A week ago, I wrote an article for CMS Wire on The Long Hill for Enterprise Collaboration.  Normally I put an announcement at the top of my blog sharing the link, but I wanted to write this post, and I’ve just been a tad busy…

You should read the article before proceeding much further.  In the article, I talk about the challenges facing the adoption of collaboration tools, an important one being the desire to perform one activity in one interface.  Email is a classic example because, for all its faults, you can collaborate with anyone with an email address.  People will tend to stick with one tool and not keep switching unless they are the “stopper” that is always on a mission to convert people to the good of collaboration platforms.

Well, this scenario is something I have seen quite a bit.  There is one example that really drives home the need to get people not just out of email, but to get everyone into something that can transfer collaborative data between systems just like email is transferred using SMTP today.  That example….me.

Pie Said What?

That is correct, I am a violator.  I am not always compliant.  I have been implementing collaboration solutions for a long time.  I almost always play the role of a stopper in any organization or project that I join.  In the last six months, I’ve noticed something….

I’m spending more time collaborating in email than ever before.

I am working more with people outside my organization than I ever have in the past.  Doing a lot of work in the Federal market, my company is frequently teaming with other companies, and not always the same ones.  For each effort, we have to find different ways to share content and track actions.  Rather than supply the collaboration solution for everyone, we tend to use email.  Why? Simple, our partners use it as well.

It doesn’t stop there though.  I have also been working with people at AIIM and vendor companies on CMIS efforts.  More users and more reasons to collaborate, but still no single system.  Once again, we all use email, so that is where we work.

Doing all of this in email, I have found myself collaborating with colleagues on purely internal efforts via email.  I’m just cruising along in my workday, and before I know it, I’ve sent documents via email rather than sending an alert or a link to a document in an email.

I’m regressing!!!!!

What Can Be Done?

Well, like any good American, I’m going to blame someone else for my problem.  There are two solutions which would solve the problem:

• Universal Collaboration: So we need an incredible, kickin’, collaborative platform with no storage or user limits that is online an free to everyone.  Let’s not forget security because I want to collaborate in one place on all my efforts, not just the public ones.
• Universal Communication: Bad name, I know, but the point is simple.  If my collaborative artifacts could be sent to anyone for interaction the way I send email, but they do their work in their collaborative environment and I am staying in mine, that would be great!

I think it is pretty safe to say that the first will not happen in the foreseeable future.  The second sounds like a lot of work.  Well, the efforts we expend to push Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 adoption is a lot of work as well.

Fun fact, one old, and lovely feature of eRoom is the ability to email content to a room.  That was a first step in the right direction.  If collaborative packages could just be emailed between systems in a standard format, that might solve all the problems.

There is no easy path.  Maybe instead of trying to get over the hurdles by creating new features, selling, and evangelizing, maybe we should make the tools the obvious in-process tools.

But why solve it?  There is a lot of money to be made telling people how great the software is now.

Elgg 1.7.2 was released this week and it is primarily a bugfix release. I usually don’t post stories about web application releases that add no new features but felt inclined to do so this morning. Elgg is one of those social media applications that I’ve always wanted to use for a project but never got around to using. If I can’t find the right project to need Elgg then at least I can talk about it and keep it in my thoughts.

Some of the more significant bug fixes in this release include:

• Saving drafts and previewing blogs works as expected.
• Page titles can now be edited in the Pages plugin.
• Group names no long show up in Friends Collections.
• Added a group member listing page.
• Group forum topics can be edited.
• User data for usernames with UTF8 characters are correctly migrated to the new data scheme.

See Brett Profitt’s post for additional details about Elgg 1.7.2.

The vendor famous for bringing us PDF-files, Adobe Systems, announced their intention to acquire CMS-vendor Day Software last week. Day had been rumoured as an acquisition candidate for a while, but not by Adobe. The acquisition is expected to close in December and with the unanimous support of the Board of Directors of Day, this looks like a done deal.

As usual when this happens, the vendor to be acquired is very optimistic about the future prospects. To quote from a message to Day Software customer and partners:

this will serve as a new catalyst for Day to accelerate our investment in product innovation, our customer community, and our global ecosystem of channel and technology partners

The Day management team is understandably in a happy mood, but when it comes to product improvements, Day really has a case to prove over the coming months. Most in our community did not see this as good news for the product or for the standards that Day has been championing. I’ve been talking to customers in the past weeks and here is our take on what the acquisition could mean to customers:

• Until the deal has been closed, Day will continue to operate as a separate company with its own partner and customer community
• Product updates are likely to be delayed: Day is known for letting itself distract by such things as open source and standard involvements with less focus on delivering a solid and easy-to-use product. It will now inevitably be seriously distracted for a while, whilst getting to know the ins and outs of the new owner and whilst trying to teach a large sales force how to work enterprise web content management deals.
• Don’t expect CQ5, Day’s main product, to receive much attention inside Adobe. To put things in perspective,  Day is a very small fish indeed next to the whale that is Adobe. Adobe has 8,600 employees compared to Day’s less than 150. Compared to previous acquisitions by Adobe, e.g. Macromedia (1,400 employees) and Omniture (>1,000 employees), this is quite a small deal.
• No overlap with existing Adobe products. Quite unlike recent industry acquisitions, e.g. when Open Text bought Vignette or when Oracle bought Sun, there seems to be no product overlap. As part of the expected integration of the two companies, Day will operate as a product line within Adobe’s Digital Enterprise Solutions Business Unit
• Adobe emphasised integrating proprietary technologies such as Air and Flash in the acquisition announcement and did not mention anything about Day’s work on standards. This was quite worrying to several Day customers.
• CQ5 moving down in the market. At the moment CQ5 is overkill for anything but complex and global websites. Expect that to change when Adobe begins to put its engineering footprint on the product.

What should you do as a customer?

1. Use the change and added uncertainty to get discounted rates or freebies. Day has an expensive product but is known to be flexible on licensing models
2. Keep reminding your Day Software contacts of your existance, while they are busy closing the deal. Expect some new faces in 2011 as the organisational integration kicks in and as always make sure you get an experienced team on your project.
3. Prepare to listen to some funny stories from the competitors. Usually some use an opportunity like this to spread some good old FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). Fellow Swiss-vendor Magnolia have already started this with a public blog: Day to be acquired by Adobe – implications?

More detailed and interesting coverage of the deal:

• CMS Wire: Perspectives: What the Adobe + Day Software Deal Means, Part 1
• ComputerworldUK: Will Adobe See the Light (of Day)?
• Jon Marks: A Fine Day For Adobe
• mwd advisors: Adobe acquires Day Software to flesh out enterprise portfolio
• Real Story Group: ECM Perspective and DAM Perspective

and finally for extra credits read: In defence of PDF, an interesting perspective from a new Day employee saying that “Day has a strong prejudice in favor of HTML as the one true and proper Web format for documents”.

This past weekend, I returned from a two week camping vacation in the mountains of Colorado. During those two weeks of little Internet connection…a lot of good content management stories came my way via email but were not posted here at CMS Report. I’ve decided to go through my mailbag this week and post some of the better stories that were missed in my absence.

A couple weeks ago, Stefane Fermigier sent us an email regarding the release of Nuxeo EP and DM 5.3.2, an ECM Platform and Document Management application. Stefane writes:

I’m very happy to announce that we have released Nuxeo EP and DM 5.3.2 today.

The release notes are here:

http://blogs.nuxeo.com/dev/2010/07/nuxeo-dm-532-is-available.html

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release, which I believe is the strongest we’ve done so far, and also the one that took the less effort to create thanks to the build and QA process we’ve put in place in the last year.

We have other new releases coming up in the following days: Nuxeo DAM 1.1 and Nuxeo CMF, and the next release of Nuxeo DM will be Nuxeo DM 5.4, scheduled around October this year.

Remember also that we have the Nuxeo World conference in November: http://www.nuxeo.com/about/events/nuxeoworld2010

Meanwhile, I hope you will enjoy using Nuxeo DM 5.3.2. We’ve upgraded our intranet to use this version (over 5.3.1) in the final days of testing the new release, and I can tell you it is noticeably snappier and overall more pleasant to use than the 5.3.1.

You can find additional details of this new version of Nuxeo on Stefane’s blog. I’ve also embedded a video on what’s new in Nuxeo DM 5.3 below.

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I spent time last week at the UPenn Wharton UI Conference 2010 in Philadelphia, where I was treated to a session that was music to my ears.

“Your CMS is Not a Toaster,” led by Jen Yuan, an IT communications analyst in Penn’s IS and computing department, hit the nail on the head: CMS is NOT the greatest thing since sliced bread. It’s a tool to help you achieve your website goals. Nothing more, nothing less.

There was a lot to take in from her session (more in a later post) but it was her research into CMS systems currently being used on campus that really made my eyes pop out.

A few months ago, Yuan conducted a survey targeting anyone who manages CMS or CMS-like systems on campus. In all, 64 people responded. The slate of questions included one asking which CMS a given group or department was using.

Care to guess how many CMS systems are in play at Penn? Five? Ten? Go higher.

Yuan’s survey identified approximately 20 (yes 20) CMS or CMS-like systems in play at Penn. The leader by far: open-source Drupal, being used by at least 14 separate departments or groups on campus, followed closely by “custom systems” (eight) and Joomla (seven).

And, old friend WordPress was cited six times by respondents, recalling for me the debate we sparked here at the Myth a few months back with our post, “Is WordPress a CMS?”  But I digress.

Rounding out the remainder of the systems consisted of a who’s who of systems and tools: Adobe Contribute, Documentum eRoom, Open Text/Red Dot CMS, Expression Engine, DotNetNuke, Sharepoint, PaperThin CommonSpot … the list goes on.

Granted, Penn’s like any other large, decentralized university operating with many, many fiefdoms that don’t easily roll up into a central web authority. But it would seem a natural to try to rationalize at least some of the systems in an attempt to standardize, save on costs, reduce the range of programming expertise required, and so on. I know – easier said than done.

It begs the question: How many CMS (or CMS-like) systems are in play at your organization? And, what are you going to do about it?

Related posts:

1. Is WordPress a CMS?
2. What Ben Franklin Can Teach Us About Web CMS
3. Does it Matter Which CMS Product You Choose?

A recap of our company happenings this week.

How we, as knowledge workers, spend our day is something that we ourselves tend to not fully understand. 

Dilbert is currently busy…

Our impressions of what we have done in the course of a day are frequently far different than what really took place.  Dilbert famously noted that “Mondays are not part of the productive work week” and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

To find out a bit more about how we work, we’ve launched a brief survey that asks you to look at your most recent full day at work and answer a few questions.

Please click here to take the survey.

Participants will receive an Executive Summary of the survey’s findings and can also enter a drawing to win a set of Dilbert CubeGuard information overload blockers (three sets will be awarded).  After you complete the survey, please share the survey link with colleagues or in forums where knowledge workers congregate; the more people participating in the survey, the better we will be able to take the first steps to increasing our own productivity.

David M. Goldes is the president of Basex.

In case you haven’t heard, WordPress 3.0 was released last week. This is probably the first time I’ve been behind in blogging about the official release of a new major version of WordPress. However, since I told you all about WordPress 3.0 coming soon a couple weeks ago, I felt there wasn’t a need to rush and tell you to go get WordPress 3.0 and try out all it’s new features including taxonomy and multiuser integration. Instead, I spent this past week seeing how others reacted to WordPress 3.0.

As a fan of open source content management systems, its been rather pleasing to see some of the larger technology publications spend more time talking about applications like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. For the tech press, WordPress 3.0 was no exception with some of the major players such as Computerworld, PCWorld, and TechCrunch all making sure they spin out an article reviewing this latest version of WordPress.

What may surprise you though, is that open source CMS is just not an interest of computer geeks. Slowly but surely, open source CMS is the talk of business folks too. For example, both Fast Company and BusinessWeek made sure that they included articles this past week on WordPress 3.0. In the Fast Company article, Francine Hardaway writes some classic things to why business should pay attention to WordPress. Some of my favorite lines from her article, “6 Reasons Small Businesses need WordPress“:

• “WordPress can do anything you need it to do, and for a small business, that’s a gift usually reserved for expensive sites.”
• “Plug-ins for WordPress are the business-to-business version of apps for the iPhone.”
• “WordPress no longer looks like a blog. For small businesses who wouldn’t know a blog from a bag of potato chips, WordPress is a website, otherwise known as a content management system.”

These are all some fantastic words from Hardaway and I think they show that applications such as WordPress are making a significant impact in the business world. I wouldn’t call WordPress an ECM, but it most definately walks and talks like a CMS for the small business folks. If you haven’t taken a look at WordPress in quite awhile, I’d encourage you to take a new look at this application.

Below is the summary video from the WordPress folks introducing you to WordPress 3.0. Enjoy.

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There was some talk during the Enterprise 2.0 Conference last week that Social Networking was having a negative impact on our relationships.  This idea was put forward by Alcatel-Lucent’s Kathleen Culver during her session (#e2onf-25), but not everyone bought into the concept.

I for one agree with the observation. What I feel we are seeing is the flattening of our overall relationship depth.  To explain this, let me talk about the positive impact upon relationships first.

My Social Network Gains

My use of social networks is divided up into two groups, professional and social.  I know that this is not necessarily the norm.  That said, I have seen the tools that I use overall fall into two categories, regardless of focus:

1. Network Mapping: This is LinkedIn (professional) and Facebook (personal).  If I know someone well enough, I link to them.  Essentially, the tie has to already exist. Obviously there is more that can be done with these tools, but we’ll hold off on that.
2. Idea Sharing: This is Twitter and my blog, both professional in nature. I share ideas, both short and long, and over time the audience has grown.  This growth has been through connecting and sharing other ideas.  The connections are to mostly “new” ties.

LinkedIn, by itself, has not significantly grown my network.  It has just helped me keep track of my professional network.  LinkedIn’s capabilities have grown over the years, but my usage has not to a large degree.

As for Twitter/blogging, as of right now, I have about 900 people following me on Twitter and I am following about 200.  I’d guess that there are at least 10-20 people that I have met that I could readily reach out to and have a drink with if I was passing through their town.  A small handful of them might be upset if I didn’t reach out if I was passing through their neck of the woods

This is purely counting people that I wouldn’t otherwise know, not those that I’ve met through real life that I’ve connected to online after meeting in real life.

Overall, a net gain.  Let’s look at Facebook…

Weakening my Strong Ties

On Facebook, I have about 150 friends.  Most of them I knew before I joined Facebook, and a vast majority I met in real life first.  They include family members, my best man, and my closest friends from high school.

The people that I listed are people that I kept in touch with before Facebook.  There are many that I have resumed contact with since joining.  Typically we exchange a few messages and maybe meet-up once.  After establishing a ne “baseline”, we track each other through Facebook, exchange comments, and move on with our lives.

Let’s look at the close friends.  We would regularly call each other, go out of our way to catch-up over drinks, and generally interact as much as our lives and the distance would allow.

Now, we mostly track each other through Facebook.  We feel we know what is going on in each other’s lives.  The urge/need to reach out over the phone isn’t as pressing.  This seems good because I spend so much more time online, so it helps save time.  Aside from maybe commenting on their statuses more than average, I interact with them online as much as most others on Facebook.

My strong relationships seem to be becoming weaker.  My interactions with my close friends are, on average, more superficial than they where before Facebook.

My friendships seem to be moving towards the mean.

Is this Good?

Let’s quickly sum-up:

• Lots of new ties professionally.
• Average strength of new ties, and of previously existing weak ties, is stronger
• Average strength of old, strong ties, is weaker

The answer really depends on your goals.  In my professional life, Social Networking is making things better as I meet more people and gain new opportunities.  The entire Enterprise 2.0 conference is a direct result of my use of Social Networking tools.  My social activities were also entirely the result of my Social Networking. On the whole good things.

That said, there is nothing like talking to good friends all night about anything and everything.  My professional life exists to support my personal life, so the weakening of my personal ties is actually a concern.

Then there is Dunbar’s Number.  Simply put, this is the number of stable social relationships that a person can maintain.  The number is 150.  So, with more professional relationships, personal ones will invariably be pushed aside.  As bad as it sounds, this is probably a wash given that it is relationship 151 that will be dropped.  If that particular relationship was more important to me, it wouldn’t be the one that gets neglected.

Let’s be fair, there is nothing stopping me from calling people like I used to do.  on the other hand, there is nothing stopping them from calling either. It happens much less on both sides, so it isn’t just me.

Will I give up Facebook? No, it still serves a purpose that was not being met before. I am going to make a more concerted effort to connect the old fashion way with my close friends.

So excuse me while I go call my best man.

Earlier this week I attended Bowen Craggs & Co’s third Web Effectiveness Conference in Paris. 2 intense days focusing on current achievements, challenges, headaches and predictions of the hard working individuals managing some of the largest and most complex Web estates in the world. Two of the dominant topics were:

• The changing role of the corporate website
• The impact of social media in the enterprise and how the attitude is maturing

Stephane Aknin, head of group e-communications at AXA, opened with a quote by Simon Mainwaring, which seemed to sum up a lot of what was discussed over the 2 days:

The online presence of a brand will increasingly become the sum of its social exchanges across the web and not the website that many currently call home.

The changing role of the corporate website and the impact of social media on the web more widely are in many ways linked. It is naturally not a simplistic case of social media taking over the roles and functions of the website; rather, corporations are gradually realizing that the way they have to act, comply and behave online is changing fundamentally because of social media. –At least the web professionals inside the organisations are! Jerome Colombe, head of Web governance at Alcatel-Lucent concluded that The 2.0 (r)evolution has “cracked the Web architecture lines we knew”. The godfather of Web analytics, Jim Sterne, who talked about how to actually measure the impact of social media, bluntly claimed that the impression of your company no longer derives from the corporate website.

After years of social media hype with rushed-through policy making and childish excitement in equal measures, it was great to listen to a discussion that finally appears to be maturing. Sensible questions were being asked and people were openly sharing their hard-learnt lessons. Some of the key points I scribbled down throughout the many presentations that brought up social media related issues were:

• Listen listen listen! It takes time to follow the many conversations that go on, but it is vitally important to dedicate that time.
• Respond to criticism if appropriate – and don’t mull it over for days: do it quickly.
• Have social media guidelines, even if you don’t intend to actively participate on social media platforms; your employees need them.
• Do not attempt to remove critical; even defamatory comments and do not try to shut down “negativity groups / spaces” – you will immediately be branded a “controller” and it will always backfire, as more than one organisation told us. When you find yourself in a social media storm, “facts simply don’t matter”.
• Befriend someone influential in your legal department and get them to take a real interest in social media; one organisation told how they have made one of their senior lawyers responsible for social media; all initiatives and considered scenarios are run past this lawyer. Every organisation should have a social media lawyer who can take a pro- rather than a re-active approach.
• Don’t befriend customers, clients or stakeholders anywhere in the social media space; Maintain a professional distance whenever you represent your organisation.
• Social media monitoring: think of it more as an alert mechanism than an achievement indicator!

I have deliberately not credited all the speakers for their good advice as many of them were talking out of very recent painful and still highly sensitive experiences, but thank you to all contributors nevertheless – and thanks to Bowen Craggs for facilitating and moderating all this valuable no-nonsense knowledge sharing!

For more on the impact of social media on the enterprise and the deafening hype around it, check out Peter Kim’s talk on the subject given at the recent J. Boye conference in Philadelphia.

What is happening in your organisation? Control or conversation?