Pattern Finder

Oracle Announces Oracle Cloud Office

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Although the details are sketchy, it appears that Oracle will be coming out with Oracle Cloud Office, a SaaS-based productivity suite based on OpenOffice.org. See the following articles:

• Eric Lai, "Oracle will boost MySQL, release Cloud Office suite," Computerworld, January 27, 2010.
• John Rath, "Oracle Outlines Integration with Sun," Data Center Knowledge, January 28, 2010.

This adds Oracle to the list of vendors who already offer an online productivity suite (Google, Zoho) or will soon (Adobe, IBM, Microsoft).

I didn't hear Oracle's presentation yesterday because I was out of the office consulting, but based on these and other news stories it sounds as if Oracle has a grand vision here--certainly one more expansive than Sun ever did. It will be interesting to watch this play out over time.

I'll Be Talking at Lotusphere About Alternatives to Microsoft Office

For those of you attending Lotusphere 2010 (Orlando, FL, January 17-21), you may want to stop by to see my presentation on alternatives to Microsoft Office. It's session INV108 within the Futures and Innovations track, entitled, "Microsoft Office Alternatives: Considerations and Best Practices."

For those of you who have read my Market Insight: Productivity Suites 2009 or Productivity Suite Proliferation: Is It Time to Ditch Microsoft Office? reports (note: Burton Group subscription required for access), the session's findings will not be surprising.

However, it will be my latest thinking, which continues to evolve as I talk to more clients about their productivity suite strategy and issues they worry about. For example, as time goes on, I've become convinced that segmenting your users is not only key, but required. I've always said you have to segment your users (e.g., casual users, expert users, Twenty Somethings used to the web, veteran workers wedded to Microsoft Office) to figure out where it makes sense to displace Office--or if you can even do it. But at this point, I think you need to put a permanent process in place where you continually segment users. You can't get away with thinking that segmenting your users is a one-off deal. Instead, you must create a feedback loop that ensures that you're fielding a set of productivity suite options that map to your workers' evolving needs. If you don't do that, you'll fail.

In the past, enterprises ensured that workers didn't bump into any feature constraints by overbuying--by buying all the features for everyone. Today, if you can successfully segment your users, you can buy different sets of features for different segments, and save money in the process.

In any case, I think it will be an interesting session, and I hope to see you there.

Using Twitter to Do "Real" Work

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While the media continues to talk about Twitter as a social phenomenon, I'm struck with how people are starting to use it as a replacement for longtime standbys. For example:

• Product Support: Back in June, I talked to an IT manager at a small financial services firm in the UK. They'd moved to Google Apps and were quite happy with it. As he noted, "It's refreshing to have relatively happy users." When I asked him about support, he said, "Nothing has been broken. When you're looking for information it's easy to find; if you're unsure, one Tweet will get you the info." It's been my experience that enterprises are less than thrilled with Google Apps support--it's difficult to get Google on the phone and you spend a lot of time trolling through forums. This IT manager didn't seem to have that problem, I suspect because he had a relatively small installation (eight employees). However, he also was completely sidestepping the normal support procedure. He'd moved beyond dealing with the vendor; he was quizzing the users via Twitter.
• Product Intelligence: SharePoint 2010 is currently in beta test, and enterprises are pounding it and poking it to understand it. If you go to Microsoft and ask how the beta is going, they'll give you the party line that things are going well (which I think is accurate, as far as it goes). However, that's the 50,000 foot view. What you really want to know is, "What are people doing with it, what are they trying out, where are they running into trouble?" With Twitter, that's easy to find out. Just do a search for "#SP2010." (On Google, do a search for "#sp2010  site:twitter.com"; on TweetDeck, add a column and search for "#sp2010". That tag gives you a realtime pulse on what's happening with SharePoint 2010.

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):

Online Productivity Suites News Roundup

As I was browsing through Google News this morning, I noticed a cluster of stories about online productivity suites. At Burton Group, we continue to have Dialogues with clients about alternatives to Microsoft Office, so I thought it would be useful to provide a subset of those stories (removing the rants) along with a précis or quote:

• Christopher Dawson, “Google Edu Apps vs. Microsoft Web Apps: Should I have waited?”, ZDNet, September 21, 2009. The Athol-Royalston School District in Massachusetts moved to Google Apps in August 2009: “students are using Apps quite naturally, even if some teachers and staff are a bit more reluctant.”
• Bryon Acohido, “Microsoft takes notice as more people use free Google Docs,” USA Today, September 21, 2009. A story highlighting IDC’s July QuickPoll saying 27% of respondents are already widely using Google Docs or expect to be within a year, and then quoting Microsoft’s Chris Capossela, noting that Office 2010 will have web apps. "A healthy percentage of Google Docs adoption is coming from ad hoc use," Webster says. "It's the classic case of employees making use of free consumer (online) services to get their work done, without asking permission."
• Tim Anderson, “Microsoft's Office Web Apps - a long way from here: Inside the (half-baked) tech preview,” Channel Register, September 21, 2009. A catalogue of the pluses and minuses of the Technical Preview of the Office Web Apps: “The Office Web Apps look great, present a familiar Office-like user interface, and generally render faithfully. The Silverlight-driven previews look particularly good, with smooth zooming and the ability to pop-out documents into a separate window. The main hesitations are around the limited editing features and the poor performance, which we must hope will be fixed before release.”
• Jason Brooks, “REVIEW: Office Web Apps Will Pose Strong Counterattack Against Google Apps, Zoho,” eWeek, September 21, 2009. “Microsoft recently pulled back the curtain on its Office Web Apps in the form of a limited-access technical preview, and according to eWeek Labs' tests so far, the Office Web Apps suite—while studded with its fair share of tech preview warts—signals that Microsoft's counterattack on the online office encroachment of Google, Zoho and others is off to a solid start.”
• Zack Whittaker, “Students vs. Google Apps vs. Office Web Apps,” ZDNet, September 22, 2009. A student at the University of Kent in the UK compares Google Apps with Microsoft’s Office Web Apps.
• Barry Collins, “Microsoft Office Web Apps review: first look,” PC Pro, September 22, 2009. “Although it’s clearly very early days for these online apps, the obvious fear is that Office Web Apps will only be useful for editing documents created in the desktop software, and of limited use when attempting to create documents from scratch. That may be a sensible move for a company seeking to protect its desktop software revenues, but will disappoint anyone hoping the Web Apps would provide an alternative to the regular Office upgrade cycle. Indeed, if you want to make Web Apps part of your company’s workflow - or even your own - you’ll need to upgrade to Office 2007 or 2010.”

ThinkFree Behind the Firewall; Zoho for SharePoint

Yesterday was "news rich" in the productivity suite market. Two small vendors, ThinkFree and Zoho, made interesting announcements.

ThinkFree released its ThinkFree Server Enterprise solution on June 22 and announced it on June 23. Basically, this allows an enterprise to take ThinkFree's SaaS productivity suite/document sharing solution and install it on an internal server behind the firewall.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on June 23, Zoho announced Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint. The e-mail I got from the PR person says,

This add-on, when installed on a Microsoft SharePoint Server, integrates Zoho Office Suite with Microsoft SharePoint.

The add-on provides users with the following functionality:

• Create new documents and save them to SharePoint in MS Office formats.
• View existing documents within SharePoint using Zoho Apps (Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show).
• Edit existing documents with Zoho Apps and save them back to SharePoint.
• Provides collaborative editing capabilities based on SharePoint's sharing permissions.

You can find more information about it in a post on the Zoho blog.

Via a server-side install, this connects Zoho to a document sharing/management application, similar to Google Apps, Microsoft Office/SharePoint, and ThinkFree--a capability that isn't offered by Corel, IBM, Novell, or Sun.

If you've been poking around, looking for alternatives to Microsoft Office/SharePoint, these are both worth looking at. With the entrance of Adobe into this space earlier in the month, the options just keep getting better and better.

IBM's LotusLive: Clean Branding, Messy Backend

After a year, IBM finally decided to fix its Bluehouse fiasco. At Lotusphere 2008, IBM announced a SaaS-based sharing service for documents, contacts, activities, and meetings. However, it (1) didn't include e-mail and (2) was reserved for companies of fewer than 500 employees. Given that implementations of SaaS-based solutions in the market (e.g., Google Apps) always begin with e-mail, and that large enterprises (IBM's bread and butter) were looking for SaaS solutions as a way to save money, at announcement this was a really broken product. We told IBM that--they did the, "Yeah, right" thing--and we started referring to it internally as Outhouse.

Fast forward a year. At Lotusphere 2009, IBM announced that they were adding e-mail to the solution, giving it a new name (LotusLive), and making LotusLive available to companies no matter what their size. Much better, but still behind the market curve (which I'll get to). The part I found interesting was that IBM Lotus at a press/analyst briefing admitted that although the analysts had universally panned the lack of e-mail in January 2008, it was only when early customers also expressed their displeasure that IBM finally decided to fix the e-mail problem by buying Outblaze, a Hong Kong-based e-mail provider in January 2009.

So compared to last year, Bluehouse (now LotusLive) is a much better product. However, that's faint praise.

Where IBM did make a smart move was on the branding. LotusLive is the umbrella term for IBM's online offerings. This is in stark contrast to Microsoft, which seems to delight in confusing both customers and analysts with a plethora of terms: Office Live Workspace, Office Live Small Business, Windows Live, and the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. (This may be changing, as Microsoft is apparently going to merge the Office Live and Windows Live brands).

LotusLive supports web conferencing, collaboration, and e-mail, but the e-mail offering is balkanized. For lightweight mail, you use the web-based iNotes client (or a POP3/IMAP client) with the Outblaze backend. If you want full-featured mail, you use Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging. In short, there are two different e-mail engines at work here, which does not bode well for large clients that want to switch back and forth between SaaS and internal e-mail. This is a discussion I have with clients all the time, and the ultimate dream is to be able to turn a knob and seamlessly alter where e-mail is hosted. The mailboxes migrate behind the scenes, licensing is taking care of automatically, and the business is able to tune its e-mail engine to map to what the business needs from month to month.

This is the vision that Microsoft is marching toward--how fast that marching will occur is up for debate--but Microsoft understands that software plus services implicitly demands that the two become fully integrated. IBM gets that at a user interface level--"Click to Cloud" is IBM's term for being able to easily store information in the cloud--but hasn't yet declared that it is willing to do the heavy lifting to fully integrate the e-mail backends.

In summary, IBM's SaaS story is much better than it was a year ago, but the story still doesn't have the happy ending that enterprises ultimately want.

Lotus Symphony: Looking to Go Beyond Playing Catch Up

IBM Lotus had several presentations on Lotus Symphony this year. Symphony is an office productivity suite that natively supports ODF-based word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Other characteristics are:

• Free license
• Supports 28 languages
• Runs on Windows (XP, Vista), Linux (Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu), and Mac OS X
• Based on Lotus Expeditor
• Three support options: Symphony Embedded Version (free: included with the purchase of other products such as Notes 8, Foundations, and iNotes); Standalone Symphony Free Support (free: online support via forums); Symphony Standalone Fee-Based Support (priced for up to 20,000 users, limited to 20 technical contacts)

At the moment, Symphony acts as a wannabe to Microsoft Office, with a few things missing, such as VB Macros (that feature is coming). If Symphony were just that, it wouldn't be that interesting--true, it could save you licensing fees compared to Office, but that would be all it does: it would improve the bottom line but not offer increased productivity for information workers.

However, IBM Lotus is becoming a bit more outspoken about their future plans. On slide 5 of the IBM Lotus Symphony Overview (presentation ID506), the company portrayed a pyramid with five tiers, with an arrow pointing up the pyramid stating, "Over time, investment will shift." From bottom to top the tiers are:

1. Meet needs of most users: Usability, stability, platform support
2. Adoption capability: Interoperability, compatibility, deployability
3. Linked values: Cross integration with Lotus portfolio, first choice for office tools of Lotus users
4. Solution enablement: Programmability for ISVs, extensible and open
5. Beyond Office: Breakthrough document manipulation experience

The interesting one is number five: Beyond Office is the idea that Symphony should become part of an ecosystem that makes composite documents, similar to what the DITA standard allows for technical documentation. And guess what--IBM is the company that pioneered DITA. So given the company's DITA heritage and IBM Lotus' declared strategic plan, over the next several years Symphony should become a much more capable, interesting, and productivity enhancing product.

Lotusphere 2009: What Might Have Been

Following are two blog posts I had mentally (and optimistically) written before attending Lotusphere 2009. Unfortunately, IBM Lotus didn't make the corresponding announcements. Oh, well. But since it seems a shame to waste them, here's a glimpse of blog posts I would have loved to have made:

• IBM Lotus Combines Quickr and Connections to Create a SharePoint Killer: When a prospect asks IBM Lotus about collaboration these days, Lotus ticks off the triad of Notes, Quickr (collaboration workspace and document libraries), and Connections (social software). Lotus customers have heard the pitch for several years and get it; everyone else gets confused and goes with Microsoft's simpler (IBM would claim simplistic) pitch of SharePoint. Finally recognizing that its complex messaging was getting in the way, IBM Lotus announced today that it was combining Quickr and Connections to create QuickConnections, a software suite that gives SharePoint 2007 a run for its money.
• IBM Lotus Announces "Social for SharePoint": IBM Lotus has historically preached to the choir: making major announcements at Lotusphere to the Lotus faithful. While IBM Lotus has a huge installed base, this habit has the effect of making enterprises who aren't Lotus customers unsure of what the company offers. Furthermore, many enterprises now view collaboration through a SharePoint lens--and if a vendor doesn't play in or complement the SharePoint ecosystem, it's not worth taking the time to figure out what they do offer. Finally recognizing that ignoring the SharePoint elephant in the room is not getting them new customers, IBM Lotus has announced a compelling add-on to SharePoint: Social for SharePoint, which is basically a Connections add-on to SharePoint. Although customers like SharePoint's portal and content management capabilities, many feel that its social software capabilities are rudimentary--and they are. Social for SharePoint fixes that problem in spades, and leverages the enhancements to Connections that IBM continues to make. In short, IBM Lotus now offers a product that works with SharePoint to deliver the social software capabilities that Microsoft promises but doesn't deliver. 

XML Power: DAISY XML Add-In for Microsoft Word

Microsoft has announced the availability of a Microsoft Word add-in  (Word 2007, Word 2003, Word XP) for saving OOXML-based Word documents as "DAISY XML." It's available for free at http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/daisy/.

DAISY (Digital Access Information SYstem) XML is the foundation for supporting digital talking books. It works by linking sections within an XML file to points within a corresponding digital audio file. By using special devices or by installing special software on PCs, users who are blind or have poor vision can jump to specific sections in the audio stream or skip over footnotes altogether. This is an improvement over having to listen to the audio serially.

While the Word add-in is OOXML-based, there are ODF initiatives for generating accessibilty-friendly documents. The DAISY Pipeline (as described by DAISY; as described by (SourceForge) is an open source project for performing DAISY-related transformations (including ODF to DTBook). In addition, the ODF Accessibility Guidelines offer an ODF-based foundation for generating accessible documents. However, these two initiatives are developer-focused, giving programmers tools that help them create products that will generate accessible documents. Today's Word add-in cuts to the chase, giving end users with disabilities something they can use today.

Whether ODF- or OOXML-based, such products and initiatives highlight the value of XML over binary formats. Because XML teases out the underlying structure of a document, it makes jumping from section to section or object to object easier than it was in binary formats (which are inclined to treat a document as a serial, undifferentiated thing). Put another way, XML embeds more intelligence within documents, and that's a good thing.

All Google Apps Docs Can Now Be Viewed Offline

On Friday, The Official Google Docs Blog announced that all Google doc types (documents, spreadsheets, and presentations) can now be viewed offline. At this time, users can also edit word processing documents; that additional capability will be added over time for spreadsheets and presentations. The post also included a pointer to more information about Google Docs Offline: Overview: What is Google Docs Offline?

Of course, viewing and editing documents offline has been a capability of software for years. It's nice to see Google go retro and add some software flavor to its solution.