Dec 20, 2007
I just turned in the last of a rapid-fire succession of project deliverables and was catching up on reading John Eckman's great blog Open Parenthesis. John has a poignant series of posts about social computing in the Enterprise that I found myself silently nodding my head in agreement as I read. I share John's enthusiasm for the promise of DiSo project and hope that one day one will be able to share a profile across communities on different social networking sites. What pushed me over the inertia to write my own post was John's entry called Like Facebook, but without all the fun (I love the title. Reminds me of the Wordie tag line "Like Flickr, but without the photos). John is also critical of the notion that you can recreate a social network within a company and have it get all the personal interest of Facebook.
In his post "Is Facebook in the Enterprise an Oxymoron?" Tony Byrne comes to a similar conclusion: "But when does Facebook-behind-the-firewall stop being Facebook? I think the minute a central authority gets behind it -- and instinctively mandates some available MOBIG (Microsoft/Oracle/BEA/IBM/Google) software because it happened to be familiar or free -- is the minute the system will lose its appeal to rank-and-file employees."
I am looking forward to seeing more creative ways to build on top of existing social networking platforms and personal tools like "My Yahoo" style consumer portals. OpenSocial looks interesting. So does the NetVibes API. What might be just as interesting is a potential shift in how large enterprise look at enterprise software for the knowledge worker and how they deploy and manage it. There used to be a larger focus on infrastructure and large projects to deploy massive enterprise software applications. What if enterprises start piggy-backing off of public infrastructure and change their focus to building high-impact tactical components and applications? It does seem risky to invest development dollars on a trendy service that you have no control over. But it can't be riskier than all those enterprise portal projects that wound up failing (note: CMS Watch says that companies are getting better at deploying portals.)
I would love to hear of stories of companies that are building applications for themselves on consumer oriented infrastructure. The CMS Watch network is using Facebook to collaborate and coordinate and I have to say that I am underwhelmed. The old list serve worked much better than the Facebook group discussion boards because Facebook doesn't send you an email when someone adds a new topic or posts a reply to someone else's topic (if there is a setting to enable this, please let me know!). It is kind of fun to see people's pictures and what movie stars they resemble though! Maybe the recipe is to allow the public networks to bring the fun and interest and context that makes you want come back and add applications that are useful for people to do their jobs.
Dec 12, 2007
Magnolia 3.5 Community Edition is now GA. It will probably be a little while before the Enterprise Edition is final. But at least it is on the horizon. See my earlier post for a list of what is in the release. The big differences between Enterprise and Community Edition are Magnolia's Site Designer (a WYSIWYG editor for developing display templates), a JSR-168 (portlet spec) connector, the option to use Day's CRX rather than Apache JackRabbit for a repository, and, of course, the ability to buy support.
Dec 10, 2007
I have been considering taking the Ad Sense off of my blog because no one seems to click on them. I used to find this frustrating but after reading John Eckman's post "Who clicks on ads?" I feel proud to be serving a sophisticated audience. To quote John:
Is the reality that the relatively disenfranchised online (to sum up the four bullets danah points to above) are less discriminating with their attention, and give their attention away more cheaply?
Does this mean that the clicks of the great unwashed online (pardon the image) pay for the web using experience of the urban elite adblock using digerati?
Interesting... Â
Dec 10, 2007
I just glanced at my blog traffic stats and, on a lark, clicked on the "search engine wars" view to see that Google represented 97.81% of my search engine traffic. I knew it was going to be high but what surprised me is how much higher this is than the average (Google had a 56.96% percent share according to Market Share. However, Geoffrey Mack estimated Google's share at 85%). My snap judgement, draws me to two conclusions:
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Google likes my blog more than the other search engines do.
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My audience likes Google more than other search engines.
These conclusions are not mutually exclusive and I think they both could be right. As for the first one, there a couple of reasons why Google could like my blog (and I am sure that it is not because they think I am smart. With all those Ph.D's, I am sure that they know better than that). I blog on Blogger - a Google product. In addition to being lazy and cheap, choosing Blogger was actually a calculated decision. I suspected that Google may favor (unintentionally of course) their own web properties. More importantly, however, I think that Google love's blogs. Their hub and spoke view of the web is very conducive to the blogosphere and their ridiculously powerful search indexes can handle the volume. Ad Sense is probably making them a ton of money off of blogs too (of course, they don't pass much on to me. Hey maybe that is the reason why Google's market cap is so much higher than Content Here's!). Other search technologies and businesses are optimized for more traditional media.
I did a little test of searching about Facebook and Intranet: a topic that has captured the attention of the blogosphere (at least my little hamlet of it). On Google, the top 5 results were all blogs. On MSN, however, the top 5 results were a television station, a press release, and pages from the Facebook site. On Yahoo! 4 of the top 5 results were blogs. Maybe they use del.icio.us (the other social media phenomenon) to help their search. They would be crazy not to. So, Google loves social media. But I don't always want social media. Soon after my Facebook search, I needed to find a 1099 form to download and send to someone. On Google, I got a Wikipedia article and a bunch of other links about 1099s but not the form. The top results on MSN were from the irs.gov site and got me pretty near the form that I needed to download. So Google appears to be more about the thing while MSN tends do be more the thing itself.
As for my audience loving Google, I think that is probably true too. I write a lot about open source, Firefox puts the Google search box right there in your face. Safari does too (and doesn't allow you change it) and open source geeks love their Macs. I also like to think that my blog appeals to a hipper (nerdy is hip right?) crowd and IE is for the older crowd who think that IE is the Internet (apologies to the 30% of my readers who I have just alienated. I promise that I will fix that IE display issue someday). Google is also a big advocate of open source so there is probably some affinity there too.
So, if you take these two conclusions (even a little bit) you might be open to another proposition: that the Internet may be dividing again. This time it is less about browser compatibility and more about content. You have the "popular web" that is all about "blogging" and "tagging" and "poking" and "pwning". And then you have the traditional web that is more along the lines of the formal broadcast model with a few "official trusted sources." So maybe George Bush knew what he was talking about after all.
Of course, no one wants to break up the web. Having one Internet is really nice and no one wants to give up their reach into the whole Internet. That is why Microsoft bought a chunk of Facebook and traditional media outlets are trying to push community. In the long run, the uniters (not the dividers) are going to win. But still, you need that self proclaimed elite faction trying to stake out a "cool web" to push the envelope on what you can do with Internet technology.
Dec 03, 2007
Alan Pelz-Sharpe has a great post on the CMS Watch Trend Watch blog that describes the difference between back up and archiving (they are not the same). He makes the point more articulately than I ever could so I will encourage you to click through. Alan goes on to say:
2008 will see ECM vendors aggressively trying to move into the archiving sector. It's a move driven (as all meaningful market dynamics are) by buyer demand. At the moment, demand stems less from a full understanding of retention and archiving, and more from the need to shift ballooning volumes of e-mails (e-mails that may well become the focus of a laywer at some future date), that are swamping mail servers.
If ECM vendors respond to the stated need of handling larger volumes of data, I doubt that their solutions will address the core need of organizing and filtering information into a useful archive. Are we talking about bigger refrigerator doors? In the case of email, will their solutions be smart enough not to "archive" marketing, personal, and other email with no legal value?
Nov 30, 2007
CMS Watch just reported about a new start-up called Acquia that will provide services and products around Drupal. Acquia is different from some of the other companies that have tried to make money off the Drupal phenomenon. Unlike SpikeSource, that operates independently from the Drupal community, Acquia has none other than Drupal founder Dries Buytaert on board - he is the CTO. I am intrigued to learn more about what Acquia is going to do and, more importantly, how it will be regarded by the community. It is worth noting that the Drupal trademark and domain belong to Dries - not the recently formed Drupal Association.
Nov 27, 2007
Many open source software projects have started to experiment with Facebook to facilitate social networking within their community. Alfresco has taken things to another level by building an integration with Facebook to surface the Alfresco repository in a Facebook application. I think this ties nicely with the concept of using Facebook for the social networking aspect of your Intranet.
This integration uses Alfresco's Web Scripts feature that allows you to create your own server side API (written in Javascript) for things like AJAX-style interactivity. I think of Alfresco's philosophy as "enlightened ECM." Rather than try to build everything on their own platform (and find yourself managing a collection of second rate applications), Alfresco's strategy is to integrate with best of breed applications. You look at their website and they use MediaWiki for their wiki, WordPress for blogs, and Baynote for search. All the open standards and APIs give you great tools to do these integrations. I used to think of this as Alfresco talking the ECM talk but not walking the walk. Now I get that they see the old ECM vision as being as outdated as I do.
Of course, this strategy has its liabilities. The integration requires development work and the result doesn't always function smoothly (try searching for something on the Alfresco and you will see what I mean). Some customers just want everything out of the box (even if the features are lame and never get used) and don't want to be bothered with best of breed if it requires expensive and risky integration. However, I think it is safe to say that most current Alfresco customers (who were attracted to the product because of its architecture and standards support) like the idea of integration and service based architectures.
Nov 26, 2007
There has been an enormous amount of writing and discussion about building a business case for a CMS and I don't have much to add other than to say that most of what I have heard is totally wrong ;)
The conventional approach to the problem is to focus on process and efficiency. There is usually some spreadsheet that promises time savings from better tools for editing and accessing content. The estimates are usually wild guesses that have been adjusted to make a particular point. The uncomfortable reality is that most companies are under-investing manpower in managing content. You can't save money by saving labor that you are not applying in the first place. A slightly more reasonable approach (especially in the advertising based industries such as media and publishing) is around the volume of content: more content means more indexed pages that may translate into more search engine traffic that leads to more page impressions and potential for ad click-through. If your content stinks, the equation doesn't work.
In my opinion, the business case discussion should be around the content itself - not the technology used to manage it. This is a difficult conversation to have for a number of reasons. First of all, the human effort required to manage content (no matter what tools you have), while very costly, does not have a big spending event that triggers an ROI conversation. The expenditures from managing content (or the cost of not managing it) happens in drips and drops but it can really bleed a company. Secondly, there is a misperception that all content is good and worth managing. CIO's like to say that "disk is cheap" but it really isn't. The cost of disk drives continually declines but the operational cost of managing the information is actually going up. I don't have any hard data to back this up but I think it is obvious. For every byte on a disk, you need to back it up, you need to organize it, and you need to scroll past it when looking for something else. Most importantly, you need to find it and combine it with other bytes to make actionable information; otherwise, that byte is worthless - less than the cost of saving it no matter how cheap the cost of the disk drive is.
Estimating the value of content is hard and frequently complicated by sentimental or otherwise irrational feelings. A person's content is typically more often more valuable to him than it is to others. Not just because he was interested in the topic but also because he feels the need to justify the effort that he invested in creating the content (or paid someone else to do it). There is also a timing aspect. The value of some information goes up over time, while other information goes down. For example, there was a time when the most important piece of content for me was the master's thesis that I was writing. Now, I don't even know if it still exists in paper or digital format. Two years later in the corporate world, I was submitting a purchase request for $8,000 to recover the data off of a 3.5 inch floppy disk that was sitting in some ooze at the bottom of someone's desk drawer. It may have had an old financial report that was needed for a taking the company public. I will never know because the $8,000 recovery attempt failed.
At cmf2007, Bob Boiko's keynote talked about how we are not yet in the information economy because we have a hard time determining the value of content and the markets for trading information are primitive. Content managers are put into the subservient role of having to post everything that they are given. I would tend to agree with him. I do not feel like companies are any better at deciding what content to keep than the parent of a prolific three year old artist. In fact, I feel like the parent has the edge because he has a finite amount of refrigerator door space.
The next time you are looking at a new CMS because you are drowning in content but starving for information, ask yourself "is this CMS just a bigger refrigerator door?" "If i just dump my content into another CMS am I really solving the problem?" " Do I really understand the problem?" Those questions are hard to answer without understanding what content you have, what it is worth, and how could be made to be worth more. Here are some questions that I like to ask.
- How often are these assets requested?
- How often are they revised?
- What is the value of the business processes that this content enables?
- What is the cost of the content being wrong? This may have to do with brand image, misinformation, etc.
- What would you pay to recover this content if you thought it was lost?
- How much would another company (maybe a competitor) pay for this information? Not saying that you would sell it, but if you were selling it.
You start asking these questions and all of the sudden, content starts looking like the most important asset in your company. It probably is... either that or the people. Just like with people, you can get more out of content by retaining and investing in the right content (and either improving or letting go of worthless content), creating better processes, and providing an environment (or repository) where the content is more productive (accessible). I have never heard of a company trying to calculate the ROI of moving from one office to another. Most companies accept that they need good office space that does not interfere with people doing their jobs. Physical office space is considered a cost of doing business that has very real but complex and difficult to estimate value. It is never considered a substitute for good people or good processes. I wonder if a CMS should be valued in the same way. A CMS will not solve your content management problems but it will make your life more pleasant while you are doing the work. A little like a nice office.
Nov 21, 2007
French Open Source ECM vendor Nuxeo just announced that it was chosen by the Press Association (PA - the national news agency of the UK and Ireland) for use in PA's publication process. Writers and editors in the UK will use Nuxeo for their editorial workflow. The selection came after a successful prototype phase. One of the deciding factors was that the absence of license costs allowed PA to focus investment on customization and integration of the product.
For those who have not heard of Nuxeo, most of their activity is in France and they generated a bit of a stir when they changed their technology strategy by discontinuing a successful Zope based product (CPS) and building a new Java based platform on the JBoss stack. Readers of this blog may remember my concern about the disruption of switching platforms and replacing a mature product. Well, it looks like Nuxeo successfully made the transition and also landed a big, non-French client on the new platform.
Nov 19, 2007
Following in the vein of Tony Byrne's 10 Steps to a Successful Vendor Demo and my post on how to sit through one , here is a link to Joel Spolsky's How to Demo Software article. Besides being an entertaining read (as all Joel's posts are), I think this article re-enforces the importance of the performance and other production values to a vendor demo.