Collaborative Thinking

Social Software: "Made By BEA"

At the O'Reilly eTech conference (March 27), BEA introduced a collection of social computing products under the "Web 2.0" banner. BEA also revealed a new web site, en.terpri.se and a supporting blog. The product is expected to become available in mid-2007. The products relevant to my coverage are AquaLogic Pathways and AquaLogic Pages (see summary below).

First Impression:

From what I've seen so far, BEA appears to have done its homework to design these products with an enterprise environment in mind (e.g., security, integration). There are some dependencies on AquaLogic infrastructure that will cause some people to hesitate - especially if they have already made a non-BEA portal investment. I expect BEA to move fast to "black box" these underlying services and eventually release versions that will work with other infrastructure services. That would enable BEA to target existing customers as well as new customers who are just interesting in an enterprise-grade platform for social computing. So overall, Pages and Pathways should be credible solutions that IT groups should include as they compare/contrast market offerings from other providers. The initial release is likely to be relevant only to BEA customers until some future version (without dependencies on other BEA products) is available that will make Pages and Pathways attractive to a broader market.

Concerns:

BEA is not considered a major collaboration vendor. It does however have DNA in the space based on its acquisition of Plumtree. Plumtree, while known primarily for its portal product, also offered the Plumtree Collaboration Server which did offer workspaces and discussion forms. While Plumtree also was not a strong collaboration player overall, the it was not uncommon to find Collaboration Server deployed as an extension to the portal investment. So, while there are some roots here for BEA to point to and attempt to leverage, the brand perception of BEA as a middleware vendor will remain the biggest obstacle for it to overcome as it moves into the social computing space. 

Market:

This move puts BEA in direct competition with other large platform vendors such as IBM (Lotus Connections), Microsoft (SharePoint Products & Technologies which supports user profiles, blogs, wikis and social search, Knowledge Network which provides deeper support for expertise and social networking) and Oracle (WebCenter).

There are also smaller vendors that are credible alternatives for users to consider when investigating options for social software. Quite often these providers exceed the basic functionality being delivered by traditional enterprise software providers: Atlassian, ConnectBeam Jive Software, and Traction Software are a few examples of innovative companies.

Summary:

"AquaLogic Pages" is a platform that allows end-users to create blogs and wikis. Drag-and-drop from a palette of widgets to back-ends enables users to mash-up data in addition to their own content contributions. DataSpaces is the component for working with structured data sets while LiveSpaces is the component to actually take collections of pages and assemble them into a web application. Templates support both a blog and wiki layout style. The product was formerly code-named "Builder". The BEA web site for Pages can be found here. A white paper on the product can be found here.

The screen shot below shows an AquaLogic Pages application used to assign sales people to a prospect. The prospect’s location and the location of sales people are displayed in the Google map and updated dynamically depending on which sales person is selected by the user.

"AquaLogic Pathways" is a platform for what BEA defines as "collaborative information and expertise discovery". This product focuses more on tagging, social bookmarks, tag clouds, search and social networking. Connectors to back-end systems such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and ECM systems (e.g., Open Text) are available. The platform also includes a ranking system called ActivityRank that examines explicit and implicit usage and usage patterns to score items. The system can be leveraged for expertise location as well. The product was formerly code-named "Graffiti". The BEA web site for Pathways can be found here. A supporting white  paper on the product can be found here.

The screen shot below shows AquaLogic Pathways with a tag cloud and ability to search for documents or experts. 

InkDrop: New Standard in Company Boilerplates

Similar in concept to Slideshare and Brainshark, Onstream has also come up with a way to screen cast Powerpoint slides. The audio narration is something that I would very much like to see in Slideshare (as well as the ability to create a customized landing zone for listeners, registration, access controls, etc.

With the continued explosion in blogs, vlogs, RSS feeds, podcasts, social media communities and other innovative uses of rich media solutions and services, I'd like to introduce a new concept for company boilerplates - QuickCasts.

Powered by Onstream Media (a FastLane client), QuickCast allows users to take existing PowerPoint presentations, personally or professionally narrate them using a telephone and send to countless recipients around the world via an embedded link.

Source: InkDrop: New Standard in Company Boilerplates

Microsoft And Social Networking: Aggreg8

Interesting news. Microsoft has a lot of exploratory and innovative activities going on externally which could provide interesting feedback loops to its core enterprise software group (e.g., Knowledge Network). For additional information, as reported by Mary Jo.

Aggreg8 is a social networking and collaboration space for the IT community. Inside you can keep track of your trusted network, find others through your network with similar interests or situations.  Then you can collaborate with anyone in the community inside our working groups.  We even allow you to create your own working groups, choosing if you want to collaborate with the whole community or collaborate in private working groups.  All the expected tools are there for collaboration, allowing you to create postings, post files, share events.  And you can tag, rate reply to any posting.  Of course Aggreg8 can come to you as all the working groups come with an RSS feed.  So come on in and build your influence in IT!  To the MVP's we offer a warm welcome for helping us to build the best community possible.

Source: Aggreg8 - Home

Why Don't Search Vendors Think More Like Collaboration Vendors?

After the end of Day 1 at the Enterprise Search conference two thoughts come to mind. First, that the book Ambient Findability should be required reading my anyone in the collaboration space to better understand and appreciate information architecture and the collaborative and social aspects that surround how people interact with information. And second, it's a shame that the vast majority of search vendors are locked into a rather narrow way of thinking about search. Almost exclusively, the thinking is rigidly grounded around content. And I understand that - it's the basic blocking and tackling that needs to be done -- but I had expected greater out-of-the-box thinking in terms of the social and collaborative aspects of search and some bold, assertive and creative thinking about the future of how search intersects with community and networks as filtering mechanisms.

Peter Moorville's keynote was the only example of innovative thought today. There might have been others, once the event broke into multiple session tracks I could have missed something. But an informal poll of search vendors in the table top display room left me wondering if only Microsoft and IBM "get the bigger picture".

More later as I go through my notes - surprisingly the wireless here is not free and not even priced as a day pass. 

Microsoft "People Ready" = Lotus "Super Human Software"

Just a quick thought on the media event last week where Microsoft unveiled a new campaign anchored around a "people ready" theme.

After the "Information Worker" message that never seemed to gain much traction (announced around 2003 or so if memory service me correctly), this is much better. Completeness and execution hurt the Information Worker theme and enabled IBM to actually steal the message and make it their own by delivering Workpalce to the market (including professional services thus befitting a "consulting ready" corallary to Microsoft)

But IBM does have a clear and long history here that Microsoft cast aside too easily. Remember "Super Human Software" and "I am..." marketing campaigns circa 1999. Some links to older information at the time:

The sixth annual Lotusphere in Orlando kicked off with an opening session focusing on what being "superhuman" is all about.

The Unofficial I AM Photo Journal

We are.....SUPER.HUMAN.SOFTWARE!!!!

So that's what I found to be so terribly disappointing in the IBM reaction. Rather than embrace the "people ready" theme as their own (pointing to its own lineage), IBM just threw some obvious darts at Microsoft that are stale and old criticisms.

So my quick take is:

1. A perfect theme for Microsoft to embrace.
2. But a theme that needs much more than just a "buy and deploy my technology stack" leave behind to make it real. Microsoft needs methods, practices, patterns of how to make the technology a real solution in both a business and people context.
3. A theme IBM cannot ignore, or does so at its peril.
4. But a theme that IBM could have so easily countered with its own record of people-ready efforts in the past. OK, so the super.human.software was not the best of campaigns and yes, the "I AM" ads were not overwhelming and perhaps best forgotten - but close eough to "people ready" to counter with...