Bob Barnes' Blog

The Perfect (information) storm

bob.barnes — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:43:00 GMT

While attending the recent Microsoft SharePoint conference in Seattle I noticed a thread around the growing issues of the changing and expanding information tide and the various and perhaps competing demands on using and controlling that information.

MOSS 2007makes it easier for people to collaborate in a number of ways, from simple collaborative sites for sharing documents, to blogs and Wikis. Allied to this is the ever growing email traffic, which, when you add voice mail and logged instant messenger traffic, leads to even greater volumes of “stuff”. The myth that this is no problem since disk space is cheap was also explored by Debra Logan who pointed out that it is naive to consider just the cost of the hardware, since it has related support, back up and even power costs.

There are other factors to consider relating to the torrents of text. It is one thing to just let information grow and grow, but there is also the need to be able to find the stuff later, if you can’t access it, how can you use it? This of course may just be in the normal course of daily work, someone looking up an HR Policy for example. But it may also be driven by legal requirements, for example e-discovery in the case of a law case. In which case having vast amounts of information with little or no structure can prove extremely costly. In any case having huge volumes of information can make the user experience for the seekers of truth very poor indeed. Of course a good search engine (such as those offered by MOSS and FAST) can help, but at the end of the day the search engine can only retrieve what is there – and if a lot of it is out of date rubbish then that will pollute the results with unnecessary noise.

There is yet another aspect to handing and presenting all this information which is slowly breaking out of its niche and that is “Accessibility”. Earlier I used the word “access” – this is significant and goes beyond just “finding” stuff. Accessibility relates to people with some sort of disability or limit to their ability, to access the information. Dana Simberkoff pointed out the way the need for this is growing, both because of legislation, such as “UK Disability Discrimination Act of 1995!, but also for the more pervasive affect of an aging workforce. It could just be the need to increase the browser font size when your eyes are tired (a condition I certainly recognize) – not something MOSS supports out of the box (but there is the "Accessibility Kit for SharePoint" – AKS that can help here). So the system, through a great search engine and good navigation might be able to “find” the information you need – but if you can’t read the small font, understand the language, or make out the diagram that uses low contrast colours then it is still something you cannot use. The value of information depends on at least four aspects, it’s content, it’s presentation, it’s discoverability and it’s relevance to the user – in other words, is the material correct, can you understand it, can you find it and is it pertinent to what you need.

Microsoft have now recognized that “accessibility” needs to be a theme throughout products like SharePoint and should be treated as a fundamental like security, but it will take time. For example there is the challenge of the tools such as “Silverlight” and SQL Reporting Services that can make information very appealing (gauges, fantastic graphs, etc) – but are they always that useful to every level of user, or are they in some cases making things harder to understand?

So there are a number of pressures on the use of collaborative content storing web based tools, such as SharePoint.

So we need to consider and plan for the need for;

Ease of content creation

Flexibility to allow users to create collaborative workspaces

The need for agility and speed of creation

The need to help make it easy to find the information later (metadata, structure, common terminology, etc)

The need to comply with the many & various legal requirements (some of which are still vague and untested)

The need to create and enforce workable policies

The key to all of this, and the subject of many of the talks, is “Governance”. There is a clear need to set up guidelines and policies to give a good chance of running a successful system (“Governance develops and manages consistent, cohesive policies, processes and decision-rights for a given area of responsibility.” Wikipedia).

There are many ideas around governance but key is the need to include a mix of senior business people, along with IT and potentially legal in the governance team.

Once there are legal compliance needs involved it is important to consider who, as individuals, are at risk and these are typically the CXO level people – this usually sharpens the minds of senior management.

Another important concept (again with thanks to Debra Logan) and one I agree with, is the need for an “Information Manager” role. As I see it this is a business rather than IT role to oversee, refine and enforce governance. The “Information Manager” is a role that can help with setting a balance between the desire for great agility, local autonomy, and control along with tight legal and ethical compliance.

This is a significant challenge given that companies frequently allow users to take the easiest way – the path of least resistance and often follow the herd without any long term thinking. But perhaps we are heading for the perfect storm – the need for more users to access the same information in different ways and for different reasons could be the final push to force companies into supporting a role that can guide them away from the impending information storm. The web wave is becoming a tsunami.

Public Site Live on Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007!

bob.barnes — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 15:34:00 GMT

This month (December) our first public facing Web Site built using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 went live. This was for a division of one the leading UK high street banks.

This is a very much a first stage of a large initiative that will see the site become much more interactive and personalised in the future – but the initial aim was to replace a rather stale and static site that had been up since 2001. This old site was difficult to update, hard to navigate and did not allow the client to cross sell their products to their potential user base, which lead to calls to them which could have been answered on the web site, if only it had been easy to find things! The old site also lacked any search mechanism.

So in essence, for this initial phase, the aim was to build a site that allowed users to find out what they need to know directly from the website without the need to interact with the bank in other ways so reducing telephone and written correspondence – which is otherwise both frustrating for the users and frankly costly for the bank.

So why use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the content management tool?

Clearly there are many (too many?) dedicated content management tools on the market that could have been used to build this information based site. Why take the risk of using such a new product (indeed a mere beta 2 when we started) instead of one of the tried and tested ones?

Well if the entire aim was just the new site as it now stands then maybe something else could have been used. However the long term plans better suite a truly integrated platform approach due to the need to integrate backend systems, along with the built in workflow and web forms capability. So the decision was more strategic than tactical and it was important to take the bigger picture in to account. As a CMS it has proven perfectly adequate and the users and content editors have found it very straight forward to use and it allows them to very quickly add or change content without the intervention of IT.

So what was the experience with SharePoint 2007 like?

Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 combines and improves on functions from SharePoint 2003 and Microsoft’s old content management package CMS 2002. Generally speaking the experience was good – the consistency of the use of “Lists” to control everything from site Pages to Images, CSS and custom tables of information was very useful. However matching the exact requirements of the third part y designers was harder and called for some imaginative use of “Content Types”. Of course one of the key issues was that we started with a beta, so documentation and best practices were thin on the ground – not an issue for the future or for other such sites.

There was also a need to provide some management information capability to support strategic decision making and to show if the site was working as intended. Although SharePoint 2007 has its own reports around hits and search statistics it was decided to extend this using “WebTrends Analytics 8”. The MOSS 2007 built in search stats will help to drive site content over time by, showing for example that there are frequent failed searches on a particular topic for which there is no good content. This can also be used to drive their FAQ facilities

The project was also an example of an Agile one rather than a traditional waterfall approach. This interactive approach saved time (and the odd tree) and allowed greater flexibility. It also facilitated “late decision” allowing the client to see what things looked like and make relatively late changes – with out the need for delays caused by having to changed detailed specification documents. It did mean that the client had to commit to working closely with us – often having one or two of their staff on site sitting along side our team, with them creating content and checking the look & feel as features were refined. This close team also helped shape the site and avoided any “big surprises” as the project progressed.

So hopefully this now provides a foundation for future enhancements to this site and should allow them to really start taking advantage of the MOSS platform to deliver real value beyond that of a simple web content management package.

Web 2.0 and Collaboration

bob.barnes — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 08:18:00 GMT

There is a lot of talk about the next generation Internet – Web 2.0 and how it might impact different types of internet users. My interest lies in its possible application in improving collaboration – both inside a company and also between companies and even between companies and their clients.

One of the keys to Web 2.0 is interaction and working together to improve things – and this is also a key to collaboration.

Since Web 2.0 emphasises interactive tools like Wikis, and to a lesser extent blogs (not as interactive) its theses sort of facilities that are going to help grow collaboration into the mainstream. This all goes along with discussion groups and shared libraries of documents and images. Of course none of this is really new – newsgroups, for example, were well established on the Internet as a way of interactively sharing information before the “Web” took off.

What has changed is the availability of these tools and their ease of use and more recently with the advent of platforms like Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and the Office 2007 suite, the integration of these tools. Currently people use one tool for blogging, one for Wikis, one for shared areas and so on – the result is messy for people to contribute too and even harder for readers to make much sense of. Integration is the thing that will make this all easier.

Of course collaboration is not just a matter of the tools there is a large element of culture and personal factors to take in to consideration, basically around what’s in it for me or my company. But added to that is the effort barrier. Even if I am inclined to collaborate or even if my company is prepared to reward successful collaboration in some ways, if it is just too hard or too much effort to do it then I probably won’t bother. It is therefore important that tools used in the collaborative space make it easy and convenient for me. It should be no harder to save a document to a shared area than to my C: drive – it should be easy for me to write a blog using Word and just post it straight to the blog site. Well this is the direction that Office 2007 and SharePoint are taking. An example is the feature in Word 2007 called Publish – which allows me to publishing to a Document Management server, some shared workspace or just as easily to a Blog –these are all SharePoint 2007 features in the background – but as a user I don’t need to worry about that – I just choose what is appropriate.

Wikis (and indeed blogs) are now a standard feature of SharePoint 2007. Wikis are very useful way of evolving and changing content so that it gets better the more people use it, again a Web 2.0 tenet. While it may not be the greatest Wiki tool – it is by no means the worst – but it is the integration that counts – it’s not just some off-shoot loosely coupled tool it is a part of the collaborative interactive framework

Email is another great (or terrible) collaborative tool. It is just so easy for me to add a name to an email - just in case they may be interested. Filing it then becomes their problem – not mine. This is all well and good - until months pass and no one remembers where that information went. Certainly there are better desktop search tools around, for example those in Vista, but that should not always be the first resort. If people want to use email wouldn’t it help to give them an email address that would file the information centrally? For example if a team is working on a particular project, that has a SharePoint 2007 site already set up to store relevant documents, it would be great if you could add an address to the project email address list that send emails and their attachments directly to the SharePoint site for filing. Well MOSS 2007 now offers that feature. (Those of us who have been around awhile might be reminded of Lotus Notes email enabled database!!) Again it’s all about reducing the effort and thinking required to ensure that information is stored. Of course there is the risk that too much is captured – but better that than vital information goes missing.

The integration of CMS functionality into SharePoint 2007, also opens up the possibility of greater flexibility of your intranet. This begins to blur the lines between intranets and websites, bringing all of the functionality of an intranet with the fluid look and feel, and content management provided to public facing web sites.

Of course the integration with Instant Messenger/Live Communications giving me presence information as well adds greatly to my ability to quickly interact with colleagues to get or give quick answers to questions. If I am working on a shared document on a SharePoint server my “Document Management Task Pane” on the right hand side of my current Word document can tell me who is on-line without ever leaving Word.

Web 2.0 also implies exploiting more devices such as mobile and handheld ones. Again it’s a convenience thing – being able to see and interact while on the move – given the obvious limitations still associated with these devices. Again SharePoint 2007 now considers Mobile devices as a standard target for “views” of lists and supports variations of content that allows information to be correctly formatted for smaller devices.

Intranet 2.0?

Is this time for people to re-consider their Intranets? The noise surrounding Web 2.0 is causing companies and particularly retailers to rethink their websites and to make them more interactive. Well the same can be said about many, if not most Intranets out there. “Intranet 1.0 “meant mostly flat non –interactive sites – possibly allowing people to search and download policies and other useful documents. But really intranets could be the platform for more interactive feedback and comment – a place to share tips and best practices. In the past this has been too hard to do – but with the Web 2.0 drive and the arrival of more interactive platforms such as SharePoint 2007 perhaps now is the time for companies to think ahead. Sharing information with partners and customers is great – but perhaps collaboration should start at home!

Stealth IT & the PC Renegades

bob.barnes — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 07:44:00 GMT

Over the many years I have spent in IT I have been pleased to see a growing professionalism in central IT in many medium to large companies. They are now taking a very serious attitude to controlling the environment, have proper standards based IT management, perhaps exploiting the ITIL standards, and embrace good methodologies and implement change management all critical systems. In some case companies are out sourcing and/or of-shoring a lot of more routine systems and management which again means that strict disciplines are required when managing the IT estate. This is of course all good stuff, however I am increasingly seeing an interesting effect deep within business departments. I call the effect Stealth IT – sometimes IT departments call it end user computing – in the sense that there are certain tools like Excel and Access that business users are free to use as they wish. The disciplines that are shaping the central IT departments are at the same time slowing developments down in most cases and causing frustrated end users to make up their own systems using whatever tools come to hand – like Access, Excel or Lotus Notes. Some departments will hire their own developers or technical staff or leave it to enthusiastic amateurs. At first this can look like a really quick and easy solution to a business problem – Central IT is perceived to be too slow and unresponsive for the business and they prefer to use a local resource under their direct control. The problem is that it means large corporates may have key areas of their business or key functions running on ridiculously large spreadsheets or “Access” databases that IT maybe unaware of and that are unsupported – especially when the local resource (often a contractor) moves on. Central IT only hear about these when something goes badly wrong or there is an audit of some sort – by which time the damage is done. I often wonder if the senior management of these companies are aware of the risks that these departments are running – especially with respect to compliance and any aspect of disaster recovery.

So can anything be done?

Well on the organisational front I have seen some progress against these renegades by the introduction of rapid response teams – where IT have a small team of people who can go in to a department and resolve small requirements without the over head of too much documentation and time. The advantage is that central IT can keep some control and are aware of what is going on across a company - which if nothing else avoids the re-invention of wheels and wasting of time and effort. The down side is there are still these pockets of applications sitting on local machines or departmental servers that are effectively unmanaged. There may well still be hundreds of uncontrolled spreadsheets roaming around!

Another encouraging sign on the horizon comes with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) with both its now much more powerful “list” capabilities (think simple databases) and the concept of server based Excel. Excel Services (part of 2007 Office System), allows the storing sharing and running of Excel workbooks server-side. It has two main interfaces, a DHTML browser interface (does not require Excel on the client), so that you can view/calculate shared sheets through the browser and a Web Services programmatic interface to allow developers access to both the logic and the data in a workbook. If this is used correctly this can remove the need for email circulation of sheets, and the re-invention of the spreadsheet wheel that is far too common in large organisations. This also looks scalable and can allow off loading of complex spreadsheet calculations to a server.

This allows for much more centralising and sharing of good "Excel" or SharePoint “List” based solutions. It still needs backing up by some central IT support squads, who can share best practice and ways of working but it is a step in the right direction and a feature of MOSS that way be over looked. Some may say this is just an extension of big brother computing – but when trying to keep control, cut costs and especially with an eye to compliance maybe big brother knows best sometimes!

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 - an Overview

bob.barnes — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 16:17:00 GMT

The whole really is greater than the sum of is parts!

So the curtain is well and truly up on the next version of SharePoint – now called Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or MOSS!. Beta 2 is now out and I will be commenting on this over the next few months

So what’s this MOSS all about? – In a sentence it is now much more of a fully fledged .NET 2.0 platform than a single application, combining and extending features of “SharePoint Portal 2003” and “Content Management Server” along with workflow, Excel Services and much, much more.

Full feature lists are available from many sources (see www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver/ for example) so I don’t intend to produce a detailed one here but want to consider what it means to a business considering its strategy for better team working, document management, records management, compliance or simply for managing its public web site!

There are several main facets to the product which sit within a “portal” framework (I am not a fan of the ill-defined term “portal” and it is interesting that the word has now disappeared from the product name). These facets include;

Collaboration/Team working (Team sites, Wikis, Blogs RSS alerting etc)

Enterprise Content Management (Web, Documents and Records management)

BI/Business Data Catalogue (easy creation of KPI dashboards_

Forms (web based & rich client)

Search (much improved relevance & user interface)

People (Profiles, Social networking, etc)

This all sits on a foundation of SQL Server (either 2000 or 2005 versions) and Windows SharePoint Services v3.0 (WSS). The integration is supported by the familiar (but now enhanced) web parts for example you can now use the web parts created in Visual Studio .NET. Under pinning this is enhanced security and workflow.

Of course ifs not all good news, – for example the offline working story is still not great - it gets better with OutLook 12, but it still takes more forward planning than many will use. But then again there are 3^rd party add-ons coming that will help to improve this – take a look at Digi-Links products (www.digi-link.com) for example. Also some of the richer Records Management features, especially around email, need Exchange 12 to get the most from them, which could be a road block in the short term. Duplications are not automatically controlled in the product - although at least the Search interface will collapse the display of duplicates - making things easier to read

So what will all these well integrated functions give you?

Well one of the key advantages is that this is all Microsoft based (not everyone’s taste – but it is for a lot!) and is well integrated and familiar (particularly to current SharePoint users). It means that if you want to exploit things like enterprise blogging, role based targeted business information, document and records management or even the content management of your extranet or public facing web site (with much improved CMS tools – which can also be used to make your Intranet much more appealing than was practical with SPS 2003) then you can use a single Microsoft framework. Of course in true Microsoft fashion these features may only meet the 80:20 rule – there are better point solutions for each of the facets – but the point is the integration and ease of use (especially with Office 12) –and importantly lower cost of ownership being on the one platform. Of course you need to be a Microsoft shop to really benefit – this is not for the Linux/Unix brigade and access to .NET 2.0 developers will help a lot too.

So where will it be used?

An obvious application is compliance and compliance related activities. Now there is much better document management, with proper versioning with major, minor versions – (echoes of SharePoint Portal Server 2001 here), undelete (hurray!), and practical workflow. Add to this the abilities to properly lock the documents and seal them into a company file plan and to access key business data via the Business Data Catalogue, all the key elements are there to meet compliance requirements.

A more common use may well be the automation of simple business processes, such as holiday requests and staff appraisals. Using the enhanced people profiles and “My Sites” will make this role based workflow much richer. Such processes exploit the workflow and the new web based InfoPath forms capabilities alongside the improved document management (for example document level security, and the powerful concept of “Content Types”). Workflow has effectively 3 levels of complexity in SharePoint 2007, the out of the box pre-built ones – e.g. circulate documents for feedback, the next level is the rule/wizard driven flows you can create with the new SharePoint Designer (one of the sons of FrontPage) and finally the full workflow, which can be built with a graphics designer in Visual Studio (so not for the layman!)

With the right levels of knowledge and imagination powerful yet simple flows can be built – and if that is not enough for you there are still 3^rd party tools that will extend it further!

A leading Energy company has already committed to a strategy of using SharePoint 2007 and one its key drivers will be the way that the can automate a large percentage of its business processes using a single standard platform

What sort of impact will this all have?

Remember Lotus Notes (yes I know its still around)? That made a BIG impact on business because it enabled integrated email, workflow and forms so that power users could configure without heavy and expensive IT involvement. Now it is possible to match and even extend what could be done with Notes but now using SharePoint 2007 and a browser – even tighter integration (something Lotus never quite managed) will be possible with Office 12! So watch out for viral growth within large enterprises.

The Balanced Information Diet

bob.barnes — Tue, 24 May 2005 09:24:00 GMT

Is information really treated in the right way in the enterprise? Is there a tendency to gorge on one type of information and the expense of another – and in doing so is the balanced view lost?

An analogy might help to clarify the situation.

People need both food and water to survive. However for healthy living and growth the quality and composition of the meals is important. For most people they want a complete meal – not the unprocessed ingredients, as they may not have the time or skills to prepare it themselves. A well balanced diet has long been recognised as a foundation to good healthy living.

Now consider a company and its need to be "fed" by information. We can consider "structured information", the numbers, like "drink" – you need it regularly and it must be clean and of good quality. A lot of companies do realise the importance of this and have their numbers well under control using tools like ERP and BI.

However let's take the "unstructured information", documents, emails, etc, and consider that as the "food". Again it should be of good quality, clean, well presented and hopefully a pleasure to consume. However when we come to look how some companies serve up their "unstructured information" it is often an unappealing stew.

What is needed is a more balanced approach. It is important that the numbers and the supporting documents are considered as part of the same balanced diet. The content of this diet must contain only good quality ingredients and it must be well prepared and served in an appealing way and should suite the needs of the consumer. A lot of times companies worry about sourcing information and buy expensive content management systems which help people get material on to the Intranet or Portal but not enough effort is placed on the quality and the relevance of it. Indeed just like food – information can go off and be dangerous to health once past its "use by date".

What must be remembered is that busy business people need business information to help them make decisions, not just raw unprepared information. It is this balance of clean well processed information; both structured and unstructured that should be the goal.

All these needs can be encompassed with a well planned balanced approach.

To add to this needed for this balance, compliance requirements mean that companies need to be very open about where information has come from and how it is processed. Just as with food it is important that it is fresh, clean and properly prepared – consider it as "health and safety regulations" for data!

What are the implications?

Companies need to take a more holistic view of what information they have, how it is looked after and served to the right people in the right way. This is not just a question of technology, just like preparing food is not just a question of buying the latest and most expensive cooker. The processes to look after the information and the people its intended for are just as important. Ownership is also needed, the various information needs to be owned and maintained by someone – with a overall information delivery owner guiding the process – in effect an information "chef".

Companies should look to a coherent information management strategy encompassing the handling of structured and unstructured information. They should define and standardise the way it is stored, labelled and handled and must consider all the different users and deliver channels it will use. They should decide what fits where and how it all should be labelled (we are getting hotter on labelling our food – but documents and other vital pieces of information rarely have so much as a meaningful title).

There is also much money to be saved in taking this strategic approach. Use of agreed technologies and processes will improve efficiency; reduce waste and the re-invention of the wheel that is associated with the common piecemeal approach of different parts of the company having their own "solutions".

It should not be left to be handled by local point solutions that are both wasteful and inefficient. Strategic consolidation of the approach to handling information should be seen as the goal. Too much critical intellectual property is lost without such planning.

Information processes need to be tailored to suit the company taking in to account the full information life cycle from creation to archiving and/or destruction. There is a strong need to change the way people handle, store and use information. Such change management is a major component in any information strategy. It is also often thought of as a one off step, this is wrong. Proper information handling and processes need to be part of business as usual. A healthy diet is for life, not just for a few weeks after Christmas.

Napoleon said that an army marches on its stomach, recognising that to be effective, an army needs good and plentiful food. Just as a badly fed army will not fight well – a badly informed company will not compete well.

Compliance – Building the C-Level defences

bob.barnes — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 11:45:00 GMT

Compliance is a word that continues to dominate business and IT thinking as deadlines approach (and then recede again, in some cases). One thing that is clear is that the current wave of compliance requirements, like Basel II and Sarbanes-Oxley will not be the last. A very clear message to CxOs relating to this was handed down recently in terms of a very long prison sentence – that sort of thing certainly clarifies the mind and boosts the budget, for ultimately its is them that pays. The UK has already had to deal with quite a lot of regulation – but how far off will a Euro - SOX style law really be?

The one thing they all demand is order. If you can account for every thing (meaning documents, databases, emails, etc) and how it is controlled – and you can show that you have taken good steps to prove a level of audit over it, you will be fine! This points to good document and records management and most importantly well designed and strongly enforced procedures. – This is not a problem that you will solve by technology alone. People may need to changing working habits – which in itself is a big challenge.

Now there are two main attitudes that you can take – firstly, that this is all a government-induced pain and let's see what we can do as the minimum, to scrape by, or secondly, the more positive and far thinking one, of seeing this as an opportunity to get properly organised and to sort out processes that have been neglected for years!

Of course, some would say that I am merely promoting compliance related services and some would therefore question my parentage. However, while yes, we are promoting assistance, there really is no good reason not to take the judo approach of turning the weight of the compliance burden to your own advantage? Now is the time to take a good long and holistic look at enterprise wide information architecture and information handling – not just at point solutions. It may seem more expensive – but it will save money in the long term.

So don't look for the halfhearted solution that will just do for now – because it will ultimately prove hard to keep going and may not be up to the job. It may be tempting to use a few sand bags for now, which might well keep the current level of water out - but perhaps now is the time for proper C-level defences - before the next wave hits.

To see more thoughts from Conchango around compliance go to I Love Compliance.

Flying the Easy way

bob.barnes — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 08:42:00 GMT

No, not a reference to Flight Simulator or Windows with Wings, but here I am talking about the benefits of sharing knowledge and learning's. Flying would be very difficult and painful if pilots didn't learn from someone who had done it all before – and that is the point – sharing the solution of problems rather than re-inventing them. This is brought out very well in the recent update of the well known knowledge management book Learning to Fly: Practical Knowledge Management From Leading and Learning Organizations by Chris Collison, Geoff Parcell, Capstone Publishing Ltd, November, 2004. These guys have spent a long time with BP and other organisations looking at how to take the much doubted idea of KM and making it useful and pragmatic. They point out that it is not rocket science and is not a question of just slapping in technology, but is more a question of getting good learning practices embedded in an organisation so that lessons and ideas are shared. This is a well-written and very clear book with many good ideas and well worth a read.

This update of their earlier book has many more practical hints and stories. Learning before, during and after a project is emphasised as well as making sure you tap the right people. BP have their own tool, "BP Connect", but Microsoft's "SharePoint Portal Server" with it's concept of "My Sites" and User Profiles also supports the same concept of a person advertising their own expertise and having it made available to the company as a whole. In this way, finding the right person becomes much easier.

Communities, especially Communities of Practice are also discussed as useful tools in spreading knowledge. This is an area Conchango would strongly agree with through considerable experience and is something we use in-house as a way of keeping each other abreast of new developments and approaches.

A key message from it is to make sure that you learn from those who have already solved a problem before you start to tackle it yourself. Of course being a consultant I would advocate this approach because in a way that is a key benefit of using a consultancy – i.e. to gain from the fact that consultants have seen similar things done else where and can pass this on, for a fee of course!

Is it a bird, is it a plane? – no it’s a Portlet, or maybe it's a Web Part or…

bob.barnes — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 09:00:00 GMT

I am collecting names for the for those pluggable web components that process requests and generate content within the context of a portal. Sun, Oracle, IBM and others tend to call them "Portlets", Microsoft call them "Web Parts" – SAP like to call theirs "iViews" and Plumtree use the term "Gadgets". I would be glad to hear of any more people have com across – although by majority verdict I think "Portlet" wins as a good generic name.

Whatever you call them they can all be considered building blocks of a portal – but I have found what confuses some consumers more, is the assumption that "portlets" from different vendors are all basically the same with the same levels of features and abilities to interact. This is unfortunately not the case – at least not yet. There is hope on the horizon however with initiative such as JSR 168, that attempts to standardise interoperability among portlets and portals, and bodies such as OASIS with for example WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) standard which aims to define the use of Web Services in portals. As ever these standards will take time to evolve and be adopted – in the meantime don't assume all portlets, gadgets, whatever, are born equal!

XML – the next COBOL??

bob.barnes — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 08:29:00 GMT

Someone suggested to me recently that XML (eXtensible Markup Language) will have a similar length of life as COBOL (the original Common Business Oriented Language - which wouldn't be a bad alternatively name for XML) – and given that COBOL has been around since 1960 and is still going strong, it suggests that XML will be around for quite a while! XML is the son of, and a subset of SGML the Standard Generalized Mark-up Language. SGML is very powerful, especially when compared to HTML but perhaps too complex, especially for web use. So, in 1996 it was decided that there was a need for something between HTML and SGML and hence XML was conceived. XML offers a simple, extensible, but well structured way of describing datasets. The big thing about XML however is the take up. More and more systems now support XML mostly because of its combination of power and simplicity - it is even an integral part of Microsoft Office 2003 for example, you can save Microsoft Word and Excel files as XML.

It is relatively simple to map different XML "dialects" (i.e. different sets of tags denoting different data definitions) via eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL). The benefit of this is the ability to flexibility to map different vocabularies or taxonomies together using custom XSL. There are an increasing number of agreed industry specific transformations and the growth in these will make life easier – however as with any "standards" –One growing example is XBRL (Extended Business Reporting Language – see XBRL.ORG.) – Which is establishing itself in the growing area of compliance reporting.

So is XML the holy grail of common data formats – or a form of software duct tape for sticking systems together? – Well, its ease of use and flexibility look life ensuring a long life – but its very flexibility can cause issues, with the diversity of schemas. However, as with COBOL, while it may not be the best approach in theory it is likely to be around for a long time yet.

Instant Messenger - is it really useful? – are you missing a trick?

bob.barnes — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 16:34:00 GMT

Instant messenger in its public guise may not seem an ideal tool in a serious business environment, and maybe thought of an insecure waste of time, where people just chat to their friends and do no work. Well that is certainly one aspect and a possible risk. However Microsoft, Yahoo and others now offer corporate versions that are secure, monitorable (Big Boss IS watching you!) and intended for the business market. IM is also associated with “Presence Information” that tells you if someone is on the network and available to chat. The short interchanges on IM can often replace both emails and phone calls and can certainly oil the wheels of communication. How many one or two line emails do you get from colleagues that ask simple questions – and how often do you remember to delete them afterwards?

One significant growth path here is IM between people and applications, which is already beginning to be seen, where you ask a question of a system rather than a person (for example to get someone’s contact details). With the new corporate tools now available this trend will continue and grow. In short IM, if properly managed, can provide a useful boost to informal collaboration and communication within a team or a community and can really drive down the cost of email use.

Browser or OutLook for Collaboration - Reach or Rich!

bob.barnes — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 10:22:00 GMT

Most collaboration tools are based on the use of the browser. But a lot of people spend a lot of their time in Outlook. Email has, almost since its start, been a away for people to share documents and ideas - mostly because its easy and familiar - so why would then start using a browser as well (browser based email is still not up to the job - compared to the power of Outlook). There is also the issue of offline working - Outlook, certainly in it's latest form, works well either on-line or off, and importantly the user doesn't need to care. Despite the hype we are not a fully connected society - not even in central London!

Interestingly IBM are re-emphasising an old concept (with it's roots in Lotus Notes) of a "Rich" client rather than a thin but wide "reach" browser (of course they support both). Microsoft would say that their integration with Office does a lot of this – which is fine if you have Office 2003!

So where do collaboration tools really belong? A lot depends on context and application - but the answer may well lie in the ease of use - people use the tools at hand even if it's not the best in theory. True integration of the tools and real ease of use still have a long way to go!