June 1st, 2009

Twitter on your intranet: 17 microblogging tools for business

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 3:44 pm

Categories: Active Directory, Blogs, Cloud computing, Collaboration, Community, Convergence, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Identity, LDAP, Products, SaaS, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Social media, Social networks, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Wikis, openid

Tags: Blog, Business, Messaging, Twitter, Tool, Intranet, Microblogging, SocialCast, CubeTree, Laconica

Ultimately, if you want to use the right tool for the job, you’re probably going to need a specialized microblogging platform.So you’re bitten by the Twitter bug and want to bring the social messaging experience to work in order to connect with and share information conveniently amongst your colleagues. Perhaps you’ve even obtained permission to try out microblogging in trial form on your local intranet. You sit down and begin to see how you can adopt social messaging internally. It goes slowly at first…

As a Web-based consumer application, you quickly discover that while Twitter itself is a terrific environment, it isn’t very usable yet for businesses because of it lacks a variety of capabilities needed to fully work on the local intranet (details on this below). You wonder what other options exist to bring microblogging to the workplace in a business-friendly manner. Plenty, it turns out.

As we’ll see, choosing one carefully will be key to the long-term success of your experiment.

With the recent growth of Web 2.0 tools in the workplace (to about half of all organizations today), this scenario is becoming more common. The good news is that the broad success of Twitter over the last year has led to the introduction of a whole series of business-focused microblogging applications that bring many (though not yet all) of the necessary enterprise capabilities to the microblogging world.

What exactly is microblogging?
Read the rest of this entry »

March 20th, 2008

Standards support for mashups emerge

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 1:18 pm

Categories: Badges, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Global SOA, Identity, LDAP, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Open APIs, Products, RSS, Right To Remix, SOA, SaaS, Situational Software, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web services, Widgets, openid

Tags: Dion Hinchcliffe

The announcement earlier this week that IBM has put together an open approach for making user data secure inside of Web mashups, known as SMash, was the most recent step in an unfolding story about the way the industry is trying to bring structure and order to the rapidly growing and frequently unruly world of Web mashups.

As I’ve covered here in the past, mashups have enormous potential to allow more rapid and much less expensive development of online applications by emphasizing assembly over development, economies of scale by enabling high levels of reuse, and the consequent ability to rapidly get software solutions with the right data in the right place at the right time.

However, all is not rosy in the mashup space as I wrote last fall; there are significant challenges remaining before end-user or enterprise mashups can become a widespread reality despite the numerous offerings that exist today. Since then, I’ve only have one major new item to add to the list of adoption issues, namely that fact that most leading mashup solutions don’t provide a good enough SaaS delivery model. Consequently Yahoo! Pipes remains the best example of a mashup tool that has the requisite low barrier for use for widespread adoption, despite far more sophisticated and capable brethren from the likes of JackBe, Serena, and soon, Lotus, the latter which appears to be repackaging everything it learned with the impressive QEDWiki into an enterprise-class product.

Fortunately, good news is on the horizon for many of the issues I raised last year. It now appears that the mashup industry is heading in a direction which may make the space much more viable indeed over the next year. For example, two my biggest concerns, both non-starters for organizations that want to adopt a mashup model (21% of all organizations reported that they were interested last year), was 1) the lack of serious security and identity support and 2) not having a common standards for the assembly of Web parts such as widgets, gadgets, and other Web applications. Without knowing how to secure mashups, safely handle sensitive user and business data, or know where to make infrastructure and tooling bets, most organizations were likely to sit on the fence and wait until these risks were addressed.

IBM’s announcement this week about SMash was just one of many solutions now being offered resolve these two issues not only in the mashup space, but across the Web industry, as our personal and professional data gets more and more federated across the Internet and within our organizations. Efforts in this area include range from Google’s OpenSocial initiative to the push for adoption of DataPortability.org’s and OpenFriendFormat’s support which are all improving the world of data safety, security, and mobility in the mashup world as well.

But the most comprehensive and detailed plan for bringing standard approaches and techniques to mashups has to be OpenSAM, which leverages many existing standards such as WebDAV, openid, LDAP, and also subscribes to DataPortability.org’s standards to create a consistent and well-organized design and interaction model for offering complex, heterogeneous mashups to both the consumer and business community. Even more importantly, they cite a good number of companies already offering Web applications that support OpenSAM. The OpenSAM vision is broad and focused across the usage spectrum and the OpenSAM folks say that “once OpenSAM is added to an application, it can immediately join mashups with all other OpenSAM applications.”

While there is still a lot to sort out and the mishmash of standards can seem Read the rest of this entry »

February 4th, 2008

openid: The once and future enterprise Single Sign-On?

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 4:40 pm

Categories: Active Directory, Business Models, Customer Self-Service, Enterprise Web 2.0, Google Accounts, Identity, Identity 2.0, LDAP, Lightweight Service Models, Live ID, Open APIs, Products, Radical Decentralization, SaaS, Social Networking, The Social Graph, Two-Way Web, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), openid

Tags: Web, Site, Single Sign-on, Identity, Enterprise, Channel Management, Marketing, Dion Hinchcliffe

The decision two weeks ago by Yahoo! to support the burgeoning openid initiative, where users choose their preferred user account provider for logging into other Web sites, was a defining moment for the increasingly popular effort to bring order and sanity to the often confusing world of user identity on the Web. This major move by Yahoo! underscores how new models for user identity and security are becoming strategically important in the online world, and it also has long-term implications for the enterprise, as we’ll see.

Enterprises will be able to manage the growing problem of the proliferation of accounts created in external, off premises Web apps.There’s no doubt that Yahoo!’s addition of over 250 million accessible user accounts to openid, which can now be used to log into the thousands of openid-compliant Web sites, is a significant win for an initiative that is starting to reach critical mass. My own tests show that Yahoo!’s support for only the newer, more secure specification of openid greatly limits the number of external Web sites you can actually access with your Yahoo! account, however this issue will surely be resolved as more 3rd party sites adopt the new spec.

More interestingly, Yahoo! at this time does yet not allow 3rd party issued openids to be used to access its own Web properties. Why is this vital? Because it will fundamentally limit the usefulness of open Web identity, and openid; what’s the point of having an identity from your preferred provider — or as we’ll see below, from your workplace — if you can’t use it where you want to? This one way adoption of open Web identity is common among the major adopters in the space so far.

Provider-only support of open Web identity is going to be a major challenge for the movement until someone articulates the value proposition for allowing 3rd party authentication of accounts from other Web sites. Read Dare Obasanjo’s reasoning around this in the second half of this post.

Other major Web firms and software companies have been pursuing the grail of open — or mostly-open — Web identity for several years now, including most notably Microsoft and Google. Josh Catone over at Read/Write Web wrote yesterday about Microsoft’s stated intent to join the openid bandwagon, which will likely push the number of openid accounts well past half a billion, regardless of what happens with Microsoft’s acquisition play for Yahoo! This kind of scale of support will put open identity, and specifically openid, on the map and hopefully simplify and empower Web users around the world.

Open identity does push users into considering their Terms of Service of their provider much more carefully, since the’re making a long-term strategic decision with whom they’ll will invest with their Web identity, and whether they offer a good home for what may be their last new Web account ever. A quick examination of Microsoft’s Live ID (the open Web identity formerly known as Passport) shows how Microsoft has had to remake their service to be more open and friendly to users and businesses that support it. Expect that many of today’s identity providers will begin making their offerings more appealing for those shopping for their new Web super-identity. This will likely include, as we see, some enterprises.

What’s so important about open Web identity and how does it affect enterprise identity?

Well for one, when using openid sites that allow 3rd party identities, users need only Read the rest of this entry »