’t be suitable externally. I wrote about these early days of Blog Central in a 2004 Portals Magazine article. “IBM set up Blog Central without any restrictions or predetermined uses as a pilot to see what creative uses evolve. Dan Gruen observes that this “hands off” approach has paid off and enabled “bottom up” innovation by individual IBMers. Serendipity, itself, is one of the emerging benefits. Recent blog posts of everyone are displayed at the IBM Blog Central site so participants can see what the others are doing, discovering new ideas, as well as people who have compatible interests. Many new initiatives and relationships are generated this way. This serendipity extends to regular meetings as each participant can look at the other’s blogs to find previously unknown common interests or new ideas to discuss, getting to know more about the others in less time, making meetings more effective. “
Suzanne says that Blog Central is still going strong, serving many different specialty areas within IBM. Sales, engineers, researchers, product evangelists, and experts use their blogs to share information and promote discussions across boundaries. They have updated the interface. There are also many ways to find blog content. Search results within Connections bring back related tags, forums, blogs, wikis and profiles, along with traditional search results. Blogs can also be rated and you can see featured blogs. Here is th blogs tool with ratings and comments.
Social Bookmarking within Connections is provided by the well-known Dogear application created by IBM Research in Cambridge. It was one of the first enterprise social bookmarking tools. In 2004 some IBMers were using del.icio.us but it had its limits. There were also security concerns with having bookmarks on a publically available site, and while you could bookmark internal pages, metadata on that bookmark could share confidential information. Once inside the firewall, the developers added authentication and other features. While they provide the opportunity to make bookmark private, about 4% are marked this way. You can view most popular bookmarks and tags and filter tags to view related ones. You can create watch lists to see what people are doing in Dogear, as well as to follow your favorite tags. You can see who has watch listed you. Within the enterprise you can use tags to find people with similar interests and build your reputation. Internal thought leaders develop a following through watch lists without having to write a blog. You can also provide notifications of tags and write a comment, saving the trouble of writing an email. You can also filter your tags by asking to see only combinations of tags. Now there are over 418,000 public bookmarks within IBM on Dogear.
Activities is another tool developed by IBM Research. It is designed to simplify the work process by connecting the many different communication channels and social software functions related to a single project. It takes the information out of the silos of individual tool and makes information activity centric. You can information directly into Activities or drag and drop information from other tools and add comments. It also has calendaring and contact information. Here is an Activity list with prioritized activities.
Connections allows for extensions through plug-ins that allow you to embed Connections into other tools. This is a good idea and Suzanne said it has increased adoption. You access Connections through Microsoft Office tools, as well as Lotus Symphony. IBM Research and the CIO office are working on new features and capabilities. People have seen the popularity of twitter so now there is an experimental BlueTwit for inside IBM. The Beehive tools are exploring how to use Facebook features like fun walls, photo posting, and high 5’s inside the enterprise. With the opportunity for use and testing within the large IBM population, potential products can be evaluated on usage data across a range of audiences, not just the IT people.
I asked Suzanne about how people can deploy Connections as they are misunderstanding in the market on this issue. You do not need to purchase or have IBM Websphere Portal Server or other IBM products. Connections is offered as a standalone suite of tools. You are provided Websphere application server and access to DB2 at no extra charge. You can also use other databases such as SQL and Oracle. IBM also provides standalone versions of Profiles and Activities. Connections is an on-premise software offering. However, some IBM partners will host it for you, and IBM itself is now offering BlueHouse, a hosting service for small firms, which includes some elements of Connections.
Lotus has been developing community-based software long before Web 2.0. Now with IBM Research and an active CIO office testing new ideas on a portion of the over 500,000 IBMers and external people in the IBM environment, it gives them an opportunity to really test and improve social software in a large enterprise context. I am going to be having several more conversations with Suzanne this summer on this application development process and some of the other tools that have emerged.
Post Script - See how Luis Suarez uses Lotus Connections to cut way back on his email as discussed in the New York Times, I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip.
by Bill Ives
July 1, 2008 at 7:26 am · Filed under
Reviews
No, this is not an oxymoron. ThoughtFarmer provides a nice integration of old school intranet and new school social media to provide a comprehensive platform for enterprise 2.0.
A few weeks ago I met with Chris McGrath, co-creator & product evangelist for ThoughtFarmer, at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. The ThoughtFarmer team has been doing web application development for large corporations and government clients in Vancouver, Canada since 1995. ThoughtFarmer began as a client project for Intrawest Placemaking (the development division of Intrawest, the company behind Whistler Blackcomb, Steamboat, Winter Park, and several other resorts).
Placemaking wanted the ultimate intranet: an always-current, self-healing knowledge repository that would capture the company’s intellectual capital and strengthen workplace community. Chris and his colleagues developed a prototype of the system that was enthusiastically embraced by Placemaking. But when they went looking for a technology to power it in Placemaking’s Microsoft environment, the only apparent option was a heavily-customized version of SharePoint.
The SharePoint customization couldn’t match the prototype and would exceed the project budget, so Intrawest put the project on hold. Chris and his colleagues saw a market opportunity to build a wiki-inspired intranet platform specifically for Microsoft environments – a simpler, friendlier alternative to SharePoint. So they invested their own funds, built ThoughtFarmer version 1.0 from scratch on the .NET platform, and sold the first copy to their original client. The result is documented in a case study on Cases 2.0.
ThoughtFarmer’s primary goal for Placemaking was simple: turn all users into authors. Using an underlying wiki base, all employees at Placemaking can add, edit and annotate content on the ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet. With the exception of a few policy documents, Placemaking’s intranet is a completely open, malleable, living collection of current thoughts, processes and key lessons learned.
This reminds me of what Janssen-Cilag did when they scrapped their traditional intranet for a wiki so everyone could contribute, except ThoughtFarmer takes this concept much farther. The wiki base is embedded under a full suite of intranet and social media tools in ThoughtFarmer. As they say nicely on their site, “ThoughtFarmer embraces the good things wikis have brought us: an open, easy, democratic authoring environment with no barriers to content creation. ThoughtFarmer then adds structure and social networking to that wiki core.” You get “wiki collaboration, without the chaos.” Here is a screen shot of a ThoughtFarmer intranet with some features highlighted.
With its latest 3.0 release, ThoughtFarmer provides blogs, calendaring, discussions, document management, people profiles, search, security, tagging, version history, wikis, workstreams, and more. You can have free tagging like del.icio.us or closed tagging with a taxonomy. One example of closed taxonomies is the physician extranet “Primary Care Central” they deployed for the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. For example, to find a lab requisition on Primary Care Central, a physician can navigate by lab location, condition type, or requisition type. The tags help surface the same lab form in multiple, logical locations.
ThoughtFarmer is also multilingual. They now support English, French, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean because of current clients and will add more languages on request. ThoughtFarmer is optimized for organizations with 100 to 5,000 employees that run in a Microsoft environment, as most do at that size. They authenticate with Active Directory to make it easy for these organizations.
ThoughtFarmer has a blog by its own name that includes some interesting cases studies such as Graymont Limited, a mining company that works in 200 year old quarries using enterprise 2.0 technology. Graymont wanted to create a common set of information tools for over 1000 employees in several dozen locations across the continent. Graymont’s IT Director, Ron Ogilvy, said that their ThoughtFarmer intranet is “a continuously evolving, self-healing base of information.” There are also great pictures of the mines.
In Spring 2008, ThoughtFarmer tried a creative marketing idea to reach bloggers. They created a fake company, Tubetastic, with the slogan “We make tubes – a whole series of them” (a reference to Ted Steven’s infamous remarks on net neutrality). They set up a ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet to run the company. They placed selected bloggers in key positions in the company and invited them to participate. I was on the list and did look at the intranet but was too distracted with other things to comment at the time. However, ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch wrote about it and it got nice comments from people like Jeremiah Owyang and Suw Charman-Anderson. It is an innovative idea that might only come from British Columbia. Kudos to them for trying it. But more importantly, I think that ThoughtFarmer provides a nice blend of traditional intranet functions with social media in a wiki base. It has achieved its goal of turning intranets on their head to increase participation and bring them into enterprise 2.0.
by Bill Ives
June 27, 2008 at 8:38 am · Filed under
Reviews
I have written about Awareness several times, the most recent was on the Fast Forward blog, Awareness Makes a Smart Move with Its Facebook Integration. Last week I caught up with Eric Schurr, VP of Marketing and Direct Sales, to discuss the latest version of its platform, Awareness Summer 2008. This release includes Microsoft SharePoint integration, advanced social networking functionality and portable widgets that extend Awareness-powered Web 2.0 communities to any website and third-party services such as iGoogle and Facebook. In addition, administrators of Awareness communities now have enhanced self-service reporting and metrics functionality to better understand and manage community activities.
Microsoft SharePoint users can now connect with Awareness communities on the Web, bringing external-facing social media to SharePoint users. This allows Sharepoint users to link to these external communities through web parts for social networking, content contribution, content viewing, as well as administrative and reporting functions. There is also, single sign-on, integrated search, and the Sharepoint profile can be enhanced with Awareness capabilities. This integration can support customer collaboration, marketing campaigns, market input for innovation, market research, and other community-based objectives. This Awareness - SharePoint integration can also be used to complement SharePoint for internal-facing communities.
The Summer 08 Release also provides additional ways to connect with other applications using their portable widgets and improved API. The portable widgets allow Awareness-powered communities to be extended to any page on the Internet. These widgets span a range of Awareness capabilities, including displaying and contributing community content, social networking features and more. Awareness widgets can be rapidly placed on any HTML page or third party services such as Facebook and iGoogle. The Awareness API has been extended to include the entire range of Awareness community and administrative level capabilities. This empowers companies and partners to build their own communities and integrate with other collaboration and social networking services. They can also extend and embellish the communities that Awareness builds for them. I think providing completely open APIs is a smart move, as well as all this increased connectivity.
Awareness has also increased its social networking capabilities to complement its support for user-generated content. A customizable user interface and the ability to create different types of social groups within communities can make for a more varied user experience to drive increased engagement and participation. New features include: people lists, status, profile privacy, presence and activity feeds and a personalized drag and drop user interface. There are also two new types of organizational constructions within communities. First, there are Neighborhoods, where community administrators can create structured social areas that feature comprehensive security and customization. The neighborhoods are more “top-down” and structured with assigned membership. In contrast, there are also Groups, where users can create ad-hoc social areas that other users can join by invitation or by request. McDonald’s has launched a number of the neighborhoods to connect with both employees and owner operators.
Awareness has also worked on its administrator functions. They now have increased self-service capability to report and graph participation and success metrics in their communities, including user activity, content activity and other metrics. These include user and group growth over time, most and least active users and groups, top/bottom categories, most viewed content, most commented on content, highest rated content, etc. They have also increased performance with significant increases in page views per second capability, showing 10 to 20 times performance improvements over the current Awareness release.
I think they are hitting key areas with this release, especially the increased integration, social networking, reporting, and the offering of both top-down and bottom community options. As I wrote recently in response to Andrew McAfee at the Fast Forward Summit, striking the right balance between the concepts of “emerge” and “impose” is what will define successful enterprise 2.0 offerings. Awareness is working to cover both of these bases with their Summer 08 Release.
by Bill Ives
June 25, 2008 at 5:38 pm · Filed under
Reviews
EveryScape is creating “The Real World Online” through a visual and interactive platform for local search that is creating a virtual experience of all metropolitan, suburban and rural areas. I recently talked with Jim Schoonmaker, EveryScape’s CEO who explained their business model, as well as what they offer now and their future plans. I immediately liked their site, as the top example was a virtual tour of the Boston Celtics victory parade route.
However, since we are writing about enterprise applications here, I first wanted to understand how EveryScape supports businesses. Jim explained that the way local businesses got exposed to potential customers used to be simple; you took out an ad in the Yellow Pages and did local newspaper ads. Now it has become difficult with a more complex search engine bidding process for ad space that can be beyond the interests and/or understanding of many local businesses. Users get text and maps but it is hard to get a real feel for the unique nature of local businesses.
EveryScape is designed to give local business a better way to reach customers and have a richer web presence. EveryScape will create a visual record of a neighborhood and then ask the local businesses if they want to be included in this visual record. Do they want people to be able to go inside their business? Like the traditional Yellow Pages, EveryScape is free to users and charges companies to offer a visual display of what goes on inside their restaurant, store, etc. They pay a yearly subscription fee to open themselves up to virtual foot traffic. Here is a screen shot of the actual Cheers Bar in Boston through EveryScape.
At first, Jim thought they would get mainly high-end retail, hotels, and restaurants. He was pleased to find a more diverse set of customers with hair salons, dentist offices, hardware stores, book shops, and many other typical small businesses. The opportunity to bring people inside their store and see their unique offerings appeals to many business owners. Everyone knows what the chains look like, now the world can see what these individual business look like. I like this support for, and focus on, the unique qualities of individual small businesses. Local institutions are also included. Here is the interior of the Harvard Museum of Natural History, a place I used to take my kids when they were young.
This service makes long tail advertizing simpler and allows small businesses to have the same or better web presence than large firms through this collective site. It helps to level the playing field. Everyscape works on the SEO for them and is also developing partnerships with sites like Boston.com that already have good traffic. They are moving into online conversion starting with hotels with a “book now” button added to their hotel descriptions. There has also been interest by some chains, especially ones that have a unique set of resorts or other locations. EveryScape has covered one million points of interest, 15,000 miles and 21 states in their first year. Now they have started an Ambassador program, designed to speed expansion worldwide through a team of trained Ambassadors, who are photographers and entrepreneurs. They can earn money by photographing the public spaces of specific destinations, as well as interiors of local businesses. “Destination Ambassadors” own a particular region, meaning he/she is responsible for capturing the photography of the region’s public spaces (streets, landmarks, etc.), with the additional opportunity to sell interiors to local businesses. “Local Business Ambassadors” are essentially assignment photographers for EveryScape.
They also support user-generated content with World Tags. Through this feature, EveryScape lets businesses upload photos, videos, links and more. For example, a restaurant could upload a video interview with its chef, or a women’s boutique might want to upload photos of its latest line.
EveryScape is also working on social networking features. Their new “Scape Memo” lets people share favorite locations with friends. You can create a private link on EveryScape.com with up to 200 “memos” that identify your favorite locations to share with friends. For example, you could create a link pinpointing your 30 favorite restaurants nationwide, or you could send your friend a link with a memo identifying a new dinner location. Scape Memos are private and are shared via email. In addition, users can embed any memo within their favorite social network such as Facebook or LinkedIn.
When I wrote a book on business uses of blogs a number of years ago, several local regions were starting to use the Web, through blogs, to focus on their unique local businesses and fight the spreading homogeneity of national chains. The new Web, with increasingly rich bandwidth and increased user participation, is even better equipped to support the long tail of business. EveryScape is taking this concept way beyond these early blogs to allow us greater access to what is unique. I like what they are doing.
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