Alfresco, SharePoint and iPads.... Oh my.....

Well what a busy two days I have had, and I need to blog them properly, so I guess this is really just a heads up. I have been out of the office to an Alfresco 3.2 "lunch and learn" yesterday, visited the Microsoft Canada building this morning for a "SharePoint 2010 for social computing" seminar and then this afternoon we had an excellent SharePoint 2010 provided by Microsoft at our premises. Lots to write about.....

And that does not even include the iPad !

Headlines

• Alfresco 3.2 - sorry Microsoft, but I would say this is a 'real' ECM system !

• Alfresco 3.2 is a "virtual" IMAP server, allowing you to view your repository and drag and drop from any IMAP compliant email client - nice feature.

• SharePoint 2010 for social computing - well of course its playing catchup, and will never be 'as good' as the best of breed tools provided by smaller, more agile providers BUT it may well be good enough for many enterprises - goodness knows if we could get this into use in my organization it would be more than "fit for purpose".

• SharePoint 2010 in general - lots for MS to be proud of, lots for customers to be looking forward to. There are lots of enhancements to 'ECM' - which are really EDRM features (but expect a future post on the death of the 'ECM label' !) - things like unique Document ID's for persistent linking (URI's) and enhanced records functionality. Actually quite impressed with the Managed Metadata Service - as our MS guy noted, when he working with clients as a consultant he had 'built' this functionality about 4 times in the last 4 years......

And then of course, there was the iPad.........

A big congratulations to Leo LePorte and his TWiT organization for their live coverage of the event, excellent viewing. I know its targetted as a consumer device, but I just started thinking immediately of the possible enterprise uses, as a laptop replacement, event as a 'thin client' desktop for some knowledge workers! Seriously all the people who turn up to meetings in our building with the big Lenovo ThinkPads, just so they can ignore the meeting and read their email - sorry, I mean just so they can access a pertinent document, and make the occaisional note.....

For example, got SharePoint 2010 (including Office Live), a decent secure wireless infrastructure in your building, a "unified communications" app' and I can see this being a seriously useful piece of kit. Of course, its still does not multi-task, but like I said, its supposed to be a "living room' device. I am looking forward to the Linux / Android powered competition from the likes of Asus and Acer though :-)

Mashable.com already has a good list of 9 possible alternatives, go take a look and see what you think.

What exactly is 'collaboration' - and who owns it ?

This article is mostly prompted by internal discussions within my group at work, but also because I have been reading Prof. Andrew MacAfee's book on Enterprise 2.0. Also in the bigger picture it links back to some posts from late last year on the TiMAF definition of information and information management, because your definition of what constitutes collaboration will impact on who the 'owners' are.

To set a little context, we have been taking about business ownership models for SharePoint (MOSS 2007) in our organization. Our CIO is very much focused on IT providing a service to the business and as such we always look for the 'business sponsor' or 'business owner'. For SharePoint specifically this an issue due to its both its broad feature set, and in no small way due to the Microsoft marketing which depicts it as a tool which 'the business' can use with a lot of help from IT.

So how about splitting up SharePoint's major features does that help? Well it may do, because it might be fairly easy to find the business sponsor for records management functionality, or for business intelligence features. I suppose document management might be more difficult to find a single owner because of its broad scope, unless you have an ECM strategy which in turn has a business owner/sponsor.

Collaboration however is a much more nebulous beast. What exactly constitutes collaboration may change depending on the organization or even the circumstances, and who might want to stand up as the business owner of something so ephemeral ?

At the Open University 'collaboration' was part of our ECM programme, but to be honest that was only collaborative workspaces, wikis, blogs etc not the 'communications' tools such as the Exchange email servers which belonged to a well established group. However we did 'own' collaboration to the extent that we wrote the collaboration strategy, and guidelines on which tools should / could be used for which collaborative endeavours. However as ECM Programme Manager I was also 'co-owner' of our corporate intranet, and in many organizations Corporate Communications (or whomever else) might step up and take the collaboration space because of its links to the intranet. On the other side of the coin I have worked as a consultant with Corp. Comms executives who vehemently insisted that any form of collaboration tool, web based or not, was well outside of their remit.

Throw in newer collaboration related 'phenomena' such as Enterprise 2.0 and things can get even more complicated. Prof. McAfee suggested in a recent post that overusing the word 'social' was a great way to kill your E2.0 initiatives before they even get started (make sure you read all the comments to get the full discourse). Those who decry “social this and social that” as over use of an empty buzz word seem to have forgotten the reason collaboration is so important is because we are social animals, and we like to work together (there are of course sound evolutionary reasons for this !).

So at this point I would suggest that part of the solution is to accept that there is no such thing as single amorphous blob labeled as collaboration – but many contextually different elements to collaboration, each of which may lend itself to a different type of technology or tool, to a different type of management, and even to a different loci for 'ownership'. As a starting point, lets look at the Wikipedia definition of collaboration:

“Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus.” (click for the full definition)

If we then acknowledge that we must concentrate on people, process, content and context for successful collaboration, and that dividing collaboration into synchronous or asynchronous is too simplistic, how else might we categorize or collaborative endeavors towards our common goals?

The following five sub-categories are my suggestion for slicing and dicing it to help it make sense:

Messaging Centric Collaboration: The lowest common denominator or fall back position for many, this category includes not only the use of email for collaboration (with all the bad practice this entails, such as large CC lists and attachments) but also Instant Messaging and SMS texting tools.

Content Centric Collaboration: Working together to create or edit a particular item (or items) of information. A good example is the Document Library centred approach of MOSS 2007, where the discussion forum, project blog or even the wiki is used to provide collaboration around the creation of content in MS Office formatted ‘documents’. Other ECM or DM products generally support this mode of collaboration through commenting directly on documents etc.

Conversation Centric Collaboration: The focus is not any particular content item, but instead on free flowing, creative discussions, often between geographically dispersed teams or individuals. Also often used in a ‘knowledge management’ focused scenario, tools might include blogs, wikis and instant messaging.

Process Centric Collaboration: Enhancing a particular production process workflow by adding a collaborative element. This may include discussion with teams or individuals up or downstream in the process workflow, or the collaborative brainstorming of issues causing exceptions in the process etc. For example in the EMC Documentum workflow tools there was a feature that would automatically create an eRoom workspace, assign users to it and email them a message with a link to the workspace and information on the process exception !

Collaborative Management: The co-ordination of programs, projects or processes via collaborative interaction, for example using team workspaces, team calendars and collaborative project management tools.

My colleague Martin White, Managing Director of Intranet Focus likes these definitions (we used them when working together for the UN Secretariat) and he uses them with his clients. As I publish on this blog under a Creative Commons license, feel free to use them too - but this leads to my first question to any readers who would like to comment:

Does this way of splitting 'collaboration' into constituent parts look helpful to you ?

My second question links back to my mention of our internal discussions:

Who is the 'business owner' of collaboration in your organization ?

Are you managing a Government web site ?

If so the latest webinar (28th January) from my old colleagues at Prescient Digital Media maybe of interest to you.

Best Practices for Managing a Government Website Redevelopment

"Governments at all levels are gaining an appreciation for the importance of establishing an effective web presence, whether to provide citizens with accurate, timely information or improve the delivery of services through web self-service. And with trends like social media gaining momentum, the pressure on the teams managing those sites to drive improvements on an almost continuous basis is increasing."

Looks interesting, and I don't think I have ever seen anything addressing this particular subject before, and Prescient do good webinars, hence a little advertising for them !

ThoughtFarmer 3.6 released - instant demo available

ThoughtFarmer is an excellent "intranet in a box" product. They have just announced the release of their new version 3.6 - you can go to this page to read about the new features:

ThoughtFarmer 3.6: Relevant Home Pages, Easier Searching and Customizable Groups

However, even better than this, they now offer an 'instant demo' account, all you had to do is provide an email address, and they you can get access to a live server and play to your hearts content. I have sent off for mine, and will report back when I have had the chance to play with it a bit.

ThoughtFarmer instand demo sign up page

Open Source in Content Management

A belated happy new year to you all. Apparently I do actually have readers, as this post from John Mancini points out that this blog is number 14 on the Technorati list of 'ECM and content management' blogs ! Although I will have to blog a bit more often to get my "authority rating" somewhere up near John's !

Having not blogged for over a month (well it was the holidays, and I have been guest writing for a non-techie blog) I was just about to do a post reviewing Prof. Andrew McAfee's book on Enterprise 2.0, but my old mate Laurence beat me to it today, with his review over at Word of Pie !

So, finally, onto the place of open source in content management, as per the title. Why tackle this subject, because my other colleague, Janus Boye blogged about his presentation on this topic at a recent British Computer Society event. He mentioned his confusion, and asks his readers:

"Dear reader, perhaps you can help me out? Am I am the only one thinking that:

• open source has lost its meaning and moved far beyond source code access to either a way of life for some very transparent vendors, or a new way to capitalize on software and attract snazzy investors
• open source does not have any real benefits for the buyers
• open source does not equal open standards. And, by the way, which open standards (except those from the W3c, e.g. HTML and XML) are used and referred to by all the analysts and vendors?"

Well...... lets see, we should take these in order:

• Open source has lots it meaning - nope, I don't think so ! However, I agree the context in which people use the model has broadened considerably over the years. However open source code is open source code - you either make it available or you don't, whatever your reasons as a vendor. But this leads onto the next point.....
• Open source does not have any real benefits for the buyers. Whoa there Janus, that's a rather sweeping statement ! Of course it may be true for some buyers, just as it is not for others. It depends on the context of the organization. Some benefits appear to me to be available for all, for example open source normally means a 'free' download version, which means you may not need to pay 'license' costs for test and dev environments, or at least for 'experimentation' VM's for your developers to "play" with the product. However I do feel that access to source code has its real benefits to organizations that want to do complext in house development. Having been involved in a broadly scoped and complex EMC Documentum implementation, do I think having the source code would have helped my developers if we had been using Alfresco instead - hell yes ! But unless you have development resources to make the use of it, then access to the source code is not going to be of much benefit.
• Open source does not equal open standards - on this we can agree. However, generally speaking I think all things being equal, the "open source vendors" (or projects) have a better track record with respect to implementing standards. Certainly the open source players like Alfresco where first out of the stable with CMIS implemenations (even before the nascent standard had been ratified).
  

I agree with Janus closing remark - that customers should not "rush into open source", that is common sense, you should never rush any technology procurement with out fully considering your context and environment, and ensuring you have a good solid understanding of your requirements. If you really don't understand your requirements, your going to have a hard time fulfilling them !

BUT

There is also no good reason at all to preclude open source vendors / open source projects / products on some odd 'principal' - examine the potential benefits and you may find that they fit well with your standard way of doing things, your culture and your requirements.

Finally....

A colleague I know slightly less well than Janus is Seth Gottlieb who is an open source CMS expert who blogs at Content Here. If you want to discuss the benefits (or disbenefits) of open source with Janus, join him and the rest of his team at the excellent JBoye 2010 conference in Philadelphia in May.