“The only open source collaboration solution to offer
workflow” (Source)

I know. I had to read it twice.

Maybe Kablink defines “open source” or “collaboration” or “workflow” differently than I do. But solutions like Plone, Drupal, and Alfresco have had workflow of some kind for quite a while. It isn’t like there’s just one other open source collaboration offering out there with workflow, there are several. I’m not sure how Kablink thought they’d get this one past anyone. Maybe they’ll comment here to attempt to justify their claim.

The problem with today’s event sites is that they are too focused (live music, social gatherings, etc.) and too isolated (people have to sign up to use them, they are really only used for RSVP-ing, etc.). I’ve also found that finding interesting events can be tough. I think Meetup.com is a particularly bad offender–they’ve got a weird taxonomy thing going with their events. Their search doesn’t appear to be full-text indexed across meetup names or descriptions. Try to search meetup for “Alfresco”, for example. Although I know there are multiple Alfresco meetup groups out there, you won’t turn up one with a keyword search even with your search scope set to “100 miles of USA”. And when you create an event, it seems like there is a limited taxonomy for categorization. You have to decide if your meetup is about “Software” or “Technology”. Why would I pay them to host an event no one can find attended by a set of people who’s profiles I can only leverage in the context of meetup.com?

This is a sticking point for me. We all belong to different communities with different interests. And sometimes those overlap. Our social graphs shouldn’t be in silos. Neither should the events we attend. Managing your connections across networks together and exposing events to sub-sections of your connections (or across your entire network, regardless of where it is hosted) is really powerful. After all, as Bob says, it is through these events by which we form and strengthen those connections in the first place. Hopefully, this is what you’ll be able to do with Ringside.

His post got me thinking about what I might like to do with events in my own community. So here’s a list off the top of my head. Maybe Bob will comment on how/if this maps to the Ringside roadmap.

Attend/host flag & security settings. An individual ought to be able to publish an event, make public/private settings about that event, and indicate whether they are attending or hosting the event.

Event matching/de-duplication. What would be great is if there was a way to match up events. If I say I’m going to a Wilco concert, and you say you’re going to a Wilco concert, there needs to be a way to figure out if those are the same event.

In-network/same-event notification. Once you figure out two events are the same, people in the same network can discover the fact they share similar interests. The system should facilitate this kind of thing.

Targeted event promo. You should also be able to publicize an event to particular cross-sections of your graph. I might want to host a Ringside meet-up that only goes to my open source/E2.0 friends without spamming my family about it.

Interest level indication. An individual ought to be able to specify whether they are thinking about attending an event or are definitely attending an event. For example, someone might post an event they would only go to if someone else from one of their networks is also going.

Events as tags. Obviously events integrate with the rest of the model. Activity feeds certainly have to know when someone attended an event. But you should also have the ability to tag any item with an event. A photo library app needs to be able to let users tag photos that pertain to certain events, for example.

Event discovery. Events should be easily discoverable by tag/topic, full-text keyword search, by geography, and by attendee. I’d like to see a mash-up between Dopplr and an event database, for example, that knows what kind of events I like to attend and then cross references that with my travel schedule so that if I am traveling to San Francisco, and one of my favorite bands happens to be playing, the site can let me know that, including which of my friends might also be planning to attend (or would attend if they knew I was going to be in town).

Slice-and-dice RSS subscriptions. I should be able to get an RSS feed for each of the following: All events happening in a particular cross-section of my social graph, all events happening in a particular tag/topic, all events in a geography, all events in a particular date range, all events attended by a particular individual in one of my networks, or any combination of these (Live music shows happening in Dallas that my friend Jim is going to).

RSVP options. People should have the option of whether or not to track attendance to an event. Even for an event they are not hosting, they may or may not care who else is attending.

Configurable reminders. People need to be able to choose whether or not to send reminders to attendees. Attendees need to be able to opt out of receiving reminders.

Event ratings, comments, and UGC. People should be able to rate, comment on, and upload content related to an event.

Flexible event types. Events don’t have to be of any particular type. An event is really just a span of time during which something that might be potentially interesting to others is happening. “I’m going to Taco Bell for lunch tomorrow” and “I’ll be spending an hour in the Ubuntu forums Saturday” are both legitimate events that people might want to publish.

Calendar view with the same filtering capability as the “slice-and-dice RSS feeds” requirement. And the calendar ought to be widget-able so that anyone can embed it on their own site.

Standard calendar options for events including start and end time, duration, “all day event”, recurring event. I guess if the event was (or could be exported as) an iCal compliant piece of data that might be enough?

Who’s bringing what. Obviously everyone is familiar with the concept in a social gathering (You aren’t the guy who always just brings the chips, are you? Come on, make an effort, man). But this is also relevant to professional events, particularly for “un-conference” or bar camp type events where attendees are expected to present.

What about an ecommerce component? Maybe you ought to be able to sell tickets for an event. This could open up a can of worms regarding capacity, tiered pricing and availability, ticket authenticity verification, etc., but it might be cool/fun to provide something that could loosen the stranglehold a small number of vendors have on the “live event” market. Just a thought. At the very least, if an event requires a charge, you should at least be able to link to a shopping cart somewhere.

Some rough notes from the conference appear below…

Collaboration Case Studies: Pfizer

• Pfizer implemented MediaWiki, initially to use as a knowledgebase.
• Known as Pfizerpedia, the site gets 12,000 unique visitors per month.
• Key adoption factors were: Seeding the wiki with content, promoting early adoption through key champions, taking advantage of pent-up demand, holding the hands of the users as they learned to use the technology, providing guidelines for acceptable use, integrating the wiki with other content stores (team spaces and formal document management), tracking and reporting on usage and impact
• Pfizer found that because they lack enterprise search, their wiki evolved into a user-maintained index of sorts. I found it odd that an organization that is so knowledge-centric would lack enterprise search.

Collaboration Case Studies: Mitre

• This was a great example of Enterprise 2.0 in the real world.
• Components of their solution: Portal (Oracle), Team spaces (Sharepoint), Search and Expertise Location (Google Search Appliance), Social Bookmarking (Scuttle). If they have wikis or blogs I missed what they are specifically using.
• Their “Phonebook” app was really compelling. Beyond just being a corporate directory with contact and org info, it allowed users to see what communities everyone belonged to, documents they’ve published, projects they are assigned to, things they’ve bookmarked, and whether or not they are online.

Look at http://www.wikipatterns.com for patterns and anti-patterns around wiki implementations.

According to McKinsey, 40% of the work done in western organizations is Tacit which includes decision making, collaboration, and knowledge management. This is where the focus of IT investments should be.

Mash-ups

Kapow showed a demo of their mash-up maker tool. The simple example was that of being in a spreadsheet and needing to retrieve the stock price for a given symbol. Their point was that not all web sites have an API but with their point-and-click tool you can create REST-based services on top of any web page. In their example, they fired up Kapow, opened the quote.com website within the tool and highlighted the stock symbol field to define it as one of the service’s parameters. They then clicked the stock quote button which returned the price. They highlighted the returned price and defined that as the value the service should return. That’s all they had to do to define the service which they then deployed to a locally running server. They then went into Excel and wrote a formula which invoked the service using the stock symbol in the currently-highlighted cell as the service parameter to return the stock price. Obviously, if quote.com changes their markup, service will have to be redefined, but it was easy to see how business people with little or no technical skills could create their own mash-ups, even when the data sources don’t have an existing API.

IBM showed a demo of their mash-up maker called QEDWiki. They showed how they could build mashups through a web browser. Their tool didn’t provide the service builder–the value of the tool seemed to be bringing together data from existing REST-exposed sources into a single page and being able to do that configuration in the browser. They mentioned a mash-up tool being available at Alphaworks but it wasn’t clear whether or not that was the same package being demo’d.

Opening Keynote

Have you noticed how chummy Adobe and Alfresco are these days? John Newton, Alfresco CTO, and David Mendels, SVP from Adobe, were both on the opening keynote panel. The two were definitely in sync on where they thought content management was going. John said he thinks social computing will drive ECM from being used by 10% of the people in an organization today to being used by 80% or 90% in the near future. He mentioned the Facebook integration that’s been getting so much press lately. David said that content must be service-enabled so that it can be assembled in new ways which plays right into Alfresco’s recent addition of the REST framework.

Mendels also let it slip that Adobe has two hosted content management solutions, both of which run on Alfresco. One is Buzzword, which Adobe recently acquired. The other wasn’t named.

Alfresco says it’s all about connections. Adobe says it’s all about interaction. Seems pretty in-step to me.

WCM Keynote

This was a disappointing mix of closed-source WCM vendors. None of the vendors differentiated themselves at all or offered up anything new or interesting with regard to where WCM is headed.

WCM Analyst Panel

As a general rule, you shouldn’t miss an opportunity to hear Tony Byrne speak. His honesty and straightforwardness is always refreshing at these events. He gave the audience a piece of advice regarding evaluating CMS vendors which was to insist on a bakeoff. He said, “You wouldn’t buy a ferrari by watching the sales guy drive the car around the lot, you’d insist on getting behind the wheel. Why should it be different with a CMS?” I’d add a bit to that. When you do the test drive, you should take your mechanic.

I see many customers making CMS decisions before thinking about who’s going to do the implementation and the customization. Or they wait too long to get a professional services firm involved in the process. Obviously, I’m biased–my ECM practice at Optaros is in the business of helping clients with CMS evaluations and customizations–but the point is to seek advice from subject matter experts. Even if you do a bakeoff, there’s still a lot to learn from the people that have been there that you might not uncover during the bakeoff.

The Future of Collaboration/Enterprise 2.0

I was extremely frustrated with this session. I attended thinking the panel would stick to the topic–Enterprise 2.0. Unfortunately, the discussion was around everything but that. The moderator and the panel seemed to confuse “Web 2.0″ with “Enterprise 2.0″. Rather than talk about how Web 2.0 technologies can be applied within an organization to boost collaboration, leverage the power of the social network across the org, and reap the benefits of a less-structured, self-forming, self-regulated approach to Knowledge Management (this is McAfee’s and generally everybody else’s definition of Enterprise 2.0), the entire session was devoted to old ideas around customer engagement, customer-driven product development, and online communities. It was a very extranet/internet-centric discussion which entirely misses the point.

I wasn’t the only one who was frustrated–after asking the panel a question which essentially boiled down to “Is it you or me? Which one of us is confused?” several people approached me to share their disappointment.

Andrew McAfee

This was a panel composed of Frank Gilbane and Andrew McAfee. McAfee has done a lot of research around Enterprise 2.0 at Harvard and is always an entertaining speaker. Unfortunately, the format and the length of the slot didn’t really give him much room to stretch his legs. I did get a chance to ask him if he had done any research into the size of an organization that’s required to get the full network effect inherent in Enterprise 2.0 solutions. He said no one really knows yet what the minimum size is but anecdotal evidence suggests it’s “surprisingly small”. If you are looking for examples of real-world Enterprise 2.0 implementations, you should check out the site he started for capturing Enterprise 2.0 case studies.

I’ll post my notes here as soon as I can.

I’ve architected Notes/Domino applications as well as solutions on other document management and collaboration platforms and I’ve ported applications from one platform to another. Platform migration tools are usually good at moving apps with little or no customization. The “problem” is, Notes/Domino is often used to develop complex, highly-customized applications. For those, there’s probably no getting around a complete re-development effort if they are to be moved at all.

If you accept that you are essentially starting over for all but the simplest applications, your next problem could be with end-user expectations. A lot of the functionality vendors are just now getting around to incorporating into their offerings has been present in Notes/Domino for some time. If the goal is to port the highly-customized application with a 0% loss in end-user functionality, prepare yourself for a substantial development effort and, potentially, the acquisition and integration of best-of-breed components to keep the app as functional as it was before.

This is probably true for any platform migration project. Although you’d like to think that the end-user requirements are de-coupled from the underlying technology choice, platform-specific features or strengths always seem to find their way from the platform feature spec sheet to the list of features end-users can’t live without. Sometimes, that’s because the platform might have been originally selected because of those strengths (i.e., platform X has strong collaborative features or platform Y has great Office integration, for example). Other times, it is because developers are inherently lazy–features that rely on functionality that comes “for free” or is built-in to the platform are often at the top of the priority list.

I think platform migration utilities are most efficiently used as a marketing tool rather than a technical tool–they give the sales folks an answer to the “what about our existing applications on platform X?” objection. Use them to migrate your simple stuff, then start the real work of planning the migration of your customized apps.

I don’t have an easy answer on that last point yet, but in doing research on the topic, I did stumble across an excellent article on “The State of Workflow” at JBoss’ jBPM site. If you are involved in workflow or BPM initiatives it is certainly worth a read.

As a matter of fact, there’s a fun little project that several of us (inside and out) have been playing with for a few months that we’ve wanted to talk about more broadly, but didn’t have a lightweight way to get it out there. Now we finally have a reasonable way to kick off the conversation. Next week, perhaps.

I’m looking forward to finding out more about this and anything else Ray wants to talk about.