Shared Spaces ... the Collaboration Advisor

Quick Links, Dec 18

(no Audio Edition)

Positions

• Lars on Email vs. Workspaces ... Lars talks about what happens when a group agrees to use a collaborative workspaces and then reverts to email. MindThis


• Macalester College on OCS ... Macalester College is having difficulties with its newly implemented Oracle Collaboration Suite. The Mac Weekly

Vendor Moves

• TypePad Problems ... TypePad had another round of service problems, this time due to failures in its new redundant storage system. Computerworld


• Rockliffe Wireless Email ... Rockliffe announced Version 7.0 of MailSite, its email server for service providers. Adds wireless push email alerts via SMS. Available immediately. eMediaWire


• Patent Office on NTP vs. RIM ... The US Patent Office has put extra people onto the task of reviewing the patents at the heart of the NTP vs. RIM dispute. Bloomberg. The Office rejected another of the five patents at the heart of the case. Globe and Mail

Other Industry Happenings

• Alex Leaves Ipswitch ... Alex Neihaus, VP of Marketing at Ipswitch, is VP of marketing no more. He's left for an undisclosed startup in Boston. Ipswitch Blogs


• Microsoft's Top 10 for 2006 ... Directions on Microsoft posted its list of Microsoft's top 10 challenges for 2006. Vista figured prominently. CNET News

Quick Links, Dec 15

(Audio Edition, 3m41s, 868KB)

Positions

• Stowe on Office ... Stowe argues that Microsoft Office as a metaphor is dead, although there are some places where Web-based services have not yet delivered sufficiently compelling alternatives. Corante


• 100 million Wireless Email Users ... Nokia expects that there will be over 100 million users of wireless email within 4 years. InformationWeek

Vendor Moves

• Convoq Dropping ASAP Express ... Convoq announced that it will end the free ASAP Express service on December 31. People wanting to keep using Convoq's online meeting service will have to subscribe to its ASAP Pro service, at $495 per year. Convoq


• Visto and NTP ... Visto signed a licensing agreement with NTP, for the wireless email patents in NTP's portfolio. NTP also took an equity position in Visto. Visto


• Visto Files Suit Against Microsoft ... Visto filed a patent infringement suit against Microsoft, alleging infringement of various wireless email patents held by Visto. Visto is seeking a permanent injunction against Microsoft's use of its intellectual property. Visto, and ENTmag


• Vignette Collaboration 7 ... Vignette released Version 7.0 of Vignette Collaboration, its enterprise collaboration product. New features: instant messaging integration (with Microsoft LCS), internationalization enhancements, improved search engine capabilities, high availability support, among others. Available this month. Vignette


• Basecamp Adds FTP Hosting ... Basecamp added FTP hosting to its hosted collaborative project management tool. Customers previously needed their own FTP server for hosting files. Available immediately to all fee-based plans. Basecamp Forums


• HP Halo Collaboration Studios ... HP unveiled a number of Halo Collaboration Studios, for enabling face-to-face like interactions between groups of people that are geographically scattered. The Halo studios offer a high fidelity video conferencing and document conferencing experience. HP, see the Halo Introduction and Use Case


• Basecamp Affiliate Program ... 37signals announced an affilitate program for Basecamp. Subscribers that sign up friends and colleagues earn credits against their own Basecamp subscription. Basecamp


• Exchange 12 Beta 1 ... Microsoft released Beta 1 of Exchange 12, the next version of its email, calendaring, and unified messaging server. Exchange 12 will only run on 64-bit servers. Geekzone, with some commentary at Ferris Blog

Other Industry Happenings

• CTC 2006 Call for Submissions ... MediaLive has issued a "Call for Submissions" for the Collaborative Technologies Conference in Boston in June 2006. There are a number of suggested topics, although you can suggest others too. Submissions are due by January 13, 2006. CTC 2006


• Jabber Protocols for Open VoIP and Multimedia ... The Jabber Software Foundation published a couple of Jingle specifications, a set of extensions to the XMPP instant messaging standard. Jingle Signalling offers technology for peer-to-peer communications session management, and Jingle Audio enables one-to-one voice over IP. A number of additional extensions are planned. Google is very involved in the standards setting process. BusinessWire, and Google Talk Blog

Quick Links, Dec 13

(Audio Edition, 1m48s, 428KB)

Positions

• Platforms = Bad Acquisition ... Mike at Datamation links to an article by Greg of RightNow Technologies, re "major software vendors selling platforms with no tangible value". Greg argues that customers need business results, not just a platform on which solutions have to be built. Datamation Blog


• Teaching Collaborative Technologies ... Debra writes about her experiences with training people how to use collaborative technologies. Key lesson: the more examples that are given, the better for those in the training session. Collaboration Loop

Vendor Moves

• Akonix L7 Enterprise v4.3 ... Akonix released Version 4.3 of L7 Enterprise, its IM security gateway for enterprise customers. New features: advanced LDAP synchronization, advanced Microsoft LCS Clustering and Fail-Over Support, and support for Google Talk, among others. Available immediately. Akonix


• Skelta SharePoint Accelerator R2 ... Skelta Software released Version 2 of its SharePoint Accelerator, a workflow design and orchestration product for SharePoint Portal Server. New features: recovery of deleted documents, enhanced administration, and new process debugging tools, among others. Available immediately. Skelta Software

Other Industry Happenings

• Survey on Exchange Disasters ... Lucid8 surveyed organizations regarding disastrous failures with Exchange Server. Over 360 people participated in the study. Almost 75% had suffered from an Exchange disaster, with Exchange being down for at least 8 hours at 70% of these. 23% of respondents reported that they had suffered permanent data loss from the Exchange disaster. Lucid8 offers disaster recovery solutions for Exchange. Lucid8

Quick Links, Dec 12

(Audio Edition, 1m52s, 404KB)

Positions

• Eric Mack on GTD and Notes ... Eric writes about his use of Lotus Notes as a way to implement David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology. Eric Mack Online


• Different Directors for RIM? ... RIM lacks "big directors", especially "big US directors" on its Board of Directors. With the legal woes with NTP, is this a bad thing? The Globe and Mail


• NTP Won't Shut Down RIM ... Jerry says that NTP won't push for RIM to close down its US operations. NTP wants money ... as in about $900 million of it. Washington Post

Vendor Moves

• Central Desktop Update ... Central Desktop released a new version of its online team collaboration offering. New features: dynamic navigation menu, improved task management, improved discussions, and improved calendaring capabilities, among others. Available immediately. Central Desktop


• Intellext Watson for Free ... Intellext announced a free version of Watson, its Pillar 7 style product for automagically discovering information related to current topics. A professional version remains available. Intellext


• SpeeDEV and Kovair Merger ... SpeeDEV, a provider of collaborative development lifecycle management solutions, announced a merger with Kovair Software, a provider of document management and collaboration software. The new entity will be called SpeeDEV. SpeeDEV (PDF)


• Good Technology on NTP ... Good Technology issued comforting words to the market, regarding its licensing agreement with NTP for wireless email capabilities. Good Technology established a licensing agreement with NTP in March 2005. Good Technology

Travel Update, Dec 7 and 8

With the When 2.0 conference completed, my focus turned to the other meetings I had arranged for Wednesday and Thursday in California.

First up on Wednesday morning was a meeting with a Californian-based law firm on collaborative infrastructures. It has been a long running user of Documentum eRoom standalone, and had some questions over its direction, with an especial focus on eRoom vs. SharePoint. We had a great discussion over about 5 hours.

My next meeting was down the train track a bit. I tried to get a taxi to where I needed to go, but after ringing about 7 different companies with no success, I hopped onto the CalTrain and then walked to where I needed to go. The chief marketing officer ran through their ideas about a forthcoming calendaring service, and I asked a range of why/how/why not questions, and gave feedback from my perspective. It was a good meeting, culminating in dinner at a local bar.

I had to go up-state a bit for my Thursday meeting, and was planning on taking a cab. When I was informed that the price would be close to $300, I elected to take the CalTrain into San Francisco, and then catch a cab from there. It worked fine, but meant that from the point of being dropped at the train station in Palo Alto, to getting where I needed to be over the Golden Gate Bridge took something like 2 hour 40 minutes of travel. I hadn't quite budgeted for all that time!

Thursday morning dawned fine, albeit after a fairly short sleep (due to watching Braveheart for the first time, and then being unable to get to sleep until 2.30am). I visited with a vendor planning some collaborative extensions to an in-market product, and again responded to their ideas, asked why/why not questions, and generally had a great time. Thanks to Mike and team!

With my meetings all completed, it was time to hit the cab back to the San Francisco airport (the T-Mobile WiFi network was awfully difficult to use), catch a plane to LAX, and wait for my New Zealand flight. After landing in LAX, I met up with Isaac Garcia of CentralDesktop, and we talked market place dynamics, product strategy, and other good stuff. I'm looking forward to the various goodies that Isaac & team have up their sleeves.

There was no business class upgrade on the way home, so I settled in for a long flight. Thanks to the lack of sleep the night before, I was able to get about 7 hours of sleep in a row. Not too shabby! I also got to read one of the more recent John Grisham books I had missed.

There was no Friday, so I landed in Auckland at 6.05am on Saturday morning, and then waited for a flight back home. I acquired a bunch of flowers for my lovely wife, a bag of M&M's for each of my sons, and a single red rose for Susanna (18 months). The gifts were gratefully received, although Susanna took one look at the rose, saw what the boys had received, and felt rather short changed! It is good to be home.

Thanks to all who made my trip last week such a rewarding and pleasant visit.

Quick Links, Dec 8

(no Audio Edition today)

Positions

• Gartner Says Halt ... Gartner has advised its clients to halt deployments of the RIM BlackBerry server software and wireless devices until its legal woes are resolved. Gartner expects a resolution within 2-3 weeks. CNET News, InfoWorld
• Paper Calendars ... Rob discusses some of the reasons why he doesn't use an electronic calendar, and concludes that he's not alone, having been at the When 2.0 conference earlier this week. Rob's BusinessWeek Blog

Vendor Moves

• Notify-ication of a RIM Workaround ... Notify Technology announced that its wireless email server software, the NotifyLink Enterprise Edition for Exchange and GroupWise, can provide a replacement for BlackBerry Enterprise Server. It supports multiple types of devices, including some BlackBerry ones. Comment: the one thing Notify doesn't say, and definitely needs to say and clarify, is whether they have a licensing agreement with NTP, or whether they actually don't require one.
• Nokia Goes for BlackBerry Replacement ... Nokia is building on the uncertainty around RIM BlackBerry to encourage customers to embrace its line of wireless email server software and devices. It provides comfort about prospective legal issues by reminding the world that it has a patent license from NTP. Bloomberg
• NextPage 2 Update ... NextPage rolled out an updated edition of Version 2 of its service-based document coordination offering. Users can add existing documents to a NextPage Version History Map at any time, without having to start the document writing process afresh. Available immediately. prnewswire.com

Travel Update, Dec 6

When my alarm went off at 6am, it felt like I was waking up at 3am ... but then, according to my body clock, it was. The When 2.0 conference was due to start at 7am at Stanford University, and when I arrived at 6.58am there were about 10 people milling around, including Ray Ozzie. Kudos to Ray for being on time, available to talk, and not hidden away in some protected tower.

I'll write about the content of the day at a later stage, but from an organizational aspect, Esther, Daphne and the rest of the team did an outstanding job. The setting was pleasant, the food was good, the sound system was 99.7% perfect, and the videographers didn't get in people's faces. For me, the first half of the day was the most interesting and relevant; I found the second half more tough going. I sat next to Rob Hof from BusinessWeek for most the day ... and was glad that I'd recently renewed my BusinessWeek subscription!

The conference had an interesting business model ... charge $1195 to attend a one-day session, get 165 people to attend, prepare a paper on the topic by interviewing the players, and then invite the players to be part of 4-person panel discussions. Ask some discussion-generating questions, invite questions from the floor, and give people lots of time during the day to mix, mingle, and talk business over good food and fine wine. Outgoings include venue hire, food and wine, sound system hire, video taping ... you do the math. Very interesting.

I walked back to the Westin, and then met up with one of the product managers from Oracle for dinner. We had a far ranging discussion about collaborative infrastructure, calendaring, platform vs. product, and much more. Thanks to Marten.

Travel Update, Dec 5

I woke on Monday morning to the sights and sounds of the Pacific Ocean, as experienced from floor 2 of the Hyatt Regency at Huntington Beach. I ate breakfast looking out through the trees toward the ocean ... it was a great way to start the day.

I was picked up by my client at 9.30am, and we spent the day discussing product features, product strategy, go-to-market ideas, and in-progress partnerships. These guys are working on a neat product ... but I'm under NDA until it is released.

By 3.30pm, it was time to head up to the Orange County airport for a Southwest Airlines flight to San Jose. I had not flown on Southwest before, but I was hugely impressed with their business ideas ... you can order a ticket online, you can change it without penalty when and if you need to, and so on. Sounds like the way the airline business should be run. Kudos to all involved.

After landing in San Jose, I took a cab to the headquarters of JotSpot, Inc., for its 7pm meetup. Although I didn't count how many people there were, my sense of it is that about 40 people showed up. It was neat to meet Scott and Joe. Four demos were given:

• The JotSpot Bug Tracker provides a wiki-based approach to capturing, assigning, closing out, and reporting on bugs or issues with a product. It includes a change log that tracks every change over time, by performing a delta comparison between different versions of the page. Outstanding bugs can even be grouped and graphed using the integrated JCharts open source charting application, through which charts are drawn on the server in PNG format, and then sent to the browser.


• Kathleen of Knowesys, a Jot solutions partner, showed something of their work. I didn't totally follow what they had done (I was getting tired!), but it was something about dynamically changing layouts and formats based on certain settings on configuration pages. I haven't done justice to the description.


• Scott Johnstone (sp?), the Head of Vertical Applications at JotSpot, Inc., demonstrated the Class Reunion Planner that he has built in the last 4 weeks since joining Jot. It looked good, and one lady in the audience wanted to know when she could get it.


• Finally, the man himself, Joe the CEO, demonstrated a beta edition of JotSpot Tracker, a replacement for some uses of Microsoft Excel. For spreadsheets that just show simple lists, in other words those that don't have formulas in them, the rows and columns can be pasted into Tracker. Every row is automagically turned into a wiki page, but is displayed as a spreadsheet table. Columns can be sorted, just like with Excel. Additional information, such as comments and notes, can be appended to each row, exactly unlike Excel. It was ... not bad. Formula-based calculations will be added, thanks to a new hire named Michael.

And finally, it was time to head off to my hotel. I had a reservation at the Sheraton Palo Alto, but my reservation could not be found when I went to check in. Melissa asked for my name once more, and discovered that I had been bumped to the hotel next door, the Westin Palo Alto. Some things in life are tough, but not that!

Whilst the hotel was very comfortable, I go on record again as saying that something stinks about Internet access at Westin properties. I wasted 90 minutes trying to get my computer connected to the Internet, including having service people calling to my room in person and by phone. A resolution was not forthcoming. I remain very unimpressed ... especially since I experienced very similar poor service when I stayed at the Westin Times Square in June 2005.

All-and-all though, it was a neat day.

Quick Links, Dec 6

(no Audio Edition today)

Positions

• Google Calendar NT ... Rumor had it that Google was going to announced its calendar service today, but it was NT ("not today"). Carl Sjogreen, a product manager from Google was there, but when Dan Farber asked during an opportune time, he was unwilling to disclose anything. ThePodCastNetwork, Business 2.0


• Teams at Google ... Isaac links to a recent article on how Google uses teams for business success. Central Desktop


• Questions in Presentations ... Hobie writes about the design of presentations around questions. Two-way interactive presentation tools, such as MindManager, would need to be used to facilitate such a session. Mindjet Blog

Vendor Moves

• Antepo OPN System Express Chat ... Antepo announced a free starter edition of its enterprise presence and instant messaging platform, called the OPN System Express Chat edition. Excludes a number of capabilities from the full commercial edition (OPN System XT), including AOL connectivity, upgrades, and customer support. The free starter edition is available for up to 25 users.


• NextPage 2.0 Wins ... NextPage announced that its NextPage 2.0 document coordination service won "best document management product" at the 2005 Information Management Awards in London. NextPage

Other Industry Happenings

• Release 1.0 Issue on Time and Timing ... To coincide with the When 2.0 workshop, Esther Dyson released the December 2005 edition of the Release 1.0 newsletter, entitled "When 2.0: Time and Timing". Features the background research that was used at the When 2.0 conference in Palo Alto. Release 1.0

Quick Links, Dec 5

(Audio Edition, 1m32s, 364KB)

New Blogs

• Microsoft RTC Team ... The Microsoft RTC team has started a blog (hat tip to Irwin). Technet Blogs

Positions

• Troy on DayPoint ... Troy reviews the DayPoint SE Web-based collaboration offering. It is targeted at small companies. Intranet Journal

Vendor Moves

• Palm Treo 700w User Manual ... The user manual for the forthcoming Palm Treo 700w smartphone, powered by Windows Mobile 5.0, is available. The Treo 700w will be available in the US in January/February 2006. msmobiles.com

Other Industry Happenings

• What a To-Do about BlackBerry ... Users are beginning to wonder what they'll do if the US BlackBerry service is closed down. The "workaround" technology is not invisible to users ... that is, users will notice a difference. Two pieces of good news, however: (1) the US Patent Office ruled that one of the five patents involved in the patent infringement case is invalid (also here); and (2) one tester of the new BlackBerry 8700 likes it. Seattle Times, CNET News


• Volker on Microsoft "Push" Email ... Volker dissects Microsoft's approach to "push-based wireless email", and finds some areas for concern. Microsoft has bundled wireless email services into Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2. vowe.net


• Email vs. Wiki ... Fortune weighs in on the current discussion between using email vs. wikis for group collaboration in enterprise settings. Fortune