Collaboration Archives - Page 18 of 20

Software 2006

Posted on March 30, 2006 ·

I’ll be attending “The must-attend software event of the year”, Software 2006, organized by the Sand Hill Group.

The 2,500 participants meet industry leaders on April 4-5th in Santa Clara, CA.

I hope to blog from there, although it’s more likely that I only get to do it after the event. I also hope to meet many of my readers. If you’ll be there and would like to meet, drop me a note.

Tags: software2006, Sandhill.com, Sand Hill Group

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, Marketing / PR, Open Source, SaaS, Social Networking, Software ·

Blogs To Replace Personal Websites

Posted on March 5, 2006 ·

(Updated)

I don’t think this is a radically new idea: personal websites are so 20th century – Blogs bring them to life, and they are easier to set up. As Don Dodge says, “Blogs are two way, in fact many way, communication where the readers create a conversation by leaving comments, trackbacks, and links. Web sites don’t lend themselves to leaving comments and starting a conversation.”

I think for most individuals a blog offers more power, flexibility, ability for self-expression and dialogue, than a static website. There are a few tricks, however, if you feel the need to have a permanent front-page. Several blog-platforms allow for “sticky posts”. Create only one sticky post, this will always stay at the top, i.e it can become your “static” home page. Smart use of titles, icons, graphics with URL’s in the sticky post, surrounded by categories, lists in the sidebars can turn the “sticky” into the point of entry for several parts of your blog – a’la traditional websites.

Some blog-platforms (e.g. Blogware by Blogharbor, the one I use) also cater for creating classic, static Web pages, allow you to FTP content up to your site, have photo albums ..etc. The static pages don’t automatically become part of your blog categories or your main page, giving you the freedom of freely mix and match with the blog. You could use the static page as your homepage (like the sticky described above) ,or you could call it from a link in a blog post – making sure that’s the only way to access it, someone cannot stumble upon the standalone page without reading the post.

The static page, the sticky post, or badges on your sidebar could also become the launching pad to a personal wiki (SocialText and JotSpot both offer free personal versions) , to your documents in Writely, or to any number of Web 2.0 app’s. It doesn’t matter that all these services are hosted on different servers by different companies, you can bring them all together on your launchpad page.

I recently wrote about using wiki’s to create an Instant Intranet for companies – if you have any projects that require collaboration with others, you can do the same, making it part of your static page.

With all these tools available, who needs a traditional web-page?

Update (3/22): Apparently not just personal sites: Steve Rubel reports Another Company Goes Blog Only

Tags: blogs, blogging, website, homepage, static website, blog as website, intranet, wiki, collaboration, web 2.0, jotspot, socialtext, writely, blogware, blogharbor

Filed Under: Blogging, Collaboration, Personal Productivity ·

Wikis are the Instant Intranet

Posted on March 4, 2006 ·

(Updated)

Since I received a few questions after my post: 43 Wiki Prank and the Whiteboard Test, I though I should add a bit of clarification. The underlying thought in that article was to pick the right tool for the right situation, and the whiteboard-test is just one trick to differentiate when Wiki’s are helpful vs. Forum, Blog ..etc software. It’s by far not the only situation when a wiki is invaluable.

Another example is setting up a living, breathing Intranet, one that people can actually use. Anybody who works in large corporations probably thinks of the IntraNet as a one-way communication channel for Management to talk (down) to employees. Getting your own content in? Forget it! Even when I was VP in a mid-sized organization and did not have wait for approval, I still had to talk to the IT Director, wait for him to fit it in his team’s schedule, then tell him what was wrong when my content finally showed up.

It does not have to be this way! Companies “own” (well, at least part of the day) the intellectual capacity of their employees, so why not put it to work? Even in the large corporate environment a wiki can be a lively collaborative addition to the Intranet (see the wiki effect by Ross), but for smaller, nimble, less hierarchical business a wiki is The Intranet.

At a much smaller organization I wanted to introduce a wiki for collaboration, for all the reasons explained in the video below. The company was a bit more old-fashioned, not exactly the early-adopter type. I expected some resistance against something with a geeky-funny name like wiki… so I simply announced we’ll be creating an editable Intranet. People started to use it from day 1, and few cared that the thingie behind is called a wiki.

David Terrar describes a somewhat similar story here.

Finally, the excellent video by JotSpot Founder Joe Kraus.

43 Wiki Prank and the Whiteboard Test

Posted on February 28, 2006 ·

Weblogswork is making fun of Ross Mayfield using a wiki for everything. Ok, so it’s really Alex Muse’s idea, check out his story. They set up and CrunchNotes announced the 43 Best Blogs page, which is open for anyone to edit. Of course Ross typically ends up selling / using / donating Socialtext wikis for the right purpose, while this 43thingie is just a mess. I could have my 5 minutes of fame by inserting myself in the #1 position. Not that being a mess is bad … I suppose it’s just a cool prank to get some buzz and attention – otherwise a digg-like voting system would make more sense.

Let’s use this opportunity though to make a point: wikis are a wonderful productivity tool, they help cut down on the flood of email we’re all buried under, reduce “occupational spam” (those unnecessary CC’s, even worse, BCC’s) ..etc…etc…etc. But most importantly, a wiki is for collaboration. Not everything we do is a collaborative effort, and as such, a wiki is not always the best tool to use. Key in picking the right tool is the intention, the desired outcome of the communication.

For ad-hoc, one-to-one, or one-to-some type communication email is still the winner. Blogs are the best for one-to-many regular communication and dialogue. When the value is in the individual contributions, preserving their original content and sequence, traditional forum software is probably the best. Movie-, book-, product reviews are typical examples, for example I would question that Amazon’s ProductWiki is such a good idea. (well, it is, if you enjoy wiki-wars).

The simple “whiteboard-test” helps determine when wikis are really helpful: if ideally you’d like to have all participants of your conversations together in a room, where anyone can walk up to the whiteboard, wipe off content, correct, overwrite what others done until the group collectively reaches the desired outcome, then you should use a wiki. In other words it’s not the debate, the process, the individual arguments that matter, but the synthesis of the collective wisdom. (actually, you get all the other stuff from the change logs). It’s clearly easier to use wikis in a self-controlled environment, like project teams, companies … essentially any team driving towards a common purpose, but Wikipedia is proof that collaboration can be achieved with the open community at large, too.

For everything else, there is always good old pigeon-mail.

Filed Under: Blogging, Collaboration, Social Networking, Software · Tagged: 43 Best Blogs, 43 Wiki, atlassian, Collaboration, confluence, Jotspot, ProductWiki, socialtext, Weblogswork, wiki, wikis

Web 2.0 in the Enterprise – Round 2

Posted on February 22, 2006 ·

Stephen Bryant lists Five Reasons Web 2.0 and Enterprises Don’t Mix (hat tip: Espen Antonsen). He cites his personal experience of having worked in an innovative small software company that could not close deals with the slow enterprise behemoths. “What we needed was a shorter sales cycle, a very, very big salesforce, or some combination of the two”

One of the key changes we’re experiencing today is that the traditional big salesforce becomes obsolete.

At the recent Web2.0 In the Enterprise event (references here, here, and here) Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext described his bottom-up grassroots approach: first a small team, typically a department, or an ad-hoc project team starts using the hosted wiki … then some other teams within the same organization … eventually Ross walks in to close a corporate level deal, but by the time it’s a fait accompli. (more in the Wiki Effect).
Jeff Nolan of SAP related his experience after making an investment in Socialtext, and bringing the wiki “officially” in-house: he received dozens of emails from SAP-employees who had long been using the hosted version for their own project, just had not told anyone ,since it was “unofficial”.
One of Ross’s competitors, Joe Kraus of JotSpot said: “for the bottom-up effect to work, the price has to be expensable, not approvable”
Of course you could argue the above approach will only be feasible with communication / team collaboration tools, not with Enterprise packages that require the whole company to be on the same platform. Well, it depends.. as Sales VP in a smaller (30 employee, $5M) company I found myself in a situation where not only my team needed a CRM solution, but the whole company needed some IT modernization. For budgetary and resistance reasons we decided the sales team will march ahead on its own, but we implemented NetSuite, laying the foundation for the rest of the company to join us on one integrated system.
Finally, a quote from SugarCRM’s John Roberts: “Software is bought, not sold.” Nice punchline, not a 100% true, just like the “No Software” tagline from the other guy… but delivers the message: sales is replaced by demand generation, becomes a pull– vs. a push-process.

Next I will talk about how Enterprise Software “comes down” to the SMB sector – but for the sake of readability, it is in the next post.

P.S. Stephen, perhaps one day we’ll hear about the pig-killing job in Tuscany

Update (2/23): The Doctrine of Slow and Old: Big Business and New Applications
Update (2/25): Giving enterprise software practices an ‘angioplasty’

Tags: Enterprise Software, Web 2.0, TIE, Sales, Enterprise Sales, Demand Generation, SAP, Oracle, Wiki, wikis, Socialtext, Jotspot, NetSuite, SugarCRM, salesforce.com, web20enterprise, business model, social software, CRM, ERP

Filed Under: Collaboration, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, Open Source, SaaS, SMB / SME, Social Networking, Software, Startups ·

Web 2.0 in the Enterprise – Blogging the TIE Event

Posted on February 17, 2006 ·

The Web 2.0 in the Enterprise panel discussion hosted by TIE was exciting. In fact it wasn’t really a panel discussion, rather a most interactive group event. Jeff Clavier as moderator with Charlene Li, Ross Mayfield, Jeff Nolan as panelists quickly threw away the traditonal “moderated discussion followed by Q&A” format (that’s-so-web-1.0), and turned it into a vibrant, lively, interactive, “Web 2.0-style” conversation.

In fact the conversation was hectic enough that I’ll do this in a reverse order: first attempt to organize some of my thoughts, then just publish my rather raw notes.

Key thoughts:

Far too broad subject. Lots of different interpretations: A technology? Marketing label? Software delivery method? New functionality? Business Model? Human interaction, collaboration? ..etc. As Jeff put it the day after in his blog: “It’s pretty hard to focus on the concept of mashups when you are also introducing blogs/wikis, or talk about the signifigance of scripting and hosted software delivery at the same time. “

Conclusions from the Panel:

Web 2.0 is people, collaboration, creating together.
Business Model change is more important than technology change.
The divider between consumer and enterprise software will blur.
Give up control, gain value.
Start small, grow bottom up.
The question is not what new programs can do for us, but now that we’re enabled, what do we do together, better.

Now, my unedited, raw notes:

Intro Round:

Jeff Clavier
Define Web 2.0:

Rich, easy-to-use user experience
Architecture for participation
Vertical Apps, mash-ups

Why these panelists:

Friends
Bloggers
Been living/doing Web 2.0 before they knew it

Jeff Nolan
Expanding on definition:

Rich user interface. Late 90’s move from client/server to Web-> gained access, lost usability (of interface)
AJAX. Scriptable client. Key is that developers use same tools that users can now have to extend functionality
Realization of SOA.

Having two different technologies for consumer and enterprise is nonsense. Web 2.0 technology started with consumers, as it matures, the line between the two will blur.
How do companies develop software: community concept. Interesting example for partner effort: salesforce.com’s AppExchange .

Charlene Li
- Web 1.0: control was in center, by institutions
- Web 2.0; small companies, few resources, power pushed to end-users.

Don’t need huge sharepoint installations, just use a wiki.
Business managers like it, IT fears it. Ning ; do-it-yourself mentality. Social Computing – Forrester report, being circulated, not exactly just to Forrester Clients (but that would be sooo 1.0!)

Ross Mayfield
Introduces himself as “ross dot typepad dot com” (but that’s only natural for someone who employs guys with names like Ingy döt Net )

Socialtext:

part open source
hosted system
appliance

Web 2.0 is People. Ajax is a cleaning detergent. 🙂 Real change: how we sell software: bottom up.
Ad-hoc groups forming standards, foresaking institutions, e.g. mashup camp .
Evolution:

Mainframe: power to the Enterprise
PC: tool for individuals, personal empowerment. Create individually-> deliver, share.
Web 2.0: Create together

KM failed us: fill form -> contribute knowledge -> some system magic processes, shares. Now people have the tools, the social interaction and provide knowledge together.
You let go of control, get back value.

Q&A:

Q: Where is Web 2.0 in the enterprise today? Enterprise world living in the past.
Ross: It exists in email. Email is broken . Occupational spam (CC; BCC).

Q: Can SAP, Oracle …etc absorb Web 2.0 ideas or will new companies emerge and displace them?
Jeff Nolan: History is against us, few companies make the transition. But rules exist to break them 🙂 Today’s vendors invest hugely in technology. Story by Shai Agassi : CTO of Prcoter & Gamble told him if the SAP system goes down for 4 hours, it takes out the quarterly profit.
Oracle is buying its own LAMP stack. They can only beat SAP by changing the game : removing licence revenue entirely… of course this is speculation only. One could argue that Oracle and SAP are already in the subscription business: maintenance revenue.
Charlene: Microsoft is pulling pieces of Web 2.0 into Sharepoint.

Jeff Clavier: Enterprise tactic: as soon as there is a noted leader, they will make a move: acquisition.
Jeff Nolan: Sales is what’s broken, not the technology. Example: after SAP’s investment in Socialtext he receiveed dozens of emails from various groups inside SAP, who had already been using the hosted wiki, just hadn’t told anyone.

Q: VC’s don’t want to invest in Enterprise software …
Ross: Cycles back and forth. Problem is the business model: 50-60% of cost is sales. They have too much legacy in place. Moore’s law does not matter. The disruption to watch for is not in the technology, but in the business model.
Cost of personal publishing trends towards 0, cost of forming groups trends towards 0. Simplicity key for user experience.
Jeff Nolan: “lots of rounded boxes”
Ross: Wikipedia – no other software that gets a group of strangers together so effectively

Jeff Clavier to Charlene: What will it take for IT to embrace web 2.0?
Charlene: They ask: “How do I stop it?”

Q. (actually a remark) from an Ernst & Young Consultant: his Client is using Socialtext to document SOX compliance procedures.
Ross: Stages of penetrating a large Client:

small group using hosted system
IT starts having security concerns
get the appliance behind the firewall
CIO gets interested – > global use

Quote from Clay Shirky : Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity .
Clarification: transactions stay in SAP. We’re a conversation backbone, not a transaction backbone.

Q: Somewhat longwinded question, basically questioning the “Appliance” model, and outsourcing in general: “wholesale outsourcing is far-fetched”.
Ross: Appliance: it’s just a different way of SaaS, a matter of network topology.
Counter-example to the hosting Q: One of the world’s top 10 companies want ALL their applications hosted.
Jeff Clavier: Look at some of the huge salesforce.com implementations.

Q: How will all Web 2.0 solutions work together? – e.g. put some Basecamp functionality into Wikipedia? What’s the future role of a CIO?
Ross: Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, a huge investment bank appointed an Exec just to oversee usability testing, make sure all systems fit together.
CIO’s in the future will not only be concerned with driving down cost, but instead with driving innovation. They can go back to thinking more strategically.

Q: Flickr… etc are in the consumer space, Socialtext is a tool. What are the emerging applications for the Enterprise?
Q: Collaboration, but inside a “walled garden” is not Web 2.0, is it?
Jeff Nolan: Brings example of blogging inside SAP, IT was stonewalling, so he went ahead, bought a bunch of licences and started it himself. But now he starts seeing “entrepreneurial” opportunities inside the corporation: if there is a large enough blogging community, he could start using Adsense inside. Basically it’s not about creating new applications, but discovering new opportunities.
Charlene: It’s not about tools, it’s about people, collaboration.

Q: How do I use my “old” transactional data in a wiki-type environment?
Jeff Clavier: Integration layers, RSS ..etc.
Charlene: RSS Transport, open formats… Business managers can pick data, make his/her own “application”.
Q: (more a remark): Microformats: great, but not enough standards agreed upon.
Charlene: Give it a little time …

Q: Haven’t heard what problem Web 2.0 solves.. other than being a gateway to VC’s 🙂 What will it change?
Jeff Nolan: There is this mistaken expectation that whoever is doing Web 2.0 will do something new, change things. It’s not “Web 2.0” , it’s YOU.
Ross: Do you interact socially online differently than before? (yes, and a lot of commotion from the audience). There you go …
Q: (actually a remark) from the audience, that sums up the essence of the night: “We just did Web 2.0 here, getting an answer from the panel would have been Web 1.0, now you got 25 answers from all of us, that’s 2.0″ 🙂
Ross: Fostering of transparency will change management principles.
Kids are doing homework on MySpace.
Jeff Nolan: Craigslist+Google Maps mashup: a third person brought it together, it was not initiated by Craigslist, not by Google.

Jeff Nolan: There are about 1500 major business processes in any company, of which 20 impact revenue.
Ross: Process going away.
Jeff Nolan: Disagrees. (actually me, too .. or I am in between … but that belongs to another post)

Jeff Nolan: Value of IP is not in code, but in community -> Open Source.
Charlene: Enterprise has identity, authentication, reputation system, which does not exist out in the open – i.e. consumer space.
Ross: Build Wikipedia inside a corporation, a.k.a “SAPedia ” Goes on explaining how Socialtext can give away a good deal of its software and get paid for related service.

Q: Will the Web be able to handle the incerased traffic?
Ross: On issue of Attention: I don’t have to read the New York Times, I have trusted friends who will refer to what’s interesting… point is, use feeds, subsrcibe selectively, use the “unsubscribe” button.

Q: On small businesses adopting blogs for marketing, for customer acquisition
Charlene: SMB: Office Live, Basecamp..etc > not apps, but platforms. Hosted Services. (this is where I left the room for 5 minutes, if anyone has notes, pls, contribute…)
Jeff Nolan: We may think of a stripped-down giveaway version of CRM, supported by advertising. In fact, we could by our own ad network.

Q: (more a remark): Companies are run like command economies . Technology empowers workers to be more entrepreneurial.
Charlene: Mindsets will change. Enterprises need to start small, bottom-up.
Jeff Nolan: Quotes a story from SAP, when one of his employees new to blogging sent him a draft blog post for approval. “No, I don’t want to approve, just post it”

Q: We talked about enterprises adapting to new Web 2.0 technology. How about existing “old” products? Is the current IT infrastructure a bottleneck?
Charlene: Everybody is using a browser, there is a lot of information in those sessison that we don’t know about, don’t share.
Ross: Just do it in a socially acceptable manner.

Q: Will viruses come to Web 2.0? What standards will safeguard community?
Charlene: Pollution comes with social interaction.
Jeff Clavier: Splogs: companies work together fighting it, in a collaborative way, not alone.
Ross: Blogs are individually owned-> individual policies for fighting spam.
Wikipedia is figthing spam not using some feature, but through human intervention, collectively.
Digg is another example for collective filtering.
Charlene: Comment-based reputation systems don’t work. Pulling identiy info from various systems through API’s better.
Jeff Nolan: Microsoft gave up the Passport concept when they realized it won’t work.

Q: For time critical info, e.g. in Customer Support, how can Web 2.0 help?
Ross: There should not be escalation, the system should be better organized, i.e. wiki for Help Desk: make it available to more people, not jus the Help group. A group of people have to agree on how to use it.

Q: (from a consultant): Web 1.0 made a lot of people rich. Where is the money, what are VC’s investing in.. what should I start tomorrow? (huge laughter in audience)
Charlene: VC’s keep on asking me the same. If I knew the answer, I would not be here 🙂
Concern: they all chase the consumer Internet… should look towards the Enterprise.
Jeff Nolan: Joshua Schachter , founder of del.icio.us is a good example, he was thinking more like an investor than a founder … keen on building something he can scale up.
Ross: Entrepreneurism is just experimenting. Start small, use open source, build, test. Company, business model, $$$ comes later.
SugarCRM as example of disruptive business model
Jeff Clavier: Companies that are successful are all built around large communities.
Don’t try to be 10% better than and existing one, do something new.
Charlene: Nobody is providing Social Networking for companies. (debated by some in the audience)
Platforms are big, see NING.
Ross: NO! Start with an application, which becomes succesful -> then convert it into a platform

There was an endless stream of questions, the host had to cut it, due to time constraints.

It was a lively, intense discussion, special thanks to Prashant Shah , TiE SV Charter Member. I am told the video will be available in about a week.

Update (2/17): Other Blogs on this event:

Update (4/10): Jeff will moderate another session on the subject at IBDNetwork.

Tags: TIE, Software SIG, Web 2.0, Enterprise Software, web20enterprise, Collaboration, Business Model, Empowerment, AJAX, Social Nteworking, Social Software

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology ·

Blogs To Replace Personal Websites

Web 2.0 in the Enterprise – Blogging the TIE Event

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