Brian on Collaboration

Teaching people about blogs

I'm showing people at work how to blog.

Purpose, Purpose, Purpose

While attending a session (Enterprise 2.0 – The corporate side of Web 2.0) this morning, I loved what the speaker (David Gootzit) had to say about Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies. He likened a successful adoption of these technologies to the classic real estate moniker "Location, Location, Location". If there was a theme, it would be that a clear purpose is the universal theme to successful implementations. Here are some key things I took away:

The "Let's put the technology out there and see what happens approach"

In Gartner's research, over 90% of "put it out there" implementations, the ones that start off as, "let's just give users some tools and see how they start to use them, then well adopt a strategy", fail. I've got to say, this is pretty in line with not only what I've found has happened at Habañero every time we put something out and think that everyone will just start using it. That, and our common effort to rescue our customer's unwieldy "tests" of new software further validate this concept. The core message is that social computing technologies are not successful because the tools are cool or are enabling something new, but rather, they are successful because someone has a vision, driven by a clear purpose of how a community is to be impacted BY the technology. So how do you inspire a community to rally behind a purpose? There's a few ways.

You can't make a business case for social software, but you can use social software for a business case

There is no ROI in wikis, blogs, better, quicker, faster, stronger collaborate-and-share technologies. The ROI is in how they are intended to impact the business. How will the changes to the community experience make you more money? Make your products better? Make people care? Reduce risk? This business case, David notes, is driven by a purpose. But realization doesn't happen right away. Most of the time, the types of shifts companies are looking to create happen over long periods of time, with evolving community needs. For this, he suggests creating a Purpose Roadmap.

Never test or prototype with the user community you intend to impact

I found this comment funny. We break this rule all the time and then have to deal with the aftermath. The basic rule here, is you have one try (MAYBE two if you're lucky) to truly get engagement from a user community. If you fail to hit it on the head, offer a compelling user experience, or simply get it wrong, you're toast. TEST with people who know how to be good test subjects….not with your community. A good reminder.

Never break John Gall's law

I don't like Murphy's law ("If anything can go wrong, it will"). It's so pessimistic. That said, I love John Gall's Law (called Gall's Law). It states:

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."

Applied to social computing, this basically means, don't boil the ocean with the first attempt. In fact start very, very, very, very small. I'm reminded of our larger consulting engagements that deliver some large, super featured portal or collaboration technology and then struggle with adoption. I love this law, and hope we live it more. God it's tempting to want to add more stuff.

Your tools should stretch a culture, not alter it

To Gall's point, making a "hoarding culture" a "sharing culture"' or a "technophobic culture" an "adoptive culture" is not something that happens over night. Again, it takes years. Find a way to include things in the purpose roadmap that provide incremental and small differences to the community you're impacting. Something we run into all the time: our customers want to make people "retain and share knowledge" because they are not doing it now. Now that I look at it, that's a pretty lofty (and likely impractical) change. I love this roadmap concept.

Purpose, Purpose, Purpose

I think this point is pretty clear now. I'm bet this content is trademarked by Gartner, but I don't think it'll hurt to list what David calls the Magnificent Seven for driving a good purpose for enabling effective Web 2.0 social tools within the enterprise context. They are:

Magnet (what's in it for users)
Aligned (what's in it for the business)
Properly scoped (small, small, small)
Promotes evolution (needs will change, so will the vision, that's the nature of community)
Low risk (choose low risk over high rewards)
Measureable (in business value terms)
Community driven

Now that I've completely stolen everything David said (with editorial), I suppose I say:

"I make no money from this blog."

J

Gartner – Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit (and using Word as a blog authoring tool)

I'm attending the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit this week, and these conferences always give me a blogging boost. I've been to a few sessions so far, and I'm pretty impressed with some of the speakers, so I thought I'd take notes in public form (via the blog). To do this, I'm also testing out Word's integration with Typepad (the company that hosts my blog). It's pretty cool so far, and here is how Word integration with typepad works:

   

1) First, I created a blank word "blog" document template on my desktop:

1a) I did this by clicking on the Word "Office Button" and Publish  Blog

2) Word asked me to set up my link to my public blog. There is easy publishing available for Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, SharePoint (of course), Community Server, TypePad and WordPress. Though if your blog software offers web services for publishing, you'll probably be able to publish to it.

 

   

3) Finally, I started to write my blog posting. It's pretty darn intuitive to write, add categories, post and edit existing postings. Here's a picture of this blog posting:

 

   

I like this for a few reasons:

a) I can create blog postings while offline (for example when I'm at a conference) by using word as the "note taking" tool, and then publish when I come online.

b) I get to use the familiar interface of word, including spell check.

c) I don't have to remember my blog password. I tell you I forget that thing every time (might have something to do with blogging frequency).

d) Personally, I think the word interface is better than Typepads. It's that cool ribbon that does it for me.

The Enterprise Use of Web 2.0 Tools

It seems these things always happen while I'm on vacation.

While I was away our company reviewed our practice and group priorities for the quarter. We call these Rocks (I like to think it relates to Covey's concept of put the big rocks in the jar first, then let the little ones fall around them. If you do it the other way, the big rocks can't fit.) Anyway, I digress.

One of the Collaboration Practice rocks for the quarter is to "Raise our company profile in Intranet and Web 2.0 Collaboration experience". Recently, you see, I've noticed more and more of our customers experimenting and implementing web 2.0 tools within their enterprise...a little wiki here...an little social networking here....and how can we take advantage of this company Facebook group?

I've noticed they sometimes don't call us. It's no biggie...we don't know everyone in every company we work for, and lots of these implementations are skunk work projects. But I'd LOVE for our customers to call us. We research this stuff. We hire people who breathe this stuff. We experience first hand our own (or our customers) challenges with these implementations, and we love helping people.

During the review session (which occurred, I think, while I was sipping a Hurricane cocktail in New Orleans at the famous Pat O'Briens), I overheard that there was a mumbling to my rock: "Why are we spending time all this time on Web 2.0 stuff...do we even know if this bandwagon has any value?"

Someone was obviously sitting in different seats than I was. Maybe their view was blocked by a post. I don't think I've ever seen something so new be pontificated, planned, researched or adopted by corporations in the history of my role with Collaboration concepts.

This is so critical to me, I'm offering a week long view into what I've thought about, read, researched or heard on Web 2.0 Collaboration within the Enterprise.

Once caveat. Let's not get caught up on what "Web 2.0" really means to you. I experienced my first wiki nearly 10 years ago. I think my home phone still had a cord on it. Yet wikis are often lumped with the term "2.0", a term which I only recall hearing about several years ago. I guess wikis fit that dynamic, user driven, community oriented, web based, us vs. them concept that envelops the concepts of Web 2.0. So who cares if they've got a bit of dust on them.

They're still powerful.

 

Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 Conference Successful

So perhaps a new look and feel will revive my interest in bloggin'.

The Microsoft MOSS 2007 conference is a success for Habanero...we sent 8 folks down to the conference, and as a collective, we've learned a lot. We've also had a great time hanging with our clients, and seeing their eyes light up on cool stuff. Some of the highlights include:

Microsoft blueprint for Silverlight announced. The keynote showed some stuff that General Mills was doing with Silverlight and search. I am convinced this is the future of the enterprise search experience, and I'm going to avidly pursue figuring this out.

Community Kit for SharePoint. It's interesting. Clients don't like 3rd party products (to extend SharePoint). They're concerned about company longevity & pains related to installing, configuring and sustaining a 3rd party product. But boy, are they excited about free code. The community kit presentation highlighted some exciting upcoming features that are extending SharePoint's out of the box experience around blogs, wikis and other social, web 2.0ish kind of features. Export to and import from Word in the "upgraded wiki" features are pretty damn hot lookin'.

Advanced Search. There's a lot of buzz around search here. Not only because the free search was announced, but because of the crazy stuff that people are doing on MOSS search and the recent acquisition of FAST from Microsoft. As soon as that deal is final, expect some amazing stuff. Did you know that for enterprise users (not home users) google, yahoo and msn only own 30% of the Internet enterprise search market [Chris got this out of a analyst presentation]? This means products such as FAST make up the majority of searches that users within companies perform. INTERESTING.

Social Web 2.0 Tools. It's great to see a broader user community get excited about these tools in the workplace. I did a presentation to a bunch of Records Managers a few weeks ago to talk about social networking and collaboration tools and how we are seeing them used in the enterprise (and the RM challenges they cause), and I thought...holy cow...get up to speed on this stuff people! It's good to see some excited big ticket executives talk about the importance of these technologies within their companies.

Records Management on SharePoint 2007. I'm not crazy. There is a HUGE market here. General Mills, DAFRA, and some other big organizations gave presentations on what they are doing within SharePoint specifically around Records Management. One person in the audience asked "so are you locking down fileshares then?". Ahrg...some people just don't GET it. If you're creating a solution that is so bad that it forces people to want to use their old stuff, then perhaps it's your solution that's the problem, not the fact that the old stuff is still available. Anyway, I digress. I'm really happy about the progress we've made in this area and confident there's a good message on how these two play nice together. Certainly a blog topic to kill all blog topics.

Dude, Habanero rocks. Yet more validation we are rocking at Habanero. Besides sending more people than any other consulting company in the world (a guess, but I'm pretty sure this is accurate). We are WAY, WAY ahead of the general user community in SharePoint Information Architecture, designing a brand within the MOSS framework, architecting for large scale inter-continental deployments, user training, governance and having a kick ass framework for developing custom code solutions [see press release on Habaneros.com].

How do we communicate our lessons learned?

How do we get this information out to customers, future customers, and the general public at large?

Did you know, for example, that while SharePoint can run on a 64 bit server, there is no Adobe PDF ifilter available for a 64 bit machine to allow SharePoint to index pdf's?

or how about:

Did you know that if you're creating an external website on the MOSS platform, you should edit down the JS file that comes with SharePoint so external website users are not needing the nearly 1mb file when they browse your site?

or

Telerik's free MOSS 2007 editing control is all but required for MOSS sites that are going to support non IE browsers? The in browser editing controls for MOSS 2007 do not support Safari or Firefox!

How do we get this news to you?

A revivial

In the interest of starting a wave of Blogging effort at Habanero around the topic of Collaboration, I'm reviving my blog until we get a shared author "Collaboration Blog" going here.

Soon, my friends. Soon.

Microsoft Releases 2007 Office System Licensing

Microsoft has released its Office System 2007 Licensing. Some interesting things to note:

a) Current Office Professional users will migrate to Office Professional Plus under SA's and EA's.

b) Forms Server (InfoPath forms via the web) will be released as a separate server offering, but also included in the new Enterprise CAL introduced by Microsoft. This will have a separate licensing structure for external website use.

c) The new Enterprise CAL (which will be an upgrade to the Core CAL many companies already own) will include:

• Business data exposure via the Business Data Catalog
• Forms Server
• Excel Services (Not sure what this is going to be called)
• Rights Management Services
• MOM licensing
• Security licensing (don't know exactly what this is yet)
• Communicator licensing

d) A new desktop suite called Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 will include the laptop friendly tools Groove & OneNote.

e) A product acquired from a company called UMT (www.umt.com) is being re-branded and included in the 2007 server lineup as: Microsoft Project Portfolio Server 2007.

References:
Microsoft.com: Client Suite Licensing
Microsoft.com: Pricing Overview (Including Servers)
Microsoft.com (Word Doc): Pricing FAQ Sheet - Includes Great details about each individual server.

What's Hot in Office 12

Here's what I'm excited about in the next release of Office (Currently called Office 12).

Enterprise Content Management

Nearly every organization we work with is using a different technology to work with external web content and internal portal content. The reason for this, I believe, is that in the past, managing web content has always been a different beast than managing documents, collaborative workspaces and enterprise content and applications. These differences, however, are cleverly addressed in the next version of Office 12, and I think the following worlds are finally coming together in a very cohesive way:

• Records Management
• Document Management
• Web Content Management
• Form Based Content Collection & Management
• LOB Data Management

More details on the Microsoft direction for this merger of technologies can be found here:
Microsoft's ECM Vision

Business Intelligence Improvements

To me, BI suffers in one key area: How do users SEE the data that has been painstakingly optimized for reporting. This has caused some major problems for organizations:

• High costs of 3rd party BI visualization products, which don't really integrate with tools like excel for complex reporting
• Painful development time for creating rich drill down reports that have good user interfaces
• Frustrated managers and executives that have to muddle over excel or pivot table complexity to see their data

There's a TON coming to improve this in Office 12:

• Much much better data visualization in Excel (such as being able to quickly apply color shading visualization)
• Improved Pivot Table Reports (create excel documents that have the functionality of Pivot Tables but are disconnected from the awkwardness of the Pivot Table user interface) (See an example of both new Pivot table UI and Visualization in the Excel O12 Blog)
• Rich Visio integration for super data visualization
• Excel Services (You've got to visit this Microsoft Excel Blog)
• Better web based management of the "report and BI dashboard"
• KPI management & Business Scorecard features built into the products

Richer access to Line of Business Data

So you're typing up a contract for a client. Ideally you'd attach that client name as meta data to the document so you could find it better later. In Office 12, connecting to data stored in a line of business system is, well, easy. Office 12 deals with this. From a business perspective, imaging surfacing data stored in Line of Business systems to your portal so that all users in your organization can see that data. I'm anxious to connect this to our CRM at Habanero so we can see contacts, opportunities, activities, and project details for our clients one one cohesive SharePoint page. Keep your ear out for this term:

• Business Data Catalog

From a technical perspective, I couldn't do this as much justice about this new technology as Eli Robillard does in his blog. 

Much Much Better Search

The way we think about Enterprise search has been flipped 180 degrees in Office 12, and in a good way. Besides better algorithms, look for:

• The ability to search structured data out of the box
• Social networking searches
• A flexible search user interface
• General feature improvement (hit highlighting, "did you mean" spelling checker, etc.)

Greater access to content in Documents and Spreadsheets

Our Single Source Publishing Solutions are specifically targeting reusing content that sits in Word Documents for reuse on the web, PDA, phone, etc. or for LOB data integration. In some ways, our solutions are only relevant and successful because the technology is still a bit weak at addressing the need to separate content from presentation logic. Office 12 and the new XML based file formats address this head on, allowing a much better separation between content and styling (and improved ways of manipulating both).

Better Accessibility

Office 12 is really looking to gain broader reach. We see this in:

• Web based forms created by InfoPath
• Support for greater authentication mechanisms
• Broader reach of SharePoint functionality into Internets & Extranets
• Improved UI

This one is going to come up so much in future blogs, I'll stop there.

Slight shift in blog content

I'm anxious to start to share cool details about Microsoft's next version of SharePoint, CMS and other Office products (Called Office 12 or O12). Officially, the O12 client software is no longer under NDA (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Visio, Access, Outlook). The O12 "servers" are. That said, I've decided I'm going to do two things with this blog until O12 becomes fully public.

a) I'll point you to the best resources on Office 12 and Microsoft's next wave of their collaboration, Enterprise content Management, Business Intelligence, Portal and Desktop Publishing suite.

and

b) I'll try to summarize the publically available details of Office 12 in a manner that makes sense to me :)

O12 is slated for release in the second half of 2006. There are no official details available yet on product pricing or how the server or client products are going to be packaged, which is probably the biggest annoyance, but as soon as we find out, I'll post it.