| 1. |
Beware the social networking news feed
A few weeks ago, I was having drinks with a friend of mine who'd recently separated from her husband. She hadn't told many people the news as of a week before we met up, but then she changed her relationship status on Facebook. A broken heart icon declaring that she was no longer married appeared on her profile, and immediately she was bombarded with phone calls and emails from concerned friends. She was mortified, as she didn't realize that changing this piece of information in her profile would go out via her news feed.
I saw this as an isolated incident, until it happened again today to another friend of mine who's apparently separating from his wife. In fact, unlike the previous occasion, I found out from Facebook. It was a lousy way to find out that a couple may be on the road to divorce -- as it would have been a lousy way to find out any other piece of "serious" or "sensitive" information. But there it was in my Facebook friends news feed. I learned from a mutual friend that the dissemination of the news was unintentional.
And what about enterprises that use Facebook as a corporate intranet? Could it be that employees are also unaware of such automatic information distribution? As readers of The Enterprise Social Software Report know, it's difficult to separate professional from personal information on Facebook, which has also had a history of privacy and security breaches. Though you can now categorize friends and decide who gets to see what information, I admit, I find it crazy that in this day and age, people still think that things published on a social networking site will go unnoticed, or not be disseminated. Unless you specify otherwise, you should assume it will not only appear on your page but distributed to every close, personal Facebook friend you have. All 347.
If you mix work and play on Facebook, don't be naive. If you're going to sip wine while naked in a hot tub in California, don't write about it on your wall unless you're comfortable with everyone knowing, including your boss, your ex, your clients, and anyone else you may have thought it was a good idea to "friend."
In this blog, I once linked to a colleague's Facebook page, and then was contacted by his company's PR firm, insisting I switch the link to the person's profile on LinkedIn. I accommodated, but was also perplexed. What I'd said about the person was nothing but complimentary. It was clearly an issue of not wishing to mix work and personal information. But really, it's too late. We're already there, thanks to Facebook, thanks to the legions of social networking sites on the web. Social software doesn't let you control the dissemination of every piece of information about you out there -- yet. If you don't want people to know, just don't publish it. Anywhere.
Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:18:00 -0400
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| 2. |
No easy upgrade for Sitecore customers
While Web CMS vendor Sitecore
has been busy promoting the new user interface in its recently
released Version 6, the company has attracted quite a bit of criticism from
existing customers for the new version's lack of an easy upgrade path.
In a recent blog posting by Sitecore's VP of Technical Marketing, Lars Nielsen,
he
discusses their upgrade strategy and explains the company's choice between
delaying the release of Sitecore 6 or let the database conversion tool follow
afterwards. Similar to many other vendors in this situation, e.g., Microsoft,
Sitecore decided to get the new product out the door and worry about upgrades
later.
The definition of immediately afterwards may extend beyond the 2 months
that have transpired since V6 came out, but I see that Sitecore themselves have
still not upgraded their very own website. According to Sitecore, an alpha
release of the upgrade tool is expected this week, but there is no news
on when customers can expect a final release.
Regardless of vendor, upgrades are never straightforward, and you typically
want to wait until the vendor has gone through the pain itself before teaching
them the ropes. In this case, though, it is telling that Sitecore -- a vendor
with a support
model that we have previously questioned -- has focused more on pleasing
new prospective customers and less critical analysts alike with exciting new
demos rather than supporting its faithful customers. If the past is any guide,
do remember to budget and plan any upgrade carefully.
Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:18:00 -0400
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| 3. |
A new (and wearable) Content Technologies Subway Map
A new season brings an updated vendor map:
We added a Yellow Line -- for XML & Component Content Management vendors,
and reflected some other station changes.
And now, if you like what you see, you and your wall can wear it. Our new store
at Cafe Press offers t-shirt and posters of various sizes, along
with other CMS Watch tchotchkes.
Regarding the latter, perhaps you already own your fill of mugs and mousepads, but can you ever
have enough beer steins? Bring it to the next event where we're speaking and
we'll fill it up with the closest available brew. ;-)
Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:55:00 -0400
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| 4. |
Web UI development: inherently slow?
In a thoughtful post at JavaLobby, developer Ali Loghmani poses a simple but important question: Why is Web UI development so slow?
Here, Loghmani is not just talking about the creation and placement of AJAX widgets on web pages. He is talking about full-cycle development and testing of web and portlet interfaces that integrate with popular MVC webapp frameworks such as Grails, Django, Tapestry, or any of a slew of others.
The reason this is an important question, of course, is that people write custom
web and intranet apps against their DAM,
WCM, ECM,
and Portal systems all
the time, whether for public-facing B2C apps or just to create a CMS front-end
that content contributors will actually use. And it is invariably a resource-intensive
process. Gobs of time, money, and engineering talent go into the creation of
web interfaces (and the code that binds those interfaces to back-end business
logic).
Loghmani laments the protracted program-test-debug time in development frameworks that require (as many do) redeployment of files to an appserver before changes can be previewed. This is certainly a problem. It's one thing to do an eye-pleasing mockup of an AJAX webform in a browser; quite another to wire it into JSF and do full-cycle debugging in WebSphere, say, or JBoss (or whatever).
There's also the perennial cross-browser compatibility bugaboo. Web UIs tend (still) to perform differently in different browsers, necessitating ugly "browser-check" code with parallel logic branches to handle the various browser types and their legacy quirks. Writing and testing this kind of code takes time.
Of course, to some degree UI development is an inherently hard problem. The
mapping of widget states to program states is not always straightforward. To
the contrary, the possible permutations are more often than not incalculable,
and the potential side-effects
legion. You can't expect this kind of programming to go quickly.
In the end, Loghmani argues that the sheer complexity of popular MVC frameworks is a major (perhaps the major) contributor to long UI development times. As much as I value simplicity, I have to disagree here. In my experience, complexity is not a bad thing per se if you can properly hide it. Twenty years ago, three-person crews were the norm on airliners. Today it's almost entirely two-person crews. Ironically, the airplanes have gotten much more complex, but the human interface has been refined to the point where you no longer need a "flight engineer." This is an example of how complexity can be hidden, to good effect.
I think one could argue that the main reason Web UI development is slow is because insufficient tooling exists to make it quick and easy. Things like Tapestry and JSF (and appservers) are complex, with many moving parts. Developers are constantly having to open the hood and make hand adjustments to rather intricate machinery, using only basic hand-tools.
In the post-2.0 world, that won't do. Time is too precious. We're going to
need better tools -- or perhaps an entirely new development paradigm. Old-school
MVC development, à la Struts and all the rest, is just not cost-effective
any more. If indeed it ever was.
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:49:00 -0400
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| 5. |
Oracle doesn't eat its own blog food
Via numerous acquisitions, Oracle
has built up a formidable collection of products that they sell for Portals,
Content Management, Web 2.0, and other content technologies. As a result, customers
find considerable overlap in functionality and often there are multiple options
for doing same things. Consider blog services:
Oracle
WebCenter page lists "...services such as wikis, blogs, discussions..."
as one of the benefits
BEA
AquaLogic Pages (now part of Oracle) touts "Drag-and-drop simplicity
for creating wikis, blogs and basic Web applications"
Stellent had a blog module even before it got acquired by Oracle
So its perhaps a bit surprising that when it came to their own
blogs, Oracle chose to migrate to Six
Apart's Movable Type.
We had cautioned about lack of a decent blog functionality in Oracle stack
in our recently released Enterprise
Social Software Report 2008. Well to be fair to Oracle, they are not
the only ones -- many other product vendors use 3rd-party blog and wiki products
for specific functionality. Blog migrations are never easy, but Oracle seems
to have pulled it off successfully.
So if you are a buyer of similar technologies, remember that:
- If a product vendor is selling you a suite that claims to do everything, be
very cautious and ask for real life examples and demos
- A product suite might not be the best option; keep your options open and consider
point solutions for specific requirements
It's quite possible that Oracle uses one of its own blog packages behind its
firewall. But when ECM vendors put their trust in best-of-breed tools for high-profile,
publicly-facing sites, perhaps there's a lesson there.
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:52:00 -0400
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| 6. |
Start flossing your content now
Nobody likes content migrations. But they're inevitable. Like trips to the
dentist.
You can perhaps reduce your pain by reading this nifty little white paper,
"Content
migration: options and strategies," by James Robertson of StepTwo
Designs. It's a wonderfully concise survey of your likely toothaches and
options for dealing with them.
James is not optimistic about outsourcing the migration project, but as
others have pointed out, staffing depends on how you organize the effort,
and there is potentially a role for temporary help.
You'll also want to pay close attention to the question of metadata. Oftentimes
enterprises implement a new system in order to employ tag intelligence for publishing
and navigation. Someone knowledgeable needs to add all those tags -- at least
as part of the final migration QA process. Like transforming the content itself,
you'll find automated classification tools a mixed bag at best.
Everyone can agree though, that the more attention you pay to regularly
cleaning up your content beforehand, the more likely this particular dentist
visit will prove less painful.
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:08:00 -0400
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| 7. |
eXo updates product suite and continues rapid growth
Flying below the radar for most North American analysts, French-based commercial
open source portal vendor eXo
has been very busy recently. Earlier this month marked the release of new
versions of their key products, including eXo Portal, which we cover in the
Enterprise Portals Report 2008.
Then last week eXo announced a new
branch in Tunisia covering the emerging (but also largely underresearched)
marketplace in Northern Africa.
When we started covering eXo back
in 2006 the firm had a 27 employees and had just opened a US office. Today
they have 70 developers have joined the growing ranks of open source projects
trying to
offer an alternative to Microsoft SharePoint.
eXo has also been an early
adopter of Adobe Flex, which is actively used in several of the eXo products,
including the beta version of the new "Liveroom" video conferencing
component.
I don't pick favorites and am not saying that eXo is the "best" or
"leading" enterprise portal, but in these times where the portal market
is increasingly dominated by large vendors (IBM,
Microsoft, Oracle)
it is important to remember that the open source portal market may indeed offer
you viable alternatives. Beyond eXo we also cover Apache Jetspeed, JBoss, Liferay,
and Plone.
Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:37:00 -0400
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| 8. |
When a Wiki package gets too real
In talking to wiki users, we find a wide range of sophistication. Some are
quite content with the simplistic "edit this page" features you can
now find in most Web CMS and Social
Software suites, while other customers seek more advanced features (such
as topical refactoring and advanced aggregation and print services) that constitute
for them a "real" wiki.
And then there are those who cut their teeth editing Wikipedia pages or learned
about wikis by using the earliest tools. They come with a particular set of
expectations -- especially around using good old fashioned "Wikitext"
mark-up -- that today are met largely through the MediaWiki platform, the same
tool that powers Wikipedia.
As Enterprise Social Software
Report readers know, MediaWiki tends to find favor among wiki purists,
but is often perceived as too arcane by novice users. Here's a nice
summary of some relevant issues by consultant Dan Katz. (Thanks to Janus
for the link.)
I'm more sanguine about open source wiki options and less enthusiastic about
Socialtext than
Katz, but he makes some very good points regardless of the tool you select.
The key for you the customer is, as always, to test with "real" users
before you deploy...
Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:46:00 -0400
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| 9. |
Talking about Social Software
I recently had a long and wide-ranging interview with IT Business Edge
on the topic of Social Software technologies.
The intrepid reporter, Ann All, transcribed nearly the whole discussion verbatim
-- a rarity these days! -- and something any analyst (well, at least this analyst)
welcomes only with some trepidation, because you're never (I'm not) as articulate
in a stream-of-consciousness chat than a well-considered article. For example, I was more harsh on SharePoint in the end than I intended to be. Anyway, the
key points come through and I'm not complaining.
Ann also offers some interesting commentary here.
Look for more from us over the coming months on the topic of Social
Software, in these pages and others...
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:04:00 -0400
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| 10. |
Infrastructure Updates for SharePoint
Through the SharePoint product
team's MSDN blog, Microsoft announced that it had released a
significant infrastructure update for SharePoint (and related technologies
like Project Server that leverages SharePoint components). The update seems to
primarily address three areas:
Search functionality and search-related performance (like index performance).
Content Deployment bug fixes (which hopefully will correct a series of irritating
bugs related to deploying content from one SharePoint environment to another
in web content management scenarios). These are include the hotfix packs Microsoft
released for content deployment back in May of this year.
General interface and performance improvements. In reading the three or four
pages in Microsoft's site that aimed to describe what was actually included,
it was difficult to pinpoint what these "improvements" actual mean
to SharePoint administrators. However, Microsoft describes them as "...fixes
and product performance updates driven by customer feedback which have resulted
in significant platform performance improvements..." Again, I was unable
to nail what precisely has changed or how significant the improvements were.
What's interesting, at least with regard to search, is that it seems the "ancillary"
search products like Search Server 2008 (and it's "free" sibling Search
Server Express 2008) are driving updates to SharePoint's search technology.
As mentioned in the SharePoint
Report 2008, Microsoft has invested heavily in improving SharePoint
search. In fact, historically, it seemed as if SharePoint Search was the the
parent of these independent search tools, but it now appears as if "the
student [has become] the master" as Darth Vader said to Obi Wan.
In particular, SharePoint is getting Search Server's federated search capabilities
and "a unified search dashboard." From what I saw at the last SharePoint
conference, both of these search products borrowed very heavily from the SharePoint
interface construct, but improved the visibility of certain configuration settings.
In particular, I liked the ease with which you could configure the federated
search.
However, these changes call into question how this will all play out within
the Shared Services provider and whether administrators who are struggling to
figure out where to go to change search settings -- at the site, site collection,
Central Administration (in the Application or Operation tab) or in Shared Services.
While most key search settings reside in Shared Services, SharePoint has search-relate
configuration in spread over virtually every administrative interface. My hope
is that this "unified search dashboard" brings some order to search
within SharePoint.
In the end, these changes (along with the FAST search integration) also add
more evidence to the theory that Microsoft is going to decouple search from
SharePoint entirely (and potentially the Office team) -- making SharePoint a
client technology. As I blogged about in a post on the completion of the FAST
acquisition, Microsoft seems to be leaning very heavily towards and independent
search product team. And just to add fuel to the conspiratorial fire, this type
of organizational structure might make sense if, say, Microsoft were to acquire
a large Internet-centric search company (although it begs the question what
they'd do with all of this overlapping technology).
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:20:00 -0400
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| 11. |
DAM industry rollup
I recently wrote an article for DOCUMENT Magazine summarizing the state of the digital asset management industry. Readers of our DAM Report 2008 will recognize these as excerpts from the Report's executive summary, but if you're looking for something to put in front of your boss or CEO to give a quick overview of the state of DAM, here's the place to look. It's in a downloadable, print-friendly, magazine-spread format, too.
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:17:00 -0400
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