Collaborative Thinking

Think Beyond Per Tool Usage Policies

A good article to scan on the topic of blog usage policies that also includes some informative links to follow. However, this is not a new problem. Most organizations have had to address technology usage policies for some time (you can go all the way back to people participating on CompuServe forums and other bulletin board systems over dial-up). So the first thing to check is whether your enterprise has an overall information technology usage policy that handles internal and external situations. It is also important to also verify whether employees have been properly notified and have acknowledged in some way that they are aware of such policies (which might also intersect with code of conduct and related procedures). Specific policies (for instance, on blogs) can then be defined within this framework to provide people with more specific information. It is important that all of these policy and procedure efforts outline how the organization handles monitoring and enforcement methods since those employer practices might touch on topics such as employee privacy rights and HR activities (e.g., supervisor notification, employee warning, termination process for certain types of infringement).

That "online communication policy," released in November 2006, sets standards for employees when they're acting as "a delegate of the company."

Specifically, they're expected to disclose their association with Dell whenever they do any sort of blogging, social networking, Wikipedia entry-editing, or other online activities related to or on behalf of the company. If the subject matter crosses over into hobbies or people's personal lives, "there would be no rationale for us to get involved in that," Pearson said in a phone interview Tuesday.

Translation: "If someone is a fisherman and they want to talk about fly fishing outside of work, then that's not our business, it's personal," said Pearson. "But if someone is going to talk about notebooks and anything related to Dell, they have to say they're from Dell."

Corporate employee blogs: Lawsuits waiting to happen? | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Blogging Without Permission

This story is a reminder that in many states, employers are free to terminate an employee (even one that is highly valued) on many different grounds - grounds which might come across as reasonable to some and absurd to others. Regardless of which side you come down on, the story below is very relevant to workers who express their opinions through the use of social media (in this case, a personal blog). If you openly participate in a variety of causes, or advocate positions that might become a concern of your employer, then there are potential risks and consequences (some of which do indeed seem to border on the absurd - in the article, it is alleged that an intern was terminated for writing about her positive job experiences on a password-protected journal).         

A few minutes later, I was off the phone and out of a job. No severance. No warning (which would've been a much smarter proposition for CNN as it would've put the ball effectively in my court and forced me to decide between my job or the blog). No nothing. Just, go away.

Right before I hung up, I asked for the "official grounds" for my dismissal, figuring the information might be important later. At first they repeated the line about not writing anything outside of CNN without permission, but HR then made a surprising comment: "It's also, you know, the nature of what you've been writing."

And right there I knew that CNN's concern wasn't so much that I had been writing as what I'd been writing. Whether a respected and loyal CNN producer of four years, like myself, could've gotten off with a warning had I chosen to write about, say, my favorite pasta sauce recipes, who knows. I'm dead sure though that my superiors never concerned themselves with my ability or inability to remain objective at work, given my strong opinions; they worried only about an appearance of bias (specifically, a liberal bias), and apparently they worried about it more than any potential fallout from firing a popular blogger with an audience that was already large and was sure to grow much larger when news of his firing put him in the national spotlight.

Deus Ex Malcontent: Say What You Will (Requiem for a TV News Career)

XMPP and Microblogging (Twitter)

Via Slashdot: Interesting article, follow the citation link for screen shots of the implementation. 

The example application that illustrate this article is a distributed Twitter-like microblogging platform.

Introduction

Since I designed the first version of the pluggable pubsub module for ejabberd in early 2007, I had in mind to turn it into a powerful application server. I have already blogged about the power of the new API of ejabberd 2.0 pubsub engine. However, this single article does not do any justice to this idea and how it can change the face of the web.

Customizable services based on pubsub is XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) at its full speed. The XMPP protocol has been designed since the beginning to be a near real time routing / distribution engine. A piece in the puzzle was missing however. This is where I think our new plugin based pubsub API fills the gap and turn ejabberd into the first XMPP application server.

As a proof of concept and as a way to robustify our API, we have written the Personal Eventing via Pubsub (PEP) as a plugin of our pubsub engine. It is a big specification and should clearly show the potential of the framework.

The XMPP application server: The Twitter case

The PEP implementation was still not enough to demonstrate that ejabberd is a fault-tolerant, highly scalable application development platform for the Web 2.0 era. I decided to start a series of articles demonstrating how to build a distributed Twitter-like microblogging platform based on ejabberd 2.0.

Introducing the XMPP application server: The Twitter example - Process-one

Integrating SharePoint And Confluence

Very thorough article and worth reading if you are trying to leverage existing SharePoint investments but take advantage of one of the better wiki platforms in the market. It would be valuable for Microsoft to continue down this path of providing well-defined and public interfaces (as opposed to vendor point-to-point deals) so that other blog and wiki vendors could integrate with the platform. While Confluence is popular, customers should be able to integrate other blog and wiki vendors as well(e.g., MindTouch, Six Apart's Moveable Type, Socialtext, Traction Software, and WordPress). Microsoft should avoid the appearance of dictating to customers what options they have for third-party integration and would be better off letting the partner ecosystem act in a more viral and customer-driven manner.

SharePoint Connector for Confluence - How We Did It

A few months ago, we and Atlassian announced their SharePoint Connector for Confluence, which impressed both customers and analysts. Now, ThreeWill, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in developing SharePoint-based solutions, which helped design and implement the SharePoint Connector, will describe how they did it.

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Integrating Content and Search Results with SharePoint

Have you ever needed to integrate an external system with SharePoint, showing content from each system within the other? What if you needed to integrate search between SharePoint and the external system? How do you keep the user experience seamless if the systems use different authentication mechanisms? Have you wondered if this can be done if the external system is written in Java?

If you answered "yes," then read on. Along the way you will learn some of the internals of SharePoint 2007 web parts, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 enterprise search, and Microsoft Single Sign-on (SSO).

Overview

This blog entry discusses how three developers integrated MOSS 2007 with Confluence, an enterprise wiki, in about 2 months time. It discusses work behind implementing the features for the SharePoint Connector for Confluence as shown in the diagram below.

Those features are broken out as follows:

Feature	Primary Technology
Content Embedding	Web Parts
Integrated Search	MOSS Enterprise Search
Single Sign-On (SSO)	Microsoft SSO Service

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog : SharePoint Connector for Confluence - How We Did It

Social Software Vendor Roundup

Quick partial listing of vendors that frequently come up in my client inquiries (either from clients themselves, or referenced by myself):

Category	Vendor/Product	Comment
Blogs
	Apache Roller	Open source, also used in IBM Lotus Connections
	BEA Pages
	Jive Software Clearspace	Blogs one component of platform
	Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies
	Six Apart, Moveable Type
	Traction Software TeamPage
	WordPress	Open source, backed by Automattic
Wikis
	Atlassian Confluence
	BEA Pages
	IBM	Wiki capability within Domino, QuickR and QEDwiki
	Jive Software Clearspace	Wiki one component of suite
	Media Wiki	Open source
	Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies
	Mindtouch Deki Wiki	Open source community at OpenGarden.org.
	Socialtext
	Traction Software TeamPage
	Twiki	Open Source
Social Bookmark Systems
	BEA Pathways
	Cogenz
	Connectbeam
	IBM Lotus Connections	dogear component
	Scuttle	Open source
Feed Syndication Platforms
	Attensa
	KnowNow
	NewsGator
Social Network & Community Sites		Typically offer a mix of user profiles, blogs, wikis, social networking, etc.
	Awareness Networks
	CollectiveX
	Communispace
	HiveLive
	IBM Lotus Connections
	iCohere
	KickApps
	Lithium
	Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies
	Ning
	Ramius CommunityZero
	Select Minds
	Sparta Social Networks
	Prospero
	Telligent Community Server
	Tomoye
	Wetpaint

Common Craft Adds Additional Videos

Blogs is the latest addition. Nicely done and great for level-setting experience for an audience unfamiliar with social software. Even if you are familiar with these tools, the presentation is so engaging in its simplicity that it is still enjoyable to watch. The ability to simplify what can become a complex collections of topics is an admirable skill:

Video: Blogs in Plain English

Video: Wikis in Plain English

Video: RSS in Plain English

Video: Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Video: Social Networking in Plain English

Extreme Blogging: Moveable Type Enterprise Solution

While there are a lot of blogging tools popping up within collaboration and content platforms, most are not comparable to specialized tools. There are times when "good-enough" may satisfy the vendor but not satisfy business requirements. The debate between specialized versus generalized tools can be endless and needs to be put in the context of an organization's IT principles rather than debating vendor product features. For example:

• If the organization invests only technologies and services that are mature, stable, secure, and proven in the field - then generalized tools will likely suffice. If the organization invests in any technology with the potential for competitive and market advantage, regardless of stability, security, or technical maturity, then specialized tools will almost certainly be deployed.
• If the organization states that "Vendor X" is our strategic vendor, and where possible, we will buy from Vendor X - then a blogging tool will be acquired from that vendor (even if it is not best-of-breed). However, if the organization states that technology will be selected based on best-fit for its business requirements - then that would favor a specialized tool that was best-of-breed. 

So there is no overall right/wrong - organizations should keep up-to-date on industry advances and, in the case of blogging, advances by Moveable Type and WordPress (as well as Traction Software). Being informed is important, even if your decision-criteria favors generalized solutions from larger vendors.

Moveable Type Enterprise Solution   

Movable Type 4.0 has seen an incredible reception in just its first few weeks -- bloggers have told us they love the new user interface, the powerful asset management, and the smart new templating features. And Movable Type Enterprise Solution is a new layer of capabilities that layer on top of MT4 to give you bulletproof blogs that are easy to manage. Building on the all-new core platform, we've incorporated the capabilities that made Movable Type Enterprise the best enterprise blogging and social media platform on the planet:

• Directory Services Integration, with support for Active Directory,OpenLDAP, iPlanet, and most other common LDAP servers.
• Enterprise Database Support, offering robust integration with Oracle 10g and Microsoft SQL Server, on top of MT's core support for MySQL and PostgreSQL.
• Customizable User Administration, which lets you manage users in the system with powerful predefined roles and groups that are infinitely customizable.
• Automatic Blog Provisioning, to give each of your users a blog with your custom templates and settings, the first time they log into the system.
• Powerful Reporting and Management, offering administrative tools that let you manage entries, comments, and settings for thousands of blogs all on one screen, with customized status reports that you can export as XML feeds or in Excel format.
• Unrivaled Platform Support, which works with the web servers and middleware you have now, and offers centralized web-based deployment with no client software installation required. And professionally-translated multi-language support is built right in.

MT News Blog

Windows Live Writer Beta 3 Now Available

A tool I use for virtually all of my blog posts...

This is the last beta before our final release so please give Beta 3 a run and keep the feedback coming in!

Some highlights of this release:

• Insert videos using our new 'Insert Video' dialog

• Upload images to Picasaweb when publishing to your Blogger blog

• Publish XHTML-style markup

• Use Writer in 28 additional languages

• Print your posts

• Justify-align post text

• Better image handling (fewer blurry images)

• Resolved installation issues from last release

• Many other bug fixes and enhancements

Writer Zone: Windows Live Writer Beta 3 Now Available

Company bloggers can help put out fires

Interesting story on Dell's use of blogging:   

When Dell Computers started getting reports of laptops exploding in flames last summer, Lionel Menchaca took the heat - from his own legal team.

As the Texas-based computer maker's chief blogger - officially the Dell Computer digital media manager - he'd done the corporately unthinkable and posted a video from Osaka, Japan, of a Dell machine bursting into flames at a conference.

"Our legal people and others were e-mailing and calling and asking me: 'What are you doing? This is bad. You can't do that,' " Menchaca says of his post on the Direct2Dell blog last August. "But I said: 'This is what blogs are about. Everything has changed. We have to be transparent and honest. People are talking about this, they're posting these images, we can't ignore it. We have to deal with it directly.' " With the backing of founder Michael Dell, Menchaca weathered the internal storm and, as it turned out, won accolades not just from Dell customers, but from the business community over how the company managed to stickhandle around a disastrous public relations event.

The blog became Dell's prime tool to communicate what it was doing, how it would handle recalls and what it knew about the problems almost as soon as the executive team managing the issue itself knew. In doing so it eclipsed Apple Computers, which stumbled when confronted with the same problem at the same time.

.....

Has the blog strategy paid off? Menchaca says at the outset in 2006, about 48 per cent of blog postings and responses about Dell were negative. Today, that's down to 24 per cent.

It's not the kind of hard-core metrics that will win a showdown at budget time with the chief financial officer, but it's a positive that Menchaca takes as a win and a simple strategy almost any company could copy with similar results.

Business Edge News Magazine - businessedge.ca - Ontario Edition - Company bloggers can help put out fires

Blog Technology Within The Enterprise

For Burton Group clients, the following technical position document has been recently published. Clicking on the link will bring you to a client log-in page.

The document addresses the following questions:

• What are the decision criteria for deploying on-premises blog technology for internal use within the enterprise?
• When is it appropriate to use blog systems within the enterprise?
• Should a license-to-blog or gated-blog or blog-central or structured-blog model be used?

Blog Technology Within The Enterprise

Effective use of blogs can improve communication, information sharing, and community-building. As blogging systems become relevant within enterprise intranet environments (i.e., behind the firewall), information technology (IT) groups must determine whether such systems should be deployed and if so, what type of blogging deployment model is preferable. In this Collaboration and Content Strategies Technical Position, Burton Group Principal Analyst Mike Gotta examines typical requirements, alternatives, future developments, and evaluation criteria needed for IT groups to establish a position regarding blog technology.