This is the reminder that September 3rd is the last day to sign up for the User Conference.

The Plone community has raised the bar on their flagship content management system with the release of Plone 4. With the unveiling and release announcement of Plone 4, this is proving a busy week for fans of this CMS that runs on the Python-based Zope application server.

“Plone 4 is much faster, requires less memory, and performs well even when serving up massive files. “, says Plone co-founder and Firefox User Experience Lead Alexander Limi. “They [Plone users and developers] also didn’t want us to sacrifice what we do well to get there — and we haven’t. Plone 4 is not just more powerful — it continues to improve in areas Plone has always been known for: usability, security, and a CMS that is easy to install, upgrade, and looks great right out of the box.”

Some of the significant changes and improvements in Plone 4 include:

• Notable performance improvements
• New theme
• Search and indexing improvements
• Group Dashboards for a Customized User Experience
• Massively improved handling of large files & media
• New, faster folder implementation
• Improved management of users and groups
• Dynamic forms framework based on jQuery Tools
• Improved first-run experience
• Smooth upgrade experience
• Reduced memory footprint
• Upgraded infrastructure

Interestingly, the announcements and even the Plone 4 download page discuss the “under the hood” improvements available in the CMS in preparation for Plone 5. That’s right, they’re already talking about Plone’s future with Plone 5.

For addttional details about the Plone CMS be sure to visit Plone.org.

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 Here is an interesting concept that is well articulated in a new book, The Learning Layer by Steven
Flinn.  Recently, I had an opportunity to
speak with Steve about this marriage of aspects of Web 2.0 and artificial
intelligence (aka adaptive systems) that can have useful applications within
the enterprise.

Steve is the CEO of ManyWorlds,
a firm that conducts R&D in the area of next generation systems
and business processes and provides practical applications of this work to
organizations. He was an executive at Royal Dutch Shell where he held  a variety of positions including Chief
Information Officer and Vice President of Strategy and Strategic Alliances.
Steve has a background in economics, mathematics and computer science.

Steve noted that use of personalized responses
based on user behavior has been pervasive on the consumer Web through such
things as Amazon’s recommendations. 
However, this technology has been applied much less within the
enterprise.  He feels that this is
ironic since behavioral information available within the enterprise  can generally be much richer than out on
the Web. You have a more clearly defined set of users and many more
interactions to data mine, along with more related teams who collaborate and
generate more behavioral data.  I
would certainly agree with the difference in the quality of information on user
behavior and also add that many Web 2.0 applications such as wikis work better
within the trusted environment of the enterprise. This seems to be another
case.

The Learning Layer approach takes this
personalization several steps further. Not only are personalized
recommendations provided to individual users based on their behavior and the
behavior of others, but the system feeds these recommendations back to itself
to continuously adapt on an automated basis. Steve said that the technology is
currently available to do this, it just needs to be properly applied.

For example, a system managing content might make
recommendations for related content based on a user’s profile and actions.  Using the Learning Layer approach, it
would also keep track of all user behavior and feed this back into the system
on a regular basis. The relationship between two sets of content may become
stronger or weaker depending how it is currently being used.  The same logic can be applied to the
connections between people to see the ebb and flow of connections.

The approach can be applied to work flow and here
it gets even more interesting in my opinion. Just as old school knowledge
management created more direct business value when aligned to business
processes, I see the same thing happening here.  Let’s take the example of a property casualty insurance
underwriter. After the system takes in enough actions to be able to
differentiate the skill level of users, it is ready to go.

Now if an underwriter with no experience in
underwriting laundry mats, for example, starts to work on one the system
recognizes this. It also knows the steps that an inexperienced underwriter
should take when working with laundry mats and provides these process steps. It
can also recommend a person who is slightly more advanced than the user who can
offer guidance. If the user has middle level experience, then the process steps
can be tailored to that level. In the meanwhile the system is observing the
ongoing user behavior on an aggregated basis and making adjustments in the
proper process steps for everyone at all levels.

The technology is around to create this type of
system. I can see the value and wish I had this capability when I designed
knowledge management systems for underwriters in the early 90s.  Call centers that deal with complex
topics would be another great target area. You need to have enough complexity
to warrant this type of intervention and then enough users to generate useful
data for the system to apply.

We also discussed the concept of learning value
that Steve raises in the book. He took the concept of value of information from
decision analysis and applied it to learning. In decision analysis people
calculate the value of having certain information to help with decisions. The
same concept can be applied to learning. 
When undertaking an activity there is the direct value and the value of
the learning derived from the undertaking. This often translates into the
amount of uncertainty that can be eliminated by the new knowledge and its
effect on actions. Steve noted that learning only has real value if it changes
behavior (i.e., decisions).  If
people will still do the same thing regardless then nothing is gained. That
sounds simple but it is often overlooked.

I like this approach. I think it does extend the
possibilities of enterprise 2.0. If we can create data rich environments
through the transparent interactions within enterprise 2.0 then we have
expanded the learning opportunities. Then if we can use this expanded learning
to better guide individual behavior we have taken it a notch further. Now if we
can turn this learning back on the system to auto-generate changes within the
system itself, we have taken things another step further.  I think the data gained from the
transparency of enterprise 2.0 is a large piece of the value. Here is an
approach to make better use of this transparency.  

The joint is jumpin’
It’s really somethin’
The beat is pumpin’
My heart is thumpin’
Spent my money on you honey
- HAD A DREAM ABOUT YOU, BABY

It’s pretty addictive watching your blog stats, isn’t it? Remember when Google Analytics came to town and instead of waiting days to see traffic reports, you could see updates in mere hours. On a good day, you could sometimes see things in 15 minutes. Well, GA, there is a new new kid on the block, he shows you data in real time, and his name is chartbeat.

I’d never heard of it until last week when I was lucky enough to meet the cool folk at betaworks (@Borthwick and @aweissman). These guys don’t mess around – they’re behind such social media hits as TweetDeck, bit.ly and twitterfeed. You heard it here first – chartbeat is going to be big.

It’s really easy to get started – you just stick a couple of JavaScript tags onto all your pages a.l.a. Google Analytics, and you are done. The reports you get are much simpler than those from GA, but it is really real time. You can see the visitors on your site within a couple of seconds of their arrival. I wrote a test link bait post (sorry), tweeted it, and saw my 17 concurrent visitors within seconds.

Visitors to your site in real time. Notice one person is writing a comment. Click for large image.

But there is more. GA simply registers a hit when a page is loaded. chartbeat has a heartbeat and chats to the server every couple of seconds. This means that it can more accurately measure time spent on the site, user actions like scrolling (giving a nice scroll depth metric), and even keypresses. In the screenshot above, you’ll see one person is writing – they were leaving a comment at the time.

Typical detail page. Gotta love the scroll depth and engagement indicators

It also comes with a nice preintegration with backtype. This searches the social media buzz of the interwebs and reports activity as part of your report. When @izahoor, @theg, @irina_guseva, @cmsreport and @kevinc2003 were kind enough to retweet my horseshit blog post, I saw my dashboard get a bit busier and saw their link love appear shortly afterwards in the backtype console. Good stuff.

Nice integration with backtype. Click for large image.

It has an API and a bucket of prebuilt widgets. I haven’t had time to play with these, but I might add a widget here soon. The downside being, of course, it would pretty much always say “1 user currently viewing this page”. And that would be you.

It gets better. chartbeat even monitors the health of your site. While I was testing, my dickhead hosting company GoDaddy had yet another embolism, and my site flatlined for about 5 minutes. But unlike the previous million times this happened, it didn’t die silenty. I got a nice email from chartbeat informing me of the tragedy. Also, it tells you how long a page took to load for each user. 20 seconds isn’t great, GoDaddy. And yes, it has a free iPhone app too.

Because I’m a social media guru who understands transparancy and douchebaggery, I’ve shared my wonderful stats with the world. So have a look at my chartbeat dashboard.

You do have to pay a small fee for all this goodness, but it is money well spent. Buy it. Finally, a huge nod to @arctictony for helping me out.

There is a new version of mojoPortal out and about. Version 2.3.5.1 of mojoPortal offers some new features and improvements including:

• A new jQuery UI Skin – Read Joe Audette’s blog post for more details on this new feature.
• Feature Setting Groups – By adding groups, one can organize the settings into logical groups that make it much easier for the user to digest because they can view one group at a time.
• User access control by roles
• Upgrades for rich text editors TinyMCE abd CKeditor
• Upgraded to the latest MySql Connector
• Updated Italian and German resources
• The Extra Skins download file has a new skin

Additional details about the new features and bug fixes for mojoPortal 2.3.5.1 can be found in the official release announcement at mojoPortal.com.

There are a number of ways
to monitor the web to see what and how you and others are doing. Many of these require more configuration
than the average business user is willing to engage in.  Workstreamer is designed to address the
need of users such as sales and customer service reps, supply chain managers,
and others who what to easily track what is occurring and what is being said on
the Web about specific companies.

I recently spoke with Hank Weghorst,
Co-Founder and CEO and Suaad Sait, Co-Founder, about their offering. It is
described as a "real-time business listening platform"
that allows you to stop searching and start listening. They automate the
listening function for tracking business information, not just social mentions
of your brand.  So it brings in data from blogs, tweets, social networks
like LinkedIn, contact directories like Jigsaw, finance sites, CRM services
like Salesforce, and more. The results are presented in a stream of findings
that can be expanded to drill down on specific companies. You can see a sample
screen below.

Looking at the screen above from left to right you
first see the user and the companies they are following.  Then you see the feed of detail as
around each company. The waving line shows the varying amount of buzz. The
numbers indicate the change in mentions from the day before. Then the company
details are offered with icons linking to such sources as Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, LinkedIn, Jigsaw (the business card site). The next column provides
what they call the tone cloud. It is a tag cloud like visualization that shows
the key themes emerging for each company and allows you to drill down to the
specific mentions.

In the far right column you can see the other team
members. Workstreamer allows the formation of groups to share information. They
start with others in the same domain but then others can be added.  This team feature comes in handy as you
can comment on results and these comments are shared with team members. For
example, a sales manager can point out the significance of news items to the
rest of the team or ask someone to follow up on a change within a client.  You can see a comment in the screen
below

One of the things I especially liked was the
capability of expanding the results through specific visualizations. For
example, the numbers of job openings over time is presented in a line
graph.  Details on executives from
Jigsaw are displayed in a table. Each visualization is specific to the type of
data covered. Below you can see a graph of job posting by a company in the midst of the stream of other news items. 

It is very easy to start tracking a company.
Workstreamer has already added over million companies into their database and
they continue to add more. So if you type in a name, they offer you instances
to choose from. If the name is not in their database yet you can still start
tracking it. I gave them the name of a very small local company and they came
up with it instantly.  The goal is
a one-click start and this appears very possible. 

Workstreamer does a lot of filtering for business
relevance so you are not overwhelmed by useless information. You can also
select to narrow results to specific content types such as news sites or social
media.  In addition, you can
connect Workstreamer to your LinkedIn and Salesforce.com accounts. They provide
nightly email summaries of the top news in the firms you are tracking.

The current version of
Workstreamer is free. They plan to remain free through 2010 to build awareness.
The free version will always be available and always retain its features. In
2011 they plan to offer a fee-based premium version with additional features.
For what I have seen the free version is quite robust and useful.  I am very impressed with both the ease
of use and the usefulness of the data visualizations. I plan to give it a try
myself. 

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.

 
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.

 
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.

 
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. 

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 integrates 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.

CubeTree 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.

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

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. 

If you’ve been on the fence about registering for the Cascade Server User Conference, take a look at the top five benefits of joining us in Atlanta, GA on September 13 – 14.

The highly-anticipated 2010 Cascade Server User Conference schedule is now available on our site.