For those readers who are in the Singapore area, I'll be presenting at the event below later this month:

Date: 30 November 2009
Venue: Suntec Singapore
Time: 8:45am - 7:00pm

Fostering Innovation In The Infocomm Ecosystem

Enterprise 2.0: Leveraging Social Media to Promote Workplace Innovation

Mike Gotta
Principal Analyst, Collaboration & Content Strategies, Burton Group

Organisations are leveraging Enterprise 2.0 applications to develop collaboration strategies within and outside the workplace. Blogs, wikis and social network sites, coupled with community-building practices, help organisations leverage relationships in ways that promote more effective information sharing and innovation.

INFOCOMM INDUSTRY FORUM 2009

Joe Burton, CTO, Session Notes:

• Why is an architectural approach towards collaboration important? That's a question Cisco wants to answer - point tools are not enough.
  • Example1: collaboration-enabled CRM process. Note: Reminiscent of "Collaborative CRM" concept defined by Meta Group years ago which has morphed into "Social CRM".
  • Example2: virtualizing key business functions - scaling expertise, customer intimacy via video (Telepresence) just-in-time customer representative or expert. 
  • Example3: Streamlining complex human processes - follow-me, single number reach... reduce cycle time, coordination, process latency
• Reference Architecture for collaboration (logical diagram illustation)
  • Devices (desktop, mobile, in-room)
  • Collaborative Applications (conferencing, enterprise social software, customer care, messaging, telepresence
  • Client Services (client frameworks)
  • Collaboration Services (presence/location, tagging, semantic processing, real-time messaging, content services, social graph, etc)
  • Medianet Services (transcoding, auto-discovery, auto-configuration, etc)
  • Network Services (transport, signaling, QoS)
• Simple use case scenarios discussed that exercise architectural components (e.g., reduce travel expenses)
• Real-time voice and video
  • Service Advertisement Framework: discovery protocol - device can go to network and broadcast/request capabilities ...
  • SIP Session Management
  • Survivable Remote Site Telephony/Voicemail
  • Medianet Auto-Configuration
• Context: Presence
  • XMPP as presence hub with interfaces and connectors to other presence providers
• Context: Network-based Tagging
  • Pulse Collect: deep packet analysis (web, blogs, wikis, documents, recorded audio/video - future: SaaS Apps, Conference Calls)
  • Pulse Connect: Open Social Web Services API (profile data, presence server, policy engine)
• Intercompany Media Engine
• Intercompany Cisco TelePresence
• Client Services Framework: multi-platform multi-media softphone without a user interface ... can plug-in behind Microsoft Office Communicator, Sametime, etc
• ECP platform diagram: MVC framework,  BOSH, SIP/SIMPLE, IMAP. SOAP, REST, JCR, CMIS, open social, CMIS, RDF/SPARQL, portlet standards,
• Missing on slide: ATOM, RSS but believe it's in there - wonder about Open Search, FOAF and XFN

The following is Part 2 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco.

What is Cisco announcing?

To understand and decipher what Cisco is announcing, it is important to break the information down into four distinct areas: Strategic Pillars, Reference Architecture, “Extend Current”, and “Enter New”.

Strategic Pillars

• Interoperable, Open Architecture: Given the strategic focus on inter-company collaboration, Cisco plans to leverage open source, open protocols, and modernized methods of interoperability (e.g., SOA, Rest) to enable any device or application to leverage a consistent set of core of collaborative services.
• Flexible deployment models: Cisco intended to offer application and infrastructure services for different computing models including SaaS/Cloud and on-premises, or hybrid combinations of both.
• Enterprise social software: Cisco plans to deliver the type of social tools and applications popular in the consumer world, but with the necessary foundation expected from enterprise organizations (e.g., security, availability, quality of service, and reliability).
• Video communications: As stated earlier, conversations and visual communication are now viewed as collaboration from a business perspective, rather than the tooling viewpoint so long adopted by IT. Cisco believes that communication-centric and people-centric interaction models are the basis for next generation collaboration platforms and solutions.
• Secure inter-company: Boundary-less computing that allows internal and external collaboration across employees, partners, suppliers, and customers. Externalization trends are resulting in companies needed to collaborate as easily externally as they do today internally.

Reference Architecture

• Infrastructure: At the lowest level, the Virtual Computing Environment effort would be leveraged here (compute, storage, and network).
• Collaboration Services: In the middle layer, Cisco’s assets related to presence, location, unified communications, collaboration, and content management are situated at this tier of Cisco’s model.
• Communication & Collaboration Applications: conferencing, blogs, wikis, customer care, e-mail, telepresence and other people-facing applications are at the highest level.

“Extend Current”: Upgrades To Existing Assets

• Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage: One-button start of a combined and integrated Telepresence and WebEx meeting (improved user experience, productivity).
• Video-enabled Cisco Unified IP Phone 8900 and 9900 Series with Cisco Unified Communications Manager
• Cisco Intercompany Media Engine (IME): simplifies high-definition audio and video across organizations (common user experience internally or externally)
• Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory: opt-in directory for companies to list endpoints, rooms, etc.
• Cisco WebEx Connect IM: The product moves from AIM to an XMPP-based IM network based on the Jabber. WebEx Connect C6.0 begins with federation across all XMPP based clients and the AIM network and will federate across other networks such as IBM SameTime, Microsoft Office Communications Server, and Yahoo!. Integration with Cisco Unified Communications and WebEx Meeting Manager. There are additional policy management capabilities as well.
• Cisco Unified Presence and Cisco Unified Personal Communicator 8.0: Combines presence from SIP/SIMPLE, SIP (PBX phones), and XMPP sources. Federate and exchange messages with clients like Microsoft Office Communicator, IBM Sametime, Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, Cisco WebEx Connect, and GoogleTalk. Support for server-side IM logging. B2B federation support (native for XMPP, via third-party products for non-XMPP Public IM. Presence interfaces for application enablement as well.
• Any-to-any Cisco TelePresence HD interoperability with Cisco Media Experience Engine 5600
• Cisco Unified Communications Manager Session Management Edition

“Extend New”: New Entrants

• Cisco Show and Share: Digital Media System 5.2 introduces an updated Desktop Video portal (Show and Share) – a social collaboration platform that mimics YouTube that includes many collaborative functions (e.g., commenting, polling, ratings, tagging, user-generated authoring and publishing, usage reporting, multi-language support, content subscription, advanced search, and TelePresence playback). Speech-to-text transcription allows intelligent viewing experiences (skim for relevant points in the video).
• Enterprise Collaboration Platform (ECP) is based on open source components (search, semantic web), standard interfaces ( Java and document APIs), intellectual property added by Cisco, and the Liferay portal. It includes a wide variety of features such as a personal dashboard, social & networking-based auto-tagging, click to call/meet/IM, people and communities, information search, content management, a directory profile, social graph, blogs, wikis, forums, teamspaces, video support, a UC-enabled browser as well as micro-blogging and activity streams. Search is also included (search faceting, rating, semantic search, time-based search results, related content, user-defined notifications).
• SaaS e-mail: Corporate-grade hosted email, native support of Outlook; up to 25G mailboxes, high availability and mobile support for all users, Web 2.0 client, delivered by WebEx Collaboration Cloud with IronPort; US and Canada
• Cisco Pulse: Pulse is a search platform that performs dynamic tagging of content as it traverses the network, offering a real-time, cross application view of the entire organization. Pulse helps people locate and connect with the best available experts and information. State-of-the-art search and deep-packet analysis enables automated tagging of content and media in real-time (any content in motion across the network, including video and audio). Pulse integrates with Cisco collaboration solutions (TelePresence, WebEx), as well as with other social applications and custom mashups.
• Cisco Media Experience Engine (MXE) 5600/3500 (Real time media transformation, including speech to text, HD Interoperability with Cisco TelePresence)
• Cisco ISR G2: Medianet-ready router, optimizes video performance in the branch

The following is Part 3 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco.

Clarifications & Questions

As the launch event and collaboration summit progress, additional information will be provided. Areas where I have questions and will be looking for clarification include:

Hosted e-Mail

• Specifics on mail migration support (professional services, tools).
• Specifics on hybrid models (some Exchange inboxes are likely to remain on-premises).
• Specific details on how e-Discovery, audit, and compliance needs are addressed.
• Will there be any calendaring migration concerns (not explicitly mentioned)?
• Cisco needs to compare/contrast its approach with Microsoft’s BPOS – not just e-mail but overall to equate synergies from other WebEx Collaboration Cloud services.
• Is there a Notes/Domino compete opportunity too?

Show And Share

• How are storage and records management requirements satisfied?
• Are there any network management concerns?
• There will likely raise privacy issues – what are the EU implications for instance? Is there an opt-out or consent (opt-in) capability?
• ISSupport for record/playback conferencing systems?

Enterprise Collaboration Platform

• What are the specifics of Liferay deal?
• Does the deal include Liferay Social Office?
• Will the portal be available for both on-premises and SaaS? Will functional parity be attained between SaaS and on-premises?
• Is there Wave support (federation)?
• Does Cisco believe that it is now competing in the portal market with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle?
• Does Cisco believe that it is now competing in the content management market with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle as well best-of-breed vendors like EMC? Will there be a partnership coming with EMC given the virtual computing environment partnership?
• Does Cisco believe that it is now competing in the search market with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle?
• Does Cisco believe it is competing in the Enterprise 2.0 market with Microsoft, IBM, Jive, and others (Telligent, Socialtext, Atlassian…)?
• Where is the application development story given the SOA, Rest and other interfaces for collaborative applications? Given Liferay is open source – how will Cisco interact with that community?
• Where is the social media play? What is the touch point between ECP and EOS?

Pulse

• Do organizations want this at the network layer vs. other alternatives that are based on activity streams?
• How does Pulse honor permission models (authentication, authorization and access controls)?
• Are there privacy (EU, labor unions, worker councils) concerns with Pulse? Is there a model that supports opt-in consent?

The following is Part 4 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco.

Is Cisco’s Vision Holistic Enough?

While Cisco does a very good job of navigating market transitions and managing its efforts to move into market adjacencies, that does not mean that it has “perfect knowledge”. The collaboration market is not well defined. Some strategists include content management, search, portal, and Enterprise 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis) within a collaboration domain. Cisco may think it knows the borders of a market in which the borders are in reality, porous and ill defined. Additionally, the two dominant vendors in the space (IBM, Microsoft) have successfully fought off challengers for decades.

There are more reasons for Cisco to fail than to succeed in the collaboration market unless Cisco understands the secondary and tertiary nuances of the market. The obvious tooling segments of collaboration (e-mail, calendaring, discussion forums, and workspaces) are well known. However, there are strongly related segments such as unified communications (a segment Cisco knows well), content management, search, portal and Enterprise 2.0 (blogs, wikis, tags, bookmarks, communities, and social networking). It is unlikely a vendor can become a dominant platform leader without solutions that cover each of these segments to some degree.

As Cisco moves more broadly into social computing (e.g., social networking), a more clear strategy as to where Cisco is going with identity needs to come through more strongly. The intersect between identity and social networking is critical to understand (e.g., relationships, social identity, social roles). As Cisco progresses into social networking, a strong analytics story will be required (e.g., social network analysis - albeit Pulse does SNA at its own level).

Another arena Cisco needs to understand concerns collaborative applications. Developers have been an integral part of IBM’s and Microsoft’s success in the collaboration market. Collaborative applications provide tremendous business value. Cisco need to define what program it will put in place to attract developers and build a community around that program. Cisco also need to consider what developer environments it intends to support.

A thriving partner and third-party ecosystem is another critical success factor for Cisco as it attempts to become a collaboration market leader. Cisco needs to identify (and promote) business models and related services to expand Cisco’s platform and solutions into a sustainable ecosystem.

Finally, and this is a challenge for all vendors in this space – Cisco needs to not only offer a mix of SaaS/Cloud and on-premises solutions but also need aligned strategies that unify enterprise and consumer solutions (social media).

Cisco Collaboration: Bottom Line

What should Cisco do?

• Cisco needs to be clear that it is taking on IBM and Microsoft directly – there is no way to avoid this competitive positioning.
• Cisco needs to articulate its broader direction concerning content management, search, and portal. It is competing in those markets (whether it wants to or not). Cisco believes that it is not - that it is only leveraging these capabilities to bolster it's own collaboration effort. However - the final vote rests with customers who will likely want to pull Cisco in directions that it had not intended to invest in (content management) or compete (portals).
• Cisco will be taking on E2.0 vendors (namely Jive) and must articulate a strategy concerning communities and social networking.
• Alignment of Cisco’s social media efforts need to occur with its enterprise collaboration efforts.

Bottom Line

• Cisco demonstrates that it has learned a lot about the collaboration market and its related domains
• Cisco has identified three areas that it intends to influence and/or control: virtual computing, voice and video networks, and inter-business collaboration
• In those areas Cisco will progress and mature over the next 3 years (expect incremental consistency) – people should not expect overnight success – this remains a journey for Cisco
• In terms of specific perspectives on certain key announcements:
  • Credible hosted e-mail play
  • Very strong endorsement of XMPP with the revamping of WebEx Connect
  • Missed opportunity (from a media perspective) to point out synergies with Google Wave (given XMPP strengths)
  • Strong argument that Cisco is best positioned (vs. Microsoft and IBM) to become the central enterprise presence hub (detached from IM, telephony etc) given its support for native XMPP, SIP/SIMPLE and programmatic interfaces.
  • “Corporate YouTube” (Show and Share) enables Cisco to lay an early claim to that aspect of social computing and Enterprise 2.0 trends
  • Pulse is an innovative approach but critical issues remain open
  • Enterprise Collaboration Platform solidifies how Cisco looks at the collaboration market but opens a “Pandora’s Box” of questions. Cisco will try to position its platform more narrowly than will the market and customers. Cisco needs to pay very close attention to how  inter-dependencies across content management, search, portal and application development can adversely affect the collaboration areas it seeks to influence and/or control.
• The final vote rests with customers - the more success Cisco attains - the greater the demand from customers to broaden and deepen ECP's capabilities as a Tier 1 collaboration platform.

The following is Part 1 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco.

What is driving Cisco into the collaboration market?

There are many reasons driving Cisco in this direction (revenue opportunities, growth needs, and customer demand). Cisco believes that the collaboration market is in transition – that there are structural changes in the market that opens the door for Cisco to leverage its assets (voice, video, and networking) in ways that will enable it to take a leadership position. This should come as no surprise to market followers or competitors – Cisco is a company that strongly believes that its ability to grow and innovate is dependent on how well it:

· Understands the emergence and evolution of market shifts and the repercussions of those shifts to Cisco (pro and con)

· Formulates strategies, adjusts its own business model(s), and arrays resources to capitalize on market opportunities created by those shifts

· Continuously listens to customers and other stakeholders along the way

· Restructures its organization and channels to best leverage its relationship capital in ways that establishes market leadership

· Iterates and executes on those strategies in a manner that times Cisco’s entry and growth into those market adjacencies

What major changes in the collaboration market is Cisco exploiting?

Cisco is exploiting three “wedge issues” as it moves into the collaboration market:

· Virtual Computing Environment: The deal with EMC and VMware enables Cisco to catch-up to a transition that matured more rapidly perhaps than Cisco expected. Market expectations and competitive needs combined to make a partnership necessary. Cisco can leverage this alliance as it attempts to influence/control its role and infrastructure solutions in the SaaS/Cloud market.

· Video Networks: It should come as no surprise that Cisco fixates on video. However, it is a lever that Cisco can exploit given consumer trends (YouTube) and social computing trends where conversations and visual communication are now viewed not from a tooling viewpoint but as “acts of collaboration” at the people and process level. Capitalizing on video trends keeps Cisco on a necessary business trajectory. Video is a competency Cisco can claim as its unique heritage compared to Microsoft and IBM as well.

· Collaboration: Converging UC (voice, conferencing) and collaboration trends make this a crucial market adjacency for Cisco to enter. In some ways, it had no choice. Cisco could not allow a key rival (Microsoft) to encroach in the UC market without a response. So on the one hand, its move into collaboration is defensive to protect its UC assets. However, more importantly, given the structural shifts within the collaboration market – it is very opportunistic for Cisco to move into collaboration regardless of Microsoft. The move into collaboration is enables Cisco to transform its voice and video communications solutions into broader solutions and adjust its business model to deliver additional solutions specific to collaboration.

Summary

Cisco sees value in a network-centric approach that will unify collaboration activities across multiple silos. It's embedded capabilities in the network enable it to perform unique services such as auto tagging all forms of media. As collaboration moves in the direction Cisco believes will happen, the sharing of knowledge transitions from a text centric model to include voice and video (on-demand, Podcasts, etc) where it (Cisco) brings unique value relative to other approaches.

The combinatorial opportunity arising from these wedge issues enable Cisco to target SaaS-based email to gain short-term customer traction and establish longer-term market credibility as a collaboration platform and solution provider. Simultaneously, Cisco hopes to build momentum (via WebEx Collaboration Cloud and Enterprise Collaboration Platform), to solidify its collaboration story. Its new portfolio component, enterprise social software, positions Cisco more broadly across multiple market segments associated with collaboration (content management, search, and portal). Overall, becoming the market leader for inter-company collaboration appears to be the primary focal point for Cisco. However, it will end up competing head-on with traditional collaboration vendors (i.e., IBM, Microsoft) as well as up-and-coming new entrants (e.g., Jive).

Highlights of Cisco's press release is below (with a link to the full release). Additional blog posts will come out later today (starting around noon PT) that will include my early thoughts. I would recommend attending the virtual launch event (webcast).

ANNOUNCEMENT DETAILS

New telepresence and unified communications solutions deliver rich business-to-business communications across organizational boundaries

• Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory is a Cisco-hosted directory of endpoints, organizations and people with access to Cisco TelePresence endpoints. The directory features a virtual assistant to assist with scheduling meetings between  the more than 1000 rooms and 75 customers on Cisco TelePresence exchanges.
• Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage is a simple, one-button initiation and scheduling solution with video integration between Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx conferencing. Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage, combines the ease-of-use and broad reach of Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx Meeting Center
• The Cisco Intercompany Media Engine gives end-users business-to-business communications over any IP network, maximizing network efficiency and reducing costs. This new solution, submitted today to the Internet Engineering Task Force for standardization, includes features such as business-to-business wide band audio, voice and other collaboration capabilities, including video, with multiple levels of built-in security, and will add additional capabilities in the future. Service providers will benefit from the ability to offer new business-to-business communications services, differentiated network capabilities, and expanded managed services.
• With Cisco Unified Communications system 8.0, Cisco extends support for a wide range of endpoints including new video- and WiFi-enabled Cisco Unified IP Phones and additional smartphones via Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator. Cisco UC 8.0 also offers customers a choice of deployment models – whether on-premise, on-demand, or hybrid.
• Further details about today's Unified Communications 8.0 news are available here.

Mail, messaging and presence tools

• Cisco WebExTM Mail is a new corporate-grade, hosted email solution from Cisco with native Microsoft Outlook interoperability, optimized mobile device support, and browser-independent AJAX web 2.0 access. Using technology acquired from PostPath, Cisco WebEx Mail has a highly scalable infrastructure that overcomes the limitations of traditional mailbox size. Cisco WebEx Mail is on-demand, highly available, and designed to free IT departments from the burden of email infrastructure management and operation.
• Using technology gained through the acquisition of Jabber, Cisco today announced it has integrated the XMPP standard to provide secure, federated presence across its collaboration portfolio, starting with Cisco WebEx Connect Instant Messaging and Cisco Unified Presence 8.0. This announcement showcases Cisco's commitment to deliver standards-based solutions to drive greater interoperability across clients, devices and applications. The XMPP open standard allows presence federation among presence systems, both business and consumer, as well as support for third party enterprise instant messaging clients and applications.

Cisco breaks new ground with enterprise social software offerings

Cisco is introducing enterprise-ready social software solutions that allow customers to dynamically form teams and communities in a highly secure manner. Cisco's technology helps enable teams to be formed based on expertise and relevance, regardless of location, and brings experts together with both asynchronous tools and real-time voice and video.

• Cisco Show and Share is a social video system that helps organizations create and manage highly secure video communities to share ideas and expertise, optimize global video collaboration, and personalize the connection between customers, employees, and students, with user-generated content. It allows organizations to record, edit and share video with comments, ratings, tagging and RSS feeds, and speech-to-text transcripts can be uploaded for easy video search and viewing.
• Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform is an enterprise-class social software portal that features a corporate directory with social networking capabilities. It allows users to create team spaces and community environments 'on the fly' and also offers a customizable framework for integration of legacy business applications and web 2.0 content. Unlike today's document-centric portals, the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform is people-centric, facilitating real-time voice and video communication to connect people, communities, and information to make faster business decisions.

Cisco offers customers new medianet-ready devices that optimize networks for video, voice and collaboration

Cisco introduced three new, network-based devices that help customers evolve their IP networks to medianets.  In combination with the recently introduced Cisco Integrated Services Routers Generation 2, customers can now enrich their existing collaboration capabilities with new, network-based functionality.

• From the Cisco Media Processing family, the Cisco Media Experience Engine 3500 and the Cisco Media Experience Engine 5600 provide real-time video transcoding, allowing any content to be shared across the network to any end-point device.  Innovative features such as speech-to-text transcription of videos will help enable video on the network to become as searchable and accessible as text and web pages today.  The MXE 5600 also facilitates standards-based interoperability across many video endpoints, allowing for Cisco TelePresence to interoperate with video conferencing devices from other companies.
• Cisco Pulse is an innovative search platform that performs dynamic tagging of content as it traverses the network, offering a real-time, cross application view of the entire organization.  This intelligence allows people to accurately locate and rapidly connect with the best available experts and information they need.

Cisco Breaks Down Barriers to Business-to-Business Collaboration -> Cisco News

Notes from a collaboration and social computing session at Enterprise 2.0 conference:

The presentation will provide insight into EA's internal social collaboration strategy, successes and failures, solution, insights, best practices. Specifically, we will look at our integrated social networking, knowledge management, community and search solution.

Speaker - Bert Sandie, Director - Technical Excellence, Electronic Arts, Inc.

Bert is a key contributor to Electronic Art's (EA) dynamic culture. His technical and leadership background in the high-tech industry has helped him drive sharing, social connections, collaboration and innovation at EA. His current projects include knowledge management, social networking, and learning and development solutions at EA.

Notes:

• Bert: Efforts driven by HR, focused on KM and social networking for a few years
• Know more about employees from external information that info available internally
• EA has 9,000 employees, global company, employees all over the world,
• Games are highly instrumented so consumer experience can be improved
• Multiple YouTube channels including one for recruiting, Twitter for EA and commercial products, multiple branded web properties, forums for customer feedback - all these things influence employee experiences
• Best guess. 3/5 employees on Facebook, maybe more - used at home and at work (not blocked)
• Very visual company, YouTube also not blocked
• Three years ago not much blogging but not certain levels of employees all blog on games
• How does this all influence collaboration? KM, blogging, streaming, social networking, communication, image management, notifications...
• Doing all this internally, 9 year journey, beginning with a "knowledge portal" that included user profiles
• "Knowing your users" as important internally as externally
• Products have too many features - overwhelming users - giving someone a user manual means you have failed
• Think of collaboration as a lifecycle - including face to face communication - face to face builds relationships and trust, personal insight
• Why do people participate? learning, competitive, socializing, recognition, sharing, collaborate, affinity, validation, altruism...
• Note: salient point - identifying participation models is important when trying to understand collaboration
• Defining the user experience: Aesthetics, Functionality, Usability .... design is important - design includes how it works
• Knowledge portal, social network, enterprise search key pillars - built on top of SharePoint - in a year with 2 developers
• Principal: Usability: fast and responsive; easy to understand, simple to use
• Principal: Features: user profiles (role, team, skills, interests), content management (articles, blogs, videos), communities of practice (groups), unified search as well as team specific solutions (sites and wikis)
• Principal: "The Look": typography, layout, color palette, graphics and images
• About 5000 views per month on knowledge portal out of employee base of 9000
• Have internal YouTube capability but no ratings (ratings might discourage contributions - all content is valuable).
• EA has multiple skins for MySite profile ... gives every team or part of the organization a group social identity (e.g., around games)
• About 25 skins, teams build them - they want that affinity, community - (social identity)

Next week, Alice Wang and I will be presenting our research and consulting findings on the intersect social media and social networking has with identity and security for Burton Group clients. This topic has been a major source of client inquires over the past few months as organizations are dealing with employee use of social media tools like Twitter as well as internal tools associated with "Enterprise 2.0". If you are a Burton Group client, I believe you will find this presentation very informative. If you are not a Burton Group client, Alice and I will be presenting this topic again on Thursday, November 5 at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco. For those attending that conference, you can find details on the event web site. If you are not attending - it's still not too late to register!

Telebriefing Description:

Use of social networking to improve information sharing and community-building will transform how organizations think about identity and its relation to collaboration and social media strategies. Social network sites, micro-blogging, activity streams, blogs, and wikis enable employees to construct their own identities via profiles and social graphs. As employee participate and contribute in these social networking environments, internally or externally, they also establish social roles and community reputations. This TeleBriefing by analyst Mike Gotta and consultant Alice Wang will examine the risks and benefits of more open and transparent information sharing on collaboration and identity strategies.

Presented by: Alice Wang and Mike Gotta

Dates:

Tuesday, October 27, 2009
12:00 p.m. EDT/9:00 a.m. PDT/16:00 UTC GMT/17:00 CET
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
12:00 p.m. EDT/9:00 a.m. PDT/16:00 UTC GMT/17:00 CET

Register:

• Online (for Burton Group clients)

Notes from session w/Sean Squires and Lincoln Demaris

• Case Study: Knowledge For The Field - one of several systems for KM at Microsoft, repository of high-quality of field-ready content, intitial phase focused on content publishing and discovery
• 80K Microsoft employees might access the system to learn about a product, 45K sales/marketing/field might want to know how to sell the product, 1K subject matter experts might use the system as well
• Challenges/key takeaways: user experience (tough to cut across different processes), collaboration (different groups manage information differently), Info Discovery (search results are difficult to refine and validate)
• Wikipedia held up as very good KM solution
• Key Component: Publishing Site:
  • Pages as storefronts
  • Consistent wiki-like user experience
  • Implicit structure
• Key Component: Document Center
  • High-value managed content
  • Not a walled garden
  • Submissions can come from anywhere
• Key Component: Shared Services
  • Enterprise consistency, taxonomy and folksonomy
  • Content type, metadata, content analytics, social feedback
• Planning for on term store for all of Microsoft, one feed store (?)
• May have multiple term sets and taxonomies but centralized management and sharing
• Demo
  • Prototype Site: InfoPedia
  • Search results include lots of metadata
  • Refinement pane on left side - pulls metadata to be used as filters
  • Custom control for Digg-lke voting
  • Document center is a stylized content query web part out of the box
  • Managed keyword control also shown
  • You can use tagged filters relevant for a page to send into the content query web part of show different documents in the doc set based on the page and the tags on the page (if I heard the speaker correctly) - contextual content query then.
  • Workflows associated with topic areas that are assigned to pages so participant contributions can be routed to page owner, subject matter expert etc.
• Tagging is relied on extensively and works with content query web part - social tags and/or authorized tags - tags drive navigation, discovery, etc
• Pages as storefronts vs nested subsites
• Wiki editing and social features can help with user participation and contributions within a governance model to have contributions checked.
• Document Center is strictly managed
• Demo
  • Document set can be thought of as a better folder model for collections of content
  • Content Organization - folders, rules, poilicies
  • Can now attach policies to location - location-based retention
• Content Organizer ensures permissions and policies applied correctly
• Overall impression: very well done for content-centric KM approaches.

Gail Giacobbe, Principal Program Manager Lead and Ted Pattison, SharePoint MVP

• "Primary reason I don't use wikis is that we have so much information to track across so many sites that I simply can't keep track of them and forget they exist" as opening statement - not sure this is a real argument, can say that about any new tool not just wikis. Any new tool that requires behavior change can be a burden.
• Valid point is the need for wikis to support rich information (video, diagrams, etc) and need for compliance, audit, DLP, etc etc
• Enterprise Wiki leverages publishing infrastructure which powers Enterprise Wikis
• Note: should include differentiation from team wiki and deal with possibility that team wiki might be promoted to an Enterprise Wiki so how does that happen?
• Enterprise Wiki address the Community component of SP2010
• SP Foundation: Web Edit - easy page editing, wiki linking with auto complete, cross browser
• New site template for SharePoint Server build on publishing infrastructure - enhanced with categories, social tags and notes, page templates (content types and page layouts), ratings (web analytics) and customizations (master pages, CSS)
• Inherent content management, security, etc from SP2010 platform
• Wiki is an open publishing model - hmm, not sure I agree - it is an open collaboration space more than publishing - more community than publishing
• Demo:
  • Can insert web parts in wiki page
  • Can use rich text editor, insert graphics, use ribbon to change formats, etc etc
  • Good news - no wiki syntax and very easy to work with content as if it was a familiar document style
  • Rich content support is very straight forward
• Enterprise WIki is a publishing site - managed meta data, site provisioning causes group creation, metadata column automatically added, brand via master pages and CSS, cache scheme built in for scaling,
• Added new content type for wiki ...
• Enterprise Wiki can have multiple sub-sites ...
• Users will need to remember the different user experience, features and capabilities between the different types of "wikis" (enterprise and team) - that might prove to be a problem down the road from a design and user experience viewpoint.
• My Tweets during the session:
  • Nice demo in the sense of using a wiki style of content in an application context but not what you would think of as a wiki demo #spc09
  • Not sure I see this clear line between baby wikis and adult wikis (team vs enterprise) #spc09
  • I wonder if some of the distinctions between team and enterprise wiki are somewhat artificial based on underlying tooling #spc09
  • Seems that content gets locked into one wiki or the other - you need tomake the right decision up front and hope it doesnt change #spc09
  • So how does a Team Site with wEB Edit "wiki" get promoted to an Enterprise Wiki? #spc09
  • Interesting that "wiki" is implemented via publishing engine #spc09
  • Sitting in Customizing Enterprise Wikis in SP2010 #spc09

Notes from Venky Veeraraghavan's presentation, forgive the typos!

• Session objective: understand technical architecture and planning required to deploy
  • MySite personal portal
  • Social feedback
  • People and expertise search
• @SPSocial is the Twitter ID to follow
• Demo:
  • MySite has 3 out of box pages ... expect people to rename pages to make them their own
  • Shows stream of comments on Note Board and activities re: tracking people and tags
  • Activity feed is very extensible stream ... can track items coming form within SharePoint but you can build connectors to include other sources
  • Will talk about mining Outlook later
  • Shows Silverlight org chart browser
• Major components
  • Pages: My Network (was in 2003, removed in 2007 now back?), My Profile (was in 2003), My Content (was in 2007) (own personal site collection, you are the administrator of your own site), My
  • Site Collections: MySIte Host (centrally managed), My Site
  • Web App: My Web Application
  • Service Application Proxies: EMM (meta data). UPA, Search
• Activity Feed
  • New for SP2010, web part, Atom 2.0 feed
  • Consolidated: activities from everything I track (inbound)
  • Published: my activities (outbound)
  • Should be able to export atom feed for other feed readers
  • Need to consider performance implications of feeds
  • Architecture: two databases: social data (note feedback, social bookmarks, social tagging) profile database (profile properties, membership colleagues etc). "Gatherer" job scoops up data and sends to feed table to scale ... simple select all items I track ... then API to inject into feed store ... you can write gatherers that collect data from sources you think are interesting and then stick into feed - set to 1 hour timer
  • Note: permission models! What are the ACLs around the feed elements so that right people see only permissions items in consolidated feed. Also true for "My Activity" stream - how to wrapper what is sent outbound.
  • Extensibility requires some key points to know: Activity Application (say CRM), Activity Type (say New Meeting) and then an Activity Template " has scheduled a meeting with on for user experience.
  • Activity Event: "Mike has scheduled a meeting with Company ABC on DD, MM, YY" is displayed
  • Considering whether you can "friend" a gatherer if I heard it right...
  • Consumption API is an Atom 2.0 feed
• Feed Readers
  • Goal of 2000 RPS current at 500-700 with activity, 2100 without activity RPS = requests per second
• Profile Pictures
  • Central picture library
  • Resided three ways (for use in SP 32x32, use in AD and client apps 48x48 and for profile page 96x96)
  • Controls needed for photos due to legal and risk concerns (e.g., harassment) 
  • Picture picker, supports policies, can replace with other picker
  • Sync up to AD, supports write-back if configured
  • Outlook and OCS use Pictures in AD
  • Note: really, really, need to plan for privacy
  • Top issue: Picture usage: consent, opt-in, corporate policy
  • Top Issue: Activity feeds: who follows me and possible need for two-way consent
• Bookmarklet for browsers, can see who else in company has tagged page, discussions around URL, using Firefox in demo,
• May also want to tag customers, may have LOB application for instance, can tag customers or other artifacts - you will want your info to be URI accessible thus leveraging tags
• Note: Wonder if there will be a bookmarket for Office client tools not just browser.
• Social Feedback: Social tags, notes and ratings
  • Helps categorize, annotate, promote and help retrieval of relevant links
  • Applies to any URL inside or outside of SP with bookmarklet
  • Independent of write-permissions
  • Primary way or promoting documents and web pages to news feed
  • Basic level 3 tuple: Person, URL, Feedback
  • Note: still need permission controls around sources being tagged/bookmarked as well as tags/bookmarks - not sure enough security was discussed and therefore not sure if it is in there
  • Note: biggest barrier: not enough intranets have rich native web content
• Social Feedback table has 3 tables with foreign keys into Profile and EMM (Enterprise Metadata)
• EMM supports folksonomy and taxonomy terms so people can select the meanings they want
• Now we get to security ... need to prevent tags as giving away existence of document people don't have access to
• Security trimming ... not explained deeply, pointed to other sessions
• Related services: search service index tags and security trimming
• Scale: Cab be very large datasets ... enterprise metadata generates tag at Internet scale
• SP2010 will estimate 600 million rows at RTM - use Excel model ... social feedback database
• Need a privacy policy for tags/bookmarks ... transparent sharing, what happens when an employee leaves, security, activity feed repercussions, etc
• Note: security teams will look at this to see if it introduces additional surface area for attack as well as data loss/leakage etc
• Need to plan for adoption - employee advisory committee prior to deployment, seed the network with tags, connect with HR, legal, execs, etc
• Workflow for handling concerns and escalations
• Mining Outlook for expertise is consent driven ... nothing every published without user concent
• Knowledge Mining: Tags are in Outlook 2010 and SP2010 (knowledge network stuff), client does analysis, get consent on client and server, indexing occurs and they can query
• Colleagues (social graph) is indexed as well as distribution list and site membership (see Social Search session)
• First question people ask is "how did it know" (the system) so user education about company policy is important, "suggestions" form system only visible to owner, only indexing profile properties marked for "everyone"

Jeff Teper, Corporate VP; Kirk Koenigsbauer, GM

• Question: A follow-up to a response during Steve Ballmer's keynote that was somewhat evasive. My follow-up here this morning was:
  • What architectural change has been implemented within SP 2010 so that clients can expect quicker release cycles for application layer capabilities vs. lower-level infrastructure/platform modifications?
  • What development life-cycle change internally was made to support a faster cycle-time (vs. 3-3.5 years between releases now)?
• Answer: None. There was absolutely no additional insight. Microsoft is trying to "have it's cake and eat it to". You cannot make the case that the value of SharePoint to organizations is that it provides this massive all-encompassing platform that supports a wide range of capabilities unlike any other solution in the market - and then, turn around and say "well, because it's so large and complex it takes time for this platform to change and move forward in a manner that is stable consistently over time". It begs the fundamental question - when does a platform become too large? Is SharePoint getting so complex and so inter-twined that no one should expect a more streamlined release cycle - regardless of cloud. Cloud does not make it any easier for Microsoft to deliver business capabilities defacto any faster if (1) internally, the development cycle remains the same and (2) there are no specific architectural changes to allow different collections of components to be released at different pace rates. 

I'm left thinking that we will be talking about SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2017 and so on - a release cycle of 3-4 years - even with Cloud/SaaS and BPOS. Should business and IT decision makers pause for a moment and take a long-view perspective on SharePoint over time.

While there is a level of irrational exuberance right now at the conference given all the changes in this release (there is a lot in SP2010 to like), business and IT decision-makers should think long and hard about committing too much of their business to this type of slow-moving platform infrastructure since Microsoft seems incapable or articulating how this release is a more adaptive platform for Microsoft itself to deliver capabilities more rapidly in response to customer needs.

For instance - even with this release there is still a lack of parity between on-premises and BPOS. As you listen to some Microsoft execs is sounds (not all the time but often) that SaaS follows on-premises vs. having BPOS as a first-class release target (that SaaS will "catch up to" on-premises) - I could be off here - but that's my perception. Microsoft still seems to be reacting to the Cloud from a SharePoint perspective versus treating it as a peer. And this gets back to the development life-cycle internally.

The other angle here is mobile - mobile seems to be consistently marginalized or treated as an after-thought. Responses are somewhat flippant and seem to avoid discussing much more popular platforms like iPhone and Android.

Perhaps there are certain solution domains that should NOT be on SharePoint if those solution areas require more business agility in the market. One space where this might be true is the social computing area as an example.

The eggs, bacon, and sausage however were excellent.

Notes from Christian Finn, Director, Social Computing

• 13 sessions in "social track"
• Microsoft design point is to co-mingle structured collaboration tools alongside social computing tools - it's unrealistic to think of social computing disconnected from collaborations strategies
• Back to information workers and productivity ... find knowledge, share ideas, work in teams, feel valued, manage projects, build= a network and use content
• Long-term ROI of social computing is helping information workers feel valued (e.g., via comments from peers, ratings, etc)
• Microsoft also thinks of the IT Pro ... control costs, provide solutions, maintain security, do more with less, ensure compliance, reduce islands, etc
• This situation also causes users experience is fractured across too many tools and silos
• The challenge for IT: If you are in IT - they are asking for consumer versions of sites for internal use - but arguments raised re: compliance, security, etc.
• The challenge for the Enterprise: Connecting the dots is the challenge of the enterprise ... need to locate expertise, build community between people as a result of mergers, or onboard new employees
• Social Computing lowers the cost for sharing and organizing ... surfaces knowledge and networks (expertise) and increase employee engagement
• Pitfalls: Demographics, hierarchy, policies, culture, etc
• Microsoft believes SharePoint scales to meet as narrow or broad a view an organization has on social computing, you can use it in a very classic way - no MySite etc - keep with basic document libraries, forums, workspaces - or - you can use blogs, wikis, profiles, etc - all in one platform.
• Customer examples: Accenture (extensive use of MySite, social distance), skill attributes used for staffing, etc), Electronic Arts (very strong from a user experience and aesthetic viewpoint). Looks more like Facebook, supports skins for different product areas, etc. British Telecom used podcasting kit for just-in-time learning. Supports knowledge retention (interviews, user-generated videos on best practices).
• SharePointM social journey began with MySite 2003 (disagree that Microsoft had any clue of social computing in 2003 though - some recasting history here)
• Demo
  • MySite: much cleaner UI, less form-like, softer blending of UI elements, typical stuff (name, presence, phone, etc), can use Business Connectivity Services to bring in HR data etc, free-form text for entry of ad-hoc information, redesign of middle section of MySite - tabs for organization, colleagues, tags, memberships etc) - supported by privacy settings.
  • Note Board emulates Facebook Wall type interface - can have Note Board on documents, sites, not just "wall". can have list of comments ala discussion stream
  • Personal tag cloud - when clicked will find people and artifacts
  • Tag Profile: way to aggregate all the people who are using a tag inside the organization... can "follow" tag - do a people search and locate all people associated with that tag
  • MyNetwork is a running newsfeed - stream, river of news model - activity stream comes close to social messaging (Twitter) but not sure I would go that far - seems more "FriendFeed" like.
  • Follow a tag results in event being posted into news stream - way to discover people and artifacts - passive signal model
  • Colleagues ... social graph, Facebook friends, can organize colleagues into groups with privacy controls at group level
  • Filters for newsfeed
  • Organization: org browser is an overlay directory to find people and their relationship to the organization ... not sure who someone works for, where they report in the org structure - Silverlight and HTML version. See digest, direct reports, etc and then can link to full profile - can control delegation
  • Content: similar to 2007 version - can share documents, etc.
  • Status message shows up in news feed Note: wonder how this works with OCS presence status? Opportunity for integration but doubt that there is any linkage right now. Visa-versa - can OCS/Communicator status be sent to news feed - maybe too much noise (on phone, busy) but maybe not
  • Blogs: Much improved UI ... actually looks like a blog ... more Ajax type UI for posting ... maybe not as great as Wordpress or other tools but likely good enough for many situations ... believe you can use Live Writer as well (better choice in my opinion for authoring)
  • Note: Wonder if there is a blogs central type catalog - does not sound like it.
  • Video streaming built into SP2010 ... natively stream of video up to 2GB from store ... ratings supported ... Silverlight player
  • Wikis: two varieties ... team site wiki:  as people move from documents to web pages as medium of information exchange, need to support this within team sites - rich text editor ... bar was really low, previous version of wiki really was not a wiki so this implementation is a significant advancement ... oddly, don't use wiki term. Also have Enterprise Wiki (different) - more like Wikipedia - build on publishing model ... page publishing and categorizing of pages (then why call it a Wiki?) ... access controls supported and versioning ... can chose to have workflow aroudn wiki as well (ex: HR policies database). Under the cover all of this are in lists so blogs, wikis can have workflow attached.
  • Enterprise Wiki surface is a publishing template so you can put web parts and other artifacts like video.
  • Note: people will have to keep close track of team wiki vs. enterprise wiki - different capabilities and different implementations! Will not be able to take a team wiki and promote it to an enterprise wiki for example.
  • Records management and social computing: can apply rules (disposition etc) to blogs, wikis, etc.
  • Note: I still do not believe there are sufficient data loss controls, audit logs, etc here - Msft needs to prove that the support for security, identity and privacy needs much more thoroughly beyond demoware.
  • No iPhone application - too bad :)
• Customization: REST, JSON, ATOM, etc.

Notes from Steve Ballmer keynote...

• Vision: seamless experiences across your life
• SharePoint is at the center of intranet, Internet, etc
• Public Beta in November
• Synergies with SharePoint Workspace (Groove recast for SharePoint with improved offline support)
• Targeting 1H2010 for general release (note: my guess is May)
• What is SharePoint? Collaboration, analytics, social networking, content management, portal, workflow, etc etc
• Want to someday bring SharePoint to consumer market
• New user experience for SP2010 - ribbon and other office UI elements
• Consolidate workloads and costs on a single platform (old argument but more so with this release)
• Adding sandbox environment
• Additional standards support (REST, JSON, ATOM) Note: Encouraging widespread development of third-party applications (e.g., Adobe AIR) that front-end SP2010 via these standards might be one of the most significant advancements in the release and Microsoft doesn't push this concept strongly enough - look at all the AIR apps around other social tools for instance
• Demo
  • Business Connectivity Services (next generation of business data catalog)
  • Many more templates within Visual Studio specific to SharePoint
  • Sandbox solution:enable developers to create applications that can be throttled by IT ... isolate application ...
• Note: so far, 45 minutes into keynote, not a single message that would be considered a message to a "business decision maker" - interesting ... pitching to developers and support people in audience, no focus on business solutions, processes, etc (few side comments but nothing in-depth and compelling)
• Cloud, discussion on hybrid split between SP online and SP on-premises
• Important: Still no parity still between SP2010 in cloud and on-premises - better, but not 100%
• Note: When will cloud/SaaS be the primary target environment for SP releases? Seems like on-premises is the target environment creating this lag in terms of parity
• Internet-facing SP: SP in cloud for intranet different than customer-facing Internet
• First real business scenario: Kraft example, consolidated 200 web sites. Volvo also using SP externally for Internet. Not clear what percentage though in these examples are SP - are they 100% run on SP or other platforms are also leveraged
• Demo Internet Facing
  • SharePoint Server For Internet Sites
  • FAST Search Server for Internet Business
• Intranet 2010 Products
  • SharePoint Foundation (successor to WSS)
  • SharePoint Server
  • Fast Search Server
  • SharePoint Online
• Question on long elapsed-time between releases: Basically, SteveB reply is that it has taken them this long (to the 2010 release) to get to the point where the foundation is at a point where they can release application-level functionality faster. But no insight as to what people should expect in the future - is the next release 2013? No guidance so I'm not sure anyone should believe that cycle times are going to get any better until there is proof...
• Question on social computing: SteveB rightly points out the need for social computing to address security and identity aspects of related applications and that IT organizations play a key role to help mitigate risks but no specific insight as to how data loss, identity and security issues are handling in 2010 social computing. Hopefully more to come in this space...

Notes from Jeff Teper keynote

• SharePoint 2010: the business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the web
• Sites: single infrastructure for intranets, extranets and Internet sites
• "Replumbing" of UI, adding ribbon, etc
• SharePoint and Groove user experience consistent now - SharePoint Workspace, offline support, better mobile support
• Collaboration: wiki, blog, tags, etc etc all improved
• Social tagging was a significant focus area
• MySite - some rewriting of history on how MySite was positioned originally. Back circa 2003, MySite was an orphan feature that no one seemed at Microsoft was able to clearly position. Was never intended to play the role it is being positioned for today re: social computing.
• Profiles - revamping search and finding people
• Single metadata store for tags, taxonomy etc
• Search - query on experience, people search, KM aspects, social graph, org chart, etc
• Social Computing Demo
  • Activity feed, tags, tag clouds, recent blog posts, etc
  • Can see aggregation of other connections re: activities, etc
  • Ratings fro documents
  • Expertise location: people search ... displays people and profile information, can view recent content from person, authored content, browser where person is in organizational chart
  • Note board (like FB wall) on profile page