Amplify the Impact of Your People with Enterprise 2.0 Technologies

Below are my notes taken during a Microsoft keynote session at the Enterprise 2.0 conference:

Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 was designed primarily as a collaboration and content platform - while there are social software / social computing aspects to collaboration and content, the design point was not in consideration of recent E2.0 developments. So my reaction was that much of the presentation was applicable to any collaboration and content audience interested in business productivity. There was some mention of the update to the Community Kit (which I will post about separately). The MySite discussion regarding the value of employee profiles was insightful (along with the social search aspects) but overall, it is a stretch for MOSS 2007 to be realistically considered as a social computing platform in the context of capabilities commonly associated with E2.0 tools (i.e., blogs, wikis, XML syndication, tagging, social bookmarking, social networking). The Community Kit helps with some of the deficiencies - but there are aspects of that community development effort (delivered via CodePlex and not officially as a Microsoft "product"), that organizations need to be aware that I have mentioned previously. So overall, I thought it was a good presentation, well-delivered and outlined the breadth of SharePoint as a collaboration and content platform, but was left feeling that the richness of its "E2.0-ness" was more of a marketing spin.

Derek Burney, General Manager, SharePoint Platform & Tools

• Seeing interest growing with social software/social computing
• Talking to customers about their needs in that regard
• New world of work, some trends:
  • One world of business
  • Always on / connected
  • Changing workforce demographics
  • Consumer adoption of Web 2.0 tools
• Role of software for this new world
  • Simplify how people find each other
  • Find information and provide business insight
  • Help retain and share knowledge
  • Build communities across organizational silos
• Business Productivity Infrastructure
  • Five key components
    • Unified Communications
    • Business Intelligence
    • Enterprise Content Management
    • Collaboration
    • Enterprise Search
  • Common Services
    • Office Business Application Services
    • Secured, well-managed core infrastructure
• E2.0
  • Wikis, Expertise Search, RSS Feeds, Social Networking, Profiles, Presence
  • Embedded within the Business Productivity Infrastructure
• People, different audiences/constituencies
  • Employees
  • Partners, suppliers, contractors, joint ventures...
  • Customers
  • Community (non-affiliated)
• These groups tend to work in silos, five key areas to focus on:
  • Promote expertise and build communities in your organization
  • Strengthen customer relationships
  • Build next-general applications
  • Unify communication modalities
  • Accelerate product development and innovation
• Promote Expertise & Build Communities
  • Wiki demo, Canadians at Microsoft, Passport information
  • MySite demo, picture, contact info, responsibilities, skills, past projects, interests, organizational hierarchy, blog, documents in document library (can have multiple libraries) - "common" things displayed between person's MySite and person browsing
  • NewsGator Social Site beta
• Strengthen Customer Relationships
  • Screen shots of external sites
• Build Next-Gen Applications
  • Duet, Dynamics, Office Business Applications (OBA), ISV OBAs, and Corporate OBAs
• Unifying Communication Modalities
  • Live Meeting
• Accelerate Product Innovation & Development
  • Community Kit For SharePoint V2

Comments

[doug cornelius]

I agree that SharePoint is light in the features department for E2.0. The compelling aspect is the integration of its tools into the intranet platform, allowing for easier deployment of the tools.

I find the biggest hole to be the lack of feed aggregation. Both Attensa and Newsgator seem to fill that hole quite nicely.

This was my take on the presentation: http://kmspace.blogspot.com/2007/06/e20-amplify-impact-of-your-people.html

[Sandy Kemsley]

I think that talking so much about the specifics of the Microsoft product was inappropriate for a keynote: we expect to have a little more thought leadership exhibited during these sessions, and save the vendor pitches for the breakout sessions where we have a choice of what to attend. My notes on this session at http://column2.com/2007/06/enterprise-20-derek-burney/

[Mike Gotta]

Doug - SharePoint has become much more of a platform that a product. But I think you need to carefully assess the modularity, extensibility and the ability to replace components of the platform with other components. You also need to look at the level of coupling (loose vs. high) between SharePoint and other Microsoft technologies. If you take an architected approach and the platform meets requirements, it can be a compelling choice. But there is a high need for proper due diligence because the commitment an organization makes to MOSS 2007 will be one that will be difficult to move away from down the road.

[Mike Gotta]

Sandy - agree overall - not just Microsoft though - I thought most of the vendor sessions (save the one by SAP) was aligned to product and current marketing messages.