(SAN JOSE, CA) “Digital work became more social… but work has always been social,” says Thomas Vander Wal, InfoCloud Solutions, addressing the KM World 2009 conference. “Businesses by nature are social – you need to have people in your org talking to each other.”

 

Drivers of social media and enterprise 2.0 include:

 

• Office productivity tools are not efficient for collaboration.
• Social tools augment face-to-face.
• Volume of information has grown
• Gaps in enterprise tools, CMS, and other traditional work tools
• Individuals are making a difference
• Ease of sharing & connecting with others
• Easier knowledge capture

 

“All of this is similar to e-mail in the 1990s. It was a strange new way of thinking… and now we’re using social tools and saying the same things that we did about email.”

 

“Social software creates a lot of information – many layers of information. We need tools to understand this information and structure for understanding.”

 

1–9–90 rule (Charlene Li) helps understand the ‘who’ in social media: 1% creates the information; 9% curates it; 90% merely are consumers of the information.

 

SOCIAL MEDIA ON THE INTRANET

 

“We’re looking at our intranet and it’s an utter mess. Something is really broken here,” says Thomas, emulating a typical intranet client. “Social media helps fill in some of the gaps in the enterprise tools (example: BBC intranet: 115% wiki use in 7 years)”

 

When comparing Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 Vander Wal has a clever analogy: Web 2.0 is like tunneling through a mountain (it’s tough to sort out the context in the mass of information, and problems are merely small cracks in a large mass); Enterprise 2.0 is like tunneling under water (it’s easier to get started, but problems quickly become massive problems). “Web 2.0 is about numbers of users, Enterprise 2.0 is about % of users (% of employees using social media).”

 

We need to encourage social comfort for employees:

 

• Comfort with others (people to interact & share with)
• Comfort with tools
• Comfort with subject matter

 

“It’s been said that walled gardens are bad for the enterprise, but they give comfort to employees,” says Vander Wal, citing Andrew McAfee’s opening keynote at KM World 2009. “What we really want are comfortable walled gardens with permeable walls.”

 

--

 

Follow Thomas on Twitter: www.Twitter.com/VanderWal

Follow Toby on Twitter: www.Twitter.com/TobyWard

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(SAN JOSE, CA) “Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals,” says the man who coined the phrase, Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist, Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management; Author, Enterprise 2.0.

 

“A key word is emergent… we’ve always been good at imposing things on people,” adds McAfee, who was addressing the KM World 2009 conference in San Jose. “What we’re now doing is not dictating what people need to do… but instead throwing out a technology blank slate, and letting people fill it in.”

 

Key ingredients for Enterprise 2.0 success:

 

• Altruism: People want to help (stop obsessing about risks)
• Process: Beware of the ‘one best way’ (use tools that let structure appear)
• Innovation: Expertise is emergent (build communities that people want to join)
• Intelligence: Crowds can be very wise (experiment with collective intelligence)
• Benefits: Real, measurable benefits (increased innovation, employee satisfaction)
• Impact: Sitting this one out is a bad idea (look at technology with fresh eyes

 

“I think it’s (Enterprise 2.0)  as big a leap forward in the 90s as enterprise-level technology (e.g. ERP),” stresses McAfee. “We’re not going back to business as usual.”

 

However, McAfee emphasized that failure is common and that it is, in fact, easy to ‘snatch’ defeat from the ‘jaws of victory’ by not avoiding some common barriers:

 

• Declare war on the enterprise (“Its bad marketing to management.”)
• Allow walled gardens to flourish (silos kill)
• Accentuating the negative (spend less time on the risks)
• Try to replace email
• Fall in love with features (we don’t want more, keep it simple)
• Overuse the word “social”

 

McAfee concluded his keynote address to KM World 2009 with the following quote from futurist Norbert Weiner in 1954: “The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

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(SAN JOSE, CA) While an innovative intranet may be cool, and look great, a truly innovative intranet delivers true value and advances an organization's standing in its industry.

The Intranet Innovations 2009 report celebrates the winners of the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards, produced by Step Two Designs, sharing remarkable ideas from across the globe.

Intranet Innovation Award winner, SabreTown (Sabre's social networking for employees)

Winning entries include intranets from all over the World including:

• CRS Australia (Australia)

• IDEO (USA), IBM (USA)

• SunGard (USA/NZ)

• NYK Group (UK)

• Sabre (USA)

• COWI (Denmark)

• ChTPZ (Russia)

• Prophet (USA)

• AEP (USA).

The Intranet Innovations Awards celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the enhancement and delivery of intranets.Now in their third year, the awards have uncovered many innovative ideas from across the globe. Use these ideas to gain senior management support and to deliver an ever-better intranet.

For example, AEP, a US-based electric utility have created an online ideas system that has identified $8 million in savings, $2 million in the first month alone.

With winners across four categories (core functionality, communication and collaboration, frontline delivery and business solutions), there are valuable ideas for every intranet team.

The 198-page Intranet Innovations 2009 report shares the full results of the awards, including screenshots and details of the winning entries.

For more information:

• Winners at a glance

• Table of contents

• Reviews & feedback

• Global supporters

• Licence conditions

• Previous year’s winners

• Enter the 2010 awards

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This is the story of a very profitable, successful, large enterprise that spent over $2 million on their intranet. When the intranet launched, it crashed in seconds. It has never gone live again (more than a year later).

Leaving an intranet design to the whim of a designer, a creative agency or any individual not working from a sound blueprint represents poor judgment, management, and is a recipe for disaster.

Sound intranet design follows a process that incorporates:

1- Business requirements (as expressed by management)
2- User requirements (as expressed by employees)
3- Strategic & functional planning
4- Governance
5- Best practices & usability

The process for arriving at the stage where a designer applies color and images to a design concept is one that should be taken seriously, and if done properly, may take a number of weeks. This process is the underlying foundation of a successful intranet design, one that is examined and outlined in the webinar Intranet Design – A Business Approach to a Winning Design.

Intranet Design – A Business Approach to a Winning Design

View more presentations from Toby Ward.

Note: not all 25 intranets profiled during this webinar, but not are available for distribution. 

The story of the failed intranet, and the squandering of more than $2 million and years of worker hours, is ultimately a story about a failure in planning. Without sound requirements that drive a thorough intranet blueprint, culminating in the intranet design, your intranet risks failure.

Read More on Intranet Design:
Leading an intranet redesign
Intranet redesign: rolling content inventory
Intranet redesign: building a business case
Building an intranet blueprint

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(LAS VEGAS) Lest you be tingling with excitement about the potential enhancements to your less than spectacular content management system, there are two realities for SharePoint 2010: what is promised, and what is hoped for.

 

Those working with MOSS 2007 can be forgiven for the vacuous deflating sound from their proverbial balloons – those familiar with 2007 promises that don’t materialize as promised (e.g. People Search); others attending the annual SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas can be forgiven for their rapid inhalation of hot air as there is great reason to be optimistic, even excited.

 

Nonetheless, I’ve been both impressed and underwhelmed with what I’ve seen, but more time is needed for Microsoft to complete the beta testing and final refinements before 2010 ships to customers in the spring of 2010. When I asked SharePoint chief Tom Rizzo to explain how he thought the content management functionality compared with other market leaders, Rizzo – speaking as a proud, if not slightly defensive father – instead turned the question back on me: “I challenge all of the other vendors to offer as comprehensive a platform as SharePoint – nothing comes close.” Touché!

 

Here are five of the biggest impact, promised improvements to enterprise content management (ECM) that I’ve seen with my own two eyes, and even used (albeit with mixed success as the ‘lab’ demos are not all working as promised, and a demo is in fact just a demo):

 

1-     Publishing platform – the entire publishing platform is, in essence, a wiki. You can choose to lock down wiki or public authoring rights, extend them to some, or extend them to all. However, it is possible to create sites as wikis. The wikis come with complete version control, history and permissions, and the rich editor or “ribbon” functionality (as seen in Word 200).

2-    Web content management (WCM) – communications professionals rejoice: publishing news and other static content just got a lot easier. The new publishing includes the new “ribbon” user tool that opens when you click on a page or a document, or you simply hit the edit button at the top of a page. Instead of opening a content ‘template’ the new publishing features in-context editing: click on whatever piece of content you want to “edit”, and edit right there on the page (just as you would a wiki). New image tools allow for better control and manipulation of photos, and you no longer have to make the extra step of uploading a photo to a document library before you input it into the page – you can now pull images right from your hard drive, or a website URL.

3-    Records management (RM) – Microsoft has invested a lot of money in improving RM in 2010. Among the many features that have impressed, users or administrators (or someone else that has permission to do so) are able to lock down a document in a document library, as a record. And with a right click, can send that document to a Record Center with confirmation. Additional Life Cycle controls have been added.

4-    Digital asset management (DAM) – yes, SP 2010 actually includes DAM – you no longer have to use a third-party option to professionally manage images, video and other multimedia.

5-   Taxonomy & meta data – perhaps the single, most impressive upgrade or enhancement to SharePoint is the addition of true taxonomy and meta data  controls. All content now comes with a Managed Meta Data Service Term set that can be inherited from the global taxonomy (site collection), can be built upon or controlled by an administrator, or open to all users (or a combination). In other words, when content is created, be it a page, document, wiki, meta data can be added on the spot, as determined by the publisher or limited to a pre-determined set or tree of terms that is locked down. End readers and users can ‘tag’ the content as well with term tags, ratings (1-5 starts) and “I like it.” What is most encouraging about the use of meta data is that it can be “forced” or a “mandatory field” for all content (we all know that most organizations have options to input meta tags on content, but most content authors ignore it if given the choice).

 

Other taxonomy features:

·        Term ‘nesting” or “threading”(think of the tree with parent & children categories)

·         “Fill-in” choices as an option in locked-down taxonomies

·        Different taxonomies at different levels: site collections, sites, libraries, etc.

·         Managed meta data service can be consumed by multiple farms

·        Multilingual taxonomy support (taxonomies using multiple languages)

·         Taxonomy workflow (invite specific people to contribute or review the taxonomy)

·         View and filter documents by term:

o              Geography

o              Product Category

o              Vertical Industry

o              Content Type

o             Deal Size

o            Folders

o              Etc.

 

While not all of these promised improvements were working in the hands-on labs in my time spent using MOSS 2010, this is in-fact only the beta version (in fact, one of the MS officials helping me through the hands-on labs told me that some of the tutorials are in fact still alpha versions. In fact, the first time I used the new wiki I was convinced it was the 2007 version as I could see not a single improvement to it). There is still some 6 or 7 months still to pass before Microsoft has to work out all the bugs, kinks, and refinements (planned release to existing MOSS 2007 customers is at the end of April, though I would not expect something for installation much before the summer; new customers will have to wait even longer).

 

Finally, it’s worth noting that MOSS is a massively complex, and powerful system. It’s to be expected that some of the promised functionality may not work for some time, or without serious additional development and customization. In fact, any organization considering an upgrade may do well to wait until after the first service pack, or simply trial the new SharePoint Online which will have close to feature parity with the installed, on premises version.

 

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(LAS VEGAS, NV) If there was one, overarching message delivered by CEO Steve Ballmer in his keynote unveiling Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (at the annual SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas): SharePoint is no longer just an intranet solution, it’s been architected for all forms of web scenarios.

 

“SharePoint is one of my favorite Microsoft products…. It’s true,” says Ballmer. “SharePoint, in my estimation, is kind of magical.  I don’t think there’s anything like it in the market. It has become a platform for a whole big set of scenarios that were served by niche (products).”

 

New scenarios include all of the typical intranet scenarios, but all the Internet scenarios they can attack. To drive the point home, Ballmer cited many companies already using MOSS 2007 for their public website including:

 

·         Kraft Foods (consolidated 200 websites to a single platform saving $2 million per year)

·         Volvo (36 languages, 70 countries)

·         Pfizer

·         Library of Congress

·         Hawaiian Airlines

·         Kroger

·         Conservation International

 

However, it remains to be seen whether the improvements to MOSS’s web content management will be sufficient to quell the traditional content publishing and management concerns of marketing and communications managers who operate external websites. The new UI for web content management is a marked improvement – in-context editing deploying the ‘ribbon’ UI introduced in Office 2007.

 

Ballmer announced that MOSS 2010 will public beta test this November (no specific date was delivered). The MS chief also spent a lot of time talking about “the cloud” and was even so bold as to state that “SharePoint is in the center of the cloud.”

 

“It’s all in the cloud–we certainly agree with that,” said Ballmer, who stressed that SharePoint Online has more than 1 million online users (and 7,000 partners). “SharePoint is more capable, more extensible, more Internet & cloud focused. It’s an amazing product.”

 

NEW FEATURES / TOOLS:

 

·         “Ribbon” interface (in-context editing)

·         "Visual web parts” (“no more hard-coding of web parts”)

·         Supports development / design on Vista & Windows 7

·         Access services (publish Access dbases through SP)

·         New sandboxed solutions

·         Integrated rich media & Silverlight

·         Improved Visual Studio & SQL

·         Upgrades from 2007 will include a complete migration of an existing home page design / UI to 2010

·         Improved social computing (blogs, wikis, tagging, ratings, etc)

·         Improved search algorithms and FAST Search integration

·         New site scenarios for:

o        Pricing analysis

o        Hiring processes

o        Citizen management (citizen portals)

o       Project tracking

o       Sales reporting

o       Conference planning

o        Delivery scheduling

o        Compliance review sites

 

SOCIAL COMPUTING

 

“We needed to facilitate this next generation of social computing,” stated Ballmer, though not convincingly, when asked about the improvements on social media – a notorious weakness of the MOSS 2007 platform. “We’ve done this with My Sites, mashing-up, etc. I think we’ve moved towards 3.0.”

 

Improvements to the highly criticized social computing of MOSS include:

• Better blogs, wikis, calendars
• Co-authoring
• Content tagging
• Tag clouds
• Ratings
• Bookmarks
• MySites “Smart Profiles” and feeds
• Browse colleagues and experts
• “Share This Site.”

 

“There isn’t an enterprise on the planet that doesn’t want to embrace social computing, but they worry about how to do it,” explained Ballmer. “If we can show a path to CEOs and CIOs that we can let people interact with each other the way they want to (and still protect privacy and security) then they will embrace social computing.”

 

CONTENT MANAGEMENT

 

Improvements to ECM include:

 

·         Document management: The ceiling limit on a document library moves to 10 million, and within a site collection, to hundreds of millions of documents; no longer will you have to right click to bring up the actions / options of a document, the ribbon hosts all of the options / actions the user needs

·         Taxonomy management: you will be able to have consistent content types taxonomy across server farms (applied at the document level)

·         Pictures: photos no longer have to be in an SP library, but can be uploaded from your hard drive

·         The addition of true Digital Asset Management

 

GOVERNANCE

 

Perhaps the biggest criticism or flaw of SharePoint has been the issue of governance, which Microsoft has only addressed half-heartedly, as reflected in Tom Rizzo’s comments: “There’s a lot we’re doing on governance, but its only 20% software, and 80% process,” says Rizzo, Senior Director, SharePoint. “We’ve invested a lot in best practices, centers of excellence. We’ll continue to invest, but I think we’re still need near the beginning, than the end.” In other words, governance is more the client’s responsibility than Microsoft’s.

 

SHAREPOINT CONFERENCE STATISTICS:

 

·         7.5 miles of network cable

·         7,400 participants (up from 3,800) – 94% growth

·         297 world class speakers

·        70 countries

·        165 sponsors

·         300+ hours

·         240 sessions

·         45+ hours of hands-on labas

·         18 customer sessions (Delloite)

·         2 SharePoint marriages

·         Biggest Beach Party ever by Mandalay with Huey Lewis & The News

 

Follow my SharePoint conference updates on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TobyWard #spc09

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