Key Links for SharePoint 2013

These are some key links for SharePoint 2013:

• Capabilities and features in SharePoint 2013

• Topologies for SharePoint 2013

• SharePoint 2013: presentation: IT pro training

Overview Video of Microsoft SharePoint 2013

AvePoint’s – EMEA SharePoint Usage Survey 2012

AvePoint released their EMEA SharePoint Usage Survey 2012.

It’s worth a look :

A survey of more than 700 IT managers and administrators from public and private sector businesses in Europe, representing more than 1.2 million end users…

A view of SharePoint usage by version taken from the report:

Disclaimer:

This is post is purely for informative purposes, and is not placing comment, opinion or promotion of AvePoint  products or services.

Jive Anywhere – a social browser extension from Jivesoftware

Jive released a browser extension today : “Jive Anywhere” (article via Techcrunch) also see “Jive Anywhere: socializing the web.”

In the print screen examples below you can see how the extension expands out from any browser tab to show the discussion and content in your community related to that page.

This print screen shows the expanded discussion thread taking place.

When it’s not required it can be easily tucked away onto the right hand scroll bar, like so.

I have to agree with other commentators like Alan Lepofsky who write :

“I don’t say this often, but Jive Anywhere has the potential to be one of those rare “game changing” technologies with respect to the way people work.”

In his article “Jives Latest Release Takes Integration To 11”

I think of this tool in the following way:

In the world of the hunter|gatherer, the foraging for knowledge by the information worker, this is now a must have tool!  Jive Anywhere brings the community to bear and support that virtual roamer, and allow them to return the goods into the heart of community – the people and context that matter in an instant.  At its best reducing the time to action and response, but in simple terms helping people stay in touch and up to date.

This pervasive availability of connectedness into your core community, to garner and share knowledge in this way is a real step change.  Especially with the support of context “cartridges” for particular sites or service providers. (e.g. Salesforce.com)

I liken this to the evolution of browsers that brought social network connectivity into each tab, via  the extension apps and underlying API integration of from the social network.  Also this mimics the advantage that blackberry had when it brought email, voice and texting into a single mobile device.  In some way Jive are jumping ahead of their competition with this browser extension release.

There are a couple of things I would like to see evolve in this extension:

• multi-community support – in the same way that some twitter extensions support multiple twitter, it would be useful to use the tools for different communities and contexts.
• better support of SSO | Identity federation – I don’t see it supporting common enterprise security configurations in its current state.
• mobile browser | app support -  many people will browse the web on smart phones or tablets, and they will need this extension in those devices contexts as well.

Download and Install Jive Anywhere from >> here 

What do you think?  Have you tried this yet?

Some thoughts on the latest G+ User Interface

Last week Google made a significant refresh of the user interface to their G+ social network system.

Google+ – UI update Introduction

 

 

There were obviously much comment made on the likes and dis-likes of the revised interface.

I see it as a positive improvement and also a stepping stone on to further service integration and UI tweaks.

The reason I see it as a “stepping stone” move, is the number of comments the perceived unused quantities of “white space” that have been placed into this iteration of the UI.

      I like the vertical left navigation menu that Google has introduced.

   What I’d like to see the options is

• GMail
• Google Docs
• Google Drive (? – see this link)

Like this:

So you can see | view Gmail in the same interface window (browser tab) as G+.

So perhaps the “whitespace” section could be preview of the GMail inbox | Google Docs,  or by using the GMail |Google Docs icon from the vertical menu you would use those services inside the G+ wrapper.

I would even suggest Gmail could deliver message notification inside the G+ stream, while still being able to filter into the inbox, the time | activity stream of G+ and Gmail message can occupy the same flow.

For example Photos are already well integrated into the G+ interface – so I don’t particularly see why others can’t be.

In fact both these  Photos lead to the same place.

Universal Menu – Photos	G+ Menu – Photos

So Google is duplicating its menu system across its “common” menu system and in G+  vertical menu.  I would expect to see convergence in this area.

I don’t like having to switch tabs to use these other Google services or that clicking on links would open in new tabs.

This is what Facebook gets right – all their services happen in a single browser tab.  Whether it is messages, notifications, other services all operate within a single browser tab.

I hope & think Google will come around to this way of delivering its services too.

What do you think?

Do you prefer multiple tabs or single tab for multiple services?

Would seeing Gmail messages appearing inside G+ appeal to you?

My view of the Jive NewWayTour – London, 24th May

I attended the Jive NewWayTour in London yesterday.  The event was put on with Logica, hosted by Chris Morace (Senior Vice President of Business Development, Jive) and had a keynote customer presentation from BUPA‘s Nick Crawford (Head of Group Internal Communications, Group Marketing), talking about their implementation of Jive for their 52K global employee base.

Key Points from the Jive Key Note:

Early adoption days are over.  Gartner MQ for social software is 5 years old. Jive is a  MQ Leader in everyone  – Social Software for Workforce, Social CRM, and External Social communities.

Key use cases:

T-Mobile – use Jive inside and outside the firewall.  Prior to public launch of “MyTouch slide” – smart phone.

Estimated $100 Million saving from using ‘internal’ launch to key employees and tracking issues in Jive and then learned from that to serve their customers better and faster.

Newscorp – 50K global co. WSJ, Fox News, Avatar, Glee etc.

Using social software since 2008, know what social software can or can’t do.   Trying to create a sense of ‘family’ in the company, that is globally dispersed and representative of lots of different brands.  Running best practices courses and education for digital journalists through Jive.

Mattel – largest toy co in the world.  What’s their next big product? Idea source from 30 K employee. “Computer Engineer” Barbie - created big external buzz after internal idea sourcing.  Success achieved on ‘no extra’ money – it’s a new way of doing things.

Key Points from the BUPA Key Note:

About BUPA: 52k employees across 11 countries – healthcare leader and partner, extracting value and synergies by collaboration across their businesses. Grew by Acquisitions.

Why Jive: ( access, space to collaborate, news sharing, viral, iterative and vendor supported, management and reporting, searchable, multi-lingual, web 2.0, budget)

(photo credit: John Schwiller)

How Delivered :

Group IT, Comms and HR collaborated on the platform in soft launch phase to deliver the platform for corporate launch.

Launched and positioned as “BupaLive” – your job, Facebook – your social life, Linkedin – your career

Challenges and fears – dispelling a few myths:

Fear vs Time  >> fear of a lot things at start, decreased over time.

• facebook in the work place | productivity will decrease <> treat people as grown ups
• internal comms will lose control of the message <> need to adapt and change role and coach leaders | don’t lose control of message
• won’t be able to handle the volume or type of feedback <> can see what the conversation or feedback and respond to it
• it’s a young person’s game <> not really relevant lots of  engagement across all ages
• business units don’t have the resources <> not true Group comms (now grown to 3 people) smaller at launch & Jive has improved comms and productivity.
• how much will it cost <> still in budget | low level of customisation keep service easily iterated by vendor.
• management will lose control | why do they worry? (ineffective managers?) <> most engaged employees are active on the platform (leaders of the future)
• it’s not secure in the web | structured approach and sign up <> monitoring and educating, treating people as sensible and able to use common sense.
• can’t calculate the ROI <> see Business benefits below…

Adoption and use:

Corp comms, driving viral use, used competitions, e.g. introduce a friend and win an ipad etc.

Only 16K employees have PC and laptops, some people no device or email address | care homes | activity coordinators … doing things in their own time, logging in from home.

Employee engagement analysis showed better and score higher with users of bupa live

Users growth linear 2010 = 5k,  2011 = 11K – worked through each business group.

Created collaboration groups over 1800

Users and leaders – chicken and egg (bottom up and top down)

Viral video “get moving” global challenge

BUPA Mobile app dev – passionate and involvement – 16 weeks planned, delivered in 8 weeks

Internal crowdsourcing – “top tips questions” – ” joint venture information” – all supplied  by  SME’s  from other  business units than question source.

Group conference site – loaded all presentations and videos for main corporate conference for larger engagement and dicussion

Business benefits/Engagement/ROI:

10% estimate £190K saving (700 users questioned |at year 1)

Telesales increased by 2% because of collaboration in Jive

Mobile app dev – IPhone app – £20K saved

What’s next:

big brainstorm | vip leaders group | more functionality in Jive 5 etc.

There were also options the following tracks after the keynotes.

• The New Way for Business Leaders
• The New Way for Technology Leaders
• Jive 5 Overview for Customers

I attended the Jive 5 overview, in which there were about 60 participants in the room.

Here’s a list of companies represented at the Jive 5 Overview stream (and where possible their activities with Jive)

Cancer research uk – patient care external use
Cisco – external use
Danone – external and internal use
British Sugar – internal use
BP – internal use
Deutsche Bank – not yet customer but very keen to explore
BUPA – internal use
Thomson Reuters – internal|external uses
Infosys – internal use and partner

Logica – internal use and partner
Serco – internal use
Dachis group – internal use and partner
National History Museum – internal|external use

About Jive 5:

Apart from revamping the UI for focus on activity streams, and a comprehensive mobile device support via HTML 5. Jive have been a number key acquisitions to cement their leadership in the social business arena.

Proximal Labs : To enable social graph analytics and recommendations.  Giving more targeted content for the users and the Social Media & Sentiment Analytics application in the Jive Apps Market space.  A combination of real time search & analysis of big data sources (Twitter, Facebook), as well as inside the firewall to (Jive, CMS) etc.

Offisync : To provide more fully feature Microsoft Office integration – to allow better value extraction for customers from both MS Office and Jive.

The Jive app marketplace is also a key part of version 5, enabling lots of service providers and vendors to provide tighter integration and surface their application functionality inside Jive.

Mobility & Augment Reality (growing up fast)

From Evernote:

Mobility & Augment Reality (growing up fast)

About a year ago, I remember watching this video of the Layar implementation in Amsterdam.

Layar: Demo – Amsterdam

I was stunned at the quality and size of application and its implementation. Though I was also left thinking ok, what next, where and when will I come across it?

Now a year on, I think it’s fair to say Layar has grown significantly – “having over 1000 published layars, covering every country in the world ”.  Ok but, there are other services about, though this wikipedia article looks a little behind the times (an emerging competitive market?)

Anyway, the item that brought me around to thinking about this again, was the IBM seer augmented reality application for Wimbledon tennis championships.

IBM Seer (Wimbledon 2010)

This brings together location data feeds, tags and links about of points of interest, via location recognition and user interaction.  It supplements the location recognition and augmented reality with live video streams and community interaction via feeds from twitter.

I’m impressed by the depth of information and interaction this application delivers to visitors to the event. Which brings obvious value to people who are unfamiliar with their no doubt crowded surroundings, and also want get best experience and interact with rapidly changing events around them. I do wonder how many people attending Wimbledon will actually use the application (as a percentage of total attendance) [itunes counts downloads right?]and how the local mobile transmission infrastructure will cope with peaks of demands from such an application like this.

The wikipedia article providing a good list of use cases and applications of AR, and some examples are so commonplace they often get forgotten as AR examples. “Commonly known examples of AR are the yellow “first down ” lines seen in television broadcasts of American Football games using the 1st & Ten system, and the coloured trail showing location and direction of the puck in TV broadcasts of ice hockey games.”

Certainly the IBM seer applications makes me think that corporations and intuitions, and not just events will be providing AR apps or layer(ar)s for navigation and points of interest guides to help people move around their company locations, or as a guide to an art gallery or museum for example.

Certainly the rise of continued proliferation of powerful smart phones and mobile infrastructure in many industrialised nations makes a the use of apps for this purpose a strong likelihood.

Intuitions like museums and galleries, could has many (re-usable) point of interest markers (like a barcode – readable by Blackberries or other handsets) or a GPS marker stationed as they wish or required. These would be a great way to replace (single-use) paper based information transfer and yet provide all the regular information about the current item on display or the exhibit. As well as link the visitor to a lot more content or community interactions sourced from across the internet.

I would be grateful for such navigation aids available at a company locations, these would really help people find their way to or from meeting rooms, amenity or other corporate facilities.  They’d be great at helping people around temporary diversions etc.  These would be great at conferences and submits too.  Though I can imagine elementary “I trust my GPS, I don’t need to think, so I’ll walk off a cliff” mistakes will become popular humour stories at the company restaurant.

I wonder whether it makes sense to build stand only applications like IBM seer or produce a bespoke layer within a comprehensive platform like Layar ? Also I’ve failed so far to mention Google maps or latitude or Google earth , which may be already merging into a global AR platform.

I guess in some way this is only a matter of time, but the matter or manner of implementation will still surprise I’m sure.

Technorati Tags: Collaboration and Productivity ,Mobile Collaboration ,Portals ,Technology ,Tools ,Information Management ,Innovation ,Connectivity ,Augmented reality

Thinking on Portals, Application Servers & Middleware, and Strategic Enterprise Architecture

Recently I attended an event the Oracle Middleware 11g Forum around the launch & release of their Fusion Middleware 11g suite of products.

Oracle should be commended on the swift work they have done of incorporating the technologies and services they have acquired into their own product set.  Within the 11g release there is the unified and integration of mainstream Oracle products with the product set acquired from BEA Systems (WebLogic and AquaLogic etc.)  There is a clear standardisation around the Weblogic server as the strategic application server within the Fusion Middleware stack.

The pending acquisition and integration of Sun Microsystems into Oracle will pose a few interesting questions around existing complementary product set. But also to give the obvious capability of singlehanded delivery of hardware, OS, middleware, and application stack.

        

Both of these acquisition brings much more of a level set between Oracle and IBM in the J2EE space around enterprise portal, application server, content management, SOA and middleware.  This should bring another boost of invigoration to this marketplace, which is already looking lively because of innovative adoption around consumer social computing services and mash up or widget integration technologies.

An example of the IBM Middleware stack: (taken from an article about “Develop and Deploy Multi-Tenant Web-delivered Solutions using IBM middleware”)

An example of the Oracle Middleware stack: (taken from an article on the blog of Eric Marcoux “What do you want to know about Fusion Middleware ?”)

However this doesn’t rule out other players in this space, such as Microsoft, Autonomy, Opentext  etc. While they may not be so closely aligned around the technology or industry space, or perhaps bring such a broad offering, as IBM or Oracle they should not be ignored. In fact their strengths or niche plays should be significant influencers on the strategic enterprise architecture of an organisation.

What then are the questions that should be asked to ascertain that the Strategic Enterprise Architecture choices are optimal for your organisation?   Caveat :– I am not claiming to be an enterprise architect! However I hope these should be reasonably logical and common sense, and the answers should go some way to revealing the degree of alignment between the enterprise architecture and business requirements.

• How does my End-User (desktop and productivity suite choices/need) integrate or align with choices around Portal and Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Applications?
  • Do they complement or conflict?
  • Do they offer the integration that enables users to engage in business processes, or does inflict conflicts and hindrances?
• Is there a sensible balance between departmental application choice and autonomy in comparison to corporate mandates and direction?
  • Are there governance policies in place that sustains a level of commonality across business units?
  • Is there a that framework allows departmental processes and requirements to be surfaced and delivered in a uniform way?
  • Is Identity and Access management provided centrally?
  • Are compliance, security and risk management services provided in a consistent manner?
• Are the Strategic Enterprise Architecture choices enabling or preventing the evolution of a competitive business model?
  • Is the architecture promoting an agile and adaptive business model & culture?
  • Is it helping to make the best of the human interactions and capital within the business?
  • Is it serving to optimise TCO and reduce overheads, via enabling virtualisation, centralisation or cloud services technologies?
  • Is it serving the business through enabling a greater percentage of core business orientated employees, by reducing the focus on operating non-differentiating IT services & functions?
  • Is it enabling the business to serve the influential outliers – business partners, suppliers and customers?

These are by no means a definitive list, but I hope you think them relevant and helpful. I’m sure there will be areas I’ve over looked or ignored so please chip-in with more, comments and feedback.

There some good material here :

Enterprise Architecture Scorecard

The Open Group Architecture Framework

Comment on Gartner: Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit – Main sessions & Keynotes, London 16 & 17 Sept

Gartner hosted the 4th annual Europe based “Gartner : Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit” (pcce4) in London this week. From statistics given the delegates had a good cross industry and European countries (and further afield) representation.

The summit host Toby Bell and his colleague Debra Logan welcomed us by providing a grounding for the event through a key note “Certain Strategies for Uncertain Times”.  This contextualised the summit, technologies, and business objectives of the delegates against the backdrop of the current business and economic climate.  They underlined the need for IT to re-shape its role in their business, and shift the perception of being a cost centre into a facilitator and necessary partner to achieve growth and business revenue.

A challenge indeed! Especially when the business will continue to demand cost optimisation or look for significant strategies and approaches to deliver reductions in cost overhead from the operational maintenance of IT systems within the business. Which is backed-up by the Gartner indicating “8 out of 10 dollars spent in IT is ‘dead money’” – spent just to keep things running, and protecting existing investments in people and technology.

Achieving this role change doesn’t lie in a technical solution. But comes back to the people, corporate culture and the manner in which communication between different but inter-dependant business (departments/teams/individuals) transpires.  The resulting business strategies and goals either foster better mutual understanding, respect and cooperation and can produce transformational attitudes and benefits.  Or result in strategies that continue to reinforce the siloed thinking, divisional structures and misalignment of roles that hinder and hamper mutually beneficial events and results for the business.

I think that though not clearly emphasised by the summit, in terms of a ‘track’ or major session, “people and culture rather than technology”,  became a significantly re-occurring comment or phrase that was a common thread throughout the summit. Underlining it as an important concern, and fuelling enquiry and debate amongst both delegates and analysts.

The summit also provided stimulus and examples for new and innovative approaches and methodologies in the format of thought leadership and model case studies.

None more so than the excellent guest keynote from highly respected author, thinker, inventor and speaker Dr. Edward de Bono (author of ‘Mechanism of the Mind’ and ‘Lateral Thinking’), on “Why our Current Thinking is not Enough”.

His talk on creative thinking and the need to overhaul the underlying mechanisms and approaches to thinking that have been so dominant for the last 2400 years in the Western culture, was very well received. I’m sure it will prove a fruitful ground for much personal, and you hope, corporate and societal introspection and contemplation.

He gave some great examples on the use of challenge, provocation, and random introduction to stimulate and produce creative and value ideas and approaches to established conventional and logical thought.

This post describes some excellent examples of where his thinking has been used.

He also described his 6 hats parallel thinking technique which can prove extremely beneficial when understood and correctly applied.

There is a concern that his thought leadership, proposals and hypotheses have been widely adopted or practiced without the appropriate analysis and enquiry to show whether they are most optimal ‘thinking behaviours and patterns’ to be adopted and used.  It makes sense to me, to have that debate, enquire, study and draw conclusions in this area before further advocacy of major changes to society ‘thinking behaviours and patterns’ is more fully utilised.  Whatever that result, the contribution from Dr. de Bono is immensely valuable and it was a privilege to hear him speak.

The model case study presented to the full body of the summit was that of “Building the stacks for a Mutualised Newspaper” by Dr. Chris Thorpe from the Guardian. He provided tremendous insight into how the Guardian is developing it’s ‘Open Platform’ (content API and data store). Made to serve out its contents & its people for the mutual use and benefit, co-creation, co-fabrication/co-distribution and co-monetisation of both itself and its ‘collective community’. So that what is contributed, aggregated, used and consumed helps integrate the Guardian “into the fabric of the internet.”

When you consider the ‘doomsayer’ stories, articles and events that envelope the ‘traditional push media and publishing model’ – the transformational approach and interactivity that the Guardian have achieved via this open data, content and platform approach is nothing short of revolutionary! And as Chris Thorpe described is fully deserving of the accolades prescribed by Tom Watson MP.

“I’m not bowled over much these days. But Guardian Open Platform is a chasmic leap into the future. It is a work of simplistic beauty that I’m sure will have a dramatic impact in the news market. The Guardian is already a market leader in the online space but Open Platform is revolutionary. It makes all of their major competitors look timid.

Governments should be doing this. Governments will be doing it. The question is how long will it take us to catch up.”

Furthermore their achievements in the use of cutting-edge content enabled cloud based mass-media applications is to be applauded. Demonstrating clear prowess, leadership and innovation in the development, design and delivery of these applications.  There are perhaps more example of such temporal cloud based mass-media applications out there. That aside, however, I think these indicate a ‘new’ breed or model of application delivered from cloud based resources, which will become the frequent offspring of event driven interaction between the “collective” and their social media and content.

A great example of this is The Guardian’s use of the community in the analysis and review of the UK MPs expenses receipts and claims.

In conclusion:

The Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration summit main sessions and keynotes, provided much for the delegates to take away and contemplate, which should then be followed up by evaluation and incorporation of appropriate strategy for that organisation.  For me one the key tenet to build a clear strategy of utilising the “collective web intelligence” as it relates and is relevant to your organisation.

Disclaimer:  Permission for publication was sought and granted by Gartner

UK Premium Support Seminar

Just a note that I’m presenting at :

My topic is:

CSC – The CSC portal: keeping focus on content and collaboration
Speaker: Charlie Hope, CSC Lotus Collaborative EMEA Technical Lead

 

So I guess you can work out who my employer is!

Technorati Tags: lotus, CSC

Facebook an example in Social and Contextual Networking

Wikipedia lists numerous examples of social networking sites, popular ones, being Bebo, MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, Windows Live Spaces etc.

These all have their market share and particular niche, photography, music, youth orientated etc.

However recently Facebook has been making significant headway in reaching a wider audience and possibly from a greater variety of social and economic categories.

Though I am not in any way familiar with a large variety of social networking sites. I feel these factors are the critical ones to enabling Facebook’s current ascendancy, and want I think should become commonplace within collaborative and social networking applications with the business and corporate enterprise environment

1. Clean and Uncluttered Look and Feel:
   

   For the information worker it is vital to be able to locate, retrieve and process information quickly and efficiently. There is no greater hindrance to this, than a messy over complicated, confusing or visually bombarding presentation.

   There are no such problems for Facebook, it clean cut look & feel, intuitive lay out make it easy to use, as well as pleasing and friendly to the eye.

   

   (see more examples below).

2. Key Social Networking Elements:
   1. Profiles:
      

      These are the mainstay of any social network site, where individual’s list, describe and tags various essential and non-essential elements about themselves to allow others to understand, collaborative and engage with them better.

      

   2. Networking and Collaboration Tools
      

      These allow you find and communicate with others, allowing you to find contacts via your contacts list, education background, community activities, employment etc. As your list of contacts grows so does the vibrancy and uniqueness of your particular portal on Facebook.

      Interacting with contacts can be private, public, visual or audio, rich text, plain text, online or offline.

      

   3. Contextual Displays – composite and personally relevant
      

      This is where the action is your home page… your news feed.

      

      Here the actions, activities and updates of your contacts are delivered sequentially to your own personal view of world through Facebook. Obviously as public social network these activities are mainly leisure based; but it isn’t a huge change to understand how this could be immediately relevant, useful and effective in a business or commercial environment.

      Responses to shared tasks could be tracked

      Workflow application integration into the flow of the working day

      Status and location information, updated and displayed to all relevant parties

      

      Decisions and actions can be published and rapidly orientate a dispersed or remote team into the strategy or plan.

   4. Application Access and integration:
      

      Where the richness and vibrance of Facebook really excels, is the applications that users can add to their interface.

      

      Their appearance on profile enhances interactions, particular interests or involvements or passions. Once again the jump to understanding how useful this would be in an enterprise environment is not a difficult one. One advantage that Facebook has in its use and availability of applications for users is that the security of application content is not a concern, where that will be in an enterprise environment.

      Facebook should (and are) being congratulations for making it easy for users to create and develop applications they would like to see and use; and for making interaction with other public networking sites easy and relevant. They have applications that make use of Google, Flickr, Travel sites like TripAdvisor, Last.fm and many others.

      I particularly like the simple but effective features in the “Notes” application that pulls in entries from a blog that you use.

      

3. Responsiveness:

What keeps people coming back to Facebook is that is responsiveness and quickly becomes an effective way to keep in touch, or in the know about activities or people you have contact with.

Speed of response is something that is expected as a default. The internet has set expectations in terms of functionality, performance, availability and content. These translate into what information workers expect of services provided to them within their working environments.

In conclusion:

If a product is going to cut it as a social networking tool and contextual interface to the corporate environment, I believe it has compete and compare favorably with sites such as Facebook. Lotus Connections is a product that aims to provide this functionality of social and contextual networking within the corporate environment.

At this stage I’m not in a position to fully evaluate and compare, but Lotus Greenhouse is a site promoting the latest Lotus products from IBM; and it is running a Lotus Connections site. Interestingly there is a blog entry on that site comparing Lotus Connections with Facebook, so perhaps the evaluation is already there!

Technorati tags: social networking, facebook, collaboration, lotus connections