Enterprise 2.0 | CMS Blog Watch

Enterprise 2.0

OpenSpan Accelerates the Automation of User Processes

Posted in Enterprise 2.0, tech tools on July 27th, 2010 by Bill Ives – Comments Off

Here is a software innovation that is
potentially transformational.  I
have long been interested in providing support to knowledge intense business
processes. This was my first exposure to what became knowledge management in
the early 90s and the concept behind many useful enterprise 2.0
implementations. Now
OpenSpan is going beyond mashups to provide quick to
create interconnections between applications to automate many aspects of
business processes. As a result users have more time to focus on the decisions
within these processes.  These
automations can also create substantial time savings to drive significant ROI.

I recently spoke with Rick Marquardt and
Francis Carden of OpenSpan about their offering.
OpenSpan's User Process
Management software provides an intuitive visual design environment for
automating user processes within and across applications without requiring APIs
or changes to the application's code. They have figured out a way to get inside
the application even if it does not contain an API for this task. Developers
have the ability to integrate Windows, cloud/SaaS and custom legacy
applications, which enables organizations to improve user efficiency while
extending the ROI of existing applications.

With OpenSpan organizations can go inside any
application a user accesses, monitor user interactions to understand how power
users operate and then automate processes to streamline these actions.
Building these automations
to connect applications is a drag and drop process as Rick and Francis
demonstrated to me. Below you can see an example of making connections between
a CRM application and an Order Entry system. This can eliminate the current out
dated practice of cut and paste between apps to automate fill-ins.


Picture 3
 
Open Span can also monitor user activity to
help determine which processes to automate and what applications to connect. In
addition to reducing steps, this can also reduce the number of windows on a
user’s desktop.
Using the OpenSpan Events desktop monitoring
technology, you can record every step in every user’s workflow, 24×7x365. It is
no longer necessary to conduct sample time and motion studies or view screen
recordings to try and guess what's happening. You can get the user’s detailed desktop
interactions in real time for accurate monitoring. This can both help target
where to automate and then track the ROI from these efforts. I have been
involved in a number of call center monitoring efforts so I have first hand
appreciation of the value of this capability. Below is a sample screen.


Picture 1
 
OpenSpan is now offering a free download of
their IDE, OpenSpan Studio or the Plug-In for Visual Studio. Built on an
embedded version of the Microsoft Visual Studio Framework, the plug-in can be
used with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and makes OpenSpan functionality
available for the first time via a .NET API. This means that developers can now
access all of OpenSpan's runtime capabilities directly from code and mix and
match .NET and OpenSpan projects in a single executable. OpenSpan has decided
to make the tools available free and focus their commercial fees on providing
the run time to support automations the developers create. I think this is a
smart move. It reduces any financial risk until a solution is created that
demonstrates value.

To further support developers OpenSpan has
created the
OpenSpan Developer Community. It offers  extensive resources, including a code gallery, knowledge base
and forum for collaborating with other developers. This is another smart move
as the objective is to empower developers with increased capability to create
applications that use the OpenSpan runtime. The OpenSpan Developer Community is
seen below.


Picture 2
 
I asked how this goes beyond mashups as they
have a similar objective. Mashups generally only draw data from multiple sources.
While this is certainly an improvement in application development, OpenSpan
also can perform transactions within these applications by getting completely
inside the applications. This can even work with third party applications. I
watched OpenSpan connect a FedEx tracking system with an internal order
processing application with only the requirement of gaining user access to the
FedEx Web app, not developer access. Rick said that their clients have seen
dramatic improvements in business process execution. I can believe this. As I
said at the beginning this could be transformational. 

Upgrading to SharePoint 2010

Posted in CMS, ECM, Enterprise 2.0, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, WCM, Web Content Mavens on July 26th, 2010 by Pie – Comments Off

No, I haven’t converted into a SharePoint fanboi.  I am merely acknowledging that it is here to stay, at least for two more versions.  Realizing that, my company has been doing quite a bit of SharePoint work in the past few years.  We have recently been looking at SP2010 and just upgraded a customer to the new version.

This dalliance with SharePoint has not gone unnoticed by some people in the local area.  I was asked to co-present with Wyn Van Devanter to the Washington, DC Web Content Mavens group on what web managers need to know before making the move from 2007 to 2010.

I thought I would share my slides and offer a few additional notes for people.  For the record, Wyn tackled the first part of the presentation and I handled the second portion.  We could probably each speak to the other half, but we each presented to our strengths.

SP2010 Overview and Upgrade Planning

There were several discussions that spun out of the presentation.  I think the actual discussion was a lot more valuable than the presentation.

  • Competition: There was a discussion on competition.  If you stick to the public website , there is a wide selection in the WCM/CMS market.  If you look at the Intranet usage, you are really looking at some of the newer Enterprise 2.0 players that offer a broader set of capabilities.  The legacy competition, eRoom and Lotus Notes, each have their own issues in regards to they’re being long-term players.
  • Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement of SharePoint.  SharePoint is not designed for WCM.  It has a lot of requirements that drive other license revenue for Microsoft.  It has complexities and requires a Microsoft platform and .NET expertise.  That said, if you have SharePoint (MOSS) 2007, you are likely going to be on SP2010 in the near future.
  • Future of SharePoint: We had a fun discussion on this.  It is my opinion that this version of SharePoint will mark the peak of SharePoint’s popularity.  The next version will likely ride on the coat tails of SP2010.  After that, I believe SharePoint will fall into the legacy category.  It is simply too big to innovate enough to maintain a lead over a long period of time.  Someone new is likely to come in and supplant them.  Of course, even with this estimate, that is some time away.
  • SharePoint for WCM, Really?: Yes really.  While I have stated in the past that maybe SharePoint is not ideal for WCM, it doesn’t change the fact that people still use it for that purpose (at least the 2007 version).  They will likely continue to do so in the future as SP2010 is better suited to WCM than MOSS 2007.  The question you want to ask if someone proposes SP2010 for your website it this: What are you using for your website? Oh, and get references. Plural.

There were more, but these are the ones that I remember clearly and that aren’t covered in the slides and notes.  Feel free to drop questions.

References

These are the links from the Reference slide of the presentation.  I am providing them here for easy reference.

Good luck.

SuccessFactors Extend Its Enterprise Capabilities Through CubeTree Acquistion

Posted in Enterprise 2.0, tech tools, twitter on July 22nd, 2010 by Bill Ives – Comments Off

I have written about
CubeTree several times. The most recent was Cubetree engages its user community in product development. I also met a number of their executives at the last
year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference so I was interested to learn that they have
recently been acquired by
SuccessFactors,
another firm I have covered (see
SuccessFactors: Bringing Web 2.0 to Talent Management). SuccessFactors is one of the
world’s most widely deployed cloud-based business solutions. It is used by more
than 8 million people within over 3,000 companies.

Recently, I spoke with Carlin Wiegner, the CubeTree
CEO, about the impact of this acquisition and how CubeTree will fit within
SuccessFactors.  First, he said
that this move is opening a many more doors for them given the large installed
base, new use cases in areas such as learning, and a larger sales force that
SuccessFactors offers.  There is
also great synergy between the two offerings. SuccessFactors has recently
broadened their offering with the BizX performance management system that
offers more robust support for knowledge workers.

The addition of Cubetree can take this BizX support
to the next level with its many collaboration features. Individuals can quickly
create rich profiles and begin engaging with others in their organization to
get work done, find co-workers who can help, and share insights as they happen.
Teams
can make use of workspaces that
enable groups to immediately gather around a project, collaborate, share
documents and perform work tasks.
Ciubetree also
provides executive dashboards
 that offer insights into
how a company is executing on a day-to-day basis. 

CubeTree will remain a
separate brand as SucessFactors wanted CubeTree’s capabilities to both extend
its own offerings and as an independent, but well aligned, offering.  For example, the SuccessFactor employee
profile will now have CubeTree’s related communication and collaboration
activities embedded within it. 
Other aspects of CubeTree will findtheir way into the appropriate
SuccessFactors offerings. The CubeTree micro-blogging feature will be embedded
within SuccessFactors but also remain a separate free offering. 

Below is a sample screen
from the micro-blogging feature. In this case you see a
status update "in
progress" where an employee is letting his co-workers know that he has
wrapped up his current project and where he will be if they need him for the
rest of the day.
The CubeTree micro-blogging
capability also i
ntegrates with Twitter. Below we see the same employee sending a notice
about the release notes post to a customer who had a question about new
features in this weeks release. By adding a custom hash tag (#cubetree) to his
Twitter update it is posted to his CubeTree feed. He then adds a comment back
that he is pushing it live on the blog.


Picture 1CubeTree provides
micro-blogging as a free feature and the other capabilities comes in a
commercial package. I think this is a smart move as micro-blogging is the
perfect way to introduce your offerings within an enterprise. It is easy to
install and does not require integration with business process to obtain
initial benefits. It can then be spread virally throughout an enterprise to
quickly demonstrate value.

I also asked Carlin about
what new features that CubeTree has introduced since our last conversation.
They do frequent releases for continuous improvement but one of the main areas
they have focused on is more robust email integration. CubeTree can work with
any email client as it is not a plug in. Instead it sends messages that appear
to the email client like any other message. This allows users to stay within
email for many CubeTree activities. You can also have very robust email alert
settings that can be easily turned on and off. Below you can see some of the
robust email settings.


Cubtree pix 2
To complement the email
integration there is also very robust mobile capabilities. Below you can see a
message on a mobile device. The user is
replying to an instant
notification and posting it back to CubeTree


Cubetre pix 3
I like this combination
as SuccessFactors and CubeTree nicely complement each other without bring
redundancies to sort out.  Carlin
said they sorted through several possible mergers. I do not know the other
possibilities but I think they made a good choice. 

Useful Guidelines and Metrics for Speeding Up Your Organization

Posted in Enterprise 2.0, book reviews, cases and trends: learning and KM, learning on July 21st, 2010 by Bill Ives – Comments Off

Here is a very timely book
from several thoughtful people at The Forum Corporation, Strategic Speed (Harvard Business
Press)
was written by Jocelyn Davis, Henry Frechette, and Edwin Boswell and
recently released.  Forum has shown
great longevity. It was founded in 1971 and I competed against it in the 1980s
when I was with a long since gone learning firm. 

I could not agree more with
their basic orientation. It is time to engage and empower employees rather than
simply fine tune processes and continue to do things to people in the outdated
mode of Fred Taylor.  The authors
use a nice image of the college campus with paved walkways and barren short
cuts across the lawns. You can try to regulate what people do but they will go
against the grain if it makes sense to them.

Enterprise 2.0 provides us
with better tools to empower and engage employees and enable them to set the
proper pathways that better align with actual business processes.  Technology is not the focus of this
book but it offers an approach that will work very well to guide enterprise 2.0
adoptions.

The authors did extensive
research in creating this book. They looked at hundreds of examples of
accelerated and sluggish businesses, created 18 in-depth cases examples, and
surveyed 343 senior business leaders in n both fast and slow companies. From
this work they abstracted four critical leadership practices than enable strategic
speed and conceived of two key metrics: reduced time to value and increased
value over time.  I like the value
part as too often ROI has focused on speed issues without tying them back to
the bottom line.

The book begins with a
useful chart of ten differences between fast and slow companies. The underlying
themes for fast firms include collaboration, reflection, transparency,
flexibility, coordination, innovation, and alignment. These are all issues that
are better enabled through proper use of enterprise 2.0 technologies.  Consistent with these themes are three
basic principals the authors found in fast firms: clarity, unity, and agility.

They note a bit later that business collaboration is the main driver of unity. In contrast, when there is
a culture of internal competition projects and strategies get derailed. I have
certainly seen this latter problem first hand. For example, when managers are
asked to rank order their teams in performance reviews that is an invitation
for counterproductive competition. 
This approach can put individual goals above team and company
goals.  The authors offer a number
of examples where learning activities went across divisional and, even company,
boundaries to create greater collaboration and unity.

They also introduce a
strategic speedometer to enable you to better measure your company’s efforts on
the three fronts of clarity, unity, and agility. Again, this score card can be a
very useful metric in evaluating enterprise 2.0 adoption with such measures as
the translation of strategy into clear and measureable goals, presence of
cross- boundary collaboration, and evidence that people capture and communicate
what they learn from initiatives.

I certainly recommend this
book for anyone undertaking an enterprise 2.0 adoption, as well as those who
simply what to effectively speed up the efforts of their company.  There are many useful examples and
practices to achieve these goals. 

Collaborative Applications Market Remains Strong

Posted in Enterprise 2.0, knowledge management tools on July 14th, 2010 by Bill Ives – Comments Off

I frequently speak with
vendors in the collaborative applications market as I cover this space for the
AppGap blog. Many of the smaller best of breed vendors have been reporting
strong revenue despite the economic down turn. They have been helped by the
need for tighter budgets as they are often seen as a lower cost alternative.

A recent IDC report supports
these observations. As reported by Tekrati (see
IDC: Hot Spots in Overall
Collaborative Applications Market Help Offset Economic Decline
), IDC research
shows worldwide revenue for the collaborative applications market was $7.6
billion in 2009, representing a decline of 0.3%.  The top 3 vendors in 2009 (based on worldwide revenue) were
Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco. These vendors accounted for 55.8% of the market
total. However, that leaves 43.2% of a large pot.

IDC found that some of the
largest year-over-year growth came from the emerging social platforms submarket.
Erin Traudt, research director for IDC's Enterprise Collaboration and Social
Solutions program is quoted,"IDC believes that with a minimal decline
during a very tough economy, the worldwide collaborative applications market is
poised for a positive rebound in 2010 and that key submarkets such as social
platforms, conferencing applications, and team collaborative applications
(TCAs) are helping to sustain the market as customers continue to benefit from
the enhanced productivity and lower costs associated with these
solutions,"

I am very pleased to hear these observations as I think this is
growth market as these tools are part of the core of enterprise 2.0. I am glad the
market continues to like these options. Here is more good news. When IT
professionals were asked by IDC if they had to choose between best of breed
versus the collaborative applications from their current vendor, 64% of
respondents indicated best of breed would make the strongest business case.

These results are also consistent with growth in the technology job market that was reported by the Wall Street Journal (see Region Leads Rebound in technology Jobs). This article indicated that Silicon valley was the leader here and many of the best of breed players are located there.    

Forrester on Using Social Computing To Boost IT Productivity

Posted in Enterprise 2.0 on July 8th, 2010 by Bill Ives – Comments Off

IT is sometimes portrayed as the bad guy or the
obstacle in the enterprise 2.0 space as some times they attempt to block or
curtail social media activities. Forrester’s Nigel Fenwick presents a nice
twist to this view by offering research on
how social computing can boost IT
productivity
. I saw Nigel at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston so
it is nice to get a review copy of this report.

I really liked the
report’s summary. It concluded that their
“survey of social
media users indicates that IT staff increase productivity by adapting Social
Computing to their role. CIOs should enthusiastically embrace social media as a
means for boosting IT productivity while also giving IT staff the experience
needed to support Social Computing initiatives across the enterprise.”

Drilling down they
found that
70% of IT staff respondents were positive about
the productivity gains from social media while the rest were mostly
neutral.  I think that IT has a
great opportunity to get out in front of the enterprise 2.0 wave and play a
leadership role rather than being overrun.  Nigel seem to agree with this as the report suggested that
IT leaders can tap the early social media adopters in their ranks to help
educate the IT team on fitting social media into work.

The survey also found that 80%
of respondents believe social media has a positive impact on innovation, and
78% believe it will also have a positive impact on customer service.  There are many use cases already out
there on both counts. Social media can support c increased collaboration that
fuels innovation. The report suggested that CIOs should actively encourage IT
staff to participate in internal communities to both ask questions and provide
answers.

A recent IBM study
found that employees were more likely to ask questions on internal social media
and use these channels to promote their expertise by answering questions in a
public manner.  The Forrester
reports backs this up as 92% percent of IT employees cite social media as
helpful in getting answers to their questions, and 85% reported that social
media is helpful for letting others know how they can help them.

There is much more detail in the report and I
found it helpful. Amongst the conclusions is the suggestion that CIOs should
encourage their staff to experiment and share their findings with others.  

How to Empower Your Employees to Serve their Newly Empowered Clients

Posted in Enterprise 2.0 on July 6th, 2010 by Bill Ives – Comments Off

On September 14, Forrester will publish Empowered, co-authored by Josh
Bernoff and Ted Schadler, its sequel to Groundswell.
 Groundswell
was about
social technologies empowering consumers, the new book demonstrates how
empowered customers place demands on companies, and how it takes empowered
employees (refered to as HEROes – highly empowered and resourceful operatives)
to meet their demands. In this book, the authors tell the stories of some of
these HEROes, like Mark Betka at the US State Department, the Twelpforce team
at Best Buy, and the Rob Sharpe, who transformed sales training at Black &
Decker with his own internal YouTube.

I got a preview of the
approach as Forrester shared a review copy of the report,
The
HERO Index: Finding Empowered Employees
by Ted Schadler and Josh
Bernoff.  Here is apartial quote
form the summary. “T
he HERO Index is a new tool we have
developed to measure just how empowered and resourceful your own employees are.
Our data reveals that some industries (like technology products and services)
and job descriptions (like marketing and nonretail sales) harbor more HEROes
than others. Your new job is to find the HEROes in your organization and to
encourage and support their innovative applications.

I like this approach.  There has been too much effort to simplify jobs and automate
processes. What first appealed to me about the early stages of knowledge
management was the attempt to empower employees with the right information to
excel at their jobs. The same opportunity was what re-energized me when
enterprise 2.0 came along.
To research this report,
Forrester surveyed 4,364 US information workers — people who use computers or
mobile devices in their jobs — in November 2009.

The reports points out that the
same
Web
2.0
technologies that empower customers are available to empowered
employees in (I would add) enterprise 2.0. They then offer many cases of what I
would call enterprise 2.0. For example, Sales trainer Rob Sharpe at Stanley
Black & Decker created his own internal YouTube-type sites to share
insights.  Employees working with
clients can use
can use cloud technologies to share project
schedules or background materials.

These efforts are
often light-weight from an IT perspective and are originated by people form the
business units rather than IT.  In
fact, they found that reveal that 39% of HEROes use productivity tools not
provided by their IT departments. 
These employees often do things at their own expense. For example, they
found that 23% of HEROes use a smartphone for work and more than half of them —
12% — paid for it themselves. In addition, 13% pay for all or some of their
monthly data plan.  They do this
just to enable them to do their job better. No wonder they should be
considered heroes.

I am looking forward
to this book. In the meanwhile the Forrester report is very useful to help you find HEROs
in your organization, help then succeed and/or become a HERO yourself. 

Booz Allen Extends its Enterprise 2.0 Collaborative Platform

Posted in Enterprise 2.0, knowledge management on July 1st, 2010 by Bill Ives – Comments Off

A few months ago I wrote a
series of posts on the innovative and
award winning approach Booz Allen is taking to
enhance enterprise collaboration and engagement (see
Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: The Series).  Recently, I spoke again with Walton Smith, the Program Manager for Booz
Allen's information sharing efforts and the lead for the Government 2.0 client
practice. Walton said that the
first version of Hello, the collaboration
platform, covered the exchange and archiving of tacit knowledge. Now they
wanted to expand it to incorporate document management in an integrated and
collaborative manner.

Booz Allen selected SharePoint for the document management
application as 90% of their clients used it and they already had an enterprise
license.  To extend the
collaborative capabilities they made use of a number of third party tools
including MindTouch and some other open source offerings. MindTouch was added
as the wiki platform because of its ability to scale and the flexibility to
rapidly develop mashups and social applications. It could also be easily
integrated into the overall Hello skin.

The new version
of Hello includes a front end dashboard built on the iGoogle model.  Users can configure it to meet their
individual requirements. The third new feature is the capability to support
projects. In the prior version of Hello everything was open. Now you can put in
security levels to create private subsets of the conversation to support a project
team.  They also have added FAST
for enterprise search
as it provides a federated search across applications.
The search results bring back related people and documents at the same time.
These are all great next steps to make the collaboration platform more robust
and serve a broader array of needs within the enterprise. Here is a sample
screen.


Picture 1
We also discussed their
micro-blogging efforts (which plan to be installed in the near future). Walton
likes micro-blogging for circulating content because of its speed.  Busy managers and consultants often do
not have time to write a blog post or make a wiki entry and email is too
limited. However, they can quickly push information and ideas around the firm
through micro-blogging. He finds that it also levels the playing field for
information exchange. Messages more quickly move up and down the organizational
levels as anyone can put a message into the micro-blogging system and anyone
can respond. The traditional filters of company hierarchies can be put aside,
furthering the speed of communication. 
At the same time private groups can be easily set up for conversations
within levels as needed.

In addition to supporting individual exchanges, micro-blogging can become the vehicle
for virtual group discussions. For example, Booz Allen has held several forums
through
micro-blogging.
In this case senior executives make themselves available for questions at an
agreed upon time. Employees can follow the discussion thread and make
contributions.  This provides a new
sense of connection, as well as updates on where the firm is going which is
especially valuable for a global organization of 23,000 people operating in
almost every time zone. Even if people cannot participate, these forums are
archived and accessible at any time. 
We have seen these group dialogues on Twitter. Moving them inside the
trusted environment of the enterprise can further open up the conversation.

Walton related another use case as micro-blogging can serve as an ambient
alert system that tracks events within the enterprise.  There was an issue around a new smart
phone roll out.  The IT people
responsible for this began to see concerns on the
micro-blogging system long before the
volume of help tickets rose to alert status.  They were able to quickly address the issue through the
micro-blogging system and other
channels, indicate they were aware of it, and add that a fix was on its way.
The speed of detection that
micro-blogging
offered turned what could have been a black eye for the IT people into an
example of proactive responsiveness.

Walton sees micro-blogging
as a means to stay in touch with the pulse of the enterprise. This can be
oversight of a tactical issue like the smart phone effort or more strategic
topics such as what are people hearing from clients in the field or what are
the main concerns of employees. Many of the enterprise
micro-blogging tools have recognized
this potential and have implemented metrics and dashboards to aggregate
messages for more comprehensive monitoring.

The system recently received another award, this
time from CIO Magazine. The award citation noted that “B
ooz Allen Hamilton
wanted a "deliberately fun" way to increase collaboration among its
23,000 worldwide staffers, especially those who might feel isolated while
working at client sites. Its solution: Hello, a suite of tools including blogs,
forums and wikis that make it easier for employees to find staff with specific
expertise, and to mine and enlarge the consultancy's knowledge base. The system
serves the company's goal of finding ways its employees can "work together
differently" and has also added to the bottom line: While Booz Allen
doesn't sell Hello, it has leveraged its experience with the system to develop
customized Enterprise 2.0 solutions for clients.”

I continue to be impressed with what Booz Allen is doing in the enterprise 2.0 space and enjoyed Walton’s presentation at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.  

 

Novell Pulse Brings Real-time Collaboration to Enterprise 2.0

Posted in Enterprise 2.0, tech tools on June 30th, 2010 by Bill Ives – Comments Off

Novell’s
latest collaboration offering, Pulse, provides a real-time collaboration
environment for the enterprise that brings 
authoring, communication and social messaging
together in a single secure solution.
Built to work alone or in concert with existing
collaboration tools, Novell Pulse uses the Google Wave Federation Protocol to
allow seamless integration with other co-editing and collaboration tools, such
as Google Wave, as well as new extensions that third parties can build on top
of the Novell Pulse platform.
 It draws on instant
messaging, document sharing, social connections, real-time co-editing and
enterprise controls.

Recently
I spoke with Andy Fox, the VP of Engineering at Novell and Wendy Steinle, Director
of Marketing for Novell Pulse about what Pulse brings to enterprise 2.0.
I have been intrigued with
Google Wave (see
My Notes
and Thoughts on Google Wave Video Demo
).  The
Google Wave Federation Protocol allows any organization to build their own wave
service that can interoperate with all other Wave providers, including Google.
By adopting the Google Wave Federation Protocol, Novell Pulse will let users
collaborate across systems, in real-time on a character by character basis.

Key
features of Pulse include
granular policy-driven controls at the person, group and organization
levels.
Collaborative editing and
document sharing enable users to get work done with other users in real-time,
from co-editable online documents to the ability to share, view and comment on
traditional office documents in real time. Andy showed me an example of this. A
single interface allows users to see, sort, filter and send direct messages, blog
postings and group feeds from one place. Document presence shows users in this
single in-box when their colleagues are visiting, editing or commenting on a
document or message.

I
asked Andy about microblogging and he said they have merged blogging and
microblogging by allowing messages to start small but expand beyond the usual
limits imposed on microblogging. He mentioned that many business messages often
relate to documents and need to go beyond tweets. This flexible blogging
capability allows users to share, follow and comment on topics and ideas.  You can engage in real time chat around
documents or images. Unlike IM, these conversations are archived and become
searchable.  Messages are seen by
your followers and can be directed at individuals and groups.

The
ease of use and ad hoc nature opens up some interesting use cases. For example,
a manager can ask for her staff’s travel budgets. Instead of the siloed email
option, the conversations can occur real time and in a transparent format.  While this open exchange can occur in a
wiki, it is more difficult to set up and does not operate in real time.

In
another example, document co-creation becomes simpler. It operates real time
like Google Wave. The comments and brainstorming can be easily incorporated on
a character by character basis. Collaborative meeting notes can operate in the
same manner.

A
suggestion system in Pulse allows users to recommend people and groups. There
are also customizable personal and group profiles with added fields, sections, tables
of content and gadgets. You can visit profiles to connect with other users or
groups that a person is following or who are following that user or group.

Novell
Pulse integrates with both Novell Teaming (see
Novell Teaming 2 Brings a Richer Collaboration Feature Set) and Novell
GroupWise (see
Novell GroupWise
8 Brings Enterprise 2.0 Capability to Personal Productivity Functions
). It is
currently being used by over 4,000 customers in a pre-beta format.  Pulse is planned for a release later
this year. I think it brings a number of innovations to enterprise
collaboration and look forward to its release.

 

Summary of My Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

Posted in Enterprise 2.0, meetings on June 25th, 2010 by Bill Ives – Comments Off

I did a series of
ten posts covering sessions at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference. It remains
one of my favorite events in this space and is an especially good venue to meet
many of the people I often only encounter on a virtual basis. This is the
fourth year that I have participated and it is becoming like a reunion.  Here are the posts.

Selling the Case for Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise
Collaboration Technologies: Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

Enterprise 2.0 Black Belt Workshop – Afternoon Part One – Enterprise 2.0
Conference Notes

Enterprise 2.0 Black Belt Workshop – Afternoon Part Two – Enterprise 2.0
Conference Notes

The State of Enterprise 2.0 – My Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

Microsharing: It is All About the Tools. It is Not About the Tools – My Notes from Enterprise 2.0 Boston Conference

Are CIOs Ready to Bite? – My Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

Social Behavior, Usage Patterns, and Adoption: My Enterprise 2.0
Conference Note
s

Enterprise 2.0 Value Propositions: My Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

Using Chaos Theory Principals to Overcome Information Overload within the
Enterprise and on the Web – Part One: My Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

Using Chaos Theory Principals to Overcome Information Overload within the
Enterprise and on the Web – Part Two: My Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes