Files stink (the computer kind of file that is). I mean, I really hate having to deal with all the computer files in my life. At the office I have files on my computer, stuck in various web spaces and shared drives, buried in email folders, taking up space on thumb drives and god knows where else. At home it’s almost as bad (in some ways worse) now that everyone in my family has a computer (that I try to keep backed up) not to mention all of the interactions we have with schools, non-profits, and my wife’s business.

It seems like we have all sorts of these containers called "file" to hold information but can never find anything and the time it takes to organize files is never worth it. Even worse, I feel like I have to shield myself from the files people virtually throw at me through email. I am losing the battle against the onslaught of computer files and I am one of the people my family and friends come to for advice about this stuff. Imagine what the computer novices or phobes go through.

I don’t even want files. What I want is the information stored in a file. I want documents… you know, reports, analysis, recommendations, etc. Files are overhead. Computers are supposed to take care of overhead.

So I have been thinking about files and documents lately and I have come to the conclusion that our reliance on the computer file as the primary structure for storing our digital "stuff" is hurting us in ways we cannot see. This is holding us back from realizing truly breakthrough capabilities.

The computer file is older than I am, which according to my kids, is a REALLY long time. The Wikipedia entry for computer file suggests the concept started in 1961 with MIT’s CTSS project. At this point I think many of us simply take files for granted. That is, those of us who are experienced enough to deal with files.

My kids know about files, enough to do their homework. But I bet they don’t know where iTunes keeps their music (and why should they care?). My Mom certainly does not understand files. She knows Yahoo! Mail well enough. But files? No way. I suspect there are many users of the Internet who do not have a clue about what files are or how to manage them.

So if files are so bad why do we put up with them? It’s probably because their use is so ingrained in us that we cannot imagine an alternative. And to be honest, until recently, neither could I. But then along comes some great alternatives. A good example of this is online office suites like Google Docs and Zoho. Another example, which I won’t get into in this blog post, is SharePoint lists.

One of the few times Google Docs requires you to deal with files is when you upload a Word document. Documents exist entirely within the online office suite. How office suites evolve to manage documents will play a huge role in determining their success. After all, we don’t want to transfer the mess we have with files to the online office suites.

Having version control built into the office suite is a great start. How many of us get lost after resorting to appending "v2" to file names stored on our computer or have to guess which document is the latest among the similarly labeled files sitting on a shared drive? Office suites using a folder/file interface are doing so to offer something familiar but I think they need to evolve to something much more.

A recent conversation I had with a colleague is a good example of the value of online documents. He was asked by friends at a non-profit about a problem that occurred when a critical person left the organization and important documents (files) were lost. The few people they had on staff barely could handle email and they had no idea how to handle their organization’s documents.

The toughest technical challenge these organizations face is not having the skills necessary to compose a document. But rather it is not having the skills necessary to manage and share documents. In my opinion, storing files in a web workspace is marginally better than a shared drive (although it can be significantly better if best practices are used). There is just too much separation between the browser using the web workspace and the file’s application (word processor, spreadsheet application, etc.).

The juggling that has to take place between the two windows is something many people never seem to master (“ok, I read the document in this window and then I will flip over to this window to write a comment …”). In addition, the workspace and the file applications often compete with each other by offering similar features. For example, both SharePoint document libraries and Microsoft Word have version control.

I believe one of the reasons why it is easier for a group to manage and share documents using online office suites (rather than with files) is because they use the web rather than tolerate it. This is an important concept that was noted by Tim O’Reilly in his original Web 2.0 blog post. He referred to it as using the “web as platform” and is an important design pattern for Enterprise 2.0 too.

I’ll get into this topic in more detail in upcoming blog posts. In addition, over the next few months much my blogging here will be exploring the concept of Enterprise 2.0 along with examples that help explain it.

Last week Google confirmed rumors they are planning to add an online presentation capability to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. During an on stage interview at the Web 2.0 Expo, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced active development of the new feature. Rumors started in February when enthusiasts found references to “Presently” while combing through the Docs and Spreadsheets Javascript that gets downloaded to browsers.

During the interview Battelle said this “completes what most people call an office suite” and asked Schmidt if Google Apps is now a competitor to Microsoft Office. Schmidt responded by saying they do not intended to have all of the functionality of Microsoft Office but to provide something different. He went on to say this is a “different way of managing information” and is a “better fit for how people are using the web”. He also described it as a transition from an “older architecture to this web-based architecture”. In a two minute period Schmidt summed up a major transition that is taking place on the Internet and is making its way into corporate intranets.

In my opinion, Google can make a pretty good argument they are not directly competing with Microsoft Office. They are offering something very different but familiar. Of course, I expect Microsoft strategists will see this through their Office glasses and eventually try to respond by extending the Office suite. In my opinion, the difference between Google Docs and Microsoft Office is the difference between working within the web versus using the Internet for the distribution of files. This may be the most significant change in how people use the Internet since your neighbor first sent you an email from AOL.

The challenge Google, and others like Zoho, face is in getting users to see how this approach is better. But Google is slowly making progress. Almost a year ago I switched to using Gmail as my exclusive email provider for home use. Before that I would have never dreamt of using web-based mail. But now I cannot imagine the opposite. Aside from the basics, like capturing more spam that any solution I have tried (btw, I haven’t changed my email address for ten years so spam chases me constantly), I most like how Gmail handles file attachments.

First, some background. I work with a local youth baseball and softball association. One of our many initiatives to improve communication with our parents is the publishing of league information (schedules, game results, standings, directions to fields, etc.) on the Internet. Fortunately, we came across League Lineup, a feature-rich but inexpensive solution run by a very responsive team. Getting all of our schedules published is not as easy as I would like but we get by with some Excel spreadsheet templates that league directors fill out. These are eventually converted to CSV (comma separate value) files that get uploaded to League Lineup.

As a result of spring finally arriving here in the Midwest league directors are now sending me Excel spreadsheets with schedules to be uploaded. Gmail’s rendering of spreadsheets has come in very handy when receiving these documents.

In case you haven’t seen this feature, Gmail shows an attachment accompanied with three links: “View as HTML”, “Open as a Google Spreadsheet”, and “Download”. I have learned to understand and cope with the performance of each of these choices. “View as HTML” is wicked fast. I use it when I simply need to read the attachment quickly. “Open as Google Spreadsheet” takes a little longer but the information is usually presented quite fast and I am able to do some simple spreadsheet functions.

But, I have come to consider clicking the “Download” link (which downloads and opens the file in Excel) with some trepidation. To me, the “Download” link is best described as the “Let’s wait for the disk light to turn off” link. It is irritatingly slower than the other choices. The point I am trying to make here is there are many scenarios in which I prefer to see information show up in a browser quickly rather than a rich client application.

In many ways these three links represent the changed user experiences we are seeing as a result of Web 2.0. Some of you might point to Microsoft’s Excel Services for SharePoint as a move to this new model. However, this product only provides a read-only representation of a spreadsheet in a browser (to be fair, it is an incredibly accurate representation though). To collaborate on the spreadsheet you need to use traditional file sharing methods. The source for the data shown in Excel Services is an Excel file sitting in the SharePoint site. In my opinion, Excel services is pretty good for what it does but is just a step or two beyond a web-based Excel viewer.

So does this mean the end of client applications? Not at all, but I think their focus will have to change. In my opinion, a rich client application should extend a web experience, not the other way around (embrace and extend, but from a different perspective). I would not be surprised to see Google offer downloadable software that extends the Windows Explorer or browser user interfaces with Google Apps features. In some respects this is already happening. For example, Google Desktop indexes Gmail and Zoho Office offers some convenient client-side features as well.

What do you think?

I recently started using Microsoft OneNote 2007 and really like it. Previously I used a combination of several disjoint techniques and tools to handle task, information, and personal knowledge management but so far OneNote seems to provide a much simpler experience and has some powerful capabilities for organizing "my stuff". This exploration led me to re-evaluate the role of Tablet PCs in my life and, subsequently, the lives of my children. Our two middle-schoolers have nearly outgrown their current desktop computers and my wife and I were starting to talk about their future computing needs as our oldest daughter enters high school this fall.

A key to the success of our children in the future will be their ability to consume, manage, and call upon digital information. Being able to use Google and Wikipedia will be important but it will take more to stand out in the future. Think of the growth of information we have dealt with in our own lifetimes and the struggles we go through to keep up.

We decided our middle-schoolers should have Tablet PCs so they can use them in high school and be well prepared for college. Naturally our kids are excited about this but we have been trying to get them to see the importance of learning personal knowledge management skills and not simply seeing Tablet PCs as convenient ways to IM from their bed.

But we have one problem in seeing this vision through. We are having a difficult time finding any retail stores carrying Tablet PCs. Of course, this could be due to the current economic downturn in the Detroit area. We have a Microcenter about a twenty minute drive away that carries Tablet PCs. But their display only had one Fujitsu Lifebook (with the battery missing) and a much larger Acer Tablet. That’s it. No Tablet PCs at Best Buy, Circuit City or Comp-USA.

I understand Tablet PCs are not the big hit Bill Gates expected when he predicted they would become “the most popular form of PC sold in America”. Although their numbers are small Tablet PCs are growing much quicker than the rest of the PC market. Besides, the past few years we have heard of many initiatives to provide Tablet PCs to school children.

The report, America’s Digital Schools: A Five Year Forecast – Mobilizing the Curriculum, found a growing interest in programs where each student and teacher have their own computing device (31% of superintendents indicated using a 1:1 program in at least one grade versus 4% in 2003). This is due to the success shown by programs implemented so far. However, many challenges still exist so we are not counting on our local schools to supply technology and, more importantly, being capable of teaching the types of skills necessary to properly leverage it any time soon.

There are several resources for learning more about student use of Tablet PCs. The best is  Student Tablet PC. This site has tons of useful information for those of us just starting out with Tablet PCs, especially if you are a student. Check out this snazzy screencast demonstrating some of the things you can do using GoBinder (a Tablet PC application for managing school work), Adobe Acrobat, MindManager and others. While you are on the site be sure to see how you can take more effective notes using a Tablet.

But as for test driving Tablet PCs, does anyone have any suggestions? Do retail stores in your area carry Tablet PCs?

Seven years ago WebEx went public just before the IPO market collapsed beating its closest rival PlaceWare, which filed just weeks after WebEx. PlaceWare eventually withdrew it’s IPO and was later acquired by Microsoft for $200 million in 2003. Now WebEx is being acquired by Cisco for $3.2 billion. In my opinion, this is happening just as profits in the web conferencing market are about to dry up.

Now, don’t take what I am saying the wrong way. WebEx is a great service. But, the technology upon which their web conferencing business is built was fantastic seven years ago. In 2000 companies like WebEx and PlaceWare were solving seemingly intractable problems. The methods they used were later employed by instant messaging products and other web services hoping to gain a foothold in companies whose Internet firewalls block the direct network path between desktop computers and servers on the Internet.

A few years before WebEx arrived, Microsoft NetMeeting showed many of us the value of sharing presentations and views of desktop applications. However, NetMeeting had a major deficiency, it could only work within an intranet. Getting NetMeeting screen sharing sessions working between companies was virtually impossible. It required specialized conferencing servers on the Internet in addition to complex firewall changes for all companies involved. So, in comes WebEx and PlaceWare and, like magic, we are sharing presentations and desktop applications with minimal effort. No IT involvement at all. It just works.

Low-Cost Web Conference Competition

In the past seven years a number of low-cost competitors have emerged. TechCrunch listed a few last week and Robin Good has previous published a list as well. WebEx’s pricing model has changed to reflect this competition. For example, you can now get a monthly subscription for $49 which includes unlimited meetings with up to 10 participants. For a sales rep, that is a pretty good deal. But, for a corporation with thousands of teams and team members there is still room for improvement.

Looking a year or two out I see continued price pressure on the web conferencing market beyond the current set of low cost providers. "Internet 2009" will be quite different than "Internet 2000". There are now companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon willing to spend big bucks building out their server infrastructure and are looking for new applications to use them. As a result WebEx’s MediaTone Network, once a compelling differentiator, seems less valuable today.

The Value of the WebEx MediaTone Network

According to slides from WebEx, the MediaTone Network is composed of 37 sites scattered around the world, all connnected via a private network. The goal is to provide shorter network paths and smaller bandwidth latency for customers using WebEx services. However, I have to wonder about the value of such a network today since most web conferences are one way presentations. In these scenarios the quality of the bandwidth mean much less than in application sharing scenarios.

To illustrate what I mean let’s say we have a web conference with five participants. Two of them are from the sales department of a company and the other three are employees at a potential customer. Prior to the meeting the presenter uploads a set of slides to the web conferencing service. The service converts these into a set of image files that are automatically forwarded and cached by each meeting participant’s desktop computer.

Once the presentation is cached the bandwidth required for this presentation is simply a matter of the central server sending signals out to all participants to move to a particular slide. So the amount of bandwidth used is very small. Of course, I am simplifying matters a great deal and there are scenarios such as sharing video clips that complicate matters but this is how many web conferences play out nonetheless.

Application screen sharing, on the other hand, places more demands on the web conferencing service since the contents of a computer’s screen are transmitted from a participant to a central server and then back out to the other participants. In this case a lower latency network connection can make a big difference and the MediaTone network would likely improve the meeting quality. However the bandwidth required to do this is less than you might think and is now well within the low range of most residential broadband connections.

Internet 2007 and Infrastructure on Demand

Today we have applications running over the Internet that also require consistent bandwidth to work well. Online office suites, such as Google Docs and Zoho Office, are constantly sending updates back to a server. In addition, Skype has shown that you don’t need a large server infrastructure for real-time communications. One could even say that Skype provides more "media tone" on the Internet today than WebEx.

In addition, the cost of providing an easily accessible server with high-connectivity bandwidth is becoming extremely cheap. Infrastructure-on-demand services like Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) provide powerful servers for 10 cents an hour. EC2 also just charges 20 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth.

The cost of web conferencing software is dropping too. For example, DimDim is an Open Source web conferencing system which is expected to finish beta testing this year. My brief testing with DimDim showed that, although not quite ready for prime time yet, it is looking pretty good. Once released for production use I plan on experimenting with it further.

So, let’s go back to our previous example of a five person web conference (two sales reps, three customers). I can envision a scenario where an Internet entrepreneur combines the DimDim Open Source software with EC2 by providing a scheduling service that provisions an EC2 host with DimDim software in time to host a web conference. After the conference the EC2 server is terminated. The cost to host a web conference using Amazon’s servers and bandwidth would be less than 40 cents. The only fixed cost assumed by the conferencing provider is the host providing the scheduling and provisioning functions. And you thought $49 a month was cheap!

WebEx is more than web conferencing

A little over a year ago WebEx acquired Intranets.Com, a company which provides a hosted online office suite. From a functional point of view the combined solution is complementary. However, the online office suite market is becoming very competitive, probably more so than web conferencing itself. With Google entering the market and providing an online office suite for free (or a for-pay enterprise version) in addition to Microsoft Office Live I wonder how much growth Intranets.Com will have long-term.

And, speaking of Google, why wasn’t Google interested in WebEx? Web conferencing is clearly a gap in their office suite and I would expect the enterprise customers they are now talking with are inquiring about this as well.

Perhaps web conferencing is at the point where it is becoming a feature of an office suite, not the basis for an entire business. If this is the case then WebEx’s timing is perfect, once again.

In the spirit of contributing to the online discussion started by James Robertson here are my five tips for driving adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. These come from personal experience and from talking with IT leaders in the trenches.In the spirit of contributing to the online discussion started by James Robertson here are my five tips for driving adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. These come from personal experience and from talking with IT leaders in the trenches.

1. Demonstate the Enterprise 2.0 technology. First, by making a working prototype available on your Intranet. Second, by using it for your own projects (you become your company’s expert). Enterprise 2.0 cannot be sold via Powerpoint and analyst reports. Often IT doesn’t like prototypes but you have to work past the resistance and somehow get the Enterprise 2.0 technology out there so people can see it, use it, and think about how it can solve their problems.
2. Foster a community of users. By following tip 1 you will soon find others who have problems that can be addressed by the new technology. These people are invaluable. Keep them up to date on your progress and help them any way possible (like letting them use the prototype to test with their own projects). IT users are good to have but it is much better to have users from business units. These users tell success stories that will sell the solution to the rest of the company and show real business value.
3. Make it easy to start using the Enterprise 2.0 technology. Nobody wants to wait for an IT project to get approved, signed off, funding allocated, yada yada yada. Deploy it in a way that eliminates all of that overhead. Self-service sign-up is one way of doing this. It should only take minutes (or seconds) to get a new wiki or blog created. In addition, the service should either be free or should be approvable by the lowest level of management.
4. Help users help themselves. Keep the community going beyond service deployment. The traditional IT approach of creating job-aides, FAQ sheets, and documenting best practices in a spiffy-looking Intranet site can often be delegated to the community. If the Enterprise 2.0 technology is easy to use and solves real problems then you will have plenty of help from passionate users. Besides, if you are driving the adoption of wikis then the community site (also based on the wiki tool) becomes a working example.
5. Get senior management support. This will help ensure funding and drive the most efficient use of the technology. Use the community to spread success stories that bubble up to business unit managers. A word of warning: if you use internal dollars to charge for an Enterprise 2.0 solution then be sensitive to what behaviors this encourages. By aligning deployment with senior management support you can drive the correct and desired behavior and make it easy to start using.

It’s nice to see the thinking and discussions surrounding Enterprise 2.0 start to mature. This past month a number of bloggers provided tips for driving it’s adoption. It all started with James Robertson’s post challenging others to "publish their list of 5 tips for gaining adoption of enterprise 2.0". Looking back there are a number of good suggestions, including a post from Collaboration Loop’s own Mike Gotta.But this week I came across WikiPatterns, a site for leaders who want to drive adoption of wikis in their companies. The site is hosted by Atlassian Software, the makers of Confluence, an enterprise wiki. In short, this is an incredible resource and goes a long way to bridge the gap that sits between IT departments and the business units they support.

Patterns are something many large IT departments already familiar with or are considering using. They were a very hot topic just a few years ago and are used for creating software architectures as well as common user interfaces. Patterns are a way to share practical advice about best practices and avoiding bad ideas already attempted (called anti-patterns). A good resource for learning about patterns is Patterns and Software: Essential Concepts and Terminology written by Brad Appleton. On this webpage Appleton says "Patterns help create a shared language for communicating insight and experience about these problems and their solutions".

Wikipatterns, as the name suggests, apply patterns to the adoption of wikis. Patterns are generally described in a three part rule involving a context, a problem, and a solution. Each Wikipattern contains these basic elements and are organized by: Name, Summary, Usage, Example, and Related Patterns. Although still evolving, the patterns documented in Wikipatterns look to be tremendously helpful already. For example, the Magnet pattern "involves having some content exclusively on the wiki to draw users to it". This may sound familiar to anyone who has tried to drive adoption of other types of collaborative websites, such as a workspace or a portal.

Do you get the same feeling looking at an empty wiki as you did when you first encountered an empty spreadsheet? We knew at the time this new concept called a spreadsheet was powerful. But, still, it was blank. What do we do now? Wikipatterns provides help for those who want to use a wiki but know that an empty wiki isn’t the place to start, just like we know not to send someone a blank spreadsheet and have them fill in their expense report.

I just recently discovered Wikipatterns (via Web Worker Daily) and this is the first time I have looked deeply into the concept of patterns. But, what I’ve seen so far interests me a great deal. Here are some questions I am starting to ponder:

• Does WikiPatterns represent a key piece to enabling companies trying to fill the gap between IT and Business and help drive adoption of new technology?
• Can patterns be applied to other technologies like Microsoft SharePoint or eRoom? Are product-specific patterns sustainable or do patterns only apply to a capability (like wikis)?
• Are there, or should there be, patterns for blogs, social networks, or other Web 2.0 technologies?
• Can a company harness patterns unique to its cultural norms and behaviors that give it a competitive advantage? Is this an example of how a company might create what McKinsey calls "a formidable competitive capability"?

What do you think?

You may not recognized the Drupal name but you have used the product. According to estimates the number of sites using Drupal is in excess of 50,000! These include MTV UK, Sony’s MusicBox, Leo Laporte’s TWiT site, NowPublic, The Onion, Spread Firefox, Linux Journal, and several political sites such as Vote Hillary, Draft Obama, and Chris Dodd for President. Web 2.0 darlings Flock and SocialText use Drupal on their corporate websites. Drupal.org, the project’s home site, is one of the busiest Drupal sites serving over half a million software downloads a month. This includes downloads of Drupal itself (about 80,000 a month) and numerous extensions available for the product.

One of the reasons Drupal is so popular is its robust and growing community of developers. Although architecture may not attract system integrators it can be a primary reason they stick around. The core Drupal development team, led by Dries Buytaert, has staunchy insisted on developing a platform that is modular and extensible. Because of this system integrators from around the world have used Drupal as the basis for thousands of websites.

As standard functionality Drupal provides support for things like blogging (both individual and group blogs), remote authoring (using tools like Windows Live Writer and Performancing), collaborative books (think wikis, but slightly more structured), RSS syndication and aggregation, and search engine friendly urls, to name just a few. But perhaps the most powerful capabilities come from innovations available in user contributed extensions to Drupal. Here are just some of the incredible things you can do with these extensions:

• Easily integrate services such as Flickr, Amazon, Facebook, Google Analytics, Google AdSense, and online calendar systems within your website.
• Support various forms of media such as flash video, podcasts, image and photo galleries.
• Drupal can be a powerful content aggregator repurposing syndicated Internet content and can even leverage Yahoo’s term extraction services.

The innovation doesn’t stop at the corporate firewall. Enterprises can use Drupal’s powerful taxonomy and keyword management capabilities as well as its support for single sign-on systems. Distributed authentication was architected into the platform from nearly the start of the project. The support for single sign-on is very good.

The core developers also incorporate significant user contributed innovations into the platform itself enabling the development of the next generation of extensions that continue to outpace offerings from competitive products such as those from Microsoft and IBM. For example, the team is considering adding native support for OpenID in a future major release. But, for now, support for OpenID is available as a user contributed module.

Why does the use of Drupal continue to grow? One reason is because a number of companies actively promote Drupal. The most prominent is Lullabot, a web development firm led by Jeff Robbins. Their weekly podcasts are incredibly valuable for anyone working with Drupal. Even developers not involved in Drupal would have found their recent podcast discussing PHP development tools insightful.

But there are many others in the Drupal community contributing to its success. There has been a recent explosion of Drupal screencasts explaining how to use, configure, customize, and extend Drupal. In addition, groups.drupal.org hosts local interest groups (my favorite is the Grand Rapids Drupal user group, they call themselves GRupal) as well as those interested in contributing to the community but who aren’t software developers. For example, there are groups focused on marketing, education, and use within enterprises. A great example is the Drupal Dojo group. They host regularly scheduled web conferences and make screencasts available illustrating Drupal capabilities.

And there is interest in Drupal from large companies as well. Most notably, IBM DeveloperWorks published a series of tutorials that were written by engineers in their Internet Technology Group. The tutorials provide an introduction to site theming (customizing the website’s appearance), module development (how to extend Drupal), as well as basic information about setting up a development environment.

Yahoo uses Drupal for internally managing user interface patterns and is also hosting an Open Source CMS conference in March. This will have a "sub-conference" covering just Drupal.

There is probably nothing in Drupal that products from the big vendors can’t do and may have implemented somewhere. The difference is companies using Drupal are meeting customer needs faster and cheaper because they are sharing innovations within the community. This is resulting in a growing community that is increasing the pace in which new innovations are brought to market. Companies such as Optaros and SpikeSource, for example, are stepping in to service large corporate customers and deliver solutions quickly and inexpensively.

In my opinion, unless the large software vendors figure out a way to leverage a community to this extent their days of competing for Internet marketshare may be numbered. At one time we used to measure the success of Microsoft, Netscape, and Apache by tracking how many websites were hosted by a particular web server (Netcraft conveniently publishes these numbers). But, these statistics are becoming less important since systems like Drupal are increasingly being used and run on any number of webserver platforms.

In an era where Google is giving away services for free, the cost of deployment and the time it takes to bring innovations to market is becoming much more important. Many smart system integrators are recognizing the power of an open community like Drupal and are effectively competing in this new environment. Time will tell if the large software vendors can adapt.

Earlier this month at CES 2007 Microsoft announced plans for Windows Home Server (WHS), a software product that provides backup, file sharing, and remote management capabilities for XP and Vista home computers in a single household. You can install the software on the hardware of your choosing or buy it from one of Microsoft’s partners. HP will ship it in a product called HP MediaSmart Server.

When I first heard this my inner-geek went crazy. I had to find out more.

But shortly after reading up on the product I started thinking about how busy we were going to be until school is out for summer; basketball in the winter, softball in spring, writing this blog on the weekend, all those half finished projects still needing attention, etc. and all of the expenses that comes with these activities.

The services Windows Home Server provides are compelling: automated backup, restoration of individual files (even files going back several revisions), restoration of an entire computer, monitoring of all computers in the house, plus access and sharing from the Internet. In addition, it looks easy to use, as you would expect from Microsoft. The hardware is sold without a monitor and everything is managed from a PC in the house.

But, when you get down to it this is really being marketed as an old-school product, isn’t it? I mean, it is a "server" but, for many of these features, you really don’t need a server at all. For example, remote backup has been around for awhile, in some cases it is provided as a free Internet-based service. A good example of the innovation taking place with these services is CrashPlan, which provides backup services between friends’ computers or you can pay for storage on CrashPlan’s servers.

Granted, you could argue that many products don’t really need a "server’ per se but are sold that way nonetheless. But, even so, why couldn’t this server run as a virtual PC? VMWare calls these virtual appliances (there goes that inner-geek again). Looking through their virtual appliance directory I found at least two projects that provide similar services as WHS, but are probably still for the hobbyist. I wonder if similar virtual appliances are now being developed as commercial products.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Windows Home Server looks like an amazing product. The full PC backup and restore functions are especially innovative. But, as this home’s chief computer administrator I have to balance a number of things before adding something like this to the mix, particularly the up front cost and the investment in my time (both of which have many competing priorities). In my opinion, if Microsoft is correct in their market assessment, we should see several competitive products popup shortly; if they aren’t already here. Many of these will likely not require any hardware at all (or can use memory and disk already on computers in the house) and provide most of these services via a residential broadband connection. Their argument will be lower cost of start-up and fewer hassles since no hardware installation is required.

So let’s tie this back to enterprise computing. I wonder why my reasoning for the products and services I use at home is so different from what is going on in the corporate IT world? For our home computer use I need services (as much as my inner-geek wants to do it ourselves), not products. But, in the corporate IT world this is often the last thing to enter the discussion.

Maybe this is because we don’t want to risk using a small company for services that store our data offsite. But what if a large company provided cost effective services that met our needs? IDC’s predictions for 2007 mentioned software as a service (SaaS) several times. Google, for one, may force this discussion soon with their Apps for Your Domain service. But IDC also predicts Microsoft and SAP will "shift their SaaS initiatives into second gear."

IDC is not alone in identifying the disruption SaaS will continue to make. Gartner’s Tom Austin discussed it recently on their High-Performance Workplace blog. The tone of the post is blunt, asking: ‘Is what we provide to our employees that special that when push comes to shove, you would rather see your firm lay off people instead of using free "Office from the Internet" services?’ The discussion that followed in the comments brought up issues with privacy, compliance, and control.  To me, all of these issues are requirements that must be addressed by a service provider if they are to succeed. The as-is licensing of free services is a non-starter for many businesses. But, if a service provider is willing to meet these enterprise requirements and is less expensive than doing it in-house, why wouldn’t a company do it? I wonder just how strong that inner-geek voice can be.

I am having a difficult time justifying the purchase of a home server product (from Microsoft no less) because of the numerous inexpensive alternatives and the commitment a piece of hardware takes. When will we see similar discussions about enterprise IT services? That time sure seems close to me.

I recently read The Change Function, a book written by Pip Coburn. It clarified much of what I have been thinking about the adoption of collaborative technology and provides a perspective that every intranet strategist should read.

The subtitle for the book is "Why Some Technologies Take Off and Others Crash and Burn". I might have also added "…and why others just sputter along". A common complaint about collaborative technologies is they fail to deliver the results advertised beyond small pockets of groups.  Although, some of these problems are associated with the technology, much of this, I believe, is due to the way companies choose and deploy collaborative technologies. The Change Function strengthens my belief in this.

In short, The Change Function says that change is up to the user. The user decides to change (or not) based on the current level of perceived crisis versus the total perceived pain of adopting something new. If the current crisis is less than the pain of adopting something new then change will not happen.

Coburn says the tech industry’s usual approach (and I dare say a large majority of IT organizations’ approaches) to providing a value proposition is based on Moore’s Law or Grove’s Law. In other words make the technology cheap enough or fast enough (or with enough bells and whistles) and the user will change. If that doesn’t work, well, then the users are simply not smart enough to see the value.

Using The Change Function as a guide, there are two directions we can take to help with technology adoption. Either increase the current level of crisis or lower the perceived pain of adoption. So often our approach to driving adoption of collaborative technologies is to show its numerous benefits and if the users can’t understand that then we’ve done the best we can. Illuminating the benefits of collaborative technology is important but incomplete.

The concept of the change function is about focusing on the end user of a technology. We must first understand the user’s current crisis. Coburn admits that the word "crisis", is ambiguous but it refers to the level of dissatisfaction, from indifference to crisis. An obvious example is the need for more convenient communication driving the development and widespread adoption of cell phones. A non-obvious example is the success of the iPod. Few of us understood the hassles we were going through with portable music until Apple introduced the iPod.

One approach might be to increase the user’s crisis by convincing management that a new collaborative technology is valuable and must be broadly adopted to gain its full benefit. In this case, management’s role in the change function is to increase the employees’ crisis by making a particular change a priority for the company.

In his recent blog post, What’s my real job, Jeffrey Phillips talks about how to get people to spend time on an innovation initiative.  Phillips illustrated the change function in action when someone at a recent engagement asked "how should I spend my time, and what’s most important from the company’s point of view?" Phillips’ answer was the use of compensation and recognition stating "If we layer on other responsibilities but don’t provide compensation, the tasks that aren’t compensated won’t get done or won’t get done well."

The other factor in the change function is reducing the total perceived pain of adoption. In my opinion the increasingly wider recognition of the value of user experience, which many of us observed in the success of Web 2.0 technologies, takes us towards one possible approach. This has led to some companies using Web 2.0 solutions to improve internal processes and to the birth of Enterprise 2.0. Certainly, many Enterprise 2.0 solutions are much easier to use than their predecessors. But, we should not lose sight of the needs of the user and simply focus on the user interface of a tool. What are the crises that can be resolved by Enterprise 2.0 tools?

Perhaps Coburn provides some insight into this as well. In a section of the book where he describes the potential for business intelligence software he says:

Today’s business world is becoming infinitely more complex, and modern companies generally have a large number of applications that take care of running the business. Such application diversity initially wasn’t much of a problem because the applications were meant to automate self-sufficient independent functions, so there was initially little concern that the result of this diversity would be a mismatched collection of "stove-piped" applications rather than a unified network of linked systems.

But the resulting complexity is perhaps the single largest crisis facing enterprises in relationship to technology. The crisis: how to integrate and make sense of all this data.

Here is one area where I disagree with Coburn. Yes, complexity is the largest technological crisis facing enterprises today.  Enterprises not only have to make sense of all this data but employees have to use this highly complex set of applications, each with their own interface, method of controlling access, and independent repository. These "stove-piped" applications significantly impact the productivity of users who have to navigate each one independently, inhibit the sharing of ideas and use of company data within teams, and obscure opportunities where re-use and recombination of data can occur.

A primary goal for Enterprise 2.0 should be a simpler IT environment that provides the data we need to make a decision along with the capability to share the insights we gain. Wouldn’t that be a change?

What do you think? Let me know by leaving a comment below.

Ever since writing about Google Docs and Spreadsheets, I have been fascinated by the prospect of a completely web-based office suite. Since then I have been using Google Docs and Spreadsheets whenever possible. This past week I experimented with the Zoho suite of tools. They look to be several steps ahead of Google in terms of features and level of maturity. This only fueled my interest in these emerging services.

Web office suites blur the lines between what is a personal productivity and a collaborative application. This can challenge our traditional segmentation of technologies like collaboration, personal productivity tools, knowledge management, and others. For web office suites these can simply represent features, just as the information worker simply sees these as basic needs. Fundamentally, what we are after is enabling a workplace that allows us to be our most effective regardless of whether the action we are performing is about collaboration or doing something for ourselves.

For example, the most common way of sharing documents today is by attaching them to email messages. Or, if you are trying to be more efficient, you might first upload the file to a website and then send a link. However, in my opinion, it is too late to think about how to share a document after you finished it. We need to consider up front how to work as individuals in ways that enable opportunities to make our colleagues their most effective.

Perhaps the best way is to keep your files in a location that others can easily access. One approach is to work directly within a collaborative workspace product like SharePoint or eRoom and stop storing files in "My Documents". Web office suites take this a step further and don’t even require the person you are sharing with to have an application loaded on their computer. The application and document are both provided by the web office suite.

Initially the key to success for web office suites will be their ability to meet a particular set of needs and then branch out from there. Microsoft Word is fantastic for authoring a document that will be printed but this is a capability the online word processors appear to be avoiding for the moment. For example, I couldn’t find any way to force a page break with any of the products I used.

Instead web office suites seem to be focusing on activities such as authoring blog posts and others not related to producing a printed document. Zoho has an incredibly powerful online application builder called Zoho Creator. Think simple (as in easy to use) yet powerful version of Microsoft Access for the web. These types of applications are especially well suited for web delivery. More on this some other time.

I have no doubt the level of sophistication in web office suites will continue to rise. Service providers are adding new features and improving their user interfaces using rich elements. But, are web applications ever going to be rich enough? Don’t write them off so quickly. Every time I have done that in the past I was proven wrong. Products like Zoho and Google Docs show that web applications can have a rich responsive interface in addition to the added benefits of wider accessibility and collaboration.

And don’t think the improvements won’t continue to come for AJAX applications in general. With the level of interest in AJAX reaching the stratosphere expect more innovation to follow. For example, if you look into the capabilities applications can leverage in libraries and frameworks like JQuery or Scriptaculous, the potential for even richer web applications is phenomenal.

Offline access may be the final feature that convinces many of us. But will it be something everyone uses or just the one feature that companies need to know is there before committing? Certainly offline access is needed by those traveling with laptops but online applications can still benefit telecommuting workers who have their own PC at home.

And finally, trust. Do you trust having your documents stored somewhere else? Will you ever be ready to use Google Docs (for example) as your only word processor? For me, not yet. However, at one time I asked the same question about email systems but I am now a faithful Gmail user.