Shared Spaces ... the Collaboration Advisor

I Didn't Realize America Has Had Higher Education Institutions for So Long, Oct 30

From page 11 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (PDF):

I think that's supposed to be 1965 ...

Quick Links, Oct 30

• Perspective ... Larry on Enterprise RSS ... Larry argues that Charlie Wood and Greg Reinacker are "missing the bigger picture" when considering requirements for RSS in the enterprise, due to the profile of usage within enterprises being different than that adopted by consumers. He advocates thinking about requirements in four categories: (1) identity, (2) security, (3) integration, and (4) administration and service management. Larry Cannell


• Perspective ... Microsoft Office on the Web ... Richard wonders whether Microsoft is building a Web-based edition of Microsoft Office. ZDNET Blogs


• Perspective ... Avoiding Collaboration Pitfalls ... Martin talks about the careful planning required to gain business value from collaboration technology. Ideas: (a) ensure the technology makes the user's job easier, (b) the more invisible it is the better, and (c) recognize that some people will use collaborative technology for back-covering. vnunet.com


• Rumor ... BlackBerry 8700 Coming ... Research In Motion may introduce the BlackBerry 8700 this week, in conjunction with Cingular Wireless. There may be some technical innovations included in the device. Cellular News


• White Paper ... Enterprise IM Benefits ... CipherTrust is advertising a new White Paper on Bitpipe, with a title of "Benefits of Enterprise Instant Messaging". When you download it, you actually get "CipherTrust IronIM: Secure Instant Messaging Gateway" that does discuss enterprise IM benefits, but appears at first blush to represent a product profile. I found the title change a bit deceptive. The first half of the paper discusses enterprise IM benefits, and the second half analyzes the CipherTrust IronIM product. Bitpipe and CipherTrust (PDF, 6 pages)

Quick Links, Oct 27

• Event ... When 2.0: Time and Timing ... Esther Dyson is hosting a one-day workshop in California on December 6 on "time and timing". "Time matters in many software-driven contexts. Most obvious are calendars, scheduling, events and resource allocation over time (aka project management). But there are less obvious ways time matters, too: Human relationships, purchase intentions, document relevance and other important aspects of our lives all grow or decay over time. Time patterns - persistence and frequency of e-mails, for example - mean a lot...even though exactly what they mean is unclear." Release 1.0


• Perspective ... Email Archiving ... IT managers should be involved in the early stages of developing records retention policies for email. Most initiatives start with the legal department, but they generally lack the technical expertise to make it happen. SearchExchange


• Perspective ... Why Customers are Flocking to Linux ... Based on research from The Butler Group, (1) flexibility (uncouples OS decision from hardware decision), (2) security (security designed in from day 1), (3) reliability (due to all of the cross-checking), (4) total value, and (5) future value. AME Info


• Product ... RedDot CMS 6.5 and LiveServer 2.3 ... RedDot released Version 6.5 of CMS, its Web Content Management software, and Version 2.3 of LiveServer, its content delivery and application integration software. New features include contextual content delivery, better personalization, and integration to SharePoint Portal Server. Available immediately. RedDot


• Product ... FirstClass ED ... Open Text announced that its FirstClass division released an online learning add-on module for the FirstClass communications and collaboration platform. CCN Matthews

Case Study: Lane Neave Evaluates Document Management Systems, Oct 28

Michelle Grant is the Knowledge Manager at the Christchurch-based law firm Lane Neave. Lane Neave has been in business for over 120 years, and offers a range of specialist legal services. Michelle spoke yesterday at the October branch meeting of NZKM Christchurch, on the subject of selecting a document management system.

This is what I gleaned from listening to Michelle's experience ...

Key Decision Criteria
A cross-functional project team from Lane Neave was given the responsibility to evaluate and recommend a document management system for the firm. There are 5 people on the team, including a representative for the legal PAs, a lawyer, Michelle as the knowledge manager, and two others. An external consultant has also been involved, adding expert input and insight to the team.

The team developed a set of key decision and evaluation criteria, some of those being:

• A centralized filing system ... a single repository for all types of content.


• An intelligent search capability, with relevancy ranking.


• Integration with existing systems, such as the practice management system.


• Version control over documents.


• Future proofing of the system architecture, particularly for extranet functionality, which means the ability to provide secure online access to in-progress documents for clients as an alternative to emailing stuff here, there and everywhere. During the Q&A, Michelle noted that they are not seeing demand for this from clients at the moment, but they wanted the assurance of investment protection if and when this becomes a priority.


• Ease of use.


• Ability to capture emails that are intentionally added into the system. At this point in time, Lane Neave does not want to automagically capture every email sent and received through the system.


• Financial viability and strength of the document management vendor. They want a partner that will be around in years ahead.


• Vendor experience in the legal sector. Lane Neave doesn't want to be the guinea pig.

During Q&A, I asked about the need for offline / disconnected access to documents in the repository. Michelle said that this was not a priority, due to the availability of remote access for partners and lawyers while traveling.

Based on this list, the project team looked at 17 different document management systems, and completed an indepth review of 9. Products reviewed included Interwoven WorkSite (which has a huge footprint in the legal industry globally), Hummingbird Enterprise, SilentOne, idocs, DNA Dashboard, and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server.

Michelle and her team standardized the pricing of each option for 60 users over a 5 year period, thereby including annual maintanence charges. Total five year cost ranged from NZ$25,000 (US$18,000) to NZ$170,000 (US$120,000).

Current Status
At the conclusion of the evaluation, and with a preferred solution in mind (at no point during the session yesterday did Michelle name the preferred solution), the team decided to delay making the decision for 6-12 months. This was driven by five factors:

1. The IT infrastructure was not ready for the new document management system. New servers were needed, and some overall re-architecting was planned. The team felt it would be better to have this in place and stable before embracing a document management system.


2. Microsoft Office upgrades, especially around Microsoft Word, were planned. Again, it was decided that the firm should roll these out before proceeding. (Peter will be pleased Michelle didn't read my manifesto about this).


3. Inconsistent document management discipline and enforcement, especially for requiring metadata for client and matter number. Some users add this information today; others don't. Michelle and the team decided to start requiring this of everyone immediately, so that when the new system is deployed, people will already have the new habits firmly entrenched.


4. The existing authoritative content at Lane Neave was not ready for migration to a document management system. Michelle gave the example of duplicated collections of precedents, due to merger and acquisition activity by Lane Neave.


5. The products needed some maturity for the "mid-market", a category into which Michelle put Lane Neave. Whilst that number is fine for New Zealand, a site with 60 users would classify as "small business" for many of the vendors involved. Regardless of the categorization, however, Michelle and the team wanted the products to "fit better", although details were not disclosed.

Change the Culture Investments
In order to get Lane Neave people ready for the document management system, a number of cultural change investments have been made, such as agreeing on a consistent "house-style" for all Microsoft Word documents, the delivery of training every 2 weeks in house-style usage, and metadata enforcement. Michelle randomly assesses documents for compliance with the house-style, and awards such as lunch for two at Rosebank Estate Winery and Restaurant are dished out.

Some Ideas for Lane Neave
There were a number of complementary technologies that stood out as being of potential value at Lane Neave. I recommend that Michelle and her team should investigate:

• NextPage 2.0, for coordination of documents across people at Lane Neave. I've written about NextPage 1.5 and 2.0, and think that this has global applicability.


• Authentica Secure Documents or something similar, for beyond-the-firewall enforcement of document confidentiality. With legal contracts being regularly sent by email to outside parties, an appropriate digital rights management platform would be a helpful addition.


• Workshare Professional, for the automatic stripping of metadata for documents emailed to outside parties. This prevents the unauthorized disclosure of internal information to external parties.


• AfterMail, for the auto-magic capturing of every email sent or received by the business. Getting people to manually choose which emails to save to the document management system isn't going to work at the business level ... I like AfterMail's capturing approach, and also the ability to leverage that information for specific business purposes.

What Do You Think?
Have you experienced a document management selection in recent months or years? How did your experience differ or align with Michelle's? I welcome your feedback through leaving a comment below, or by email.

Wednesday December 7 in San Francisco: An Opportunity for You

I will be in San Francisco on Wednesday December 7. I am available to meet with collaboration technology vendors for a private consultation on market conditions and product strategy, or with an end-user organization on vendor and technology selection.

This will be the last time I'll be in the US for 2005, and won't be back until after July 2006 ... so if you have some pressing matters to discuss, please get in contact with me ASAP.

Quick Links, Oct 26

• Event ... The Future of Enterprise Email ... Stephen O'Grady of analyst house Redmonk is moderating a panel on the future of enterprise email at next week's Open Source Business Conference in Newton MA. Speakers from Zimbra, Scalix, and Funambol are on the panel, as is the CIO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Trial Courts. Looks like it will be a great session, particularly given Stephen's frustration with enterprise email and calendaring. OSBC


• Story ... Microsoft Into Hosting? ... Microsoft looks set to offer hosted implementations of SharePoint within a year. CRN


• Product ... Teamstudio Audit Services ... Teamstudio released Teamstudio Audit Services, for assessing usage, connectivity, security, and resource availability for Notes-based applications. Includes Teamstudio Security Audit (Security Control, Server and Database Security, and Agent Rights) and Teamstudio Asset Audit (Usage Monitoring, Mapping, Agent Activities, Replication, Redundancy, and ACL Issues). BusinessWire


• Product ... CMiC Collaboration Manager ... CMiC's Collaboration Manager enables users to submit specially-formatted emails that are parsed and entered into the collaboration platform's database. This makes interactions with Collaboration Manager from mobile devices a lot easier. Windows for Devices

Quick Links, Oct 25

• New Blog ... Productive Strategies ... I've been following the new "Productive Strategies" blog ... it's well worth reading what Mark has to say. A recent post was on work vs. time ... and how the different focus drives differential behaviors in pursuit of increased productivity. Productive Strategies


• Event ... Gates and Ozzie for November 1 ... Microsoft's Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie are hosting a press event in San Francisco on November 1. The event will "preview upcoming technologies from Microsoft". CNET News Windows Blog, Seattle PI


• Perspective ... Microsoft servers "for the people" ... David Coursey advocates that Microsoft should offer a range of servers, mainly for workgroup productivity, that deliver "such compelling benefit that users demand their IT department install and support them". eWeek


• Product ... Intellisync for Dopod ... Intellisync announced that its wireless email and mobile software is available for the Dopod 900, a smartphone running Windows Mobile 5.0. The Dopod is manufactured out of Taiwan. CNET Asia has a review of the Dopod 900. Intellisync


• Product ... 80-20 Compliance Server Beta ... 80-20 Software is beta testing a records management add-on for Microsoft SharePoint. Enables the indexing, linking, storing, searching, and accessing of records stored in a SharePoint repository. Available immediately; no charge. 80-20 Software


• Product ... Workplace for Business Strategy Execution ... IBM released Workplace for Business Strategy Execution, which rings with Pillar 6 ideas. Helps employees know if their activities are aligned with company objectives. InformationWeek


• Product ... Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile ... Microsoft released the beta of Office Communicator Mobile, which extends Live Communications Server to smart phones and PDAs. General availability targeted for 1H2006. eWeek


• Product ... SealedMedia Sealing Service for Documentum ... SealedMedia released SealedMedia Sealing Service for Documentum, an enterprise digital rights management solution for content beyond the Documentum 5 repository. Available immediately. BusinessWire


• New Customer ... for IntraLinks ... Marlin & Associates, a New York and Washington D.C.-based investment banking firm. BusinessWire


• Thought ... The "Not Insane" To-Do List ... A three-pronged approach to daily productivity ... this is a neat idea. American Digest


• Thought ... Focus on Ideas, Not Excuses ... Nathan says that instead of "creating excuses" as to why something won't work, focus instead on "creating ideas" about moving toward realization. Nathan Womack

Speaking at ... Open Collaboration Forum, Nov 15

The Open Collaboration Forum is a meeting place for senior messaging and collaboration executives across the world, with a focus on improving business performance through open-source enterprise collaboration technologies. It has been chartered by Akiva Corp.

I will be presenting a Web seminar for the Forum on November 15, 2005 at 9am PST. My topic is Why Closed Doesn't Work for Collaborative Workspaces: Three Reasons Why Openness Is Required.

Email carries too much baggage for effective use as a team coordination and collaboration system. A better option is for team members to use a collaborative workspace, that is a pre-assembled collection of tools specifically designed for sharing of information about a project between team members. As great as the idea sounds, and for all the power of today's tools, adoption of collaborative workspaces in day-to-day work has been miniscule.

It is my contention that "closedness" is preventing adoption, and that greater openness through interoperability is essential if the industry is to bring the benefits of collaborative workspaces to the masses. The plethora of very good, good, and not so good collaborative workspace products on the market are standalone, force people to learn multiple ways of interacting with others, and actually makes it more difficult to collaborate compared to email. This Web seminar outlines three reasons why today's approach doesn't work, and advocates three agreements that the industry needs to drive toward.

If you are able to attend, please complete the registration form.

Quick Links, Oct 24

• Acquisition ... EMC Acquired Captiva Software ... EMC paid $275 million to acquire Captiva Software Corporation. Captiva's technology for the conversion of paper-based information to digital formats will be integrated with the Documentum ECM platform. EMC


• Story ... Zimbra's Secret Sauce ... Rob reviews Zimbra's approach to reinventing email, with reference to its recent white paper. Some good ideas. LinuxPlanet


• Perspective ... Navigation in SharePoint ... Robert shares some thoughts on how to design an intranet navigation scheme for SharePoint. The ideas apply to many things, not just SharePoint. Intranet Journal


• Perspective ... Six Priorities for CIOs ... Gartner laid out 6 priorities for CIOs in the coming year: (1) keeping tight control over IS, (2) creating a stable core of IT services, (3) managing the CEO-CIO relationship, (4) paying attention to security and risk, (5) building a business process capability, and (6) getting the right information to decision makers. SearchCIO


• Product ... Liquid Machines Documentum Gateway ... Liquid Machines and Trinity Technologies announced the Liquid Machines Documentum Gateway, an enterprise rights management platform to extend access control and audit capabilities of Documentum's ECM platform beyond the repository. Secures content and monitors usage of data when it is outside the Documentum environment. Available immediately. MarketWire


• Product ... eCapture for eRoom ... Visioneer and Daybreak ICS jointly announced eCapture for eRoom, enabling the scanning of a document and its delivery to an eRoom with a single push of a button. Available mid-November. BusinessWire


• Product ... Interwise and eRoom ... Interwise has completed its integration of Interwise ECP Connect (its voice, Web and video conferencing solution) with Documentum eRoom. Available immediately, for eRoom 6 and 7. BusinessWire


• Product ... Actify DesignShare ... Actify released DesignShare, a collaborative product data management solution, for sharing digital design work via Microsoft SharePoint. CCN Matthews


• From the Trenches ... Groove in Florida ... The Florida Division of Emergency Management embraced Groove Virtual Office to help it coordinate recovery efforts post-Katrina. Key deliverable: a "common operating picture". eWeek


• Report ... Real-Time Collaboration ... Collaborative Strategies released "Real-Time Collaboration and Communication Market Trends and Analysis 2006: A Market in Transition" ... its latest analyst report. Talks about the "on-demand" collaboration market. MarketWire

Verosee for Windows: Workspaces for Skype, Oct 20

I received an email from Jim Asiano earlier today, letting me know that Verosee for Skype was available for beta testing. Being rather overwhelmed at the moment, I decided to click on the link for a quick read, but got caught when I saw it had to do with "workspaces for Skype". And, well, stuff happened, and now you get to hear about it too.

What is Verosee
Here is how Verosee describes its offering:

Verosee extends Skype™ to provide free workspaces that automatically synchronize files and chats—with or without an Internet connection—and eradicate the disorganization inherent to exchanging email attachments and portable media. Verosee enables team members to be contextually aware of each other’s status and activities, bringing convergence throughout the project life cycle—before, during, and after meetings.

Installation Experience
My experience with installing Verosee on my Tecra M4 was:

• Visit the Verosee Download page. I gulped when it said the file size was "99 MB" (3 times the size of Groove Virtual Office), but it appeared to only download 36.4 MB. Verosee requires Windows 2000 or XP, Internet Explorer, and Skype 1.4 or beyond. No Mac version is available.


• Post installation, I launched Skype with the expectation of seeing something different. When nothing showed, I clicked on the "Verosee arg" icon that had been added to my Windows desktop. It ran some stuff, and then asked me to register. I had to lie when registering though, since there was no "New Zealand". BTW, my favorite movie at the moment is this one (blame Eric!)



• There were a number of spelling errors ("beeing" sted "being") and English grammatical errors in the set up process ... but nothing too bad for a beta release.


• The activation key arrived quickly. I clicked the button on the Tecra M4, and then by the time I'd read the dialog box and shifted over to the PowerBook, the activation key had arrived by mail. I like it when things work that well.


• Once all that guff was done, I was asked if I wanted to allow another program to access Skype. When I said yes, my Skype buddy list was sucked into Verosee and shown on the left-hand side of the new screen. On the right hand side, there is a large area called "Space", which didn't seem to do much. I couldn't work out what it did.



• Then it was time to create a shared space. I was asked to give a name to the new space, to associate it with an existing Project (or to create a new one), and whether I wanted to invite other people to the space. I invited Eric ... I hope his Tablet is working at the moment! Here's what the space looked like once I added a document, and a chat item.



• There are some definite places where the user interface needs some work. As I said, I couldn't figure out the rationale for the "Space" pane. There are also some missing visual cues, such as expansion icons on lists of projects and spaces. But ... this is just a beta ... so I'm sure they'll come. Also, I found the product a bit unresponsive ... it wouldn't quickly perform the function I asked, even though my Tecra M4 has 1 GB of memory on board. If only I could try it out on the Mac ...


• The overall structure of Verosee reminded me of Groove Virtual Office, but without a lot of the extras. There's a threaded chat area, a file store, and in-space / in-project / online / offline presence display. Users can initiate a multi-party Skype conference call from within a space, but I couldn't see how to initiate a person-to-person IM chat. In terms of "projects", it seems like it is merely for the purpose of grouping spaces, rather than doing something special. Each space also offers Search capabilities.

Reaction
Here's my initial reaction:

• It's a neat idea. Integrating shared spaces capabilities with Skype is a first as far as I'm aware. I haven't seen it done with AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, or the other instant interaction clients on the market.


• The size of the download is going to put off a lot of people. I understand that there is a lot included in the product, but, it's big. You would have to be certain that this is ready for prime time before advocating this to a group of people.


• I'd like to be able to right-click on a user in my Skype client, and see the list of spaces we share. It doesn't appear to offer this today.

Net-net: If you like testing new stuff, try it out. If you want to do real work immediately, work with other existing products.

What Do You Think?
Is this of interest to you? Are you going to try it out? Let me know by email, send me a Verosee invite, or leave a comment below.