Pattern Finder

Oracle Plans on Supporting OpenOffice.org; Silence on Sun StarOffice

Oracle has updated its FAQ page on the Sun acquisition (hat tip to Savio Rodrigues' blog post). Under the question of, "What is Oracle's plan for OpenOffice?," the company states,

Oracle has a history of developing complete, integrated, and open products, making integration quicker and less costly for our customers. Based on the open ODF standard, OpenOffice is expected to create a compelling desktop integration bridge for our enterprise customers and offers consumers another choice on the desktop. After the transaction closes, Oracle plans to continue developing and supporting OpenOffice as open source. As before, some of the larger customers will ask for extra assurances, support, and enterprise tools. For these customers we expect to offer a typical commercial license option.

So the good news is it looks like Oracle will continue to contribute to the OpenOffice.org codebase and offer support for OpenOffice.org, as Sun does now. The curious thing is there is no mention of Sun StarOffice. Is this because Oracle figured calming down the open source proponents was more important than talking about Sun StarOffice, which it will continue to develop and support? At the other end of the spectrum, is this because Oracle plans to drop development and support of Sun StarOffice? Or is the answer somewhere in between?--maybe Oracle hasn't yet figured out what to do about Sun StarOffice.

Something to ponder.

(As an aside, the Oracle lawyers might want to do their homework. It's supposed to be called OpenOffice.org, rather than OpenOffice, as the name OpenOffice is owned by someone else. I know. My wife used to be the product manager of OPEN/office.)

BPOS at Coca-Cola Enterprises

Notes from the

Image via Wikipedia

Coca-Cola presentation at Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference 2009.

The Need

73,000 employees: 30,000 knowledge workers. 40,000+ employees that work out of factories and depots. 2.4 vending machines and coolers. 30Is the largest marketer and distributor of Coca-Cola products.

Business Challenge

• Needed a more effective way to collaborate
• No robust and integrated enterprise solution
• Too many partners providing dozens of communication and collaboration solutions
• Move from being support focused
• Lack of governance

A Lotus Notes shop.

Vision: Establish digital communications as a key enabler to engage employees with the company, drive effectiveness and efficiency and improve collaboration and innovation.

Goals

• Deliver the next generation Intranet
• Create a more collaborative environment
• Simplify integration
• Create two-way communication
• Consolidate multiple technical infrastructures
• Leverage existing infrastructure

Governance

• Executive Steering Group Meets bi-annually
• Operational Governance: Meets quarterly
• Delivery Team: Meets weekly

The Solution

March 3, 2008: Coca-Cola Enterprises announced that it will begin using Microsoft’s integrated communication and collaboration tools across its organization.

Implemented Microsoft Online Services: SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, OCS Online, Live Meeting.

Solution wins:

• Provides integrated collaboration
• Microsoft product integration
• Free CCE resources from system support
• Provision additional capabilities on an as-needed basis
• Delivers enterprise support model
• Evergreen Support Deployment (no patching)

Created a Teamsite Wizard. Included things like Language, Time Zone, Purpose. Provisioned in about a week.

Our Usage

User Experience and Portal Design

• Established standards and style guides to implement a consistent look and feel
• Developed IA scheme to ensure scalability and long term adoption
• User-friendly and intuitive design allows for ease of use
• Consolidated platform to access all internal information and documentation

Four major sections: Home, Company, Workspaces, Life & Career

Portal Separation:

• Corporate Portal
• Teamsites
• Micro Sites
• Tool Sites
• Business Unit Sites
• Partner Sites (coming soon)
• Community Sites (coming soon)

Microsoft Online has a list of partner solutions they support.

9 different localizations; 2,400 Teamsites in 10 months.

Integrated with SAP so employees can do thinks like change 401K withholding.

The Cloud

Monthly Averages:

• 2,055,702 page views
• 15 minutes, 20 second minutes average time per visit
• 8.5 visits per visitor

Get a pre-production farm; can get an online database.

Hosting Limitations

• Certain product feature limitations
• Increased deployment time lines: You can write the code in 8 weeks, but then Microsoft has a deployment time as well.
• No visibility to servers for support
• No Central Admin/Shared Service Provider access
• No SQL access (can’t do queries against the DB, for example)

Quotes from the SharePoint Conference Keynote

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Following are some good quotes from the Steve Ballmer/Jeff Teper keynote at the SharePoint Conference:

• A questioner asked Steve Ballmer and Tom Rizzo if the company would have a single web page ("sort of like Windows Update") that would list the current updates for SharePoint. Steve Ballmer replied, "The right answer is 'yes'; what's the current answer, Tom?"
• Steve Ballmer: "SharePoint Online is helping us understand compliance issues and we can roll that back into the SharePoint software."
• Steve Ballmer: "SharePoint, in a sense, is becoming an operating system."
• Jeff Teper: The symbiotic relationship between Office and SharePoint was there from the get-go."
• Jeff Teper: "SharePoint 2010 includes a replumbing of the UI."
• Jeff Teper: "SharePoint is the ultimate Swiss Army knife."

What’s New in SharePoint 2010

I’m attending the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas this week and received the 274-page Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Beta tome in my registration materials yesterday. Due to the 3-hour time difference between Boston and Las Vegas, I woke up early this morning and decided to while away my time by reading it. Based on what it says (note: the book contains the disclaimer, “This is a preliminary document and may be changed substantially prior to final commercial release of the software described herein.”), following are my initial impressions about the differences between SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.

• The UI is friendlier: The 2010 interface includes the Ribbon UI. Hopefully, that will make SharePoint less click-happy. (I’ve always felt SharePoint 2007 makes me click five times to complete a task that should take one click.) In addition, 2010 includes better support for what Microsoft calls “multilingual experiences.” That is, fields within lists can support multiple languages, and users can submit multiple entries (e.g., an English version, a French version, a German version) for a specific piece of content. Also, SharePoint can use rules (e.g., show this paragraph to new workers, show that paragraph to long-time employees) to customize content for users.
• Metadata is now pervasive: Recognizing that good metadata facilities make content easier to classify and search, Microsoft has significantly expanded support for metadata in SharePoint 2010. Examples include: (1) automatically extracting metadata from images, (2) configuring a folder to automatically add tag content with a specific tag (e.g., the folder “Preliminary” adds the tag “stage=Preliminary” to all content stored in that folder, (3) support for folksonomies (user-defined tags), and (4) the addition of the Enterprise Managed Metadata (EMM) service (allows sharing of metadata configurations across sites and farms).
• Support for compound documents: SharePoint 2010 has added the concept of “Document Sets”—that is, an uber document made up of multiple documents. This way, an enterprise can create a product rollout plan that consists of an Excel spreadsheet containing rollout dates, a PowerPoint presentation popularizing those dates, and a Word document describing the rollout stages in detail. By being a Document Set, these documents can be controlled as one logical entity (e.g., versioned as a whole, managed by a workflow as a whole).
• Blogs and wikis are improved: Frankly, given that blog and wiki support was so dismal in 2007, it was impossible for the feature set to go in any direction but up. At a glance, the blog and wiki support looks solid but not ground-breaking.
• Records management and business intelligence are no longer second-class citizens: Both records management and BI showed signs of being add-ons in 2007. In 2010, they’re much more integrated with normal SharePoint usage. For example, rather than records management capabilities being affiliated with a specific site template, a site collection owner can designate which records management features are enabled within that site collection. In the BI case, again, BI is no longer affiliated with a specific site template, but rather a set of capabilities that can be used in any SharePoint site. In 2010, PerformancePoint is no longer a separate product, but rather a service (PerformancePoint Services) residing within SharePoint 2010 (assuming the enterprise buys an enterprise license [ECAL]).
• Web analytics is now included: SharePoint 2010 includes a Web Analytics service so that enterprises can monitor site usage and search terms. For companies drowning in unused sites (e.g., a project site goes live, is used intensively for two months, and then never used again), this capability will be invaluable in helping them clear out the deadwood. In addition, it will help companies understand how their employees are using SharePoint—the first step in optimizing site design, terms, and so on.
• Multi-tenant SharePoint Online will now support custom code: The current version of SharePoint Online comes in two flavors: multi-tenant and hosted. The multi-tenant version (allows no customization) is targeted at SMBs, while the hosted version (allows customization) is for large enterprises. The lack of customization capabilities has been a huge issue, especially with partners that like to customize an installation for their clients. In 2010, Microsoft says it will allow such customization via a mechanism called “Sandboxed Solutions”—basically, process and data isolation.

To be clear, these are not all of the changes that are coming in SharePoint 2010; but they are, at least, some of the interesting ones.

Free Webcast on My Productivity Suite Quadrant Report

As I noted in a post on the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog, Burton Group now offers two reports and a TeleBriefing on the subject of productivity suites. However, all three demand that a user have a subscription to Burton Group’s IT1 or CCS services. If you don’t have that kind of cash around but would like to watch a free webcast about my recently released Market Insight: Productivity Suites 2009 report, here it is on BrightTalk (it’s free, but requires a registration):

Information Intelligence: Watching How Decisions Are Made

Image via Wikipedia

My colleague Mike Gotta recently put up a blog post entitled, “Social Analytics: Another Front For Business Intelligence.” In it he talks about Socialcast’s announcement of its Social Business Intelligence platform, and the fact that “the need for comprehensive analytics when it comes to social activities is very real.” I agree.

However, I think it gets a lot more interesting when it’s seen as part of a larger capability that I call Information Intelligence. The idea is that tracking digital content—where it’s created, where it goes, who consumes it, what it’s about—supplies enterprises with insight into how they’re creating and consuming information. We’ve done this for years with physical goods--ERP systems monitor production plans, inventory levels, shop floor status, and distribution pipelines. By understanding how physical goods move through the factory, we’re able to optimize the process. It’s about time that we did the same thing for information. After all, we are inclined to call this the “information economy.”

We’ve created islands of analysis for digital content; now we need to start building the bridges between them. We need to integrate mechanisms such as:

• Web Analytics: monitoring user behavior on web sites
• Blog Analytics: tracking posts and linkbacks on blogs
• Search Analytics: watching what users search for and the results they get
• E-mail Monitoring: analyzing e-mail flow (e.g., Gist and Xobni)
• Social Network Analysis: documenting which users link to and correspond with other users

It’s only when we start connecting these dots that we’ll start to understand how ideas flow, where the bottlenecks are, and where the experts reside. Put another way, we’ll be able to watch how a specific enterprise makes its decisions—the first step to optimizing the process. We’re a long way from having an integrated system—but we should at least start thinking about how to create one.

Universities Grappling with Blogging

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There’s an article in The New York Times this morning (”M.I.T. Taking Student Blogs to the Nth Degree“) that discusses how colleges are using student blogs to publicize life at the college and entice prospects. It notes:

Dozens of colleges — including Amherst, Bates, Carleton, Colby, Vassar, Wellesley and Yale — are embracing student blogs on their Web sites, seeing them as a powerful marketing tool for high school students, who these days are less interested in official messages and statistics than in first-hand narratives and direct interaction with current students.

It's an interesting read because it's a nice encapsulation of the fine line organizations must walk between (1) going for the PR angle and (2) reflecting reality. An admissions officer at MIT says,

“You want people who can communicate and who are going to be involved in different parts of campus life,” he said. “You want them to be positive, but it’s not mandatory.”

And not all posts are positive. Ms. Kim once wrote about how the resident advising system was making it impossible for her to move out of her housing — expressing enough irritation that the housing office requested that the admissions office take her post down. Officials refused, instead having the housing office post a rebuttal of her accusations; eventually, the system was changed.

In the past, the way to deal with the problem would have been to sweep it under the rug; today, the solution--with some help from blogging--is to actually fix the problem.