Google SearchWiki - a very public beta ?

Yes I know, everything 'The Goog' does has beta plastered on it somewhere, but what I mean in this case is that releasing to the public (or those that have Google accounts) first appears to be a very large public beta for a feature that would bring considerable value to their enterprise search offerings. You can read about SearchWiki and watch a little demo video here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html

I am sure other search vendors probably offer similar features (if not, why not ?) but this looks like it would be really useful in the GSA context. I will wait to see what Steven Arnold has to say about it as he usually provides a sound analysis of all of the Google monsters moves....

OpenText RedDot Web 2.0 briefing

Yesterday morning I attended this event in downtown Toronto with a colleague from Prescient Digital Media, and it was a jolly good event.

Why ? Because it was not a simple product pitch by OpenText's RedDot web content management division (not that there is anything wrong with technical sales pitch presentations, if they are advertised as such). No, this was an interesting session with some good comments and input from the floor, and even better considering it was a 'Web 2.0' session, the first speaker was Craig Hepburn, who I follow on Twitter and who's blog, 'ForWebSake' is included amongst the resources on my Pageflakes site. Craig presents a great case study on the work he and his colleagues did at his previous employer, STA Travel so I suggest you check out his blog for a practioners viewpoint of the marketing potential of Web 2.0 technologies.

The second session was from Derrick Stanford, a Regional Sales Director on making web 2.0 safe. Again this was a nice overview of the linkage between web 2.0 technologies and the realm of electronic records management, not a salespitch for Livelink per-se, but an interesting discussion of how legislation is not necessarily keeping up with the tech.

So that is what is really interesting to me. Craigs great illustrations of how the use of User Generated Content (UGC) can provide huge benefits for a business, contrasted with questions from the floor about how to protect your business reputation online and how to deal with the pitfalls of blogging and greater user community interaction. This was followed by the ubiquitious discussion of whether or not Facebook should be banned, and how some people don't want to meld their work and personal tools, but that millenials do (or at least many of them) and they want to meld and merge their work and personal tools into a single view of their digital persona.

Personally I think that most people mix some elements of work and non-work life, whether deliberately or not. I mean unless your a deep undercover spy do you really maintain a tight, 'firewalled' seperation between your "9 to 5" and your "social" life ? However do we really need 'one ring to rule them all" ? OpenSocial and other protocols and standards should allow us to syndicate and aggregate and use our platform of choice, be it iGoogle, Pageflakes, Netvibes, Facebook, Ning or LinkedIn etc (even Second Life ??)

Now, add this social, behavioural aspect to the inability of red tape encumbered government beauracracies to keep up with technology, to reform and 'edit' their privacy and data protection laws, and what do we have ? Well a big mess probably, and I am not going to suggest any answers but hopefully I will have provoked my four readers into thinking about this :-)

EMC's Digital Echo and CentreStage

It appears I sit down to do some report writing for clients, and miss all sorts of things !

So, EMC bought Mozy and then Pi and now together they are Decho (for Digital Echo no less....). Although Decho's only current offering is the Mozy online storage solution, it will get really interesting when the 'Pi' piece gets released.

Here are a couple of interesting articles from the Register with some good analysis:

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/17/emcs_decho_cloud_services/
  

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/19/decho_analysis_and_commentary/

Also CentreStage, EMC's new "Knowledge Worker' client, which is also the eRoom replacement has its own site here at: 'CentreStage the movie'

Now this is certainly an interesting take on marketing, but apart from the wierd 'movie' itself, which did provoke a laugh, there is a good flash demo and a datasheet and whitepaper on the 'assets' page.

I doubt EMC will market CentreStage as 'Sharepoint Killer' but its certainly a very interesting looking client that has the ability to replace both eRoom and the Webtop interface to Documentum Content Server. In some ways it could be seen as going up against Oracle's Beehive and IBM's Lotus Quickr.

All three of these products are definately able to provide viable alternatives to Sharepoint (in its MOSS2007 form) in varying scenarios, proving as many are starting to learn, that Sharepoint is not "the one ring to rule them all." Before I am accused of it, I am not having a downer on Sharepoint, like I always say, the only way to figure out which product or solution is best for your own requirements is to thoroughly analyse those requirements in the first place, and then place them in an holistic, enterprise architecture view, and then go from there.

By the way, if anyone actually reads this blog and attended the Momentum Europe conference in Prague last week, I would be grateful to recieve any reports on the conference.

OASIS CMIS press release

Here is yesterdays OASIS press release on the formation of the CMIS technical committee:

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/OASIS-Members-Form-Committee-Advance/story.aspx?guid={A42B48F4-3BCB-4225-B91F-54299FB27096}

If you scroll down there are lots of interesting little endorsement snippets from various interested vendors.

New blogs added to Pageflakes ECM site

I can't quite beleive that I was not aware of the InformationWeek Content Managment blog of Peter Hagopian, and the Information Management blog of his colleague, Andrew Conry-Murray.

So I will add the feeds to the Pageflakes.com/ecm resources site.

Interestingly I found these via my Google Alerts, which I only got round to setting up last week, and this morning I had an Alert on my name, as Peter had mentioned one of my articles on the Prescient Digital Media web site in a posting he made back in August called Content Management Acronym Soup. The article he qouted was 'CMS or ECM, What is the difference' and he said I did a good job of 'dissecting them', so my belated thanks to Peter for that nice endorsement !

For many other interesting articles by my colleagues see the main articles page on the Prescient site at: http://www.prescientdigital.com/articles

More Sharepoint stuff from the JBoye08 conference

Toby has posted another Sharepoint related article on IntranetBlog based on his interaction with various industry experts, and more to the point `seasonded users` who are discussing their experiences at the JBoye08 conference in Aarhus, Denmark:

What the experts say about Sharepoint (MOSS)

I like these frank qoutes from anonymous users, so I am going to replicate them here:

• “The perception is that the search engine is terrible. I’m not 100% in agreement… the engine is pretty good, but the search interface can be weak (e.g. the engine does support wild card and Boolean searches, but usually the implemented interface does not).”

• “Personal sites (My Site functionalilty) is both interesting and scary at the same time.”

• “The complexity across farms is ridiculous. Make sure your consultant (MS partner or implementer) give you a list of those things that stop working across farms.”

Toby is also tweeting live from the conference so if your on Twitter search for Toby Ward and follow in `near real time` :-)

Janus Boye is now blogging...

My friend Janus, principal of JBoye consulting in Aarhus (Denmark) and analyst with CMS Watch has finally got round to finding the time to blog on content management related issues at:

http://www.jboye.com/blog/

He is very knowledgeable and experienced in the fields of content management and portals, so add him to your 'blog roll' or your feedreader, as I have added him to my list of ECM related soruces on Pageflakes at http://www.pageflakes.com/ecm

This is a site which aggregates RSS feeds from bloggers and sites covering ECM, WCM, portals, records management, enterprise search, knowledge management etc.

By the way, Pageflakes normally looks like this, a bit `portal-ish`with portlet type boxes:


But if you have an account and log in, you can access a `reader`view which looks more like a `standard`RSS reader, like this:

Is the shine coming off Sharepoint ?

My thanks to my colleague Cathy who pointed my in the direction of this interesting article at InformationWeek; Can Microsoft keep Sharepoint rolling ?

Its a good and interesting read, and seems to agree with everything I ever say on these pages about Sharepoint / MOSS:

• It might be the product for you, but how do you know unless you analyse your requirements
• A phased implementation appears to be more successful, add bells and whistles later
• Sharepoint in itself is not a 'strategy' - it can be part of ECM, Intranet or collaboration elements of your overall Information Management strategy
• Contrary to MS marketing hype, Sharepoint does not actually do everything brilliantly
• A Sharepoint deployment, like any other technology implementation will ultimately fail if not aligned with strategy, and if not properly planned with comensurate governance in place

By the waym, my employer, Prescient Digital Media, can help with all of these things :-)

Speaking of which Toby Ward just posted this on Intranetblog.com from the JBoye08 conference in Aarhus, Denmark, where he appears to have been chatting to Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMSWatch: Sharepoint Overview (pro's and con's of MOSS)