I posted previously on Jane McConnell's Intranet Trends 2010 report, and now Jane has video on YouTube that was made at an event in Brazil, where she summaries the five key trends. I have linked to it below, enjoy !
You can find out more about the report and get a copy from Jane's site here: A unique report, Global Intranet Trends 2010
Tuesday, 8 December 2009
Content Management vendors, and CMIS
This posting is really just a link post, no thoughtful analysis here.......
My old mate Laurence has an excellent CMIS update posting on his Word of Pie blog. He has been involved in CMIS development on behalf of AIIM, and this summary piece is well worth reading: Looking at CMIS 1.0, thinking of 2.0
On the same subjectbut with a different twist Alan at CMS Watch posted "Three reasons to list CMIS in your Document Management RFP" having written some really big ECM / EDRM RFI's and RFP's I have to agree with his logic, including this nascent yet to be fully ratified standard can still help keep your selected vendors 'honest' !
On a different subject, but still with CMS Watch, they have updated their graphical representation of the information management / content management industry and the various vendors:
As I used to live just 40 mins north of London (England, not Ontario) I really like the 'tube' metaphor (yes, we call the London Underground the 'tube' not the Metro or the Subway - Subway is a sandwich shop!). If you want a higher resolution PDF copy for printing head on over to the CMS Watch site here: Technology Vendor Map.
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Google Chrome OS - think enterprise..........
I have said this before, and it appears I have to say it again, you have to consider the 'whole' and not the parts when thinking critically about some of the recent Google announcements.
What brings this on is the way Google Chrome OS got a real "kicking" in a podcast I was listening to on the train on the way to work this morning. "It's crap, it can't do anything without a network connection, its just the Chrome browser, thin computing was tried and failed before, yada yada yada......".
So Google will work with Netbook manufacturers to release "official' machines - so what ? There is the Chromium open source project. "its just Linux" again, so what ? In fact I am not even going to continue down that road.........
Think a little out of the box. My own personal interest is not in consumer computing. I don't care about Chrome OS versus Android on my phone or my netbook, I think about the enterprise space. I think of the implications for information and knowledge management, for ECM and intranets, and I think that a "thin client" based on Chrome OS plus a really good intranet could be a pleasent working experience. However I am also not saying this will work for everyone, so don't flame me because you need full on Windows for printing to your full colour A0 plotter, or for scanning invoices, or your Mac for graphic design, but lets think about it.....
I have ranted about what Google should / could do in the enterprise space before, and I think with their "private cloud" deals with the U.S. Federal Government, so of that might come to fruition, but I recently found this excellent post, which specifically focuses on Google Wave - another product which receives some heavy criticism from those who confess they "don't get it":
Google Wave Killed the ECM Star... George Parapadakis postulates his theory that Wave good have a major impact on the ECM space, for the reasons why I will qoute him directly:
"Why? because the ECM industry, and Document Management before it, was invented as a workaround to compensate for NOT being able to do what Google Wave does...."
Make sure you read the comments as well as his post. JM Pascal builds on the theme with his posting: Wave and ECM, my feelings and opinions. Some may note that all the big ECM vendors ahve been keen to jump on the E2.0 band wagon, with new collaboration tools and web based front ends to their industrial strength back end behemoths, tools such as EMC CentreStage, Oracle Beehive and maybe even SharePoint. So merging collaborative authoring into the wider collaboration tools seems to make sense to me.
However don't forget Wave is also a protocol, an extension / add on to XMPP, and we already have one old "groupware" vendor diving in with both feet, in the shape of Novell and their Pulse product. I am Pulse is just the first of many server products built on the Wave protocol / Wave Server foundation.
This brings another interesting angle to the ECM element - for many years there as has been a monolithic suite (examplified by EMC) approach to ECM software, versus a "build your own from best of breed" approach. So the integration possiblities provided by Wave, alongside initiaves such as CMIS could literally provide options and solutions that I personally am not imaginative enough to dream up right now ! Add open source into the equation, in the form of Alfresco, Nuxeo, MindTouch etc and we literally have a world of possibilities..... :-)
So back to Google Chrome OS. It's an enabler for some simple, low cost, low maintenance - yep almost 'thin computing' - use of either full on public cloud, so called "private cloud" or even just "inside the firewall" LAN based web technologies.
As I have said before, internal Wave, Docs, even the relativley crappy Sites, a GSA etc could enable a decent intranet. Push this to the next level with the latest web based GUI's for ERP and CRM systems, utilization of light weight AJAX toolkits to web enable your inhouse line of business apps, and yes all of a sudden alot of your staff, even sophisticated 'knowledge workers' can exist purely in their browser !
Even in a Microsoft environment, do I need Windows 7 and a full copy of MS Office when SharePoint 2010 is my ECMS, and it provides links to the "online" version of Office 2010 ? Nope Chrome OS would work just fine in that scenario.
Once again we are back to my old hobby horse of taking a truly holistic view of our intranet ecosystems and our information and knowledge management requirements.
Now, if we can just get some of the prominent detractors to think a little before dissing everything that they are not comfortable with, before exploring the possibilities
What brings this on is the way Google Chrome OS got a real "kicking" in a podcast I was listening to on the train on the way to work this morning. "It's crap, it can't do anything without a network connection, its just the Chrome browser, thin computing was tried and failed before, yada yada yada......".
So Google will work with Netbook manufacturers to release "official' machines - so what ? There is the Chromium open source project. "its just Linux" again, so what ? In fact I am not even going to continue down that road.........
Think a little out of the box. My own personal interest is not in consumer computing. I don't care about Chrome OS versus Android on my phone or my netbook, I think about the enterprise space. I think of the implications for information and knowledge management, for ECM and intranets, and I think that a "thin client" based on Chrome OS plus a really good intranet could be a pleasent working experience. However I am also not saying this will work for everyone, so don't flame me because you need full on Windows for printing to your full colour A0 plotter, or for scanning invoices, or your Mac for graphic design, but lets think about it.....
I have ranted about what Google should / could do in the enterprise space before, and I think with their "private cloud" deals with the U.S. Federal Government, so of that might come to fruition, but I recently found this excellent post, which specifically focuses on Google Wave - another product which receives some heavy criticism from those who confess they "don't get it":
Google Wave Killed the ECM Star... George Parapadakis postulates his theory that Wave good have a major impact on the ECM space, for the reasons why I will qoute him directly:
"Why? because the ECM industry, and Document Management before it, was invented as a workaround to compensate for NOT being able to do what Google Wave does...."
Make sure you read the comments as well as his post. JM Pascal builds on the theme with his posting: Wave and ECM, my feelings and opinions. Some may note that all the big ECM vendors ahve been keen to jump on the E2.0 band wagon, with new collaboration tools and web based front ends to their industrial strength back end behemoths, tools such as EMC CentreStage, Oracle Beehive and maybe even SharePoint. So merging collaborative authoring into the wider collaboration tools seems to make sense to me.
However don't forget Wave is also a protocol, an extension / add on to XMPP, and we already have one old "groupware" vendor diving in with both feet, in the shape of Novell and their Pulse product. I am Pulse is just the first of many server products built on the Wave protocol / Wave Server foundation.
This brings another interesting angle to the ECM element - for many years there as has been a monolithic suite (examplified by EMC) approach to ECM software, versus a "build your own from best of breed" approach. So the integration possiblities provided by Wave, alongside initiaves such as CMIS could literally provide options and solutions that I personally am not imaginative enough to dream up right now ! Add open source into the equation, in the form of Alfresco, Nuxeo, MindTouch etc and we literally have a world of possibilities..... :-)
So back to Google Chrome OS. It's an enabler for some simple, low cost, low maintenance - yep almost 'thin computing' - use of either full on public cloud, so called "private cloud" or even just "inside the firewall" LAN based web technologies.
As I have said before, internal Wave, Docs, even the relativley crappy Sites, a GSA etc could enable a decent intranet. Push this to the next level with the latest web based GUI's for ERP and CRM systems, utilization of light weight AJAX toolkits to web enable your inhouse line of business apps, and yes all of a sudden alot of your staff, even sophisticated 'knowledge workers' can exist purely in their browser !
Even in a Microsoft environment, do I need Windows 7 and a full copy of MS Office when SharePoint 2010 is my ECMS, and it provides links to the "online" version of Office 2010 ? Nope Chrome OS would work just fine in that scenario.
Once again we are back to my old hobby horse of taking a truly holistic view of our intranet ecosystems and our information and knowledge management requirements.
Now, if we can just get some of the prominent detractors to think a little before dissing everything that they are not comfortable with, before exploring the possibilities
New netbook OS - JoliCloud
Yesterday the folks over in France at JoliCloud sent me an email allowing me to join the private Alfa of their Netbook specific Linux distro. So I gleefully loaded it up on my little Acer Asprire One.
Downloading the 600MB ISO was swift even on my limited bandwidth DSL connection, and they have a superb tool for creating bootable USB flash drives, available in Mac, Windoze and Linux flavours. Install went flawlessly and perhaps a 45 mins to an hour to download and install a total of 145 OS and application updates. This meant it was quite late, so I basically just used it to check Gmail, loadup my Google Reader and take a look at the NHL scores.
The UI appears to be based on Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) and so it maywell be Ubunto under the hood. Just like its more famous cousin Google Chrome this is a netbook specific OS based at blending the best of two elements of the modern computing paradigm: "the open web and open source" - a direct qoute from their Our Idea page.
I will report back more as I use it, but if you want to get in on the Alfa stage, I have some invites I can send out.
Downloading the 600MB ISO was swift even on my limited bandwidth DSL connection, and they have a superb tool for creating bootable USB flash drives, available in Mac, Windoze and Linux flavours. Install went flawlessly and perhaps a 45 mins to an hour to download and install a total of 145 OS and application updates. This meant it was quite late, so I basically just used it to check Gmail, loadup my Google Reader and take a look at the NHL scores.
The UI appears to be based on Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) and so it maywell be Ubunto under the hood. Just like its more famous cousin Google Chrome this is a netbook specific OS based at blending the best of two elements of the modern computing paradigm: "the open web and open source" - a direct qoute from their Our Idea page.
I will report back more as I use it, but if you want to get in on the Alfa stage, I have some invites I can send out.
Saturday, 21 November 2009
Chrome OS - no big deal, technically ?
Missing out the X Window system and using the browser as GUI ontop of Linux - it's not actually that innovative really. Don't get me wrong, I would give it a whiz on my Netbook, and I want to see how it pans out, but at the moment all this talk of not using it as a desktop PC OS seems to be missing a lot of opportunities and I wonder if Google might change its tune on that. Super fast, super slimline OS, with fast browser running HTML 5 based interfaces to all your business apps - sounds like it might be appealing to enterprises to me.
Anyway, I seem to remember using the browser as the main interface to Linux for some time now - that would Konqueror on KDE - the file manager come browser that shows what IE should have been :-)
Seriously though, not everything has to be in the cloud, there are plenty of lightweight web servers you could run on your local machine, kind of like running Webmin, so surely you could still have Chrome the browser as the interface but access local apps and storage.
Overall, a little underwhelmed by this inital release of information but we will see how it develops won't we ? If you have not seen it yet, check out the Chrome OS demo video on YouTube.
Anyway, I seem to remember using the browser as the main interface to Linux for some time now - that would Konqueror on KDE - the file manager come browser that shows what IE should have been :-)
Seriously though, not everything has to be in the cloud, there are plenty of lightweight web servers you could run on your local machine, kind of like running Webmin, so surely you could still have Chrome the browser as the interface but access local apps and storage.
Overall, a little underwhelmed by this inital release of information but we will see how it develops won't we ? If you have not seen it yet, check out the Chrome OS demo video on YouTube.
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
EMC introduces My Documentum
Some former colleagues from the Open University attended the 'Momentum Europe' conference in Athens last week. I had already spotted this press release but have only now got round to examining the release of the new 'My Documentum' family:
"EMC My Documentum Family Delivers The Power of Enterprise Content Management to Every Business User"
The press release has embedded YouTube videos and links to product information pages.
So, my initial thought was, nothing new here, it's just repackaging existing products under a new marketing banner, but its Documentum Client for Outlook (DCO), File Sharing Services etc
Not so ! Discussing this with my old colleague Mark, who was at the conference and very much knee and elbow deep in the Open University Documentum implementation, he said there is considerable new code, and for example with DCO the integration is much slicker, giving a much more 'native' Outlook experience.
This is interesting in the historical context of a blog based discussion with Shiv Singh of RazorFish about "Outlook as the portal" - its your email client, your personal information manager, your contacts manager, calendar, RSS reader etc etc ...... but also your client for your Documentum ECM repository (and other enteprise systems too ?)
To take that topic down a slightly different path, at an AIIM sponsored seminar on SharePoint 2010 this morning, one screenshot showed Outlook 2010 displaying social information gathered from SharePoint MySite profiles.
Yet, unless I am missing something, or doing something really stupid, with Outlook 2007 and SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) you can not simply drag and drop an email from your inbox into a SharePoint document library. Sure you can connect to a document library, it appears in your left hand navigation pane, and will allow you sync the contents of that document library to take them "off line" and on the road with you - but can't just simply move an email into the library ! Nor can you create a 'shortcut' in the Outlook shortcuts view of the left hand nav bar, to a WebDav (Network Places) view of a document library either.
Hurrah (!) to EMC for continuing the client side development, and lets home SharePoint integration with Outlook and particularly email is better in the next version.
"EMC My Documentum Family Delivers The Power of Enterprise Content Management to Every Business User"
The press release has embedded YouTube videos and links to product information pages.
So, my initial thought was, nothing new here, it's just repackaging existing products under a new marketing banner, but its Documentum Client for Outlook (DCO), File Sharing Services etc
Not so ! Discussing this with my old colleague Mark, who was at the conference and very much knee and elbow deep in the Open University Documentum implementation, he said there is considerable new code, and for example with DCO the integration is much slicker, giving a much more 'native' Outlook experience.
This is interesting in the historical context of a blog based discussion with Shiv Singh of RazorFish about "Outlook as the portal" - its your email client, your personal information manager, your contacts manager, calendar, RSS reader etc etc ...... but also your client for your Documentum ECM repository (and other enteprise systems too ?)
To take that topic down a slightly different path, at an AIIM sponsored seminar on SharePoint 2010 this morning, one screenshot showed Outlook 2010 displaying social information gathered from SharePoint MySite profiles.
Yet, unless I am missing something, or doing something really stupid, with Outlook 2007 and SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) you can not simply drag and drop an email from your inbox into a SharePoint document library. Sure you can connect to a document library, it appears in your left hand navigation pane, and will allow you sync the contents of that document library to take them "off line" and on the road with you - but can't just simply move an email into the library ! Nor can you create a 'shortcut' in the Outlook shortcuts view of the left hand nav bar, to a WebDav (Network Places) view of a document library either.
Hurrah (!) to EMC for continuing the client side development, and lets home SharePoint integration with Outlook and particularly email is better in the next version.
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
Gina Trapani releases "The Complete Guide to Google Wave"
Obviously it's a work in progress.......
Picked up on this from Gina's announcement on the This Week in Google podcast (another excellent Leo Laporte / TWiT production). Gina has made her work freely available online so go here to read the 'first release' of The Complete Guide to Google Wave.
I have been playing with Wave, not much admittedly but you really need to have a 'critical mass' of friends to Wave at if you want to evaluate it from an Intranet / enterprise perspective, and to be honest I don't really care about the public / consumer use cases. The screen shot below shows me in an IM type 'real time' conversation with Casey and old colleague from the UK, with a "public" wave open in the right hand pane.
For those who still wonder about Wave or just plain "don't get it" take a look at the free online version of Gina's book (there will be paid-for PDF and dead-wood versions coming later). Personally I still think its too early to condemn Wave (as some are doing) but also too early to say exactly how this will pan out. I have said before that I can see Wave in an enterprise setting, with hosted (Appliance) based versions of Gmail, Docs, Video, Search (of course) etc all working as a "private cloud" integrating with "heavy duty" CRM, ERP and ECM solutions where required. But, we will see.........
Picked up on this from Gina's announcement on the This Week in Google podcast (another excellent Leo Laporte / TWiT production). Gina has made her work freely available online so go here to read the 'first release' of The Complete Guide to Google Wave.
I have been playing with Wave, not much admittedly but you really need to have a 'critical mass' of friends to Wave at if you want to evaluate it from an Intranet / enterprise perspective, and to be honest I don't really care about the public / consumer use cases. The screen shot below shows me in an IM type 'real time' conversation with Casey and old colleague from the UK, with a "public" wave open in the right hand pane.
For those who still wonder about Wave or just plain "don't get it" take a look at the free online version of Gina's book (there will be paid-for PDF and dead-wood versions coming later). Personally I still think its too early to condemn Wave (as some are doing) but also too early to say exactly how this will pan out. I have said before that I can see Wave in an enterprise setting, with hosted (Appliance) based versions of Gmail, Docs, Video, Search (of course) etc all working as a "private cloud" integrating with "heavy duty" CRM, ERP and ECM solutions where required. But, we will see.........
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