Collaborative Thinking

SproutBuilder: Making Widget Creation Easy

Interesting, if I have time later, I'll try playing with this:

SproutBuilder is going to explode the world of widgets on the web. This is far and away my favorite product I've seen at DEMO, not just this year but ever in the three years I've attended. Limited beta accounts are available to RWW readers via http://www.sproutbuilder.com/readwriteweb

The product is a drag-and-drop Flash authoring tool built on Adobe's Flex. SproutBuilder lets you build very sophisticated, multi-page widgets with media, analytics and more. In minutes. With ease.

...

I asked Ryan Stewart, Rich Internet Application Evangelist at Adobe, if he had every seen anything like Sprout. He told me, "Sproutbuilder is one of the absolute coolest use cases I've seen for Flex. I think it lowers the barrier to entry to Flash and I hope it's going to spark a lot of creativity among people who aren't creating Flash content today."

I think that almost any individual or organization publishing online would find great value in using SproutBuilder to put together a nice looking, highly functional widget to distribute their content around the web.

SproutBuilder: You've Got to See This Drag and Drop Widget Maker - ReadWriteWeb

Meanwhile, Over At WebEx: A New Sheriff In Town

Cisco has gone a little quiet regarding WebEx Connection, collaboration beyond unified communications and building out the partner ecosystem (channel and technology vendors) that will drive success for its composite application platform. The story below provides some insight:

Making sure that Cisco’s sales teams are motivated to sell WebEx services has just become the responsibility of a new general manager at the on-demand Web meeting provider. The sudden departure late last year of Cisco’s former chief development officer Charlie Giancarlo, who had been widely regarded as heir-apparent to succeed John Chambers, led to a rapid reshuffle of top management at Cisco. That meant promotion for Don Proctor, who’d been general manager at WebEx for just three months, and who now reports directly to Chambers on all of Cisco’s software products. Four weeks ago Doug Dennerline (pictured) took over as senior VP of the collaboration software group and thus the new general manager of WebEx.

.....

Dennerline outlined four main priorities that he sees for WebEx this year.

• Get Cisco’s sales team selling the WebEx service
• Finish preparations for a production launch of WebEx Connect, the company’s on-demand collaboration and composite applications platform
• Harness Cisco’s partner channel to sell WebEx
• Tap Cisco’s resources to bolster research and development of new WebEx services

» Taking the reins and tending the cows at WebEx | Software as Services | ZDNet.com

Cisco's Webex Bet: Widgets + Collaboration + SaaS

Interesting video interview highlighting some possible Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities: 

..... Most recently, WebEx has been putting resources into it’s WebEx Connect platform, which Shankur described as a “Business mashup collaboration platform”. Think widgets on top of a communication platform for extranet and intranet. There’s two major elements of this platform, one is a server side platform and the second is a client based widget platform. Inside of the client platform is a web based and desktop based program, each will quickly integrate widgets from third parties.

A practical use case of their platform could be for internal sales teams to collaborate build documents, proposals and plans, they could then work with prospects, sharing data, bringing the process to the close, then pass on to delivery and fulfillment teams. The toolset could comprise of video, IM, synchronous tools like persistent chat, document sharing, and even the dreaded email. Existing CRMs could create widgets that could deploy, making the process seamless. I’m somehow reminded of the portal movement in the late 90s which I was deploying at Exodus.

I asked Shankur a few other questions, and found out that this is part of the overall corporate strategy of WebEx, and also their recently new parent company, Cisco. In the future they will align with Cisco’s “Unified Communications” strategy, and integrate other products. I asked about Five Across, Tribes, and other acquisitions, but he didn’t give me any hard answers. The Widget framework should be able to support widgets from other platforms, like NetVibes, Google Desktop and Google Widgets, Facebook and Microsoft Gadgets. “Do you have Live Video?” Shankur responded that they have partners like Veodia who are building a widget.

  Video: Webex guns for Enterprise Web Collaboration, joins Widget craze

Widgets 1.0 Requirements: Working Draft

W3C News Update:

Widgets 1.0 Requirements: Working Draft

The Web Application Formats Working Group has released an updated Working Draft of "Widgets 1.0 Requirements." These design goals are the requirements for device-independent standards for scripting, digitally signing, securing, packaging and deploying client-side Web applications (widgets). Also known as gadgets or modules, widgets are small programs like clocks, stock tickers, news casters, games and weather forecasters that display and update remote data and run on the Web browser environment. Read about Rich Web Clients.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-widgets-reqs-20070209/

http://www.w3.org/2006/rwc/

Business Widgets: Intranet Portals Redux?

I'm having a flash-back to portals when they first jumped over the firewall onto corporate intranets circa 1999.   

Technology: Business Widgets

Everywhere you look, you see widgets: Netvibes, Pageflakes, Google, and Microsoft—even Apple has gone widget-crazy. But are they useful in a business context? (Hint: Yes, but there's a catch.)

Source: Business Widgets

Web Office Widgets and Intranet Dashboards

On my ZDNet blog last night I took a look at the evolving world of Web Office widgets. I noted that the personalized start page Pageflakes has just introduced a couple of new office "flakes" - a Calendar Flake and a Notepad Flake. They also have an existing Mail Flake, as well as flakes for Writely and iRows. Netvibes, Webwag and others also have similar offerings. Is this a sign that we'll soon see a widget office suite!? That may sound odd at first, but when you think about it - componentized web apps are potentially very useful on a company Intranet.

Source: Web Office Widgets and Intranet Dashboards