Acquia Makes Drupal Community Building Accessible

May 12, 2008 at 9:27 am · Filed under Reviews

Many companies are now looking to build communities outside the firewall to engage customers, suppliers, and prospects, as well as create communities inside the enterprise to engage employees on key topics. I have written about several new approaches to supporting communities on this blog and Fast Forward. Drupal has been around a long time in web years as a community platform. I first heard about it in 2004. Acquia was recently formed to make Drupal more accessible and provide professional support. I recently, spoke with Acquia executives, Jeff Whatcott, vice president of marketing and Bryan House, director of product marketing. There will be more on Acquia later in this post but first let’s cover Drupal itself. The Drupal open source platform has developed a large following amongst the development community and over 2,000 contributed modules have been created covering all aspects of social media functionality from Google Map integration, to on-line rating systems, to PayPal integration. Many, but not all, are mashup-based.

Drupal started in 2001 as a bulletin board and it has continued to integrate new functionality as web 2.0 emerged. It is now on Version six, soon to be seven. Drupal is a internally hosted platform which provides significant flexibility in design and functionality. Not all community requirements fit into the categories of blogs, wikis, forums, etc. Because of Drupal’s many add-ons, it can go in many directions. For example, a bicycle community is focused around rides. It needs to provide easy ways to provide the general data on rides such as titles of rides, their distance, difficulty, comments and reviews, ability to upload pictures, Google map integration, etc. It also needs to cover specific instances of the ride such as organizer, start time, variations in route, etc. See the screen shot of a bicycle community home page below.

This does not easily fit into a standard community format but with the Drupal components, the specific requirements of this community can be more easily constructed. Here is a page on a specific ride.

Here is the page to set up a ride.

This rich functionality was, until recently, only available to the technically accomplished, leaving out many potential users, including me. It is being used by such web sites as Fast Company, the Onion, Amnesty International, and the AOL Developer Network but these sites have excellent technical resources. For the rest of us, Drupal was not only hard to get started but it was also difficult to find the right add-on modules from the many options. Acquia was formed at the end of 2007 to solve this problem and make the rich functionally available to all. They have developed a commercially supported version and selected and certified the best modules. They also offer documentation and technical support for the version and modules they support. There is an installation package with additional documentation. If difficulties arise in the supported version or add-ons, Acquia will fix them. They also offer hosted network services such as automated updates and spam blocking. You still do not pay from Drupal, itself, just the Acquia services. These will become available second half of 2008.

Acquia has an excellent blog with many contributors. In fact their web presence started in a blog format. They now have expanded to a more traditional web site while retaining the blog as an active communication channel. Every new employee is expected to introduce themselves on the blog within a few weeks of joining the firm and the blog draws good traffic. Acquia uses the term social publishing to describe their offering since it integrates many aspects of social software. I think Acquia will be a welcome addition to the both enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0

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IBM Lotus Connections - A Video on Activity-based Computing

May 9, 2008 at 7:41 am · Filed under Reviews

Lotus Connections is the IBM enterprise 2.0 platform with a number of social media features: Profiles, Communities, Blogs, Dogear (social bookmarking), and Activities
to organize your work and integrate with your colleagues. The idea with Activities is to enable what IBM calls Activity Centric Collaboration. The goal is to organize work around the activities people do rather than the tools they use. This is a common theme in enterprise 2.0 tools. My first introduction to what we eventually called knowledge management was creating activity-based tools in Visual Basic in 1993. I have been encouraged to see this concept reach maturity with today’s tools. I was introduced to IBM’s approach to the concept in 2005 through a press briefing. It was called Unified Activity Management then. It was still experimental then. Now the concept is fully integrated into their enterprise 2.0 offering in a functional manner.

Here is the first in a series of demo videos on Connections. This video “focuses on the Activities service, and it goes into some of the new features we’re releasing in the next version of Activities! You can also use this and future videos as training tools on how to get started and learn to use new features.” This is a nice example of video blogs to combine dialog with pictures to provide a more comprehensive message. Thanks to Tomoaki Sawada for pointing out the video through our Facebook connection

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GroupSwim Moves Deeper into Enterprise Collaboration

May 7, 2008 at 8:33 am · Filed under Reviews

This week, I had a chance to talk again with Jason Rothbart, VP of Customer Success at GroupSwim. I have written about them before, see GroupSwim: Enhancing Online Enterprise Communities. Their initial focus was on consumer web communities to provide a better solution to mine the information in online forums. They began to move to enterprise solutions when we first talked as they supported communities inside and outside the firewall. Now they have taken a more significant step into Enterprise 2.0 with the enhanced ability to support file collaboration . As a result, they have divided their product line into two segments, GroupSwim Collaboration for internal collaboration and GroupSwim Forums for external customer forums.

Now you can now add files in three ways: by emailing them into the site, adding them to a discussion, or uploading them directly. Once the files are in the system, GroupSwim provides:

- Tagging and indexing for easy discovery using search
- Capability to managing multiple versions of the document
- Suggestions for related files and discussions based on what you are reading
- Previewing from the web so you don’t need to download in order to see what is there

These are all useful features for the business user. When a file is added, GroupSwim applies their underlying semantic analysis engine to auto-generate tags and complete the indexing. They also auto-generate the related files and discussions through the same engine. A page is generated for the file that includes:
• Document preview and search
• Upload new versions
• Start a related discussion(s)
• Review auto-generated tags and add more
• Identify top contributors to the file
• Browse related content

The screen shot below shows a sample file page. It begins with a description of the file, the previewed file is shown under that and related discussions below the previewed file. The many other actions are available on the right column.

Jason mentioned a high-tech company that started using GroupSwim as the shared collaboration site and knowledge base for their sales force. This client has a complex product and a geographically dispersed sales force. The head of sales was constantly answering the same questions. Now, there is common platform for handling these issues. It was so well received in sales that the rest of the firm is adopting GroupSwim for their internal collaboration and will be rolling out the external Forum product for their customers. This is a great example of an Enterprise 2.0 success story.

One of the GroupSwim’s core features is its semantic engine for understanding and conveying content relationships in a variety of ways. They enhanced their semantic search to automatically check spelling, stemming, and suggest terms to help broaden or narrow your search. Jason showed me an example of all the features. You can see a sample search screen below. Under the search field, you can see the suggestions for narrowing the search. The icon in front of the results glows green to represent content that has high traffic and importance. You can link to other content with the tags on the right side, as well as team members who are experts on the terms you are searching. GroupSwim correlates the tags, the people that post the content, and the group’s reaction to the content to automatically determine experts by topic.

I liked the screen layout and the simplicity of the system, as even I could grasp it quickly. Here is another great example of a tool that started on the consumer web and evolved into an enterprise application. There is more in store. They plan to offer a wiki capability soon. It will come with all the features described for file pages. A future thought is a decision page. You could certainly use their discussion pages for this now but this enhancement would be a new page type that is optimized to support a the decision-making process. It would include features such as reminders, time lines, and voting. I think it could be a very good next step to make GroupSwim even more useful within the enterprise. They have a GroupSwim blog, The Diving Board, to provide more details on current and next steps.

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Serena Announces New Initiatives to Take Mashups Further into the Enterprise

May 5, 2008 at 7:18 am · Filed under Reviews

Last week I caught up with Kyle Arteaga, VP, Corporate Communications at Serena Software. I have written about their efforts several times on the Fast Forward blog. Most recently, I covered an effort to make mashups more accessible, Serena Releases Free Pre-Packaged Mashups for Common Business Processes. This is my first Serena related post on AppGap and it covers two new additional efforts to make mashups more accessible.

First, Capgemini and Serena will offer clients a free boot camp with training on how to use mashups to address their everyday business problems like mashing together data and processes from Salesforce.com and SAP. Capgemini refers to this program as RAIN (short for RApid INnovation). Through this program, Capgemini’s RAIN engagement team will offer a one day training session to be conducted in Cupertino, Calif. to its clients, helping them take advantage of mashups and enterprise 2.0 to solve specific business issues using Serena’s Business Mashup tools. Andy Mulholland, the CTO of Capgemini is co-author of Mashup Corporations: The End of Business As Usual. He was recently quoted, “Companies need to become faster and more responsive to changes in the marketplace. This shift will only happen if the organization from the ground up adopts rapid innovation approaches and Web 2.0 technologies.” I can agree with this.

RAIN business analysts will then take the education process a further by creating a mashup for their client that addresses a specific problem for their enterprise. They then leave the new application for free, following the Lay’s potato model, “You can’t just have one.” I think this is a smart investment, as Capgemini will learn an extensive amount of information about the client while demonstrating the power of mashups. Both of these factors will make them a more valuable business partner for further work.

In their second move, Serena is launching a public Mashup Exchange where companies can buy and sell mashups. Using HiveLive technology in the Mashup Exchange, Serena will also able to create private MicroExchanges™ for companies as well where they can swap mashups with colleagues. For example, IT can help business users by publishing Mashup-enabled access to an internal SAP system in a secured, private MicroExchange. Companies can then choose to make their mashups available on the public exchange. Unlike some exchanges, Serena offers this platform to third party developers at no cost, allowing many niche providers entrance to a larger marketplace.

I found it interesting that Serena has found that some companies start their internal mashup exchanges at the division level. This allows for pilots with division specific data and more control over the process. In some cases, the mashup may stay at the division level to avoid irrelevant data or data that has a different vetting process. This will especially appeal to the many large enterprises have multiple CIOs. In other cases, the mashups may go enterprise wide once it is tested and refined at the division level. The flexibility is very useful here. In one example, a European military purchasing group has created mashups across their supply chain to help with the bidding process. At the same time they developed other mashups for internal use of sensitive information.

The guiding principle in the Mashup Exchange is similar to their Mashup Composer, where companies can use a visual design tool to build and test mashups without coding at no charge. They also made a set of pre-packaged mashups available for free beginning in Q4 07. Serena wants to lower the barrier to mashups use and provide a preferred platform for innovation in enterprise 2.0.

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BlogBridge Feed Libraries for Enterprise 2.0

May 2, 2008 at 9:06 am · Filed under Reviews

RSS has given employees and everyone else the ability to easily subscribe to the vast amount of information out on the Web. Now comes the question, what to subscribe to? What is cool? For the business user, the question becomes, what sources, sites and blogs, provide information useful to my business that I can rely on for quality content? BlogBridge Feed Libraries are designed to help companies provide guidance to their employees on where the useful content is located and then make it easy to subscribe to it.

BlogBridge provides Expert Guides to content in a variety of topics on its public site. Access to these sites is free just as the public version of the BlogBridge RSS Reader. It is the RSS reader I use. I have also created three of the expert guides on knowledge management blogs, enterprise 2.0 blogs, and enterprise 2.0 application provider blogs. There are many more useful ones on topics such as wine, entertainment, and many business topics, including much on technology. I subscribe to several of them. You can also take these lists and add you own and delete the ones you do not find helpful.

Now comes the Enterprise 2.0 part. Blogbridge also makes this service available for use within the enterprise. I spoke last week with Pito Salas, CEO at BlogBridge who said, “Here is a crucial point that many people will miss but is critical to understand the BlogBridge Feed Library: it is a piece of software that you can install on your own server, inside your firewall. It’s not the content of the library (the books,) it’s the software to organize the library (the building.).” The Blogbridge Feed Library provides a flexible web based structure to showcase Feeds, Reading Lists and Podcasts to people within the enterprise.

The BlogBridge Feed Libraries can be the ’web content directories’ where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their RSS Aggregators. The experts within your firm can place in the Feed Library the blogs and other sites that they feel will best address the issues that employees face as they deal with the topic cover by the Feed Library. For example, one firm might have Feed Libraries on Marketing, Engineering, Human Resources and Manufacturing. Another might cover Biology, Medicine, Technology, Management, and Research. A bioresearch firm might have different libraries for subsets of Biology. It puts your experts in control of the recommendations for web reading. At the same time individuals can customize it with their own additions for their individual RSS feed lists.

As experts make changes in the recommended feeds, it is easy for users to update their libraries. There is a place for biographical information about librarians and there is a built in announcements blog where you can communicate with your clients. You can also completely change the look of the site to match your organizational web site. The libraries contain thumbnail images of each of the sites. Analytics are provided so you determine the most popular feeds with an automatic top 10 and top 100 listing. It can also be integrated with Google Analytics. The service is available as an on-demand service or you can host within your firewall. It is also available as an open source option for non-commercial users. Since this is an enterprise library, it can include blogs and sites within the enterprise, as well as those on the Web. These Feed Libraries are a useful way to help employees find the information resources they need to support their work and they offer the opportunity to bring the expertise of the firm to help guide their selections.

Below you can see a sample Feed Library. There is a description of the librarian. Within the library there are several sub groups. Clicking on any of the orange bars such as the first one, labled aviation accidents, reveals more feeds.

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InsideView: Adding Intelligence to CRM Through Mash-ups

April 30, 2008 at 7:30 am · Filed under Reviews

InsideView recently launched a new offering, SalesView, an on-demand Business Search and Intelligence application, designed to bring insight gained from subscription-based and user-generated sources to the enterprise. It integrates with many of the CRM products such as those from Landslide Technologies, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and SugarCRM through mashups. Last week I spoke with Rand Schulman, Chief Marketing Officer of InsideView. He outlined what InsideView sees as the convergence of social media, user generated content and enterprise applications. Putting their new offering into context, Rand explained that “SalesView is born of this trend, and delivers on its promise with a smart, fresh and complete approach to business search and intelligence.”

Rand also introduced me to their concept of Socialprise, a framework for understanding the way in which the rich, unstructured data of social networks and media are being leveraged within the enterprise. Socialprise applications are a convergence of social media and enterprise applications, presented as a mash-up of both the information and user experience of these previously separate worlds. Their SalesView release works within this framework and is designed to mash-up social data with enterprise-grade search and intelligence capabilities, to help sales teams automate prospecting and provide actionable insights throughout the sales cycle. Sales efforts often require relevant business intelligence that used to be accessed from a number of traditional, subscription-based , “walled garden” data providers. Rand pointed that his own identity varies widely across these sources as he has held positions at several firms in the past few years. Through SalesView, which aggregates both traditional business data providers and more recent Web 2.0 content sources, he can find an accurate picture of his current identity.

In the brave new Web 2.0 world, social networks and other user-generated content provide the opportunity to gain deeper insight into personal and professional relationships than was possible just a few years ago. This promise of greater insight can only be realized if the business user can practically digest the massive volume of data from an ever-growing number of free and paid sources. There are social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, but also blogs, job boards, and forums. An individual sales person does not have the time to check all these sources and do this aggregation manually. In fact, it is not even feasible for a marketing department or sales operations team to keep up with all of these data sources. Once again mash-ups can provide a solution to another enterprise and internet data integration challenge, in this case with a focus on sales and marketing professionals. This is the approach that InsideView has taken with SalesView. It does not try to replace CRM and its data management and process tracking functions – rather it integrates within CRM to automatically feed it with current, relevant, and vetted content.

Rand showed me an example of SalesView working as a mash-up in Salesforce.com. It draws on 20,000 data sources to get information about companies, individuals, and key business events. Then it consolidates the data to present recent, relevant insights directly within Salesforce.com’s standard Lead, Account, and Opportunity views. SalesView delivers the Who, What, and When of sales – Where it can be acted upon most effectively, in the familiar contenxt of enterprise applications like CRM.

SalesView can be accessed through native mash-ups within the Salesforce.com andr other leading CRM tools like SugarCRM (and soon Microsoft Dynamics and Landslide Technologies). SalesView is also available as a standalone Web application that can be leveraged by any sales and marketing organization, regardless of what CRM they use.

I have also thought, perhaps unfairly, that CRM was overrated since it was mostly a content store that had to largely be manually fed. I think enterprise 2.0 tools such as SalesView can provide real value to CRM by taking advantage of the increasing overlap and transparency that is emerging between the enterprise and the Web. It can make CRM socially intelligent and therefore greatly magnify its value, making it something actually useful. The same could happen for other enterprise applications. There is great promise here in what InsideView has dubbed “socialprise” applications.

The New York Times recently talked about InsideView and other related products in its piece, “MySpace Mind-Set Finally Shows Up at the Office”. The story begins, “As online social networking weaves itself more extensively into the fabric of everyday life, a new class of technology vendors has set out to make the social Web relevant in the workplace, too.” It goes on to point out the richness of the new data available, “For example, a salesman for a financial services company might use SalesView to get information on a prospective client, from her job history and education to her hobbies and favorite restaurants.” Let’s hope the information is used wisely. That is certainly the objective of InsideView as Rand pointed out in the article. I have found that many people I talk to in a business capacity already know something about me from my blogs. In each case this has been useful to our conversation. Imagine being able to quickly view all relevant information about an individual or company across thousands of sources prior to meeting with them. It looks like InsideView has already done just that,

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Connectbeam Offers New Social Networking Application Integration Possibilities

April 28, 2008 at 8:07 am · Filed under Reviews

Recently, I had a chance to catch up with Puneet Gupta, CEO of Connectbeam. I wrote about them a while back on the Fast Forward blog, Connectbeam: Combining Social Bookmarking and Social Networking. As the post title suggests they believe that business networking begins around the sharing of ideas and information so they tightly integrated social bookmarking into their social networking platform.

Now they have taken things a step further with their Release 2.2. It introduces the Connectbeam web services Application Programming Interface (API) that enables you to add full functionality of Connectbeam social software into your existing IT applications. The Connectbeam web services API consists of a series of programming interfaces that have been modularized into functional areas such as Social Search, Bookmarking and Tagging, Social Network, and Communities - allowing you to pick and chose the functionality you chose to integrate with your existing apps and IT infrastructure. You can find out more about what they are doing at the Connectbeam Social Computing Blog.

Puneet showed me an example of how this works. We saw a demonstration of Connectbeam integration with Sharepoint. We first saw how Connectbeam integrates with Sharepoint search. A search term, java, was entered into the Sharepoint search field. The standard Sharepoint response came back in the left column. On the right side was additional contextual information delivered through Connectbeam. You can see a list of related tags, related users, and related bookmarks. Clicking on any of these links brought you to additional information relevant information about the social context of the search. For example, the clicking on one of the related user provides a list of the documents this person has tagged with the search term.

In the second example of Sharepoint integration, we went to the profile page of the Sharepoint user. There was an about me tab that was part of Sharepoint. Next to it was a social context tab that brought information from Connectbeam. For the individual you saw their tags, their bookmarks, and their communities. Each item in each list was a live link to more information. In both cases the integration between Connectbeam and Sharepoint was complete and not apparent to the user who saw the additional social information as just part of the same interface. You can find this demo through their Connectbeam web site.

In addition to the open APIs, Connectbeam’s Release 2.2 also includes other new features. There is automatic user provisioning for LDAP to eliminate user registration process and dynamic email address lookup for ease of community invitations. Enhanced licensing infrastructure allows you to better monitor application usage and adoption. Multi-language support is also offered for global implementations.

There is a growing trend of enterprise 2.0 applications opening up their APIs for integration with enterprise applications. This is a welcome addition as it brings in the social context in robust manner through Connectbeam’s strong combination of social networking and social bookmarking.

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Central Desktop Acts on Enterprise 2.0 Security

April 25, 2008 at 3:03 pm · Filed under Reviews

I have written about Central Desktop before (see Central Desktop Provides Wiki-based Collaborative Platform and How Obama is Using Web (and Enterprise) 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign). Last week I touched base with CEO, Issac Garcia on what they are doing in the security area. This continues to be a major concern for companies as they consider bringing Web 2.0 applications into the enterprise. Central Desktop targets the small to mid-size market and project teams within large enterprises. As project teams within larger enterprises want to expand Central Desktop usage, security issues are likely to come up. They also serve SMBs in high security areas such as financial services and healthcare.

These rising security issues have prompted Central Desktop to add a number of useful security layers through their new Security Pack as an optional add-on for those who need them. Issac took me on a tour. First, there are a number of administrative security settings around passwords such as minimum length, complexity, and frequency of change. Then there is the offering of trusted email domains to addressHIPPA compliance for healthcare service providers. It allows data to be sent via email. Those not in the domain have to go through a secured password site. The Trusted IP address feature allows for access from only certain systems to prevent accidental access. You can also turn off the “remember me” function for sign in. You can even create custom terms of service and privacy policies to go with Central Desktop usage.

In addition to these new features, Central Desktop takes care with security in general. There is physical security with access to the data center controlled and monitored 24×7 by onsite personnel and camera surveillance. The building is seismically designed to withstand most natural disasters, including an 8.3 magnitude earthquake.

Real-time network, server and application monitoring is also used. Firewall and router technology, SSL Encryption and a Network Intrusion Detection System are used to monitor and proactively block worms, hackers, and other undesirables. Log files are retained and analyzed for proactive monitoring of network activity. All server devices and software are protected by encrypted passwords and accessible only through encrypted communication paths. The application security model prevents customer data cross-over and ensures complete customer data segregation and privacy. Customer data is segmented from the Application layer providing additional security buffers. System-wide backups of all data to tape or disk are performed daily. Onsite and offsite backups of all data are rotated and stored on both live servers and tape

Here is what eWeek said about the Security Pack, Google Apps Rival Takes Its Turn at Security. Central Desktop has also received a major round of funding recently, announcing receipt of $7 million in funding on April 16.

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QuickBase’s New Developer Program: Going the Next Step to Support Its Developers and Their Mutual Clients

April 23, 2008 at 9:07 am · Filed under Reviews

QuickBase® is a hosted Enterprise 2.0 application platform designed for business users and part of the Intuit product group. It lets you select ready-made online workgroup applications or templates designed to solve common business problems, customize them to suit individual processes, and share within a team. Most people can modify applications on their own, without enlisting help from their IT department. It began in the 00s as an application before its time and now the market (aka enterprise 2.0) has caught up with it and its customer base is expanding. You can read more on their QuickBase Team Collaboration Blog. Recently, QuickBase announced a new program to serve two new audiences, those who do not want to create their applications no matter how easy it is and those who want to develop applications for the first crowd.

To serve these two markets QuickBase recently launched the beta release of the QuickBase Development Environment and a new QuickBase Developer Program. This new Platform-as-a-Service will allow developers to quickly develop rich Internet applications, or RIAs, which work with QuickBooks® using a new toolkit that leverages the Adobe® Flex® open source development framework and QuickBase’s well-tested on-demand database, application and workflow capabilities. Last week, a group of us App Gap bloggers spoke with Bill Lucchini, vice president and general manager of Intuit QuickBase who said. “We are now enlisting the help of an enormous community of talented developers to create innovative, rich Web-based solutions to important business problems. To ensure developers can continue to innovate we’re also providing them with the fastest and easiest way to build a profitable Software-as-a-Service business.” They are also helping them run their business with support in such as areas as billing through the Intuit product suite. The idea is to recruit and help their business partners in multiple ways to ensure mutual success. It seems like a win-win to me.

QuickBase is going beyond simply providing another development platform, as their recent press release said, their third party developers will be able to reach a potential market of nearly 25 million employees within the small businesses that use QuickBooks®. Applications built on the platform will be featured on the Intuit Solutions Marketplace, which reaches millions of small businesses looking for QuickBooks add-ons. Once applications are deployed, QuickBase will only charge their developers for the computing resources their applications use. QuickBase will also manage customer billing so developers can focus on creating great solutions, not moving money. The win-win gets better. If you are part of a large company why not leverage its reach and customer base in creative ways. Work has begun and examples are demonstrated at the QuickBase booth (#421) at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco from April 22-25, 2008.

This announcement has gotten some wide coverage, including:

• TechCrunch noted the advantages that QuickBase brings to a growing number of major developers who are opening their program to third party development in a post titled, “Watch Out Salesforce. Intuit Opens Up QuickBase To Developers”.
• Webware joined in with its post, “Intuit getting into the hosted app business”.
• Bob Warfield at SmoothSpam wrote that QuickBase did their homework. “Intuit went out to a series of focus groups drawn from their developer community and other sources and came back with 3 requirements for the platform.” First was necessary but not sufficient, provide a sound technology platform with no limits. But that is just table stakes as Bill Lucchini noted to us. Second, their developers told them that they also have to make it possible to create a profitable business on the platform. Lastly, make it easy to get started, which is why QuickBase is leveraging the Intuit parentage to save significant cost and time by handling billing, integration with QuickBooks, provisioning, email connectivity, and other business necessities.

As I said, a win-win-win, as it helps QuickBase, their developers, and their mutual clients.

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Nuospace: An Easy-to-Use Wiki for the Small to Midsize Business Market

April 21, 2008 at 8:33 am · Filed under Reviews

Even though they are designed to be simple, the interface and functions of regular wikis can be a bit complex for the average user and the same can be said for applications like Sharepoint. That extra complexity can be just enough drive them back to email for exchanging documents. I have seen this happen on a number of occasions. Nuospace is designed to address this issue for small to mid-size businesses who need a simple application that can let them escape from the spaghetti and chaos of email for exchanging documents and other simple collaboration tasks.

Nuospace is the first product of Brightside Software, founded in June 2007. Last week I spoke with Dimitri Lisitski, co-founder of Brightside and leader of the Nuospace effort. It is their first product and will remain their main focus over the next few years. It is currently a SaaS offering but they plan to offer a version that can be hosted within the firewall in the third quarter of 2008. The key design principle behind Nouspace is to keep it simple and have it remain simple. However, they did not give up useful functionality for this simplicity. Dimitri took me through a demo.

Noupace allows you to set up a variety of pages. There are pages designed for document sharing, discussion forums, standard wiki pages for text creation, posts that work like blogs, and directories to organize the other pages. It was easy enough for me to use so that makes it pass the simplicity test. I especially liked the interface. The look of each set of pages was identical and the functionality was consistent so it was very easy to learn. With document sharing pages you can upload documents, invite others to participate in the editing, and make comments. Then you see on one page the evolving history of the documents and the comments. The same format is used for discussions and posting.

Currently, they offer the tool in a free trial version. The trial version can last forever but you are limited to 100 pages and 200 MB of storage. Then you can upgrade to a commercial account and the pricing depends on your usage. The commercial option will launch the end of this April. It will have SSL security and encryption for pages. You can also make anything confidential.

The plan is to keep the product simple which is a wise move. I heard what happen with Lotus Quickplace as it keep adding features as customers requested them until it lost its simplicity. Nuospace plans to adopt an integration strategy rather than an addition strategy. For example, instead of building a calendar feature, it will integrate with several leading calendars. It is also working on integration with Salesforce.com. I think they are taking the right path. This tool should liberate the non-technical business user from the tyranny of email for simple document exchange and collaboration, as well as a number of other group communication tasks.

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