Intranet Benchmarking Forum

Is Bill Gates right? - Will SharePoint 2007 replace email

Is Bill Gates right? He said that the adoption of social networking-type applications within companies would drive the next generation of business software and growth. Collaborative technologies, which imitate popular social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, would become as ubiquitous in the workplace as Microsoft Office tools such as word processing and spreadsheets were in the 1980s and 1990s.

Gates was speaking to an audience of more than 100 chief executives at Microsoft's Redmond. Applications such as Microsoft's SharePoint Server, which allows employees to work collaboratively and share information in a Web-based format on corporate intranets, would likely come to replace email as the dominant form of corporate communications,

Gates said, as they are more efficient in allowing companies to delegate responsibility and accountability to a wider range of employees. "When we think about information that empowers people, we think about electronic mail," Gates said. "That form of communication is inefficient when you get to having to make decisions that include groups." Web-based collaborative software leads to "direct empowerment of end-users so it doesn't require the time delay and cost of getting things done," he said.

It's a nice idea and one that Gates would love to see happen I guess. It seems there is a view that SharePoint 2007 will become the default intranet platform just as Outlook did with email. But intranets are multiple services - rather than one service (as with email) - but there is already a decline in email use in my life through increasing use of  other tools - blog posts, facebook, twitter, IM, Skype.......and the list goes on. That said, email still remains solid in its role.......one to watch!

The Semantic Intranet

We’re into the final editing of the Intranet Futures paper I’ve been working on. Following the previous post about trends in Intranet Futures, I wanted to focus specifically on one topic that I’m finding quite exciting. A groundswell of activity around semantic technology promises to have a major impact on enterprise information discovery. Which means, simply speaking, that the power of Intranets to deliver relevant and useful information when needed may soon begin to be fully realized.

In the paper, I discuss how the number of applications using semantic technologies to describe data will grow, along with user-friendly lenses that facilitate the ability to view and combine data and relationships in different ways.

For years, there’s been a frustrating chasm between Intranets, knowledge and work processes. And when organizations finally begin to understand the value of connecting these into a seamless experience, even the best technology struggles to make sense of the unstructured and meaningless morass of information that burdens most enterprise information systems.

I recently spent an afternoon talking with Sean Martin of the Cambridge, MA-based company Cambridge Semantics. As we chatted, it quickly became clear to me how powerful this technology is, and how the pieces of the solution; common languages, formats and ontologies, are finally coalescing to allow for some real-world examples of the semantics in action.

But, explained Sean, “Semantically described and integrated information does not reach its potential unless it surfaces to managers, scientists, and knowledge workers in flexible applications that adapt dynamically to changing contexts and requirements.”

To achieve this, Intranet management teams will need big-picture thinkers who have both a wide view of enterprise information flows and a focused understanding of how individuals in an organization work. Imagination and creativity will also be needed to identify and deliver these unique and powerful views into the enterprise.

Today’s nascent semantic projects may be located in the research departments or test labs of a typical larger enterprise. Getting these projects out of the lab and surfaced up to the accessible, consumed layer of the Intranet that most employees see day to day will be the main challenge for Intranet leaders and CIOs in near future.

To prepare for this, today’s Intranet managers must begin to think more deeply and strategically about the future of company information systems, and do their part to engage with research and IT teams to make the semantic Intranet a reality.

The reason I find semantics so exciting is not only the promise of the technologies themselves, but additionally in the potential semantics has of evolving the role and mission of the Intranet manager. Semantics may be, finally, the place where enterprise data architects come out of the corner to shake hands with the Intranet team. And, in turn, the Intranet team moves beyond content templates and UE standards to understand and implement the tools that will turn their Intranet into the the powerful and valuable information system it can and should be.

For more information about the IBF Research Programme please visit the services section of www.ibforum.com

Realising the potential of personalisation

There is much debate about the value and success of personalisation on the intranet. The IBF have just released a new research report on this topic, by Abigail Lewis-Bowen. It examines why organisations are getting such mixed results despite the expectations on personalisation to reduce information overload for employees and ensure they get the right information. The report also looks at the impact of Web 2.0 technologies such as RSS and tagging on more traditional personalisation techniques.

One of the issues that intranet managers face in successfully implementing personalisation, is the sheer amount of effort and hard work that go into getting it right, and without which it fails to deliver on it’s promise. Implementers face a number of key challenges:

• Mapping content to user profiles
• Developing accurate profile data
• Awkward user experience
• Meeting the needs of all users

Abigail then goes on to look at the ground rules for effective personalisation (such as common authentication for users, straightforward publishing processes for content authors, and pre-populating profile data) and the importance of measuring to track success (such as satisfaction, use and productivity).

As well as looking at personalisation from the more traditional, rules-based perspective, the report also examines how social computing tools such as RSS, tagging and mash-ups can enhance this approach. These tools allow the user greater control over content, achieving a balance of ‘push’ and ‘pull’, as well as leveraging information gathered from user behaviours. However these technologies will take time for people to adopt, while the basic ground rules for successful personalisation still remain key to realising it's full potential.

IBF members can download the report from the extranet (PDF file).

Why face to face meetings are under threat!

Most organisations and business groupings have grown with a cultural habit of physical or face to face meetings. We have all historically travelled distances small or large to sit in rooms with colleagues or peers to exchange words.

For decades no one gave this routine much thought - aside from some organisations that questioned the value of meetings generally from time to time. But technology mediated meetings are now re-casting face to face meetings profoundly. The advent of usable services for talking, sharing content through screens and for viewing each other in some instances, has started to shift our thinking.

• Do we need to meet physically and why?
• Which meetings can and should be online?
• What are the upsides and downsides?

The rationale for NOT meeting physically is clear:

• Saving time
• Saving travel cost
• Saving carbon impact
• Reducing stress

In my own work and that of IBF we have a default assumption that meetings should be online unless there are clear reasons for meeting in person. Reasons to meet in person seem to be:

• Relationship building
• Handling sensitive matters - particularly personal issues
• Concentrating at high levels

Beyond that we struggle to see the need to meet physically. What is interesting is how one face to face meetings can then provide enough foundation for online meetings for up to 12 - 18 months.

Many people still baulk at this thinking, believing we will end up working in atomized worlds where we are left in technical isolation. That is just not true in practice if we start to understand how to select meeting formats based on the above criteria. Timothy Leary, the Harvard Professor and LSD "Guru" who before his death saw the internet future clearly said that "in the future, all physical meetings will become sacred".

What did he mean? He meant, in my view, that when we do meet in person, it will be for a good and compelling reason that gives the meeting real value. It is somehow "wrong" on many levels to sit in a meeting with content that could be easily shared online. It offends our planet and shows a lack of technical understanding.

Face to face meetings and events and conferences are essentially at the end of their shelf life. We have exhausted the medium of face to face meetings. We know what they can do and no matter how good the agenda, no matter how well facilitated and how smart the venue, the value limits are now defined. Most conferences we attend are just an excuse to chat to peers in coffee breaks.......i.e. a chance for relationship and trust building. In my pertsonal view, they are also a brutal and expensive indulgence environmentally and organisations should consider boycotting such events from a corporate ethics stance.

On the other hand, we are in the foothills in our knowledge of how to use online meetings. We experiment, make mistakes, learn, progress - all the while the technology advances. Still most organisations are nervous or at early stages in using these meeting tools but this will advance in coming decades and face to face meetings will counter (as they are now) to flounder.

The interesting area that is virtually never mentioned is the power that comes from seeing how the online and offline meetings can work together. One example we are experimenting with at IBF is IBF 24. This is a 24 hour online global intranet gathering we are hosting for intranet managers and team on 18 - 19 June. We are pioneering a new meeting format with live material, talks etc with several hundred online at any one moment. The intriguing part is that attendees will be located in their own offices with colleagues or other visiting organisations and they will participate together.

The cost of attending is a fraction of attending a conference in person: no travel, hotels or expensive event passes and no carbon impact and no travel stress. But by attending online "together" colleagues can experience the face to face with the online. Other exercises have been conducted on smaller scales in some enterprises but this IBF 24 pilot event will try to innovate in the online space.

Why are we all still investing so much time and energy in the exhausted medium of face to face meetings when meetings enabled through technology offer so much more scope and experience?

Mashup - putup or shutup?

The prospect of any user letting loose home-brew applications on a corporate intranet is probably the stuff of nightmares for many intranet managers (don't worry, this isn't a geeky Halloween story). However, several companies are working on mashup tools that allow non-programmers to put together new applications, building-block style. These include Microsoft Popfly (see Microsoft launches mashup tool for non-techies' ) and Yahoo! Pipes. A good example of a mashup is housingmaps.com that takes apartment advertisements from Craigslist.com (a very text based interface) and plots them on a Google map.

Such tools were there in the original vision of Web 2.0, but have yet to achieve the recognition of other technologies ('Web 2.0' currently being almost synonymous with 'blogsandwikis'). The mashup technologies are still immature and require a much more technical mindset than something like a wiki. However, the popularity of applications in Facebook is starting to expose a broader range of people to to the idea of 'disposable' mini applications running on a browser page.

Therefore its highly likely that mashups will begin to permeate the intranet world. Some see the technology as the natural successor to the portal and portlet approach that struggled to take off (or the web-part concept in SharePoint). Currently, most portal environments have strict controls over code deployed on servers to make sure that rogue programming doesn't threaten the platform.

So should intranet managers welcome mashups? I think they should. They fill a gap for niche-need applications that wouldn't have a strong business case if done by a full-blown IT team, and for which there may be greater tolerance for quirks so long as people accept that they're home-grown. Many organisations had Lotus Notes developers that could knock together a custom database application in relatively little time and few intranets have yet been able to replace that functionality. This is one reason why many Notes installations are like the living dead in corporate IT (couldn't resist another Halloween reference) . Mash-ups could fill that gap, and just as with Notes, I don't expect all users will create applications, but instead there'll be a group of people that develop the skills to help their colleagues.

This isn't to say that intranet should become a free-for all though - just that the governance around it should be at the right level:

• interface standards should still be encouraged
• the infrastructure to host these applications needs to be set up so that they can't affect other services
• mashup applications need to carry a health warning so that users intuitively understand that what they're using may not be 'industrial strength'.

Then step back and wait for the monster mash-up ;-)

Giving a face to your feedback

There's a story (probably apocryphal) of a woman who was driving to a job interview and running late. To make an already stressful situation worse,  another driver cut her up. Incensed, she swore at him and made a typical road-rage gesture then sped off. She made it to the appointment with just a few minutes to spare and took a second to compose herself outside the door. When she walked into the meeting room she recognised her interviewer immediately... it was the driver of the other car.

I was reminded of this when speaking to a communications manager about why she didn't like discussion boards on their intranet. "People are much harsher online than they are face to face, the whole tone is just more negative somehow", she said.

I think she had a good point - its the anonymity of road rage and discussion boards that make people more blunt. Possibly they're also more inclined to exaggerate a point to make sure they've been 'heard' because theres often no response either.

The same thing happens when an intranet has a link to "feedback@thisorg.com". As a portal manager I had to remind myself that when users didn't hold back on expressing their frustration, it wasn't personal. But then I was keeping it impersonal by just giving them a box to fill in.

We therefore always recommend that feedback mechanisms should make it clear who the real person is behind it. Give the real email address of a site owner, or call the discussion board "ask Jack..." rather than "Your feedback" and make it clear how quickly you will respond.

Intranet search still a poor cousin

We started to include intranet search – for people and content – as part of the standard IBF design evaluation in 2006. Now in August 2007, we have seen quite a few different implementations, but with only a few exceptions, intranet search is still very much a poor cousin to the public internet variety. People search, in particular, is fond of declaring ‘no results found’ when a user has made only a simple single-character typing error, leaving them with no choice but to try various permutations until they get lucky. At least with a printed staff directory, frustrated users could thumb through until they found what they needed, but most intranets lack the electronic version of this fallback solution. Quite simply, if you don’t know how to spell the name you are looking for, you’re stuck.

Ironically, one of the solutions we have been persuading intranet managers to take up is almost a century older than intranets themselves. Soundex is a fairly simple set of rules to turn similar-sounding names into a four-letter code. It does have some drawbacks and should not replace a simple text match as the first step in a search, but it is implemented by most scripting languages and is fairly forgiving of spelling and typographical errors.

Content search does a little better in our scoring, but even here we find poor regard for the user experience, with no mention of the original text searched for and scolding messages for choosing search terms that yield too many results. Yet public internet search is very big business indeed, with companies like Google and Microsoft falling over each other to retain or capture market share, respectively. The driving force behind this enthusiasm is advertising. Unfortunately, there are no similar forces at work on intranets. While a few enterprising organizations do actually carry third-party advertising on some pages, the economic model for getting search right is completely different. It is all to do with saving time and frustration within a captive audience. So what is needed is a means of measuring and improving the perceived value of search within an organisation. Knowing how long a user has spent searching and whether they were successful would be a step in the right direction, but there is little evidence that even this basic level of measurement is taking place. Perhaps this is something we should be including in our benchmarks? Let us know what you think.

SharePoint Serving Suggestions

The launch of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 certainly seems to have generated some interest - I would say the majority of intranet managers that I've spoken to are considering it as a potential platform to migrate to. However, SharePoint is not a single product or even a suite (like Office) but, in Microsoft's own words, a "Set of Products and Technologies". This can make it hard to work out exactly what you're looking at when you see a demonstration. Its even more of a concern if you only plan to buy one component without a clear answer as to what else this may be committing you to further down the line.

Mary Jo Foley on ZDNet recently blogged on "SharePoint: The next big ‘operating system’ from Microsoft?". Viewing Sharepoint as an Operating System brings a useful perspective to what deployment might entail. Microsoft sees it as a middle-tier,  "It is the 'missing link'  between personal productivity and line-of-business applications" says Foley (paraphrasing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer).

It helps to bear in mind that there are two main elements:

1. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) - this primarily gives the team collaboration element for sharing documents, discussions, team Wikis etc. This is what most people know SharePoint as because it was part of the Windows Server 2003 installation.
2. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) - this is the glue that joins it all together and is closes to the idea of a portal with associated services like search and content management.

You can use WSS without MOSS, but what you create will feel like little islands of information. As soon as people complain that they can't keep track of all their WSS team spaces then you'll need something to glue them all together - and I bet you can guess what the answer is!

The third thing to consider when looking into SharePoint is what degree of functionality you'll get when interacting with your legacy systems. This includes things that only become fully functional with the latest versions of  Office 2007, Exchange, SQL Server etc.  I was involved in one comparison of SharePoint against an existing Portal installation. On paper SharePoint appeared to offer many exciting features compared to what was installed, but in reality the existing Portal could do almost as much on paper too - the issue was that neither system could deliver everything when confronted with the practical reality of a typical corporate IT landscape, legacy systems and all.

Just like buying a ready meal in the supermarket, remember that the appetizing picture on the front is only a "serving suggestion", you may not find all the ingredients in the packet.

Further reading:  An informal history of SharePoint gives some insight into how Microsoft has ended up where it has, and the anomailes of e.g. Groove not quite fitting in yet.