SharePoint Center of Excellence - Why You Need One #spc12

For the first time, this year’s Microsoft SharePoint Conference had a dedicated “Business” track for non-technical, business decision makers and judging by the 600 plus people that packed in to this session there was a huge demand.

This session was presented by Andrew Woodward, a longstanding SharePoint MVP, the founder of UK based consultancy 21Apps, and this week named as one of the top 25 social influencers for SharePoint.

In his introduction Andrew explained that his background was in agile software development but that he had come to realize that it doesn’t matter how good the code was if the requirements were wrong, and that this had led him to move to this business orientated side of SharePoint.

His aim in this session, he told us, was to redefine the concept of a Center of Excellence (CoE), and that in his definition the CoE was non-technical. He explained that this was an ongoing process, and that there was room to develop the idea further.

Challenges

Andrew described the challenge facing SharePoint projects, “Experience shows that without the right team in place to support the adoption, exploitation and promotion of new ways of working organizations struggle to achieve the expected return on investment.”

Andrew went on to introduce us to a number of models and approaches that he uses to help define organizational challenges relating to SharePoint. Firstly we were shown the Cynefin framework, which is used to describe problems, situations and systems.

Figure 1: A Cynefin framework diagram

Next Andrew explained the Montgomery Burns test for validating a SharePoint vision statement, and was surprised to find that around 90 percent of the audience didn’t seem to have an explicit vision for SharePoint anyway.

Andrew suggested that we use our stated aim for our SharePoint project to complete the statement, “The Montgomery Burns award for outstanding achievement for …” If your vision fits well into the statement then it probably needs further work. For example, “The Montgomery Burns award for outstanding achievement for improved collaboration,” or, “The Montgomery Burns award for outstanding achievement for excellence in collaboration.”

Finally Andrew showed us the Kapitola Pathway which he uses to align the use of SharePoint with organizational goals. Here’s an example he showed which illustrates why the empire might build the death star.

As the model shows, the basic idea is to map actions and rationale with left and right arrows. Andrew explained that the benefits of this approach are that it provides an end-to-end view of how SharePoint fits into broader organizational strategies, validates broader strategic plans by testing them against projects and initiatives, and that the technique allows the CoE to quickly validate and challenge the business requests.

Figure 2: Example Kapitola Pathway 

SharePoint Center of Excellence

Andrew opened his discussion on the SharePoint CoE by explaining that what they do is be the single point of contact for everything related to SharePoint in the organization. We were advised to brand the SharePoint Center of Excellence and to develop a mission statement.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

How Unisys Used the Power of SharePoint to Socially Enable a Global Workforce #spc12

Fresh from the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, my overview of a great session looking at how one multi-national company created a vibrant knowledge sharing culture using SharePoint.

I think that along with the analyst sessions, the customer showcase sessions at SharePoint conferences are the most valuable. I was particularly looking forward to this session as Unisys has long been at the forefront of collaboration and social computing with SharePoint.

I covered a session on Communities at Unisys at last year's SharePoint conference here on CMSWire. In this session, Gloria Burke, Director of Knowledge and Collaboration Strategy and Governance, took us through the three year journey to develop a global social intranet at Unisys.

To add a little extra spice, Gloria had this week been named as one of the top 7 Social Business Leaders of 2012. The stage was set.

Challenges

Speaking to an audience of over 300 people, Gloria opened the session by setting the scene at Unisys, a worldwide IT Services company with over 22,500 employees in 100 countries, dealing with both commercial and government clients.

The challenges that the business faced in 2010 would probably be very familiar, Gloria told us. They included knowledge silos, employees struggling to locate subject matter experts, an inefficient on-boarding system, a disconnect between ideas and innovation, and an inconsistent approach to the capture and re-use of knowledge. Everyone seemed to agree that this sounded all too familiar.

Vision

Gloria described her approach to dealing with these challenges. She had begun with a series of leadership interviews to assess internal views. For the external view, she had engaged analyst organizations such as Forrester Research and Gartner who provided external benchmarking. She used these inputs to define an end state vision for both tools and culture over a three year period.

The key elements of that vision included the development of a knowledge sharing culture, enabling employees to build a professional online persona, leveraging social tools to streamline access to information, integrating social tools into core business processes and empowering employees.  To realize the vision, the program would have to have five key work streams:

1. connection and collaboration
2. intellectual capital capture, repurpose and reuse
3. knowledge access, management and governance
4. infrastructure and application
5. culture and transformation.

Tools

We were shown a timeline which illustrated the Unisys journey over the past three years. The journey began in June 2010 with the deployment of SharePoint MySites, which included integration to import skills from employees from PeopleSoft into MySite Profiles.

This was followed by the launch of a center for Communities of practice. The center provided information and features to help users find, join and organize communities, and included a community manager tool. Gloria emphasized that there had been a focus on both strategic — or top-down communities, and organic — or bottom-up communities.

Communities at Unisys are categorized as know what, know how, know who, and know more. Variations on classic knowledge management definitions I noted. Employees are hard aligned to communities relating to their business unit, but also have the option to self-subscribe to communities in which they are interested.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Summary of 'Creating Your Brand in SharePoint 2013 On-Premises or In the Cloud' #spc12

Fresh from my first developer session at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, "Creating Your Brand in SharePoint 2013 On-Premises or In the Cloud," I'm here to share a few of presenters Randy Drisgill and John Ross's tips for building a branded website in SharePoint 2013.

I was afraid entering the session that it would be code heavy, but was assured early on that there wasn't much code involved.

Agenda:

• Intro Branding On Premises and Online
• Low Effort branding
• Medium Effort branding
• High Effort branding
• SharePoint Online

Introduction

The talk begins with examples of branding, showing Microsoft logos that have changed over the years. Branding applies to all of your company's marketing and websites and can involve images, logos, CSS, etc.

Microsoft offers two plans, each with separate branding capabilities: small business plan and enterprise plan. It is interesting to see that Microsoft has different abilities on branding in the different plans.

The approach to branding is Low, Medium, High and apparently there is a fair amount of change beginning with the Medium Effort. When you reach the medium effort, it's time to bring in design manager.

Low Effort Branding

Page editor in SharePoint 2013 is pretty much the same as it was in SharePoint 2010: it still has the ribbon where you can add video, images, web parts, etc. I usually think that content publishing is important to get branding to look nice and create a good user experience.

Some of the new capabilities include composed looks — the themes have evolved and enable you to create themes with custom images and colors, master pages, etc.

My observation is that the default themes are pretty ugly. They actually looks a bit like editing a WordPress theme, but with less functionality, you choose your theme location, image url’s, master page url, and more. You can choose which fonts can be available in the editor, not sure that it's useful, but it's an option.

Medium Effort Branding

Medium effort branding brings the design manager into play. The design manager can be found in the site actions, but you need to have publishing activated on the site in order to locate it.

Basically you get your HTML and CSS uploaded to the design manager, then apply SharePoint objects like search. SharePoint designer is optional when using design manager, you are free to use whatever web tool to create your branding: notepad, Coda etc.

Both the master page and the page layouts can be edited with your web tools.

You can use the snippets gallery to get your navigation, breadcrumbs, search boxes, title, logo, etc. into the HTML design by copying the snippet code from the snippet gallery into the HTML code, then adding your own CSS and branding to it.

All of this can be done in a sandbox solution before publishing.

In your master page gallery folder you can create a subfolder to store all of your branding assets. Keep it nice and simple so that it is easy to understand and manage. A good practice is to document what you do as well; you may need it if your servers crash.

Before you start adding snippets, publish a version of the HTML file, this will give you a master page in the theme folder. When you've done this, you can go into the snippets gallery and change the options on the snippets you want, copy the snippets code and add to the HTML file in the place you want it. When you click save the HTML file will update the master file automatically. Pretty sweet!

Important to remember here is that you need to brand all of your site templates that you use, if you don’t you will get an unbranded page when you search or similar.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

OpenText Cloud Announced for Faster, Cheaper Information Management #OTEW2012

One of the really big announcements this week from OpenText’s customer conference in Orlando is the release of the OpenText Cloud, which according to OpenText CEO Mark J. Barrenechea in his keynote speech, is the only cloud on the market at the moment specifically for enterprise information management (EIM).

It’s hardly surprising that OpenText Cloud should focus on EIM — after all OpenText is an EIM vendor, if nothing else — but it is the breath of what it is being made available that is really surprising.

OpenText Cloud

From the word go, Barrenechea says, the new cloud will provide all OpenText’s offerings as cloud products and services that will run in parallel to its already extensive list of on-premises products. The result is, that as of this week enterprises will have access to more than 20 ready-to-use OpenText applications and services.

The difference with other cloud vendors, he says, is that the vast majority of them focus on providing infrastructure and applications in the cloud. OpenText, in contrast, is focusing on providing its full stack as well as specific knowledge and contextual support for deployment and maintenance, management, monitoring, security, optimization, upgrade and application management of all aspects of the cloud.

It also provides a service-level agreement on application availability, which we have seen in the past is one of the things that enterprises considering a cloud move need to look at from the very outset.

But the 20 applications and services are only the start, Barrenechea says:

The OpenText Cloud is purpose-built for EIM. Over the next two years, all OpenText software will be available both on-premises and in our Cloud. With over two million end users and 21,000 customers already in our cloud, we are making great progress."

OpenText EIM Stack

That’s a pretty impressive statement and probably the kind of thing that we’re going to be hearing a lot more of from vendors in the near future as enterprises take the advantages of cloud to heart and forget about concerns around security and the availability of applications.

For OpenText, the services it provides will be divided into four core areas:

• Infrastructure Services: It provides an infrastructure that runs the cloud from 10 data centers around the world along with storage, networking, backup, virtualization and monitoring abilities.
• Hosting Services: The provision of complete IT services that range from deployment to disaster recovery. Along with service-level agreements, current hosted offerings include: Tempo Social, Tempo Box, Content Server, Records Management, Content Lifecycle Management (CLM), Business Process Management (BPM), Web Content Management (WCM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM).
• Information Services: Information exchange from any device to any device and includes seamless business process integration across the entire global infrastructure of any data format. Current services include: fax, message archive, EDI VAN, capture and recognition, notifications and telex.
• Social Collaboration Services: Provides a pervasive layer of collaboration, social marketing, synching and sharing abilities across all applications through the OpenText cloud.

OpenText Cloud Financials

This is such a major project that there is really not a lot more to be said about it until it is actually running for clients. The initial offerings are available already, but the idea of a whole stack up in the cloud is a pretty interesting idea.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

MetaVis Offers SharePoint Governance With Advanced Content Crawling

The 2012 SharePoint conference starts next Monday, and with a week yet to go vendors are already lining up with this year’s announcements. MetaVis, which specializes in SharePoint information management and governance, has announced that it will be previewing Informant for SharePoint.

SharePoint, File Sharing

Informant is a governance and compliance tool for SharePoint that takes into account not just the explosion in data across the enterprise, but all the ways that information is making its way into the enterprise, particularly through file shares.

File shares have multiplied the amount of content coming into the enterprise to levels never seen before, and while that on its own is difficult to manage, the potential for information to move in the opposite direction and out of the enterprise is a security and compliance nightmare.

Here MetaVis cites SkyDrive, Dropbox, Google Docs, Amazon S3, Outlook e-mail and legacy file shares as the main culprits, but there are many more applications, and many more ways that content can leave the enterprise.

The only way to regulate that effectively is by regulating and monitoring the content, which is what Informant is designed to do.

MetaVis Informant architecture

Informant offers an easy way for enterprises to crawl, analyze and report on issues around content to ensure that it is located where it should be, and that it is not leaving the enterprise uncontrolled.

SharePoint Data Governance

According to Peter Senescu, President and Co-founder of MetaVis Technologies:

The increased use of SharePoint, file systems and cloud-based file systems have left many companies asking what information sits across these unstructured data silos “Organizations need tools that will allow them to crawl, analyze and enforce governance policies for their unstructured data – no matter where it resides…”

MetaVis Informant resource selection
 

With MetaVis Informant companies will be able to:

• Identify Sensitive Information: Identify sensitive information across multiple sources using advance crawling and advanced analytics.
• Content reporting: Develop detailed analysis of all enterprise content as well as identifying content that falls outside current policies.
• Automation: Enforce compliance standards in SharePoint, Office 365 and other file systems.
• Advanced Security: Apply desired permissions or lock-down objects like libraries, folders and lists.
• Take Action: Auto tag, archive, backup and set field values based on analysis and compliance policy reports.

The public beta of Informant, which is available for download now, supports not just SharePoint 2013, but also previous versions of SharePoint as well as Office 365, Dropbox and file systems. Support for Google Drive, Amazon S3 and Outlook e-mail is coming soon.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Enterprise Social as Enterprise Platform #YamJam12

During the opening keynote address at the YamJam ’12 Yammer user conference in San Francisco, Yammer Founder/Microsoft Corporate VP David Sacks and two other speakers discussed how enterprise social technology is quickly evolving to a point where in the near future the enterprise social platform will actually serve as the main platform where employees communicate and do business.

Consumerization Starts Trend toward Enterprise Social Dominance

While the personal benefits of social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter are well-documented, Sacks said in business we are “still primarily communicating through the organizational chart, top-down.” However, thanks to consumerization, he said this is starting to change.

“Employees bring enterprise social tools to the company, invite their co-workers, and it is later made a strategic initiative,” he said. Interestingly, Sacks said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told him PCs followed a similar “consumerization”-driven path to enterprise adoption in the early 1980s, as individual employees brought in their own PCs while corporate IT departments still focused on mainframe computing.

In the future, Sacks said he expects all enterprise applications will be social and allow all employees to work off the same data set. This will solve the current problem of “social network sprawl” Sacks sees at many businesses.
“There are many social networks in one company,” he explained. “The CRM application has its own social feed, the ERP application has its own social feed. We’re going right back to the siloed world we came from.”

In response, Sacks said Yammer is developing an “enterprise graph” that maps connections of people with things, such as files and documents,” in the enterprise. He said social networks like Facebook already create similar maps in people’s personal lives that connect them with things such as movies they like and books they have read.

Changing How Employees Talk to Each Other

One of the two other featured speakers during the keynote was Microsoft Corporate VP Jeff Teper, who said Yammer is changing how employees talk and share information in organizations. He said Yammer is making employee conversations more “contextual.”

In addition, Teper said Microsoft, which purchased Yammer in June 2012, is trying to move all of its applications to the cloud as quickly as possible. “We hope the Yammer model will serve as a catalyst to move the infrastructure to the cloud more quickly.”

Teper said Microsoft has previously used the “viral, end-user-driven motion” of the development process used by Yammer to help drive development of consumer products such as the XBox, but never used it to drive development of enterprise products until purchasing Yammer. “It makes it much more fun for us to build software for you guys and allows us to get software to you guys faster.” He said Microsoft will offer Yammer both as a free standalone solution as well as an integrated paid solution.

Enterprise Social Growth Spurt

The other featured speaker during the keynote, Gartner social media analyst Sue Landry, said social media is growing at a pace that eclipses that of other disruptive technologies such as the telephone and television, and is becoming much more prevalent in the enterprise space.

“Forrester expects 60 billion enterprise social applications by 2016 and Gartner expects 40% of large enterprises will at least have corporate casework completed by 2015,” she said.

According to Landry, enterprise social technology’s rapid growth is driven by four reinforcing forces: everyone, anytime, anything and everywhere. “The rich experience is with the person in context,” she said. “That makes the technology invisible.”

As a result of the “invisibility” of enterprise social technology, where it is so integrated with user’s daily lives they don’t notice it, Landry said it will become a platform, or “part of how everyone lives and breathes. Thus in the near future, enterprise social tools will enable the augmentation of business processes and applications from any source.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Eventbrite Isn’t Just Selling Tickets, It’s Building A New Kind Of Social Platform

What if partygoers could automatically share Instagram photos? Or conference attendees could exchange LinkedIn requests without collecting cards? With Eventbrite's API, we are about to find out.

Every time you invite people to an event, you create a mini social network. Startup ticketing platform Eventbrite aims to help put that physical network to use through online apps.

Think about automatically sending a tweet when you walk into an event to announce yourself, Eventbrite CEO and co-founder Kevin Hartz suggests. Hartz goes on: “Think about using Instagram at an event. That could be better shared among [attendees]…You can imagine on the professional side, what could happen with LinkedIn after an event.”

None of these hypothetical examples is a priority for Hartz himself. Eventbrite is pretty good at selling tickets and plans to stick to it. But the company recently gave other apps the opportunity to bring these use cases to life by opening up its API.

“There’s almost nothing as powerful as a live experience. People actually gathering offline--it’s something you don’t forget.”

For the last 18 months, developers have been able to easily add Eventbrite-powered capabilities to their apps. For many, this means simply using Eventbrite to sell tickets within their apps. But the API also presents an opportunity to integrate a new kind of social graph: one based on physical meetings rather than clicks.

Giving people the ability to share, mingle and keep in touch with the people who they attend events with is arguably more useful than offering new ways to interact with their 800 Facebook friends.

“There’s almost nothing as powerful as a live experience,” explains Hartz's wife and cofounder, Julie Hartz. “People actually gathering offline, it’s something you don’t forget.”

So far the implementations have been gingerly engaged. 5K races have used the Eventbrite API to send photos and race times to participants, Paperless Post uses it to link tickets with invitations, and services provided by MailChimp and Salesforce use it to help companies stay in touch with the people who attend their events.

Since it set up shop in 2006, Eventbrite has differentiated itself in the ticketing space by allowing anyone to sell tickets on its platform--whether they’re planning a cooking class for their friends or a . Throughout the last couple of years, however, it's been on a bit of a growth spurt. It has been quick to develop mobile opportunities like an iPad credit-card reader to help event coordinators working in non-tradition venues organize admissions and launched an aggressive international expansion. So far, it’s sold tickets in 174 countries.

Hitching a ride in other apps, whether as an enabler of online connection between eventgoers or a simple ticket seller, should further serve its growth.

“When you’re moving in to dominate a space, you can’t be everywhere at once,” Kevin Hartz says.

Apps with Eventbrite integrations, however, can be.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

NoSQL + Hadoop Without the Headaches: MapR Technologies Announces New Big Data Platform for HBase #stratany2012

Live from O’Reilly Strata Conference and Hadoop World: MapR M7 brings enterprise-grade reliability and performance to HBase, adding integrated snapshots, mirroring, instant recovery, and delivering consistent, low latency.

The Big Data Treasure Chest

Within most enterprises there sits a large and precious treasure chest. Inside that chest sits data which holds great, untapped value. While CEOs might have recognized this a few years back, they didn't talk about it much because it was impractical and near impossible to extract wealth from the data.

Not so much anymore. Hadoop’s speedy data processing and analytics capabilities have changed that dramatically.

Enterprises worldwide are now using, or plan to use, Hadoop to unlock the value in their big data stores. But doing so isn't simple and it’s not without risks. This has opened the door for vendors to add reliability, stability and host of bells and whistles to Hadoop. MapR is one of the companies that leads that space.

MapR Announces New Big Data Platform

This morning at the O’Reilly Strata Conference + Hadoop World 2012 MapR unveiled M7 which promises to bring unprecedented Hadoop and NoSQL capabilities together on an easy, dependable and fast platform. With MapR M7, Big Data operations ranging from batch analytics to real-time database functions can be performed with enterprise-grade reliability and protection.

“We've made Hbase enterprise grade,” says Tomar Shiran, director of product management at MapR, explaining that MapR M7 can withstand multiple software and hardware outages and keep applications running without needing any administrator intervention at all. It’s the only Hadoop distribution that provides instant disaster recovery and full data protection with snapshots and mirroring, he adds.

But MapR M7 doesn't stop there, it also provides constant and consistent performance at unprecedented levels because it doesn't require compactions and because its innovative data structures minimize the read- and write-amplification factor. Updates and inserts are also much faster.

“We start with Hadoop and by adding our own innovations we make it much better,” says Shiran. 

MapR & the Google Compute Engine, Plus More

And while we know that every vendor has a pitch to explain why they are the best, MapR points to its recent wins. They snagged an exclusive to run Hadoop services on the Google Compute Engine last June, which says a lot because Google wrote the paper on Map Reduce. In that same month, Amazon announced that MapR’s Hadoop distributions would be available on Amazon Web Services vs. its own Elastic MapReduce service that runs on Apache Hadoop.

MapR has other impressive enterprise level Big Data ground-breakers on its client list as well, such as the Rubicon Project, a digital advertising infrastructure company that automates buying and selling for the global online advertising industry; Ancestry.com which crunches human genome, text and other data to lead you to your ancestors, and many, many others.

MapR is setting a new benchmark in the world of Enterprise-grade Hadoop. It will be interesting to see if anyone is able to exceed it before it “bests” itself.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Knowledge Networks, Content Intelligence and The Zen of SharePoint #SharePointSym

It’s not everyday that I attend a SharePoint conference and become engaged in academic discussions about the value of knowledge sharing and content intelligence. Such was the case when I attended the opening keynote of the KMWorld 2012 of which the SharePoint Symposium was a part.

A Higher SharePoint

Listening to David Weinberger, one of the authors of Cluetrain Manifesto and Co-Director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab at Harvard University; and Jeremy Bentley, CEO  and founder of Smartlogic speak about how the concept of knowledge is changing and how applying content intelligence to the information collected can improve its value, respectively, you can’t help but understand SharePoint on whole other level.

When you think about it, SharePoint isn’t simply a platform, it’s a knowledge network. The benefits of knowledge networks go way beyond simply sharing information. According to Weinberger, participating in knowledge networks, whether it’s SharePoint or Reddit, makes us better equipped to be better humans. We learn how to appreciate the power of disagreement and difference, while at the same time we embrace humility and display generosity. It takes a lot to ask a question in a public forum, and requires great confidence to supply an answer. Even if we are able to hide behind a clever moniker or avatar, participating in knowledge sharing makes us quite vulnerable.

Is Your SharePoint Portal an Echo Chamber?

As a result, Weinberger cautions, we resort to echo chambers to make us feel safer and secure. We are among our own in forums where we’re most likely to agree with the answers given, whether they be political, personal or professional in nature. Weinberger challenges us to embrace the messiness, the vulnerability and the uncertainty that knowledge sharing brings by learning how to appreciate difference and diversity of the crowd.

When creating our own networks, he urges us to learn how to deal with difference in useful ways, like approaching issues from different perspectives, or asking questions about the things we don’t know and inviting others to ask questions about us.

When you think of SharePoint, the same strategies should apply. Are your users power users, or everyday users? Has your SharePoint portal become an echo chamber for your team, or is a place where diversity thrives? If not, it may be time to take a step back and examine the integrity of your knowledge network.

How Smart is Content Intelligence?

In every knowledge network, there is information. But how is it structured? If you’re still managing your information the same way you did a decade or more ago, Jeremy Bentley suggests that you might want to add some intelligent content layers to it.

For starters, you probably have a lot more information to manage than you did a decade ago. It used to be that you had information overload. Now you have big data. The difference — how you handle it. With content intelligence, you can better identify what is your information. It’s almost impossible not to label it something (even if most of us label it unstructured!).

Once you identify it, you need to extract meaning from it. What's in it? Once you extract, you need to classify it to determine what it's about.

Again, the same process can be applied to how we share and manage information within SharePoint. It sure would make it much easier to use if we knew what information there was, what's in it and what it's about, wouldn't it? The same content intelligence is just as vital when it's self-contained, as when it's being shared. Bentley says that the new world of big data needs a new layer of content intelligence — and I've even argue that it's just as true with each new generation of SharePoint.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Location-Based Social Apps Making A Splash #Demo2012

There are a lot of exciting, fresh and hungry young startups launching impressive products amidst the vibrant atmosphere of Demo's Fall conference. While many are presenting us with a more streamlined, personalized digital portal to the real world, the applications inevitably bleed into each other. 

Clearly, we won't have several favorite geocaching sites, or we'll have to check all of them to find our friends. At best, you and I have enough time to use roughly one of each, and we'll probably fall into the habit of using the one that more of our friends are using.

That triggers the conundrum: each new social platform is basically a blank page until people pile onto it. Essentially, each is useless until used. The only way to get around that catch 22 (aside from massive investments to promote development, partnerships and traffic) is to mix existing services in a useful (and fun) way. A few new products have managed to continue the trend of blending our online life into the physical world in pretty compelling ways.

Where You At?

The most effective presentations in the social category here have offered a tightly targeted consolidation of recreational life.  New apps like MyPref, Go-Matic, Coparent and iSocialite rely on location-based services to connect you with the brands, products or people you love.  Sometimes, they rely on existing connections from Facebook, Twitter, your address book, etc. and simply add a layer of convenience.  

Go-Matic connects you with nearby buddies in a pretty direct, head-slapping, why-are-we-not-all-using-this kind of way. MyPref records your brand preferences and weaves them into a network. While offering the requisite algorithmic recommendations, it also has the sweet feature of alerting you when a product you love happens to be available at the store you're passing by. The link between online shopping and retail presence (with lots of added social features) seems pretty appealing, as long as you've got a handle on your shopaholicism.  

Paving The Way

It pains me to say that some of the companies here will not make a splash on the social scene, perhaps even being out-shined by other presenters at this very event. Each and every startup seems genuinely determined to solve a problem, cater our technology to our lives, fill a glaring gap in the industry or help us navigate the real and digital worlds (sometimes simultaneously).  But it seems to be a developing industry with much more of a future than a past.  

Location-based services that require a lot of attention, or which bleed into the spectrum of augmented reality, may suffer from the fact that we simply can't be as absorbed in our phones as we are in our surroundings (unless you like walking into mailboxes).  When we all get our Google glasses or retina implants, that might change.  In the meantime, browse safely!

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

New Oracle BI Release Makes Data Analytics Mobile, Visual, Actionable #oow

Oracle is rolling out Oracle Business Intelligence Release 11.1.1.6.2BP1. Notable features of the latest Oracle BI release, introduced at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, include a new mobile user experience and visualization features.

Responding to Mobile Popularity

Responding to what an Oracle press release calls mobile devices becoming “ubiquitous productivity enhancing tools across the enterprise,” the latest Oracle BI offers revamped mobile features including live thumbnails and search for both online and offline content, as well as greater touch and multi-gestural interactivity, offline content access that can be restricted by administrators, enhanced visualization tools such as charts, graphs and maps, “trellis views” of data and scalability Oracle says can “serve thousands of mobile users simultaneously and process millions of rows of data.”

Oracle BI users can also deploy the solution on premises or in the cloud, and Oracle says development on a single unified platform allows all apps created with Oracle BI to be controlled from one central location. 

Oracle Sees Mobile Future

An “oracle” is one who can see the future, and Oracle apparently sees a future where mobility is a key component of business technology. Earlier this week at Oracle OpenWorld, the enterprise IT vendor introduced three new mobile applications as part of its PeopleSoft HR/financial management suite.

The new Oracle PeopleSoft applications — Mobile Expenses, Mobile Approvals and Mobile Company Directory — provide access to data via smartphone, tablet and desktop. Based on HTML5 and CSS3, the solutions do not require download but are accessible via standard login and provide a user experience tailored to the specific user device. 

Putting Data on the Road

According to a recent Forbes article, mobile business intelligence meets the growing need of businesspeople to have data readily available on the road. “The decision maker often needs only quick access to a few key metrics shown on a mobile device,” states the article, which goes on to say mobile business intelligence solutions can “reduce decision bottlenecks, increase business process performance and enable broader input into the decision at hand.”

Although laptops, smartphones and other portable devices started popping up on the IT landscape in the early 1990s, Forbes identifies the April 2010 introduction of the iPad as the “inflection point” for mobile BI. “The time for mobile BI is finally here,” Forbes concludes, and Oracle is agreeing with that conclusion.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Document Mgmt Roll-up: MS Outlines Exchange 2013 Features, HP Tackles Information Governance

It's a busy time in the document management world. The Microsoft Exchange Conference returns after 10 years as Microsoft gears up for the new Office 2013 release, HP uses Autonomy’s IDOL for information governance, AvePoint offers governance in SharePoint, FileTrail extends SharePoint’s records management, and Alfresco releases a new synching tool for enterprises.

Microsoft’s Exchange 2013 Features

There are a number of conferences on, but one of the more interesting ones is the Microsoft Exchange Conference, which makes its return after a 10-year absence.

It’s not really surprising that it should reappear now, given the developments around Office 2013 and Office 365, but this is specifically about Exchange. So far, with only one day of talks over, the whole emphasis has been on the new features that are due to come in Exchange Server 2013, as well as those that will appear in Exchange Online and Office 365.

In an Office blog post published this week Harv Bhela, General Manager for Exchange Program Management with Microsoft outlines some of his thoughts on it, and talks about some of the features that will appear in both online and on-premises versions of Exchange (even if these are well known already).

Little in relation to this will be much of a surprise, as the public beta was released in July and the private beta earlier in the year.

The first day of the conference focused on the security and compliance features that will come with Exchange.

According to Bhela, the data protection and archiving features look to take Exchange into the Big Data world. Some of the features that aim to do this include:

• Cloud-based email security with Exchange Online Protection
• Monitoring, protection and identification of sensitive data with Data Loss Prevention technology
• Email archiving, hold and native data governance
• New e-Discovery tools to locate information
• Integration with SharePoint and collaboration with site mailboxes

Meanwhile, Microsoft (for some reason) still won’t confirm release dates for Office 2013 or Exchange Server 2013, but a good guess is Spring 2013. If you’re interested in more on the Exchange conference in Orlando, check it out here.

HP’s Information Governance with IDOL

One of the more interesting announcements this week is the one from HP about the use of Autonomy’s IDOL in the management of structured and unstructured data.

It’s just over a year since HP bought Autonomy for US$ 10.2 billion. While HP has been adding Autonomy’s IDOL to some of its software, it never really gave the impression that it had a fully developed IDOL integration plan.

This release, though, looks very much like an information management strategy that sees HP really pushing the boat out as it looks to try and build on that acquisition. Interested in more?

AvePoint Compliance For SharePoint

But it is not only HP that has been issuing releases around information governance this week. AvePoint has also been busy and announced the availability of its DocAve 6 Service Pack 1 (SP) that provides governance for SharePoint.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Gearing up for Salesforce #Dreamforce 2012, Chatterbox Details to Come

Salesforce will host the Dreamforce 2012 conference Sept. 18-21, but CEO Mark Benioff has already announced the cloud storage system Chatterbox at another tech conference.

Chatterbox will be Dropbox for the enterprise, Benioff said, but it's just the start of a busy week for anyone who's thinking of adding to their Salesforce package or looking for new vendors altogether.

The focus at Dreamforce this year is social enterprise, and keynote speakers are divided up among the sales, customer service, marketing, collaboration and small to medium business categories. Additionally, entrepreneurs like Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, strategist Anthony Robbins and, of course, Benioff himself will be addressing the crowd at San Francisco's Moscone Center. 

General Colin Powell (Ret.) will also be speaking because he is now a limited partner in the powerful venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Tuesday night's opening gala will feature the musical stylings of funk-rock pioneers The Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Keynotes to Note

Among the various segments at this huge conference, the Data segment features keynotes from companies like Pandora and CareerBuilder on how Data.com helps their companies. Furthermore, for SMBs, executives from Square and Yelp will be giving keynotes about their Salesforce experiences.

For those who are curious about specific products like Chatter, there are good sessions to attend on all four days of the conference. On Tuesday, there is a session right after lunch called 'Chatter: Best Practices for Chatter - The Engine of the Social Enterprise' that could be helpful.

On Wednesday there is 'Chatter: Finding the Right Talent, and Empowering Employees' in the early afternoon. Thursday, check out 'Chatter: ENGAGE - The 6 Steps to Success with Chatter' right after the Chatter keynote.

CMSWire at Dreamforce

CMSWire is attending Dreamforce this year, and we'll be covering new products like Chatterbox in particular. Salesforce has promised other new products, and those will be our main focus as well. Look for me there and say hi!

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Why SharePoint 2013 Isn't for You

There’s a lot of noise on the street since the announcement of SharePoint 2013. We’re headed towards the largest SharePoint conference of the year in Las Vegas this November and it’s only going to get louder. Where does that leave you, the end user of SharePoint? About where you were before the announcement came out, I would think. It should not affect you at all.

Where Is All the Noise Coming From?

If you listen closely to the groundswell, what you hear is a bunch of developer geek speak about SharePoint 2013. There is the marketing coming out of Microsoft, but the Man-on-the-Street conversation is mainly from developers and IT Pros who are talking to each other about how to set it up, how to optimize it, how it is different from 2010. This has absolutely nothing of relevance for people using SharePoint on a day to day basis.

The day to day talk is a distraction to SharePoint end users. In general, the users are not interested in the technology, they are interested in the solutions the technology can provide. This is nothing new. We had the same type of situation after the release of SharePoint 2010. At that time, I took the same position: It’s going to take two to three years for SharePoint 2013 to become relevant to the daily user.

The Current Situation

SharePoint is not an app that gets upgraded every month as part of an update cycle. It is a development platform for providing business solutions. Large clients who rolled out SharePoint 2010 in the past two years are going to find it hard to justify moving on to 2013 in the near future, unless they can find a business justification for spending the time and money it will take to make the transition.

At conferences where I speak, I ask people what SharePoint version they are currently using. Over the past year it has been mostly 2007, with half of those using a hybrid solution that combines with 2010. Those clients who are implementing SharePoint for the first time will start with 2010, but those with existing infrastructure are going to stay with that until there is a real business reason, real financial justification, to run an upgrade.

So Who is 2013 For?

With that said, who should be interested in SharePoint 2013? Why, developers of course! 2013 is still in beta. Enough said. Stop reading and get back to work. Unless you are a developer, an author or a training company, why are you concerned about SharePoint 2013?

I’m not being facetious. I think it is a real distraction for day to day users to be concerned about the “new” functionality of SharePoint 2013: Social, My Sites enhancements, Managed Navigation, the App Store. To upgrade to 2013 is a business decision that will have to be justified at a much higher level than the end user. Will the business gain enough impact to make that upgrade worthwhile?

Final Words

What’s my advice to people actually using SharePoint to get their work done? Keep your head down and out of the line of fire. SharePoint 2013 isn’t for you. For now, let the developers and IT Pros work through the bits and see what’s there. When your company is ready for it, they will let you know.

Editors Note: If you're intersted in another view on SharePoint 2013:

— SharePoint 2013: 7 Features Users are Going to Love by @andrewbish
 

About the Author

Mark Miller is recognized internationally as a Senior Storyteller, weaving engaging tales to simplify the explanation of complex, technological solutions. His current mission is to save the planet from the default SharePoint 2010 interface at NothingButBranding.com. He is the founder of two of the largest, online SharePoint communities in the world: href=”www.nothingbutsharepoint.com”>NothingButSharePoint.com and href=”https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/eusp/Pages/default.aspx”>EndUserSharePoint.com.Mark is a founding member of href=”http://sharingthepoint.org/Africa/Home.aspx”>Sharing the Point, a group of SharePoint evangelists who travel the world bringing support and encouragement to underserved SharePoint communities.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

A New Way to Think About Social Media #socialintel2012

Day One at the Social Media Intelligence Conference yielded thoughtful amendments to the word-of-mouth textbook on enterprise-level social media strategy. As the opportunities for social networking expand exponentially, so do the possibilities they offer. 

You'll still hear no (smart) business person deny the relative infancy of social data, but like the medium itself, a pervasiveness of theory, experimentation, pontification and opinion is helping to shift some preconceived notions into practiced, applicable strategy.

It's A One-Way Mirror

Dorothea Bozicolona-Volpe's keynote had a purposeful stride which succinctly summarized the most basic ideals of utilizing social media in a business environment. Volpe argues that this stuff is in our DNA, and we have an innate capacity for it. And sometimes it does seem to be the graphical representation of our inner monologue, reflecting everything from our most profound realizations to our most mundane events. 

There's a prominent looking glass right before our eyes, where we're compelled to notice and analyze our lives as they happen, potentially causing more narrating than living. Smart businesses capitalize on your vanity; absorbing your narration, converting it to data and, ideally, responding with an affirmation that you've been recognized in order to kickstart the cycle again. We are in a worldwide focus group, except we don't know when we're being watched (assume: always).

When you go through the looking glass to observe the unfiltered world, you get truly honest data. These are, as Jesse Gross of Semphonic put it, unsampled, unsimplified, real-world totals. How many marketers have yearned to be a fly on the wall, gaining real insight into the perception of their product? Sally Falkow pointed out that while that used to be a dream, it's now a standard and fundamental tool at our disposal.

Transparency = Authenticity

The social landscape has no hiding and no gatekeeping. There exists unfettered creativity, constant interaction and complete visibility. Not only do mistakes and issues refuse to be buried, they are frequently propelled to viral fame. People love to promote inspiration and discourage deception. En masse via social media, they have the power to do both.

To encourage a positive response, initiate a positive emotion. To dispel disparaging accusations, admit wrongdoing and offer to make amends. Don't deny or deflect, because authenticity earns respect, not avoidance. The consumer holds grudges, and is pretty damn wary of being deceived.

We're Not Kidding Around Anymore

The truth is, the Internet is social by nature. Whatever persona we thought this phenomenon would embody, that's where it has gone. Social interaction is woven into the technology, as it serves to provide worldwide connectivity. Policing connectivity by attaching each interaction to a real, live person is what social media does. That has the added bonus of making each interaction valuable and measurable, rather than ambiguous or distant (like an impression or a visitor).  Like the average social media user, responding to your emotions is not only innate, but useful. Merging intuition with data should make for a pretty effective combination.

About the Author

Matt traveled here from the 1950's in a time machine made from an old jukebox, and now spends his days staring in wonder at all of the awe-inspiring innovations that clutter the digital age.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

News from the Front: Simpler, Mobile Drupal 8 Previewed #DrupalCon

For those in the Drupal community, DrupalCon is simply DrupalCon. For the rest of you: DrupalCon is a bi-annual Drupal conference put on by the Drupal Association. It’s a world-class tech conference, it is THE place for Drupal news and it’s happening this week in Munich, Germany. 

Lowering the Learning Curve with Drupal 8

Drupal is considered one of the most powerful Web CMSs available, but one of the biggest complaints about the open-source Web infrastructure is its overwhelming complexity. This is especially heard from non-technical users like copywriters, designers and marketers. In an effort to address this, the project founder and lead Dries Buytaert announced earlier this year that Drupal will be adopting the open-source PHP framework Symfony into its next major release, Drupal 8.

Initially, this announcement left many wondering why such a dramatic shift was necessary or what benefit it would bring to Drupal users. Since then, the Drupal core programmers have been busy and at Drupalcon Munich, a series of significant usability and feature upgrades in the works for Drupal 8 have been demonstrated. These improvements are sure to please CMOs and CTOs alike.

Content creation in Drupal 8 will be greatly simplified for less technical users. Drupal 8 will provide easier layout control and facilitate gorgeous designs with practically no coding. All of these features will greatly lower the learning curve for new developers.

Mobile and Beyond

Drupal’s next core iteration is poised to conquer mobile. With a friendlier admin in mind, a new and simplified pullout menu will leverage one toolbar that works on all devices enabling complete mobile Web administration. Drupal 8 is going to implement responsive design out of the box, even differentiating between phones and tablets. A responsive layout builder was showcased and it’s pretty revolutionary. Entirely new layouts can be created with drag and drop.

Authoring improvements were also on display. The form looked cleaner with most options moved to a sidebar. Inline editing with True Wysiwyg will eliminate the separation of focus between editing and preview modes. And staying in-sync with the responsive/mobile motif, viewport previews will allow you to see what your page will look like on different devices.

Drupal 8 is currently in early development and is expected to ship in 2013. There are more exciting new features planned for than can fit in one post. The key takeaway from Dries at Drupalcon Munich is that Drupal is gearing up to be more accessible and to address the Internet’s latest and greatest challenges. As the Web continues to evolve, Drupal is taking major steps to ensure its place as a leading CMS today and in the future.
 

About the Author

Ben Finklea is the CEO of Volacci, the leader in Internet marketing for Drupal-based Web strategies, and the chair of the Drupal Branding and Marketing Committee for Drupal Association. He is a serial tech entrepreneur, author and SEO thought leader.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com