Synergise IT

Have you ever wondered how much data can your brain hold in bytes? I just did while lazing in bed (and yes I hear you say “Geek”). I didn’t have the answer but Google return this and this. I do not have much understanding of everything but somewhere did say something like 3 terabytes.

A silly Saturday arvo rant. =)

The guys at Infovark wrote a highly interesting post about delivering measurable value through Enterprise 2.0. This is one question I have battled with for ages and ages and I have still yet to come up or read about a good solid value proposition regarding Enterprise 2.0.

As the guys at Infovark stated

Enterprise 2.0 claims to improve efficiency by increasing social productivity. The theory is that by making more information available to more people, and allowing them to connect with each other easily, we can collectively get more done. But does this claim hold true? I’m seeing more and more posts from good folks who can’t deal with the overload of this new social graph. The time spent keeping track of all the communications from all of your contacts might actually make you less productive.

There’s no doubt that a more aware and better connected knowledge worker has the potential to be a more productive one. But the social dimension is only one part of the Enterprise 2.0 equation. In a business context, making connections and managing relationships is a means, not an end.

This is the Big Difference between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 needs to deliver measurable value - not just get a bunch of people together to click on advertisements.

I totally agree with the general idea of social networking not being able to deliver measurable value within an enterprise. However, there are some other areas of enterprise 2.0 that could probably deliver measurable value.

1) Mash ups - building of mashups can help deliver faster, timely and more accurate data from a variety of sources. This will reduce the time taken for employees to hunt down these numbers/data from the sources or through some weekly powerpoint/excel status reports. Value can be measured by the reduction of time spent on searching for something. Also if mashup is done externally for your customers, it can deliver measurable value depending on what kind of mashups you build.

2) Enterprise Search - the first letter of “SLATES” or also part of the “FLATNESSES” Model. This is clear, deliver accurate search results from anywhere within the organisation. Reduce time taken to search for stuff on a crappy search engine (which most organisation’s have today). Value can be measured by the reduction of time spent on searching for something.

3) RSS - Information is power. This delivers timely information to employees and would be exceptionally important for people making decisions based on other internal work streams. This reduces the risk of making a wrong decision. Value can be measured by the reduction of errors due to untimely information.

4) Please contribute to this list…

Google has just invested $500million in a new wireless broadband company and they would be providing search and applications to the network’s users. Coupled with Google’s Android, Google is becoming a big player in the mobiles market.

With the iPhone SDK and Andriod in the market, two big players are investing time and money building their capabilities and also preparing the market to learn, develop and implement applications for the mobile phones. In future, people might receive a brand spanky new phone with capabilities to login to their company’s internal applications and work from their phone.

Now, do I really want that? Currently I spend at least 12 hours a day in front of the computer and sometimes more. I should be exercising, spending time with my family, working on my hobby or any other thing that creates a work-life balance. The last thing I want is to be bothered by ringing emails or a call from the boss to get you to do some stuff. It would be nice if I can access the internet while shopping with my partner and go online to check if the prices of her dress is cheaper online or not. But nothing more!

Many people in companies have “lost” their freedom to emails and with mobile applications coming to your phone, means more time working. It would be a super awesome technology if people can manage it well and I believe many actually do manage it well but for those who can’t, stay clear of this.

I have been exploring many different enterprise 2.0 related open source software and there were two products that came up tops - KnowledgeTree - enterprise grade document manager and Mindtouch - enterprise grade Wiki. Many of the products I have reviewed have highly similar functionality. They do what they are meant to do, store / retrieve documents or collaborate through the Wiki platform - no surprises in this space. However, some of the stuff that I specifically looked at were UI ease of use, scalability, support and APIs. Let’s start with Knowledgetree.

KnowledgeTree is

a open source turn-key document management software designed for business people to install, use and purchase. Collaborate with team members, securely store all your documents and ensure regulatory compliance with absolute ease. With no vendor lock-in and with source code readily available, KnowledgeTree provides a more flexible, cost-effective alternative to proprietary applications.

When I first created a demo account for myself on KnowledgeTree, I browsed around the software and it took me nothing more than 2 mins to figure out the site navigation and general functionalities. It was that simple, things were where there as you expect it to be and no surprises, no dramas. UI was totally simple on the eyes and the site in general was pretty. Excellent features includes drag and drop access to the document repository for Windows, integration into MS office applications, customisable “iGoogle type” dashboard, MetaData support, workflows for managing document generation and integration to your applications via SOAP Web Services. See the full list here.

KnowledgeTree API documentation is good and very comprehensive. Scalability is pretty clear from their list of clients and also from clarification with the sales team at KnowledgeTree. Support from the sales team has also been very very quick and answers were clear. I am very impressed. If you are looking for an open source document manager, look no further, Knowledgetree is the one.

MindTouch Deki Wiki is a enterprise Wiki software. The key to Deki Wiki success and popularity is its ease of use and its SUPER excellent widgets and Web Services support. Its pretty much up to your imagination on what you wanna mashup and display on screen. Check out their service extensions.

For a quick overview of Deki Wiki, please watch video below

When I first tried Deki Wiki, everything was clear and I understood all functionalities very easily. There were no surprises, no dramas. It was super easy to use, WYSIWYG editor is GREAT and there is even imaging support! This is great stuff. I totally love this. I have four words to describe Deki Wiki - Simple, Scalable, Extensible and Flexible.

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However, having said all these, organisations are moving toward enterprise content management (ECM) software and such standalone software is not very helpful in providing a single view of the enterprise. You can argue that organisations can build integration layer between these products but if it came as a package, then a suite of such standalone tools that works nicely together producing an ECM effect, ultimately this would give IBM Filenet, Microsoft SharePoint and similar products a run for their money.

Being in the IT industry for a while, sometimes you lose track of things and let me give you one of mine. I spoke to a non-IT mate of mine recently and was asked why everything in IT is “information-something” just like Information technology, information systems, information management.

I was totally taken by surprised by that statement. I always knew managing information is key to technology but never looked at the terms this way. Well, we learn something new everyday.

Check out AllRise a community court system where you can file complaints / “lawsuits” against anyone or anything and users can join in as the defense or prosecution and fight the case out. However, there isn’t a judge deciding on the case but everyone would be judging the case. People would vote for either sides and the verdict is community driven.

Well, if court cases can be decided by the people then maybe next time, local council, state and maybe even country decisions can be made by the people - at least the simpler stuff. Parties who traditionally hold power and authority is slowly losing their power to online communities. However this will not go down very well with some powerful figures. Since ancient times, people have been fighting for power (amid other things like money, land and people) and with internet taking away the power from these parties, I am not sure how they would react. I do not have an answer to this but I am sure there might be an ugly fight if it does happen in future.

One area of Enterprise 2.0 that I haven’t really explored deeply into is document management. I spent a great deal of time over the last few days checking out various open source document managers and this is my review.

1) KnowledgeTree
This is my favourite. This is a standard document manager that is extremely simple to use. Check out the demo to know what I mean ease of use. There are sample data available for you to play around with.

Knowledgetree has all the standard functionality like check in/out, version control, transaction history and document ID (access the document directly). Special functionality include Microsoft office connector and drag and drop desktop access. One disadvantage is that the content within the documents are NOT searchable. This can be a driving factor why I would not use this product. Natasha from Knowledgetree corrected this error of mine and everyone, I am sorry… KnowledgeTree provides full text indexing on all Office 2003 & 2007 documents, PDF, HTML, Plain Text, Open Office, XML and Postscript Files. Thanks Natasha! =)

You can choose to host it inhouse and the system requirements are:
PHP 5.2.4 upwards
J2SE 5.0 (JRE 5.0)
Apache Web Server
Microsoft Internet Information Server

2) EPIWare
This is also another similar document manager with a just average UI. I feel that this is much harder to use as compared to KnowledgeTree and the UI is not as interactive. However, one big advantage is that the content within the documents are searchable. Disadvantage is that there is no document ID which will make communicating slightly harder.

EPIWare has a wiki included as well but seems pretty hard to use - I haven’t checked it out the wiki fully yet but these are my initial thoughts.

System requirements is really simple the standard Apache, PHP, MySQL

Try it here

3) Alfresco
This is not just a document manager but a pretty full on Enterprise Content Management software (not to be mixed up with CMS - they are two different things). It seems pretty powerful and relatively flexible.

These are the things that Alfresco does.
- Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
- Document Management
- Collaboration
- Records Management
- Knowledge Management
- Web Content Management
- Imaging

This is a pretty complicated and enterprise grade software. Clients includes American Stock Exchange, Electronic Arts, Harvard Business School Publishing and Activision.

System specification can be found here

Threadless and Ponoko are leaders in collaborative designs where consumers, like you and me, with a passion for designing t-shirts or furniture would submit their designs and sell it other consumers who likes the design. Threadless is a community based t-shirt design company where users submit t-shirt designs and users will vote which t-shirts they like. The winning t-shirts would then be mass produced and sold. The designer for the winning t-shirt design would then get a sum of money which is up to $12,500. Ponoko is slightly more complicated - to get a good idea of what they are doing, see this

This has changed the way the market is operating. The old business models of continually innovating on designs and have a strong pool of designers working on new ideas for the new season has been attacked by the world of individual designers who are truly passionate about what they are doing. In Ponoko’s case, consumer can even mashup product designs and create something brand new for themselves!

The above idea is not new. Its somewhat similar to open source software where people come together to develop a software that they are passionate about.

Web 2.0 is hitting the markets faster than you can imagine and either you embrace it or you get left behind.

I might be shot for saying this but lets give it a go. This is a super far fetched idea and more than likely it will never work.

What do you think of a government who just executes the decisions made by the people? People vote for everything that is brought up by the people. I am thinking along the lines of Web 2.0 + democracy!

When I first heard of Twitter, I thought to myself, what on earth are these people thinking? Why would anyone use such a service? I have 4 different instant messengers and I am already overloaded and now there is microblogging… No offence to Twitter - it was due to my lack of insight. However, after using Twitter, I do find that Twitter is a pretty cool tool. But why?

1) You can receive Twitter on your Mobile!

2) It can potentially reach a mass audience (Twitter was used during the California Bush fires and Barak Obama used it in the upcoming US Elections)

3) You can choose to follow anyone on Twitter

With these 3 reasons, Twitter is a great service… Mobile phone is something almost every adult in developed country has and bringing selected updates from people to your mobile makes communication more streamlined and responsive. This is clearly showed by the LA Fire department twitter service. If anyone thinks twitter is the same as facebook or instant messengers, then you are wrong. The differentiating factor is mobile convergence.

On a side note, Twitter is built on Ruby on Rails. So if anyone says Ruby is not scalable, look at Twitter… They are hammered with data from all over the world and they are doing just fine. =)