Amplified08

This week rather than attend a wiki Wednesday gathering I attended Amplified08. This was a gathering of various 'social media' networks from across the UK. Details of what happened can be read over on the Amplified08 wiki and blog. What did I think of it? I met some interesting people had some interesting conversation but left not really any the wiser as to the aim of the meeting beyond a desire to connect people. The interesting thing is that when I attend a wiki Wednesday meeting I go along with the expectation of meeting interesting people and having interesting conversations. Why did I expect something different? Maybe my issues is that I'm too preconditioned to expect meetings to be focused around producing a product. Maybe it's because I'm interested in wiki's and I share that in common with those who attend wiki Wednesday's, I'd describe this as a strong tie. However in the case of Amplified08 the thing we all had in common was an interest in social media and that we belonged to at least one networking group, for me this is a weak tie. If I had to choose between attending a wiki Wednesday or another Amplified session then wiki Wednesday wins. What would make me change my mind? A higher purpose. One reason community's band together is to speak with a unified voice. The old adage "we are stronger if we stand together than stand alone". So what could that higher purpose be? Net Neutrality, Defending the freedom of the network, Defining standards, Influencing government, Taking back ownership of our identity data. What would you choose?

Dear Gartner

This week I had a fantastic small world encounter. Sitting in a meeting with colleagues from another large pharmaceutical company I was asked if I'd met Jessica? Admitting I was part of the team that produced it I enquired where they had 'encountered' her. The answer "in a Gartner report". At first I was flattered but once I saw the report I was less than amused. Why? Gartner had incorporated not one or two slides but the whole slide deck, except one - the acknowledgment slide. Further they identified the source as www.slideshare.net. This is equivalent to showing a video and identifying the source as YouTube. It is amusing that Gartner appear not to understand the basic difference between author and publisher. I'm not upset that Jessica is hanging out with consultants but I would like her to let me know who they are. So you should feel free to use the content but please provide acknowledgment to the author and maybe a comment against the content where it is published.

omCollab - Intergrated enterprise 2.0 toolset

Stumbled across this one today while reviewing options for improving our Scuttle, social bookmarking, instance. I've been keeping a watching brief on the work that Andreas has been doing ever since I met him at a London Wiki Wednesday meeting about a year ago. I remember a conversation about how social bookmarking was undervalued and the great opportunity for integration between social bookmarking and the other web 2.0/enterprise 2.0 tools. Well Andreas has not only developed an updated and improved version of Scuttle, omBookmarks, but has actually released an integrated suite of open source web2.0/enterprise2.0 tools, omCollab. What is more this has all been nicely packaged and released as open source (installation and download instructions here).
omCollab combines MediaWiki, Wordpress and omBookmarks together, while judicious and intelligent use of mediawiki extensions provides light but significant integration between the tools. The user is presented with a consistent look and feel across the platform with integration of the user ID delivering a solid social networking experience.
Andreas has delivered a great product that is significantly ahead of the crowd. IMHO it has the potential to be an open source challenger to Microsfot's SharePoint, IBM's Connections and probable knocks Suite 2.0 into touch. Does it contain all the tools I've previously identified as constituting the enterprise2.0 tool set? No a GTDware component is missing and without RSS it may well prove difficult to deliver a rich social profile into the social networking experience however these thing can be added with time. For now just enjoy and be grateful someone has raised the bar on enterprise2.0.

When Jo meets Charlie

'Why when I'm constantly interrupted by email alerts would I be interested in adding to my problem by installing an Instant Messenger?'

This question and other like it are answered in this new slide deck that has just been shared by John Castledine, a colleague of mine. He felt that the 'meet Charlie'/'meet Jessica' presentations had 'missed the opportunity to speak directly about WHY Enterprise 2.0 tools should be adopted widely in the workplace'. I'd agree with him and this addition to the 'meet Charlie' pantheon certainly delivers against that brief.

When Jo meets Charlie

view presentation (tags: enterprise 2.0 web km)

How valuable is tabbed browsing?

I’ve recently been helping a group of colleagues improve the way they share literature, a combination of social bookmarking (capture and archive) and RSS reader (alerting to new items of interest). Pretty simple until you realise they are all stuck using IE6 and so no tabbed browsing. They all like the idea and the simplicity of the process/workflow but when they realised that the RSS reader was web based they were concerned that the process would not work. Why? Because it meant they had to open yet another instance of IE6, they already had 4 or 5 instance open to do their work, if this was the case then they probably wouldn’t bother. I look at my work desktop and I have IE7, it’s non-standard one of the perks of being in IT, and I realised just how enabling tabbed browsing is. Once you have tabbed browsing you can live within one instance of your browser but more importantly you can configure it with multiple home pages. Now when I open my browser at the start of the day I open all the tools in the enterprise tool set and I’m ready to go. I can sympathise with my colleagues who are already opening 4 or 5 web based applications in different browser instances and here I am suggesting they add a couple more. So I’m adding another tool to the enterprise tool set and that’s a browser that supports tabbed browsing.

Creating the integrated Enterprise2.0 environment

Previously in the post Social Profile I discussed how the integration of information from Social Content Creation and Social Information Management tools would enable the capture of a transactional descriptor of the current interests and activities of a user. In this post and subsequent ones I will discuss how such a integrated enterprise2.0 environment could be created.


In considering integration we can see that in addition to hyperlinking there are three key components:

1. Single User ID - In order to allow any aggregation of information across systems it is essential that users have a single identity across all the tools. In this case enterprise2.0 has a big advantage over web2.0 as it can leverage this via LDAP or Active Directory.
   
2. RSS Enterprise Server - RSS enterprise server provides a tacit method of aggregating all content from the Social Content Creation layer plus which feeds a user is reading.
   
3. Tagging Service - this provides a way to aggregate all keywords/tagging and annotations a user assigns to the content they interact with along with their microblogging.

These three components make up the integration layer that resides below the social tools layer.

How achievable is this? Not as far away as you might think we are already seeing examples of companies moving in this direction. For example NewsGator are already showing how a RSS enterprise server can aggregate a users activity, i.e. social sites, while the logical evolution of a social bookmarking tool would be a tagging service, are Connectbeam hinting at a move in this direction? Finally to enable this the RSS enterprise server and tagging service need to be developed with this in mind so that the synergies between these tools can be realised.

OnePoint: Revolutionising team collaboration

OneNote is widely recognised as a gold standard personal knowledge management tool. It is an application with an intuitive user-friendly interface that readily enables a user to aggregate information together from multiple sources and arrange it in a familiar notebook format. One of the less well known features of OneNote is the capacity to create shared notebooks. We have combined OneNote 2007 with SharePoint 2007 to create an excellent team knowledge management tool, which we refer to as 'OnePoint'. This implementation provides an intuitive user-friendly interface onto a SharePoint document library with automatically managed online/offline capability. In addition to this the ability to add hyperlinks, text and pictures alongside these document files adds significant value to a team - users doesn't always have to open a document to find information. OnePoint has enabled project teams to move seamlessly into working in a collaborative fashion resulting in increased engagement and cohesion. An added bonus, probably related to the facile fashion in which information can be collated, is that we are seeing teams aggregate not just the data/information they are using but also including the context, rational and decisions they are making on it. OnePoint is not only revolutionising team collaboration, but also reducing email traffic, eliminating information silos and being demanded by users of all technical ability!

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Update: I have been asked to take down the slide deck associated with this post. Hopefully I will be able to re-post it in the near future.

Update: After a bit of "anonymising" I'm free to re-post the slides to slideshare, enjoy.

Social Profile

From the users perspective social networking tools provide a means of creating and maintaining a profile of themselves with the ability to managed relationships with other users. Simplistically it displays a description of who I am, what skills I have and who I know/work with. In general this is defined by a user entering and maintaining information about themselves, a static profile. In general the static profile is made up of what the user considers to be important facts about themselves, or the information they want to highlight. However in addition to the users static profile there is also the users tacit or social profile. Essentially this represents the sum of the content the user has created using Social Content Creation tools and the content they have read and stored using Social Information Management tools. These ideas are illustrated in the diagram below along with how these tools interrelate.

In this diagram we see that in the bottom layer I create content, in the middle layer I consume content and at the top is me, the user. What this diagram illustrates is that a user is describe by both their static profile and by the sum of all their activity in the two layers below. This summed activity can be considered a social profile. The social profile is a transactional descriptor of the current interests and activities of a user and provides a time bounded snapshot of the user. The challenge is how to aggregate this social profile.

Weapons of Choice – Choosing the Enterprise2.0 tool kit

Having spent sometime exploring all things Web2.0 and ‘eating our own dog food’ a group of early adopter/enthusiast decided we needed to introduce Enterprise2.0 into our company. Scott had already produced the now infamous ‘meet Charlie’ presentation and we had put together ‘meet Jessica’ a version contextualised for research. With these communication tools in hand we sat down to plan our road map. The first decision was what tools should we focus on? If you look at the cloud of Web2.0 tools available it is clear you need to make some key choices. Invariably at this stage you are resource limited and you will need to show some immediate return in value if you are going at get funding support for the next step. So where to focus your time? Which tools are you going to put into your Enterprise2.0 tool kit?

At the start we chose five types of tools that would define the basic building blocks of our Enterprise2.0 tool kit. These were wiki’s, blog’s & GTDware (Social Content Creation tools) and RSS reader & social bookmarking (Social Information Management tools). Before discussing the tools we did choose it is worth explaining why we decided to not focus on social networking and mash-ups tools.

Mash-ups

We chose not to consider mash-ups for the simple reason enterprise is already well served by this type of tool. Tools like Pipeline Pilot and Business Objects are the enterprise equivalent of Yahoo pipes. They can take data from multiple sources and allow it to be transformed and manipulate and then served up in many different forms. If you look further we can consider that most of the Enterprise Information Integration (EII) tools set are in fact expert user mash-up tools. In reality this is the one area where traditional business is actually ahead of the web2.0 curve.

Social Networking

We decided not to pursue this because we did not understand what a enterprise2.0 social network was. We understood what we liked about the social sites we had joined, what value we were or were not getting from them, etc. We knew we would need a social networking solution but also could not decide if we needed a Facebook (social and fun) or a LinkedIn (professional and conservative) or something hybrid. We also had been playing with a early release of Microsoft’s Knowledge Network for SharePoint and just didn’t know how static profile information could/should integrate with tacit profile information and how best to capture it. Finally most of the tools we had chosen had a social networking component within them. We knew that if social networking turned out to be critical early on then we could always use one of these to provide a starting point. In the mean time we could continue to explore and understand what were the requirements for a Enterprise2.0 social networking tool.

Weapons of Choice

Wiki – Provides the space for collaboration and the sharing information in a structured fashion.
This was an easy one, Pfizerpedia, based on Mediawiki was already up and running. It is a great technology that just does structured wiki very well. The familiar look and feel from peoples exposure to Wikipedia certainly helps and there are a great number of useful extensions available from the open source community. Its biggest draw back is the lack of a WYSWYG editor but early adopters are happy to deal with this and will wear it as a badge of honour. Also lacking is LDAP integration. At some stage we knew we would have to resolve these limitation but at that stage our key drivers we just growing the wiki and learning how to manage it.

Blog – Provides core communications and discussion space and an obvious antidote to email.
This again was a simple choice, we had gone with Drupal early on and this had been very popular. We had this in place felt comfortable with it and had successfully got a number of group wiki’s off the ground based on it.

GTDware – Provides lightweight project management functionality to individuals and project teams.
We saw this filling a big gap currently for our colleagues. Our first thought was we wanted Basecamp or a clone. We had a look at activeCollab but it was not ready at that stage and also we had SharePoint looming into view. After much soul searching and experimentation with SharePoint we accepted that SharePoint could ideally fill this gap. Our main concern here was that SharePoint did not meet our key Web2.0 requirement i.e. it is intuitive, it takes less than 10 minutes to learn. However once you realise that it is a platform for developers and not an end user tool it makes more sense and is easier to swallow.

Social bookmarking – A simple and obvious tool that provides immediate user value solving the nightmare of browser based bookmark/favourite folder hell. It is also appeared to be simple on ramp into the world of social collaboration as you immediately can see how other people’s bookmarking can help you.
The choice here was pretty obvious. We had all been experimenting with del.icio.us and while other services offered more functions the simplicity of del.icio.us appealed, we had no hesitation in getting a clone of del.icio.us, Scuttle, up and running. This has all the core features of a social bookmarking service and does them very well. However it does not support communities and again no LDAP integration, something we would soon come to recognise as critical for wider adoption.

RSS reader – We saw RSS as the glue that holds all the tools together. This lets you bring all your activity/awareness monitoring to a single pace and eliminates the need for email distribution list though enabling the consumer to subscribe to what they need.
This proved to be a tricky area not because there was a lack of potential readers but because we realised that RSS is more than just a reader and that we would need a true enterprise solution. In the end this was where we had our first real funding provided and we went with NewsGator Enterprise Server which came with a RSS readers for the browser, desktop and the Outlook inbox.

Social Information Management tools

From the users perspective tools such as RSS readers and social bookmarking are ideally used in tandem. These tools work best in partnership and the combination provides synergistic value to the user. They provide the means where by a user can monitor and store links to the content generated by Social Content Creation tools. The RSS reader provides the user with awareness, while the social bookmarking service plays the role of memory.

Social Content Creation tools

From the user perspective tools such as wiki’s, blog’s and GTDware all provide means of content creation within a shared/social environment. The whole point of these tools is that they enable a user or group of users to generate content and make it available for consumption. Others are then able to edit, comment or act on this information.

meet Jessica

Hopefully you have already met Charlie and his good friend Charlotte, now I'd like to introduce you to Jessica.

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This is something we put together for internal use at our company. The aim was to contextualise enterprise2.0 for the research community. Where as in meet Charlie Scott illustrated the use of web2.0 tools for small and medium business, here we see what enterprise2.0 looks like inside a large company where intellectual property has to remain inside the firewall. In this case you do not always have access to the tools of choice and have to get creative with those you have available. Further the challenge is how to blend these tools together to create an integrated environment. Over the last 12 months we have been consolidating and integrating our tools set. As we move forward I will be sharing our learning's and experiences, hopefully you will find these interesting.