Google finally unveiled its much hyped communications tool. However, Google Talk is not a lot different than Skype, Yahoo! or Microsoft’s tools – in fact, for some, its inferior.

Here’s what Wired magazine has to say about the new Google Talk tool:

Google's Latest Is All Talk

Wired, August 25, 2005

 

After several months of feverish speculation about a mysterious new service under development, Google unveiled its latest tool Wednesday: Google Talk, a text-chat and voice-communication program that looks nice, but has no obvious advantage over competitors. The moment you fire it up, the sparse white design and primary-color logo make it obvious that this is a Google application. When not in use, Google Talk shrinks down to a "speech bubble" icon on the Windows taskbar (for the time being, it's available for Windows only). Clicking on this opens the main pane, with a searchable list of your contacts, or "friends" as Google optimistically calls them. – Google's Latest Is All Talk 

ZDnet also rings in with a less than flattering review:

What's exciting about Google Talk?

ZDNet – August 25, 2005

I'm a bit underwhelmed with the launch of Google Talk, which is a bit of a surprise, since Google has a history of coming up with decent services. I use Google Search dozens of times every day, and check Google News every hour or so when I'm at the computer. (More if I'm procrastinating… thanks Google…) Gmail is the only Webmail service I can stand using for actual mail (as opposed to catching spam. Any Webmail account will do nicely for that) and I've even taken a shine to the Google Toolbar for Firefox. What's exciting about Google Talk?

Don’t believe the hype – there is no silver bullet for effective knowledge management.

Were you to believe the constant bombardment of sales brochures, pitches, presentations, articles and related ‘spin’ it would be easy to conclude that knowledge management (KM) is some form of technology – a combination of various hardware and software components. This is what the technology vendors would have corporate managers believe.

In truth, successful KM depends more on people and process than technology.

KM Defined

Based on common definitions that can vary slightly from one to the next, simply put, KM is how corporate knowledge – both tacit and explicit – is stored, retrieved and reused for achieving corporate objectives. Notice there is no direct reference to technology.

Effective knowledge management requires three key components:

• Participatory individuals – employees who are willing, able and active sharers of tacit knowledge.
• Process and rules – defined rules and standards (e.g. corporate taxonomy) for categorizing and storing information and knowledge.
• Technology – physical infrastructure including software that enables the above and allows for effective knowledge retrieval.

“To many organizations, implementing a knowledge management strategy can initially appear to be a daunting and overwhelming task,” writes Antony Satyadas, in “Growing with Knowledge Management” for Line 56.  “Many questions must be addressed before users feel comfortable investing in a KM solution, including: Where do I begin? What technology do I need? How do I ensure the process is managed correctly? How do I measure the effectiveness of my knowledge management solution?”

Planning

Of course, any initiative needs a plan and defined goals and measurable expectations (outcomes) before any technologies should be evaluated, purchased or implemented. The priorities and expectations of internal managers, executives, and information workers need to be understood, documented and accounted and applied to best practices before any technology is considered. Once specific goals, standards, and roles are identified and documented, then technology and evaluation criteria can begin prior to solution evaluation and selection (see Pssst, wanna buy a CMS?).

Education and change management are also requisites to any KM plan. “It is important to remember that more than 50 percent of a KM solution is about change management and ensuring that your organization's culture and behavior patterns are appropriately accounted for in the strategy,” says Satvadas, who carries the title of Knowledge Discovery Leader at Lotus.

Technology

I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard or read the phrase “effective knowledge management system.” I’ll bet you $1,000 that if you asked 10,000 communications, human resource or IT professionals you might find 10 or 20 that could accurately define “effective knowledge management system.”

The truth is there is no one technology or system. In fact, effective KM often requires multiple technologies working in tandem under a set of standards that could include one, many or all of the following:

• Email
• Search engine
• Corporate portal
• Document management
• Content management
• Directory
• Instant messaging
• Personalization
• Profiling
• E-Learning
• Web conferencing
• Blog
• Wiki
• Etc.

After several months of planning and investigation, one client of  mine (Prescient Digital Media), a major energy utility, selected a portal product that included a content management platform with personalization, discussion forums, search and other utilities to work hand-in-hand with a new document management solution to reduce the average time employees spent on searching for information (based on an employee study, the average time spent searching for information on the corporate information was 18-20 minutes per day per employee) to less than 10 minutes, and to reduce the maximum number of clicks to reaching retrieval online corporate information to three or less (95% of the time).

Measurable goals are requisite to any solid KM plan.

Return On Investment

Much to the potential joy of your CIO and CFO, the benefits of effective KM are indeed measurable in terms of dollars and cents. Measurable benefits (hard and soft) can include:

• Increased customer satisfaction (which directly correlates with sales revenue)
• Reduced IT help desk costs
• Reduced software maintenance costs
• Increased employee productivity (reduced searching time, etc.)
• Reduced meeting costs
• Reduced paper costs
• Reduced paper and software distribution costs

Halliburton is one of the world's largest providers of products and services to the oil and gas industries and winner of the 2003 Extended Enterprise Innovator Award for developing an extensive collaborative portal that relies on integrated ERP functions to serve customers, suppliers and employees.

In its first year, the portal influenced $120 million in sales, according to customer surveys; improved corporate efficiencies to the tune of about $500,000 by enabling better access to technical documents; and led to reduced payment cycles.(Source: Beth Schultz, Network World, February 17, 2003

Bottom Line

Effective KM requires a lot of work, intelligent thinking, rules and standards, advanced planning, and a supportive culture (including supportive executives) not too the appropriate tools and technology. There is no silver bullet. The bullet is made of wood and requires a lot of carving, moulding, care and hard work before it can be fired with a successful hit.

The honeymoon is waning for darling tech and search giant Google. While its technology and services continue to amaze and delight users the world-over, the untold price of using certain Google services is beginning to leak into the unsuspecting public.

News.com (news division of CNET) writer Elinor Mills wrote a stinging column about Google’s information practices and the implications on individual privacy. Using Google as a research tool, Mills highlighted Google’s power and practices (not fully understood) using Google’s own CEO as an example. Mills was able to find out detailed personal information on Google CEO Eric Schmidt including particulars such as:

• annual income
• stock sales
• personal hobbies
• personal political allegiances
• etc.

Google’s response? An outright ban of News.com; a refusal to talk to the media outlet for one year. Even more peculiar has been Google’s refusal to say much on the ban or the initial story.

What is Google afraid of?

Perhaps this story can be likened to the child who got caught with his proverbial hand in the cookie jar.

Elinor Mills' article suggests that using Google’s assorted tools and services may in fact breach the average user’s privacy threshold – without the user knowing it. For example, Google collects and stores (and who knows what else) huge volumes of user data not available to the public, including logs of individual’s respective search queries. To put this into perspective, using only what is available to the public, Mills was able to find the following which was published in the July 15 article, Google balances privacy, reach:

“But spending 30 minutes on the Google search engine lets one discover that Schmidt, 50, was worth an estimated $1.5 billion last year. Earlier this year, he pulled in almost $90 million from sales of Google stock and made at least another $50 million selling shares in the past two months as the stock leaped to more than $300 a share.

 

He and his wife Wendy live in the affluent town of Atherton, Calif., where, at a $10,000-a-plate political fund-raiser five years ago, presidential candidate Al Gore and his wife Tipper danced as Elton John belted out "Bennie and the Jets."

 

Schmidt has also roamed the desert at the Burning Man art festival in Nevada, and is an avid amateur pilot.”

No wonder Google is miffed. But did Mills really do anything wrong? I’m tempted to say ‘no’ but alas I don’t know all the particulars.

One would think that if Mills had somehow broken the law then Google would flex its impressive financial muscle and sue Mills et al. Did Mills overstep an ethical boundary? I’m also tempted to say ‘no’ but this can only be a subjective opinion as ‘beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.’

But let’s just look at what Google does know about you. Here’s what CNET News.com published as a sidebar story in the Mills article under the title “What Google Knows About You”:

• Gmail -- The e-mail service offers two gigabytes of free storage and scans the content of messages to serve up context-related ads.

• Cookies -- Google uses cookies, which are commonly used to link individual users with activities.

• Desktop Search -- Google's Desktop Search lets users easily search files stored on their computer.

• Web Accelerator -- The application speeds Web surfing by storing cached copies of Web pages you've visited; those page requests can include personal information.

Now many organizations are starting to use the Google search engine on their own websites AND on their corporate intranets. Does Google track internal corporate information retrieved from the corporate intranet as well? I don’t know...

I have to admit I’m not much of a privacy wonk but I just went to my cookies folder and deleted all Google cookies. Some of my awe and over-zealous appreciation for Google was just replaced with a little bit of fear.

I had the pleasure, at the invitation of John Amyotte, Microsoft's Solutions Specialist for Portals, to see Microsoft's very own main intranet portal, microsoftweb. As can be expected, MS is "eating their own dog food" and using their own portal product SharePoint and Windows SharePoint Services to power their internal business hub.

microsoftweb is very well executed and organized and features significant improvements over previous iterations. What stood-out most is the use of personalization and profiling that makes the retrieval and presentation of information far more relevant to the individual user.

A link on the home page called My Site (the portal recognizes the user based on their Windows login - of course, MS uses single sign-in) links to John's personal website that his both a 'public' view (what those in the company see) and a 'personal' view (links and information that only he sees. The presentation and the type of information presented is customized by the individual user including news, stock ticker, presentations, etc.

microsoftweb also features a single search engine -- used for both finding people and their contact information (directory information) and general intranet pages and documents (enterprise search). When doing a search the results are divided into two columns: the first column highlights search results that are relevant intranet pages and documents; the second column produces results that are all MS employees and links to their respective sites and information that are relevant to the search query (a thumbnail photo of each person is also presented).

Most impressive about microsoftweb and the Sharepoint offering is the collaboration tools inherent to the product. Among other things Sharepoint offers a template for team meetings that store relevant documents, list team members, account for member attendance, trigger reminder emails for meetings, etc.

There are currently 31 million Sharepoint users the world-over. Moreover, Microsoft isn't resting on their laurels: Gates & company are investing the bulk of a $700 million project and a dedicated team of some 300 people to beefing-up Sharepoint and fully integrating a new and improved content management system (Content Management Server as it is known today).

Lookout Plumtree and SAP!

Microsoft's Intranet Portal Innovates

I just finished heather Burns cover story in this month's Corporate Writer & Editor called "Design Wars". Ahhhh, there's nothing like designing an enterprise intranet by committee to get those combative juices flowing!

As you probably know by now, we're all design experts. Everyone has an opinion and everyone wants to influence the end design.

DESIGNING BY COMMITTEE DOES NOT WORK. But of course you already knew this... :)

Here are a couple of pointers when undertaking design:

1- Limit the committee - your steering committee or intranet council (visit our Articles section for more on Politics of Intranet Ownership and Collaborative Governance Models) should be involved in business requirements, policies and standards (including creative standards and guidelines), resources, strategy and planning. Limit design approval to a core group of 2 or 3 people if possible.

2- Planning drives design - Build your business case and requirements based on best practices, business needs and employee needs and then build a blueprint that includes creative design standards and guidelines. Once approved, then undertake your information architecture and wireframes before you pick up your crayons and Photoshop. Don't touch the design until you have completed the creative guidelines and the hollow conceptual wireframes.

3- Outsource the creative - Unless you have a crack designer on staff, outsource the design to a professional or at least a design student. You do not have to pay a lot but putting the design in the hands of a pro will dampen the political pressure and ensure quality.

4- Build in time for revisions - Two or three rounds of changes and revisions is standard. Four to six rounds of revisions is not unheard of so schedule the necessary time.

5- Consensus, compromise and cooperation - As Nixon said, "You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot please all of the people all of the time." Be prepared to be flexible during the approval process because even a core group of 2 or 3 will have disagreements over the smallest things such as a font size, the color of a button, the size of a photo, etc. Emphasize compromise as the key to success and happiness.

My favourite intranet designs? Cisco, Xerox, Sodexho (not a good .com design though), Fidelity Investments Canada, Electrolux, and the Integer Group. Give us a ring if you'd like to see some of these intranets.

Intranet Design Wars

Microsoft has released more toys for Sharepoint customers – and they’re free!

There are 30 applications in all including:

·         online training

·         meeting management

·         absence and vacation scheduling

·         help desk

·         marketing campaigns

·         employee timesheet

·         room and equipment reservations

·         travel requests

Best of all, if you have Sharepoint and would like to use these freebies, you can download the toys at the TechNet Web site.

Wait one of the World’s most profitable firms is giving away freebies!?! There has to be a catch...

Microsoft is betting that the enterprise intranet is one of the more lucrative markets of the enterprise customer. This is just another in a series of Sharepoint announcements and their multi-hundred-million dollar plans for their portal product (including integration with Content Management Server and Office).

For more information:

More On Microsoft's Enterprise Plans

Microsoft's Worse Kept Secret

WebEx – known for hosting online web meetings – has agreed to purchase Intranets.com for a mere $45 million. To put that in that perspective, that works out to a mere $150 per customer (300,000 paying users).

An online meeting company buys small market intranet hosting business?!?

WebEx conducts online meetings and competes with Microsoft’s Live Meeting. Intranets.com hosts small business intranets (less than 100 employees on average). In their press release WebEx states that the acquisition will allow them to “offer companies of all sizes a comprehensive, cost-effective, on-demand web collaboration suite that includes both real-time and asynchronous capabilities.”

One of the real drivers behind the purchase appears to be Intranets.com own web and audio conferencing service which it launched early last year. As PC World puts it, “The move was aimed directly at undercutting Microsoft's Live Meeting software and WebEx's service.”  In other words, Intranets.com was mowing WebEx’s lawn for a much cheaper price. WebEx isn’t cheap and Intranets.com was offering web conferencing at the low-low monthly subscription price of $199 (a license for up to five presenters).

I don’t blame WebEx for wanting to do away with Intranets.com. However, WebEx claims that Intranets.com will continue to run as a wholly owned subsidiary and plans to keep all 82 employees. Not surprisingly, WebEx is immediately taking over the Intranets.com web conferencing service. No doubt the price will go up sometime in the near future.

A little more perspective... if Intranets.com has 300,000 paying users, and judging by their pricing plan the average user price is about $10 per month, that equates to about $36 million in revenue per year. The company was sold for $45 million.

The sales price makes me wonder how viable the Intranets.com business has been. Very curious indeed.

Last week I blogged on “Microsoft’s Worse Kept Secret”: the merging of Sharepoint and Content Management Server (CMS) into a single group offer.

Well, Microsoft reminded me about the importance of perspective and point of view.

John Amyotte, a solutions specialist from Microsoft Canada’s portal group, offers the MS perspective on merging products into a single group. “Merging” and “group” yes,” says Amyotte, a 5-year veteran of the content management industry. “But they are still two separate products. The goal is for it to be transparent like Sharepoint portal and Windows Sharepoint services. And this is what a suite should be….one UI.”

Amyotte stresses that CMS is not disappearing. “Just to confirm CMS is not being phased out. In fact, the next release has more R&D funding going into it then the entire history of the product.

To be precise, hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested into the new Sharepoint and CMS bundling project with the offer due next Christmas (2006). 

“One of the challenges in the ECM and portal space is that if you want to create web content, manage a document, and collaborate with peers via email and instant messaging you end up toggling between numerous solutions that do not talk well to each other.”

To overcome the multi-client challenge Microsoft envisions a more user-friendly environment that allows the user to accomplish more without having to use multiple products or interfaces.

“Multiple user interfaces (UI's) across a large organization creates a user adoption challenge. Some vendors have tried to solve this challenge by acquiring other companies, but the reality is the products are written in various languages and never truly integrate. You still end up with multiple solutions and UI's that don't integrate.”

This of course is nothing new as others like Plumtree and Vignette already have integrated portal-content management-search products. However, Microsoft is not known for subscribing to the first-mover model (think of the browser, instant messaging, and content management and portal products to name a few).

But why settle at simply integrating two or three products? “The intent of the next release is to have a transparent integration between CMS, Sharepoint, and Office,” reveals Amyotte.   

“Users create content with the tools they use everyday such as Word or Outlook and the content can easily be used to create a web page on the external site, a document repository for collaboration, a confidential document on the global extranet, or a personalized announcement for the intranet also distributed via handheld devices.” 

Big things cooking in Redmond. But we’ll have to wait another 16 or 17-months before we can taste...

Well the cat is finally out of Gates’ richly tailored bag. Microsoft is now publicly hinting what so many knew to be true about a year ago (or more): MS is merging Sharepoint and Content Management Server (CMS) into a single group offer.

Bruce Dunwoodie was one of the first to report this on CMSWire. “In one of the first public statements on the topic, Chris Capossela, Microsoft’s group vice president of Information Worker Product Group, indicated that the future of the two products was around more common technologies and an integration, if not outright convergence,” writes the intrepid Dunwoodie.

“We do think of SharePoint and CMS very much together. CMS is running Internet sites, SharePoint for intranet sites and team collaboration,” says Capossela.

Of course this is not a formal admission which MS is shy to do. However, as I blogged back on April 10 (see Microsoft’s Intranet Portal Innovates), Gates & company are investing hundreds of millions of dollars and a dedicated team of some 300 people to beefing-up Sharepoint and fully integrating a new and improved content management system (Content Management Server as it is known today).

This is serious, serious business for MS. Gates et al are not intent to play second fiddle to Plumtree and IBM in the enterprise intranet portal market (if you call 31 million users a ‘second fiddle’) and understand that linking MS-Office and content management with a portal product and .NET could be a market clincher for them.... if they execute accordingly.

This new Sharepoint offering however will not be ready until December 2006 (planned date) which gives the competition a little lead time to up the ante.