October 14th, 2009

SharePoint Statistics: The Real Reason Behind SharePoint's Price Tag

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 4:44 pm

Categories: MOSS, SharePoint, Social Media, Social Networking, Uncategorized

Tags: Microsoft SharePoint, Content Management, Collaboration, Groupware, Enterprise Software, Software, Dave Greenfield

What would you say is the most expensive part of a SharePoint deployment? A recent study by InfoTrends, a consultancy, identified where the money is being spent on SharePoint and where it’s not. The results may surprise you.

Read the rest of this entry »

September 29th, 2009

Facebook, Wrong Again!

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 4:58 am

Categories: Facebook, Social Media, Social Networking, Uncategorized

Tags: U.S. Secret Service, Facebook, Barack Obama, Service, E-mail, Online Communications, Dave Greenfield

As it being widely reported, a Facebook poll has caught the ire of the Secret Service for asking whether President Obama should be killed. The Service is investigating the poll and asked the poll be taken down.

“The USSS [Secret Service] sent us an e-mail late this morning PDT asking us to take it down. At that point, it had already been removed, and we let them know.” Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told CNN.

Give me a break. I’m all for intervening in the cases of hate, racism of overt calls to violence, which can lead to actual violent acts, but surveying people as to what they think about a public figure though hardly qualifies as such.Yes, I find the choices pretty moronic. And yes, Obama the Deliverer should be treated a wee-bit better.

But does some sophomoric poll constitute a such a real and pressing threat to the presidency that we should step on free speech? I doubt it. Facebook didn’t see fit to get involved in explicit cases of  Holocaust denial, it shouldn’t have gotten involved here.

What do you think?

 Loading ...

May 11th, 2009

Shame on you, Facebook!

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 4:08 am

Categories: Social Networking

Tags: Denial, Facebook, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Dave Greenfield

How far ought organizations go towards censoring what’s published on their social networks? Here at ZDNet we have pretty stern view on racist language in our comments section and certainly in our articles. That’s not just smart business. It’s just common sense.

Yet as Michael Arlington points out today, Facebook seems to be lacking that sort of common sense. The social network censors photos of lactating mothers, but allows holocaust denial in the spirit of “open discourse.”

Something’s seriously wrong with that sort of view and Dallas attorney, Brian Cuban, is making it a personal crusade to get Facebook to change its way. The attorney has pointed out that as a private business, freedom of speech doesn’t apply. Holocaust denial violates Facebook’s terms of service and should be stopped.

This isn’t about providing an open forum of ideas. Whether it’s Holocaust denial, gay-bashing, or overt racism there are some things that just don’t belong in social discourse. ZDNet is smart enough to realize that. TechCrunch gets it. Let’s hope Facebook wakes up as well.

May 5th, 2009

9 Tips to Pitching the Press

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 7:49 am

Categories: Best Practices, Blogs, Data Management, Enterprise 2.0, Social Networking, Uncategorized

Tags: Journalist, PR Newswire, Kudos, Public Relations, Marketing, Corporate Communications, Dave Greenfield

I just returned from keynoting a PR Newswire seminar in Tel Aviv on how to run marketing campaigns on a shoestring budget. Kudos are well deserved to Rakefet, Sharon and the rest of the PR Newswire team as well as Avi Yair at NCSM Marketing and Yigal Cohen at Linx for pulling together such a great event. We packed out over 100 folk for an event that wasn’t expected to break 70!

Israeli companies are always engaged in interesting technology and this case was no different. We had a company involved in online translation another in architectural collaboration, biotechnology, a wide range of leading Israeli IT companies including RAD, SANDisk, Allot Communications.

Some super information came out of the talk and, no, it’s not just because yours truly spoke. I was super delighted to hear from Lisa Ashworth, the CEO of PR Newswire across Europe, Middle East, Africa and India, about changes they’re making to the standard press release. Normally, we in the media world are bombarded with rather long, dull and boring looking releases, lots of text no graphics, which I suppose indirectly effects the enthusiasm and quality of coverage we can offer to you, our readers. PR Newswire is adding graphics, clickable links and video to their releases making them more “Web 2.0ish”. Good stuff.

Kelli Brown from P3 also had a very thorough presentation on the ways and approaches to social media. She illustrated her message with an indepth case study of the work being done by the folks at RadVision. It’s well worth reading.

My shpiel focused on the dos and don’ts of pitching the press. Mucho gracias to all of my commiserating journalists and bloggers out there who contributed content for the talk. Together, I was able to discern nine mega tips that anyone pitching the press should follow, the biggest being know your journalist. Kind of banal, I know, but seems like it’s an axiom that more PR folk need to follow.

Other tips to keep in mind:

• Match the audience to the magazine
• Tell the right story
• Highlight the unusual
• Make it timely
• Provide compelling collateral
• Do not expect every interview to lead to a story
• Do not stalk journalists
• Poor professionalism WILL backfire

You can find the full presentation here.

Got another tip? Love to hear it; add it below or email me. If you’re in the PR world and have some tips for us bloggers and journalists, I’d like to hear them. Email them an include your name, URL, and tip. I’ll pull the them into a future presentation sourcing you and your organization, of course.

 Loading ...

June 10th, 2008

SocialText unveils new wiki spreadsheet

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 6:02 am

Categories: Enterprise 2.0, Personal Productivity, Project Teams, Social Networking, Software as a Service (SaaS), Wikis

Tags: Socialtext, Spreadsheet, Permissioning, Google Sheet, Wiki, Productivity, Online Communications, Dave Greenfield

SocialText just announced its latest addition to SocialText SocialCalc, a multi-user wiki-based spreadsheet. SocialText isn’t the first to deliver an online spreadsheet, but it is the first to integrate an online spreadsheet with a leading Wiki and allows linking between sheets. (Click here for our exclusive, SocialCalc screen gallery.)

With that said, SocialCalc will have a ways to go before it offers the sophistication of Excel or even Google Sheets. While it has similar UI features complete with a nifty Ajax interface, it lacks the range of functions that one would find in the competitive offerings. (See our comparison of the functions offered by online spreadsheets.)

Nor is the spreadsheet integrated with the full range of SocialText capabilities. It can’t be read offline with Unplugged, SocialText’s offline Wiki reader nor can the spreadsheet be edited through Miki, SocialText’s mobile wiki.

“Pretty much every player that’s tried online office productivity has simply emulated Office on a Web page,” says SocialText’s Ross Mayfield, SocialText’s chairman, president and co-founder taking a slap at Google and Zoho, “The good thing about a social tool is that it forced us how to look at how to redesign a spreadsheet for the Web.”

THE SOCIAL TEXT SOLUTION

The announcement is the latest attempt by SocialText to expand beyond plain wikis. The company recently announced SocialText People, an enterprise, social networking extension to the SocialText wiki and SocialText Dashboard, a consolidated view for the SocialText Wiki.

The new software is based on WikiCalc, an open-source spreadsheet created by Dan Bricklin, the co-creator of the original spreadsheet, VisiCalc. SocialText acquired WikiCalc in 2005. The new software extends WikiCalc with Ajax, sharing, tagging, version control, and enterprise-level security and permissioning. The company expects that the software will find primary use in the four markets that SocialText has been focusing on – participatory knowledgebase, collaborative intelligence, business social networks, and client collaboration.

When I spoke with Ross last week about SocialCalc he pointed to the following scenario as indicative of the kind of use for SocialCalc and its sister products. Suppose a competitor offers a new bundling strategy. A field sales person might be the first to hear about the details of that pricing package, but getting a fully developed competitive response out to the rest of the organization is a major challenge. The marketing group has to be alerted. They need to find the right personnel to develop a tactical response. Those people need to meet and the results need to be communicated to the field, creating numerous documents, making sure people have the most current information, and all under the pressure of a tight deadline.

With SocialText software, a sales rep whips up a model comparing the company’s pricing with that of the competitors in SocialCalc. This sheet is added to the internal SocialText Wiki and the sales rep notifies marketing. Marketing identifies the right experts in the organization through SocialText People and pulls them into a meeting. A discussion gets started around a competitive response using the spreadsheet of field sales rep. The group then updates the wiki with that response. Since the wiki is online there’s no need to worry about versioning; every sales person instantly has the right response through their SocialText Dashboard.

OUR TAKE
SocialText has done a lot of things write with SocialCalc. The linking between sheets is significant as it lets the software address a broad class of applications.

On the backend, administrators can create workspace for groups of people. They can have subgroups with special permissions. Security is also not file centric, admins can allow non-admins to create workspaces and groups. Permissioning is based on the spreadsheets, so user can restrict who has access to those sheets.

At the same time, SocialCalc will have a long way to go. Today there’s no Excel integration, something that Google Sheets already offers. What’s more the range of functions provided with SocialCalc is still limited. Excel offers some 333 functions. Google Sheet has 263, 230 that it shares in common with Excel. SocialCalc only has 107 functions.

Still the integration of a spreadsheet and wiki should be a powerful tool for workgroups and for SocialCalc. Given that this is still an early release and SocailText’s history of delivery quality Wiki, we expect SocialCalc to find a loyal following in the collaborative firmament.

March 31st, 2008

The 3-D Web Goes Thin

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 12:30 pm

Categories: Second Life, Social Networking, Virtual Reality

Tags: 3D, Web, Web Browser, Semantic Web, Vivaty, ScreenCaster, Channel Management, Marketing, Dave Greenfield

Increasingly, it looks like Weight Watchers has gotten hold of the Semantic Web. Fat is out. Thin is in. And while no one’s counting points, it certainly looks like, thin clients will increasingly play a central roles in attracting organizations to the 3-D web.

A number of companies are enabling organizations and users to build their own virtual worlds with little more than a browser, much the way Ning, GoingOn, HiveLive, Flux, Me.com, and BricaBox has done for social networks. These instant-virtual-world companies include Vivaty, Altadyn with 3dxplorer, and to a lesser extent ScreenCaster and VastPark.

With browser only virtual worlds, organizations can engage the largest market of users today – the Web user. Even Second Life, arguably the largest virtual world with its over 13 million users, pales in comparison to the 1.1 billion that Jupiter Media estimates enjoy regular Web access.

Appealing to those users means getting rid of the fat clients needed to enter the 3-D web today. The process of downloading, installing, and configuring those clients are too complex for many users, too hefty for many business PCs, and they mean installing software on user’s desktop configuration, a big no-no if that user’s desktop exists in a business.

A thin client solves those problems and allows business to turn their Web sites into 3-D spaces. “We have chosen to develop our virtual headquarters and facility with an entirely web-browser based toolset,” says David Elchoness, Executive Director of the Association of Virtual Worlds, “If I can get someone to ‘click a link’ I’ll be able to show them the benefits of the 3D web. “

For consumers, Vivaty, a start-up based in Menlo Park, California, is creating 3-D virtual chat rooms that users can add to Web pages and social networking profiles. Vivaty chat rooms will rely on “a widget that you embed on other web pages. You choose the virtual furnishings for the room, and when you’re on a page with the Vivaty widget, you’ll — get ready for this — see images from the page featured as wall hangings in your virtual room…,” writes Eric Elden at Venturebeat.

Three years ago Altadyn, a French firm, introduced 3dxplorer, which lets individuals do the same with their home pages. The Association of Virtual Worlds will use the Altdan technology in the building of its virtual headquarters. ScreenCaster allows users to create virtual spaces, although not interactive today, could ultimately serve as the virtual spaces of a 3-D Web similar to the way Google maps may morph into the 3-D Web. VastPark will allow anyone to deploy their own virtual world. The software still in alpha and is due to go to public Beta nextmonth.

Vivaty’s uniqueness, however, and its arguably its greatest value is its integration with other social services. User can add a YouTube video or Facebook photo to their virtual world, notes Brad Stone in his article at The New York Times.

Tying all media into a common space through a thin client will be valuable to consumers today, but organizations will ultimately find powerful as well. A single 3-D space that consolidates together marketing collateral and corporate content spread across internal and external services is a powerful tool for attracting and interacting with customers, particularly if those customers can enter into that space with just a Web browser.

February 25th, 2008

SpigIT: an enterprise social network that’s fun and games

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 8:34 am

Categories: Social Networking

Tags: Software, Incentive, Employee, Network, SpigIT, Enterprise Social Network, Innovation Market, Prediction Market, Sales Force Management, Games

Harvesting breakthrough ideas is a challenge for any organization, but one company thinks a bit of play may be just the answer.

Spigit mixes enterprise social networks with game design and personal incentives to encourage new ideas and steward them from the process of discovery to implementation. Employees are encouraged to participate in stock-market-like games using the good old incentives to solicit cooperation — fame (i.e. reputation) and fortune.

Spigit’s reputation ranking algorithm, RepuRank, promotes recognition of outstanding contributors to the organization. Employees gain a tool for tapping into knowledge across the organization. Employees also have a chance to win virtual stocks (“Spocks”) or currency (Spigits), which some Spigit customers allowed employees to redeem at the company store.

The company creates two markets one for harvesting innovative ideas within the organization and the other extracting latent knowledge from employees. The Innovation Market allows employees to compete for the best idea and win points for contributing to and reviewing other ideas. The Prediction Market allows employee to pool knowledge by buying and selling Spocks based on the outcome of an event, such as a question on the success of a new slogan. The current market price becomes an indicator of the option’s probability.

Spigit isn’t the first vendor to market with an enterprise social network. BEA, IBM-Lotus, and Connectbeam offer social networks for business. But Spigit is the first enterprise vendor to organizations to build an incentive for individuals to participate in the network.  That’s been enough for six companies, including SAP, to purchase the softwarel notes CEO Paul Pluschkell.

Spigit is priced in three packages: a single annual amount, per user and per server, and then as a service. The software is targeted at being the equivalent of one senior IT executive. Prices will range depending on discounts with $300,000 for an annual fee for unlimited number of users to $10 to $25 per user per month. The break-even point, says  Pluschkell, is 3,000 users.

Adding a goal and an incentive to participate will be critical for the success of the software’s deployment. More important though will be providing the right corporate culture that enforces the collaborative messages espoused by Spigit. Without that sort of investment, no collaboration software will succeed.

January 21st, 2008

Social Software: It's Just a Game

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 2:14 pm

Categories: Second Life, Social Networking

Tags: Software, Team-building, Avatar, Team Management, Games, Management, Personal Technology, Dave Greenfield

At Lotusphere I had the opportunity to chat with a number of the researchers about the work they have going on in the area. Here are a few of the projects cooking and worth thinking about:
• Wormhole bridges the virtual and Web worlds. Woody Huang showed how you can take information in one world and then render it the other. So a list of my personal contacts, for example, may be rendered as avatars standing around me in a circle. It’s sort of like a screen-scraper for the virtual world, but one that’s constantly updated as necessary.
• Bluegrass is a SecondLife for business. This is tough one to describe here and I hope to post some links to the technology shortly, but basically Bluegrass provides a sort cartoon-ish world that employees can use to explore and collaborate. Individuals move through a lush, landscape and interact with other avatars. Avatars give off “bubble” of information that provide an excuse for incidental interactions, says researcher Li-Te Cheng.
• Team building games can be fun and form an important connection between coworkers. Normally, that’s done at costly off-site meetings. Jason Ellis and crew are hoping to enable employees to do that online by providing different team building exercises for teams in SecondLife.
I think what all of these projects have in common beside the raw technology is that the work environment should be made to be a bit more fun. Games, online interactions, and the like are parts of “playing” with one another that leads to more effective teams. I think it’s an interesting idea. What do you think?

October 12th, 2007

Are You Starbucks or Mardi Gras?

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 6:45 am

Categories: Blogs, Enterprise 2.0, Social Networking

Tags: Network, Starbucks Corp., Organization, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Dave Greenfield

Organizations continue to be enchanted by the possibilities social networks can offer, but even before the first line of code is written, they need to answer some fundamental questions about their own identities and objectives:

“Are you a library, Starbucks or Mardi Gras?” asks  John Eckman John’s the  practice director for next generation Internet over at an Optatos, an IT consulting firm working with Proctor and Gamble in building out its own internal social network called PeopleFinder.

Organizations need to decide who they are, he says. Some businesses are more sedate and orderly. They expect their  employees to tread softly, monitor what they say, and don’t rock the boat very much.

Other organizations are more like the Mardi Gras, where anything goes online. Challenge the CEO’s recent acquisition strategy. Criticize the latest product plans.

Still others are somewhere in between, like a Starbucks. Chat widely but not too loudly. Be boisterous, but too a point.

Once organizations understand who they are then that will set the ground rules and expectations for their social network and enterprise 2.0 deployments.

So which are you?

October 10th, 2007

Top Technologies for 2008

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 1:34 pm

Categories: Bookmarking, Enterprise 2.0, IP Telephony, Linux, Second Life, Social Networking, Tagging, Virtual Reality, VoIP, Wikis

Tags: Web, Software-as-a-service, Analyst, Gartner Inc., Technology, Mashup, Metadata Management, Computing Fabric, Channel Management, Virtualization

Gartner has just published its list of top 10 strategic technologies for 2008. I guess I’m a sucker for stuff like this having just spoken with a bunch of CIOs and reported on the results here.

The biggest finding that I found in my research was the shift in purchasing that was expected to occur next year. Over the past seven years much of technology acquisition has been about ROI and cost reduction. Starting next year, the CIOs and analyst  that I spoke with talked about the use of technology to improve the capabilities that can be provided to teams.

“Forrester talks about two periods of technology acquisition, which we call ‘tech digestion’ and ‘innovation growth,’” Bartels said. [That's Andrew Bartels, an analyst at Forrester Research, in Cambridge, Mass.]

During tech digestion, acquisition is all about price and ease of use, with budgets primarily driven by return on investment calculations. There’s a large focus on infrastructure rationalization and process automation—pretty much what’s characterized technology acquisition for the past seven years or so.

Next year will signal a point of transition, as we’ll see a whole new level of investment for the next four or five years. Purchases will be driven more by functionality and less by ROI calculations. “There will be a shift from making processes more efficient to helping companies optimize business results by adding analytics and vertical industry knowledge,” said Bartels.

The CIOs and IT executives contacted for this story pointed to a number of initiatives similiar to the ones Gartner listed — Green IT, tactical VOIP, and grid technologies. Virtual worlds are also being looked at as well by Westchester county.

What technologies are on your plate for next year?

Here’s the gist of the Gartner release:

Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008

Analysts Examine Latest Industry Trends During Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, October 7-12, in Orlando

STAMFORD, Conn., October 9, 2007 — Gartner, Inc. analysts today highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations. The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 12.

Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

“Companies should factor these technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Sometimes the decision will be to do nothing with a particular technology. In other cases it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology. The important thing is to ask the question and proactively plan.”

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2008 include:

Green IT. The focus of Green IT that came to the forefront in 2007 will accelerate and expand in 2008. Consider potential regulations and have alternative plans for data center and capacity growth. Regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centers, as the impact on power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny. Some companies are emphasizing their social responsibility behavior, which might result in vendor preferences and policies that affect IT decisions. Scheduling decisions for workloads on servers will begin to consider power efficiency as a key placement attribute.

Unified Communications. Today, 20 percent of the installed base with PBX has migrated to IP telephony, but more than 80 percent are already doing trials of some form. Gartner analysts expect the next three years to be the point at which the majority of companies implement this, the first major change in voice communications since the digital PBX and cellular phone changes in the 1970s and 1980s.

Business Process Modeling. Top-level process services must be defined jointly by a set of roles (which include enterprise architects, senior developers, process architects and/or process analysts). Some of those roles sit in a service oriented architecture center of excellence, some in a process center of excellence and some in both. The strategic imperative for 2008 is to bring these groups together. Gartner expects BPM suites to fill a critical role as a compliment to SOA development.

Metadata Management. Through 2010, organizations implementing both customer data integration and product integration and product information management will link these master data management initiatives as part of an overall enterprise information management (EIM) strategy. Metadata management is a critical part of a company’s information infrastructure. It enables optimization, abstraction and semantic reconciliation of metadata to support reuse, consistency, integrity and shareability. Metadata management also extends into SOA projects with service registries and application development repositories. Metadata also plays a role in operations management with CMDB initiatives.

Virtualization 2.0. Virtualization technologies can improve IT resource utilization and increase the flexibility needed to adapt to changing requirements and workloads. However, by themselves, virtualization technologies are simply enablers that help broader improvements in infrastructure cost reduction, flexibility and resiliency. With the addition of automation technologies – with service-level, policy-based active management – resource efficiency can improve dramatically, flexibility can become automatic based on requirements, and services can be managed holistically, ensuring high levels of resiliency. Virtualization plus service-level, policy-based automation constitutes an RTI.

Mashup & Composite Apps. By 2010, Web mashups will be the dominant model (80 percent) for the creation of composite enterprise applications. Mashup technologies will evolve significantly over the next five years, and application leaders must take this evolution into account when evaluating the impact of mashups and in formulating an enterprise mashup strategy.

Web Platform & WOA. Software as a service (SaaS) is becoming a viable option in more markets and companies must evaluate where service based delivery may provide value in 2008-2010. Meanwhile Web platforms are emerging which provide service-based access to infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes through Web based “cloud computing” environments. Companies must also look beyond SaaS to examine how Web platforms will impact their business in 3-5 years.

Computing Fabric. A computing fabric is the evolution of server design beyond the interim stage, blade servers, that exists today. The next step in this progression is the introduction of technology to allow several blades to be merged operationally over the fabric, operating as a larger single system image that is the sum of the components from those blades. The fabric-based server of the future will treat memory, processors, and I/O cards as components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suits the owner’s needs. For example a large server can be created by combining 32 processors and a number of memory modules from the pool, operating together over the fabric to appear to an operating system as a single fixed server.

Real World Web. The term “real world Web” is informal, referring to places where information from the Web is applied to the particular location, activity or context in the real world. It is intended to augment the reality that a user faces, not to replace it as in virtual worlds. It is used in real-time based on the real world situation, not prepared in advance for consumption at specific times or researched after the events have occurred. For example in navigation, a printed list of directions from the Web do not react to changes, but a GPS navigation unit provides real-time directions that react to events and movements; the latter case is akin to the real-world Web of augmented reality. Now is the time to seek out new applications, new revenue streams and improvements to business process that can come from augmenting the world at the right time, place or situation.

Social Software. Through 2010, the enterprise Web 2.0 product environment will experience considerable flux with continued product innovation and new entrants, including start-ups, large vendors and traditional collaboration vendors. Expect significant consolidation as competitors strive to deliver robust Web 2.0 offerings to the enterprise. Nevertheless social software technologies will increasingly be brought into the enterprise to augment traditional collaboration.

“These 10 opportunities should be considered in conjunction with many proven, fully-matured technologies, as we as others that did not make this list, but can provide value for many companies,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “For example, real-time enterprises providing advanced devices for a mobile workforce will consider next-generation smartphones to be a key technology, in addition to the value that this list might offer.”