Collaborative Thinking

Burton Group's "ACES" Framework For Social Media

At our Catalyst conference this morning I delivered a 4 hour tutorial on social media covering a variety of issues related to external and internal adoption. Below are several screen shots that provide some insight to what was discussed and how such concepts can help organizations to frame the conversation when considering business and organizational strategies in this area.

The tutorial organized the social media discussion around four drivers: innovation, user-led innovation, corporate social responsibility and strategic talent initiatives. The common thread: participation, community and outreach. We also reviewed several social media examples: Kodak, GE Research, Patagonia, Deloitte, Down Chemical, Cisco, Abbott, McDonald's, Wal*Mart and Zappos.

"ACES" reflects two sides of the social media coin. There is one perspective on social media that relates to participation, community and outreach. In this context, the focus is on "awareness", "connection", "engagement" and "sharing" as fundamental tenets. But there is also a flip-side to social media that examines the strategic planning and governance program necessary to execute on the effort. In this context, the focus is on "audiences", "capabilities", "enablement" and "sustainability".

Burton Group's Catalyst Conference Kicks Off

This week will be very exciting as Burton Group's Catalyst conference has kicked off today with tutorial sessions with the opening reception tomorrow evening. The event sessions will run Wednesday through Friday (details here). The tag for the event is: BurtonGroupCatalyst08

Below are the sessions I will be involved in - a very busy week:

Tuesday, June 24

Social Media: Transforming Work Models and Catalyzing Community Relationships (Half-day Tutorial)

Social media has become a strategic issue for all organizations. As with any transformation endeavor, there are business challenges (e.g., brand alignment, customer value, and employee adoption) and technology risks (e.g., security, and compliance). Still, social media presents enterprises with 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, improves business performance and addresses human capital management efforts (e.g., workforce adaptability, talent initiatives). This workshop will cover the following:

• What can we learn from consumer use of social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter)
• Building a business strategy for social media
• Understanding the organizational implications of emergence, communities and social networks
• Deciphering social media technology (e.g., blogs, wikis, tags and bookmarks, social networking, XML feeds)
• Applying social media for external solutions
• Applying social media for internal solutions

Thursday, June 26

The Times They Are A-Changin': New User Experiences through Social Interfaces

The next-generation user experience is focused on empowering users through rich interfaces and simpler infrastructures that provide personalized and contextual interaction with co-workers and resources. Consumer-oriented services such as Facebook and Google, increased mobility, and SaaS software delivery models are influencing the marketplace offering more options for enterprises to support different working models and styles. Enterprises will find 2008 to be an excellent year for studying and strategizing, in preparation for moving forward. Principal Analyst Mike Gotta explores some of the trends in next-generation user experiences and how the market is evolving.

This session will explore:

• How new delivery models offer more interfaces and options
• New working models and how they bring information workers together
• The impact of mobility on system requirements
• How working in-context across many tools and resources improves usability

The Value of Participation, Community & Outreach

Organizations face a variety of strategic business and human capital challenges related to growth, customer relationships, and workforce agility. Increasingly, decision-makers are betting that a new wave of social applications will foster the type of gains in productivity, customer loyalty, innovation and ultimately, business transformation, needed to address those challenges. Social software, including blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, RSS feeds, and social networking, helps establish the technology foundation for "new ways of work". In this keynote session, Principal Analyst Mike Gotta discusses how organizations are deploying social software and how such social applications might deliver business value.

The Practioner’s Handbook: Social Software In Action (Panel)

Real-world examples: actions speak louder than words. In this panel, representatives from leading global 2000 enterprises will share their organization's experience with social software. Moderated by Principal Analyst Mike Gotta, topics will include:

• Business case
• Selection process
• Deployment options (including SaaS)
• Adoption tactics
• Cultural issues

Speakers from Avery Dennison, Colgate-Palmolive, Deloitte and Harvard University will participate.

Enterprise 2.0 for Nervous Executives

Blogs! Wikis! Emergent communities! Innovation from the edge fuels the empowered worker! And it all scares the pants off most corporate executives.

People familiar with the power of social computing want to see more of it at the workplace. They believe it will make them feel more connected, just like it does in their non-work lives. Those responsible for managing the corporation see potential productivity losses and security risks. More ominously, the fluid nature of social networking runs counter to corporate hierarchies. Can that be allowed? Can it be controlled?

In this session, Executive Strategist Jack Santos and Principal Analyst Mike Gotta explore the tension between E 2.0 concepts and corporate structures, suggesting ways that E 2.0 can be advocated to the queasy.

Friday, June 27

Unified Communications: From Hype to Pragmatic Reality
Although the market hype related to unified communications has risen to a fever pitch, vendor offerings are now starting to deliver on the promise of communications and collaboration convergence. The continued maturation of real-time collaborative applications and fixed mobile convergence, the disruptive impacts to enterprise telephony from new market entrants such as Microsoft and IBM, and the continuing source of innovative social applications in the consumer market such as Twitter, promise to have immediate and long-term effects on enterprise unified communications strategies. The session will review developments to key unified communications applications including:

• Presence
• IP Telephony
• Unified Messaging
• Web Conferencing
• Video Conferencing
• Fixed Mobile Convergence
• Social Networking Applications

In this keynote session, Principal Analyst Mike Gotta and Senior Analyst Mark Cortner will discuss the key trends in unified communications and strategies to extend real-time communication and collaboration within and beyond the enterprise network.

Microsoft's Maturing Social Computing "EGO"

Note: updated with source references for EGO integration examples.

When Microsoft first released Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), it touted  the platform advantages of its embedded social computing capabilities (i.e., blogs, wikis, RSS, social networking). In fact, the company at the time was brimming with confidence that SharePoint's social computing features were as good as anything offered by best-of-breed vendors. Reality slowly set in over several months however as the market were somewhat less-than-impressed with the features that SharePoint offered out-of-the-box. While SharePoint has garnered tremendous success in terms of user adoption (people invest in the platform for  reasons much broader than blogs, wikis and social networks), many IT organizations were left to wonder if they would have to wait three years before seeing significant improvements that would support business requirements related to social computing.

Microsoft countered by delivering the Community Kit Edition via CodePlex which improved the default capabilities within MOSS. However, three concerns arose: (1) the source code on CodePlex is not supported by Microsoft, (2) the code does not go through the same quality assurance checks as supported products, and (3) there is no guarantee that whatever is found on CodePlex will be supported in future releases. At best, the Community Kit Extensions were best viewed as acquiring an advanced customized application that would be primarily supported by internal staff.   

So, after Strike 1 and Strike 2, Microsoft has finally done what it should had done in the first place. The slew of partner announcements this month at the Enterprise 2.0 conference have significantly improved the partner ecosystem around SharePoint for social computing. While I believe Microsoft was basically "backed into" this position by market and competitive pressures (made worse by sub-optimal social software), the strategy should indeed provide customers with a broad set of social computing options that leverage and extend a core SharePoint platform investment.

It is unfortunate that this message was so badly overpowered by the social computing tutorial I moderated at the event where IBM came across very impressively with its Lotus Connections solution. Overall, Microsoft's maturing perspective of its role regarding technology stewardship over the SharePoint ecosystem will benefit end users and IT organizations alike. While introducing new vendors, even those that are well-integrated with SharePoint, will raise infrastructure and operational complexity to varying degrees - ultimately, the ability to deliver more complete and robust social applications should create a credible business case that justifies the effort (for those holistically committed to a SharePoint platform).

One of the more serious considerations organizations need to now consider will be the balancing act between SharePoint (increasingly part of a corporate-wide strategic direction) and the partner solutions (which might be narrowly viewed as tactical). However, if Microsoft fails to improve its native capabilities by the next release (perhaps 4Q09/1Q10), prior tactical decisions might very well have more strategic implications. Organizations cannot assume that partners will necessarily disappear "just because" the next release of SharePoint has some level of improvement since the market overall will continue to advance. In some ways, Microsoft will always be behind the curve given its three year release cycle between major releases. This is due, in part, to the early stage where Microsoft locks-down what ultimately will be shipped).

It is important therefore for IT organizations to understand how partner solutions are integrating within SharePoint and how they function without SharePoint. Below I outline three types of integration models that appear to be taking shape. Note the acronym "EGO" helps summarize the different approaches vendors seem to be adopting thus far. It also plays well to Microsoft's maturing outlook on this space (that its own success vs. its "alter ego's" is dependent on how well partners thrive in the short run).

Enhancement

The Enhancement integration model augments SharePoint's basic social computing capabilities but the solution's benefits and capabilities are centric to SharePoint and are not likely to be easily duplicated to work with other vendors. That is, a vendor's Enhancement integration model makes many fundamental assumptions that bind it to SharePoint. There is little chance of the solution acting as a means to mediate interoperability needs between SharePoint and other social computing platforms (e.g., IBM, Jive, Oracle) that might also be deployed within the enterprise.

Example (refer to this how we did it" post)

NewsGator Social Sites 2.0 connects Microsoft SharePoint and Newsgator's Enterprise Server to add a collection of capabilities (e.g., tags, bookmarks, communities, social networking). Social Sites relies on Microsoft SharePoint AJAX Toolkit (found on CodePlex). Reliance on the AJAX toolkit commits this solution more deeply to SharePoint. It relies on, and extends, the user profile information in SharePoint (another product-specific dependency). NewsGator introduces a new feed reader (My Feeds) with Social Sites and it is unclear how unique this reader is to SharePoint (so for now, I assume that it is only for SharePoint). The community capability extends the Team Site capability within SharePoint (another dependency if Social Sites were to be duplicated for other vendors). So while Social Sites 2.0 represents a very solid and much-needed social computing extension for SharePoint, I would categorize it as an Enhancement model given the deep level of integration specific to SharePoint.

Gateway

A Gateway integration model also extends SharePoint's social computing capabilities. The primary difference between a Gateway and Enhancement approach is that the Gateway's focus is primarily on attaining some level of interoperability with SharePoint. That is, the vendor's Gateway solution offers value in both a stand-alone situation as well as with SharePoint if Microsoft's social computing platform is deployed.

Example (refer to this "how we did it" post)

Connectbeam's Spotlight Connect For SharePoint connects Microsoft SharePoint with Connectbeam's tag and social bookmark system. Spotlight For SharePoint relies on Web Parts that leverage Connectbeam's REST-based APIs. While Connectbeam integrates with SharePoint to deliver tag and bookmark capabilities, the integration is careful to maintain a level of technical separation while still providing a cohesive user experience. For instance, a My Profile Web Part shows user profile data from SharePoint along with tag, bookmark and other data from Connectbeam but tabs are used to segment the standard user profile display. Rather than dump the information all into the "About Me" area, the Spotlight data is contained with a tab labeled "Social Content". I can envision how Connectbeam can deliver specific integration with other social computing platforms (e.g., Spotlight For Oracle, Spotlight for SAP, Spotlight for Jive). This approach leads me to categorize this integration model as more of a Gateway solution. The Connectbeam application can stand alone, integrate with SharePoint, and possibly integrate with other platforms in the future.

Atlassian, Awareness, Telligent and blueKiwi are also examples of vendors adopting a Gateway integration model.

Overlay

The Overlay integration model represents the deepest level of integration to extend SharePoint's social computing capabilities. In essence, a vendor pursuing this approach begins to use SharePoint itself as its base infrastructure platform. That is, the solution essentially "lives within" SharePoint. This integration model differs significantly from the Enhancement and Gateway model since the vendor becomes almost entirely dependent on SharePoint. There may be some distinct functions kept outside SharePoint (e.g., database) to enable the vendor to deliver functions not possible within SharePoint's current set of services.

Example (refer to this "how we did it" post)

There is no vendor that currently has the depth of social computing integration that would quality it as delivering an Overlay model. Tomoye however is heading in that direction:

• "Since Ecco is a pure 100% ASP.NET 2.0 application with lots of business logic, we are experimenting with porting our application straight into SharePoint as a "_layouts application." This will allow us to keep leveraging our existing code as we transition to using more and more of the capabilities in the SharePoint platform such as Lists, Document and Picture Libraries, User Profiles, and the Business Data Catalog. So far, this approach has been easier than expected. Within only 3 days, we were able to deploy our application as a _layouts application and to run as-is with very little code changes!

Alter-Ego's

For every EGO there is an equal and opposite "Alter Ego". These are a few key vendors that are battling Microsoft in terms of delivering an enterprise-grade social computing platform that spans multiple capabilities (e.g., blog, wikis, tags/bookmarks, feeds and social networking).

• IBM: Lotus Connections represents the most well-known alternative to Microsoft. IBM and Microsoft have been battling head-to-head in the collaboration and content markets for many years - it should be no surprise that the competition will be equally intense in the area of social computing.
• Jive Software: Clearspace represents the first independent vendor to deliver a cohesive mini-suite of social computing capabilities that has enabled it to break away from the pack of smaller vendors who have focused on just a few select social software components.
• Oracle: Oracle should be considered a credible social computing dark horse. Although the software company has failed in previous attempts to succeed in the collaboration market, it has gained credibility in the enterprise content management space. Given the trend towards contextually integrating social data and features within existing applications, it should be expected that Oracle will make a run at this market.

Reader Feedback: Social Computing Platforms (IBM & Microsoft)

My post yesterday on the E2.0 tutorial was pretty popular. Since I do not have a feed for comments, I thought I would share this particular post since it is very insightful. John makes several good points below (portions below, full text here):

Comment

I do think there are a couple of underlying issues at work here. The main one is that Connections and SharePoint are fundamentally orthogonal in purpose and usage, at least currently.  They are both interesting tools, but one is a hammer and the other a saw.  When you ask IBM and Microsoft to show what their tools can do, they will play to their individual strengths, and woe be to the one expecting the audience to appreciate clean woodcuts when they really want to see clean nail driving (MS should have known this, and were foolish to participate).  Presented with the proposed scenario precisely as you described, if they knew anything about Connections and how its sweet spot coincided with the intentions of the "challenge", they should have declined outright.

Both IBM and Microsoft tout their respective products as first-class social computing solutions. I do absolutely agree that IBM Lotus Connections is a more focused platform designed around a particular solution domain. SharePoint on the other hand is a broadly horizontal platform with capabilities that span well-beyond social computing. That said, Microsoft continually positions SharePoint as a social computing solution and has done so since MOSS 2007 was released. Also, Microsoft has positioned SharePoint as a social computing solution that does not require partner add-ons or extensions.

I would argue that Microsoft's announcement of several partners during the E2.0 show is a shift in its internal thinking and external positioning of SharePoint. Microsoft has slowly come to the position that its platform out-of-the-box or via CodePlex is often inadequate to meet expectations of clients for a rich social computing environment. It is now aggressively pursuing partners to build out the ecosystem - this was not the case earlier, Microsoft has been somewhat stubborn in its belief that SharePoint blogs and wikis out-of-the-box are examples of great software and that customers could wait for the next version. 

The case can be made for either vendor to have declined - why would Microsoft want to take on a product specifically design for social computing - why would IBM want to take on a product with capabilities much broader that a particular feature set. Both vendors eagerly agreed to this idea and format. 

Comment

I'm positive news of this debacle has penetrated into the upper firmament at Microsoft (perhaps even to Ray Ozzie himself).  I think it would be interesting for you to have a post-massacre debrief with Lawrence et al. -- I assume he still returns your calls :') -- to compare notes as to what they heard vs. what you were proposing.  There had to be a tremendous disconnect somewhere (the results demonstrate that).  My guess is that when you used the word "platform", they thought of the whole Microsoft ecosystem and that they wanted to show how Enterprise 2.0 capabilities are getting gradually integrated into a CM platform that is already widely used.  I also suspect that Suzanne et al. understood "platform" to mean how IBM is developing something quite unlike anything else they have ever done (a new "application", if you will). 

I want to be absolutely clear here. This setup and evolution of this tutorial spanned months. There were multiple calls and e-mails exchanged. There should have been no confusion on anyone's part as to what I was asking. I was extremely clear that in the use case scenarios, vendors could show off their entire platform(s) to establish the "big picture" (beyond social computing) but when we transitioned into the functional component walk-thru, that section was limited to the actual tools associated with E2.0 (blogs, wikis, etc). I repeatedly described what I was looking for and gave scenarios of how that might be handled. I also asked to see the demos before the actual event however schedule conflicts on all sides got in the way.

Lawrence and I debate all the time - we stalk each other on Twitter and FriendFeed - he is as passionate about SharePoint as I am in pursing my goal of objective and critical analysis of solutions in this space. At the end of the day, it's not personal - in fact, across-the-board, the Microsoft product folks that I interact with are able to separate a passionate debate about "stuff" from more important items like grabbing dinner and having a beer!   

Comment

BTW, couldn't agree more that for now (and perhaps for ever), third party products/integrations are crucial for extending SharePoint as a platform to address E2.0 objectives.  Fortunately for enterprises that have developed collaborative environments on the SharePoint platform, there seem to be a growing number of imaginative third parties looking to make a living from providing those goods and services.  In fact, one question some potential customers may soon ask is how Lotus Connections can be made to closely integrate with SharePoint (and if so, whether purchasing Connections now is better than waiting for MS and its partners to provide equivalently interesting functionality).

- John Heckendorn

Absolutely. I think the important take-away is that organizations committed to SharePoint now have a decent number of third-party options for social computing that vastly improve what comes out-of-the-box and avoids issues related to CodePlex (not supported by Microsoft, no guarantee of upward compatibility, etc). It took a while for Microsoft to get to this point, the platform argument is a valid argument but it cannot cover up a poor user experience and an inadequate set of tools for social computing.

Thank you for a very thoughtful post!

Deciphering Corporate Social Networks

My slide deck used today for the NewsGator webinar:

| View | Upload your own

Free Webinar: Deciphering Corporate Social Networks with Burton Group & NewsGator

Sorry for the short notice - still catching up on my work and life backlog! The link below will take you to a registration page...

Deciphering Corporate Social Networks

Burton Group & NewsGator

2 pm ET on June 19, 2008

The number of businesses looking to deploy social networks in their secured business environment continues to rise. There are a variety of business benefits associated with social networks that include: better expertise location, improved collaboration, an edge in recruiting and retention, or capturing knowledge from retiring workers.
Companies want to leverage the benefits of social networks within their enterprise; however there are some unique elements and conditions of social networks in the context of the workplace that should be considered. It’s impossible to ignore the impact on business and IT when implementing social networks in the enterprise. In this webinar Burton Group and NewsGator will leverage our experience in professional social networks to help identify:

• Key concepts of enterprise social networks
• Current trends and future predictions for social networks in business
• Critical differences between consumer and business social networks
• Benefits and challenges of business social networks

Free Webinar: Deciphering Corporate Social Networks with Burton Group & NewsGator

E2.0 Conference: Social Computing Platforms (IBM & Microsoft)

I wanted to share some background information on the tutorial presented at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. Specifically, the tutorial I moderated on Monday that featured IBM and Microsoft.

Background

I have been on the Advisory Board of the Enterprise 2.0 conference for a while now (which has given me the opportunity to work with some pretty amazing people). For this event, I proposed a tutorial that would allow attendees to learn more about the social computing platforms from IBM and Microsoft from a user adoption perspective rather than a "plumbing" or infrastructure viewpoint. What I have run into during my client interactions is that people rarely get to see an in-depth demonstration that is visual and one that also allows them to see a storyline involving different use case scenarios that have parallels within their own workplace. So my starting point was to help deliver a session that was "not too high" and "not too low" in terms of marketing spin and technical details respectively.

The Vendors

I worked with IBM and Microsoft in the months preceding the event. The original idea was along the lines of:

1. Introduction and overview
2. Component Walk-thru (profiles, blogs, wikis, tags/bookmarks, feed syndication, social networks)
3. Use case scenarios (expertise, community, line-of-business application, external application)
4. Q&A session
5. Under-the-hood (architecture, development tools, planning guidelines)
6. Q&A session and wrap-up

The main point at this time (Jan/Feb) was to actually bounce back and forth a lot. For example: IBM blog then Microsoft blog; IBM wiki then Microsoft wiki. Orchestrating this flow was thought to be too much like a tennis match and we would lose the audience and perhaps incur more technical problems with such constant switching around. We also thought that we would run out of time for a serious under-the-hood discussion which actually could be a more technical session for a few hours itself. We also thought that starting out with the scenarios made more sense - give people a story to see themselves in and then go on to explain how the picture was painted more or less.

So by the Mar/Apr timeframe, we had arrived at the following flow:

1. Introduction and overview
2. Use case scenarios (expertise, community, line-of-business application, project management)
3. Component Walk-thru (profiles, blogs, wikis, tags/bookmarks, feed syndication, social networks)
4. Q&A session
5. Bigger Picture (including panel discussion led by moderator)
6. Q&A session and wrap-up

We swapped out the external app with project management and the technical dive was changed over to be a more platform-wide and future roadmap discussion that would transition into a panel format that would allow me to ask questions to dig into any issue that I thought should be revisited.

The last issue was the vendor flow. We thought at first that we would alternate from section to section (Vendor A followed by Vendor B, then Vendor B followed by Vendor A) but that created some issues (Vendor B goes twice for a long period of time and Vendor A is left at the bookends). So we ended up with repeating the same sequence from section to section.

"Rules"

I did not want to deliver a session that only covered what was possible in the current shipping product and had to be limited to what was out-of-the-box. On the other extreme, I did not want to see highly customized applications that were not really reflective of the products any longer. So to balance that goal:

• Vendors could customize their solution and shape the capabilities covered to meet the use case scenarios
• Vendors could include extensions or partner add-ons
• Vendors could include new capabilities that would be delivered within the short run (e.g., within 2008)
• Vendors have to be very transparent and explicitly call out where customizations had been applied and where partner solutions were included
• Before/after capabilities had to be shown if the vendor had something that they had replaced with a partner's solution (so if you had a wiki but demo'd another you had to show both)

The goal was to be pragmatic about this and keep the audience in mind. What I was hoping for was:

1. Vendors would create a "big picture" story anchored to the list of use case scenarios (expertise, community, project or line-of-business application)
2. People would "see themselves in the story" and begin thinking of the solution opportunities within their organization
3. Vendors would then peel that layer away and talk to the social computing components that made up that story
4. People would then relate specific functional capabilities to the solutions they saw in the demo and hopefully expand on how those tools could be used in other ways within their organizations
5. Vendors would close out with a broader look at the platform ecosystem and then look ahead to future evolution of their respective platforms
6. People would see value in a platform approach, the need for an ecosystem around that platform, and how the platform investment would grown and evolve over time

"It's Showtime..."

Some thoughts on the session itself:

IBM

• IBM was the clear winner across the board. The storyline and narrative woven around the presentation and demonstrations was near-perfect. The IBM team established the use case scenarios and drilled down into those scenarios in a way that allowed people to make the connection (no pun intended) between the use cases and functional components.
• The functional components came across very well and the social computing tools covered (profiles, blogs, wikis, feeds, social networking) were linked back to the overall storyline in a way that flowed naturally and allowed the audience to put the pieces together without a lot of hard mental work deciphering how the tools worked together in the context of an application that solved a real problem. 
• One concern I had with the IBM presentation occurred when they talked about the inclusion of a feed management function. It was not clearly articulated as to what was in Lotus Connections 2.0 vs. something of a future and perhaps a future that was beyond the "foreseeable" future boundary I had defined. The other concern (more minor) was that there was little discussion around the platform and system dependencies. Again, a minor nit but I don't recall hearing that the blog component is based on Apache Roller, etc. Maybe that did come out (someone can correct me here) but I think a few more minutes on technical requirements should have been a focal point.
• One critique I have is that IBM positions Lotus Connections as an application and not a platform. I found that hard to believe actually. It might not be a platform the same way SharePoint is a platform or other platforms within IBM - but it is clearly a platform in my mind.

Microsoft

• Clearly (based on audience reaction, post-session comments, news accounts and my own observation), Microsoft did a poor job of showing and explaining why business and/or technical decision-makers should consider SharePoint as a credible solution to meet the social computing needs of an organization.
• I was really expecting to see Microsoft show off the Community Kit Extensions, or some partner integration (NewsGator Social Sites) but that was not the case. Basically, I just saw SharePoint virtually out-of-the-box with some customization but not enough to really make an impact on me in terms of thinking that the blog and wiki functions are competitive with what the market has to offer. Even the social networking capabilities within MySite were not highlighted in a way that was compelling.
• Microsoft lost the audience. There was a break between the storyline set in the use case scenarios and the component walk-thru. I could see people in the audience struggling to stitch together a narrative of where Microsoft was going with the presentation and demonstrations (especially when the IBM delivery and solution capabilities came across so vibrantly). There was too much "in-the-weeds" talk around property sheets and forms.
• The platform argument failed. Microsoft's anchor point was that social computing capabilities emerge from a platform model. I don't disagree with that argument but the feeling that I believe many people left with after the tutorial is that the SharePoint platform is slow-moving, not very flexible, with capabilities that lag behind what is available on the market. Without showing the Codeplex extensions or any partner add-on value, the entire Microsoft presentation was difficult for the audience to get their arms around. Even existing Microsoft champions seemed incredulous based on some of the backchannel conversations that were going on in Meebo.

Some might dismiss this tutorial and its attempt to let attendees compare/contrast solutions from each vendor as insignificant due to (1) IBM having better speakers (2) or that it was just a dog-and-pony show (3) or Microsoft just had a bad day (4) or that platforms are hard to showcase in terms of value, etc.

I disagree. Each vendor had a few months to prepare. Each vendor had a lot of options to present its solution as a platform and as an ecosystem. Vendors were not limited to just showing what was out-of-the-box. As long as vendors were transparent with their presentations and demonstrations, and owned up to customizations and extensions, I was happy.

Maybe Microsoft underestimated IBM. Maybe Microsoft feels that SharePoint is on such a roll that its weak blog and wiki offerings are not going to hurt it in the long run. I'm at a loss as to why the session was such a bust from a Microsoft perspective. There was clearly more that could have been shown but for whatever reason, IBM walked out of the room with a clear and decisive win.

Did it change anyone's mind? That's hard to tell - but based on multiple comments and reactions that I heard since the session, I think people are now very open that they need to look at third-parties that integrate with SharePoint for social computing. The growing change I sense (not a tidal wave yet but something very identifiable), is the idea that organizations need to extend SharePoint with third-party products. This is becoming more of the default assumption whereas before people might have thought they could avoid adding additional vendors to the mix. And in some cases, decision-makers are more open to at least considering alternate solutions they might not have even entertained before (which would be good news for IBM and Jive in particular).

Lessons Learned

Overall, I thought the tutorial was valuable to those attending. But with most things, I saw things I would change:

1. Don't forget the break time: This was a really bad oversight on my part (thus I will not be on the show "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader"). In my spread sheet I did not explicitly include the 15 minutes or so that the conference had scheduled for a break and that time was impossible to make up. My bad...
2. Add more audience interaction: Although I had two Q&A sessions, my foul-up on the break squeezed out the second round of questions and the demo periods I felt put the session in broadcast-mode for too long. Shorter burst with feedback would be better.
3. Include more critical analysis and debate time: Next time I think my role should be a bit more aggressive and challenging. The barrier was time. Four hours seems like a long time, but to cover the ground we actually did cover, something had to give.
4. Consider a full day tutorial: Given the above, a full day or two separate but related tutorials might work out better.

What Month Is It?

I'm back - kinda. And I want to apologize for being very difficult to reach over the months of May and June for those trying to contact me via e-mail or telephone. My normal blogging cycle was disrupted by a significant workload schedule and related fulfillment demands. For the Enterprise 2.0 conference, I was involved in one tutorial, 3 panels and one other session. For our upcoming Catalyst conference, I also had to build out a new social media tutorial, coordinate panels and also work on three new presentations. So things have been hectic when you also add on the normal daily workload.

So I should be back to a more normal stride this month. I'll be the road next week and then again the week after that for Catalyst. So my posts will not be as frequent as in prior months, but there should not be any extended periods of silence.

I'll post thoughts on the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference as well as other thoughts as I catch up on my backlog of phone calls, e-mail, feeds, tweets, etc.