Here are my
AppGap posts for August. I am also writing in another Corante blog, FastForward
(see right side bar for links), The AppGap posts began toward the end of
January 2008.  Here, I am primarily
doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the
ones for August. There will be more in September.

All the tired horses in the sun
How’m I supposed to get any ridin’ done? Hmm.
- ALL THE TIRED HORSES

Where there is smoke, there is fire. In this case, it’ll be a shitstorm of a fire that’ll consume everything useful in it’s path. A bit like a Scorched Earth Campaign of Content Management.

Of course I’m talking about the Autonomy/Open Text speculation here (@hakana), here (@ldallasBMOC) and here (@piewords). In truth, the few rumours are, according to the crowds, highly unlikely to have any substance so this whole post is a waste of time. Apart from photos of CEOs in bed with hookers, no-one in Twitterville can produce a single good reason for it that I can swallow. But if this post even slightly reduces the miniscule chance of this joke of a deal materialising, it’s time well spent.

The whole is less than the sum of the parts

Onward. It’s pretty clear there is no way that this deal could make a new sale more likely. The number of different CMS and search products The Firm would have warrants the invention of a new Collective Noun. How about a Gaggle of Products? Or Confusion of Products. Or Mindfuck of Products? Should some poor customer go through a vendor selection exercise and pick Opentonomytext, they’d need to go through another one to pick the product. Ain’t gonna happen.

And the poor existing customers. Following the Open Text/Vignette deal, many poor customers are still wondering whether or when their product will be discontinued. They’re playing Russian Roulette with about 2 bullets in the chamber. If this deal happens, they’ll have about 4 bullets. Some will jump ship, so the whole idea of creating a maintenance revenue cash cow doesn’t make sense either. In simple maths terms: (Autonomy Maintenance 2011) + (Open Text Maintenance 2011) < (Opentonomytext Maintenance 2011).

Spare a thought for the search engineers at Vignette. They OEM’ed Autonomy as their search for years. “Best of Breed”, they all cried. Then arch-rival Interwoven was aquired by Autonomy. “We’re not paying our arch rival cash every time we sell a product”, they  cried. “Autonomy is a piece of shit. Let’s embed the Open Text search engine.” So they did. Hopefully they didn’t delete the code, cause they may be flipping it back pretty soon.

And spare a thought for yours truly. I’ve pushed my MS Paint skills to the limit creating the Super Spliced Open Text Logo. I think the only way I could make a logo for the new beast is on a Möbius strip, and I don’t have any lying around.

Now I’m not saying that the road ahead for either company is paved with gold. But they’ve both got some good products, some great people and a fair bit of cash. If they roll up their sleeves and innovate, they might just be okay. If they keep playing Pass The Parcel with products that develop more slowly than tectonic plates, they’re toast. Wait! Hold on a second! What’s that putrid smell? Oh, look, it’s an an elephant graveyard. And elephants don’t make good software. Especially dead ones.

P.S. Remember, this isn’t actually going to happen. Surely. They’re gonna buy someone else. Answers on a postcard.

I have been
writing a bit about the convergence of TV and the Web (for example, see Will
Google Succeed with TV Where Apple and Microsoft Have Fallen Short?). One of the remaining questions remains: will the Web TV convergence
lean to the TV side to the Web side? 
According to New TeeVee, while Google is planning to have its integrated
TV and web offering available on Sony TVs and Blu-ray players, as well as Logitech
set-top boxes, in stores by the holidays. However, TiVo says you can already
get similar functionality on its existing products and this has been able to do
so for years. TIVO claims it revolutionized television by creating the DVR, and
later, added search functionality to make it easier to find the content that
users wanted to watch, long before others offered this capability.

I plan to attend this the Enterprise Search Summit this November in Washington DC. I was at the last one in NYC in May and the one before in Santa Clara in November 2009. It is a great conference and I look forward to the next one. This session will meet at the same time and place as KM World 2010, just as did last year in November. I will be moderating a day's set of sessions at KM World and writing about both conferences. 

My Darwin colleague Thierry Hubert and I also enjoyed the May 11 – 12 Enterprise Search Summit held in New York. We presented on presented a session, Deriving Order From Chaos Through Discovery and Awareness.  Here is a series of posts that covered some of the points we made in the session (Rising Above the Over Quantification of Content). Here also is a summary of my Enterprise Search Summit 2010 notes on other sessions I attended. 

The organizers at Enterprise Search Summit have give me a $200 discount to pass on to you. Use this link to sign up. Hope to see you there. 

I read an interesting interview recently. Steve
Rubel is senior VP-director of insights at Edelman Digital discussed the convergence
of search and social media. He makes a nice
distinction between the two. “Search is an intent-driven medium, where users seek out what they want.
Social networking is where the content finds you through the lens of friends.
Those two are separate, but I think we'll see a real convergence here where
search will get a lot more social and social will get a lot more searchy.”

You
can now search your friend’s content. For example, with Google you can bring in
the results from your social connections via the Google address book. At the
same time you can go into Facebook and search your friends' content.  As a result Steve predicts that push
and pull will merge. We will become more media-agnostic through an aggregator
like Google News, along with a social stream, where we go in and out.

I like this prediction as the Darwin Awareness Engine (TM) can serve the same
aggregation function as Google News but with more robust features. The
Awareness Engine allows you to spot trends through a combination of content,
including your friends’ content or their content choices.  It will be interesting to see where
this goes. 

Some of the most enjoyable Drupal moments for me was the time I spent in 2009  testing Acquia’s Search for Drupal. Acquia Search is a plug-and-play service within the Acquia Network, built on Apache Solr and available for any Drupal 6 site.

I think Acquia Search is probably one of the most significant services provided on the Acquia Network and the feature that will continue to attract businesses to not only Acquia but also Drupal. So although I’m no longer on the Acquia network, I’m pleased to hear that new features have been added to this Apache Solr implementation.

Some of the more significant features being added to Acquia Search include:

• Attachment Indexing – Utilizing the Apache Solr Attachment module you can now search the text in document files such as PDF and Word documents. This is big! Even cooler, those documents can searched locally or remotely.
• Multi-site Searches – Search multiple Drupal sites at once.
• Update to Solr 1.4.1 which fixes a number of bugs.
• Wildcard Searches

read more

It really does not matter what you are trying to achieve; whether implementing content management, search, portal or something “social”, the project is certain to face internal organizational challenges along the way and will require a level of organizational maturity in order to avoid complete failure. How do you figure out whether your organization is indeed ready for that big web technology initiative you are dreaming of?

Unfortunately the chosen route often turns out to be a “dead end”. Don’t expect any digital agency or other type of vendor to tell you that you are not ready to buy their solutions. Many buyers start the conversation with their vendors much too early in the process, naïvely hoping for some honest feedback. What normally happens is that the vendor challenges the buyer to define their functional requirements, while important aspects such as governance and organizational readiness are left unchecked.

If you suspect that your current agency is milking you for what you are worth, you may just be right. In fact, considering the scenarios at some of our members, I’ve sometimes thought that any other vendor or any other system would be a dramatic improvement on the status quo. Actually making the change is the difficult part.

If you are able to make the decision and change things on your own, then you belong to a tiny minority of online professionals. Most have to liaise with managers, other departments and a group of critical stakeholders often not placed in the same location. Moreover, getting the permission to go ahead with a vendor evaluation process is really only the initial and easy part of the project. The implementation is much more cumbersome and risky.

In my experience, typical indicators of organizational readiness include:

• a sizeable team of experienced online professionals, including at least one knowledgeable manager, ideally with strong project management skills
• a clear strategy for your online activities with success criteria and a clear vision
• a governance model that enables you to make decisions, including how to allocate resources, set priorities, definition of roles and responsibilities
• a few failed projects under the belt with organisational learning on how to prevent it from happening in future projects

Digital projects hardly ever come in on time and on budget. Add to that the factor that if the organisation is not ready for the change, a new technology or a new vendor could actually turn out to be a competitive disadvantage.

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.

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 “Booz 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.  

 I was very pleased to see the coverage
of the Darwin Awareness Engine™ in KM World Magazine in their breaking news
section under a piece titled, Real-time
awareness. It said that “Darwin Ecosystem believes this
organic and self-organizing model is best adapted to the evolution of today’s
Web when compared with the increasing limitation of page ranking offered by
search engines. Although not a replacement for search engines, Darwin’s
Awareness Engine highlights a new and missing perspective.”

It also mentioned that “The
Darwin interface provides an intuitive, interactive ScanCloud (patent pending)
that reveals correlated themes for contextual content filtering around users’
topics of interest, a BuzzTape that displays themes that have high content
acceleration within the last 24 hours, and the ability to save attractors (a
term used in chaos theory) to monitor the evolution of favorite topics.
Darwin's Awareness Engine can be viewed in action here.”

There is more and we encourage
you to go to the enterprise article. This coverage is much appreciated. I am a
subscriber to KM World Magazine and have also enjoyed its content so we
consider this mention an honor. 

The battle to find the right piece of content at the right moment is a never ending quest for the knowledge worker.

Calling all cars…

While most companies have organized their various internal content stores and many have contracted for authoritative external content from sources such as Factiva and LexisNexis, this is only half the battle.

All of this progress notwithstanding, a knowledge worker often has to search through multiple systems to find exactly what he is looking for.  Frequently, he may not end up with the best and most up-to-date content because the individual searches produced results different from those an aggregated search would have presented.

Comintelli, a Swedish company founded in 1999, addresses this challenge with its Knowledge XChanger offering.  The solution aggregates content from both internal and external sources and then classifies, organizes, and presents relevant items to knowledge workers.  The content is packaged and delivered to work groups in a role-based and customized format so that only the most relevant information is presented.  Additionally, users select topics and enter search terms to further drill down on an area and refine the result set.

Knowledge XChanger allows knowledge workers to publish information through an easy-to-use browser-based interface or via e-mail.  In addition, the system supports commenting, voting, and chat around content.

Users can personalize how they receive information by using automatic e-mail alerts and/or via a customized start page.

When the user does perform a search, he is tapping into content that has been drawn from vetted and authoritative sources, which could include internal sites or select external sources such as news sites as well as from content providers such as Factiva.

A particularly valuable feature in Knowledge XChanger is the ability to find experts on a given topic.  The system uses Knowledge Points, a customizable feature that assigns points to users based on activities, to determine expertise.  For instance, a user may receive points for every time he reads an article, searches on a term, or comments on content.  Users can search for individuals who have expertise in a given area.

Tools such as Knowledge XChanger are key components on the road to the development of true Collaborative Business Environments.  In addition, by aggregating and delivering timely and relevant role-based content to the knowledge worker, the system tackles several aspects of Information Overload relating to search and information management.

Finally, by supporting expertise location with the system’s ability to associate individuals in an organization with topics they have knowledge and interest, Comintelli has taken a big step in improving knowledge sharing and collaboration by connecting knowledge workers to each other and jump-starting the collaboration process.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.