Archive for Enterprise 2.0
by Bill Ives
April 5, 2011 at 3:28 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
In February I wrote about an interesting report Making Greater Use of Smart Content in the Enterprise by Geoff Bock, Dale Waldt, and Mary LaPlante. It covers XML applications that have long proven value with reusable componentized content. Here is an interesting case that came out of that effort, Managing Content for Continuous Learning at Autodesk.
Autodesk, Inc., is a design software and services company and its products address all phases of the design processes for architects and designers. These professional often need to go beyond standard practices to complete their projects. They share their practical tips and best practices through online communities. As the case notes, these “communities are the long tail of the Autodesk ecosystem, where the Internet combines the insights from many small groups into a major web presence.” At the same time the professionals like to get their content in short chucks relevant to the context of their work. While Autodesk has long maintained a comprehensive set o manuals, it now needed to address the changing expectations.
First, they had already started modularizing their technical manuals. They now needed to build on this effort, to improve the accessed to this content. They also needed to better leverage the content generated through online communities by capturing and curating the contributions of innovative customers.
They set up an enhanced delivery capability by adding MindTouch to their content infrastructure. I have covered MindTouch’s move into this space (see MindTouch 2010 Provides Intelligent Product and Services Documentation). MindTounch 2010 has enhanced three major areas to support this major use case. It now provides new capabilities for authoring, discovery, and curation of strategic content.
As the report notes, “a social web platform supports “community pages” for collecting and sharing usergenerated content on a wide variety of topics. Once authenticated by the site, both Autodesk customers and support engineers from across the ecosystem can publish “tips and tricks” recommendations, blog on new topics, comment on posts, reference code snippets, or add links to topics covered elsewhere on the web.” Here is the answer.
Moreover, Autodesk can track user activity across their site and the communities to determine trending topics and the emerging needs. Content curators perform this role. This tracking helps plan future releases.
Since MindTouch optimizes online documentation for Web search, Autodesk now can cross sell through the educational materials, based on participants’ interest. This turns a purely cost center activity into revenue generating one. Smart move. There is much more in the report.
by Bill Ives
March 1, 2011 at 3:02 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0
Harmon.ie has now released a cross-platform suite of enterprise collaboration products designed to boost user adoption of the dominant enterprise collaboration tools. These include bringing central components of SharePoint into both Outlook and Lotus Notes. The goal is to increase user adoption of the broader collaboration platforms now available and stop sharing docs as attachments to email. The company was founded as Mainsoft in the 1990s but recently switched their name to align with their main product, harmon.ie.
I spoke with David Lavenda of hamoni.ie who offered some interesting research. SharePoint’s adoption by IT departments has been pervasive with close to 80% of the enterprise collaboration market. I have seen this consistently reported from several sources. However, what are the business users doing? Harmonie had an independent firm look at the issue. They found that eighty-three percent of business users continue to abuse email, ping-ponging document attachments back and forth, thus creating document chaos instead of using SharePoint, Google Docs or other collaboration suites. In addition, the study found that one third of survey respondents with access to SharePoint refuse to use it, or use it about once a month.
One of the main obstacles is that business users tend to ignore new IT tools that require them to switch contexts, juggle multiple browser windows, and learn new collaboration habits. I have seen this happen many times. So harmon.ie was launched to bring the social collaboration capabilities into email where business users already work. With one client the implementation of harmon.ie allowed them to go from a 30% adoption of SharePoint to a use by 70% of their business users in a few months.
Another client, Amway, company, has 6,000 email users working in their headquarters. They used to send 73,000 email attachments a day, on average. Since deploying harmon.ie for SharePoint, the company reports a 42 percent decrease in the average daily volume of email attachments.
Several versions of the social email capability are offered. There is harmon.ie for SharePoint Enterprise, which transforms Microsoft Outlook into a collaboration console, with advanced access to SharePoint document collaboration, email management, and social features within the Outlook and Office Communications Server interfaces. This capability appears as a side bar within SharePoint. You can see a sample side bar below.
David showed me how it works. When you send an email with an attachment, a message pops up enabling you to put the document in SharePoint and send a link instead without leaving email as shown in the screen below.
Then others can go from email to work on the centrally located document within SharePoint. Access controls are in effect reducing the possibility of the attachment getting in the wrong hands. You can also see the profiles of the document author and all editors. Their presence can be observed and IM, video chat, or email can be sent to them as shown below.
You can also rate documents and sort them by ratings using that SharePoint capability but within hamon.ie within your email. Basically, harmon.ie brings many of the SharePoint capabilities within email.
For Notes users, there is harmon.ie for SharePoint, Notes Edition. Previously branded Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes, this email sidebar transforms Lotus Notes into a collaborative workspace through access to SharePoint documents, email management, calendars, and enterprise social networks within the Lotus Notes® and Lotus Sametime® interfaces. They have found that there are many companies that have Notes as email and also SharePoint. Some of them are quite large. It works the same as the harmon.ie SharePoint version with a side bar on the right.
There is also harmon.ie for Google Docs Enterprise, which enables people to collaborate on documents over the cloud, in their native file formats, using Google Docs and the Microsoft Exchange® email infrastructure.
They offer both a free personal version and a commercial enterprise version. In both cases, there are over 3000,000 users. The commercial aversion has been implemented in over 80 companies.
The time savings here is quite obvious. David mentioned a recent comparison they conducted. More than one hundred IT professionals and business users found that harmon.ie’s drag-and-drop access to shared documents is six times faster than the native SharePoint interface, which entails switching contexts and juggling several browser windows. People averaged 61 seconds to publish an email message on SharePoint via the SharePoint interface. However, they completed the same task in just 11 seconds using harmon.ie. I can see this happening.
Comprehensive SharePoint adoption remains a challenge. A number of firms are offering collaborative capabilities that sit on top of SharePoint to help with this challenage. Here is a different approach as the SharePoint capabilities are brought into the user’s prime workspace, their email accounts. I can easily see the value of this method. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
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 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
November 9, 2010 at 3:34 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0
Bitrix is a Russian company with a US presence that offers a number of enterprise products built on their Bitrix Framework. These include Bitrix SaaS, Bitrix Site Manager, and Bitrix Intranet Portal. I recently spoke with Stephen Ankenman and Denis Zenkin about their intranet offering. It is a robust platform of enterprise collaboration and content management that operates within an enterprise 2.0 paradigm with excellent transparency. They now have over 40,000 business users that run their intranets and websites with the Bitrix platform.
Stephen walked me through many of the features of the Intranet Portal. The dashboard is very configurable at both the individual and admin levels. You can add widgets linking to both consumer Web sites like ESPN and to internal content sources like employee profiles. The admin can select how much flexibility is available. There is a very clear interface. You can see a sample dashboard below.
Finding other employees is augmented through Active Directory and Outlook integration. Whenever an employee is connected to an item, you see the employee profile with the ability to start internal IM style chats and video chats. The IM chats are archived for future access. This is a great feature as most IM conversations are simply lost.
There are a number of capabilities that align with business functions. One of my favorites is the ability to create business process workflows. You can set up a visualization of the work process and include requirements such as multiple approval levels. It is important for enterprise 2.0 platforms to align with business processes and not simply be a utility. This feature address that need. You can see a sample process creation below.
You can also set up visualizations of your organizational structure with the robust profiles placed within each chart. Below is a sample chart.
You can set up groups for a variety of functions such as putting access parameters on a discussion or managing a project. Much of the functionality can be deployed at the corporate level and the group level. This includes calendaring as shown below. File sharing also operates this way as you can use the group function to control access to certain documents. Forums can be within a group or across the enterprise. You can participate in forums through email.
Tasks are another business focused capability and task assignment allows for transparent progress to be available to the group members in the spirit of enterprise 2.0 The Bitrix Intranet Portal is designed to manage a business, making essential content available at the right levels. Stephen said that many of their clients are moving to a collaborative platform for the first time. I can see how they find Bitrix both easy to use and align with their work requirements.
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