Intrix Is Bringing Semantic Technology to Enterprise 2.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rackspace 7.0 Provides Business Focused Email

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

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

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

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

You can also manage tasks as shown below.

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

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

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

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

Enterprise 2.0 2009:Twitter’s Influence Everywhere & A New Realism

June 27, 2009 at 10:14 am · Filed under Web 2.0

My Enterprise 2.0 Boston visit this year was abbreviated but here are some takeaways based on attending selected sessions, the Expo floor and invaluable exchanges and learning from people I follow including (with thanks)  Mark Masterson, Jessica Lipnack, Patti Anklam,  Bill Ives, Clara Shih, Marcia Conner, Stowe Boyd,  Chris Brogan, Luis Suarez, Christoph Schmaltz and Gil Yehuda.

1. Twitter’s Influence is Everywhere

As  forecast TheAppGap bloggers  Bill Ives and Patti Anklam contributed to a session on “How Twitter Changes Everything” hosted by Jessica Lipnack and including “The Facebook Era” author Clara Shih and Central Desktop CEO Isaac Gaarcia. ( Find Bill & Patti’s essential panel reports here and here.)

Enterprise 2.0 organizers created hashtags for every session so you can read the discussion  highlights using #e2conf37. The room buzzed following Isaac Garcia’s comment that he regarded ReTweets as Spam. Alex Howard’s Digiphile blog post captures the exchange and offers an alternate view.

Twitter’s influence pervaded the Expo floor with micro-blogging/social messaging functionality being demoed at booths  from Lotus Connections through the latest release of Atlassian’s Confluence Wiki to Thoughtfarmer.

2. A New Enterprise 2.0 Realism

To me this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference had– not surprisingly given the challenging economy– a more somber, practical and business results focus.  There were  fewer vendors in the Expo hall and  I met too many people in career transition after being downsized from leading technology and consulting companies.

The measurable results orientation was reflected in youcalc’s emergence as  Launchpad winner.

Youcalc offers “On-Demand Analytics Apps”  described by @dinag as:

“YouCalc uses crowdsourcung to provide analytics on Everything! Excellent!”

You can read more from the Launchpad session at #e2conf16

3. New Performance Benchmark- “It doesn’t suck”

Mark Masterson (@mastermark) is one of the savviest people I know and  a conversation with Mark and his colleagues about the state of Enterprise 2.0 tools was a conference highlight.  After several attempts at implementing new collaboration tools internally they’ve found a platform that is being accepted because “It doesn’t suck?”  I’m curious if this level of changed expectations resonates with other TheAppGap readers?

I’m still trying to interpret Chris Brogan’s nugget captured on the Expo floor:

“Depressing that E20Tech has finally caught up to 2007″

but suspect it relates.

4. Adapting Organizations to be More Open Remains a Challenge

Issues around being more open for effective collaborative work was a recurring theme in conference presentations,  participant comments and the Twitter stream.  It is reflected in this Tweet from Stowe Boyd who presented first findings from his Open Enterprise Research:

@stoweboyd I want to scream when moving toward openness as a ‘tough problem’. Why does it seem that the enterprise hates people? #e2conf

in a multi ReTweeted comment from Marcia Conner (@marciamarcia)

LindaAtV3: RT @elsuacon #e2conf Major take from @marciamarcia participation-make more people centric org’s.That’s what matters-People practices FTW!

and by Jessica Lipnack speaking during #e2conf40

@jlipnack We can’t solve 21st century problems with 19th century organizations

If you attended Enterprise 2.0 in Boston live or virtually please share your impression, provide  pointers to must read Tweets and blog posts and alert me to what I missed.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Twitter in the Enterprise

June 26, 2009 at 11:50 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Fellow AppGapper Bill Ives has posted a great summary of the perspective that he brought to the Twitter Panel at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference (wonderfully moderated by Jessica Lipnack, whose post you’ll find at this preceding link).  I was deeply honored to be on the same panel, offering an enterprise perspective. I related what happened when the CEO at one of my clients requested a “twitter channel” for questions during an all-employee forum.  A handful of people (64) in the 7,000-person company. Following the event, I was requested to conduct an after-action review with those who had actually twittered questions during the event.

The after-action review surfaced one of the primary concerns about using Twitter in the enterprise: security.  While most employees are and will be sensitive to providing sensitive information about the company on Twitter, it’s always a risk.  In this case, the corporate IT security folks had raised a (very big) red flag about using Twitter for the employee forum, but the CEO decided that, for this short duration experiment, the risk was manageable.

The benefits of having a Twitter channel during an event:

• People can ask questions as they occur to them while listening, so that they don’t have to wait until the end
• Twitter allows for a nice back-channel, in which people who have similar questions or ideas can discover one another
• The potential for anonymity in a Twitter ID lets people who are hesitant to ask questions in public have a voice
• The short form requires questions to be pithy!

At the E2.0 panel, we were asked about other benefits  of using Twitter inside an enterprise. Here’s my short list:

• Situational awareness, both geographical (who is traveling to different company sites) and contextual (who is working on a particular problem type)
• Crowd sourcing: tweeting questions and getting answers from friends but also friends of friends (via the Retweet mechanism)
• Developing and maintaining relationships. Tweets help you get a sense of who a person is, and whether it’s a person you may want to collaborate with.
• Tweets with links, and especially retweets with links provide a good information filtering mechanism

I think that the challenges for enterprises who want to bring microblogging tools inside the firewall include:

• Migrating people who are already using Twitter to an internal tool. When people are using Twitter, they develop a natural style that lets them speak to their communities both inside and outside the enterprise.
• It is important for enterprise microblogging tools to enable the option to post out to Twitter anything posted internally.
• Integrating microblogging with social networking and collaboration applications that already exist or that are in plan.  It is becoming hard enough to keep track of our multiple internal and external identities as we move about software platforms for connection and collaboration that we (okay, I) don’t need additional splintering of my conversational threads
• Companies should get started sooner rather than later if they want to do internal microblogging. Now is the time to experiment, and see how it will be useful, find the early adopters (who are not all necessarily GenY, btw), and let them develop a corporate style.

Use Precedes Strategy: The nature of Enterprise 2.0 is that it is (as often defined), “the adoption of Web 2.0 tools inside the enterprise.”  The use of these tools therefore necessary precedes strategy.  Experiments using Twitter or even home-grown internal tools are a good beginning.

Twitter as a Business Application

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CubeTree Releases Innovative Enterprise Collaboration Platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The power of conversation: Cluetrain at 10

June 20, 2009 at 8:24 am · Filed under Web 2.0

I attended an anniversary celebration for the Cluetrain Manifesto at the Berkman Center last week.  Two of the declarators of the manifesto, Doc Searls and David Weinberger (both Berkman fellows) participated in a lively conversation facilitated by Jonathan Zittrain at the SRO event.

I’d been thinking a lot about 1999 lately, as I used that as a pivot year in an article I was working on (for publication in September in The Learning Organization), so the event was timely. Just as timely, Andrew McAfee shared Chapter 1 of his new book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges.

To complete the convergence, the whole world was listening to tweets from Iran. An A revolution whose beginning was marked by the publication of 95 theses is enabling a political revolution based on what the manifesto foresaw:

#9. …networked conversations are are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.

#42. As with networked markets, people are talking directly to each other inside the company…

The manifesto acknowledged what was already happening with respect to the way that companies were using the Internet as yet another broadcast mechanism, ignoring the power of the Internet to enable conversations. It was no longer possible for a company to control its messages — the market, the people on the Internet, were free to talk about companies and products in an open and honest way. People could talk back.

Inside companies it has taken a bit longer to reach a point of freedom of conversation, and companies still need to learn how to listen wisely. I how McAfee describes the trend in the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies: “…to bring people together and let them interact, without specifying how they should so so.”

Markets, companies, countries, no longer have the power to dictate how people will interact, nor what they say, nor who hears it. Companies have learned to harness communities on the web and to leverage listening technologies so that they can hear what customers are saying. The E2.0 trend signals that they are learning to listen to what their employees are saying. And so we watch Iran, to see how what this  messy and momentous conversation will generate.