Shared Spaces ... the Collaboration Advisor

Why Closed Doesn't Work for Collaborative Workspaces: Three Reasons Why Openness is Required, Nov 3

(PDF, 9 pages, 148 KB)

Introduction
This report is about why collaborative workspaces haven't been adopted, why email continues to be the default medium for communication / coordination / collaboration, and what we "the industry" need to do about it. At a fundamental level, and looking across the demands put on people today, it argues that today's collaborative workspace offerings make it more difficult for people to communicate in comparison to email. Architectural "closedness" is preventing adoption. This used to be the case with email, but it changed. It used to be the case with instant messaging, but it is changing. It is the case with collaborative workspaces, and change is needed.

Statement of Research Independence
This Strategic Viewpoint report is an independent publication of Shared Spaces. No vendor requested or sponsored this report to be written.

What is a Collaborative Workspace?

A collaborative workspace is a pre-assembled collection of tools specifically designed for sharing information about a project between team members. It is thus conceptually similar to an email client, which is also a collection of tools, such as a calendar, a to-do list, an inbox / outbox / folders, and an address book. The difference from email, however, is that the tools in a collaborative workspace are specifically designed so that the information is directly shareable between a group or team of people, usually via common access to a single place.

Common Shared Tools in a Collaborative Workspace
Common shared tools included in a collaborative workspace are:

• A Shared Tool for Discussing Project Matters. Team members can have written discussions about the project. Instead of sending an email to a distribution list or group, the content is placed into a discussion area. Other team members can read what has been said, and leave comments or responses. This gives a centrally-accessible running account of the discussions and decisions that have taken place during the course of the project.


• A Shared Tool for Scheduling Project Meetings and Events. Real-time interaction enables team members to work through differences, leverage the collective knowledge and wisdom of the team, get feedback on difficult issues, and agree to deadlines. The team might meet face-to-face, or hold a virtual meeting by audio, video and/or Web conferencing. A way of scheduling project meetings is needed, as well as a method for capturing and recording key meeting decisions.


• A Shared Tool for Assigning and Managing Action Points. The work of the team is sometimes moved forward by everyone working together (e.g., during a meeting), but more often by individuals working alone on specific areas of action and outcome. Team members need clarity as to whom is doing what, by when, and with what resources.


• A Shared Tool for Storing Shared Documents. Many team projects result in the output of one or more documents, be that a marketing plan, a product strategy, a board paper, a market growth forecast, an advertisement, or something else. Team members require a place to put these documents while they are being developed, a method of tracking versions, and clear delineation between draft and final editions.


• A Shared Tool for Listing People's Contact Details. Details on how to contact others in the team should be stored in an accessible place. With teams increasingly being composed of people from multiple divisions or departments within an organization, and even with people from multiple organizations, how to reach someone by phone, mobile, fax or email needs to be listed. An area for storing contact details, and perhaps even an individual's photo for those in larger teams, is important.


• A Shared Tool for Recording and Analyzing Structured Information. Some teams need the ability to capture information in a structured way, that is, information that is divided into specific fields and is of a particular type. Survey responses, test-bench results, product sales figures, marketing response rates across initiatives, and risks and issues all fall into this category. A team gets benefit from this information when it is aggregated, can be sliced-and-diced, and is amendable to viewing in different ways.

Collaborative workspaces also need capabilities to regulate access--for specifying who can get to the various shared tools--thereby limiting information disclosure to specified individuals or groups.

Division of Projects into Separate Workspaces
An essential idea is the division of individual projects into separate collaborative workspaces. When each project has its own workspace, team members working within the workspace do not have the distraction of unrelated information cluttering their view. The information in the workspace is solely dedicated to the project at hand, rather than being a collection point for everything related to anything. This enables people to focus and concentrate, which are key drivers for effectiveness and productivity.

Examples of Collaborative Workspace Products Available Today
Tens if not hundreds of collaborative workspace products are available today, including Documentum eRoom, Lotus QuickPlace, Groove Virtual Office, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, Verosee for Skype, CentralDesktop, Open Text Touchpoint, IntraLinks deal rooms, and many, many more. This list is not exhaustive or authoritative, and nor does it attempt to be.

Why Closed Doesn't Work for Collaborative Workspaces
This section considers why today's approach to building and using collaborative workspaces is not working.

Putting Jim Under the Spotlight
Jim (let's put a name on our "user") is asked to contribute to a divisional project that is powered by a collaborative workspace. And then he is asked to join another project. And then yet another one, although this time the project leader (Anna) is from an another division in the organization, and so Anna's collaborative workspace product will be used. And then a request is received to contribute to a strategic project that involves multiple collaborating organizations within the industry, with the project being driven by an external organization, and thus supported by the collaborative workspace product that they have embraced (Fred is the project leader). And so it continues, until our Jim is concurrently involved in 6 or 7 projects, all of which are powered by collaborative workspaces, and all of which are different.

What's wrong with what we are asking Jim to do?

Similar Meta Models, Nuanced Implementations
Much of each collaborative workspace uses a conceptually common set of capabilities. Most have a shared tool for project or team discussions (eRoom does, QuickPlace does, Groove does). Most have a shared tool for project or team calendaring (eRoom does, QuickPlace, Groove does). Most have a shared tool for delegating and managing action point assignments. Most have a shared tool for storing and organizing documents. But, there is no interoperability between the different products, because each vendor has created their own product in a vacuum.

The current industry approach to collaborative workspace design and delivery means that Jim is forced to use eRoom for one project, QuickPlace for another, Groove for another, SharePoint for another, Touchpoint for another, and another for another. There is no ability for Jim (or his IT department) to decide that he will always use the eRoom interface, for example, and use that to access every collaborative workspace. And Anna can't decide to always use QuickPlace. And Fred can't decide to always use Groove. Everyone has to learn and use everything, and this is preventing adoption, and driving people back to email.

Key Message: 80% of each product is conceptually the same. But it's treated as different.

Multiple User Interfaces to Learn
Jim has to learn to use, and be comfortable in using, the user interface of multiple collaborative workspace products. There's not just "one way" for him to work, like there is with email. Since each product has its own nuanced implementation, different tools are called different things in each product, the navigation bar looks different, and he has to click on different parts of the screen in each product to accomplish similar tasks.

We are asking too much of Jim. Due to the requirement to learn multiple ways of doing things, it is almost impossible for Jim to get in the state of "flow", whereby he is intently focused on the work at hand and the tools he is using become invisible.

Key Message: It's too hard. Technology invisibility is almost impossible to achieve.

Information Scattered in Collaborative Workspace Silos
The project information that Jim, Anna and Fred work with are scattered across a collection of non-interoperable data silos. There is no ability for Jim, Anna or Fred to see the totality of what they are involved with, whilst at the same time maintaining a strict division between projects. For example:

• Jim can't see all his meetings, from across all of his collaborative workspaces, in a single calendar. By implication, free-and-busy searches no longer work for him.


• Jim can't review and prioritize a unified list of action points. He has to manually reconcile the list, and continually check in multiple places for new things.


• Jim can't synchronize all of the contact address cards with his Pocket PC.

For the IT department, the standalone nature of individual collaborative workspaces means that regulatory compliance is more difficult to achieve. Enforcing Chinese walls between people in different divisions of an integrated financial services company is nearly impossible, particularly if a peer-to-peer collaborative workspace tool is involved. Likewise, ensuring the capture of all business records is nearly impossible, especially when the collaborative workspace product is hosted and maintained by another division, an external organization, or a neutral hosting partner. And things that should work, like free-and-busy search, don't.

Key Message: Collaborative workspace silos make it nearly impossible to get stuff done.

A Proposal for Collaboration within the Collaboration Industry

Vendors of collaborative workspace products need to start collaborating, in an intentional way. They need to put aside their own plans for world domination, which can't happen under the current approach for anyone with the possible exception of Microsoft, and come to agreement on the technology underlying a collaborative workspace. These agreements should span three key areas.

Simplicity is Essential to Mass Market Adoption
Very simple to use and very simple to understand technologies get mass market adoption. From the user's perspective, email is dead simple: to, copy to, subject line, content, send. We need something like this that is an intermediate step beyond email, while at the same time recognizing the validity of structured, formal, and enterprise-class collaborative workspaces for business processes enablement. I see this intermediate offering as suiting the high number of ad-hoc collaborations that people engage in during a business day. Rather than merely turning to email all the time, the Jim's, Anna's, and Fred's of the world should be able to have a collaborative workspace that works for everyone everywhere.

Key Message: A simple intermediate offering is needed, something more than email, but something less than process-centric collaborative workspaces.

Agreement on Five Core Functions
Our simple, intermediate collaborative workspace offering needs to have an agreed set of core and common services. Here's the five core functions that I see: threaded discussion, shared calendar, shared task list, shared documents, and shared contact records. By agreeing to these five core functions, industry players would be able to create a standards-based, interoperable server or service to deliver these capabilities.

Key Message: Agree on five core conceptual functions, and then implement them using standards for interoperability.

Unified Client for the End User
Client-side software, be that rich, thick or thin, can then be developed to interact with the collection of collaborative workspaces that users are involved with. Each client implements a client-side rendition of the five core functions, delivering a screen layout and interface that is consistent for the user, regardless of which server or service a specific collaborative workspace is hosted on. Hence for the user, their user experience is consistent across every collaborative workspace, and therefore what they learn about using the product / service in one collaborative workspace can apply equally across all the others. Hence, the two key ideas are, firstly, each organization can settle on a single consistent user interface for its employees, and secondly, the unified client can interact with multiple back-end collaborative workspace servers or services.

Aside from the ability to interact with a collection of collaborative workspaces, three other client-side capabilities are needed:

• Invitation and Subscription. The ability to invite others to participate in the collaborative workspace, as well as the ability to accept / decline / delegate participation.


• Synchronization, perhaps. Synchronization enables users to retain a copy of the information from a collaborative workspace locally on their computer. Changes made locally are automatically synchronized with the server or service-based editions, and changes made by others are pulled down to the local machine.


• Aggregation or dashboards. It is critical that users be able to see an overall summary of where they are supposed to be (calendared events) and what they are supposed to do (delegated action points) from across all of the collaborative workspaces they are involved with. Some kind of roll-up, aggregation or dashboard capability is needed for this. All calendared events from all collaborative workspaces should display in a single calendar layout, and all tasks from across all collaborative workspaces should show in a single list which is capable of being categorized, prioritized, and synchronized with a mobile or wireless device.

Key Message: A unified client that can talk to a collection of standards-based servers or services is needed.

How Do We Make This Happen?
In summary, collaborative workspaces designed for sharing of information between teams are frequently built, but adoption is lacking. This report argues that a lack of interoperability between the various collaborative workspaces is the key reason for this, and proposes the need for intentional collaboration between industry players to create a standards-based, interoperable platform for "beyond email" collaborations.

If this is a valid idea, how do we move forward? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Thoughts on Windows Live and Office Live Services, Nov 1

Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie of Microsoft announced two new services today in an event for press and analysts in San Francisco. (Michael Arrington attended the session, and uploaded photos to Flickr). The two services are:

• Windows Live ... an integrated collection of communication (email, instant messaging), browsing (sharing favorites), blogging (upgrade from MSN Spaces), search, and security tools. Consumer markets focus; most services are freely available, albeit with advertising support. Some subscription services will be offered too.


• Office Live ... a set of tools for small businesses to do business on the Web. Web site hosting, domain-branded email, Web analytics, and business management tools will be offered in three or so packages. The entry level package, Office Live Basics, will be advertising supported. One of the top tier packages, Office Live Collaboration, delivers a set of subscription-based business management services powered by SharePoint Services, such as project management, sales and collateral management, time and billing management, and more.

Both services can be customized and extended by Microsoft business partners.

Reaction and Analysis
Here's my immediate reaction to the new announcements, and some of the implications and issues at play:

• Office Live ain't about what most people call Office ... I know Microsoft is trying to extend the Office brand to all sorts of things, and that's fine, but Office Live isn't about Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, which is what most people associate with that term. These announcements aren't an attempt to offer a Web-based office productivity suite, like the much vaunted but yet-to-be-seen Google Office.


• The partnering things will be most difficult ... Microsoft is taking on previous partners by releasing competitive services. Companies that have previously offered hosted SharePoint, for example, will find themselves in direct competition with Microsoft. It has to do it, and although it has been careful to say "we'll keep working well with others", this will be the hardest thing to pull off.


• These services will do very well ... there is no other conclusion. Microsoft touches almost everything, has links to almost everyone, and has an active partner base. Consumers at home will sign up for the Windows Live services, and small businesses that want "invisible IT" will see Office Live Services as a natural progression.


• Cross-platform stuff isn't so important ... These services are targeted at the large population of people who are happy to be 100% Microsoft. The integration between the hosted services and Windows on the desktop should be seamless and will be done well. People will like that ... just like the way I like the seamless integration between Mac on the desktop and the .Mac service offered by Apple.


• Windows Live Backup would be a good addition ... to enable seamless synchronization between "My Documents" on the desktop and "My Documents" in the cloud. This provides a level of (necessary) redundancy, and would facilitiate access to critical documents from any Internet-connected PC.

Are These Services for You?
Will you sign up for one or both of these services when they are available in 2006? Please let me know why, either by leaving a comment below, or sending me an email.

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.

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.

Microsoft's ECM Platform: Embrace, Tolerate, or Reject?, Oct 11

Shared Spaces announces the publication of an independent Strategic Viewpoint report that asks whether organizations should embrace, tolerate or reject Microsoft's forthcoming ECM platform. Authored by Michael Sampson, the 7-page report provides an independent assessment of the forthcoming offering. The report:

... analyzes what is currently known about Microsoft’s ECM plans. It outlines five key decision criteria for selecting an ECM platform, details the key functionality of the Microsoft ECM platform, and analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed platform. It concludes by making a recommendation on whether an organization should embrace, tolerate or reject the offering.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Five Decision Criteria
Platform Architecture and Features
Strengths of Microsoft ECM
Weaknesses of Microsoft ECM
Recommendation

How to Buy
Existing subscribers of the Shared Spaces Collaboration Intelligence Service have immediate access to this report. If you are not an existing subscriber, you can license the report for internal distribution within your team at US$250. Contact reports@shared-spaces.com to place an order.

Joyent Connector: Collaboration for Small Teams, Oct 7

Joyent, a startup based in San Anselmo CA, introduced Joyent Connector, a collection of Web-based tools to facilitate team collaboration. The offering includes email, calendaring, contacts, file sharing, and shared applications. It is currently available for beta testing in an appliance form factor (with 1GB of memory and two 300GB hard drives for mirrored storage), and a hosted service is promised.

Design goals for the Joyent Connector were:

• Simplicity. The onsite offering ships as an appliance, for plugging into a power socket and Internet connection. The purchaser is not required to install or configure software. After installation, each user get a single username and password that works across the product suite.


• Suite Wide Tagging. Emails, calendar items, contacts and shared files can be tagged with a consistent and shared set of tags. This enables the rapid accumulation of a "virtual shared space" that pulls together content from a variety of end-user facing applications, a feature that Joyent calls a "Smart Group". Content can stay in its original location, but auto-summarize into a single list when required. It appears as though tags can not be assigned at the point of creating the item, however, requiring another trip into the item to set it. Joyent needs to change that.


• Shared Everything. Individual email messages, contact cards, calendar entries, and files can be flagged for sharing with other people on the team, or they can be kept confidential. Users can also set certain items to notify other people of their existence, a simple and quick way of keeping others informed and up-to-date.


• Shared Calendars. Users can create any number of separate calendars, and then share them with others. This enables people to get a shared perspective on what's coming up. For example, a calendar could be created to lay out upcoming milestones on a client project. Joyent doesn't appear to offer any free-and-busy capabilities.


• RSS Everywhere. RSS feeds are available for individual tools within the Joyent system, as well as for smart groups. This enables people to quickly and easily keep an eye on what's happening with a calendar, an email inbox, or an overall project.


• Platform Independence. End user requirements is for a compatible browser running on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. Firefox 1.0.6, Internet Explorer 6 SP1, and Safari 1.3 are minimum requirements.

I haven't been able to test the Joyent offering, but here's my initial reaction:

• Packaging Joyent as an appliance is a good move, and should be attractive to the remaining Exchange 5.5 small business customers in the market. They can buy and deploy one of these appliances, get a whole lot of capabilities in a single offering, and benefit from low maintenance and administration. If end users want to keep using Outlook, they can do so.


• The tagging approach to creating shared spaces will be different for most people, but the concept isn't difficult. Since this is one of the key differentiators of the offering, Joyent needs to explain this well via collateral and training videos. Some direction on how to set up a business-wide tagging scheme (a "shared taxonomy") would be good too. Agreement on that upfront will minimize ongoing issues with wrong categorization.


• Joyent needs to deliver a presence and IM capability out-of-the box. For appliance customers, it would be best for it to build the capability itself ... perhaps a strategic alliance with Jabber for the code behind the jabberNow IM appliance would be the fastest go-to-market approach.

I look forward to trying it out, either in the hosted configuration, or with a Joyent Connector if Joyent want to send me one.

Thoughts on C-Search, Oct 4

Colin Neale, head of C-Search, an IBM Advanced Business Partner, briefed me last week on their C-Search product for Notes and Domino. With the end-of-support for Extended Search for Domino from IBM, and some architectural limitations in the current edition of IBM WebSphere Information Integrator Omnifind Edition within a Domino environment, C-Search offers some valuable points of differentiated value.

Here's the design points of C-Search that I found of particular interest.

• Runs on Any Domino Platform. C-Search runs on any platform that Domino can run on. Omnifind can run on most, but not on the IBM iSeries.


• Respects Database, Document Security and Role Security. When returning search results to the user, C-Search respects database, document-level, and role-associated security configured via Domino access control lists (ACLs) and Readers fields. In terms of role security, C-Search maps roles to users and groups in the ACL as it initially crawls the database, and then updates the role mapping on an ongoing basis as necessary due to ACL changes. Omnifind finds and returns an unfiltered list, leaving it up to Domino to deny access when the user clicks through from the search result set.


• Templated Search Configuration. In order to tell C-Search to search a specific Domino database, a document has to be filled out, describing the fields and metadata of interest. For organizations with a collection of databases that have a similar design (eg, a discussion list, or a project management database), a single document is sufficient to describe search for the collection. Omnifind requires one document per database, which makes ongoing maintenance of the search constructs difficult where a collection of databases share a common template.


• Geophysical Replica Awareness. Indexed search results within C-Search take into consideration the geophysical location of the person in reference to a collection of replicas. If the index is generated on a replica in Asia Pacific, and the user happens to be in the US and there is a closer replica, C-Search will serve up the closest match. Omnifind always goes back to the original source, thereby potentially taking longer to resolve search queries.


• Monitoring for New Domino.Doc Cabinets and Mail Databases. C-Search monitors for new databases to search. The Domino.Doc Monitor looks for the creation of new Domino.Doc document cabinets, and when one is identified, search is automatically applied. If a Cabinet is moved to a new server, search automatically follows. If the Cabinet is deleted, search is automatically adjusted. The Mail Monitor keeps an eye on the Domino Directory, and when it notices that a new Person document has been created with an associated mail database, it instantiates search for that new mailbox. Both of these innovations enable C-Search to run pretty much on autopilot.


• Shared Code Base. There are four products in the C-Search line up, and they all run off a single code base. Whether the customer gets C-Search Lite, C-Search, C-Search for Domino.Doc, or C-Search Mail Monitor depends on different settings in configuration parameters. This is good for the C-Search product, enabling Colin to minimize the time taken to roll out new capabilities to all products, and it is good for customers, enabling seamless upgrading or downgrading of C-Search.


• Replication of the Index. The C-Search index can be replicated to different servers, thus supporting indexing responsibilities across multiple servers. It can also be replicated to a local machine, enabling localized searching for faster performance or when offline.

I think it is neat to see such product leading capabilities from a smaller IBM-aligned ISV. If you are in the market for an intelligent search capability for Domino, I recommend getting in contact with Colin. Note that there is a free Lite version available, which supports up to 50 users. This means that smaller companies can take advantage of C-Search at no charge, and larger companies can install a fully-functioning edition in its development environment.

What Do You Use?
What tools and technologies does your organization use for searching across Domino databases? How do you find it? Please share your experiences below, or send an email to michael.sampson@shared-spaces.com.

Thoughts on Intellisync Unified Messaging, Sep 30

Head over to CollaborationLoop to read my first take on Intellisync Unified Messaging.

Thoughts on NextPage 2.0, Sep 22

Head over to Collaboration Loop to read my initial write up of NextPage 2.0, and the new Activity Center it introduces.

Thoughts on MindManager for Collaborative Action, Sep 21

Mindjet released Version 6 of its mind mapping software today. Shipping in two editions (Basic and Professional), MindManager 6 enables the creation of visual maps for brainstorming, meeting planning, and information sharing. Others have and will (c'mon Eric!) do a great job of describing the neat things about MindManager, and although I'm not going to do an overall review, I do want to give huge kudos to Mindjet for the on-demand training videos it has included with MindManager. I've mentioned this idea to numerous software vendors, and it is neat to see one doing it so well. Given my professional focus on enhancing team productivity, in this posting I want to focus on how to use MindManager for collaborative action within a team.

Collaborative Capabilities of Today
MindManager is largely a productivity tool for individuals. Mindjet offers two collaboration-oriented features in MindManager:

• Review Mode. MindManager 6 users can send a map to another person by email for review. When the map is in Review Mode, topic and notes added to the map are shown in different colors (depending on the user), can be prefixed with text (eg, "Michael:"), and/or can be visually flagged with an icon. This is similar to the idea behind "Track Changes" in Microsoft Word, enabling a map owner to get input from others and then to quickly see what has changed.


• Free Windows and Browser Viewers. Maps can be shared with anyone, regardless of whether they are a MindManager user or not. A free Windows viewer is available (and has been for some time), as is a recently released browser plug-in for Internet Explorer. Users of these viewers can read the map, but can not make changes to it.

Ideas for Extending the Collaborative Capabilities of MindManager
I think Mindjet has some good opportunities to seriously ramp up the collaborative capabilities of MindManager. (You'll need the MindManager Browser Plug-In to view the map)

Here's my top six:

1. Real-Time Joint Editing and Review. The process of mind mapping benefits from joint input. For people working out of the same office, the ability to share a map in real-time with another person is standard fare with a paper-based map. Both can view it at the same time, and both can add new topics or sub-topics. This interaction dynamic is not replicated with MindManager, and I think it should be. Mindjet used to offer out-of-the-box conferencing capabilities, but de-emphasized these in the last few releases, because (a) it wasn't their core business, and (b) others were providing a more extensible platform for conferencing. I'd like to see Mindjet link MindManager with today's leading Web conferencing platforms, so that through a single button ("Share Map") a user could initiate a joint editing and review session. Given its emphasis on integrating with Microsoft's client and server offerings, Microsoft Live Meeting 2005 would be a natural integration target, but the ideal is for conferencing platform agnosticism.


2. MindManager Server. Teams putting maps onto a file server for joint access suffer from rules around single user access. In other words, multiple people can't open the map at the same time. Mindjet could resolve this by adding a clear distinction between "Edit Mode" and "Read Mode", with visual notification of who has the document in Edit mode at any point in time. Alternatively, it could develop a server-level capability to permit multiple people to have the same map open for editing at the same time, with branch and sub-branch locking via the standard check-in/check-out paradigm. For large teams coordinating action around a single map, such a capability would be a life saver.


3. Presence Integration. Anytime a person is noted on a map, an automatic link to their presence and availability status should be made. For example, when using a map for planning a meeting, the presence and availability status of the attendees should be displayed. This provides a quick way for people working on the map to initiate communication by text or voice with that person. Presence should be displayed at two levels, covering both whether the person is currently online, and if the person is currently looking at the same map (place-based awareness). Ideally, they should have the option of capturing their interaction and saving it as a note on the map. Mindjet could integrate with Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005 or integrate more broadly through a technology partnership with IMlogic.


4. SharePoint Auto-Navigation. A map is an ideal candidate for giving a top-level picture of the relationship between a set of information. One could be used to give a visual sense of the relationship between lists and items in a SharePoint site, rather than using the default text-heavy interface. Perhaps Mindjet (or an existing partner) could extend MindManager to automatically generate a summary picture of items in a SharePoint site, for direct visual navigation.


5. Support for NextPage 2.0. I have written previously about the power of the NextPage Version History Map for making it clear as to who has the authoritative version of a document vs. other candidate editions. Since email is accepted as a natural way of sharing a map between multiple people, it would be helpful if the NextPage Version History Map displayed authoritative and candidate versions of a MindManager map. NextPage performs its magic by adding metadata to document files (the NextPage "Digital Thread") ... perhaps the same can be done for maps.


6. Action Point Delegation / Task Assignment. When creating a map to coordinate action between team members, action points are established and assigned to people. There isn't the option today of having those task assignments automatically display as a personalized dashboard for each individual. In other words, the person authoring the map can write or type a person's name as the delegated owner, but when that person reviews the map, they have to initiate further action to capture those action points into their action point tracking system, either through a link to Outlook (via a Map Part), or a Topic Alert. The most simple way I can think of to enable action point delegation with personalized dashboarding within MindManager is to enable Topic Alerts to be set on the behalf of another person, to have a status option on a Topic Alert (current or historical alert), and to display all current Topic Alerts across all MindManager maps to each individual in a dashboard.

What About You?
Do you have plans to use MindManager 6 for coordinating team action at your place? What collaborative action features most appeal to you, or which ones do you think Mindjet should add? Please leave a comment below, or drop me an email.