Enterprise 2.0: From the Labs

David Coleman is hosting a panel that includes Bob McCandless and Chad Ata of BrightCom, Irene Greif of IBM, and Denis Browne of SAP of what’s happening in their experimental environments right now, which may not be anything that’s going to become a product. Each has 10 minutes, so this is more like a standard panel than the speed-dating vibe of the previous Launch Pad session.

McCandless started out talking about BrightCom, which makes telepresence products, and some of the work that they’re doing in gaze correction and perspective-corrected viewing so that it appears that the people on the other side of the conference are both at the table with you and looking at you. He’s talking about immersive telepresence, where you’re in a fully rendered environment that appears truly seamless since you appear as a photo-realistic avatar rather than using a literal video of you, and how new display technologies are going to have to improve in order to support that. He’s demonstrating the ideas by using Second Life, where he’s popped his telepresence avatar directly in instead of his normal Second Life avatar. He claims that this has the potential to become “indistinguishable from reality”, and that immersive technology is the next generation after telepresence.

Greif talked about IBM’s Many Eyes, a social data analysis site. She started by showing the Baby Name Wizard data visualization, which somehow reminded me of the Hans Rosling TEDtalk and his company GapMinder; as she got into Many Eyes itself, it’s very much like GapMinder. The vision, however, is to use tools like this for enterprise data, including that which is residing on people’s hard drives.

Browne talked about what SAP is doing with enterprise widgets. He makes a great point that IT departments are still in reaction mode with respect to Web 2.0 applications, and that in many cases, the business side is bringing them in. He sees three ways to implement Enterprise 2.0: extend existing applications, build new applications, and facilitate enterprise mashups. He also makes an analogy of Enterprise 2.0 solutions to iTunes, where they need to provide end user experience, distribution, security and development tools. He showed the SAP widgets, which is a Google gadget-like toolbar of widgets, such as drilldowns into sales prospecting data.

Enterprise 2.0: Launch Pad

Michael Sampson of Collaboration Success Advisors chaired Launch Pad, where four companies each had six minutes to talk about a new product that they’re launching. David Coleman and Stowe Boyd each provided a minute of critique, then at the end we voted via SMS for our favourite.

Franco Dal Molin of Collanos: team collaboration across the corporate firewall, so that it can include outsourcers and contractors. They have a synchronized peer-to-peer workspace solution which is server-less, allowing for sharing information both real-time and asynchronously. You invite others to your workspace, and what you’re doing synchs with what they’re doing. It can include any types of content or file types, but also structure content such as tasks and links. There’s versioning of the content. Each project is presented in its own tab for organization, and presumably you can share different different tabs with different people. Workplace was released about six months ago, and today, they’re announcing a voice calling add-on to allow for voice and video calls, including voice mail and call forwarding. He invited us to join the Collanosphere. [I’m wondering if you’re just looking at the product, is that a Collanoscopy?]

One of Stowe Boyd’s comments was that the problem with P2P is that if you’re never online at the same time as your collaborators, then you never synch with them; I see that in the Skype group chat that I belong to, where the chat history is actually maintained through P2P synchronization and I’ll suddenly get a big chunk of missing chat history come flooding in when someone comes online.

Avinoam Nowogrodski from Clarizen, who I’ll be interviewing later today: on-demand, collaborative project management. He had a lot of great marketing graphics that talked about collaborative project networks, but I’m not left with much of an overall impression of what their software actually does (aside from the fact that it’s called “project management”, so I assume that it does some sort of, um, project management).

Dave Peak of LiquidTalk: some of the challenges in business today are that an increasingly remote workforce limits collaboration; the Web 2.0 generation enters the workforce and have higher expectations; and roles are getting tougher, leading to higher turnover in employees. The result is a disconnected, disengaged workforce, and LiquidTalk counters this with mobile workforce engagement: create, find, organize and push audio/video business content to mobile devices. Personally, I’m not sure that I want to consume a lot of information via voice; although I listen to podcasts a lot, if I’m just trying to extract some key data, text is way easier.

Sam Weber of KnowNow was up last: his title slide claims that they’re the Live Information Management Application for Today’s Enterprise. He states that email is overused (and has become a storage device rather than a communication platform), static portals are broken, and search isn’t the answer. They monitor a wide variety of information sources — blogs, wikis, web servers, email, portals and more — and aggregate it, apply filtering, then push it out the critical information via RSS to create channels in a user portal environment similar to Netvibes. I agree with the critics that aggregation and RSS feeds are the way to go for information consumption in the future, so this one may have some legs.

The audience vote on which of these has the game-changing proposition: KnowNow.

Enterprise 2.0: BEA

After watching Ajay Gandhi in the panel just before lunch, I meet up with him for an update on what’s been happening with their Enterprise 2.0 products since BEA Participate last month. It looks like they’ll move out of beta to general release some time in July, and they’re starting to line up customers for the GA products from around the world, and across telecom, public sector and a variety of other vertical industries.

We talked about what beta customers are doing with Pages, their mashup platform, and there’s a number of things that I didn’t expect. First of all, customers are using it as a wiki platform for team collaboration: although not as wiki-functional as a true wiki platform, it can easily integrate in other content and data sources, which a wiki platform typically can’t do. Other customers are using it as a lightweight portal builder (in my opinion, it looks like it could replace WebLogic Portal for some simpler applications, although that’s not BEA’s positioning), and also using it as a tool to create portlets that can be consumed by the WebLogic Portal environment. Since Pages allows you to create a portlet directly from sources as diverse as REST or an RSS feed, that adds a lot of value.

We also discussed a bit of the roadmap for future versions, the most exciting of which (for me) is the integration with AquaLogic BPM to both invoke and monitor processes. They’re also going to strengthen their blog and wiki capabilities, and improve the tooling, and he mentioned that they’re considering a hosted version as well.

More and more, I’m seeing mashups — especially via enterprise-focussed platforms like Pages — to be the future of what is now called end-user computing: the small but necessary applications that are built by semi-technical people that exist within business units, created in the absence of a sufficiently agile IT development group. I’ll definitely be looking more at this theme in the coming months, especially at Mashup Camp next month.

Enterprise 2.0: Enterprise 2.0 Mashups

David Coleman of Collaborative Strategies ran a panel on Enterprise Mashups that included Ajay Gandhi of BEA, Rod Smith of IBM, Eric Hoffert of ShareMethods (who I had a great chat with yesterday at a break) and Lee Buck of Near-Time.

Coleman defines a mashup as something that can be working in less than a day, and declared that anything that takes longer than that is an integration project. I’m not sure I agree with that strict time definition, but it’s definitely in ballpark. He started out with some interesting slides defining mashups, since it’s likely that many in the audience aren’t familiar with mashups. His talk would have been a bit more impactful if he had taken the Bluetooth headset out of his ear, however…

Gandhi was up next to cover BEA’s mashup environment (he used the term “adhocracies” to describe some of the types of collaboration that are going on, which I love), and discussed how enterprise mashups are different than consumer internet mashups since they have to plug in to corporate data and provide some degree of security and control. He primarily covered AquaLogic Pages, which I saw at the recent BEA user conference. The nice thing about this panel is that each participant is expected to not just present, but demo, so he moved over to a Pages demo, although he didn’t do a live inclusion of my blog during the demo as we had from the stage at BEA Participate. He showed how to create a new data space, or page, which includes feeds from other sources, interactively-entered text, and other content; each page automatically has its own RSS feed. He then created a simple web application in Pages by combining a data object containing names and addresses of potential sales prospects with a map widget, where the map and data widgets interact with the map detecting any address information in the data and plotting the prospects on the map.

Hoffert gave a quick presentation on mashups as a model for building and selling applications, where revenue can be shared across the mashup participants, and the need for better standards to allow mashup components to interact. They’re involved in Open Simple Ajax Mashup (OpenSAM), which is intended to more easily allow for multi-component, multi-vendor enterprise mashups — this is another twist on the same issue being addressed by at least one other vendor by considering a sort of mashup ESB. Hoffert then demonstrated ShareOffice, one of their products, which is a mashup built on five different components for creating, editing and sharing documents amongst members of a sales team, and includes SalesForce.com data as well as document authoring and management.

We moved over to Smith, who started with some discussion of why companies do mashups, which is usually about how to reuse assets in ways that they were not intended. The emerging mashup ecosystem has to allow ease of access, have data and components be designed for re-mixability, and be ready in a corporate culture sense for the emergent behaviour and applications that will result. He demonstrated QEDwiki, which I’ve seen at Mashup Camp last year and in a few other presentations since then, although I haven’t tried it out yet. The page creation environment allows you to drag and drop components from a palette to the page, then open up properties for each component in order to create the links between them. The application that he showed, which was built in 17 hours, so fits the “less than one day” criteria if you’re a typical developer, combines two views of data about shipping vessels (a list, then a drill-down on the selected vessel) with a map of the location and relevant weather data. One of their widgets allows you to create a feed from a SQL statement, or from an Excel/CSV file, in order to integrate into their environment; this further supports my thoughts of (RSS) feeds as being the next great thing in what used to be called end-user computing. You can’t use third-party widgets, such as Google gadgets, although Smith sees that having widget interface standards is going to be essential as we move forward: essentially the same message that we heard from Hoffert about OpenSAM. It appears that this will all be part of Info 2.0, which we heard about yesterday in IBM’s Enterprise 2.0-o-rama presentation.

Last up was Buck from Near-Time, which looks at cross-organizational collaboration. He discussed “people mashups”, namely online collaboration outside corporate boundaries, where there is no single authority. They use methods such as an OpenID gateway to an internal LDAP directly as a way to help facilitate that collaboration, and provide tools for secure content sharing. Sorry guy, this is not a mashup in the sense that anyone attending this panel means, although it might be an interesting collaboration environment.

An audience member asked about process mashups rather than data mashups; Smith responded with an example about Tivoli information being available for exposure in a mashup environment, which is not really what I was looking for in response to that question.

Enterprise 2.0: Collective Intelligence

Jeffrey Walker and Stewart Mader of Atlassian spoke next on “Collective Intelligence: Monkeys or Memes?” (great title, making reference to the infinite monkey theorem), which was really about adoption patterns of enterprise wikis.

This is really going back to the theory that the IQ level of an appropriately organized collective can be greater than that of the smartest person in that group, and that’s the whole reason for using wikis in the first place, especially in a corporate environment, instead of just picking the smart guy to write the thing.

There’s some significant drivers for Enterprise 2.0 software, and they’re not all about the functionality: some are about the fact that it’s lightweight, easy to install (or software as a service, requiring no installation), easy to customize, and doesn’t require months for the IT department or a third-party system integrator to create a working solution. Many companies, however, still believe that anything that can be up and running in less than 6 months is just a toy; this attitude is driven by IT departments trying to hold onto their job security in a world where the new applications and tools cause an ever-increasing commoditization of their role.

Walker was a very engaging speaker, quite funny and lots of great material. He spoke about some of the advantages of enterprise blogging, whether purely internal or external-facing, and some interesting differences in how companies approach external-facing blogs: Sun just lets you go to town, whereas Cisco requires that you have VP approval and go through corporate communications in a process that must discourage many potential bloggers long before they’re (inevitably) turned down. He recommended checking out IBM’s blogging policy as a good balance for enterprises; having talked with a few IBM employees who also blog, I’ve heard the same thing from them.

Not for the first time this week, I’ve heard SAP’s developer network used as a great example of using blogs and wikis with their external community.

Pixar uses a wiki for project management of all film productions that they do; it started out in their IT and software development areas, but gradually moved into the business areas, which Walker feels is a typical adoption pattern. He also thinks that Enterprise 2.0 adoption is going to look a lot different in the next year than it has in the past year due to the ever-increasing momentum, market presence, and consumer awareness.

He finished up talking about Twitter, not just as a personal social networking tool, but as a platform that’s starting to be investigated by organizations like BART and LAFD to provide public service announcements via SMS. I’ve always seen Twitter as redundant with something like my Facebook updates or a my Skype status, but seeing some non-personal uses of it all of a sudden makes it really interesting.

Mader came up next to talk about some examples of what’s happened with collective intelligence. He’s the author of the book Using Wikis in Education, and used a wiki to collaborate with several others in order to move from material that he had published in his blog into full-on collaborative authoring. He also talked about how he boosted the level of collaboration by creating a Facebook group, which gained more members in a number of weeks than the number of readers his blog reached in several months; this really points out that Facebook is inherently a more social environment (duh) than the more passive activity of reading blogs, and the very act of someone adding themselves to the Facebook group would cause its presence to be extended to that person’s contacts, which is not true if someone is just reading your blog.

He took us through some of the content on wikipatterns.com, a site that Atlassian sponsors, which contains both people and adoption patterns and anti-patterns: another great resource if you’re considering an enterprise wiki and want to assist its adoption. He also talked about some of the challenges of enterprise wiki adoption: overcoming resistance to change, establishing the right scope, gaining trust amongst the contributors (usually manifested in questions such as “someone else can change what I wrote?” and “how can I approve edits?”), and embracing emergent behaviours and making them part of the corporate culture.

Mader addressed an issue straight on that I’ve seen with both blogs and wikis: the attitude that “if I put my expertise in a public forum, I’m no longer an expert”, or “someone will steal my ideas”. I’ve had this argument with several other independent consultants when trying to convince them to blog; it’s a little bit like an architect not wanting anyone to be able to walk through the houses that he designs in case they copy his ideas, when his real value is in both bringing those designs to life and developing new designs, not just selling the old set of plans over and over again. If the only thing that you will ever have to contribute is what you’ve already done in the past, then it’s time for you to retire.

There were some audience questions at the end about people’s need for attribution of material that they author; Mader feels that wiki editing history logs actually provide better attribution than an emailed Word document, and that the new generation of workers are more likely to be used to this form of collaboration. Attribution is an illusion anyway in this world of copy-and-paste; I’ve sent two documents to a client in the past several days, only to find that they copied the text out of my corporate template and put it into their own template before distribution within their company.

Enterprise 2.0: Case Studies Part II

Today started out with another panel — seems to be the more common format for breakout sessions here rather than individual speaker. I was a few minutes late and came in on someone from a vendor that I hadn’t heard of talking about his product, then Joe Schwartz of WebEx took over to talk about how they’re doing Enterprise 2.0 internally using their own technology. Because they have large operations in China, they need to be able to collaborate across a wide geography, for which their using their core web conferencing/desktop sharing product, but also leveraging blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds and other mechanisms in their outward-facing marketing. He also mentioned how they use social networking in the sales organization using tools like LinkedIn and Visible Path.

Because of the nature of their business and the fact that so much of their business is sold remotely, their sales force is really focussed on enhancing their virtual presence and touch-points. This is the first time that I’ve really heard about how social networking can make a difference for the sales side of the house; most case studies focus on inward-facing projects and people, or on the customer community in a post-sales scenario. They use a tool called SalesGenius, integrated with their CRM, to help with this; in fact, since it’s a hosted service, the sales department started it on a trial basis without IT even knowing about it. Even now, there’s no IT involvement, and a relatively low monthly cost gave them almost an immediate ROI.

Next up was Jeff Herrmann of Manning & Napier, an investment management firm, about how they implemented blogs and wikis internally using the SocialText platform. They already had a fairly collaborative culture, especially in their analytical team, but they had a problem with just capturing and retrieving knowledge (in part because of the relatively high turnover in personnel that is endemic in the industry), with communicating information between departments, and with facilitating virtual and asynchronous discussions. Funnily enough, he found it easy to get buy-in at the bottom (people who probably weren’t being heard, and saw this as an opportunity) and the top (executives who had the vision to understand how social networking could make their business work better), but said that he’s still working on the middle. And surprisingly, the most prolific blogger in the firm is the 71-year-old chairman.

We then heard from Maria Barnum of Bank of America on how they’re using RSS to distribute information out to their branch network: this is one-way notifications of everything from weather alerts to fraud notices, and used to be done by faxing or remote printing. They’re using a blog tool to publish information, since RSS is built right in, and categories allow for easy filtering of the feeds by region and role. They use a small RSS reader that sits in the system tray that alerts the user when a new item is available; essentially, they’ve created an alternative to email for distributing this type of information, which is a pretty interesting application for RSS. They use ActiveDirectory to determine that information and push specific feeds to specific people; I’d love to hear more about how they do that, since that’s an essential part of using RSS technologies in some enterprise applications. Someone asked what blog and reader technology that they are using, and Barnum said that she was not allowed to do product endorsements; I don’t think that the conference organizers intended that she not even mention the product name (after all, the previous speaker mentioned SocialText explicitly).

I consider RSS to be the next big thing in information distribution, and I’m actively paring down my email newsletter subscriptions (which I almost never read) in favour of RSS subscriptions, which assures that my email address isn’t getting spammed. I also think that RSS needs to be used much more heavily to deliver alerts and other information from enterprise applications: it provides a standards-based way to send out information that can be consumed on a variety of platforms.

Mashup goes un-Camp

Slightly against the spirit of a true unconference, the Mashup Camp scheduled for next month in Mountain View has gone commercial. From an email that I received late last week from David Berlind, one of the organizers:

If you’re a Mashup Camp veteran, the you know that Mashup Camp and Mashup University have traditionally been free events to attend and Doug and I have worked hard to keep them that way. However, given the number of no-shows as well as the number of non-sponsoring solution providers that come to Camp to commercially engage the mashup community, Doug and I are instituting a tiered fee structure that our research with you indicates is very fair.

Although the fee is nominal ($35) for developers, I don’t actually develop much code so have listed myself as an “observer” at past events: I attend primarily to learn and contribute ideas, and to blog about the experience. David and I exchanged some email, and he said that it was cool for me to attend at the developer price as long as I wasn’t there representing a corporate entity trying to sell something to the developers (as if I’d pick people with no money as a target market 🙂 ). Non-sponsoring private companies pay $495, and $995 for VCs and public companies.

Something doesn’t quite jive with the literal content of his letter, however: the two Mashup Camps that I attended last year were sponsored by deep-pocketed companies like Google and Yahoo, and I’m unaware of any great financial shortfall in running the unconferences (unless David and Doug want to start taking all-expense-paid trips to Tahiti). Furthermore, the no-show rate seemed to be well within expected parameters: keep in mind that there’s no-shows at paid conferences, too, and the loss of $35 isn’t exactly going to incent a developer to travel across the country if something better comes up. I’ve been involved in a number of Camp events here in Toronto, and yes, there are no-shows, which means that there’s some extra food at the end of the day; deal with it, or maybe stop pretending that there’s not tons of food thrown away at corporate facilities in Silicon Valley every day. I’ve also found the ratios of developers:non-developers pretty good at Mashup Camp in the past, so I don’t think that this is strictly to discourage non-developers.

It appears that they’re really doing this to encourage sponsorship of the event: I’m sure that the companies that do kick in some money might be a bit peeved that other companies could just show up for free and schmooze around with the developers, dangling job offers. Basically, the $495/995 amounts to an entrance fee to a talent fair, since many of the developers are attending Mashup Camp — at least in part — to showcase their talents in front of exactly those people from commercial organizations who might want to hire them.

Personally, I don’t think that this is the right way to go about it: I’d prefer to see a consistently low pricing structure (or free) but restrictions on the number of non-developers allowed. Sure, someone could lie and say they were a developer when they’re really a recruiter for Google, but it’s just as easy for someone to do that now, and just sign up for the $35 package. If you’re going to call something a Camp, it really should follow unconference guidelines to some degree, which traditionally includes free (or nearly so) admission, and completely participant-driven content that’s not determined in advance. If you’re going to run a commercial conference, then it’s unreasonable to expect people to pay $500 or $1000 for an event that doesn’t even have an agenda published: in other words, you can’t really do a commercial unconference event since many companies could find it difficult to justify the cost based on a complete lack of information about content in advance.

That being said, I found the two Mashup Camps that I attended last year were great, and I’ve already signed up for the one in July. And I’m not just saying that because I ran into David today at Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0: Jive Software

Whenever I attend a conference as press, as I am at this one, I receive a lot of requests for meetings with vendors while I’m at the conference. I had so many this time that I had to turn some down, and they keep coming in even while I’m here.

Today at lunchtime I had my first vendor interview with Matt Tucker, CTO of Jive Software. Jive makes an collaboration product in two main flavours: Clearspace, for enterprise collaboration, and Clearspace X, for community collaboration. Although based on the same platform, they have a few differences in functionality, such as reporting, and the pricing models are different: $29/user/year for the enterprise version, and internet-type user band pricing for the community version.

I really like the standard interface because it treats all content types — blog posts, online documents, wikis and discussion threads — the same, and combines them in the “What’s New” section. There’s a shared tagging structure between all of these types of content, so it’s really topic focussed rather than having the focus on content type that many enterprise social software suites have.

It has the expected functionality of RSS feeds everywhere you look (person, space, thread, or a specific piece of content), as well as email notifications for the old skool types who haven’t figured out RSS yet.

The company heritage is as the creator of discussion forum software used by 1,800 customers, including Apple (for their discussion groups) and SAP. There are migration tools to move from the old product to Clearspace, and a few customers are starting to migrate; there are approximately 25 customers on Clearspace today since its release five months ago, although not all of those are conversions from the old product. Although they have a project in the works with a university that will expand to 10,000 users consisting of faculty, staff and students, their largest active customer are in the 200-user range. VMWare is one prominent customer that is in the process of moving from the old platform to Clearspace for their community discussion forums.

The technology is Java on the back end, running on Solaris, Linux, Windows, OS/10 and probably your toaster; any application server; and eight (if I heard the number correctly) different databases. Although a few customers consume it as a hosted solution, most are taking it in-house and customizing it for their own use. Although Jive’s professional services group does a lot of the customization, apparently a savvy development group within a customer may also do the customization with a minimum of training.

In the future, they’ll be adding on more per-user personalization, such as content filters and views; they’ll also be adding more lightweight document approval workflow functionality, such as deadlines. This is the second vendor that I’ve talked to today who has mentioned workflow/process management in the context of a true Enterprise 2.0 product, and I know that there will be more interesting developments in this area.

Enterprise 2.0: Case Studies, Part I

Another panel, this one with moderator Brian Gillooly from Optimize, and including panelists Jordan Frank of Traction, Mark Mader of Smartsheet.com, Suresh Chandrasekaran of Denodo, Todd Berkowitz of NewsGator and David Carter of iUpload (which I understood was going to undergo a name change based on what their CEO John Bruce said last month at EnterpriseCamp in Toronto). Since these are all product companies, I expect that this might be a bit less compelling than the previous panel, which was primarily focused on two Enterprise 2.0 end-user organizations.

I’m not going to list the details of each vendors’ product; suffice it to say that Traction is an enterprise wiki platform (although there’s some blog type functionality in there too), Smartsheet.com is a spreadsheet-style project management application offered as a hosted service, Denodo does enterprise data mashups for business intelligence applications (now that’s kind of interesting), NewsGator is a well-known web feed aggregator and reader, and iUpload is a hosted enterprise social software service.

Mader had some interesting comments on how by making updates to a schedule completely transparent, no one wants to be the last one to add their part since everyone will know that they were last; this, however, is not unique to any Enterprise 2.0 functionality, but has been a well-known characteristic of any collaboration environment since Og was carving pictures of his kills on the community cave wall.

There was an interesting question about who, within an organization, is driving the Enterprise 2.0 technology adoption: although the CxO might be writing the cheque, it’s often corporate communications who’s pushing for it. In the last session, we saw that in one organization, it was pushed by HR, but I suspect that’s unusual.