The Connectbeam Social Computing Blog

Enterprise 2.0 Conference: A Platform to Measure the Evolution of a New Market

This was the third time that Connectbeam sponsored the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. It was yet another great show with so much to learn and explore. The most amazing thing was to see how the market has evolved over the last three years. Not trying to say we’ve reached the tipping point in the Enterprise 2.0 market by any means, but it was clear that companies are moving forward and trying to find ways to apply Enterprise 2.0 technologies and principals to better address current collaboration needs.

 

In June of 2007, Connectbeam sponsored the first Enterprise 2.0 show. Our demonstrations at the show centered on the ability to bookmark and tag the information people were finding using Google and other internet search engines.  We also demonstrated our first interface into the Google GSA.  People were widely interested in our solution, with the majority of discussions centered on understanding “What is Enterprise 2.0 really?” 

 

At the Enterprise 2.0 show in 2008, we launched our initial Centralized Tag Repository solution – now known as the Social Activity Repository.  We worked with a very large networking company in the development of the new capabilities, and our demonstration centered around the ability to automatically capture tags (labels) as they were being created in the Atlassian Confluence wiki, and provide those tags and related social content (expertise, communities, etc.) directly within MS SharePoint and Outlook. Our out-of-the-box SharePoint webparts were a hit and were on display at the Microsoft booth.

 

As you can imagine, we were very excited with the new release, and there were several very interested potential customers for the technology.  On a much larger scale, however, there were many attendees at the show who were just trying to decide “which Enterprise 2.0 technology should I deploy first, a wiki, a blog, or social bookmarking?

 

The Enterprise 2.0 show in 2009:  what a tremendous change in just one year!  The show attendees were highly knowledgeable, and many were experienced in implementing Enterprise social applications.  In fact, we spoke to many companies that were already making product changes.  They implemented a wiki or a blog a year or two ago, and they are now making decisions to replace technologies which haven’t truly met their needs. I can clearly recall a year ago at the same conference we had to repeatedly explain what a ‘tag’ was and how tagging – specifically in the form of a folksonomy – was useful for sharing/discovering content and expertise. We probably completed over 200 demos at the 2008 conference, and the one question which seemed to be asked the most was “why are some of the words in the tag cloud bigger and bolder?”

 

This year questions from attendees were not much about ‘why’ – why use wikis, blogs, etc. – but more about ‘which’ and ‘how’. People were more interested in ‘which’ wiki, blog, microblogging or collaboration solution to use and the ‘how to’. What are the best practices in implementing E2.0 solutions given the traditional collaboration tools in the existing IT infrastructure? Yes, we know it’s not just about the technology, but how do we get past the ‘cultural’ barriers behind the firewall? Companies have also realized that the true value (ROI if you will) is measured by applying E2.0 principals to ‘improve’ or ‘replace’ existing business processes that simply don’t work today. This is truly a sign of the evolution of a new market.

 

We were really excited to see that our ‘social activity aggregation’ message was well received and resonated with almost everyone who stopped by our booth or attended the presentation. That by itself says a lot about the evolution of this market. The following diagram from our presentation at the show illustrates how Connectbeam fits into a typical social collaboration ecosystem in an enterprise, and help connecting traditional and E2.0 world together. I thought I would use an example and briefly describe the solution in case you missed us at the show:

 

Imagine in a large Fortune global 500 enterprise, Corporate IT has decided to rollout SharePoint MOSS 2007 – that includes wiki and blog capabilities – and NewsGator RSS as company-wide news feed and collaboration platform. Engineering in R&D department, however, have been using Atlassian Confluence wiki to manage day-to-day design, and project team collaborations for a while. The marketing team has been using the Yammer microblogging service for the last 3 months to communicate company news and messages with all employees. The technical support team, on the other hand, has been piloting and now ready to roll out Telligent Community to engage with external customers and partners. There are probably other homegrown tools and solutions in play but let’s just assume this is the current social software footprint at this company. In the long run, each tool above will greatly help employees and management solve a series of collaboration and communication problems. However as ‘standalone solutions’ they create new ‘social information silos’ because they don’t communicate with each other. The content stored in the Confluence wiki by the engineering team might be very valuable and relevant to the product marketing team who uses SharePoint on a daily basis, but don’t necessarily use the R&D wiki – they might not even know that wiki exists! So this and similar real world examples from our clients illustrate the need to aggregate social activities and user generated content across the enterprise regardless of the originating source. That’s where Connectbeam Social Activity Platform^TM comes into play.

 

Social activities from various platforms and solutions above are aggregated through out-of-the-box or custom connectors (using published REST APIs) and the ‘people to people’, ‘people to content’, and ‘content to content’ relationships are analyzed and captured for future collaboration use.  This aggregation service can deliver the most relevant user generated content and activity ‘in the flow’ of the user’s daily workflow – through integration with existing applications and not by introducing yet another destination.  This not only improves overall productivity but also greatly increases the adoption of newly added E2.0 tools in the enterprise collaboration ecosystem.

 

We also believe that a strong analytics solution – not displayed in the picture above but an upcoming part of Connectbeam’s offering – built on top of the social activity repository is an essential part of this service and can greatly help with raising awareness and visibility into ‘how’ people interact and connect with each other and ‘where’ they turn to share and discover information and expertise. One can only imagine how valuable it would be to extend this solution to outside the firewall, connecting customers, partners and suppliers social interactions.

 

So to summarize my thoughts on this year E2.0 conference, I can think of 3 takeaways:

1. The Enterprise 2.0 market is rapidly maturing and decision makers are increasingly interested in applying new social technologies.
2. Large enterprises won't standardize on a single platform or application anytime soon. There will always be valuable social content and activity in point solution.
3. There is a real business need to aggregate and analyze the social metadata and user activity from various collaboration tools and E2.0 solutions across the enterprise, particularly as the number of these tools in use grows.

Looking forward to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2010 at Boston.

Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0 Is Now Available - Here's the 'Why' Behind the New Release

One of the great things about working with our enterprise customers is that we get a ringside view into what they want to accomplish and what issues they are facing. Companies see the benefits of collaborative information sharing, and are working hard to connect employees and knowledge. Andrew McAfee articulated well the value of information sharing and collaboration in his bulls eye post, which provides a great analysis for the value of internal social networks.  The companies with whom we talk are moving aggressively to create authentic, useful employee social networks.

With that as backdrop, we're pleased to announce today the release of Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0. Spotlight 3.0 adds a number of features to the Connectbeam application designed to make information and expertise easier to find and share. Full details are available on our Products page. Here are the release highlights:

• Integration with leading enterprise applications
• Feeds of user generated content from Enterprise 2.0 apps
• Social Profiles with both employee-provided knowledge and experience, and real-time updates for their work activities

There's a lot to this release, and the Connectbeam website and data sheets will tell you more.

We wanted to give you a sense of why we released Spotlight 3.0. The reasons shed some light on the direction of the enterprise market.

In-the-flow: Michael Idinopulos of SocialText wrote about the differences of putting tools in-the-flow or above-the-flow of employees' daily activities. This is a critical consideration for vendors in the social computing space, and it's an approach we pioneered here at Connectbeam. To maximize knowledge touch points, and user adoption, inside an organization, we're big fans of in-the-flow tools. That's why Connectbeam integrates with leading enterprise apps. We want to put information and internal resources right at the fingertips of employees.

Connect enterprise apps: Companies have significant investments in their existing technology stacks, both financially and operationally. They also tend to have a collection of best-of-breed apps, particularly in the enterprise social computing realm. Full-suite Enterprise 2.0 solutions are still a ways off. So the problem they're experiencing is a lack of visibility for the amazing amounts of user generated information that has been created inside their walls. Connectbeam sees tying together these different apps as a major benefit for companies. Through our Connectors and APIs, we pull in content created from across the enterprise, including wikis, blogs, news feeds, forums and other applications.

Workstreams: Connectbeam's roots are as the leader in social bookmarking and tagging inside the enterprise. Fundamentally, what we bring is the ability to tap employees as sources of relevant data and filters for what's valuable. From this, everyone in the organization gains. With Spotlight 3.0, we're extending this philosophy by integrating the workstreams of employees. Workstreams include bookmarks, wiki entries, blog posts, forum discussions and other activities. There's tremendous value in providing a single repository where these workstreams:

• Can be organized and are searchable
• Form the basis for social networking and collaboration
• Can be discussed
• Are integrated into the everyday applications that employees use

That's a brief explanation for how we approached Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0. Hats off to the team for a great job pulling this one together.

KM World and Braintrust Both Enter Their Second Decade

KM World is back again, appearing on September 23 - 25, 2008 at its usual venue, the San José McEnery Convention Center San José, CA. It is nice to see knowledge management still going strong. Connectbeam will be exhibiting at this event. I hope to see you there.

The Braintrust Knowledge Management Summit, another great KM conference enters its 10th year when it runs November 18-20 at the Disney resort in Orlando. Knowledge management has been on a long run. It is nice to part of its latest incarnation through Connectbeam. Both events have a great collection of speakers with a lot of new faces.

New Online Community for Collaboration and Content Management - Content Management Connection

A few weeks ago, I joined George Dearing’s social networking group, Content Management Connection. It is an “online community for technology practitioners, software companies, and end users to share thoughts and ideas on the changing landscape of content management and collaboration. This site is produced by The Dearing Group LLC., a marketing and new media communications company.”

There are 46 bloggers the last time I looked. A number of the participating blogs are already on my blog list and others look interesting. You can add your own blog to have it reach a new audience. It also has news, events, and surveys. In addition, there are features like most read posts, ability to comment on posts, quick surveys with instant results, most discussed authors, most active authors, most highly rated posts, etc.

George also writes his own blog on new media, marketing, and technology. I liked his post on 3 mistakes customers make with their content. Essentially, he warns people against buying on price or personal reasons and using last decade’s technology but goes into more detail. I think these are also more likely the last decade's buying practices but agree with George that they are still around. With all the integration possibilities within enterprise 2.0 these tendencies can cause even more problems now for the buyers who uses them. George also regularly publishes links to key content management and enterprise 2.0 reports and blog posts.

Making the Enterprise Knowledge Market More Robust

McKinsey was recently promoting some of their classic reports. One of them caught my eye, Making a market in knowledge. This report, produced in 2004, starts with this observation.

“Put simply, there is great value in sharing, across a whole company, proprietary insights into customers, competitors, products, production techniques, emerging research, and the like. In practice, of course, companies find it far more difficult than do individuals to take advantage of all this knowledge. An individual's knowledge is self-contained, always available. But in companies—including small ones—it can be hard to exploit the valuable knowledge in the heads of even a few hundred employees, particularly if they are scattered in different locations. In a large, diverse company, the task expands to cover thousands of highly educated professionals and managers spread across a variety of specialties, locations, even countries. But difficult as it may be to profit from this diffused knowledge, the power that such large-scale interaction yields can dwarf what individuals or small teams, however brilliant or effective, can accomplish.”

I find this well stated and still true. This is our goal at Connectbeam. The authors go to describe three approaches to knowledge management that have not realized their promise. First is "build it and they will come," then there is "take it from the top," and the last is to "let a thousand web sites bloom." They actually say that the last version has been more successful, allowing organization units to solve their own knowledge problems. However, they point out that this only helps the small groups connected to the specialized knowledge and does not address the company-wide knowledge exchanges that are often needed.

The authors then say that rather than trying to management knowledge why not look at it as a market issue. Make the benefits of providing knowledge greater than the cost. Recognition is often the main benefit for knowledge providers within an organization. They suggest increasing the benefits to the knowledge provider. The problem with many traditional approaches to knowledge management is that the cost to the knowledge provider is quite high so then the benefits have to be that much higher. The authors offer a rather elaborate market system to orchestra these exchanges with costs in the millions. Remember this is 2004.

Now in 2008 we can use new capabilities and concepts to combine social bookmarking with social networking and lower the cost of knowledge exchange. What we have attempted to do with Connectbeam is to dramatically reduce the cost of contributing knowledge so there is more universal participation and thus greater benefits for the provider, who gets more recognition, and the user who gets access to a more comprehensive set of knowledge and experts. Instead of contributing knowledge, you simply tag knowledge that is a developed as part of work. Then colleagues can easily see the relevant documents and experts to their knowledge searches. All of the members of the organization and the work they produce become the dynamic knowledge management system. The benefits to the knowledge provider go up with broader recognition just the costs go down, a good market dynamic that should encourage participation. This is what we are finding with our customers.

eContent - Rich Hoeg’s Blog

Rich Hoeg, Manager, Technical Education & Engineering Information Services at Honeywell, writes the eContent blog with the tagline, Technical Knowledge Management Online Resources. The blog is almost two years old as the archives go back to August 2006. He notes that his 28 year career has moved in tandem with the rise of the micro-computer and the web and includes a focus on knowledge management tools and learning. Back in the 1980's he started Honeywell's computer training program. In the 1990's he built some of Honeywell's first internal and external web services, and now in the new century he is focusing upon knowledge collaboration tools and eLearning for Honeywell. This experience is evident in his blog.

Rich is a client and has written a bit about his experience with Connectbeam on his blog. In his post, Tagging Inside the Firewall, he wrote, “we've brought online a pilot project which is one of the very first, if not the first, internal corporate social networking / tagging applications. By internal I mean the service and server are running inside our network domain, yet our employees will be able to tag both internal and external content…this application is inside our firewall and will allow our engineers to perform knowledge discovery, research and sharing across the miles even if they don't know each other! Connectbeam works in tandem with our internal Google search appliance.”

He recently wrote, the post Data Mining for Knowledge - Educypedia, which he said it could be titled, why I blog, or why I wiki. He commented, “One huge advantage of being the "owner" of an active blog or wiki site is that my site visitors (i.e. you) leave a data trail. This data helps me understand how folks are conducting research, and if I am intrigued, I can re-run their queries and/or links. As my mind is wired in its own peculiar manner, this process allows me to learn from my visitors ... even those who never comment or contact me.” This transparency is one of the big benefits of enterprise 2.0.

In this case he was preparing a presentation on data mining and explored the term “domain engineering” in his internal search. Rich clicked “upon the first user name profile link listed in my company's social search results (runs in tandem with Google). The end result was a tag and link to Educypedia.” He said that this site was an excellent online encyclopedia that focuses on offering valuable links to other content on the web. Now he is adding Educypedia to the Manuals Section of his firms Engineering Learning Wiki. The tools provided Rich with a way to discover connections but it also took his desire to explore and share knowledge to make the system work.

There is much more on the blog and I encourage you to explore it. Rich also uses his blog to raise awareness for good causes outside work. He supports a small mountain town (JiaYou) in southern China near the Vietnamese border with his Run for China's Children that has built a new school.

Value of Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise

Thomas Vanderwal, a principle at InfoCloud Solutions, also best known for coining the term 'folksonomy' and 'infocloud' writes about the value of Social bookmarking in the Enterprise.

Every organization needs to know itself better then they currently do. The employees and members of the organization are all trying to do their job better and smarter. The need to connect people inside an organization with others with similar interest, contexts, and perceptions is really needed. I am a huge fan of social bookmarking tools to help along these lines as it helps people hold on to information they have need, want, or have interest in (particularly with future uses) and put things in their own context and perception. Once people understand the value they derive from using the tools to hold on to information out of their vast flow and streams of information and data that run before them each day they quickly "get it".

Full write-up can be found here...

InfoCloud Solutions provides a series of workshops for businesses and enterprises to better understand and evaluate social productivity applications.

Why you need Connectbeam? Hear it from people out in the field...

We had the pleasure of recently giving a product demonstration to folks from PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Ricardo Sueiras and Martin Dugage are both well aware of issues facing enterprises around better and more effective collaboration, and information discovery. They are both smart and well connected on the scene with social software, and how it benefits enterprises, and have written about it on their respective blogs.

Excerpt from Ricardo's blog:

It was a really excellent demo. The product itself is simple enough to understand, and works on the concept of using tags to connect information to people and communities. By using the concept that users use internal and external datasources to find information (anything that can be linked) the application provides a front end for this data – infact, anything that can be linked (has a URL) is a valid datasource. If one doesn‘t exist, you can even write your own.

Excerpt from Martin's blog:

...it looks like a great knowledge sharing solution for the corporate world. We still are in a world where corporate people do write short blackberry e-mails and client deliverables, but do not publish what they know in the form of blog posts or wiki pages. It will change some day, and maybe suddenly, but not now, at least not in this country (France). So building and managing links across people and content - which is what KM is really about - should work much better if it's based on the current demand-oriented and quite selfish behaviors of the average corporate employee. As such, social bookmarking tools such as Connectbeam could be seen as the stepping stone to the cultural change we all want to see taking place.

Martin brings up a great point. Something that has been at the very core of the foundation of Connectbeam as a company. He captures the enterprise user landscape (and sentiment) as it is today. At Connectbeam, it has always been our belief, and most of us at Connectbeam have worked at large companies, that the basic psyche or fabric of what motivates, and how information is shared inside a business or an enterprise is vastly different from what we see out on the consumer Web. The status quo is exactly what Martin as outlined above.

We feel social bookmarking is the most frictionless, seamless, and least disruptive to the existing environment, and yet delivers unparalleled benefits.

Ricardo and Martin also brought up an interesting point about ownership of bookmarks. Please see our response to it on Ricardo's blog.

A day at Honeywell TechNet - a meeting of large corporations

At the invitation of Honeywell, yesterday we spent a day at their annual TechNet meeting at their R&D center in Minneapolis, MN.

TechNet is a small group of large corporations which meet informally to benchmark technology learning and collaboration tools and initiatives. This is a secure, and tightly knit forum for these large corporations to share their pain points and best practices, and learn from each other as they often are operating in similar operational evnironment in terms of scale. For the first time, they invited a select group of outside vendors to participate in this forum.

The companies who were invited to present were - Connectbeam, Google, Safari Online Books, and SocialText.

It was a very informative session, and it was a treat to get some very direct insights into some very specific pain points, common across these large enterprises, in the areas of collaboration, and knowledge and information sharing and discovery. Earlier in a session with Rich Hoeg we discussed how such companies are measuring ROI on these initiatives, and he outlined some very direct and clear ways of how these technologies and initiatives are being justified inside these organizations.

I am not at liberty to disclose specific discussion points or names of the companies that were present at the TechNet meeting, but they ranged from manufacturing, telecom, semiconductor, and services sectors.

It was invigorating to see and hear that the problem around better collaboration, learning - information sharing and discovery, and people (expertise) discovery is real and paramount at these places. There are people tasked and dedicated to figuring this out. They are all encouraged by and are already using and looking at new social media/Web 2.0 for the enterprise styled tools and applications and converging to share best practices and learning from each other.

Connectbeam to showcase at Intel Developer Forum (IDF)

We are pleased to be invited by Intel to present and showcase our product at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) taking place this week (Sept. 18-20,2007) at Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco.

IDF is Intel's premier forum for bringing its partners, customers, and prospects under one roof. Over 5,000 attendees will be at the IDF. This year there is a special floor area dedicated toward the theme of - The Digital Enterprise. If you are attending, please do take a minute to come by our booth in the Digital Enterprise area to see a product demonstration, and a chance to win a free iPhone.

The World is Flat - so is Learning 2.0 via social bookmarking and tagging

Rich Hoeg at the popular eContent blog outlines the power of social bookmarking coupled with social networking to reach across departmental and geographic boundaries as levers for better knowledge sharing, discovery, and collaboration.

An excerpt (screen shot) from his video presentation is shown below. To see his blog post and watch his video presentation, click here...

Enterprises and social networks...

David Terrar over at blognation UK wrote about the issues around social networking in the Enterprise, particularly many companies rushing to block access to mostly consumer facing social networking sites.

I feel the winning combination is some compromise between the features of the open, free for all consumer facing networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, but customized to address the unique attributes of a business.

We cannot discount the fact that companies need to, and have to, guard and protect their intellectual property (IP). And IP takes different shapes and forms across different businesses. I think this fact is often overlooked when news crosses the wire about some company blocking access to a consumer facing social site.

We discovered during early days of Connectbeam that campanies are not necessarily averse to social software (most understand it and like it), but not at the expense or risk of exposing their IP. We are seeing tremendous uptake on our Appliance product offering, which delivers social bookmarking and social networking software in a box, deployed behind company firewall, to build and foster social networks and communites inside businesses.

Yes, while this might start off by limiting the scope of social networking to within the walls of the campny, we feel this is nonetheless, a very good first step.

Connectbeam at Procter & Gamble

Joe Schueller and team at Procter & Gamble, when speaking with InformationWeek at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, outline the value of what a Social Bookmarking and Social Networking solution like Connectbeam can do, when deployed behind their company firewall and integrated with their corporate Intranet.

So the company's testing a product from Connectbeam that works with Google. Connectbeam lets employees share bookmarks and tag articles, pages, and documents with descriptive words. When an employee searches for something using the Google appliance, Connectbeam results--related tags and bookmarks--are returned alongside the Google results.

At Connectbeam, we have always held the belief, that the key to user adoption inside the enterprise is to:

1. Deliver your Enterprise 2.0 application via a path of improvement to innovation.
That is, introduce your application to the end user as part of their existing IT workflow (as an extension of somethign that they are already familiar with and use).
Internally at Connectbeam, we call this - the handshake to the past principle.

2. Align business users and IT by delivering value to both. For IT, help them extract greater ROI from an investment that they have already made (ride on top of an existing IT infrastructure).

Connectbeam features in InfoWorld's Month of Enterprise Startups

InfoWorld celebrates the month of May 2007 by paying homage to business-focused technology startups. Each day they featured a new startup (established no earlier than 2004) that is a rising star in the IT enterprise.

Ephraim Schwartz covers Connectbeam as Social Bookmarking and Social Networking for the enterprise.

CIO Insight - The Appliance Model

CIO Insight magazine has a good article by John Parkinson on putting I.T. Appliances to work.

John lists areas such as storage, search, security, email management, data analytics, and system management - where Appliances are already in place inside corporate data centers.

The availability of industry-standard components and Linux have radically altered the economics of the appliance approach. Appliances benefit from the established set of monitoring and management standards that let them behave as good citizens in the network in a way that general-purpose computing platforms and software can't.

For enterprises, who must have their data behind the firewall, Appliance is a good fit.

We welcome you to contact us to see a demo of our Social Bookmarking and Social Networking Application packaged as an Appliance, and to discuss a fit for your organization.