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Yammer – Putting the Cart before the Horse?

By paulb@conceptsearching.com on April 14, 2013 in Blog, Cloud, Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0

Is Microsoft’s Yammer a push for social or a hammer over the heads of customers stating we will indeed use Yammer? According to Jared Spataro, who heads the Office Division at Microsoft called it Microsoft’s ‘big bet’ for social. That may very well be. Only time will tell. The newest change – at least that I know of – is the ability to replace the SharePoint News Feed with the Yammer News Feed. Pretty innocuous. Over time the plan is to combine social, collaboration, email, instant messaging, voice, video, and line of business applications. That is assuming customers are willing to participate in a multi-tenant cloud service.

So what’s my point? Right now, social is not a high priority with customers, nor is it necessarily embraced by typical upper management. At the other end of the spectrum user adoption is a huge problem. I believe that you cannot compare a ‘consumers’ use of social to a ‘business’ use of social. In a previous blog I received a lot of great comments on LinkedIn commenting on within the walls of a company, end users do not behave the same as they do outside of those four walls. That change will take time. I participated in an independent Yammer group of topic experts just to get the feel of it – and one day a participant asked if they could start a different group as there was too much noise going on. The same can actually more easily happen within the organization. For this person, over time it was losing value.

Being from the ‘old school’ I still don’t see the ROI. Maybe there isn’t meant to be one. It is just a transition step to get us from where we are today to where the Microsoft’s of the world want us to be in the future. Although I still say show me the ROI, increase my rate of adoption, and prove the value. Let’s put the horse in front of the cart and not behind it.

Thoughts?

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Office 365 – How To Achieve Non-Intrusive Information Governance

By paulb@conceptsearching.com on April 12, 2013 in Blog, Cloud, Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0

The automatic generation of semantic metadata removes the end user from the tagging process as well as the subjective ambiguity. It also enables content to be related in a meaningful way without end user involvement. This enhances the value of knowledge far beyond the original intent, and expands the value of content to be accessed and used by multiple stakeholders who may or may not have known the content existed. This transforms the content into a knowledge asset as the data can be trusted, is reliable, and is correct.

The ability to generate conceptual metadata enables the sharing of information, but the lack of metadata guarantees that the data will be difficult to share, if at all. Comprehensive metadata that can capture the meaning of content improves decision making across the global organization.

Ok, sounds great but how does that relate to Office 365? This capability is core to deploying an information governance strategy both internally and externally to the cloud. What are the benefits?

Security, compliance, legal requirements, and data privacy can be more easily enforced before it becomes available on the cloud or classified within the cloud
Content can be automatically classified to organizational taxonomies within or outside of the cloud making the content available and easily found by stakeholders depending on their security access
Automatically removes and protects organizationally defined confidential/privacy content
Removes the subjectivity associated with erroneous meta tags and adds rich metadata to content without metadata
Encourages collaboration for geographically dispersed knowledge workers who can all access the most relevant content
Becomes an enabler for organizations to begin to make sense of text analytics for unstructured content

If you could eliminate end user tagging across on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments to enable use/re-use and availability of the knowledge asset and that the integrity of the asset would be maintained would this be important to you?

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Microsoft Cloud Services – We were just having a bad day. Oops, days.

By paulb@conceptsearching.com on April 10, 2013 in Blog, Cloud, Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0

Despite the fact that Microsoft has multiple datacenters located worldwide, with globally redundant, enterprise grade reliability with automatic failover and a strict privacy policy and a 99.9% financially backed Service Level Agreement (SLA), accidents do occur.

Moving to cloud based services is still considered risky, but the benefits seem to be outweighing the cons. But the cons can’t be ignored. Let’s first look at hackers. The increase in hacking is on the rise with nefarious gangs of hackers springing up globally and targeting the largest organizations. Major breaches at Google, Salesforce.com, Twitter, and Amazon have all proven that there are hidden costs and repercussions from compromised data.

But some outages and problems can be directly attributed to carelessness within the organization. Not to pick on Microsoft, February 23, 2013 was not a good day inside the walls of Redmond. First the world wide Azure cloud service went offline due to an expired security certificate. If that wasn’t bad enough, they discovered a malware infection on internal computers (already discovered and fixed by Twitter, Facebook, and Apple) had crept into Microsoft in-house systems. Add to that the continuing woes of security holes in Java. Although Java 7 was supposed to address these holes it appears that they continue.

A week or so later, Microsoft users went through a similar ordeal which mostly affected Hotmail, Outlook.com and SkyDrive — three of Microsoft’s more essential cloud services. The service interruption was caused primarily to Hotmail.com and Outlook.com when they “suffered from a service interruption caused by a firmware update which failed “in an unexpected way”, according to Microsoft’s Vice President Arthur de Haan. The failed firmware update occurred in one of Microsoft’s datacenters, in a “core part” of its physical plant, subsequently leading to a “substantial temperature spike in the datacenter”. The heat was “significant enough” causing the “safeguards to come in to place for a large number of servers in this part of the datacenter”. In that area of the datacenter Microsoft houses “parts of the Hotmail.com, Outlook.com, and SkyDrive infrastructure”.

In a just released update, Office 365/Outlook users and administrators are experiencing transition problems. The ‘fix’ for this supposedly non-disruptive transition is to verify the configuration on every device, which could be extremely cumbersome. Microsoft’s guidelines to Partners state: “In an effort to keep your service upgrade experience as seamless as possible, we suggest that you take a few minutes to validate that your current environment is configured properly. Prior to upgrade it is important that you verify your Autodiscover and MX records in DNS, as well as ensuring that your clients are up-to-date with the versions listed below. Failure to do so could result in your Outlook clients being unable to connect to their mailboxes after the Service Upgrade occurs.”

This isn’t necessarily indicative of Microsoft cloud services, as they are in the same boat as others. Should we just chalk it up to the organization having a few bad days? Or is oversight somewhat lax? Do these types of potential issues impact your decision when selecting a cloud application vendor?

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Office 365 – Aspirin versus a Headache?

By paulb@conceptsearching.com on April 8, 2013 in Blog, Cloud, Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0

Microsoft is making a big push for Office 365 and is touting the savings being achieved by early adopters. Are the savings there? Sure they are. Organizations can reduce costs significantly. In a recent article in Information Week, ‘Office 365 Gets the Thumbs Up in Kansas City’, Kansas City is expected to reap a savings of $600K per year and have reduced their data center by 26 servers. A very compelling ROI.

Turning the page, let’s look at a different scenario. Approximately 45% of Internet users (not necessarily business users) still use Windows XP or Windows Vista. Guess what – Office 365 won’t work with either of those operating systems. Office on Demand has pretty stringent requirements too and requires Windows 7 or 8 and a modern browser. Have any Google users that would like to synch Gmail to Outlook 2013? A no go unless you use IMAP.

Although these drawbacks are not necessarily business problems, they are if you are analyzing the accessibility for multiple users (think hundreds to thousands) who have multiple PC configurations and the expected ROI. I have never run across a company where every user is using the same configuration and operating system, let alone are all up-to-date and current. Rather defeats the purpose of Office 365 if people can’t access it.

With the new and growing trend for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) I would be interested in knowing if you are considering Office 365 and if you have identified any issues with the potential mismatch of technical requirements for your end user devices? Has that swayed or delayed your decision?

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Moffitt Cancer Center Case Study – Helping Those Help Themselves

By marting@conceptsearching.com on March 11, 2013 in Blog, Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0, Enterprise Metadata Management, Search

We all see case studies all the time. Obviously they are success stories or no one would be writing about them. Although this case study used our technology, it illustrates the power of technology and technical and business expertise when combined can actually make a difference in people’s lives.

Microsoft recently published a case study on Moffitt Cancer Center. Our partner Aeturnum, along with Moffitt crafted a solution using FAST for Internet Sites (now part of SharePoint Search in SharePoint 2013) and our Smart Content Framework™.

The end result was a portal to enable cancer patients and caregivers a single access point where they could educate themselves and find information pertinent to their condition. Over the past 18 months the ‘My Moffitt Patient Portal’ continues to grow, now with more than 33K users, and 89% of patients signing up for a portal account.

Being very familiar with cancer it’s refreshing to read how technology solutions can become enablers and truly help people as they face very challenging futures.

Kudos to Aeturnum and the vision of Moffitt to make a difference in the lives of so many.

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Business Social Collaboration – the Greatest Invention Since Sliced Bread?

By marting@conceptsearching.com on March 4, 2013 in Blog, Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0

I try to follow ‘social collaboration’ trends within the enterprise. I have noticed there doesn’t seem to be any middle ground. It’s like pitting a liberal against a conservative and expecting them to play well together. Some think it is the greatest invention since sliced bread and will solve all our business problems, others see it as something to be ignored and maybe it will go away. In some form, ‘business’ collaboration and social applications have been around for many years yet have never really caught on.

For those in the holy grail camp, mass collaboration is what every organization should strive for. But is it practical – or even useful? The biggest problem as defined by these gurus is end user adoption issues. I would say that in many cases, social collaboration is not really embraced by end users as a business enabler but as more routine work to address and fit into their already busy schedule. The pace of organizations today is fast and agile and will continue to be to stay competitive and achieve objectives. Perhaps in agreement with the gurus, many end users are actually stuck in their routines (think stop using email and use collaboration instead).

These tools, however sophisticated they have become must be adaptable in that they facilitate collaboration, not hinder it. They have to work within the boundaries of the business culture of the organization and are not a one size fits all. It has to accommodate the way teams work and provide rich and flexible ways to improve how they work, interact, and make decisions. It must not change the organizational culture but improve it.

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer will make a dent in the adoption rates of business social collaboration. End user training, organizational education, and the adaptability of the tools are an imperative. But for right now it’s appears to be placing a round peg in a square hole.

WDYT?

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What the heck? Tell me what to call it.

By carlam@conceptsearching.com on February 7, 2013 in Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0, SharePoint, SharePoint 2013

Since I am in marketing I can’t seem to pin down what to call ‘social networking’ as a good ‘umbrella’ term. It appears that I am not alone – please see below what professionals are calling themselves. But back to the ‘correct’ term. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

Social networking
Social networking tools
Social automation
Social computing
Social business
Social media
Social collaboration
Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0
Knowledge Management

The last bullet is an odd ball as it is no longer considered a relevant term and is in disfavor by many, but I have seen the term when referring to “social ?” (I’m quite sure I left some out). Now at a granular level we can probably find differentiators for each term. I have one colleague who still doesn’t know what Enterprise and Web 2.0 are, no matter how many times I explain it to him. He constantly tells me that real people don’t know what that means, oh well.

Oddly enough, coinciding to writing this blog, it seems that ‘social’ professionals are now jumping on this bandwagon. In a blog by Brittany Ballenstedt she wrote, “In January 2013, the number of Twitter users with “social media” as part of their bio has grown significantly, to 181,000, up from a mere 16,000 in 2009. “Maven” and “ninja” were nearly tied for being used the most – nearly 22,000 times. Other popular titles were “evangelist” (20,829), “guru” (18,363) and “consultant” (9,031). “At this rate, everyone on Twitter will soon be a social media guru,” Ad Age’s B.L. Ochman writes.”

From a business perspective, what do you think is the best umbrella term to incorporate the various components? Or should there be unique distinctions in terms and not one ‘umbrella’ term. What does your organization use?

And, if you are an expert in social media, what title do you prefer?

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OSINT? Part of your business?

By carlam@conceptsearching.com on February 1, 2013 in Big Data, Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0, Search

I don’t necessarily pride myself (that would be a little too cocky) but I believe I am somewhat informed on relevant technology as it relates to search, metadata, taxonomies, etc. I can (sometimes) stump the boss but this time he stumped me with the term OSINT (open source intelligence). I can honestly say I had no idea what it is. So back to the ‘trusted’ Wikipedia source which states:

“Open source intelligence (OSINT) is a form of intelligence collection management that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence. In the intelligence community (IC), the term “open” refers to overt, publicly available sources (as opposed to covert or classified sources); it is not related to open-source software or public intelligence.

OSINT is distinguished from research in that it applies the process of intelligence to create tailored knowledge supportive of a specific decision by a specific individual or group.”

It’s actually a rather fascinating subject. To certain government agencies and specifically Intelligence communities I can clearly understand the importance of OSINT. Most likely a requirement. However, let’s consider a large organization (or could be mid-size or small), would they (or do they) use OSINT for Competitive Intelligence, Business Intelligence, and/or Commercial Intelligence remembering that according to Wikipedia, it is different than research.

One of the examples for business in the Wikipedia definition in addition to the above included information brokers and private investigators that includes media, deep web, web 2.0 and commercial content as sources for OSINT. Again, understand that one.

Does your organization use OSINT? Can you share why?

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How many times can I pick the wrong search result?

By marting@conceptsearching.com on December 18, 2012 in Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0

With all the social networking hype abounding, specifically by Microsoft and the big push of Yammer, I have taken a step back and tried to sort this out. Collaboration, connecting users and relevant content is certainly a step in the right direction. But, there is a difference when we talk about these functions within the four walls of an enterprise. Not that I am a control freak, but at what point can this get out of control and become an unproductive distraction? If it doesn’t work as users expect from the beginning they will abandon the use of it.

With search functions pushing what ‘others’ like and feel, and rankings based on access not necessarily relevance consider the following from ‘Using the Internet: Skill Related Problems in User Online Behavior’; van Deursen & van Dijk; 2009. Although it specifically applies to Internet versus Enterprise search the results are still interesting.

• 56% of searchers constructed poor queries
• 33% had difficulty navigating/orienting search results
• 36% did not go beyond the first 3 search results (not pages, results on page 1)
• 91% did not go beyond the first page of search results
• 55% selected irrelevant results 1 or more times

Of course, searchers on the Internet are quite different than enterprise searchers. Is the search engine smarter than us or do we always believe that the search engine is bringing back relevant results? With social networking relevancy is determined by how many links, mentions, etc. It doesn’t deal with the ‘value’ of that information to that specific end user. How will new functions in Enterprise Search tools (i.e. social and collaboration) help or hinder the organization?

Your thoughts?

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