Online Office Suites - Part 1

There has been a lot of talk lately about online office suites, or Office 2.0, with the mandatory 2.0 moniker. The acquisition of Writely by Google in early March 2006 rekindled speculations that online office suites where back for good and provided a real threat to the dominant Microsoft Office position.

I believe there are some strong arguments for this, this time. If we take the new entrants in that space through a classic Clayton Christensen analysis, new online office suites clearly have new market disruptions characteristics. Compared to Microsoft Office, they provide:

• Lower performance in "traditional attributes" but improved performance in new attributes, simplicity and convenience
• Target non-consumption: customers who historically lacked the money or skill to buy or use the product. The standard version of Office costs about $400 where most online office suites are typically free.
• The business model of these new entrants make money at a much lower price per unit sold.

In addition, Microsoft's monopoly on the Office suite market has created strong regulatory pressures on the company and has forced it to transform its integrated, differentiated, proprietary file format into a more modularized and standardized file format (see OpenXML), that will drive towards the commoditization of the Office suite. If a user can produce and open any Office documents with about any Office suite application, including a free one, why would someone spend $400 for MS Office 2007? These technology factors combined with the "good enough" user experience factor will create significant competitive pressure over the coming year and Google has definitely recognized the opportunity as it gears up with its Docs and Spreadsheets applications from the Writely acquisition and soon to come, a Presently offering for presentations that will presumably support the OpenXML PresentationML format.

Over the next few weeks, I will take a look at a few of those online Office suites.

Mashup for the Enterprise? A look at QEDWiki

IBM announced early February the release of QEDWiki for the Enterprise. QED stands for "Quickly and Easily Done" and is intended to be a tool for mashups in the enterprise. As IBM puts it:

QEDWiki is a browser-based assembly canvas used to create simple mash-ups. A mash-up maker is an assembly environment in which the creator of a mash-up uses software components (or services) made available by content providers. QEDWiki is a unique Wiki framework in that it provides both Web users and developers with a single Web application framework for hosting and developing a broad range of Web 2.0 applications.

QEDWiki also provides Web application developers with a flexible and extensible framework to enable do-it-yourself (DIY) rapid prototyping. Business users can quickly prototype and build ad hoc applications without depending on software engineers. QEDWiki provides mash-up enablers (programmers) with a framework for building reusable, tag-based commands. These commands (or widgets) can then be used by business users who wish to create their own Web applications.

To see QEDWiki in action, check out an introduction and an insurance claims use case videos on YouTube.

With QEDWiki, Lotus Connection and Lotus Quickr, IBM has been riding the Enterprise 2.0 wave at full speed. Those products are definitely innovative and very interesting. It just bodes the question on how do you position one versus the other versus Websphere Portal, Quickplace and Workplace if you are an IBM sales rep...

Web 2.0... The Machine is Us/ing Us

I came across a video produced by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology from Kansas State University that I found to be very well done. Instead of looking at Web 2.0 through the usual lenses of collaboration, social networking, wikis and folksonomies, it takes a fresh time machine approach to describing how end users became the engine of the Internet and some of the societal questions that result from this transformation. This is very refreshing.

A transcript is available on Digital Ethnography's blog.

Internet Users and Tagging

The Pew Internet & American Life Project just published a report on tagging. Some very interesting findings from the report:

• A December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.
• Taggers look like classic early adopters of technology. They are more likely to be under age 40, and have higher levels of education and income.
• Taggers are considerably more likely to have broadband connections at home, rather than dial-up connections. Men and women are equally likely to be taggers, while online minorities are a bit more likely than whites to be taggers.
• The act of tagging is likely to be embraced by a more mainstream population in the future because many organizations are making it easier and easier to tag internet content.

More details on the demographics of taggers are provided below:


In his upcoming book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder,
Weinberger describes how radical it is for people to move away from hierarchical classifications. His prediction:

We'll also undoubtedly figure out how to intersect tags with social networks, so that the tags created by people we know and respect have more “weight” when we search for tagged items. In fact, by analyzing how various social groups use tags, we can do better at understanding how seemingly different worldviews map to one another.

The New Era of The Long Tail of the Pharmaceutical Industry?

I came across a good article on the New York Times this morning, The Dangers of Swinging for the Fences by Joe Nocera. Reading this article, I could not help but think whether the pharmaceutical industry had entered a new era where addressing the long tail of drugs production would be the next evolution for that industry.

Joe Nocera makes the point in his article that the pharmaceutical business is changing. This is particularly well illustrated by the tough times at Pfizer. The modern Pfizer was built on Blockbusters, which is what the industry calls medicines that generate $1 billion or more in annual revenue.

At Pfizer for instance, the top 4 drugs account for 35% of revenue. Lipitor alone with $12.9 billion in annual revenue accounts for 27% of Pfizer's revenue. And with Lipitor coming off patent in 2010, Pfizer needs to worry on how to make up for that blockbuster's revenue.

The blockbuster business model is falling apart - and not only in the pharmaceutical industry by the way. First, big bets like the Lipitor one, require a significant time period to recover the investments to produce such blockbuster and drug patents expire after 17 years. Second, expensive go to market strategies with direct advertising to consumer and doctors are experiencing a backlash.

New business models in the pharmaceutical industry are starting to favor the long tail of drugs where new discoveries tend to be very much targeted and according to Harvard economist David Cutler:

Drugs are eventually going to be customized for individuals.

Jeffrey Kindler, CEO of Pfizer is betting on it and wants Pfizer to become as good at developing $500 million drugs as in coming up with new blockbusters. Well, that's a big bet for Pfizer and let's hope with Pfizer can pull it off.

It will make for a much healthier industry and could be the start of a new area of the long tail of the pharmaceutical industry. It will be interesting to watch closely how successful Pfizer is at revolutionizing its industry.

The Cost of Ineffective Search

Great article in Network World on the Cost of Ineffective Search. The author starts with a strong punch line:

A company that employs 1,000 information workers can expect more than $5 million in annual salary costs to go down the drain because of the time wasted looking for information and not finding it, IDC research found last year.

You think that's bad. think again:

A survey conducted by Accenture this month of 1,000 middle managers found that more than half of the information they find during searches is useless.

• The Butler Group estimates that 10% of a company's salary are wasted on ineffective searches.* Susan Feldman at IDC found that 3.5 hours each week are wasted on search that don't turn up the right information.
• People spend about 9-10 hours a week on average looking for information and don't find the information they are looking for 1/3 to 1/2 of the time.

So why is search so ineffective?

1. Enterprises are not investing much in search
Most companies are under-investing in search compared to other systems such as portals, dashboards, databases and other enterprise systems and are not using the latest search technology. The best search applications use concept searches and very few companies have adopted such technology.

2. 90% of the documents that are created have no useful metadata
Companies for the past 10 years have found it extremely difficult to get employees to add metadata to content.

3. The right data sources are not getting indexed
Companies need to figure out what search is used for (customer service, eDiscovery, etc.) and adapt their search strategy.

The Answer?
The semantic web is viewed as an answer to ineffective search. Recent research from MIT Sloan shows that using semantic search technology will turn up most desired results about 80% of the time compared to 50% of the time with search technology used by most companies today.

Improved metadata through a non-intrusive tagging process will definitely contribute to improved search as well, further indicating the value of social tagging.

Service-Oriented Information Infrastructure

Mark Lewis had an interesting write up a few days ago on Service Oriented Information Infrastructure (SOII) and I could not agree more with him. Actually, I believe that in many ways this trend has already started. Look at Amazon Simple Storage Services and how sites like SmugMug and YouOs use this infrastructure to essentially run their web sites. You are talking 60,000 customers utilizing 12 GB of storage and 80 GB of bandwidth per month for YouOS and 10 terabytes of new images each month for SmugMug. That's serious infrastructure there. In the case of SmugMug, the company estimates saving $1/2 million a month in storage expenditure!

So, I definitely agree, SOII is the way of the future for the storage industry, looking at Amazon S3 strategy is actually enlightening.


This actually strongly highlights the need for standards in that space. But, then imagine the possibilities: based on the value of their information, customers could either leverage an Amazon S3 services or internal storage for key business records. This also means that application providers need to anticipate such need and layer their product architecture accordingly.

This is starting to happen, Koral, a startup in the content management space is built from the ground up to support storage as a web service and has done a reference implementation using Amazon S3. It will take a while for this type of technology to be adopted in the enterprise, but given the profound impact it will have on established players' product architecture, this clearly has the potential to be a disruptive innovation.

The Value of Co-Creation

I have been reading Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. Overall, it is a good book. One of the arguments the authors make is that corporations need highly permeable boundaries to foster innovation in their organizations and be successful. In the software industry, we have seen how IBM and others have leveraged the open source movement to co-create and drive innovation in the industry. IBM for instance estimates that it saves in R&D around $1 billion a year by investing in the Linux community. And in its hardware business alone, IBM sold $2 billion worth of Linux based hardware in 2006. Those make strong arguments for the value of co-creation, right? Well, wait to hear how P&G leverages co-creation. In the late 1990's, P&G realized that out of a $1.5 billion R&D budget, generating a lot of patents, less than 10% of the produced patents resulted in products. So P&G's CEO, A. G. Lafley, set out a pretty aggressive goal: that 50% of P&G new products and service ideas come from outside the company by 2010. We aren't talking about outsourcing here, but true co-creation. Identify most promising ideas out there that help P&G innovate and incorporate them into P&G R&D.

The result is big time dividend as mentioned in P&G's New Innovation Model in March 2006, by Larry Huston and Nabil Sakkab on HBS Working Knowledge.

More than 35 percent of our new products in market have elements that originated from outside P&G, up from about 15 percent in 2000. And 45 percent of the initiatives in our product development portfolio have key elements that were discovered externally. Through connect and develop—along with improvements in other aspects of innovation related to product cost, design, and marketing—our R&D productivity has increased by nearly 60 percent. Our innovation success rate has more than doubled, while the cost of innovation has fallen. R&D investment as a percentage of sales is down from 4.8 percent in 2000 to 3.4 percent today. And, in the last two years, we've launched more than 100 new products for which some aspect of execution came from outside the company. Five years after the company's stock collapse in 2000, we have doubled our share price and have a portfolio of twenty-two billion-dollar brands.

That's pretty amazing and should be a call for action for any executive out there. Co-creation works in a big way!

What do the "Out There" People in Your Organization Think?

The Attention Company posted an interesting survey on what it calls the "Out There" people. See the "Out There" survey and the "Out There" reactions.

In a nutshell, the survey makes the following points as described below:

• The "Out There" people are the ones "participating in online communities"
  • 20% of your organization population very active
  • 32% are somehow active
• They are the winners in your organization
• Information is everything:
  • Employees at the bottom levels of an organization have most of the knowledge
  • Transparency in decision making increases the likelihood of success

These points are particularly interesting when put in context with organizations and how better information sharing techniques can help organization perform better. This shows the benefits of having a strategy to best disseminate information and knowledge within a company.

Confluence: A Nice Product Evolution

I have been tracking Confluence for a little while now, I have to give credit to their team for a nice product evolution.
In 2.0 in November 2005, they added label or tagging support with cloud display and improved their dashboard display. See their 2.0 release notes.



More screenshots are available in this slide show.

In April 2006, in their 2.2 version, they added support for personal spaces. See the 2.2 release notes.



And, this January, they are adding people directories in 2.3. See their 2.3 release notes.



For those interested in getting in touch with their developers, some of their personal spaces are available online.

Who Likes Peanut Butter Anyway?

I never liked peanut butter, so that may be the reason why Brad Garlinghouse's memo resonnated with me. His Peanut Butter Manifesto gives us a lesson in leadership. It is the responsibility of senior management to lead the march for change and to clearly articulate why it is happening. I found Brad's manifesto effective at doing so. Ironically enough, it would probably resonnate true with quite a few organizations were you to replace the product names. Organizations often tend to spread peanut butter when they are reluctant to refocus their business and align it with clearly articulated strategic direction. To be successuful, every organization should have:

• A focused, cohesive vision
• Clarity of ownership and accountability
• Decisiveness

The drama of working out internal company issues in public is unusual but quite entertaining. I am not sure what are the benefits for a Yahoo! executive to do so. But, his call for change should be applauded. Too many executives often do so too late. Knowing when is the right time to call for change is hard, looks like that time has come at Yahoo!. Now, let's see how successfully, Yahoo! can refocus its business. Will Brad lead the charge?

Why Kodak’s Strategy Will Work…

The November 27th issue of Business week had a very interesting article about Kodak and some of the tough choices and strategy shifts it had to undertake over the past 10 years. Over the past ten years, Kodak had to re-invent itself from a film company to a print company to a digital technology provider illustrated by its recent deal with Motorola. So what's behind Kodak's transformation? First, despite the resistance to change that any strategy shift entails, is the recognition of a true identity and business purpose. Kodak is an image company and as such, it is able to adjust, though painfully, through the value chain of the image business.

In a sense, this is a classical illustration of Clayton Christensen's "Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits". The law of conservation of attractive profits states that in the value chain there is a requisite juxtaposition of modular and interdependent commoditization, that exists in order to optimize the performance of what is not good enough. When modularity and commoditization cause attractive profits to disappear at one stage in the value chain, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage (quote from The Innovator's Solution). This happened to the computer industry (see Intel) and is happening to the image industry. Kodak's bet that the growth of digital photography will happen in mobile phone and that profits margins for sensor chips will be twice those of the digital camera business aligns with the above law. Kodak is identifying new revenue opportunity in the image value chain and aggressively pursuing the shift in the value chain. That's true leadership and it will pay off. Good luck Mr Perez.

Meridio Records Management with SharePoint

I came across this interesting presentation from Meridio a couple days ago. Meridio positions itself as the leading worldwide provider of enterprise Document and Records Management (eDRM) software, engineered for Microsoft .NET platforms.

As a result, Meridio is naturally embracing SharePoint and identifying both how to position itself and provide value-added to SharePoint 2007. Meridio recognizes one of the weaknesses of the SharePoint architecture with the risk of proliferation of a large number of sites which in return makes the SharePoint infrastructure difficult to manage (if not unmanageable) for large organizations. SharePoint's approach to Records Management relies heavily on the site archictecture as well. See the Web Seminar with AIIM and Microsoft: Records Management in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for a good overview.

Meridio is positioning itself as an enterprise policy management solution for SharePoint 2007 which can act as an enterprise records management repository for SharePoint and legacy systems as well.



Here is a screenshot of Meridio’s policy management user interface in a SharePoint environment.


Meridio's architecture seems to start positioning Meridio as a potential virtual records management repository for the enterprise which is undoubtedly the right direction for them to remain relevant.


It is an interesting and promising extension to SharePoint. Remains to be seen how successful they will be now that SharePoint is positioning itself as a platform that can provide basic Records Management capabilities.

Interesting Open Source WSRP Consumers/Producers Compatibility Analysis

A colleague of mine recently pointed out an interesting presentation from CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory (University of Portsmouth) comparing experiences with open source portals WSRP development and testing.

By standardizing presentation-oriented web services, WSRP makes it possible to construct web portals in "plug-and-play" mode. This presentation compares WSRP support for the eXo Platform, Liferay, StringBeans and uPortal. WSRP4J, which is not a portal framework but a reference implementation of the WSRP 1.0 specification and the basis of WSRP support in many portal frameworks, is also discussed. In summary, WSRP Open Source implementations are still in early stages. From a producer standpoint, WSRP4J is clearly the most compatible of all and can be accessed by all the reviewed WSRP consumers. From a consumer standpoint, none of the consumers are fully functional. From Xiaobo Yang, Xiao Dong Wang and Rob Allan presentation, the test summary is shown below.

Jetspeed-2 Desktop: Client Side Portlet Aggregation

I have not had much time to get involved with Jetspeed lately, but when I read Steve Milek post on the development list last Monday, I figured I had to check out the new Jetspeed-2 desktop mode. And I have to say, this is shaping out quite nicely.

Essentially, the Jetspeed j2o Desktop mode combines Jetspeed server-side portal services with client side ajax services. Traditionally, Jetspeed has been a server centric application where every request is processed by the server request pipeline. In Jetspeed j2o desktop the page aggregation is controlled by the client services. This makes for a pretty sleek client experience. The Jetspeed j2o implementation significantly leverages the DOJO library and essentially implements a client side JSR 168 compliant portlet rendering engine. Some screenshots are enclosed below.

Jetspeed-2 Desktop View


Jetspeed-2 Desktop Portlet Drag and Drop


Jetspeed-2 Back in Normal Portal View

Users can switch back to the traditional Jetspeed view:


For more details, read Steve's post on the Jetspeed-2 dev list. Great job from the jetspeed team!

Wikis: New Trend For Consumer Oriented Web Sites?

Wikis have been around for a while. The open source community has long been using them as a means of communicating project updates and documentation. The Wikipedia phenomenon has played a significant role in increasing awareness and demonstrating the power of Wikis. Now it is time for consumer oriented web sites to jump on the band wagon and leverage Wikis as a means to provide better alignment and customer focus for their web sites. How much customer focused can you be? There seems to be a trend for a new generation of consumer web sites to leverage Wikis as a way to foster their community involvement and provide better customer focus. Granted customer reviews have been around for a while; just select one product on Amazon and consumer reviews usually abound. The paradigm shift here? The entire site content is driven by the community. This has the potential for early adopters to disrupt their industry business models. Some examples:

• Trip Advisor: This is probably the best example. Trip Advisor is opening its travel guides content to the community at large. If this takes off, this could be quite disruptive to the travel guide industry. No more outdated content; get to read about the not so-well known places to visit. Leverage millions of tourists and local inhabitants to participate in writing Trip Advisor travel guides content. Look at what Wikipedia did to the Encyclopedia industry...
• Product Wiki: Another good example of what consumer shopping web sites could become. Let your community decide what you should sell and talk about. This could be fairly disruptive as well. Sell what your customers are looking for and develop micro communities of shopping web sites where customers drive what should be on the product catalog. The risk here is that, third party resellers figure out the trick to push and promote their own products. But with the proper controls in place, this concept has some potential.
• Wet Paint: Provide a framework to create Wikis focused on specific consumer areas. Check out Wiki XBox 360 for the XBox fans.

This is just a small subset of the next generation of consumer web sites and still very much a work in progress. But well worth a few minutes of blogging...

Market Dynamics For Idea Validation

Here is an interesting idea. Use market dynamics to weed the good ideas from the bad ones. I just happened to read an interesting article from today's New York Times ("Here's an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas" by William C. Taylor) that outlines just that. I personally find the idea quite appealing. The premises go as follows:

• Allow anyone in your company to have Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) for their ideas.
• Have every employee allowed to trade $10,000 of those idea stocks.
• Let the market dynamics decide.

This is not a completely novel idea but Rite-Solutions has a product (The Innovation Engine) that does just that. A modern take on the suggestion box...

Yahoo! Mail Beta - I am loving it...

I finally got access to the new Yahoo! Mail Beta and I am loving it. My favorite feature? The RSS reader. My Yahoo! already offered the ability to add RSS feed to your personal pages; well now even better, you can read your RSS feeds in your mail client with indicators of whether or not new items are available. I look forward to Yahoo! integrating RSS with Messenger next...

An Interesting SOA Platfom Reference Model

I came accross a white paper from IDC that presented an interesting SOA platform reference model. According to IDC, any SOA platform should be made of:
Core Services

• Deployment services. To host and manage the operational, runtime functions
• Integration services. Data and process-style integration across operating environments and platforms with support for demand-driven (request/reply) or event-driven interoperation
• Process orchestration. Organizes and aggregates services into flows to automate system and business processes
• Policy. A business policy or systems rule or condition that governs an action (Business rules are the foundation of business processes.)
• State management. The ability to recognize, support, and manage entity state, thereby providing support for processing governed by state transitions

Supporting Services

• Access services. Reliable and secure system and people-based access to services and necessary system artifacts within the SOA
• Development facilities. Full life-cycle support and versioning of services and messages, including modeling, coding, debugging, testing, deployment, and change control
• Security and management services. Service and process monitoring, management, security, and ID management
• Application and data services. Services built around the supporting data persistence and data semantics

It shows the level of completness that application frameworks must provide in order to address the various requirements of SOA.

Jetspeed-2.0 has been released!

Two years in the making and a busy couple last months and there it is. Jetspeed 2.0 final release is out! From the release announcement:

The Apache Portals Jetspeed Team is pleased to announce the final release of the Jetspeed 2.0 Open Source Enterprise Portal. This final release is fully-compliant with the Portlet Specification 1.0 (JSR-168). Jetspeed-2 has passed the TCK (Test Compatibility Kit) suite and is fully CERTIFIED to the Java Portlet Standard.
The Jetspeed team will be presenting the new 2.0 release at ApacheCon US 2005 on December 10th in San Diego.
Jetspeed is a full implementation of the Java Portlet API. Notable features include security components backed by LDAP and database implementations and some robust administration interfaces. Custom portals can be built and deployed using the Jetspeed plugin for Maven. Developers can use the Jetspeed PSML language to assemble portlets and the Apache Portals Bridges project to 'bridge' portals with existing technologies including Struts, JSF, PHP, Perl. For GUI designers, Jetspeed comes with several built-in templates used to decorate portals and portlets. Join the growing community of Jetspeed users and developers at ApacheCon. David Sean Taylor will be presenting a Jetspeed tutorial that shouldn't be missed by anyone interested in the technology.

Features of the Final Release Include:

Standardized:

• Fully compliant with Java Portlet API Standard 1.0 (JSR 168)
• Passed JSR-168 TCK Compatibility Test Suite
• J2EE Security based on JAAS Standard, JAAS DB Portal Security Policy
• LDAP Support for User Authentication

Foundation Component Architecture:

• Spring-based Components and Scalable Architecture
• Configurable Pipeline Request Processor
• Auto Deployment of Portlet Applications
• Jetspeed Component Java API
• Jetspeed AJAX XML API
• PSML: Extended Portlet Site Markup Language
  
  • Database Persistent
  • Content Management Facilities
  • Security Constraints

Portal Core Features:

• Declarative Security Constraints and JAAS Database Security Policy
• Runtime Portlet API Standard Role-based Security
• Portal Content Management and Navigations: Pages, Menus, Folders, Links
• Multithreaded Aggregation Engine
• PSML Folder CMS Navigations, Menus, Links
• Jetspeed SSO (Single Sign-on)
• Rules-based Profiler for page and resource location
• Integrates with most popular databases including: Derby, MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, Postgres, DB2
• Client independent capability engine (HTML, XHTML, WML, VML)
• Internationalization: Localized Portal Resources in 12 Languages
• Statistics Logging Engine
• Portlet Registry
• Full Text Search of Portlet Resources with Lucene
• User Registration
• Forgotten Password
• Rich Login and Password Configuration Management

Administrative Portlets:

• User, Role, Group, Password, and Profile Management
• JSR 168 Generic User Attributes Editor:
  • JSR 168 Preferences Editor
  • Site Manager
  • SSO Manager
  • Portlet Application and Lifecycle Management
  • Profiler Administration
  • Statistics Reports

Web Framework Support and Sample Portlets:

• Bridges to other Web Frameworks: JSF, Struts, PHP, Perl, Velocity
• Sample Portlets:
  • RSS, IFrame, Calendar XSLT, Bookmark, Database Browser
  • Integration with Display Tags, Spring MVC

Customization Features:

• Administrative Site Manager
• Page Customizer

Portal Design Features:

• Deployment Jetspeed Portlet and Page Skins (Decorators) CSS Components
• Configurable CSS Page Layouts
• Easy to Use Velocity Macro Language for Skin and Layout Components

Development Tools

• Automated Maven Build
• Jetspeed-2 Maven Plugin for Custom Portal Development
• AutoDeployment of Portlet Applications, Portal Resources
• Deployment Tools
• Plugin Goals integrated with Auto Deployment Feature

Application Servers Supported:

• Tomcat 5.0.x
• Tomcat 5.5.x
• Websphere 5.1, 6.0
• JBoss

The release is available for download from the Apache Download Mirrors:
http://portals.apache.org/jetspeed-2/download.html
We hope you enjoy using Jetspeed! Documentation is available at: http://portals.apache.org/jetspeed-2/.