Kicking off the 5Ws of e20: Who, What, When, Why, and How?

Enterprise 2.0 is maturing, but most practitioners (even veteran players whom we could classify as “innovators”) agree that the opportunity for Enterprise 2.0 is still in its infancy.  I saw affirmation of that today on member Laurie Buscek‘s post this morning, “Enterprise 2.0 Candy Store.”

The good news is there are many, many more Enterprises moving forward with pilots, plans, strategic planning than ever before.  The Council is up to 148  members with a couple dozen more in the queue for on-ramping.  All members in the Council are in some stage of planning and/or roll out.   Because this group represents some of the most progressive early adopters on the planet, I am spending a lot of time this year exposing lessons learned from this collective intelligence.  In this way, everyone– customers, vendors, industry watchers and partners can benefit from the insights of these early pioneers.

In that spirit, we are launching our first public webinar series this week.  Sponsored by industry leader Newsgator, eight of our members will be presenting their particular experiences with 2.0 adoption strategy and deployment for their company.   These presentations are meant to inform and, in some ways, inspire others who are struggling with the difficulties of bringing such radical concepts and practices to traditional organizations.

We left a lot of time on the agenda for Q&A, so please attend the webinars and get your questions answered first hand from these expert practitioners.  Signup information for the webinar is here.  We already have over 300 signed up for our kickoff this Thursday, but I wanted to make sure the e20 community is aware of the webinar series, as well.

After each webinar concludes, we will post the deck on slideshare, as well as a recording of the webinar for the benefit of the community.  I hope to see you all online Thursday.

p.s. We launched our new web site this week. Tell us what you think!

The 2.0 Adoption Council – Social Computing Webinar Series

Dates – January 28th, February 4th, February 11th, February 18th at 12:00 p.m. ET

  • January 28th: Webinar #1: Social Computing Adoption in the Enterprise “the Before” – learn how to best develop the business case, gain buy-in, select technology and establish the team
  • February 4th: Webinar #2: Social Computing Adoption in the Enterprise “the After” –gather best practices on implementation, policy formation, training, and community management
  • February 11th: Webinar #3: EMC Enterprise 2.0 Case Study
  • February 18th: Webinar #4: Raytheon Enterprise 2.0 Case Study
  • p.s. We launched our new web site this week. Tell us what you think!

    Enterprise Social Networks are hot for ’09. But, are you ready?

    Thanks to the AWESOME new e20global Twitter ID list, I found @sameerpatel‘s tweet on Deloitte’s new report on Social Networks for the Enterprise. Deloitte is predicting nearly half a billion dollars will be spent in 2009 on internal and external social networking solutions. Similarly, Pew Internet released a report this month that demonstrates casual use of social networks is growing in leaps and bounds for adults in the U.S. which means the concept of a “Facebook for the Enterprise” will be more familiar and possibly welcome.

    So, social networking for the enterprise is coming, but will you be ready?

    To find out, you might want to try NewsGator’s new nifty assessment tool. It’s really easy to use and it’s free. Regardless of how your organization does on the assessment, it’s a great conversation starter to begin the discussion surrounding the goals for collaboration and social networking at your company or organization.

    picture-2

    The SCORE tool takes you through a series of simple questions, and then makes recommendations on vendor-neutral tools and benefits you can expect from your social networking and collaboration efforts. And I’ve said this before, if you’re considering SharePoint, you simply must talk to NewsGator. Its Social Sites offering is a social goodness booster to MOSS. Check it out, srsly.

    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.