Stu Downes

I’ve been an avid follower of foldera for quite some time now and have finally got access to the beta.  For the uninitiated foldera is a web based ajax rich collaboration environment allowing individuals or teams to share:

• emails
• calendars
• files
• tasks

The main role I would see Foldera playing is in the rapid provisioning of ad-hoc collaboration sites for organisations who have no restrictions on sharing data using web based services.  I have one or two feature requests for future versions:

• RSS feeds throughout please so if I’m working remotely from a team I can subscribe to content changes and log-in as required.  I see a key benefit to this tool being rapid collaboration between teams in different organisations, hence primarily I’ll still use my corporate facilities (which would hopefully include RSS)
• Persistent chat (I see instant messenger is coming soon)
• Discussion boards
• I was amazed the beta contained no Foldera branding, in fact the only branding in there was the Google logo next to the search bar!

Overall Foldera was fast and user friendly although I was probably expecting more after such a long development cycle.  The features I would rate top would be:

• simplicity in design and lack of screen clutter
• rapid provisioning of accounts
• rich ajax interface

The real killer is the concept that you quickly create a folder for an activity you are working on with others and in that folder store emails, files, tasks and calendar information pertaining to that activity.  You can invite others to participate in the activity, you can have email replies automatically route to an activity, and you can control which members of an activity can view any particular content.  The principles and Foldera’s presentation are excellent and I wish them every success.

Outside my work I’ve been involved with an organisation where I maintain content for some web pages which were raw html code, of course I cheated and used Dreamweaver.  Well the organisation decided that they wanted a consitent theme across the various websites and would like to extend the authorship by moving away from HTML junkies and deploying a content management solution.  A good aim which I support!

In this situation it has been handled terribly.  First of all the communications were poor, secondly the timing was too aggresive and thirdly there was no assitance with content migration (i.e. it was a complete re-create).  So now most of the local and county sites which formed part of the national organisation have no web presence.  My words of caution for anyone looking at this now would be:

• plan plan plan
• communicate communicate communicate
• give examples of how to move content
• give videos not just long documents describing the new solution
• give people enough time to complete the job (if this is a volunteer driven activity multiply your work based estimates by 10).
• If you are making a major change to a web site implement RSS feeds for subscription to changes in content.

Charlene Li of Forrester recently posted an interesting article on her blog about the results of an online consumer study over in the US, based on a paper she has authored.  Needless to say I took her up on the offer of a copy of the paper and read with interest thinking about how this data would translate into enterprises as adoption of web 2.0 technology grows.  The data comes from two studies of data gathered via online surveys, one specifically targeting the youth audience (or as I prefer to think of this group the graduates of 2007 to 2010, the middle managers and senior information workers of 2015 to 2020).

My poor graphic compared to Charlene’s shows the % of online users in each category.  Interestingly most online consumers do not play an active role in terms of interaction with content and 85% are no more tan spectators or inactives.  Do these figures surprise me, well no, will these figures be the same in 5 years time, I doubt it very much.  Why?  because more of the business applications we use today both for collaboration and focused line of business applications will become more social in nature.  Also the demographics support increased movement up the ladder from inactive to creator.  The report also highlights that over 33% of 12 to 17 year olds are in the creator category.  So with changes in business processes, tools and technology in our electronic workplace becoming more social in nature, demographics driving both user expectation, and more likely user innovation (which Graham covered recently here).

Interestingly the report states

“don’t write off older generations – many are participating, especially as spectators.  The problem has been the lack of relevant content”

This gives me great encouragement as I work with customers to help them with the implementation of technology which includes social tools.  In fact if we look at the demographics from the report for those creating content we see that the tail of creation on the public social content begins at around 25 years.

This public study leaves me with a number of thoughts when considering the enterprise:

• What are my demographics
• How to people work today and how will the technology affect their work tomorrow
• How do we encourage adoption
• How do we make content relevant

Ross Mayfield also reviewed this here.

There has been some interesting debate which was focused by this SharePoint Team blog post back in January (yeah I’m slow off the mark pulling my thoughts together here).

This post is a collection of my thoughts to date on this subject.  A lot of people have been talking about this both in their blog posts and at a customer engagement level.  I have some views on the subject and I’ll share some of them here.  So what do I need?

So for me I still actually want a file share, I still need a file share.  Not all my applications will allow me to publish directly into a personal collaboration space (but my file server allocation can be much smaller than it is today).  I also want a collaborative workspace, just for me!  Here I can show my work in progress and hide some other things I don’t want you to see.  I then accept that I’ll have some work published into team workspaces and perhaps more formally released and hence stored in document libraries.  Well I’d still like to keep track of my work and have it simply to hand so I’d like my collaborative workspace to include links to all my published work.

Then as teams and projects we’ll need similar workspaces with work in progress, published work, document libraries and more project focused elements (task tracking etc).

Now the great news is that the major vendors IBM and Microsoft already offer this, ok maybe not out of the box and with a bit of tweaking but you can do this now.  I don’t feel at present we can remove the file server element completely, but I do feel we can move to a point where we are less dominated by a file server and more dominated by a rich collaborative workspace.

With the recent release of Microsoft Office 2007 offline working became a richer experience with Groove 2007 and Outlook 2007, I’ll focus on Outlook here. Outlook allows offline access to different elements of data from within SharePoint sites. For the IBM customers using Notes this was nothing new but the 2 have distinct differences in architecture and approach.

• IBM = Offline access from Domino which can be as function rich as the online access.
• MS = Defined elements of SharePoint sites can be taken offline with Outlook
• IBM = data stored within distinct databases locally for each application accessed via the workspace or bookmarks within the Notes client.
• MS = data integrated within a single offline store accessed and visible from the inbox folder structure.

The Notes experience is to allow the user to take as much functionality offline as is possible, and depending upon how the notes application was coded you can in fact take absolutely everything securely offline to work with at your leisure, including bespoke workflow applications (if coded in that way). Online Domino has for many years been able to serve the same applications both to Notes clients and web browsers (with the extension to mobile clients as required). Each application is taken offline via the notes client menu bar (which can be difficult for some users) and then each application is stored separately on the workspace/bookmarked. The experience is very rich but in some cases can lead to confusion as to how to take applications offline and finding applications on a client where users have bookmarked many applications (although these issues have been addressed with some neat usability features in Notes 8 – a new menu bar with type ahead search for example and a “take application offline” menu option). One of the main issues with Notes generally is user perception, much of it caused by older versions of the client or badly coded applications or applications which have not been re-coded in many years (see previous post).

The “new player” on the block in this offline arena is Microsoft and they have taken a completely different approach. Serve the collaborative application via SharePoint and a browser but only serve limited elements of that to the offline clients. For the Microsoft clients the following papers describe that offline experience much better (Groove, Outlook). To take an element of an application offline the user must access that element in SharePoint and click on the “connect to outlook” link. This is much more intuitive than even the Notes 8 client BUT to take all the elements offline in Outlook you must go to each element you want to take offline and connect it to Outlook. There are third party tools which allow a richer offline experience for SharePoint namely Colligo and Iora but I will not comment further on those here (another post me-thinks!).

So there are 2 approaches in terms of what can be taken offline and how the process is initiated. IBM still need to do some work in making the “taking it offline” experience better and more intuitive (I’d suggest some guidelines for developers and standard buttons in all applications the “take offline” in addition to the menu based options). The offline experience for the user remains richest with the Notes client. The Microsoft approach allows distinct elements to be taken offline and the access to those elements is from within the “inbox” experience of Outlook. This ensures that the look, feel and functionality of the offline experience is controlled by the client – this can be both an advantage in terms of intuitive use but also a disadvantage in terms of limited offline capabilities compared to the online browser client. The Microsoft approach also restricts any offline working from bespoke SharePoint applications to the same set of offline capabilities which the client can support (i.e. none of your bespoke workflow). Having said that and listed a lot of limitations of Microsoft’s offline functionality its important to reflect on what people actually want to take offline and how the experience is surfaced to users. For example if I have a teamroom and have a discussion, a set of documents and a calendar then I can take those offline with Outlook and experience them in a manner which is easier on the eye, I can see from the folder view of my inbox if there is any new content, I can also overlay my personal and teamroom calendars (the latter being very powerful).

Its now interesting to see that the web 2.0 players are recognising the power of offline working and there are two good examples:

• Socialtext : offline wikis via an application within a single HTML file.
• Zimbra : plans for offline ajax client for their applications

Time for some opinion.  My opinion is that Microsoft need to work to improve the amount of offline functionality (and I’m sure that will happen in the next release of Office) and at the same time improve the way data is taken offline and how the ability to group that data in the folder views within Outlook. I’ll clarify that the method of taking data offline is better within the SharePoint / Outlook combination than Notes / Domino BUT I’d like the improvement to allow more than one element to be taken offline via the initial “connect to outlook” button (i.e. if I take a document library offline give me the option to take more elements of the same SharePoint site offline at the same time). Overall though I think Microsoft have the most intuitive experience for the user in terms of taking the data offline and serving that data to the user once offline.

IBM have by far the most comprehensive offline capabilities (I do have one gripe which is doclinks created from offline replicas do not then work when forwarded to others). To give kudos to IBM here with one example: 10 years ago I helped implement a combined CRM / Helpdesk / Sales Tracking system which allowed field sales and technical staff have access to all relevant information offline when talking with customers. This application overcame all their gripes about the then Notes 4.6 client because the it was so powerful and useful (e.g. before the sales person saw the customer they could check outstanding helpdesk calls and be appraised of issues they’d previously have been unaware of prior to their meeting hence they were perceived better by their customer). IBM needs to work on simplifying taking the application offline (and this has greatly improved in Notes release 8 but could be better). IBM also needs to reflect on guidelines and assistance for developers in order to make the offline experience relevant and complete. IBM would also benefit from thinking about the offline experience for their increasingly popular Websphere suite of products.

The ability to connect anywhere is not a reality for any of us and until that point offline access remains key. It is good to see IBM continuing to support this area and Microsoft becoming a more feature rich player.  Great timing, I recieved a trial key for Colligo Contributor today so at some point I’ll blog more about that!

Excellent wiki comparison site.  WikiMatrix (via James)

I see the offline web application debate has opened again with James writing one post here.  I’m a firm believer that the best experience is through a “thick” client with offline abilities in addition to the same applications also being browser accessible for times when you maybe are away from a machine with a thick client.  With my old engineering hat I used to love the fact that with the thick clients you would leverage the underutilised client PC resources to the benefit of generally scarce server resources (memory and CPU).

With all this in mind its interesting to see more of the web 2.0 players stepping into the desktop client arena, Zimbra being the latest that I’ve spotted.  It’ll be interesting to see how this field matures over the coming years.

I had previously posted here on the RSS experience and integrating it with email clients.  I concentrated on the Microsoft approach during that post.

Its now really interesting to note the recent announcement from Newsgator that they have developed a client plugin for Lotus Notes users and also announced a server side integration with their enterprise server.

So now both Newsgator and Attensa have announced offerings for Lotus Notes users.  Great news as prior to January neither company had offerings for Notes and both aimed solely at Outlook users.  In fact for Notes users I feel it will be essential that they have the option of a plugin as the present RSS plugin in the Notes 8 beta is too weak for information workers to use (see previous post).