Gina Trapani releases "The Complete Guide to Google Wave"

Obviously it's a work in progress.......

Picked up on this from Gina's announcement on the This Week in Google podcast (another excellent Leo Laporte / TWiT production). Gina has made her work freely available online so go here to read the 'first release' of The Complete Guide to Google Wave.

I have been playing with Wave, not much admittedly but you really need to have a 'critical mass' of friends to Wave at if you want to evaluate it from an Intranet / enterprise perspective, and to be honest I don't really care about the public / consumer use cases. The screen shot below shows me in an IM type 'real time' conversation with Casey and old colleague from the UK, with a "public" wave open in the right hand pane.


For those who still wonder about Wave or just plain "don't get it" take a look at the free online version of Gina's book (there will be paid-for PDF and dead-wood versions coming later). Personally I still think its too early to condemn Wave (as some are doing) but also too early to say exactly how this will pan out. I have said before that I can see Wave in an enterprise setting, with hosted (Appliance) based versions of Gmail, Docs, Video, Search (of course) etc all working as a "private cloud" integrating with "heavy duty" CRM, ERP and ECM solutions where required. But, we will see.........

Global Intranet Trends Report 2010 released

Jane McConnell has released this years Global Intranet Trends report to those who participated. It's not up on the NetStrategy/JMC site yet, probably because she is in Aarhus this week at the JBoye conference (wish I was there....).

This is the 4th year of the survey and thus the 4th edition of the report. I got my copy this morning as I completed the survey on behalf of my organization, but I have certainly not had time to read it, in depth, from cover to cover (but you can bet I will !).

It is an extremely valuable resource for those managing or interested in intranets, and well worth the spend (and I am comparing that to reports you would pay a lot more for, from one of the big consulting firms or analyst firms).

I am sure Jane won't me paraphrasing some bits from the executive summary in order to whet your appetites:

• This years survey has had input from 300 organizations worldwide, from less than 1,000 employees to over 100,000 employees
• Topics include intranet strategy, intranet management, business objectives for the intranet and social media use
• Three stages of intranet maturity are introduced and explained
• Five trends for the "Future Intranet" are identified and analysed

I will return to specific topics when I have read the full report properly, but I suggest you go to the NetJMC site and add it to your RSS feeds so that you know when the report is released, so that you can buy a copy - as they used to say on a TV advert for newspapers in the UK, "It's a right riveting read" (which in non-colloquial english means its really really good !)

Off topic - card making and blogging

So my wife had decided to blog about her interest in arts and crafts, particularly card making by setting her self a challenge to create one card a day, and post the photos on her new blog at:

http://myyearlongcardchallenge.blogspot.com/

So if you know anyone interested in that sort of thing - point them in her direction :-)

AIIM day in Toronto

Today I attended the AIIM "From Collaboration to Process Control: Whats the ideal information management strategy for your organization" (phew, bit of a mouthful) day at the Toronto metro convention centre - and a jolly good day it was too !

The first "October AIIM event" I attended in Toronto was 3 years ago, before I was even living here (we were on our trip to get 'landed' status) and they get better and better.

John Mancini, President of AIIM kicked the day off with a great opening session. He noted some updates on the ever growing mountain of digital content and the ever increasing speed of growth, but also noted that Moore's Law for raw computing power (CPU power) has been surpassed by improvements in communications technologies (providing ever greater bandwidth) and storage technologies (how much you can cram on a disk plater.) John suggested we are rapidly approaching a tipping point with respect to content volumes and content management technologies. In the great tradition of AIIM "8 things about" lists, John presented 8 key points:

1. You can't dodge the content tidal wave
2. Ubiqitous computing has an impact on both creation and consumption of content
3. Green issues - the new selling point for ECM - get rid of all that paper !
4. You simply can't do everything manually anymore (ref: business processes)
5. "Social everything" - humans are social animals, go figure......
6. Collaboration needs governance - I certainly agree with this one
7. We are moving into an era of simplicity - if records management is perceived as a nusiance by 95% of your users, then your solution better be simple
8. Mismanagement risks are rising - and not only in the highly litigous U.S. of A !

At one point John made the point that 80% of the worlds Lawyers are in the U.S., after John a gentlemen from Autonomy did a brief session as they were a key sponsor of today's event, and he gladly noted when describing their healthy financials that this was largely thanks to all those lawyers.......

The interesting point from the Autonomy presentation was the "management in place" of records in SharePoint installations using their 'ControlPoint" product, not one I knew much about previously.

After a quick hello to Ross, Doug, Kim and John from the Royal Bank of Canada's ECM centre of excellence (I see them here once a year !), it was off to the elective sessions:

Hyland Software did their normal 'transactional content management' pitch for OnBase. It's an effective and slick presentation of the message, and I have seen it a couple of times before. I have seen OnBase in use in the insurance industry when I was consulting and I can see its strengths in these transactional scenarios.

As the next session was all scanning / imaging / capture in both rooms, I disappeared back into the boothes of the small 'show hall' for a lovely chat with the ladies from Oracle. My current employer is a big Oracle user on the database front, but I have always liked the product formerly known as Stellant, which is of course now Universal Content Management within Oracles Fusion middleware portfolio ! The shock on Michelle's face when we told her you could not access Hulu from Canada...... :-)

The next session was AllStream who had some interesting case studies around combining Unified Communications with portals, which is close to our heart as we are a SharePoint shop and we are about to go live with MS Unified Communications soon.

For the final break out session I broke my promise to go and support Oracle UCM and attended the Microsoft "ECM for the masses, how to deliver on the promise" session. This was a good session by a Product Manager who had obviously honed his skills at the 'big party' in Las Vegas last week. It was not a full on SharePoint 2010 product pitch, but more a generic examination of the issues characterised as the tension between: Control and Compliance on one hand, and Freedom and Flexibility on the other.

Personally I chose to receive part of the message on SharePoint governance issues as "SharePoint proliferation, well thats your fault....." (mmmm' nothing to do with Microsofts marketing machine then?). Having said that our presenter then focused on moving forward, and that a major aim for SP2010 is the 'democratization of ECM', in other words it does not have to be control and compliance versus freedom and flexibility, but rather it should be a balance with contextual equalibrium being sought for each particular project or implementation.

We all went back to the main hall for a presentation from HP on Universal Records Management (URM, a bit too close to UCM ?) in other words the product formerly known as Tower's TRIM.

Then it was time for a quick chat with the marvellous Cheryl McKinnon, the new CMO for Nuxeo
the open source ECM platform. Cheryl forecast a tipping point of her own, that finally within the next two years the open source vendors will be taken seriously. With Nuxeo, MindTouch and Alfresco on the plot, I would agree with her. Strangely enough, for a massive Canadian company, Cheryl's old employer OpenText had not decided to grace the event with its presence.

Finally, John Mancini closed us out, with a final keynote that was as entertaining and as informative as his introductory one. John noted that the latest AIIM "8 reasons" paper (8 reasons you need a strategy for managing information - before its too late) is available as PDF, Kindle eBook, Sony eBook and formats I have never heard of, plus you can even download an audio book version from iTunes !!

An Information Charter

I count my self lucky to be an acquitance, colleague and even friend of Martin White (of Intranet Focus Ltd) who has been in 'the business' a lot longer than I.

He has recently posted on his blog an 'information charter' which is condensed into six easy "bullet points". It is superb in its simplicity, its only short, but I won't copy and paste it here, I want you to click on the link and go to Martin's site to read it.

John Mancini of AIIM has already blogged on it and notes that IT Strategies should not be 100 page documents - well I am not sure I agree with that, but being able to distill that 100 page strategy into a 6 point charter is really going to make you think hard about it.

I know one thing, we certainly could not paste Martin's charter on our intranet in good faith at the moment, personally I reckon we are a 70 to 80% fail on five of the six points !

I have the Google Wave Beta !

Thanks to one of my readers (I have readers !) I now have a Google Wave account so I can actually play with it. As my current job title is "Senior SharePoint Specialist" you can see where my initial compare and contrast is going to be coming from......



Thanks Mark for the invite :-)

Is Google Wave really targeted at SharePoint & Office Online ?

Come on people, show some imagination !

For all those who keep churning out the fact that Google Wave has no compelling improvement of email and IM, those who constantly suggest its a social networking platform aimed at taking on Twitter and FaceBook, or stating that its gonna flop because its unfinished crud;

Jeez, stop and breath and takd a minute to think about it !

Wave is a protocol (XMPP based), not just Google's current server platform and client app. There are already independent open source implementations of servers for the protocol. Yes the Google front end is unfinished - for all those who moan about how distracting it is to seen what the other person is typing; well even in the original Google I/O conference video they point out that that there will be a private 'draft' mode that will prevent this, so you can write in peace..........

Yes the released (and hyped it) early, because they want 'community' input - so no, its not finished or polished, but come on its just gone from private Alpha to invitation only Beta, its a long way from finished product(s) and no one is saying otherwise.

However all this "social networking / email killer" stuff is just distraction. The Wave protocol is about content centric collaboration - its a collaborative document creation / editing paradigm. So before pontificating on how it will never replace Twitter, think about how it might become competition for SharePoint 2010 and the online versions of the Office apps.

Think: Private cloud + Google Wave + Google Voice + Google Apps + = enterprise content collaboration platform. Is somebody going to write a CMIS API for this stack, I think they should !

Stephen Arnold has been saying for some time that people should be paying attentions to Googles moves in new database technology, so add that to all of the above.

Personally I would like to see appliances / software / VM's to more of this stuff inside the corporate firewall (you can build your own Wave servers, and buy Google Search Appliances).

I look at this from an enterprise viewpoint, and there are plenty of others who are doing so:

• Ribbit tele-conferencing gadget
• 6rounds vidoe conferencing gadget
• SAP Gravity - collaborative business process modelling
• SalesForce.com
  

But I am sure the whole federated server based nature of the communications protocol will mean clever people will come up with lots of killer apps for the "public" Wave domains.

The only valid criticism I have heard of Wave so far is that is 're-inventing the wheel' a bit where it comes to the XML format it uses.

I am not on the invite list for the beta, and I doubt anyone at Google will read this, so I am not angling for one, in fact I think its going to be a couple of years before Google really builds up its 'wave front' - but thisl an open standards based protocol - stop thinking of Wave just as its seen in the flashy demo video or the sandbox developer account you managed to scrounge that you can't do much with.

Bottom line - stop thinking 'new fangled email crossed with IM and social networking' and think powerful content centric collaboration and document editing.