Pattern Finder

Catalyst NA 2008

We're entering into Day 3 of Burton Group's Catalyst Conference in San Diego, and I thought I'd give a quick overview of the conference, the workshops I've given so far, and the presentations coming up.

The total attendee count is up to 1,500--more than last year and an accomplishment at a time when we're seeing client travel budgets slashed left and right. I talked to a client on Monday who is here basically on his own dime--although his company is a client (and hence had a free ticket to the conference), it refused to pay for travel and lodging for him to attend. Rather than accepting defeat, he decided, "Fine," and arrived here on his own frequent flyer miles and is paying for his own hotel. Now that's what I call customer loyalty.

Workshops have been quite popular this year. On Monday, Peter O'Kelly and I gave a half-day workshop on, "Exploiting New Information Management Opportunities." It was sold out. We discussed the evolution from content silos to content streams, how databases have evolved, search engine technologies, and other important patterns we're seeing. We did a "raise your hand" poll on, "How many of you have installed or are in the process of installing SharePoint?" and about 90% of the class raised their hands. When we asked, "How many of you have Lotus Notes?" about half the class raised their hands, to which one person piped up, "Yeah, we have it, but mostly because it's so difficult to rip out."

On Tuesday, Craig Roth, Larry Cannell, and I gave a workshop on SharePoint 2007: "SharePoint and Office 2007." Again, very well attended. Based on attendee comments, it's clear that SharePoint sites are growing like weeds in many companies and that governance is becoming an issue.

For the remainder of the conference I will give four presentations:

• And They’re Off!”: The Vendor Race in SaaS-based Collaboration, Communication, and Content
• SharePoint in 2008: The Next Steps
• ODF, Open XML, and the Implications of Productivity Application File Format Standards (joint presentation with Peter O'Kelly)
• Classonomies: Ontologies, Taxonomies, and Folksonomies Demystified

Technorati Tags: BurtonGroupCatalyst08

The New E-Mail Dynamics

From my point-of-view, a story type that we will see more of: NSW schools dump Outlook for Gmail. The New South Wales Department of Education and training is replacing a massive Microsoft Exchange installation (1.3 million students, 35 MB of storage per user, at a cost of Aus $33 million) with a Gmail solution for about one-third the price and 170 times the storage (Aus $9.5 million, 6 GB of storage per user). It appears that students will use Gmail, but that faculty and staff will continue to use a non-Gmail solution (unclear to me whether it's Exchange or something else).

What makes this story an archetype are two things: one, the much lower cost of the SaaS solution, and two, the generation split (students=Gmail, faculty and staff=no Gmail), which now seems to be a recurring pattern.

The Product Manager Should Be Shot

Don't you hate it when a company decides that you--a customer--should spend your time fixing their problem? I do. Here's my latest story, courtesy of Microsoft. I'm getting ready to go to Burton Group's Catalyst Conference and so this morning I installed the latest version of Microsoft Streets and Trips on my laptop. I went to activate it and lo and behold, it announced that I'd reached my activation limit. At this point there are five PCs in the house, and I'd lost track of where I'd installed it (I'd installed it on one desktop PC several months back [which I'd forgotten about] and on another one yesterday). The license says I can install it on a desktop PC and a laptop, and that's it. Fair enough. I de-installed in from one of my desktop PCs, re-installed it on my laptop, and it still wouldn't activate. Although the license says I can de-install it and put it on another machine, the activation technology doesn't work that way--when you uninstall it, the software doesn't phone home and say this machine no longer has it installed (a Microsoft Support Manager confirmed this behavior to me later).

Thus began my hour-long journey on my way to fix Microsoft's problem. My first hurdle was finding the right support number to call--the first call into Microsoft Support using the number they supplied within the software got me to a Customer Support Rep who transfered me to a different Support line wanting me to pay $35 for the call. ("So let me get this straight--your software doesn't work the way your license says it should and you want me to pay for the privilege of fixing it?") I bailed out of that one. I eventually made my way to quite a pleasant Support Rep who then said I needed to call from another phone to a different Support line to activate the product over the phone while she held on on this line (apparently conference calling isn't supported within Microsoft Support, and Microsoft assumes everyone has two lines in their house or has a cellphone). After getting caught in automated touchpad hell twice and hearing for the third time, "You know sir, you can only install this on two PCs," I finally got everything straightened out.

Here's my list of the aggravations:

• As I mentioned above, deinstalling Streets and Trips 2008 doesn't notify the license server that a previously active copy is no longer active. In short, the activation software doesn't map to the license wording. What poor excuse for a product manager allowed the product to ship with that bug? Since it was clear I was irate, the nice Support Rep transfered me to her manager when the call was completed, and he told me that this problem was fixed in the next release. OK, but that doesn't give Microsoft a pass. Anyone who did any form of customer experience analysis ("Customers de-install the software, customers have their hard drives crash," etc.) would have seen this flaw straight away. When I was a software product manager and in this exact same boat with keys for image servers (our activation software was more anal retentive than our license), I relaxed the activation software so that it gave some wriggle room to customers but still caught the egregious violators. This is not rocket science--just common sense.
• Given how many customers Microsoft has and how many support calls it takes, it's amazing how much of a maze customer support is.
• Streets and Trips 2008 won't save its files in the Streets and Trips 2006 file format. So if I want to keep running 2006 on my daughter's and wife's laptops, we can no longer share maps. Thank you, Microsoft, for trying to force me to upgrade. However, I'm cheap and I won't; I'll just seethe at Microsoft's inability to be customer-centric.

This was an aggravating episode that I'll get over--maybe. But it highlights the fact that writing great software (and I like Streets and Trips) isn't enough; a lousy installation experience will cancel all of that great work.

Giving a Webinar Today

For those of you wondering why I've been absent on my blog for awhile, it's because I've been working heads down generating PowerPoint presentations. Most of them are for Burton's Catalyst Conference at the end of June, but one is for a KMWorld webinar I'm giving today, sponsored by Just Systems and XyEnterprise.

The title is, "DITA Comes of Age: Getting Everyone to Generate More Accurate and Relevant Documentation." It talks about some findings from my December report: Content Reuse: DITA, XML, and Other Ways to Keep from Reinventing the Content. If you're interested in the subject, give it a look see. It's free.