Chrome OS - no big deal, technically ?

Missing out the X Window system and using the browser as GUI ontop of Linux - it's not actually that innovative really. Don't get me wrong, I would give it a whiz on my Netbook, and I want to see how it pans out, but at the moment all this talk of not using it as a desktop PC OS seems to be missing a lot of opportunities and I wonder if Google might change its tune on that. Super fast, super slimline OS, with fast browser running HTML 5 based interfaces to all your business apps - sounds like it might be appealing to enterprises to me.

Anyway, I seem to remember using the browser as the main interface to Linux for some time now - that would Konqueror on KDE - the file manager come browser that shows what IE should have been :-)

Seriously though, not everything has to be in the cloud, there are plenty of lightweight web servers you could run on your local machine, kind of like running Webmin, so surely you could still have Chrome the browser as the interface but access local apps and storage.

Overall, a little underwhelmed by this inital release of information but we will see how it develops won't we ? If you have not seen it yet, check out the Chrome OS demo video on YouTube.

EMC introduces My Documentum

Some former colleagues from the Open University attended the 'Momentum Europe' conference in Athens last week. I had already spotted this press release but have only now got round to examining the release of the new 'My Documentum' family:

"EMC My Documentum Family Delivers The Power of Enterprise Content Management to Every Business User"

The press release has embedded YouTube videos and links to product information pages.

So, my initial thought was, nothing new here, it's just repackaging existing products under a new marketing banner, but its Documentum Client for Outlook (DCO), File Sharing Services etc

Not so ! Discussing this with my old colleague Mark, who was at the conference and very much knee and elbow deep in the Open University Documentum implementation, he said there is considerable new code, and for example with DCO the integration is much slicker, giving a much more 'native' Outlook experience.

This is interesting in the historical context of a blog based discussion with Shiv Singh of RazorFish about "Outlook as the portal" - its your email client, your personal information manager, your contacts manager, calendar, RSS reader etc etc ...... but also your client for your Documentum ECM repository (and other enteprise systems too ?)

To take that topic down a slightly different path, at an AIIM sponsored seminar on SharePoint 2010 this morning, one screenshot showed Outlook 2010 displaying social information gathered from SharePoint MySite profiles.

Yet, unless I am missing something, or doing something really stupid, with Outlook 2007 and SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) you can not simply drag and drop an email from your inbox into a SharePoint document library. Sure you can connect to a document library, it appears in your left hand navigation pane, and will allow you sync the contents of that document library to take them "off line" and on the road with you - but can't just simply move an email into the library ! Nor can you create a 'shortcut' in the Outlook shortcuts view of the left hand nav bar, to a WebDav (Network Places) view of a document library either.

Hurrah (!) to EMC for continuing the client side development, and lets home SharePoint integration with Outlook and particularly email is better in the next version.

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 !)