Microsoft hooks up at Web 2.0.

I’m a little late on Microsoft’s Atlassian and Newsgator news from last week’s announcement coming out of the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Conference. Scrappy, but solid, little Atlassian (whom you know I just love*) was anointed this year’s wiki-mate (pun intended) for SharePoint 2007. (As opposed to last year’s which was Socialtext). I have to admit, I’m still not clear on how the Confluence wiki is preferable to the Socialtext wiki for SharePoint, but admittedly, I’m not an expert in wiki technology or SharePoint for that matter. I am a wiki user, however, of Socialtext. In the spirit of 2.0 transparency, Redmonk’s James Governor makes an attempt at clearing up the differences with Ross Mayfield chiming in on the comments.

If you need to know more about this, please read Dan Farber, Richard McManus, or see Scoble’s interview with Mike and Jeff for technical details on the announcement.

What interested Jevon and I as we IM-chatted about this last week was how serious was Microsoft about the relationships? Obviously, the company issued a press release, but is this any more than Microsoft showing up to this year’s Web 2.0 party with two “it” girls on its arm– Atlassian and Newsgator? Both startups are sexy and independent rising stars on their own. Yet, both firms could benefit from Microsoft’s large footprint in the enterprise, as well as the success SharePoint 2007 seems to be on track for (topping $800M this summer).

So the announcement is very good for both startups, but does it reveal anything about Microsoft’s plans for a long-term Enterprise 2.0 product road map? Another fellow Enterprise Irregular who has had confidential briefings at Microsoft told me that, “discussions are going on at the highest levels to address this.” Additionally, he pointed out that Steve Ballmer doesn’t make conference appearances willy nilly. “The fact that Ballmer was there demonstrates Microsoft is committed to a long-term strategy here, even if the short term strategy looks more like marketing.”

The bottom line for me is: regardless of who is selling and evangelizing behind the walled gardens and firewalls of EnterpriseGlobal, this particular announcement introduces rich enterprise 2.0 capabilities to a community that has been slow to respond to web 2.0 for the enterprise. That fact alone elicits a big “YaY!” from me.

It’s actually the NewsGator announcement that may give SharePoint customers a taste of “addicting” social networking features for large companies. After the demo NewsGator gave me last week, I pinned down Brian Kellner, Director of Product Management, on the five key benefits for SharePoint users. From a technical perspective they are:

  1. Discovery. With NewsGator Social Sites it’s easier to find people and content. It’s also easier to digest larger profiles of content that is interesting.
  2. Content IN. It’s easier to bring content into SharePoint in the form of press releases/blogs– all fresh content.
  3. Content OUT. It’s easier to send content back out in a single click with push notifications to several platforms and devices including mobile.
  4. Increased usability for SharePoint. NewsGator has added “Ajax-y goodness” so users can mark items as read, use pop-ups, etc., without page refresh.
  5. Lightens the Load for IT. As page loads draw off the enterprise server, it lightens the load off SharePoint.

But after talking to Jeff Nolan this weekend, he convinced me social networking was the killer feature for this announcement. Jeff said it’s the “seeing what your colleagues are posting and commenting on” similar to Plaxo’s Pulse that is going to add a nice dimension to SharePoint. Brian left this comment on a SharePoint customer’s blog that sums it up:

Social Sites does 4 things for SharePoint:
– Bring in content from many feeds, filtered and focused for a site with the ability to mark things read and tag items
– Easy, one-click subscription and routing of SharePoint changes – I have SharePoint blog posts going to a desktop notifier and document library changes going to my blackberry for example
– Better discovery and usability – Social Sites provides a quick scan page including a tag cloud (you can put the tag cloud web part on any / all of your team sites), a view of the top moving feeds, and most active users
– Easy discovery of expertise and interests. You can click on an author or tagger’s name to get a mini profile or view a full profile page and see tags, top subscriptions, saved items, and more for that user.

SocialSites Profile Page

In the past few posts, I’ve been complaining about the enterprise application vendors, but jeepers– SAP has truly been stepping up to the plate (I personally can’t wait to see if they commercialize Harmony), IBM clearly gets this, Microsoft is now dating and cooking up bigger plans, all we have left is Oracle. Oracle is hosting its OpenWorld Conference in a few weeks, which ironically, is not so open to bloggers. Via a Tweet from Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang earlier today at Oracle’s Lunch 2.0 event, we heard “Oracle is giving demos of their enterprise 2.0 apps. some are very promising but others need a major overhaul.” I look forward to reading the reports over the next few weeks regarding Oracle’s plans. So there you have it. The enterprise apps vendors are on the move.

Finally, I couldn’t finish this post without mentioning an alternative to SharePoint if you want great collaboration and social networking performance in the enterprise without the SharePoint experience. (Jeff and I also got into the “does SharePoint (um) suck or rock?” question. Suffice it to say there is evidence on both sides of that debate.) And of course, let’s not forget both Newsgator and Atlassian’s Confluence are available without SharePoint. That being said…

Check out ThoughtFarmer.

thoughtfarmer screen shot

I met these guys out at Office 2.0, but was tipped off to them again from Jevon. Chris McGrath, co-creator, told me ThoughtFarmer started out as a SharePoint project, but they ended up scrapping it and building their own. Granted, it was then SharePoint 2003, which even Jeff Nolan says, “definitely s**ed.”

Again, the good news here is there are strong reasons why enterprises can look seriously now at these web 2.0 technologies for the enterprise. The mission is now persuading them why they would want to. It sounds trivial, but for those outside of the “get-it” inner circle, it’s not. More posts to come on this topic. Stay tuned.

*I took a bit of a risk by backing Atlassian early on when they were relatively unknown. Now, I’m glad I did. Like in sports, good teams win on fundamentals, and these guys knew how to please customers and grow a business.

Dorothy, we’re not in Manhattan anymore…

Oh, sorry, it appears we are, but Manhattan is now in Kansas: the center of the web 2.0 universe this week for me. Everything is upside down and inside out, like a tornado has scrambled the fixed variables of space, time, and location. The guy who is making the most sense of the dramatic shifts taking place among the youth culture, the nextgen web, and the user-generated digitization of the planet is Mike Wesch, who is heading up the Digital Ethnography program at Kansas State University. We were introduced to Dr. Wesch’s work earlier this year on YouTube with his “The Machine is Us/ing Us” video of web 2.0.

What I love about Wesch is he’s an Anthropologist (I really want to say, For God’s Sakes!). He’s not a code junkie, a VC, a journalist/analyst, A-list blogger, or a consultant. He’s not even remotely associated with the tech market. His bio says that while most of web 1.0 was rising and falling, he was in Papua New Guinea doing anthropological research on “social and cultural change in Melanesia, focusing on the introduction of print and print-based practices like mapping and census-taking.”

This week’s contribution features two videos. The first explores the changing shape of information creation, retrieval, and filtering and the second explores what’s on the minds of 200 students as they face their future.

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM">http://youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM</a>

Yes.  Everything is Messilaneous.  Incidentally, the above video is based somewhat loosely on David Weinberger’s book, “Everything is Miscellaneous.” I highly, highly recommend it.  I sometimes have trouble explaining this book to my colleagues, but it is an essential read for your 2.0 library.  Also, I would highly recommend following Dave on Twitter.  I don’t follow a lot of folks on Twitter I don’t know, but I do follow Weinberger.  In addition to being brilliant, he’s hilarious.

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o">http://youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o</a>

Thanks to Zoli and Thomas Otter to tipping me off to this.

Show me the money… not the smiley faces.

When I was interviewing Nathan Gilliatt a few months ago for a webinar we were doing for our clients on the basics of blogging, he introduced me to the importance of online communities. I felt so strongly that he was correct about online communities’ importance in the social media landscape that I recommended incorporating a session on online communities at Office 2.0 and had Dion Hinchcliffe host the panel. A few weeks ago, I serendipitously stumbled upon a Social Media Club of Austin meeting on Facebook where Dell managers were going to be presenting their blogging and online community experiences. Caroline Dietz, the online community manager for Dell’s IdeaStorm gave a good synopsis of how the community is harvested for new product ideas and improvements for Dell. I had the opportunity to spend a few moments afterwards talking to Dell’s chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, which I really enjoyed.

NYTimes IDC chartThe one question I managed to get in during the open forum that I felt was obligatory was related to how measurable an impact has Dell’s social media strategy been on Dell’s business–in material (read:financial) terms. There was a lot of discussion regarding how the social media strategy is changing the culture at Dell, how customer satisfaction is improving, etc. And, I’ve seen some reports on the before and after social media at Dell. But, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to ask a public company if this social media razzmatazz has really made, well, a serious difference in the company’s affairs. It’s so easy to be seduced by this technology and to see it working for startups and small pilots, but large public companies have weighty issues.

I’ve attended enough investor analyst conferences, and I’m wondering can Dell’s social media strategy help Michael Dell the next time he’s in front of Citigroup’s Richard Gardner and he has to explain why Dell has fallen from the #1 PC maker to the #2 PC maker worldwide? Better– can Dell’s social media strategy play a role in regaining Dell’s market leadership position?

I’m also wondering why in this recent interview (9/7) with Steve Lohr of the New York Times, why didn’t Michael Dell take the opportunity to highlight how the company is effectively using social media to help Dell “get back to its roots” by directly speaking to the customer base (and listening in return)? Dietz’s answer to my direct question about whether there have been any material results from the efforts was more or less, “no.” But, maybe it’s just too early to tell. Menchaca said Dell started the blog in July of 2006, so perhaps the results are not yet measurable in these terms.

I guess I’m just in the mood for some results. There is a wide and growing wider community of experts in the social media space. Perhaps there is solid data on this that I have not seen. Something we’ve been discussing in the Enterprise Irregulars group is how social media and enterprise 2.0 differ which would account for it having slipped my view, but that topic is a post for another day and probably involves taking a crack once again at the arbiter of all 2.0 legitimacy: wikipedia. Not sure I’m in the mood for fighting with the wikipedians.

The session with the Dell folks was interesting, despite my growing impatience for iron-clad case studies of 2.0 in business success. I learned a lot, actually.

Enterprise vendors start beating the drum

IBM web2.0 goes to work Last week was a banner 2.0 week for enterprise vendors. Gee. Do you think they were reading my blog? The week got off to a good start for me with a snappy little web 2.0 seminar hosted right here in Austin by IBM, “Web 2.0 Goes to Work.” Of course, SAP announced SAP By Design, but my fellow Irregulars did an awesome job conveying the import of that announcement. ibm seminar logoLike I said to Charlie Wood at lunch the other day, “I can’t even spell SAP…” So, I won’t attempt to comment on the SAP announcement. I’m scheduled to attend SAP’s TechEd Conference next week. We’ll see if I can be learnt.

On the IBM gig, I was surprised, frankly, to find that both Rod Smith and David Barnes were both in attendance at this seminar and both presented. Smith wasn’t there for the whole shindig, but he was there to lend executive support to the the day. Smith related some anecdotal accounts of IBM’s experiences discussing 2.0 with key accounts. In general he said it’s easier to sit with lines of business now (as opposed to IT) to brainstorm ideas. With these new approaches, customers are willing to experiment more, even fail if need be, rather than wait for long, protracted 6-month development efforts that incorporate all the bells and whistles required to support the enterprise environment such as security, privacy, and compliance. Smith said, “That takes time, and [LOBs are] willing to take certain risks.” What I loved about Smith’s early discussions with IBM customers was the interest level about what was possible in the enterprise. He expressed the sentiment that customers want information to be “mashable, remixable…” that they started looking at their data as modular assets– using it in ways they hadn’t planned for. One example yielded an unexpected result when a mashup uncovered shipping information that helped a global distribution company combat piracy on the high seas.

After Smith and Barnes were done keynoting and introducing, for some reason, they made us all wear white lab coats (question mark?) and we self-sectioned off into three breakout sessions focused on each of the three main areas: collaboration, mashups, and IT integration with web 2.0 (my interpretation). I attended the first and the last, as I was having a private demo of QEDWiki in a few days. The collaboration session drew a mix of IBMers, customers, and partners. Questions ranged from, “How do I get people in my company to collaborate with these new tools?” to “How can we get access to data buried deep inside those web2.0-soulless mainframes?” Okay, well that was me asking that question. I had the good fortune to be sitting next to a veteran IBMer who said it IS possible to layer on interfaces to get access to all data in the enterprise so folks can collaborate on just about anything. The question then became– how willing would IT be to let the whole company have open and free access to that data? And round and round we went…

On the IT software integration session, my BSG colleagues were particularly engaged. IBM has packaged its offerings under the bundle, “Info 2.0.” It’s basically an integrated suite of technologies that enable the creation of mashable content. At present, I believe it includes what they’re currently calling DAMIA which transforms content into syndication feeds, the Mashup Hub where you discover, catalog, tag feeds for remixing and then syndicate content and then finally, QEDWiki which I’ve blogged about before and will later. They also have something called Ms. Rita (lovely Rita, “meter maid” in a too short uniform skirt that will never fly with corporate branding IMHO; sheesh, boys!) which is a configurable “utilization management service” to meter, monitor, and monetize web 2.0 an SOA components, applications or environments. Miss Rita (or, whatever) will probably not be available in the first release of the Info 2.0 announcement, not sure why. One fairly cool IBM application in beta right now is Many Eyes. Check it out for a free trial. If you want to see some of these tools in action check out some of these demos, podcasts, and videos.

Blogger transparency dictates that I confess I’m not qualified to comment on the technical intricacies of IBM’s foray into web 2.0, but I give Big Blue huge points for promoting web 2.0 in the enterprise. Like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, IBM has something the startups do not: a massive installed base. Even if only IBM puts some massive marketing muscle behind evangelizing, I kind of don’t care if their solutions and approach are a yawner. My sense is, they are serious about this sector for interesting economic motives that may possibly not be obvious to us right now. For instance, did it ever occur to anyone that “the cloud” is not really a cloud at all? Is IBM viewing the 2.0 transformation as an opportunity to reap big benefits from big iron? Just food for thought. Here are two pieces to ponder– one from the WSJ, one from CIO insight.

A few days after the seminar, I had the chance to revisit with Dan Gisolfi to see what he’s been up to lately with QEDWiki. Dan has teamed up with John Musser of Programmable Web. I will have more on that later this week, maybe tomorrow, as well as a report from an interesting meeting I attended with the local Social Media Club here in Austin.

Enterprise 2.0 at the Crossroads

So, I moved half-way across the country and have just returned from the second highly successful Office 2.0 conference. I started to live-blog the sessions, but soon gave up. There were a number of folks live-blogging, and I was really interested in the sessions, so I just wanted to listen. Sorry.

Let’s Celebrate the Entrepreneur, Shall We?

I feel the urge to pontificate on where I think we are with Enterprise 2.0. But first, let me say a few words on behalf of the heroes of the Office 2.0 conference. The true heroes of that event are the entrepreneurs, the startup CEOs and founders/developers who are taking the career risks and living on sheer faith. I believe it was John Creason, Chief Technology Officer, Smartsheet.com who you can watch here (Office 2.0 Set-up) who summed up the conference’s RON (Return on Networking) best:

“If I look at the Office 2.0 conference and what it’s meant to our company… A year ago, on this stage, I felt like we were giving our birth announcement for our company. We were young; I think we had less than 100 customers– most of those were friends and family… What happens here is a exchange of ideas. I was at the cocktail party Wednesday night. I walked out of the cocktail party with enough good ideas from talking to smart people here that if I would have went home [then], I would have been happy… Last year, Rafe Needleman beat us up on some ideas about our model– our pricing, our distribution– and in the last year, we’ve gone from under one hundred customers to 15,000 teams using our product, close to a Series A with Madrona, and we have paying customers in 15 countries. So, the ideas, the network, what happens here, is important…”

While I was scouting about recruiting folks to speak for the conference, I attempted to get some 1.0 (and 0.0) tech icons to talk about the Future of Computing. I talked about Ismael Ghalimi’s vision for Office 2.0. Because Ismael has planned the Office 2.0 conference from soup to nuts in 6-8 weeks each year– which is remarkable in its own right– it was tough recruiting anyone at the last minute. For the record, it’s worth noting that I truly believe Ismael is one of this generation’s leading visionaries. He has been faithful to his No Installed Apps pledge and has been running completely “in the cloud” for the past 18 months. I know there are others who have made the all-online transformation, like Dennis Howlett, but Ismael runs a fairly intense open source BPM company, Intalio, with customers and employees all over the world. More importantly, he is pushing the community to extend the limits of the “officeless office” including mobile platforms and helping to establish standards such as the OpenSAM framework. At the end of the day, it’s leadership that makes the difference for movements and “paradigm shifts” to succeed in technology. As I solicited recruits for speakers, I found myself comparing Ismael to a young Steve Jobs. He has a lot of heart, energy, smarts, a passionate network of friends and supporters, and runs somewhat counter-culture to the mainstream. Interesting comparison.

I just love entrepreneurs– the successful ones, the struggling ones, even the obnoxious ones (should we name names?) I was reminded here in Austin of the power of entrepreneurs when I signed up for my new Chase account here in Texas. When I told the Chase branch manager I worked for BSG Alliance, he told me BSG Alliance was a key account for Chase and I was entitled to a host of privileged banking services. Now, at the risk of sounding like a (gulp) Republican (does it happen that fast in Texas?), it occurred to me how badly we need to encourage entrepreneurs in our tech economy. I remember Steve Papermaster (BSG Alliance CEO) when he was just a young guy, a struggling entrepreneur. Some twenty years later, he’s created hundreds, maybe thousands of jobs. That’s awesome.

Maybe for the next Office 2.0 conference I will give away tee shirts that say, “Have you hugged an entrepreneur today?”

Enterprise 2.0 Rubber will meet the Road this year

Dr. Phil Over the past six months, I’ve had more exposure to large customers. I’ve come to the simplistic conclusion that just because you “can” DIY doesn’t necessarily mean you should in the enterprise. About this time last year, I was writing about user angst and dissatisfaction with the IT department and how this pent up demand will propel maverick departments to choose alternate methods to collaborate “under the radar” of IT. I believe that will continue. But what will be the result? Isolated uses of wikis, blogs, RSS aggregators that will be disenfranchised from enterprise applications. The reality is– you need IT on board with enterprise 2.0 adoption to really maximize the depth and breadth of these tools for the enterprise. For large enterprises, that is.

As I learn more about large organizations, I feel like each CIO I meet transmogrifies into Dr. Phil and says, “Get real, dude. We run a serious company here. We’re not going to put our assets at risk by exposing them to anything beyond our complete control.” It’s not that they’re control freaks; they’re liable for where, when, how, and why the information in the enterprise is handled. Period. That’s their job. You would think IT’s only stakeholders are users (err, people who work), but they’re also accountable to lawyers, the government, the board of directors, investors, stockholders, who did I miss? You see my point. So, I’m getting real. Not liking it, but I’m getting real. And, is it their fault that enterprise applications are so godawful impenetrable? So, I’m lightening up on IT. Hoping to see more idealistic enterprise 2.0 principles coming from Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle (MISO). SAP seems to be leading the pack here. Just about every blogger I know (okay, an exaggeration) lists SAP as a client, so they’re getting lots of 2.0 advice.

I’ve begun to see some good posts lately in the e2.0 “getting real” vein, such as this one, “Enterprise 2.0 Show me the ROI.” Perhaps it’s my bias, but I was happy to see Bill Ives’ post this week on Serena Software. In the grab-bag of Enterprise 2.0 tricks for the enterprise that have the most promise, my money is on mash-ups. We were having a conversation about this at the Office 2.0 cocktail party. (By the way, please VOTE for my panel hosted by David Berlind at SXSW on mash-ups). Mash-ups are technical enough to be interesting to IT folks, and simple enough in the way they solve business problems so that business users will clamor for them.

Then, what is at the intersection of Office 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0? No doubt we will see liberal infiltration of social networking in the enterprise via blogs, Facebook and Facebook-esque platforms (for instance, we use a private instance of Ning at BSG, which we love) to communicate and connect, as well as online communities and ad-hoc wikis for collaborating. Knowledge workers (ordinary web-savvy folk) will also graft on their own instances of Google apps for the enterprise, as well as experiment with dozens of online apps such as all of those represented at the Office 2.0 conference. I’m certain individuals and small groups will see productivity gains and experience the synergies 2.0 fusion brings to newcomers. But, until IT embraces and synchronizes its own Enterprise 2.0 strategy for the global-intergalactic-infrastructure-labyrinth, chances are we won’t see the technicolor dream unfold… it will take a village (IT, enterprise vendors, knowledge workers, 2.0 startups, evangelists) to raise this child.

Ismael asked me to plan the next Enterprise 2.0 track for next year again. I tentatively said yes. If I do accept the challenge, I will continue to look for case studies of hard core evidence of Enterprise 2.0 working in large organizations. Whether it came in through the back door– bottom up (like Scott Gavin and Simon Revell who formed a rebel working 2.0 collaborative committee that is now the delight of Pfizer) or top down (like Adam Carson at Morgan Stanley after getting the nod from Chairman and CEO John Mack to pursue the strategy), the stories are excellent and everyone takes away something they can relate to.

I will continue to blog about developments in Enterprise 2.0; I’m still a stalwart believer. I’ve never known greater freedom and creativity as a knowledge worker 2.0 (see Stephen Collins’ fab presentation), but I know there is a tough mission ahead of us. The reality should be sinking in for all of us right about now.

 

 

Game Day: Office 2.0 in San Francisco

Here we are!

Ismael just informed me over 600 people have signed up for this year’s conference. I’m sitting here in the second row, close to the stage. My colleage, Tom Steinthal, and I got here early in the main show room to ensure we’d have a power source. There is a terrific wireless network this year, and the bandwidth on two floors is promising to deliver all the wifi all bloggers, speakers, and demo presenters need

If you were unable to get here this year, my friends at Veodia (remember Veodia from the McAfee/Davenport debate?) are live-streaming all the sessions. Information on that can be found here.

We’re getting some instruction on how to use our iPhones to navigate the conference. Very cool. About to start the first panel…

Update: The opening panel featured:

Om Malik (Moderator), Founder, GigaOmniMedia
Steven Aldrich, VP Strategy & Innovation, Small Business, Intuit
Denis Browne, Senior Vice President of Imagineering, Business User Organization, SAP Labs
Danny Kolke, Chief Executive Officer, Etelos
Richard McAniff, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Office, Microsoft
Jonathan Rochelle, Product Manager, Google Spreadsheets, Google

Opening panel Office 2.0

I was particularly impressed with Danny Kolke of Etelos.

Update:  Adam Carson kicked off the Enterprise 2.0 Track.  He’s doing a thorough job explaining the difference between web 2.0 and the realistic front line issues facing user adoption in the enterprise.   With his specific focus on the investment banking sector in the Financial Services market, he’s doing an excellent job kicking off the key issues he confronted during his 9-month journey as a one-man internal evangelist.