Group items tagged

"Enterprise RSS": It's A Middleware Decision

Social Analytics: Redefining Business Intelligence

Enterprise 2.0: Long-term Issues

Enterprise 2.0: Vendors To Watch (alpha order)

Jive: Perhaps the most successful "mini suite" in the market right now and a good option for organizations that don't want to commit to SharePoint and have reservations about IBM.

Telligent: Telligent could be the "Jive of 2009" given its latest release (which rounds out the features), its integration with SharePoint, and alignment with a Microsoft environment overall.

Enterprise 2.0: Open Source Efforts To Watch

Mindtouch: A vendor I hope more organizations consider - sound underling architecture that perhaps is over-branded as a wiki solution but is more of a mash-up server (kinda) based on a hypertext and service-oriented platform.

So what’s the fine print? Here are some considerations…

The numbers Alfresco used are from a government price list. It isn’t clear to me whether those numbers are “list” or are a negotiated, reduced rate, but from my past experience with Documentum, I’d say they are closer to list.

A portion of the “first year’s cost” is maintenance and that recurs every year. For Alfresco you are only paying for maintenance, so the entire $33.5k will be due every year. Using the numbers from the whitepaper your Documentum maintenance bill would be about $115k every year.

Alfresco showed a 2-CPU configuration for their 1000-user config priced at $33,500 which included a test server. Then they showed a “high availability” config with a $9,250 up-charge. But they didn’t double the procs. If you’re going to be HA, you’ll need at least two of everything.

Document management is all about workflow, control, and risk mitigation. Its objective is summarized perfectly by the two words in its name: "documents" and "management". It got its start in the legal departments of pharmaceutical companies, who were concerned to make sure that their companies were producing documentation in full compliance with regulatory requirements. A DMS thrives where there are a) documents already being created as part of a business process; and b) those documents need to be closely checked in, checked out, supervised, edited, approved, and stored following a consistent and audit-proof process.

Collaboration, by contrast, is all about people working together to share ideas, notes, questions, comments, etc. Collaboration does not typically follow a standard process; it is much more free-form and free-flowing. Documents are not typically the format of choice. Asking a question or creating a meeting agenda or to-do list doesn't require a document; it just requires typing some words and putting them where other people can see and edit them. That's why so many people simply fire off an email when they collaborate; it spares them the unnecessary step of creating a document.

When asked about the relationship between DMS and collaboration tools, what I said was that some of the content in a typical DMS really belongs there. These are the documents associated with highly regulated processes. But most of the content in a typical DMS--to-do lists, meeting notes, press clippings, conversations, working papers, personal observations--doesn't really belong there. It's in the DMS because there was no good place to put it. That's where a collaboration suite can do a much better job. A good collaboration suite can liberate that content from the tyranny of documents and nested folders, and will encourage people to use it for actual working materials.

In many cases, you will want to integrate the two. Law firms, for example, are absolutely dependent on their document management systems to manage their filings and other legal documents. But we're increasingly seeing them set up collaboration suites to capture all the discussion around the documents, how to use them, what they mean, and so on. The two systems are integrated with links from the collaboration suite into the corresponding DMS records.

What I'm saying amounts to this: Use your document management system to manage documents, and use your collaboration suite to collaborate.

unfortunately SocialText is not very good at linking to the documents in the obvious place (attachments).

In two of our projects with large law firms we included an RSS feedreader in the social software mix (among wiki, blogs, social bookmarking). We introduced it primarily to Knowledge Management Lawyers (KML) that needed to gather a lot of content from various sources. They also use it to subscribe to updates from the wiki and blogs. They appreciate the fact that it is much easier to plow through a stream of updates rather than going from email to email and deleting every one of them.

Have a look at two case studies: Dewey & LeBoeuf and Allen & Overy

In our company, we had a survey in April (2008), asking managers if they needed a RSS Reader. Some figures: 72 managers responded, 68 managers subscribed to more than one (company) blog. 9 managers already used iGoogle or a RSS Reader, 13 managers replied they did not need a RSS Reader, 50 managers replied they need a RSS Reader. As a result we planned a project to select and deliver a company RSS Reader. The project will be executed mid 2009.

Once CRM, DMS, Intranet and other proprietary system vendors thoroughly implement RSS functionality, it will get a big push.

I think a tipping point might come if ERP apps providers (SAP, Oracle, etc.) started publishing RSS feeds of ERP data!

In another project with a large law firm we took a very close look at the production (and consumption) of current awareness material. Current awareness included for example information on current developments within legal practices, latest court decisions etc. The firm made extensive use of newsletters to disseminate that kind of information. There was a multitude of newsletters available, some of them covering similar grounds. Maintaining email lists was very time-consuming and frustrating. Consumers did not know which newsletter were available. Also, newsletters were not personalised nor very timely, as they had a specific publishing date. We therefore recommended using RSS as delivery format, which would make the process of producing and consuming content more efficient and in the end more cost-effective as shown in a business case

It's with a heavy heart and a sense of bewilderment that we conclude that the market for enterprise-specific RSS readers appears to be dead. Two years ago there were three major players offering software that delivered information to the computers of business users via RSS. Today it looks to us like the demand simply never arose and that market is over.

It's insane - a solid RSS strategy can be a huge competitive advantage in any field. We have no idea why so relatively few people see that.

Neglecting RSS at work seems to us like pure insanity.

If dashboards take off, then maybe RSS will gain traction as the wiring? This probably requires: secure feed displaying widgets, good filters.

Enterprises are scared to disrupt their own structure and command lines by introducing uncontrolled information flows both internally (which can route around management) and externally (which can route around the official PR outputs and sales inputs of the company)

Look at the headline you used.. RIP Enterprise RSS. Now read that from the point of view of a manager in an enterprise. WTF does "Enterprise RSS" mean? What are the business reasons to care? What does it do for them? People don't care adopt RSS, just as people don't adopt XHTML, Javascript etc. They adopt products that use technology to do something that they value. No one cares about the technologies used to display this page... they want to read the page.

Enterprise RSS doesn't mean much. When RSS companies start talking about secure communications channels that intelligently and automatically route relevant information to the people who need/want it, light bulbs start lighting up.

I think Microsoft SharePoint could be the killer app for RSS in the enterprise. SharePoint has RSS built in and uses it to syndicate changes that happen within the SharePoint ecosphere and notify enterprise workers that something significant has happened. Of course, SharePoint RSS could work with third-party RSS readers, but it's really designed to be used with Microsoft's Office Suite, where enterprise workers can interface with SharePoint, through RSS and other means, directly

One thing missing from this (great) post is the cost of these tools. Looking at Newsgator & Attensa, these are expensive enterprise tools and trying to sell them to IT managers that don't fully understand RSS is next to impossible. Imagine saying to a CIO, who barely understands what RSS is, that you need $175,000 for Enterprise RSS software... it isn't an easy sell.

In this part of the world (SE Asia) we're seeing more & more top management wanting tools for themselves and their teams to connect to "Facebook and these social network things". Feeds and aggregation/search tools are the perfect wiring for this. But the front end? There's a lot of choice and individual needs vary. A decently setup igoogle/netvibes page can work wonders..so why pay?

Also, reading RSS is likely viewed as not work related, and so its frowned upon within the enterprise (remember, those enterprise folks have "real" work to do, they don't get paid to read BoingBoing all day long).

Autonomy’s growth has continued since then: in its third quarter of this year, announced in September, it posted sales of $127.1m, up 42%.

The great irony in all of this is that Lynch does not want Autonomy to be pigeon-holed as an enterprise search company.

IDC’s Feldman though says that, “At this point, it is clear that Autonomy should no longer be considered purely a search vendor. It builds search-based applications to answer market demands for better information-centric software.”

What does that mean? Autonomy’s website explains: “Autonomy's software powers the full spectrum of mission-critical enterprise applications including pan-enterprise search, proactive information risk management, information governance, e-discovery, consolidated archiving, call centre solutions, rich media management, security applications, customer relationship management (CRM), knowledge management (KM) and BPM [business process management].”

Lynch says Autonomy now has in the region of 500 OEM customers, writing applications that embed Autonomy’s Meaning-based Computing, or MBC. Their own software products rely on Autonomy’s pattern matching algorithms to extract ‘meaning’ from unstructured information.

One of the differentiators over its smaller rivals in the space – including Endeca, IBM (smaller in terms of search, at least), Google Enterprise, Simplexo, Sinequa, Recommind and many more – is the list of supported file types that can be handled by Autonomy’s IDOL platform. “By supporting more than 1,000 different data formats, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, located across 400 different content repositories, Autonomy can search all categories of information repositories in an organization,” the company says.

This is a disaster. It removes the communications aspect of the wiki.

Alternatively, Kwizcom have a Sharepoint wiki which might do the trick (plus a free evaluation version). http://www.kwizcom.com/ProductPage.asp?ProductID=524&ProductSubNodeID=525

We have been experiencing problems with the notification feature for wikis in Sharepoint. When there is a change to a wiki page, it sends out the whole wiki page with no indication of the changes.

I introduced Confluence in my previous job, and was very happy with it. However it's a challenge to maintain it with pure Windows point and click trained IT staff.

With Confluence, many many plug-ins and macros are available to present access to content on your web page.

Traction TeamPage has the feature you request (and then some) which is to send e-mail notification that shows the DIFF view of the old and new pages. You can fine tune which spaces you want to monitor at this level - and even fine tune it by author, tag or other search facility.

For categorizing any SharePoint items or documents cross-site based on centrally managed taxonomies and browse it by default navigation, category tree or A-Z directory you can use the Taxonomy Extension found at:http://www.sharepartxxl.com/products/taxonomy/default.aspx

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