Collaborative Thinking

Microsoft Introduces Unified Communications Tools for Developers

What's the significance of this announcement?

There was some signaling at the recent UC launch event in October that Microsoft’s next move would occur in the development area re: building UC-enable business and productivity applications. The announcement is significant in the sense that often times applications help build the business case for infrastructure upgrades and deployment. In this case, if IT organizations can see how to build UC-specific applications, or augment existing applications through UC-related services, then the business case for adopting/migrating/deploying products like Office Communications Server (OCS) becomes more comprehensive. By delivering an application scenario around its UC platform, Microsoft alleviates some of the delays that occur when infrastructure upgrades lack an identifiable business solution. That said, there are a lot of different combinations of API's in this announcement – to some extent this reflects some lack of maturity and cohesiveness around the development model for Microsoft’s UC platform. In some ways, the API’s reflect a mashup of sorts due to multiple products being packaged together into a “platform” that is not entirely normalized. While there are a lot of API's here (arguably, an abundance of riches), application developers are not system engineers and simplification wins out over complexity. There will likely be some initial confusion on the various different approaches and techniques programmers can adopt to deliver UC-based systems. I would expect Microsoft over time to raise the abstraction layer up a notch and be more consistent with the different ways applications can be built with the various toolkits.

What does it bring to developers? See above – plus – this leverages the experience (e.g., .NET) developers already have with Microsoft tools (e.g., leverage UC plug-ins for Visual Studio).

How credible is Microsoft's position in the unified communications space?

Very credible but it has different areas of competency that are at different levels of maturity. Microsoft’s core strengths are in the real-time collaboration re: IM, presence, web conferencing. They are rapidly moving into the area traditionally dominated by communication vendors – VoIP/IP Telephony, audio/video conferencing. But right now, I believe most organizations are going to deploy OCS and “get stable” around the real-time collaboration capabilities, then move to VoIP and integration with existing communication vendors as driven by business requirements. I don’t see anyone ripping out their existing IP-PBX infrastructure in the short run. I do expect more rapid adoption of Round Table however given its price point, form factor and integration with Live Meeting. But make no mistake, Microsoft is in the UC game for the long run and fully intends to dominate it from a platform perspective - that includes mobile and speech as a standard application interaction model.

Who is the typical "developer" they're targeting for this stuff?

Different segments – Microsoft wants to make it easy for the average developer to UC-enable productivity applications, deliver deeper, more complex UC-centric systems and extend the modality of applications with speech interfaces – so I really think it is across the board – from the historical “VB”-like developer to the IT Pro who might be developing at a core infrastructure level.

Microsoft Introduces Unified Communications Tools for Developers

Q&A: Kirt Debique, general manager for Microsoft’s Office Communications Platform & Solutions Group, discusses how a new Unified Communications Developer Portal will provide enterprise developers with secure and reliable tools for building applications.

Related Links

MSDN Unified Communications Developer Portal

Developer Tools News

Unified Communications Virtual Pressroom

Redmond, Wash., Nov. 30, 2007 – In October, Microsoft launched the next generation of its unified communications products, including Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS 2007) and Office Communicator 2007. To further support the company’s software-based approach to business communications, the company today unveiled the Unified Communications Developer Portal on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN). The portal includes a number of resources, including new software developer kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs), to help developers build compelling applications on Microsoft’s unified communications platform.

PressPass spoke to Kirt Debique, general manager for the Office Communications Platform & Solutions Group, about how these resources will help enterprise developers build applications on Microsoft’s unified communications platform.

PressPass: Why is Microsoft making these tools available to developers?

Debique: We’re a platform company, and that philosophy is an especially powerful differentiator in the unified communications space. For example, Exchange Server 2007 is a foundational component in our unified communications solution, and the Exchange Server Developer Center has proven to us how important it is to have one place to go to for developers to create a vibrant community. Following the launch of OCS 2007, we want to provide developers with the tools to build communications solutions on our OCS platform. We strongly believe that it will be developers that will ignite the next generation of innovation for our customers.

Microsoft Introduces Unified Communications Tools for Developers

Other Links:

Microsoft Unified Communications: How Developers Can Blend Messaging, Voice and Conferencing with Next-Generation Applications

UNC301: Unified Communications for Developers: Building Communications Into Your Applications

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids

A fascinating article that should be of interest for parents but perhaps also somewhat relevant to those involved in organizational development within business organizations:

A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son’s confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Jonathan (who is a composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless.

Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability—along with confidence in that ability—is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.

The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.

Praising children’s innate abilities, as Jonathan’s parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.

Scientific American: Nothing Says "Early Earth Was Cool" Like World's Oldest Diamonds

Collective & Collaborative Tagging: Both Are Valid

I agree that most tagging is collective - but I have talked to people thinking about tagging within an enterprise and scenarios where teams form social contracts with each other and agree on common tagging strategies - I would define that as collaborative tagging vs. collective tagging. There is an intersect, or perhaps its a subset, between collective tagging (individuals acting alone that coincidently apply similar tags) and collaborative tagging (groups that agree on a tag vocabulary and apply those tags related to artifacts within a collaborative activity (e.g., a project). Collaboration should not so narrowly be defined and applied only to a single artifact within joint work (e.g., a wiki page). Collaboration has multiple levels and can involve coordination across co-dependent artifacts with varying degrees of symmetric "joint work" on group and individual artifacts within that project.

Collaboration and collective efforts are often confused by those not familiar with both terms, but they are not similar and they are two distinctly different efforts. Collaboration is people working together (often with a common goal) to build one thing (think wiki page with one understanding). Collective efforts are the aggregation of people's individual efforts, sometimes in the same service, but do not have common goal or common effort (del.icio.us page for a URL is the collective understanding of individuals tagging of that page for their own use.

Wikipedia Folksonomy is a Mess with Collaborative Misunderstanding :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net

Social Media Learning Curve: Part 3

So which sector is the most aggressive when it comes to adoption of social media? Charities. Perhaps this should come as no surprise. Extensive use of social media by charities does make sense, but the study does reinforce the perception that traditional organizations still have a ways to go:   

Americas largest charities are turning to the Internet in an effort to increase awareness of their missions and to help connect with their constituencies. While these organizations are known for their nonprofit status and their fundraising campaigns, they demonstrate an acute awareness of the importance of Web 2.0 strategies in meeting their objectives.

This research proves conclusively that charitable organizations are outpacing the business world in their use of social media. Seventy-five percent of the charitable organizations studied are using some form of social media including blogs, podcasts, message boards, social networking, video blogging and wikis. More than a third of the organizations are blogging. Forty-six percent of those studied report social media is very important to their fundraising strategy.

http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/studies/blogstudy4.cfm

Social Media Learning Curve: Part 2

The article below from the New York Times is relevant given my other post on the experience of Molson and its Facebook campaign. It also continues to illustrate the extensive learning curve and need to explore, succeed and fail (all at the same time) as organizations decipher social media.

Making Social Connections and Selling Cookies

FOR decades, Nabisco has sold cookies called Social Tea and crackers called Sociables. Now a competitor, Pepperidge Farm, is going all social, too, by entering the increasingly popular field known as social media with a Web site devoted to social networking.

Pepperidge Farm, owned by the Campbell Soup Company, is introducing a campaign with the theme “Connecting through cookies.” The centerpiece of the campaign is the Web site, artofthecookie.com, which is meant to help women — the target audience for Pepperidge Farm — improve their social lives.

..... The campaign, with a budget of $2 million to $3 million, includes a public relations initiative, a survey of American women on the topic of friendship and print advertising. The campaign is indicative of the efforts being made by mainstream marketers to take advantage of the growing ardor among consumers for online social networking.

So far, I have not read of anyone complaining about this campaign (unlike the Molson effort) - although, given the recent news coverage that identifies the impact of unhealthy eating habits (cookies probably fall into that category), perhaps there will be an uprising of sorts down the road. Other examples where companies are exploring social media and how its community aspects can help with brand value and product success:

In addition to Pepperidge Farm, the marketers going into the social media business include Jockey, with a humorous site for young men (jockeyunderwars.com) devoted to a video contest, and Dove, with an earnest site for women (campaignforrealbeauty.com) devoted to subjects like body image and self-esteem.

One challenge will be whether the organization behind the effort is perceived as making an honest effort or merely providing a thin veil of social outreach for the sole purpose of "selling". Does Pepperidge Farm really want to me my friend? Does it really want me to have more friends? By the way - can I get some free cookies? Um ... they're for my friends...

“Yes, they’re selling cookies,” Ms. Horchow said in a telephone interview. “But they’re also interested in getting into the nitty-gritty of this and helping bring people together.”

To curry favor with consumers, “brands are realizing they have to do a lot more than making something that tastes good,” she added. “Connecting on a personal level with people makes your life better.”

On the flip-side, here we have an campaign that targets the "social conscious" of people. This type of corporate social responsibility and issue advocacy if done well (e.g., respectful, sincere), can have tremendous influence on how people perceive the "persona" of an organization.

For example, a campaign that DeVries developed for the Pantene hair-care line sold by Procter & Gamble, which encourages women to cut their hair and donate it to cancer patients, “was supported by minimal advertising,” Mr. Allman said, “and we are almost three times over our projected traffic” for the Web site (beautifullengths.com).

Asked if products ought to be striving to play roles in the lives of their consumers, Mr. Allman replied: “Is it weird? It’s a new way to think about brands.”

Making Social Connections and Selling Cookies - New York Times

Social Media Learning Curve

Organizations exploring use of social media (e.g., as part of marketing and other community outreach efforts), need to "expect the unexpected" re: emotional reactions (both pro and con), misinterpretations of the intent and of course, the accusation that a company used poor judgement. Such commentary may not always be credible, but if a company is going to leverage social media, it needs to pursue it in a participatory manner. An organization needs to listen to the feedback it receives (from participants themselves as well as from those that might be observing such activities). While some of this information will be positive, it also means that an organization will receive insight that it might not necessarily want to hear.

Participation is a bi-directional conversation and cooperative relationship - especially when a community is passionate with its contributions or feels there is some level of joint ownership involved. If an organization is not prepared to deal with diverse streams of feedback, I'm not sure why they are pursuing social media strategies in the first place. Decision makers need to ensure that there are mechanisms in place to accomodate such commentary as part of social media programs, be open to modifying the social media effort based on such feedback, and take appropriate action on those concerns that are valid (which in some situations, might require terminating a campaign). 

Molson's online marketing campaign, in which students were encouraged to post pictures of themselves partying on campus, was “misinterpreted” as promoting irresponsible drinking, said Ferg Devins, a vice-president at Molson Coors Brewing Co. After a Globe and Mail article ran Friday, the brewer decided to end the contest one week early, he said. “The whole realm of social media – there's lots to learn,” he said. “It's really a new area. We're probably groundbreaking and leading in a lot of things we've been doing.”

Business leaders are scratching their heads when it comes to using social media in their marketing, confirms a new study to be released tomorrow. The survey, done by Pollara Strategic Insights, found that 26 per cent of business and marketing leaders say they are less familiar with social media marketing than their own customers. But the data also found that 46 per cent of business leaders say social media tools, such as Facebook, YouTube and blogs – which allow people to generate their own content and share it with others worldwide – are becoming more important than traditional mass media, including television, newspapers and radio. And 85 per cent said these forums have become an essential component of the communications mix.

globeandmail.com: Molson pulls plug on Facebook photo contest

Related Article: Molson photo contest brews up anger

Publishing Enterprise Content To Facebook

Innovative, perhaps foreshadowing things to come... 

From an enterprise perspective, organizations require the ability to publish to a Facebook audience as effectively as to a Web site audience. From an employee perspective, social networking provides a ready-made knowledge-management platform for their workers, which will increase adoption rates to the levels that knowledge management was always meant to achieve.

In response to customer demand, the Alfresco Facebook Platform has been designed to ECM enable social computing tools. The platform allows content-oriented Facebook applications to easily be developed using the content services provided by Alfresco's core platform.

The Alfresco Facebook Platform enables enterprise content to be uploaded and shared with customers and employees in a controlled, secure and audited way. New platform functionality includes:

• Application registration
• Facebook authorization and single sign-on
• FBML support
• Facebook model support including:
  • Friends
  • Application Friends
  • Users
  • Mini Feed
  • News Feed

The Alfresco integration with Facebook provides a platform for employees to access and utilize organizational information effectively with tools they know and like.

Alfresco Facebook Platform

Alfresco Facebook Application Architecture

Alfresco Facebook Wiki

Unified Communications & Collaboration on Urgent Patient Cases

Compelling example of how unified communications can transform work practices:

At the Radiological Society of North America's annual conference, Carestream Health, Inc. today announced an agreement to integrate and sell a key component of the IBM (NYSE: IBM) Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC2(TM)) platform -- IBM Lotus® Sametime®. The combination of Lotus Sametime software and Carestream Health's radiology solutions will facilitate rapid communication, including instant messaging and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) interactions between radiologists and other medical professionals involved in the diagnosis and treatment of patients.

The quality of patient care can be adversely affected by delayed communication or the inability to immediately collaborate with the right experts at the right time. Incorporating communications and collaboration capabilities into routine work processes for medical professionals can improve the speed and efficiency of diagnosis, resulting in faster results and treatment plans for patients. With Carestream Health's systems and IBM software, medical professionals will be able to find experts quickly based on location and topic, and collaborate instantly through instant messaging or a VoIP conversation.

Additionally, users can share computer screens in real time, highlighting key parts of an image to collaborate on a diagnosis. For example, if a radiologist determines that urgent care is required, they can immediately contact the referring physician to communicate critical results. By clicking on the referring physician's name -- which appears within the application -- they can begin an instant messaging dialog or initiate a VoIP call. If additional opinions are needed, colleagues can quickly be added to a VoIP conference call.

Carestream Health Selects IBM Unified Communications Software for Immediate Collaboration on Urgent Patient Cases

Burton Group Telebriefing: Deciphering Social Media

Open to the public...

12/4/2007 at 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT / 19:00 UTC/GMT / 20:00 CET

OR

12/5/2007 at 9:00 AM ET / 6:00 AM PT / 14:00 UTC/GMT / 15:00 CET

Deciphering Social Media

Social media is a critical issue for all organizations. While there are risks to address, social media offers organizations tremendous opportunities to deliver products and services that enhance customer, partner and employee relationships. Executive teams are also exploring how social media catalyzes innovation efforts and transforms work models. In this TeleBriefing, industry luminary Anil Dash, chief evangelist of Six Apart, and Chris Howard, VP and Service Director of Burton Group's Executive Advisory Program, join Principal Analyst Mike Gotta for a lively discussion on the challenges and benefits social media presents to the enterprise.

To register for this Burton Group telebriefing, click here.

More White-Label Options For Social Network Sites

It's interesting that, as a general statement, almost all the external efforts for community/social networking do not involve solutions from traditional large enterprise vendors (e.g., IBM, Microsoft). Most of the external technology platforms that support community and social networking efforts are from specialized vendors. It makes you wonder - if these solutions are great for customers, partners, suppliers, alumni and so on - why are employees treated like "cobbler's children"? Why should employees be given sub-optimal or incomplete solutions from status-quo vendors that seem incapable of delivering best-of-breed capabilities in a timely manner? (Yes, there are clearly valid points on risk, costs, complexity, and so on... but mostly I hear these points presented in isolation, without insight on the business value gained in the interim from using tools that sometimes far exceed what existing large vendors offer - and rarely do I find IT groups doing the necessary due diligence to comprehend the social aspects of these systems - most are still stopping at the functional comparison stage.)

In any case, end-of-rant, on the flip-side, the space for white-label solutions is getting crowded so if you do jump-in, make sure you have a contingency plan - at some point, the dance floor will begin to empty:   

At our TechCrunch Boston MeetUp, a company is launching called Mzinga that brings white-label social networks to consumer research. Mzinga, which means “beehive” in Swahili, is actually the combination and rebranding of two existing companies: Knowledge Planet (Web-based corporate learning) and Shared Insights (Web communities). Right out of the gate, the company already has a healthy business with $17 million in annual revenues and 100 employees. And CEO Rick Faulk says the company is “nearly profitable.”

Mzinga lets corporations create social networks for their most ardent customers or alumni and retirees. It offers a menu of social modules that companies can add to their sites, including blogs, wikis, surveys, polls, calendars, forums, tag clouds, file uploading tools, individual profile pages, group pages, and idea-management tools with Digg-like voting. Faulk used to be the chief marketing officer at WebEx, and Mziinga already powers the community portion of its site. WebEx’s most hardcore customers can join and give feedback there about future features that WebEx should implementing.

This must be the month that social networks go corporate because last week another white-label social network launched called Networked Insights. Like Mzinga, it lets companies create a place on their sites where customers can hang out and talk about their products. But it uses semantic analysis sand concept matching to extract meaning from all the chatter, and ranks conversations or comments based on how many interactions are associated with it. So a loud, whiny customer who complains a lot about a product in comments, but nobody else is joining in or linking off him, counts less than the quiet customer who only made one insightful post that spurred a torrent of other comments, links, ratings, and invitations to others to join the discussion.

The New Focus Group: Mzinga Launches at TechCrunch Boston