Synergise IT

Kapow is a business mashup server software that allows you to collect and mashup all the data you want and display it. I attended a walk through with Andrew Lasko from Kapow and was really impressed with the capability of Kapow.

Some of the really cool features of Kapow includes Content Migration, Synchronization and Integration, Transform functionality to mobile compatible and Rapid portlet development. The demo that was present to me was absolutely amazing. It not just some simple screen scraping tool or data collection tool. It has the ability to collect almost anything you can think of structure or un-structured and you can then manipulate the information add some functionality to it and display the stuff you want. In a very skewed way of looking at this, a company could (if they wanted to) do a business transformation project using Kapow.

I am now having a play with the Kapow’s mashup server and would update more when I have finished playing. In the mean time, take a look at the Kapow Demo. Very interesting.

Microsoft has been the market leader in operating systems and their office suite amongst many other products, however looking back in the past couple of years, Microsoft hasn’t been innovating much. Vista was a total let down, there wasn’t any too revolutionary about this platform except for its enhanced UI. Try the Mac OS X or even the free Linux on the Asus eee PC and you will be understand that Vista is nothing too special. I would like to call Vista the “super pro XP”

With Office 2007 costing ~$500 its pretty expensive for a tool that is slowly becoming free on the market with Zoho, Google Docs and Open Office in the market, the cost of $500 is looking less attractive. I do not foresee that Microsoft losing its market share in this area anytime soon but competitors are giving Microsoft is giving a go for its money.

Google and Salesforce has just partnered together to deliver Google Apps for SalesForce. In a relatively bizarre, but totally logical, partnership, Google apps would be infront of Salesforce’s one million paying business subscribers, and in return, Salesforce would be attracting “tens of millions” of business users on Google Apps. With this partnership, a company can reduce the amount of Mircosoft office suites being purchased and can get access to a word processor free of charge if the company is already subscribed to SalesForce. (Google Apps also has a cut down free version for the general public). See video below.

I reckon that for the continual survival of Microsoft has to innovate and challenge the market. There are great innovators out there like Google, Jive Software and many others. Microsoft needs to learn from some of the top innovators and challenge their products both on features and price. Having said this, they can choose to continue to doing whatever they are doing and still there will be heaps of people out there that would continue to by their stuff due to a strong brand name. They win either ways… Its a question of how much they win by.

Pareto’s 80 - 20 rule states that, for many events, 80% of the effects comes from 20% of the causes. Therefore if this theory holds true, I am proposing that in Enterprise 2.0, where employees contribute to the knowledge base of the company, 80% of the contribution comes from 20% of the employees.

My question would then be if this is the case, does it mean that if the organisation is too small, Enterprise 2.0 would not be too effective?

ClearSpace has been upgraded and this is an extremely exciting time for Enterprise 2.0. Jive has upgraded ClearSpace in some major ways like more drag and drop, enabling more social networking within the organisation and a XMPP cloud which allows outsiders to gain access to some stuff within ClearSpace. Check it out!

Jive also bought Jotlet which Jive plans to use their expertise to enhance their calendar functionality within Jive’s suite of software.

Community blogging has been one area that hasn’t taken off very well so far. When I speak of community blogging, I mean people living in the same area blogging collectively and writing stuff that matters to their daily life, whatever that might mean. However, New Zealand blog, Flying Pickle seems to have done it right. With a regular flow of new post and with the best posts being selected every month and would be delivered as news letters to the 6500 strong community in Korokoro, Maungaraki and Normandale.

Zetaprints has released a case study on Flying Pickles and it discusses the numbers, costs and other details regarding how a blog can be converted and made into a mini news service. Have a read, its pretty interesting how blogs can change the traditional structure of news agency.

I have just finished reading Wikinomics and I must say its a truly fantastic book. The main focus is on collaboration and it goes into detail about how collaboration can work with your customers, your suppliers, the general public, the world and most importantly, within your own organisation. This book provides alot of examples and strong cases of evidence of how collaboration can work. However if you are looking for a 3 step answer to successful collaboration, go somewhere else and before you go, let me say “good luck”.

The authors provided some guidelines to implementing the different aspects of collaboration and I must say that they are guidelines only. As every company’s structure, culture, environment and capability is different, different approaches needs to be taken. This book has provided me with a better understanding and heaps more examples I can take with me to my clients. =)

E-commerce Times wrote a summary of the Enterprise / Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008 based on a Forrester article.

Interesting enough most of the stuff that organisations are interested in are relatively cheap. Social networks and RSS is something that any advance geek within the IT department can cook up within a couple of weeks. What I would be interested to see is how and which part of the organisation are companies applying business mashups to. Business mashups is clearly very powerful. With mashup applications going into exisiting data stores and aggregating / manipulating / processing data and displaying to the end user. This is a much cheaper way than doing a full fledge IT transformation.

Another thing that really interest me is whether these initiatives within the company is driven by employees (bottom-up) or by the senior management (top-down). In both cases, the implementation would be slightly different and I would like to know the adoption rate of both the implementation approaches. I believe that 2008 will be an extremely interesting year for Enterprise / Web 2.0 within the organisation. Stay tuned

BuddyPress is the answer to social networks on WordPress. Soon enough, you can have your own little facebook running within your blog and a simple blog can be transformed your personal social network with photos, private messenging and groups. How cool is that!

Buddypress has not been officially launched, so stay tuned for the great work the open source community is doing…

Google Docs newest functionality - offline access, is a great step towards integrating their “Office” suite into the day to day life of users. Google Docs is a great idea, online collaboration, sharing, communication and if used properly, you might even be able to achieve some levels of collective intelligence (read - web 2.0)

However, to make this application main stream and widely used, Google needs to bring this into the office. I would say that a large percentage of “Office” type software is being used at the workplace and thats where the money is.

Having said this, I do not think many organisations are keen to take up Google Apps due to privacy, security and psychological issues of having the data stored in someone else’s backyard. Google needs to release a GSA (Google Search Appliance) type box and allow companies to be able to host it within their own firewalls and network. I believe this will increase the adoption rate of not only Google Docs but the whole Google Apps suite.