After failing in their US$47.5-billion bid for Yahoo, the giant Microsoft is looking more closely at Facebook. While the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft bankers have begun to look into a Facebook purchase, neither side has commented on the story (a sure sign that something is afoot).

Facebook in itself is a giant… one that could make Yahoo blush one day. With more than 70 million active users its value was pegged at US$15-billion last October when Microsoft bought a minority stake for a mere US$240-million.

What makes Facebook an even greater value than its investment price a mere 8 months ago is its growing popularity – and growing platform. There are only 7 websites on the planet that receive more monthly traffic than Facebook – and Facebook only opened to the public 18 months ago after starting as a college only niche. Of the sites that get more traffic ...

Microsoft’s flagship portal sits in fifth (according to the industry benchmark, Alexa.com). Its viral power is far stronger than MySpace (notwithstanding the music scene), and its growing at a faster clip. I don’t know of anyone that uses MySpace, and yet virtually everyone I know under the age of 45 has a Facebook account. According to ZincResearch.com, 90% of Canadians between the ages of 18 and 34 are Facebook members (9 million).

Of perhaps greater interest is the ever-expanding “Facebook Platform” and its potential as a platform service inside the corporation (for example, intranet platform). Facebook Platform is the place where all of those creative nerds build and add those cute little applications that are optional add ons to your Facebook profile. Popular applications include “Fun Wall” (2.5 million active users), “Scrabulous” and that dam vampire biting ‘game’.

Read my complete article Microsoft wants Facebook.

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Your portal solution is dying… or evolving into a Web 2.0 platform.

As I predicted at the start of the year (Enterprise intranet predictions for 2008), Oracle bought BEA, and has already moved to kill one of the BEA portal products: WebLogic Portal. Now BEA has three portal solutions, and will no doubt move to one or two….

According to research firm IDC, the Enterprise Portal Software market will expand by 50% in the next 3-4 years to a killer $1.4 billion in total sales.

"Web 2.0 collaboration features are finding a welcome home within the portal as business users want to take advantage of these new egalitarian methods that offer easy ways for end users to customize content, while IT can take comfort in the portal's ability to deliver them within a secure deployment environment," states an IDC report.

Read my complete article Intranet portal solutions die, evolve & move to Intranet 2.0.

Microsoft’s aggressive pursuit to own your enterprise intranet business just dramatically jumped. Redmond has offered pay $1.2 billion for Norway-based search vendor Fast Search & Transfer.

During a conference call for press and analysts, MS needs Fast’s search experts for  large, enterprise search capabilities for “queries involving billions, not just millions, of sources” said Jeff Raikes, MS President of Business Systems, as quoted by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley in Microsoft looking to Fast for scale, Web search help. Mary Jo states in her analysis that Fast has a more sophisticated development platform, but wonders why MS paid so much for a search platform… 

“Fast also has a “more sophisticated” and granular development platform from which Microsoft will benefit, in terms of honing domain-specific Intranet and Internet searches, Raikes told press and analysts.

Additionally, Microsoft will be looking to Fast for help with Web search. Raikes declined to get specific about exactly how Fast’s technology will dovetail/complement Microsoft’s Live Search, claiming that the proposed merger still needs to pass regulatory scrutiny.

(Help can’t come a moment too soon on the Web search front, as Microsoft continues to lose share to Google, at least according to new data released by Hitwise on January 8.  Microsoft dropped from 9.8 percent of Web searches to just over 7 percent in December 2007, Hitwise is reporting.)

Although Fast has a solid customer and partner list, some market watchers are questioning why Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for a company that is in financial distress. (Fast may end up restating its 2006 and 2007 financial results, and three of its board members resigned at the end of last year).”

What’s curious about this decision is that Google owns search on the external Web, and they and Autonomy and Endeca are dominating the enterprise intranet search arena. In short, MS has paid 3-4 times what they invested into Sharepoint 2007.

Microsoft owns the employee desktop and Sharepoint has made big strides to bolster this. But they are losing the search battle and this latest move looks quite desperate. FAST give MS some serious, heavy-weight search technology that is sorely lacking by Sharepoint, a point of weakness and criticism highlighted by Forrester’s Leslie Owens and Ken Poore in Microsoft Buys Into High-end Enterprise Search With FAST:

“With this acquisition, Microsoft leapfrogs IBM and Oracle, who have both been rolling their own nascent search initiatives -or doing small acquisitions. Microsoft is now in a strong position to offer a full menu of search products, from basic implementations that compete directly with Google’s appliances to high-end, massively scalable media and commerce systems. They also significantly extend into features like auto-categorization, entity extraction, and clustering. 

For Microsoft, FAST makes a lot of sense. Microsoft’s current search strategy was centered on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and its spin-off Microsoft Search Server Express. SharePoint’s search has consistently been criticized by high-end search providers as too lightweight – its SQL Server-dependent engine never proved to scale massively, and its search across unstructured content was superficial when compared to the deep semantic algorithms of market-leading search vendors. FAST’s strong search technology delivers Microsoft needed credibility outside the firewall and among major media outlets. And the acquisition saves Microsoft the cost and time of completely re-architecting its own search house. In addition to scalability, Microsoft buys itself into the big leagues with an enterprise-savvy connectivity solution in FAST’s Unity search federator.”

This is a great deal for FAST, but at $1.2 billion, can MS really turn this investment into positive ROI with competition such as Google and Autonomy staring them down? I’m not so sure…

Continue the discussion by posting a comment below or join us at Intranet Global Forum.

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Accenture executive last month even went so far as to categorically state that the entire realm of Web 2.0 (let alone Facebook) offers “no financial reward”.  

“There is no evidence that online networking sites are producing anything of real economic value,” said Theresa Wise, global director at Accenture’s digital media practice at a Broadband World Forum session in Paris entitled “The Emergence of Convergent Media” (as quoted by Ken Wieldand in BBWF: Accenture sees little financial value in Web 2.0 for Telecommnications Online).

While Intranet 2.0 is gaining traction, most organizations fear Facebook – even loathe Facebook. About half of the medium to large-sized organizations (it’s even higher in Government and Financial Services) forbid and block employees from using it. Notwithstanding the obvious executive concerns about employee productivity (“wasting good company time playing around on the Internet!”) a recent Forrester Research study found that 78 percent of IT organizations are concerned with the employee-driven, unsanctioned use of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprises.   

IT’s biggest concern with Facebook, however, is its threat to corporate security. Some Facebook applications could in fact grab and expose confidential corporate information (see Speaking of Facebook as an underground intranet…).

WorkBook, a new product from WorkLight (a Web 2.0 start-up based jointly in Boston and Israel), combines “all the capabilities of Facebook with all the controls of a corporate environment, including integration with existing enterprise security services…” 

In other words, WorkBook allows employees to use Facebook while the company can protect its confidential data. For example, employees can monitor other employee activities such as postings and status update, and “publish and receive company-related news and create bookmarks to enterprise application data and securely share these bookmarks with authorized colleagues.”

Specifically, Workbook provides employers with:

• Secure provisioning that ensures the application can be used only by authorized employees
• Information security - corporate-related information is visible only to employees
• Compliance with existing security policies - enterprise security integration authenticates WorkBook users via corporate authentication facilities and supports Single Sign-On (SSO)
• Integration with the company's directory or applications to provide information to Facebook profiles 

"Enterprise employees are using Facebook in today's workplace whether employers like it or not," said Shahar Kaminitz, CEO and founder of WorkLight.  "This creates a tantalizing array of new networking possibilities for companies looking for newer and more efficient avenues of employee communication, but also brings with it a host of new security issues, as corporate data is exposed to new vulnerabilities.

“With WorkBook, enterprises can rest assured that when workers use Facebook, the corporate data remains safe and secure, and the application is being used as a communication tool - not as an impediment to productivity."   

Sounds great doesn’t it? Well…

WorkBook is currently in limited release, and is licensed to enterprises by yearly subscription. Pricing starts at $10 per user per month, with volume discount pricing available. For those counting at home, that’s an annual cost of $6 million for an organization or 50,000 (without factoring in a volume discount). That’s $6 million per year (excluding volume discount) to secure Facebook.

What’s the ROI on that? My point is that while Facebook shouldn’t be discounted as the potential benefits are many, but the business case is still unclear and certainly more fuzzy than more widely accepted enterprise 2.0 tools such as instant messaging.

Post you comments and/or business case arguments for and against corporate Facebook below.

Database giant Oracle is hoping to buy smaller software portal vendor BEA Systems for $6.7 billion. The bid won’t work and BEA has already rejected Oracle, but that won’t stop the aggressive and tenacious Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and company.

Oracle has low-balled BEA with an offer of $17 a share. Today BEA is trading at well over $18 a share. Some analysts have wrongly predicted that SAP would make a bid, but SAP has publicly state it will not. Other potential suitors could include IBM and HP. HP has fanned the flames by stating, “No comment.”

This won’t deter Oracle. They’ve directed many nasty and hostile takeovers before (most recently PeopleSoft). Interestingly though, if Oracle should succeed, it will build its portal offerings stable to four portal products:

• Oracle Portal
• Oracle WebCenter
• BEA AquaLogic
• BEA WebLogic

It goes without saying that should Oracle succeed it will not maintain four Oracle products. While Oracle appeared to be putting its energy into the new Oracle WebCenter product, as of the summer, WebCenter had no intranet portal implementations that they could reference. Nor had Oracle even deployed WebCenter to manage or showcase any of their own sites.

Yesterday a BEA executive told me that if Oracle succeeds in purchasing BEA it is unlikely that Oracle would fold either AquaLogic or WebLogic portal solutions. At the same time, one of BEA’s engineers espoused the great similarities between its two portal products and said that they’re basically the same platform.

In short, Oracle is interested in BEA for more than portal solutions, but its intention to maintain its own portal products is in question at a time when BEA’s commitment to maintaining two portal products may also be wavering. Further consolidation in the portal market will continue and buyers should be cautious. 

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Forget the look-and-feel. Put it out of your mind. The look-and-feel or design of your intranet or portal is window dressing – a distraction from what employees need.

I mention this as we (Prescient Digital Media) talk with so many clients and prospective clients that want to see ‘screenshots’ as fast as possible. Screenshots are important and serve a purpose, and I completely understand having run an enterprise intranet before; everyone wants to see what others are doing.

Fidelity Investments intranet home page

However, don’t ask me to produce a design concept in response to your RFP when I, and all other vendors, know virtually nothing about your intranet other than the very select information provided in the RFP itself. If I whip up a design concept it will be entirely flawed, pointless, and completely counterproductive because it’s based entirely on guesswork because I don’t know:

• The cultural preferences and needs of employee users to different design treatments
• The mandatory or necessary requirements of business owners and senior managers
• The subtle nuances of a preferred an optimized information architecture
• The optimal page layout (whether 2, 3, 4 or more columns) with the right ration of text to white space (which varies for every organization depending on their culture and level of web savviness of users)
• The necessity nor capacity for individual personalization and customization
• Political consideration for the use of the home page
• Strategic initiatives of the organization that must be hooked into the intranet
• The type, quality and quantity of content on the intranet
• Etc., etc.

If I know little or none of the above, to what end or what purpose is served by developing a design concept based on guess work? To qualify our design capabilities? If you’re choosing an intranet consultant based on their ‘design’ abilities then you have no business running an intranet (see How to hire an intranet consultant).

That’s not to say that design (look-and-feel) doesn’t play a roll and isn’t important to users. Design is important, but it doesn’t crack the top 6 or 7 priorities. On average, based on my experience working with dozens of intranet clients, design is equivalent to between 8 – 12% of the total intranet’s value. What is really important is content (20-30%), search (15-20%), information architecture (20-30%), and governance and planning (20-30%).

Unlike YouTube or an entertainment website, users don’t really care about design nor video, flash, and bells and whistles that distract and entertain. Employee intranet users want one thing: to complete a task or to find the content or tool they need to do their job, and to do it or find it as fast as possible. In short, employees want speed. On our roads, speed kills; on our intranets, speed wins.

The following represents our updated model (based on many years of experience), the Nexus of Intranet Success, which visually depicts the critical components of a successful intranet.

Note the importance of people, particularly executives (executive support) and end users (motivated employees). Design helps facilitate the process, but never should be the focus or centerpiece. Argue with me or debate me if you like, but you will lose (see the original feature, Nexus of Intranet Success).

Just as the intranet is evolving and in need of constant refinement, I’m still refining this model as technology, employee needs, and companies change and evolve. More to come in October...

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Personalization is all the rage, but deploying a personalized intranet portal or website is a complex process. Most companies don’t offer personalization, don’t need to, and have users (employees) that don’t want to use personalization. While personalization might be overkill for most, it is important to some and distinguishing these complex solutions from traditional CMSs is an important consideration.

Seth Gottlieb, a leading expert on open source CMS and the founder of Content Here, has published an intriguing analysis of CMSs (see CMS Deployment Patterns) and uses the baking versus frying analogy to distinguish two principal types of CMS.

“Baking style rendering systems generate pages when content is published. Frying systems generate pages on the fly when they are requested by the end user,” writes Seth. “Whether a system bakes or fries content tells a lot about its architecture and what it is good at. Baking systems are great for high volume sites that do not need to personalize content. Frying systems excel when requirements include personalization, access control, and other presentation logic that uses information about the user in order to decide what to show and how.”

What are the leading baking and frying CMSs?

“I can't risk my vendor neutrality by showing favorites,” exclaims Seth. Good answer. Some systems work well for some organizations, but do not work well for others with differing priorities and requirements.

However, Seth did share some of those that he likes, and I’ve added a few of my own to mask both his neutrality, and mine (Prescient Digital Media is also technology neutral with no technology partnerships):

Some of the leading ‘baking’ CMSs (commercial and open source):

• Percussion
• Serena
• Hannon Hill
• TerminalFour
• Contribute (not true CMS but can be built upon)
• CrownPeak
• Tridion
• Bricolage (open source)
• Krang (open source)
• Alfresco (open source)

Some of the leading ‘frying’ systems (commercial and open source):

• Vignette
• Sitecore
• RedDot
• Day
• Stellant
• IBM
• Quantum Arts QP7
• Ektron
• Mediasurface Morello
• Fatwire Content Server
• eZ publish (open source)
• Drupal (open source)
• Joomla! (open source)
• Plone (open source)

In his annual review of the CMS marketplace, CMS Kudos and Shortcomings, CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne is careful not to single out winners and losers. Instead Byrne focuses on specific areas of a CMS(e.g. personalilzation, templating, usability, etc.) that particular solutions excel at, or are found to be lagging.

“Some vendors might get several mentions, and others none at all, but that doesn't automatically mean you should include (or discount) them in making your short lists,” writes Byrne. “Alfresco doesn't offer decent personalization services; should you care? Perhaps not.”

Instead, Byrne urges caution when looking at CMS vendors. Instead of evaluating vendor offers and technology, evaluate them against your specific requirements using likely scenarios in which a CMS will be used.

“I urge you to take a scenario-based approach that will help you understand which functionalities and attributes matter most to you,” adds Byrne. “And, as always, carefully evaluate the implementation team as closely as you vet any software vendor.”

RELATED READING:

CMS Kudos and Shortcomings

CMS Deployment Patterns

Content Management Proves Costly Without Planning

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Forrester Research asked 15 of the largest interactive marketing agencies (think web designers and online marketing companies) to rate the most important emerging technologies for impacting their design practices (see The Emerging Technologies That Matter Most To Interactive Agencies). Their top answer: mobile devices.

Other top emerging technologies of the 30 mentioned:

• Online video
• Ajax
• Social networks

Continue reading my Content Matters article "The most important emerging technologies" »

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Silver bullets that solve all your problems are rare in life; and nearly non-existent in the intranet world. Far from being a silver bullet, enterprise intranet portals are extraordinarily are exceedingly powerful, but are also complex, pricey and pose many, many challenges for large organizations.

There are few enterprise applications that, when implemented properly and maximize the value of the cost, are more complex than the enterprise intranet portal. Enterprise resource planning (ERP), business intelligence (BI), and customer relationship management (CRM) are all complex and costly endeavors, but the optimal enterprise intranet portal (EIP) has a bigger scale and scope that involves and engages all employees and can (should) include composite application integration of all of the above.

PORTAL VERSUS PORTAL PRODUCT

Now let’s be clear (at the risk of further complicating an already complex solution), you don’t need a portal product to have a portal. A portal is a door or gateway of importance. Your custom-built or content management driven intranet home page may be a portal. However, the enterprise portal solution is a multifaceted piece of software that has some distinguishing features from an average intranet home page. The enterprise intranet portal solution has three distinguishing characteristics:

• advanced user personalization capabilities;
• security (authorization and authentication); and,
• enterprise application integration (EAI, the software and processes that link together or integrate an organizations many applications (e.g. ERP, CRM, HR applications).

PORTAL APPLICATIONS

Now, if those concepts are not complex enough to understand for non-techies, the typical EIP delivers a lot more bells and whistles than the above distinguishing characteristics. Some solutions like the powerful Oracle Portal or IBM WebSphere Portal come with hundreds of portlets, many, many bundled applications, and a bevy of plug-in suites and additional solutions with some big and complex tools unto their own including:

• Search
• Content management
• Document management
• Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, etc.)
• Collaboration suites (e.g. team pages)
• Analytics and reporting
• Development platforms, tookits and ‘factories’

These and other powerful enterprise portal products from Sun, Vignette, SAP, BEA, Microsoft and others, have wicked horse-power capable of solving complicated business requirements. The catch: it comes at a price, and an opportunity cost.

For starters, most of the above functionality, often referred to as utility applications, are ‘thin’ versions of stand-alone products. The robustness of most portal search engines and content management systems (CMS), for example, are far less than the individual versions. Often, many organizations don’t use the search engines that come with a portal, they plug in Google, Autonomy or Endeca which are almost always far more powerful than their portal brethren.

PORTAL AND CMS

In addition to offering bundled applications like those listed above, many of the portal vendors sell separate content management systems – and vice versa. A traditional CMS vendor, Vignette has also become a leading portal vendor. CMS vendors Day, Interwoven, and others also have portals.

While the CMS vendors roll-out portal products, the portal vendors now sell content management systems – not only included in the portal solution, but also as separate products. Oracle not only has a portal product, Oracle Portal, with two different CMS packages, it also owns and sells the Stellent CMS seperately. IBM Websphere Portal has different CMS options, but also recently bought and now sells FileNet which has separate CMS and document management products. To complicate things further, FileNet now OEMs the Day content management system, and IBM and Interwoven have a long standing partnership that allows for easy integration of the TeamSite CMS into WebSphere portal.

But wait: it gets more complicated. Some of the portal vendors now have multiple portal products, and multiple CMS products. BEA sells the AquaLogic portal (formerly known as Plumtree) and the WebLogic portal. OpenText is known for document management and has a portal offering, but it recently bought Hummingbird and its products, which bought RedDot and its CMS offerings. Oracles sells the Oracle Portal, and a second portal product, the new WebCenter portal – in addition to its CMS solutions, and a wide array of complex middleware products to complex to address in this article.

“The distinction between portal and CMS is not that meaningful… users shouldn’t have to buy separate products,” says portal analyst Matthew Brown of Forrester Research. “If I’m a user, I should be able to construct a page and I should be able to run static content or incorporate a portlet or gadget. There is so much that overlaps between the two.”

But there’s a good reason to have separate stand-alone products – for some organizations – while others require an integrated solution. “Portals and CMSs still peacefully coexist,” adds Brown, who intimates the need for separate products, all the while having the option for integrated solutions. It all depends on the requirements of the buyer.

Microsoft is leading the challenge for a single, integrated solution. No longer does MS offer a separate CMS and portal product, the new Sharepoint Server 2007 combines the two. There are of course pros and cons to this – too many to go into in this space – but this is a solution that works for some organizations, and not at all for others. Unfortunately though, as described by Janus Boye on CMSWatch.com, Sharepoint has yet to share its plans for Sharepoint (see Still no official roadmap for Sharepoint 2007).

Of course each product comes with different editions and versions which can further confuse buyers. Oracle has some incredibly powerful offerings, but following the different versions, editions and products can also flummox even the most intelligent minds. To quote portal aficionado and analyst Janus Boye, author of the Enterprise Portals Report (version 3 has just been released) from CMW Watch: “Most Oracle documentation labels the current version Oracle Portal 10g Release 2. This reflects the current version of the appserver where 10g Release 2 is the same as 10.1.2.0.2. This review (the review in the Enterprise Portals Report version 3) covers Portal version 10.1.4.1 which is an update to 10g Release 2, but unfortunately the old version naming is still used. The 10.1.4.1 maintenance pack is the current release which came out in June 2006. If you’re an existing customer, you need to first upgrade the application server to 10.1.2.0.2 and then upgrade the portal repository.”

Huh?! What version does what now to whom?! Hey, it is not Janus’ fault, nor is it Oracle per se, this is complex stuff. Powerful solutions come with a certain degree of complexity, and rich technology.

COSTS

With the rich technology comes, rich prices. Power solutions cost money. Many of these products only run on proprietary application servers, and databases (e.g. Sharepoint, WebSphere, WebLogic, and Oracle Portal to name a few). So you’re not just buying a portal, you’re making a bigger financial commitment than you think – you’re either buying additional solutions or you’re further locking yourself into current platforms.

Price however is more than just the list price. The price of these solutions are more than just the advertised price found on these vendor websites and supporting materials. Oracles Portal costs a mere $10,000 per CPU. BEA AquaLogic is priced at $396/user for Application Suite + $38,000 per processor for the ‘process module’, and IBM WebSphere Portal costs $51,500 per processor; $67,000 per processor for the new Dashboard Accelerator. Note that these costs are per user, and per processor. In a large enterprise, these multiply dramatically.

These costs are on top of the databases and application servers. But wait, if you act now there’s more: service and support. Are you going to buy the product without service and support? Oh my, that would be brave. Over a few years, the total cost of ownership now can be in the millions. For some, its less, for others there’s still more…

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