Finding the Value in …er More Social Computing Architecture Ponderings

I’ve often thought that one of the worst possible fates that could befall someone would be to know the truth about something with absolute clarity, but not be able to have anyone else see it.  I feel a little like this having spent the last couple of years saying social computing only makes sense in the context of a broader enterprise architecture only to have people finally really start talking about this after yet another microblogging solution got announced last week.

So let’s take a minute to talk about how all these various microblogging “…er” products can actually lead to business value.  Most of these products are designed to let users type in short text messages which get shown to other people who are “following” the writer.  Sometimes the messages contain links or files.  Sometimes the messages relate to a group and all group members see the message.  That’s it.  That’s pretty much what they do. 

Here’s the good news.  Many end users will get the concept.  And some people will really get into the concept and generate a lot of activity (These stats reported about Twitter show 10% of users create 86% of activity. http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/ )

Here’s the not so great news.  According to analysts who have surveyed a lot of companies who try these “…er” products, usage tends to die off if they aren’t integrated with the rest of the existing business processes.  You probably saw that amazing revelation coming, didn’t you?  The truth is that the people in your company already have plenty to do.  They didn’t come to work today saying, “Wow, I really have nothing to get done, and I think I’ll spend the whole day playing around with some new technology.”  (If they DO say this, you have a different kind of problem…)

So what does any of this have to do with architecture?

1. Microblogging/status updates are just one specific kind of user-generated event or action 
2. Users who are doing productive work create lots of events 
3. The real value in social computing comes from intelligently using this event data  
4. Your architecture needs to collect, store, radiate, display, collect feedback on, analyze, and understand the context of these events 

1)      Collecting events relies on a combination of “owning” a lot of places where events happen and providing an easy ways to access events from other locations.  In NewsGator Social Sites, we see all the activity happening in SharePoint and we provide feed, email and API endpoints to bring in events from other systems.

Storing the events is pretty self explanatory, but the architecture needs to be able to deal with large numbers of actions.

Displaying events covers not only interfaces in the social computing solution itself but APIs and clients for viewing from things like iPhones, Blackberries, desktop clients, email programs and IM solutions.  It also includes capabilities like filtering and interacting with the events.

The feedback with events that includes commenting or “liking” not only provides a valuable mechanism to allow a lightweight conversation, but also creates a logical mechanism for alerting users (i.e., your event has been commented on) or highlighting particular events (like you see in the default Facebook view).

While there’s no doubt that the actual lightweight text communication that the “…er” solutions enable has value amongst all the typical communication channels available in an enterprise (phone, email, IM, discussion forums, etc), the real value typically comes from doing deeper analysis on all the events.  If you truly want to understand patterns of behavior or truly discover expertise, than your architecture needs to capture a broad array of events and have a way to distill them into some more core concept like expertise. 

Context is the last critical architectural element.  Context includes concepts like security – i.e., is an event public or private to a particular audience?  But it also includes concepts like whether the event originated from an individual act or something done in the context of a group or community and having a clear definition of what the event was.  Context allows for both privacy and filtering.

All of this is not to say that microblogging is not a valuable capability.  We have greatly enhanced Social Sites in this area, and I can’t wait to let people start using all the cool new features next month.  But in terms of enterprise social computing architecture, the “…er” solutions are really just a small subset of the total events that need to be handled.  So in terms of getting value out of enterprise social computing, it’s not the “…er” part that matters – it’s the “…re” part – as in “architecture”.

If you’ve read this far, it’s probably because you’re one of those people who has already been saying social computing must be part of the overall architecture for enterprises.  Hopefully, this little blog post gives you the comfort that you’re not the only one who has that clarity of vision.

Chatter and SharePoint and Social Sites and LinkedIn API and work and....

SF's category-endorsing 'Chatter' pre-announcement is driving some good conversation about fundamental requirements for successful enterprise social computing. LinkedIn's API announcement today is adding to the stream.

1.5 million end-users have taught us that enterprise social computing is about helping people work more effectively.   Faster innovation, better collaboration and easier expertise discovery happen when social is part of the workflow; the data is integrated; and it's all accessible to everyone anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

Some specifics:

1.    A single profile is vital to maximize key value propositions like expertise location
2.    No walled gardens.  The more open the data flows the better – in part to optimize the profile, but more generally to optimize the end-user’s opportunity to gain actionable relevant information and connections (cf. workflow integration below).
3.   More participation = better.  
4.   Security and scalability and governance = vital.

And, two memes that need more travel:

1.     Mobile, and messaging, are rapidly becoming much more important than most vendors are considering
2.    Integration with Workflow.  As the McKinsey study late this summer found, enterprise 2.0 capabilities like wikis, blogs, microblogging, RSS, activity streams etc. are most used when tightly integrated into workflows.  Competing for attention is hard and will get much harder.  Every piece of software/ every element of the workflow will be inherently collaborative.   That all needs to be seamless to the individual.

All of these are central tenets behind the design of our Social Sites offering.

1.    Single profile.  We've targeted the SharePoint installed base partly because that allows us to enhance existing profiles rather than creating another silo'd profile store.
2.    No walled gardens.  The more data in and out the stronger the network.This is a critical design point for us.   Our activity streams and microblogging ‘watch’ over 30 event-types now – and will ‘watch’ more.  More generally, any information from any internal or external system can be an event type for Social Sites --- claim your twitter stream (or 'chatter'), bring in external premium content, integrate your external social network (woo hoo for linkedin's API announcement today -- connections and status integration!) – all these are choices our customers can and do make today.
3.    More participation = better.  SharePoint is already accessible by well over 100 million seats worldwide. The 2010 version is an important evolution for SharePoint as an enterprise application platform ; better scalability, administration, and business intelligence, and a stronger social platform we can leverage to integrate more and more workflow.
4.    Security, scalability, and governance = vital.   Our partners have found that it’s critical to make sure the conversation, and more critically the work involved with the conversation, happens in an environment which is appropriately governable.  E-mumbling isn’t different from email; ultimately companies are on the hook for that conversation, too.
5.    Mobile and messaging.  Smartphones and notebooks are THE primary microprocessor growth area for Intel now.   This has been a central focus for us since our first mobile readers a few years ago. We introduced our iPhone Social Sites app a few weeks ago.  Stay tuned for much much more.
6.    Workflow integration.  A primary adoption driver for Social Sites has been Communities --- easy-to-create-and-manage places where anyone with common interests or practices can microchat  where the rest of the tools they need to do real collaborative work are available.   More and more enterprise applications are opening up to the collaborative work available from primary enterprise application platforms like SharePoint.

All of this has happily helped us bring social computing to 200 of the Global 2000 over the last 18 months.  All the new conversations are keeping us busier than ever.

New NewsGator Whitepaper: "The Benefits of Microblogging in the Enterprise"

Today NewsGator releases a new whitepaper, "The Benefits of Microblogging in the Enterprise." This whitepaper explores the business case for microblogging, the applicability of Twitter, and a framework for evaluating microblogging products.

The premise of the whitepaper: the explosive growth of consumer microblogging solutions has many organizations wondering how enterprise microblogging might improve business performance; we tackle this question head on in this whitepaper.

In practice, enterprise microblogging -- the post of short, ad hoc messages that colleagues can follow like a stock ticker -- has produced surprising business benefits, including quicker information exchange, richer problem solving and deeper customer satisfaction. 

This new whitepaper explores these benefits and gives readers a framework for evaluating microblogging tools for the enterprise. Topics addressed in the whitepaper include: 

• Why microblogging?
• Enterprise microblogging use cases
• Why do enterprises need an internal microblogging platform?
• Microblogging functions/features to consider
• Microblogging in NewsGator Social Sites

You can download the whitepaper here. If you want to see NewsGator Social Sites’ microblogging features, check out this blog post.

NewsGator Social Sites’ Top 25 Microblogging Features For SharePoint

In light of all of the chatter over the last 24 hours about enterprise social computing and microblogging, I thought it was timely to highlight NewsGator Social Sites’ microblogging features that are built in to SharePoint.   If you have SharePoint, this is a great way to meet employee demand for microblogging in a way that easily integrates with the rest of their workflow and communications.  And for more info, check out our microblogging whitepaper released today.

1. Provide ‘Twitter-like’ microblogging capabilities within SharePoint
2. Engage in lightweight, efficient conversations or share status updates (140 characters per entry)
3. Integrate microblogging comments with Social Sites’ Activity Stream
4. Use microblogging features to comment on other SharePoint activity such as document uploads, blog posts, or wiki contributions
5. View a list of colleagues that are ‘following’ your microblogging activity
6. Integrate with social network updates from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
7. Use a “Like” capability to provide easy feedback on activities
8. Upload photos and videos to your status update via mobile, desktop, or portal
9. Automatically add thumbnails of the web page that was saved to your Bookmarks

10, Create custom lists of people and/or communities to follow

11. Filter status updates by colleagues, communities, your activity, top updates, or custom created lists of people and/or communities

12. Target messages to specific users or communities

13. Search across all microblogging activity including status, comments and events using keywords or hashtags

14. Integrate conversations within Social Sites Communities to enable focused conversations around a topic

15. Use email to update your status while away from your SharePoint social computing environment
16. Receive daily email digests of your colleagues’ microblogging activity
17. Receive email notifications on activities you have created or activities that you have commented on and use email to respond to subsequent updates on the thread

 

18. Use Social Sites’ mobile application that brings microblogging to the iPhone 
  

19.View a global conversations page that provides an overall timeline for the status activity across the organization
20. Employ hashtags to easily classify and discover status updates with a topic area
21. View a tag cloud of all hashtags used in updates

22. Enable administrators to delete inappropriate updates or comments
23. Utilize APIs for consuming and publishing activities
24. Easily support your company’s SharePoint security protocols and Active Directory implementation
25. Integrate microblogging within your employees workflow rather than providing it as a separate destination

To learn more about enterprise microblogging within SharePoint, send me an email and we can schedule a demo for your company.

Thoughts on Palo Alto Network's Report, "An Analysis of End User Application Trends in the Enterprise"

Recently Palo Alto Networks released the fall edition of their Application Usage and Risk Report: An Analysis of End User Application Trends in the Enterprise. There are definitely some interesting findings within the report, and I wanted to highlight some of the more noteworthy ones from the perspective of NewsGator, particularly NewsGator Social Sites for Microsoft SharePoint.

For instance the report finds that 91% of organizations they polled were using SharePoint, up dramatically from the 37% of organizations who reported using SharePoint in the spring 2009 version of their report.  (In addition, their analysis shows a "staggering" 48% year-over-year growth in the market share of SharePoint.) 

In addition, the study confirms the observation that employees are increasingly becoming (more) active contributors.  In particular, the analysis shows that employees were "significantly more active in their blogging and posting activity" compared to the spring 2009 analysis. They also found significant increases in "total session activity" and "total bandwidth consumed" by these contribution activities. Their conclusion, which is one we fully agree with at NewsGator, is that "the dramatic increase in blog/wiki activity fully supports one of the key tenets around Enterprise 2.0 applications, which is that users, consumers and contributors are often the same person." 

Another finding in the report is that "SharePoint is being deployed by management, in a top down manner" despite the fact that Gartner reports that some 30% of SharePoint deployments are actually “rogue, meaning that end-users or business groups saw a need to be more collaborative and deployed a tool that they had at their disposal."  

What's most interesting, and perhaps important, is that, according to Palo Alto Networks, two recent surveys -- the McKinsey Report on Web 2.0 & a report by AIIM -- show that respondents are reporting measurable benefits from the use of these types of collaboration tools.  More specifically, McKinsey found that 69% of companies surveyed have noted enhanced "innovation, more effective marketing, more rapid access to information, lower costs and higher revenues" and that respondents "saw an increased ability to share ideas, more rapid access to knowledge experts, and a reduction in costs for travel operations and communications."  Likewise, AIIM's report showed that more than 50% of those surveyed "consider the use of Enterprise 2.0 applications to be important or very important" citing the three most important benefits being "knowledge sharing," "information gathering," and "improved efficiency/speed" at work. 

No doubt, the results on Palo Alto Network's fall 2009 report, as well as two other reports they cite, show that Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools are not only seeing a dramatic increase in usage since earlier in the year, but that companies and employees are seeing concrete and wide-ranging benefits from the use of these tools.  All of this confirms that the social networking and collaboration tools in NewsGator Social Sites can bring measurable benefits to the day-to-day operations of enterprises.  

You can access the full Palo Alto Networks fall report here.

Upcoming Webinar: Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Practical Steps to Creating Business Value

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 technologies and approaches can be a key driver of competitiveness and profitability.  However, since Enterprise 2.0 sits at the nexus of technology and organizational culture, there can be no one-size-fits-all approach.

Key success factors include analyzing which Enterprise 2.0 approaches are most relevant to your organization, establishing effective governance process and policies, creating a timeline for initiatives, and supporting user adoption though internal 'champions.'

NewsGator will host a free webinar on Wednesday, November 18 at 2pm ET, where Ross Dawson, author of the proclaimed book Implementing Enterprise 2.0 and Chairman of Advanced Human Technologies, will provide detailed insights into the process of successfully implementing Enterprise 2.0, drawing on real-life case studies and featuring extensive content from his book.  Christy Schoon, Director of Business Consulting with NewsGator, will supply examples and best practices to help encourage user adoption.

This webinar will cover:

• How to apply the Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework to develop your own strategy and action plan
• Identifying key risks and benefits, and the process of establishing Enterprise 2.0 governance and policies 
• Making it happen: building a business case, getting buy-in, setting up pilots, and user adoption 
• Building a culture of collaboration and innovation and creating the enterprise of the future  

As a bonus, six complementary copies of Implementing Enterprise 2.0 will be drawn for attendees of the webinar!

For information on this webinar, and to register, click here.  

NewsGator Launches New ‘Everyday Enterprise 2.0’ Blog

Today NewsGator launched a new blog -- called "Everyday Enterprise 2.0."  Because Enterprise 2.0 is often derided as a buzzword enveloped in ivory-tower abstractions that confuse as much as enlighten, NewsGator today launched a new blog from the trenches of Enterprise 2.0 – yes, there are trenches – called “Everyday Enterprise 2.0,” authored by Christy Schoon, the company’s director of Enterprise 2.0 consulting. Read it at http://blogs.newsgator.com/everyday_enterprise_20/.

As Christy explains, “I work with real businesses every day that use Enterprise 2.0 to generate concrete results. My customers don’t want to argue about what Enterprise 2.0 is, whether it’s the right term, or whether it even exists. They want to know how other companies have succeeded, what they themselves can do to achieve the same benefits, and most importantly, how to do it. So I’m going to write in plain English about everyday Enterprise 2.0 from my own on-the-ground perspective working with living, breathing social computing champions at Fortune 500 companies.”

While Everyday Enterprise 2.0’s first and second posts are: “Why this blog?” and “Pimp my site," upcoming posts will focus on:

• Training 2.0
• Proofs of concept 
• Insights from the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Conference 
• Community manager preparation 
• The notion of "adoption for adoption's sake"  
• ...and more  

Christy tells us she also welcomes comments and links to other practical resources so that the blog can become a community for sharing real-world enterprise social computing experiences among peers.

So, visit the Everyday Enterprise 2.0 blog here, and you can also read the full press release here.

Update On FeedDemon Creator, Nick Bradbury

Many of you may know that in 2005, NewsGator acquired FeedDemon, an RSS reader for PCs that was then integrated into the entire NewsGator RSS ecosystem.  When we acquired FeedDemon its creator, Nick Bradbury, officially became a NewsGator employee.  

Since then, our enterprise business has grown faster than anticipated and NewsGator has started to focus increasingly on Social Sites for enterprise organizations.  Because of that, we recently made the decision to shut down NewsGator online and have our RSS readers sync with Google Reader.  

As a result of this change, Nick Bradbury will return to being an independent developer.  However, FeedDemon is not going anywhere and it will remain a NewsGator product. In fact, Nick has lots of exciting enhancements planned for FeedDemon.  

We'd like to thank Nick for his tireless work and significant impact to NewsGator, and we are appreciative of the incredible contributions he has made to NewsGator's RSS and social computing products.

You can read some reflections about Nick's time at NewsGator from our CTO and co-founder, Greg Reinacker here.

NewsGator Named to Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 List

I'm pleased to report that NewsGator has been named to Deloitte's 2009 Technology Fast 500 list.  Citing our 5-year revenue growth of over 2,000%, Deloitte ranks NewsGator as being among the 80 fastest growing technology companies in the United States.

We're honored and excited to have our impressive revenue growth be acknowledged by Deloitte, and believe it speaks to the continued resonance of our enterprise social computing solutions within the marketplace.  A special thanks to NewsGator's customers and employees for helping us to achieve this milestone!

You can read Deloitte's entire report here.

NewsGator & speakTECH Announce Social Computing Strategic Partnership

Today Microsoft Gold Certified Partners NewsGator and speakTECH announce a strategic partnership to provide social computing solutions on the Microsoft SharePoint platform. 

speakTECH's proven track record in social computing SharePoint implementations provides a great complement to NewsGator's enhanced social computing and Enterprise RSS applications (such as Social Sites 3.0) for SharePoint. The combined solutions and delivery expertise of these companies will further provide organizations with the ability to collaborate on an enterprise-wide level and engage end users with riveting design and dynamic content.

Jean-Claude Monney, Chief Solution Strategy Officer for speakTECH, explains that "NewsGator is the leader in social computing products for SharePoint, and we are excited to offer these capabilities to our customers."  He goes on to say that "NewsGator Social Sites, RSS Readers, Widget Services, and mobile applications are among the best in their class and will help us to increase the business value for our clients."

We welcome our partnership with speakTECH and value the design and implementation expertise that they will offer our customers.