Microsoft this week celebrated the first year of its Office 2010 family of products in the market, noting that the office productivity suite has sold over 30 million units, a record pace that amounts to one copy of Office sold every second. And after just one year in the market, Microsoft's free web-based Office Web Apps (OWA) solution has blown past the Google Docs competition: OWA now has about 50 million active users, Microsoft says, double the 25 million active users Google claims.
"When we released Office 2010 to the world one year ago, our critics weren't easy on us," Microsoft Office Corporate Vice President Takeshi Numoto noted in a blog post marking the milestone. "They said we were heading in the wrong direction by continuing to invest in our desktop applications in addition to the cloud. Even more recently, there've been more predictions of the PC's demise. But the reality is, based on the market results we see in our sales and adoption data, people continue to love Office on the desktop and they're embracing Office in the cloud."
Microsoft's family of Office products consists of the traditional desktop suite, Microsoft Office 2010, various server products such as SharePoint, mobile apps for Windows Phone and other platforms, and now the OWA, which provide free, web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. The company also makes a version of the desktop suite for Mac; the current version is called Office 2011.
According to Microsoft, businesses are deploying Office 2010 five times more quickly than they deployed the previous version, Office 2007. Office 2010 is also the fastest-selling consumer version of Office ever, meaning that more people are buying retail versions of the suite and installing them manually on their PCs.
Looked at more broadly, Microsoft says there are over 750 million active users of all available Office versions worldwide, and over 1 billion instances of Office installed on PCs worldwide. (This includes only Windows PCs, not Macs or web apps.) Either figure represents a huge percentage of the estimated 1.2 billion Windows-based PCs in use worldwide.
Office isn't just successful on the desktop: Microsoft notes that 3 out of 4 companies in the US with over 500 PCs use Exchange as their primary email system, 70 percent of the Fortune 500 use Lync (or the previous version, Communications Server), and over 100 million SharePoint licenses have been sold to date.
Satisfaction with Office is also at an all-time high, something one can't say about lackluster web offerings such as Google Docs. According to Microsoft, 9 out of 10 users say that Office 2010 is the best version of Office ever and 96 percent would recommend it to others.
Looking ahead, Microsoft plans to launch its cloud-based Office productivity solution Office 365 on June 28, providing individuals and businesses of all sizes with cloud-based versions of Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync, as well as private versions of the Office Web Apps and mobile device management capabilities. And while Office Web Apps has been updated in meaningful ways a few times over the past year, there's more work to be done there, and one can't help but imagine how successful mobile versions of Office would be on the iPad, iPhone, and Android-based devices. Microsoft so far has refused to comment on such a possibility.
Related Reading:
•Office Web Apps vs. Google Cloud Connect: Which is the Better Solution for Microsoft Office Users?
•Office 365 Enters Public Beta Phase
Monday, June 20, 2011
Office Web Apps vs. Google Cloud Connect: Which is the Better Solution for Microsoft Office Users?
Microsoft is walking an interesting line between the successful but traditional software products of the past—Windows, Office, and so on—and its cloud-based future, which can be seen in such products as Windows Azure, Office 365, and Windows Intune, the cloud-based PC management service. During this time of transition, the company must continue updating and servicing its on-premises solutions while pushing customers, gently, toward more cost-effective and scalable cloud solutions.
This situation is beneficial to customers, since Microsoft often provides an interesting mix of on-premises and hosted solutions, giving customers more choice. So when you look at something like office productivity, you see on-premises products such as Microsoft Office, hosted versions such as the Office Web Apps, and then ancillary solutions such as SharePoint, which also come in both traditional and hosted versions. You can mix and match between these and related solutions, so a customer could provide part of its Exchange infrastructure in house, and part of it could be hosted in the cloud with federation linking the two together for management and integration purposes.
Office is also a great example because it's one of Microsoft's core product lines and a top driver of revenue. In fiscal year 2010, for example, Office revenues represented 30 percent of the company's overall revenues of $62.5 billion, or the same as for Windows. And that fiscal year ended just as Office 2010 was released, a release Microsoft has described as its fastest selling ever at retail.
But we're in this age of transition. And during this time, Microsoft is vulnerable, because users may move on to other hosted office productivity offerings as they make their own transitions to the cloud. One primary competitor here is Google Docs and Google Apps. These solutions haven't received much traction with larger businesses yet, and they won't until they've matured quite a bit. But they're free, and appeal to individuals and very small businesses as a result.
Google, of course, isn't standing still. Recognizing that customers still know and even love Microsoft Office, the company has created various integration tools over the years that bridge the gap between its free and cheap online services and Microsoft's Windows-based software. And this past week, the company delivered a tool called Google Cloud Connect that drives home Google's strategy in this market. Which is: we'll work with what you use today, with an eye toward getting you to migrate away from Office in the future.
It's a good idea. And one that should—and does—alarm Microsoft.
To understand why, it's necessary to examine how Google Cloud Connect differs from the Microsoft approach. Installed on client PCs, Google Cloud Connect is essentially a plug-in that appears as a toolbar in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint 2003, 2007, and 2010. You must logon to a Google account, and then choose sync settings, which can be automatic or manual. When used in the default automatic sync mode, each Office document you create or edit is automatically saved, or synced, in your Google Docs repository as you work. This is itself a powerful bit of functionality, since it provides crucial off-site backups, essentially, of your documents.
Google Cloud Connect also provides basic collaboration capabilities, allowing multiple users to edit a supported document type simultaneously, but, curiously, only using Microsoft's Office applications. That is, you can't use Google's own cloud-based Google Docs tools to work collaboratively with others using Office.
In fact, you can't use Google Docs at all: Documents synced to Google's servers are stored in Microsoft formats, and while you can convert them to something Google understands for later processing, the results are often terrible, with butchered formatting, even with very basic Word 2010 documents.
And like most Google solutions, Cloud Connect isn't exactly enterprise friendly. It needs to be manually installed on a per-PC basis. So it targets the same individuals and very small businesses as other Google products.
What Google Cloud Connect gets right, in my opinion, is the seamless integration with cloud backup. Even if you never intend to use Google Docs, this is a pretty good way to ensure that each document you work with ends up in the cloud, if only for backup purposes. And while there are some application reliability issues—Word has spazzed out on me temporarily a few times this past week—it does get the job done.
Microsoft is making its own play for hosted productivity. And while its Office Web Apps aren't as full-featured as their traditional counterparts—they're not even available offline, for starters—Microsoft is also offering customers ways to integrate its rich, client-side Office suite in useful ways with various cloud services as an interim step.
So what does Microsoft offer? Does it have a credible response to Cloud Connect?
This situation is beneficial to customers, since Microsoft often provides an interesting mix of on-premises and hosted solutions, giving customers more choice. So when you look at something like office productivity, you see on-premises products such as Microsoft Office, hosted versions such as the Office Web Apps, and then ancillary solutions such as SharePoint, which also come in both traditional and hosted versions. You can mix and match between these and related solutions, so a customer could provide part of its Exchange infrastructure in house, and part of it could be hosted in the cloud with federation linking the two together for management and integration purposes.
Office is also a great example because it's one of Microsoft's core product lines and a top driver of revenue. In fiscal year 2010, for example, Office revenues represented 30 percent of the company's overall revenues of $62.5 billion, or the same as for Windows. And that fiscal year ended just as Office 2010 was released, a release Microsoft has described as its fastest selling ever at retail.
But we're in this age of transition. And during this time, Microsoft is vulnerable, because users may move on to other hosted office productivity offerings as they make their own transitions to the cloud. One primary competitor here is Google Docs and Google Apps. These solutions haven't received much traction with larger businesses yet, and they won't until they've matured quite a bit. But they're free, and appeal to individuals and very small businesses as a result.
Google, of course, isn't standing still. Recognizing that customers still know and even love Microsoft Office, the company has created various integration tools over the years that bridge the gap between its free and cheap online services and Microsoft's Windows-based software. And this past week, the company delivered a tool called Google Cloud Connect that drives home Google's strategy in this market. Which is: we'll work with what you use today, with an eye toward getting you to migrate away from Office in the future.
It's a good idea. And one that should—and does—alarm Microsoft.
To understand why, it's necessary to examine how Google Cloud Connect differs from the Microsoft approach. Installed on client PCs, Google Cloud Connect is essentially a plug-in that appears as a toolbar in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint 2003, 2007, and 2010. You must logon to a Google account, and then choose sync settings, which can be automatic or manual. When used in the default automatic sync mode, each Office document you create or edit is automatically saved, or synced, in your Google Docs repository as you work. This is itself a powerful bit of functionality, since it provides crucial off-site backups, essentially, of your documents.
Google Cloud Connect also provides basic collaboration capabilities, allowing multiple users to edit a supported document type simultaneously, but, curiously, only using Microsoft's Office applications. That is, you can't use Google's own cloud-based Google Docs tools to work collaboratively with others using Office.
In fact, you can't use Google Docs at all: Documents synced to Google's servers are stored in Microsoft formats, and while you can convert them to something Google understands for later processing, the results are often terrible, with butchered formatting, even with very basic Word 2010 documents.
And like most Google solutions, Cloud Connect isn't exactly enterprise friendly. It needs to be manually installed on a per-PC basis. So it targets the same individuals and very small businesses as other Google products.
What Google Cloud Connect gets right, in my opinion, is the seamless integration with cloud backup. Even if you never intend to use Google Docs, this is a pretty good way to ensure that each document you work with ends up in the cloud, if only for backup purposes. And while there are some application reliability issues—Word has spazzed out on me temporarily a few times this past week—it does get the job done.
Microsoft is making its own play for hosted productivity. And while its Office Web Apps aren't as full-featured as their traditional counterparts—they're not even available offline, for starters—Microsoft is also offering customers ways to integrate its rich, client-side Office suite in useful ways with various cloud services as an interim step.
So what does Microsoft offer? Does it have a credible response to Cloud Connect?
Office 365 gives firms access to different applications from any location, expert says
Microsoft Office 365 will give companies the capability of using different types of Microsoft applications regardless of where their employees are.
That is according to Tom Warren, writing for winrumours.com, who said that people will be able to access products such as SharePoint and Lync through their desktop, online or via the cloud.
He added that Microsoft Office 365 will also include other collaborative services when it launches later this month, pooling all applications together to make it work.
Microsoft's corporate vice-president of Worldwide Partner Group Jon Roskill said earlier this month that Microsoft Office 365 will be available from June 28th.
Mr Warren told the news provider that Office 365 will provide plenty for businesses and their employees.
"Office 365 provides Office 2010, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync all Online in a cloud-based service," he said.
"The service is a full browser-based solution that incorporates webmail, collaboration and document management."
Outsourcery is the UK's leading Cloud services provider to business.
The company is attending a number of Cloud and unified communications events in 2011. To find out more about these upcoming events, visit www.outsourcery.co.uk/events
That is according to Tom Warren, writing for winrumours.com, who said that people will be able to access products such as SharePoint and Lync through their desktop, online or via the cloud.
He added that Microsoft Office 365 will also include other collaborative services when it launches later this month, pooling all applications together to make it work.
Microsoft's corporate vice-president of Worldwide Partner Group Jon Roskill said earlier this month that Microsoft Office 365 will be available from June 28th.
Mr Warren told the news provider that Office 365 will provide plenty for businesses and their employees.
"Office 365 provides Office 2010, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync all Online in a cloud-based service," he said.
"The service is a full browser-based solution that incorporates webmail, collaboration and document management."
Outsourcery is the UK's leading Cloud services provider to business.
The company is attending a number of Cloud and unified communications events in 2011. To find out more about these upcoming events, visit www.outsourcery.co.uk/events
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Microsoft betting everything on the cloud
Microsoft betting everything on the cloud
By J. Peter Bruzzese
Created 2011-05-25 03:00AM
Microsoft is putting all of its power behind making its Windows Azure cloud offering stable and flexible. From what I've seen, it looks like this strategy will pay off.
I'm not sure I would have been this confident even six months ago, but compelling use cases highlighted at last week's TechEd conference expanded my sense of what is possible in the cloud. One example, a handheld ultrasound unit that utilized Azure on the back end, allowed technicians to perform ultrasounds with just a slate PC and an ultrasound mic. That kind of portability could benefit people all over the world.
[ Get all the details you need on deploying and using Windows 7 in the InfoWorld editors' 21-page Windows 7 Deep Dive PDF special report. | Stay abreast of key Microsoft technologies in our Technology: Microsoft newsletter. ]
But where Microsoft makes its strongest argument for Azure is in its ability to provide solutions that bridge the gap between the public and private cloud. This can be seen in the development of such Microsoft products as Exchange, where you might have some of your mailboxes on-premises and some in the cloud through Office 365. Having the ability to manage both zones and to move mailboxes between them at will is an attractive pull for shops not yet ready to go all-in with hosted messaging.
Microsoft's System Center, code-named Concero, is an intriguing solution along those lines. System Center allows for deployment, management, monitoring, and provisioning of systems, applications, and services of both public and private cloud resources. I'll be discussing this solution in greater detail in a future column as we get closer to a release date.
Technologies like these demonstrate Microsoft's conviction to own the public cloud. I've often joked that Azure (aka "sky-blue") is a tell as to Microsoft's ambitions: It doesn't just want a cloud, it wants to take up the whole sky.
TechEd 2011 beyond the cloud
TechEd also saw a number of intriguing releases. Small Business Server 2011 Standard is the latest flavor of SBS, but the real focus is on Essentials and how it will tie into Office 365. Stay tuned, but suffice to say Microsoft is working on it. Between SBS, Home Server, and a variety of other solutions, I'd say 2011 is the year of the small business.
MultiPoint Server 2011 is another recent release not too many people know about. To date, it has been promoted as a great way to get a classroom up and running with Windows 7 systems as thin clients connected to a terminal services-like server. The server is easy to set up and has tools that allow teachers to control what their students are doing at any given time. A demonstration at TechEd set minds in motion on what else we can do with this box. Disaster relief seems to be an easy fit for something you can just plop down and operate in minutes.
Among the third-party releases that intrigued me, GSX Monitor stood out as a great tool for monitoring Exchange, SharePoint, Domino, BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, and more. The real-time monitoring dash was easy to work with. The install is apparently agent-less (for basic reporting), and it has all the reporting and analytic tools you would expect from a monitoring solution.
Another intriguing resource is Spoon.net, which lets you launch applications from the cloud without installing them on your desktop. Enterprises can check out Spoon Server (2011 version due June 6); with it, you can simplify app distribution through your organization via a private cloud.
Also of note was Falafel.com's EventBoard, a mobile app for the iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7 that made navigating TechEd (traditionally a nightmare task regardless of the location) a breeze. You could browse the sessions you wanted to attend, bookmark sessions, rate them afterward, and more. It included maps to help you get to your sessions as well, and frankly, it was better than the booklet issued to the audience. Obviously every conference is different, so organizers have to contact Falafel.com to get the details. But I can see this as a must for any show.
There was much more to report, but this is a taste.
This article, "Microsoft betting everything on the cloud," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese's Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in Windows at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.
Cloud Computing Microsoft Windows Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud computing
By J. Peter Bruzzese
Created 2011-05-25 03:00AM
Microsoft is putting all of its power behind making its Windows Azure cloud offering stable and flexible. From what I've seen, it looks like this strategy will pay off.
I'm not sure I would have been this confident even six months ago, but compelling use cases highlighted at last week's TechEd conference expanded my sense of what is possible in the cloud. One example, a handheld ultrasound unit that utilized Azure on the back end, allowed technicians to perform ultrasounds with just a slate PC and an ultrasound mic. That kind of portability could benefit people all over the world.
[ Get all the details you need on deploying and using Windows 7 in the InfoWorld editors' 21-page Windows 7 Deep Dive PDF special report. | Stay abreast of key Microsoft technologies in our Technology: Microsoft newsletter. ]
But where Microsoft makes its strongest argument for Azure is in its ability to provide solutions that bridge the gap between the public and private cloud. This can be seen in the development of such Microsoft products as Exchange, where you might have some of your mailboxes on-premises and some in the cloud through Office 365. Having the ability to manage both zones and to move mailboxes between them at will is an attractive pull for shops not yet ready to go all-in with hosted messaging.
Microsoft's System Center, code-named Concero, is an intriguing solution along those lines. System Center allows for deployment, management, monitoring, and provisioning of systems, applications, and services of both public and private cloud resources. I'll be discussing this solution in greater detail in a future column as we get closer to a release date.
Technologies like these demonstrate Microsoft's conviction to own the public cloud. I've often joked that Azure (aka "sky-blue") is a tell as to Microsoft's ambitions: It doesn't just want a cloud, it wants to take up the whole sky.
TechEd 2011 beyond the cloud
TechEd also saw a number of intriguing releases. Small Business Server 2011 Standard is the latest flavor of SBS, but the real focus is on Essentials and how it will tie into Office 365. Stay tuned, but suffice to say Microsoft is working on it. Between SBS, Home Server, and a variety of other solutions, I'd say 2011 is the year of the small business.
MultiPoint Server 2011 is another recent release not too many people know about. To date, it has been promoted as a great way to get a classroom up and running with Windows 7 systems as thin clients connected to a terminal services-like server. The server is easy to set up and has tools that allow teachers to control what their students are doing at any given time. A demonstration at TechEd set minds in motion on what else we can do with this box. Disaster relief seems to be an easy fit for something you can just plop down and operate in minutes.
Among the third-party releases that intrigued me, GSX Monitor stood out as a great tool for monitoring Exchange, SharePoint, Domino, BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, and more. The real-time monitoring dash was easy to work with. The install is apparently agent-less (for basic reporting), and it has all the reporting and analytic tools you would expect from a monitoring solution.
Another intriguing resource is Spoon.net, which lets you launch applications from the cloud without installing them on your desktop. Enterprises can check out Spoon Server (2011 version due June 6); with it, you can simplify app distribution through your organization via a private cloud.
Also of note was Falafel.com's EventBoard, a mobile app for the iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7 that made navigating TechEd (traditionally a nightmare task regardless of the location) a breeze. You could browse the sessions you wanted to attend, bookmark sessions, rate them afterward, and more. It included maps to help you get to your sessions as well, and frankly, it was better than the booklet issued to the audience. Obviously every conference is different, so organizers have to contact Falafel.com to get the details. But I can see this as a must for any show.
There was much more to report, but this is a taste.
This article, "Microsoft betting everything on the cloud," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese's Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in Windows at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.
Cloud Computing Microsoft Windows Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud computing
Rubicon richt SharePoint Project- en Samenwerkingsomgeving en Document Management in bij het Admiraal De Ruyter Ziekenhuis.
Rubicon richt SharePoint Project- en Samenwerkingsomgeving en Document Management in bij het Admiraal De Ruyter Ziekenhuis.
Rubicon gaat bij het Admiraal De Ruyter Ziekenhuis de Project- en samenwerkingsomgeving en het Document Management verder inrichten met als doel het verhogen van de efficiëntie van de medewerkers.
Vianen, 31-05-2011: Nu het Admiraal De Ruyter Ziekenhuis (ADRZ) de beschikbaarheid van gedigitaliseerde patiëntendossiers op basis van SharePoint 2010 online heeft gerealiseerd, is het tijd voor de volgende stap. In de volgende stap gaat het ADRZ verder met de realisatie van het verhogen van de efficiëntie van de medewerkers door het verder verbeteren van de project- en samenwerkingsomgeving en het inrichten van document management. Het ADRZ heeft hiervoor Rubicon gekozen als haar SharePoint partner. Een leverancier die zowel de IT, functioneel beheer en business aspecten van SharePoint begrijpt en over kan dragen aan het ziekenhuis.
Hiermee voldoet Rubicon aan de wensen die het ADRZ stelt aan een partner met toegevoegde waarde. Rubicon heeft inmiddels bij meerdere zorginstellingen SharePoint oplossingen geïmplementeerd. Op basis van haar SharePoint ZorgPortaal weet Rubicon de juiste functionele vraagstelling van ziekenhuizen te beantwoorden. Rubicon biedt het ADRZ dan ook full service SharePoint dienstverlening.
In 2010 koos het ADRZ voor het SharePoint platform als basis voor het aan zorgprofessionals beschikbaar stellen van gedigitaliseerde patiëntendossiers. Rubicon realiseerde een infrastructuur op basis van een degelijk ontwerp en verzorgde de installatie van de SharePoint 2010 omgeving. Bij het opstellen van het ontwerp is door Rubicon in samenwerking met ADRZ vanaf de start rekening gehouden met toekomstige functionele wensen betreffende dit platform, waardoor vervolgtrajecten als het verbeteren van de project- en samenwerkingsomgeving en het inrichten van document management, goed aansluiten op de bestaande infrastructuur.
Rubicon en het ADRZ hebben een roadmap opgesteld voor de komende jaren. Dit geeft het ziekenhuis de mogelijkheid om het platform in beheersbare stappen binnen ADRZ verder in gebruik te nemen. Door gebruik te maken van functionele domeinen krijgen afdelingen nieuwe en eenvoudigere IT diensten geboden ter ondersteuning van ziekenhuisbrede samenwerking. In de eerste fase van deze roadmap realiseert Rubicon de onderdelen collaboratie, project management, document management en de “Mijn ADRZ” omgeving. Het resultaat hiervan is dat medewerkers beter kunnen samenwerken, elkaar beter kunnen vinden en documenten en informatie eenvoudiger gedeeld en (terug)gevonden kunnen worden.
De samenwerkingsomgeving geeft de organisatie de mogelijkheid om in afdeling overschrijdende teams samen te werken. Het is dé standaard omgeving, waarin plaats is voor gedeelde documenten, taken, een agenda, forum en meer. Dit maakt het voor de gebruikers mogelijk om centraal informatie en kennis te delen. Daarnaast wordt er een project management omgeving ingericht, op basis van het “Rubicon Project Bureau”. Dit laatste is een op Prince2 gebaseerde en gestructureerde omgeving om projectmatig samen te werken, van projectaanvraag tot het automatisch aanmaken van projectsites en dit alles ondersteund door één workflow.
In de eerste fase wil het ADRZ tevens documenten van personen en afdelingen in SharePoint onderbrengen. Hiertoe wordt een documenten centrum ingericht met de gewenste document classificaties van het ADRZ. Hierdoor komen functionaliteiten zoals bijvoorbeeld versiebeheer beschikbaar en wordt een verbetering van de vindbaarheid van documenten gerealiseerd. Hiertoe wordt de Enterprise zoekmachine en Social Tagging ingezet. Beide, standaard functionaliteiten van SharePoint 2010.
“Mijn ADRZ” geeft de gebruiker de mogelijkheid om persoonlijke documenten op te slaan op zijn of haar eigen SharePoint plek. Naast het profiel met een rijke set aan Social Features, heeft Rubicon een aantal webparts toegevoegd, waarmee de gebruiker zijn of haar taken, agenda en emails ook in de browser kan zien.
“Mijn ADRZ” wordt daarmee een centrale plaats waar de medewerker snel via de browser zijn of haar informatie beschikbaar heeft.
Rubicon realiseert elke fase als project en zorgt ervoor dat ieder project vanaf het ontwerp, de realisatie, training van de gebruikers tot aan de overdracht naar de beheerorganisatie goed geregeld wordt.
De realisatie van de diverse onderdelen gebeurt middels een iteratieve aanpak in nauwe samenwerking met de medewerkers van het ziekenhuis. Dit zorgt voor korte communicatielijnen en duidelijke verwachtingen bij zowel het ADRZ als bij Rubicon. Het succes van een project zit volgens Rubicon dan ook grotendeels in de menselijke factor. Daarnaast moeten de oplossingen niet alleen eenvoudig over te dragen zijn naar de gebruikers binnen het ziekenhuis en het werk eenvoudiger maken, maar dienen deze ook beheersbaar te zijn en beheersbaar te blijven voor de IT organisatie van het ziekenhuis.
Over ADRZ
Het Admiraal De Ruyter Ziekenhuis biedt medisch specialistische zorg in Noord- en Midden Zeeland en heeft locaties in Goes, Middelburg, Vlissingen en Zierikzee. Meer informatie vindt u op www.adrz.nl
Over Rubicon
Rubicon is een toonaangevende Microsoft dienstverlener met ruime ervaring in de gezondheidszorg. Middels het inzetten van innovatieve ICT oplossingen maakt Rubicon het voor organisaties mogelijk om de performance inzichtelijk te maken en de efficiency en communicatie te verbeteren. Met een verhoogde service en kwaliteit tot gevolg. Als ICT adviespartner geeft Rubicon zorginstellingen, maar ook organisaties binnen diverse andere branches, toegang tot hoogwaardige kennis en volledige technologische ondersteuning. Voor meer informatie: www.rubicongroup.nl
Rubicon gaat bij het Admiraal De Ruyter Ziekenhuis de Project- en samenwerkingsomgeving en het Document Management verder inrichten met als doel het verhogen van de efficiëntie van de medewerkers.
Vianen, 31-05-2011: Nu het Admiraal De Ruyter Ziekenhuis (ADRZ) de beschikbaarheid van gedigitaliseerde patiëntendossiers op basis van SharePoint 2010 online heeft gerealiseerd, is het tijd voor de volgende stap. In de volgende stap gaat het ADRZ verder met de realisatie van het verhogen van de efficiëntie van de medewerkers door het verder verbeteren van de project- en samenwerkingsomgeving en het inrichten van document management. Het ADRZ heeft hiervoor Rubicon gekozen als haar SharePoint partner. Een leverancier die zowel de IT, functioneel beheer en business aspecten van SharePoint begrijpt en over kan dragen aan het ziekenhuis.
Hiermee voldoet Rubicon aan de wensen die het ADRZ stelt aan een partner met toegevoegde waarde. Rubicon heeft inmiddels bij meerdere zorginstellingen SharePoint oplossingen geïmplementeerd. Op basis van haar SharePoint ZorgPortaal weet Rubicon de juiste functionele vraagstelling van ziekenhuizen te beantwoorden. Rubicon biedt het ADRZ dan ook full service SharePoint dienstverlening.
In 2010 koos het ADRZ voor het SharePoint platform als basis voor het aan zorgprofessionals beschikbaar stellen van gedigitaliseerde patiëntendossiers. Rubicon realiseerde een infrastructuur op basis van een degelijk ontwerp en verzorgde de installatie van de SharePoint 2010 omgeving. Bij het opstellen van het ontwerp is door Rubicon in samenwerking met ADRZ vanaf de start rekening gehouden met toekomstige functionele wensen betreffende dit platform, waardoor vervolgtrajecten als het verbeteren van de project- en samenwerkingsomgeving en het inrichten van document management, goed aansluiten op de bestaande infrastructuur.
Rubicon en het ADRZ hebben een roadmap opgesteld voor de komende jaren. Dit geeft het ziekenhuis de mogelijkheid om het platform in beheersbare stappen binnen ADRZ verder in gebruik te nemen. Door gebruik te maken van functionele domeinen krijgen afdelingen nieuwe en eenvoudigere IT diensten geboden ter ondersteuning van ziekenhuisbrede samenwerking. In de eerste fase van deze roadmap realiseert Rubicon de onderdelen collaboratie, project management, document management en de “Mijn ADRZ” omgeving. Het resultaat hiervan is dat medewerkers beter kunnen samenwerken, elkaar beter kunnen vinden en documenten en informatie eenvoudiger gedeeld en (terug)gevonden kunnen worden.
De samenwerkingsomgeving geeft de organisatie de mogelijkheid om in afdeling overschrijdende teams samen te werken. Het is dé standaard omgeving, waarin plaats is voor gedeelde documenten, taken, een agenda, forum en meer. Dit maakt het voor de gebruikers mogelijk om centraal informatie en kennis te delen. Daarnaast wordt er een project management omgeving ingericht, op basis van het “Rubicon Project Bureau”. Dit laatste is een op Prince2 gebaseerde en gestructureerde omgeving om projectmatig samen te werken, van projectaanvraag tot het automatisch aanmaken van projectsites en dit alles ondersteund door één workflow.
In de eerste fase wil het ADRZ tevens documenten van personen en afdelingen in SharePoint onderbrengen. Hiertoe wordt een documenten centrum ingericht met de gewenste document classificaties van het ADRZ. Hierdoor komen functionaliteiten zoals bijvoorbeeld versiebeheer beschikbaar en wordt een verbetering van de vindbaarheid van documenten gerealiseerd. Hiertoe wordt de Enterprise zoekmachine en Social Tagging ingezet. Beide, standaard functionaliteiten van SharePoint 2010.
“Mijn ADRZ” geeft de gebruiker de mogelijkheid om persoonlijke documenten op te slaan op zijn of haar eigen SharePoint plek. Naast het profiel met een rijke set aan Social Features, heeft Rubicon een aantal webparts toegevoegd, waarmee de gebruiker zijn of haar taken, agenda en emails ook in de browser kan zien.
“Mijn ADRZ” wordt daarmee een centrale plaats waar de medewerker snel via de browser zijn of haar informatie beschikbaar heeft.
Rubicon realiseert elke fase als project en zorgt ervoor dat ieder project vanaf het ontwerp, de realisatie, training van de gebruikers tot aan de overdracht naar de beheerorganisatie goed geregeld wordt.
De realisatie van de diverse onderdelen gebeurt middels een iteratieve aanpak in nauwe samenwerking met de medewerkers van het ziekenhuis. Dit zorgt voor korte communicatielijnen en duidelijke verwachtingen bij zowel het ADRZ als bij Rubicon. Het succes van een project zit volgens Rubicon dan ook grotendeels in de menselijke factor. Daarnaast moeten de oplossingen niet alleen eenvoudig over te dragen zijn naar de gebruikers binnen het ziekenhuis en het werk eenvoudiger maken, maar dienen deze ook beheersbaar te zijn en beheersbaar te blijven voor de IT organisatie van het ziekenhuis.
Over ADRZ
Het Admiraal De Ruyter Ziekenhuis biedt medisch specialistische zorg in Noord- en Midden Zeeland en heeft locaties in Goes, Middelburg, Vlissingen en Zierikzee. Meer informatie vindt u op www.adrz.nl
Over Rubicon
Rubicon is een toonaangevende Microsoft dienstverlener met ruime ervaring in de gezondheidszorg. Middels het inzetten van innovatieve ICT oplossingen maakt Rubicon het voor organisaties mogelijk om de performance inzichtelijk te maken en de efficiency en communicatie te verbeteren. Met een verhoogde service en kwaliteit tot gevolg. Als ICT adviespartner geeft Rubicon zorginstellingen, maar ook organisaties binnen diverse andere branches, toegang tot hoogwaardige kennis en volledige technologische ondersteuning. Voor meer informatie: www.rubicongroup.nl
Friday, June 17, 2011
Collaboration as an Intangible Asset
Collaboration as an Intangible Asset7:37 AM Thursday June 16, 2011
by Robert J. Thomas | Comments (12)
Virtually every tearful Tony Award winner or jubilant NBA Most Valuable Player carries a crumpled wad of paper on which are named the people who "made it all possible." If ego and time allow, the list can be quite long. So it is with most breakthrough innovations and banner financial years.
The point is not to nod in the direction of the "little people," but instead to recognize that the intangible assets an organization has are the product of the hundreds, perhaps the thousands, of "assists" — to extend the basketball metaphor — that usually go unnoticed but without which problems would not get solved, insights would not be generated, and uncertainties would not be vanquished.
Interestingly, intangible assets are all the rage these days on Wall Street. Investors grapple daily in an effort to figure out how to value companies whose accounting assets — things like land, capital, products, and licenses — don't adequately express their true market value. Ask a buy-side analyst why Amazon or Apple fetches the price-earnings multiple they do, and inevitably the conversation turns to things like their ability to innovate, their capacity to capture and grow the best talent, their skill at managing brand and vendor relationships or ecosystems. There is no line on the balance sheet for "ability to innovate" or "skill at managing brand." And even if there were, it would have to be expressed as a probability statement: How likely is Apple to innovate or out-innovate its peers?
Most intangible assets are real but invisible, and the most important invisible ability is the ability (or, perhaps better said, the probability) to collaborate. After all, it's the willingness on the part of people to work together to solve problems when they could just as easily pass them along to someone else that forms the core of most things we call collaboration. It's the decision that someone makes to share an idea or to spend the extra hour helping out — not the regulation or contract that requires it — that usually means the difference between "good enough" and "outstanding."
Marvelous, but if it's invisible, how do you see an intangible asset or collaboration, for that matter? If you can't measure it, how can you manage it?
Fortunately, in recent years, social network analysis (SNA) has emerged as a powerful new way for managers to see the patterns of interaction — information sharing, problem-solving, coaching, and mentoring — that make up the less visible, often informal side of an organization. By asking simple survey questions online and identifying the people with whom they most frequently interact, SNA makes it possible to depict the networks that underlie or exist in parallel to the formal organization charts and process diagrams. Repeated surveys can, over time, reveal changes in networks or in patterns of collaboration — making it possible to assess whether interventions such as reorganization or targeted efforts to improve collaboration (like offsite events, new software/communications tools, or incentive programs) actually have their desired impact. Moreover, targeted questions can reveal different types of collaboration.
Case in point, SNA conducted at Novartis helped reveal a pattern of communication — and the existence of parallel innovation efforts — that made it possible to combine teams before they reached a crucial stall point in the development of a new vaccine. At a major retail bank, early signals of an emerging rift between factions — manifested in very different networks of information sharing — made it possible to save an acquisition before it came apart. And a rapidly growing pharmaceutical manufacturer discovered through network analysis that management bottlenecks were holding back critical decisions and alienating lower level employees.
Fortunately, tools like social network analysis are making it possible to do something more than "water and wait" when it comes to cultivating intangible assets. By utilizing more effective ways to depict social networks, to see change in them as a result of targeted interventions, and to distinguish among the types of collaboration possible, managers are finding that they can grow enterprise value and earn their companies a much richer treatment by investors.
So, the question is: What are the most critical intangible assets in your company? What are you doing to cultivate them? Who is responsible for managing the invisible that creates the intangibles?
Robert J. Thomas is the executive director of the Accenture Institute for High Performance and professor at Brandeis University International Business School. He is the author or co-author of eight books on leadership and organizational change, including Crucibles of Leadership (Harvard Business Press, 2008), Geeks and Geezers (with Warren Bennis, Harvard Business Press, 2001) and Driving Results through Social Networks (with Rob Cross, Jossey-Bass, 2009).
by Robert J. Thomas | Comments (12)
Virtually every tearful Tony Award winner or jubilant NBA Most Valuable Player carries a crumpled wad of paper on which are named the people who "made it all possible." If ego and time allow, the list can be quite long. So it is with most breakthrough innovations and banner financial years.
The point is not to nod in the direction of the "little people," but instead to recognize that the intangible assets an organization has are the product of the hundreds, perhaps the thousands, of "assists" — to extend the basketball metaphor — that usually go unnoticed but without which problems would not get solved, insights would not be generated, and uncertainties would not be vanquished.
Interestingly, intangible assets are all the rage these days on Wall Street. Investors grapple daily in an effort to figure out how to value companies whose accounting assets — things like land, capital, products, and licenses — don't adequately express their true market value. Ask a buy-side analyst why Amazon or Apple fetches the price-earnings multiple they do, and inevitably the conversation turns to things like their ability to innovate, their capacity to capture and grow the best talent, their skill at managing brand and vendor relationships or ecosystems. There is no line on the balance sheet for "ability to innovate" or "skill at managing brand." And even if there were, it would have to be expressed as a probability statement: How likely is Apple to innovate or out-innovate its peers?
Most intangible assets are real but invisible, and the most important invisible ability is the ability (or, perhaps better said, the probability) to collaborate. After all, it's the willingness on the part of people to work together to solve problems when they could just as easily pass them along to someone else that forms the core of most things we call collaboration. It's the decision that someone makes to share an idea or to spend the extra hour helping out — not the regulation or contract that requires it — that usually means the difference between "good enough" and "outstanding."
Marvelous, but if it's invisible, how do you see an intangible asset or collaboration, for that matter? If you can't measure it, how can you manage it?
Fortunately, in recent years, social network analysis (SNA) has emerged as a powerful new way for managers to see the patterns of interaction — information sharing, problem-solving, coaching, and mentoring — that make up the less visible, often informal side of an organization. By asking simple survey questions online and identifying the people with whom they most frequently interact, SNA makes it possible to depict the networks that underlie or exist in parallel to the formal organization charts and process diagrams. Repeated surveys can, over time, reveal changes in networks or in patterns of collaboration — making it possible to assess whether interventions such as reorganization or targeted efforts to improve collaboration (like offsite events, new software/communications tools, or incentive programs) actually have their desired impact. Moreover, targeted questions can reveal different types of collaboration.
Case in point, SNA conducted at Novartis helped reveal a pattern of communication — and the existence of parallel innovation efforts — that made it possible to combine teams before they reached a crucial stall point in the development of a new vaccine. At a major retail bank, early signals of an emerging rift between factions — manifested in very different networks of information sharing — made it possible to save an acquisition before it came apart. And a rapidly growing pharmaceutical manufacturer discovered through network analysis that management bottlenecks were holding back critical decisions and alienating lower level employees.
Fortunately, tools like social network analysis are making it possible to do something more than "water and wait" when it comes to cultivating intangible assets. By utilizing more effective ways to depict social networks, to see change in them as a result of targeted interventions, and to distinguish among the types of collaboration possible, managers are finding that they can grow enterprise value and earn their companies a much richer treatment by investors.
So, the question is: What are the most critical intangible assets in your company? What are you doing to cultivate them? Who is responsible for managing the invisible that creates the intangibles?
Robert J. Thomas is the executive director of the Accenture Institute for High Performance and professor at Brandeis University International Business School. He is the author or co-author of eight books on leadership and organizational change, including Crucibles of Leadership (Harvard Business Press, 2008), Geeks and Geezers (with Warren Bennis, Harvard Business Press, 2001) and Driving Results through Social Networks (with Rob Cross, Jossey-Bass, 2009).
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
AvePoint en Wortell Partner leveren complete SharePoint-oplossingen
Nieuwe overeenkomst breidt levering uit van Sharepoint infrastructuurmanagement-oplossingen van AvePoint en diensten van Wortell in gehele EMEA
LONDEN--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- 20110601 --
AvePoint, toonaangevend leider in het leveren van infrastructuurmanagementsoftware -oplossingen voor Microsoft SharePoint, heeft vandaag een partnerschapovereenkomst aangekondigd met Wortell, de vooraanstaande consultant en services provider voor Microsoft technologieën. Wortell dat in Nederland is gevestigd, zal dienen als doorverkoper met toegevoegde waarde van AvePoint technologieën, en beide bedrijven zullen samenwerken aan de integratie van producten van AvePoint en diensten van Wortell voor klanten in heel Europa.
(...)
LONDEN--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- 20110601 --
AvePoint, toonaangevend leider in het leveren van infrastructuurmanagementsoftware -oplossingen voor Microsoft SharePoint, heeft vandaag een partnerschapovereenkomst aangekondigd met Wortell, de vooraanstaande consultant en services provider voor Microsoft technologieën. Wortell dat in Nederland is gevestigd, zal dienen als doorverkoper met toegevoegde waarde van AvePoint technologieën, en beide bedrijven zullen samenwerken aan de integratie van producten van AvePoint en diensten van Wortell voor klanten in heel Europa.
(...)
BDO in zee met Advantive en Microsoft SharePoint 2010
07-06-2011 08:49 • Advantive
BDO heeft aan Advantive de opdracht verstrekt om wereldwijd een uniforme internet- en intranetomgeving in te richten op basis van Microsoft SharePoint 2010. Advantive ontwikkelt een SharePoint framework voor alle landen waarin BDO vertegenwoordigd is. Door middel van dit framework dwingt BDO International uniformiteit af voor inter- en intranetpublicaties.
BDO heeft aan Advantive de opdracht verstrekt om wereldwijd een uniforme internet- en intranetomgeving in te richten op basis van Microsoft SharePoint 2010. Advantive ontwikkelt een SharePoint framework voor alle landen waarin BDO vertegenwoordigd is. Door middel van dit framework dwingt BDO International uniformiteit af voor inter- en intranetpublicaties.
Making Collaboration Work
IDEACAST
The Economics of Mass Collaboration
Featured Guest: Don Tapscott, chairman of nGenera Insight and coauthor of Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World.
Ideacast »
MUST-READS
JUST IN
Six Common Misperceptions about Teamwork
BLOG | J. Richard Hackman | June 7, 2011
A leading expert on teams weighs in on what we're doing wrong.
Collaboration Is Risky. Now, Get on with It.
BLOG | Whitney Johnson | June 7, 2011
To build trust with your collaborator, follow these four steps.
Managing High-Stakes Partners
BLOG | Ben Gomes-Casseres | June 6, 2011
How can you get the most value out of your company's alliances?
Getting Credit for Making Other People Shine
BLOG | Andrea Ovans | June 2, 2011
Try this new approach to compensate teams for collaborating effectively.
The Three Essential Ingredients of Great Collaborations
BLOG | Robert J. Thomas | June 1, 2011
Here's how to get more value from team projects.
How CMOs Build Brands by Collaborating Across Silos
BLOG | David Aaker | May 31, 2011
Exceptional marketing defies product, functional, and geographic boundaries.
India's Decade of Collaboration
BLOG | Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, Prasad Kaipa, Simone Ahuja | May 31, 2011
To work, India's "decade of innovation" must become more.
Collaboration Is a Team Sport
BLOG | Adam Richardson | May 31, 2011
Companies that improve their collaboration also up their innovation.
The "Man on the Moon" Standard
BLOG | Morten Hansen | May 26, 2011
Fifty years later, JFK still sets the standard for getting diverse groups to collaborate through goal-setting.
Create Better, Collaborate Better
BLOG | Dan Burrier | May 25, 2011
The chief innovation officer at Ogilvy & Mather wants you to start collaborating out of the box.
Teams That Only Think They Collaborate
BLOG | Ron Ashkenas | May 24, 2011
Make sure their "collaboration" isn't just a facade for independent workl.
The Conversation Is Over. Long Live the Conversation.
BLOG | David Rock | May 24, 2011
The irony of the social media world is that it's making us less social.
Managing the Double-Edged Sword of Collaboration
BLOG | Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer | May 23, 2011
Collaboration can be the best thing you do at work. The worst, too.
New Ways to Collaborate for Process Improvement
BLOG | Brad Power | May 19, 2011
To innovate across boundaries, share deep knowledge with online tools.
Embedding Collaboration from the Start
BLOG | Jimmy Guterman | May 18, 2011
Here's good advice on how to foster collaboration among employees as soon as they join the business.
How Generation Next Is Rebuilding Japan
BLOG | Nobuo Sato and Mayuka Yamazaki | May 17, 2011
Young Japanese are rallying to create a new future for a battered country.
A Partnership Is Not a Purchase Order
BLOG | Ben Gomes-Casseres | May 16, 2011
To succeed with external collaborations, understand the nature of the beast.
Leading Across Borders? Don't Change a Thing
BLOG | Rajeev Peshawaria | May 16, 2011
Employees in Asia are energized by exactly the same type of manager as those in the U.S.
Getting Collaboration Right
BLOG | Morten T. Hansen and Herminia Ibarra | May 16, 2011
Avoid the two most common traps.
COLLABORATION IN HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Which Kind of Collaboration Is Right for You?
ARTICLE | Gary P. Pisano and Roberto Verganti | December 1, 2008
The new leaders in innovation will be those who figure out the best way to leverage a network of outsiders.
Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams
ARTICLE | Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson | November 1, 2007
Even the largest and most complex teams can work together effectively if the right conditions are in place.
Want Collaboration? Accept and Actively Manage Conflict
ARTICLE | Jeff Weiss and Jonathan Hughes | March 1, 2005
The quest for harmony and common goals can actually obstruct teamwork. Managers get truly effective collaboration only when they realize that conflict is natural and necessary.
When Internal Collaboration Is Bad for Your Company
ARTICLE | Morten T. Hansen | April 1, 2009
Working across organizational boundaries can create tremendous value—or destroy it.
The Discipline of Teams
ARTICLE | Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith | July 1, 2005
What makes the difference between a team that performs and one that doesn’t?
Group Versus Group: How Alliance Networks Compete
ARTICLE | Benjamin Gomes-Casseres | July 1, 1994
A new form of competition is spreading across global markets: group vs. group. Call them networks, clusters, constellations, or virtual corporations, these groups consist of companies joined together in a larger overarching relationship.
The Economics of Mass Collaboration
Featured Guest: Don Tapscott, chairman of nGenera Insight and coauthor of Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World.
Ideacast »
MUST-READS
JUST IN
Six Common Misperceptions about Teamwork
BLOG | J. Richard Hackman | June 7, 2011
A leading expert on teams weighs in on what we're doing wrong.
Collaboration Is Risky. Now, Get on with It.
BLOG | Whitney Johnson | June 7, 2011
To build trust with your collaborator, follow these four steps.
Managing High-Stakes Partners
BLOG | Ben Gomes-Casseres | June 6, 2011
How can you get the most value out of your company's alliances?
Getting Credit for Making Other People Shine
BLOG | Andrea Ovans | June 2, 2011
Try this new approach to compensate teams for collaborating effectively.
The Three Essential Ingredients of Great Collaborations
BLOG | Robert J. Thomas | June 1, 2011
Here's how to get more value from team projects.
How CMOs Build Brands by Collaborating Across Silos
BLOG | David Aaker | May 31, 2011
Exceptional marketing defies product, functional, and geographic boundaries.
India's Decade of Collaboration
BLOG | Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, Prasad Kaipa, Simone Ahuja | May 31, 2011
To work, India's "decade of innovation" must become more.
Collaboration Is a Team Sport
BLOG | Adam Richardson | May 31, 2011
Companies that improve their collaboration also up their innovation.
The "Man on the Moon" Standard
BLOG | Morten Hansen | May 26, 2011
Fifty years later, JFK still sets the standard for getting diverse groups to collaborate through goal-setting.
Create Better, Collaborate Better
BLOG | Dan Burrier | May 25, 2011
The chief innovation officer at Ogilvy & Mather wants you to start collaborating out of the box.
Teams That Only Think They Collaborate
BLOG | Ron Ashkenas | May 24, 2011
Make sure their "collaboration" isn't just a facade for independent workl.
The Conversation Is Over. Long Live the Conversation.
BLOG | David Rock | May 24, 2011
The irony of the social media world is that it's making us less social.
Managing the Double-Edged Sword of Collaboration
BLOG | Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer | May 23, 2011
Collaboration can be the best thing you do at work. The worst, too.
New Ways to Collaborate for Process Improvement
BLOG | Brad Power | May 19, 2011
To innovate across boundaries, share deep knowledge with online tools.
Embedding Collaboration from the Start
BLOG | Jimmy Guterman | May 18, 2011
Here's good advice on how to foster collaboration among employees as soon as they join the business.
How Generation Next Is Rebuilding Japan
BLOG | Nobuo Sato and Mayuka Yamazaki | May 17, 2011
Young Japanese are rallying to create a new future for a battered country.
A Partnership Is Not a Purchase Order
BLOG | Ben Gomes-Casseres | May 16, 2011
To succeed with external collaborations, understand the nature of the beast.
Leading Across Borders? Don't Change a Thing
BLOG | Rajeev Peshawaria | May 16, 2011
Employees in Asia are energized by exactly the same type of manager as those in the U.S.
Getting Collaboration Right
BLOG | Morten T. Hansen and Herminia Ibarra | May 16, 2011
Avoid the two most common traps.
COLLABORATION IN HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Which Kind of Collaboration Is Right for You?
ARTICLE | Gary P. Pisano and Roberto Verganti | December 1, 2008
The new leaders in innovation will be those who figure out the best way to leverage a network of outsiders.
Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams
ARTICLE | Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson | November 1, 2007
Even the largest and most complex teams can work together effectively if the right conditions are in place.
Want Collaboration? Accept and Actively Manage Conflict
ARTICLE | Jeff Weiss and Jonathan Hughes | March 1, 2005
The quest for harmony and common goals can actually obstruct teamwork. Managers get truly effective collaboration only when they realize that conflict is natural and necessary.
When Internal Collaboration Is Bad for Your Company
ARTICLE | Morten T. Hansen | April 1, 2009
Working across organizational boundaries can create tremendous value—or destroy it.
The Discipline of Teams
ARTICLE | Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith | July 1, 2005
What makes the difference between a team that performs and one that doesn’t?
Group Versus Group: How Alliance Networks Compete
ARTICLE | Benjamin Gomes-Casseres | July 1, 1994
A new form of competition is spreading across global markets: group vs. group. Call them networks, clusters, constellations, or virtual corporations, these groups consist of companies joined together in a larger overarching relationship.
Saturday, June 04, 2011
Groupon’s European allies in the clone wars
Groupon’s European allies in the clone wars
June 3, 2011 9:20 am by Tim Bradshaw
Groupon’s swift international expansion has been “critical” to its vertiginous growth rate. In the first quarter of 2011, 54 per cent of its revenue came from outside the US.
Maintaining that growth will be a vital part of its pitch to potential investors ahead of its initial public offering.
A trio of German internet entrepreneurs have played a key role for Groupon overseas: the Samwer brothers.
Groupon’s acquisition of CityDeal, the Samwers’ daily deals service, last year marked the beginning of its push beyond America.
Oliver, Marc and Alexander Samwer are often accused of taking the best Silicon Valley ideas – from EBay to Airbnb – and launching them in Europe. And as the founders of Jamba, they must shoulder at least some of the blame for the Crazy Frog ringtone craze.
But even if there is some truth to the copycat allegations, it’s an approach to business which has proven very, very profitable for the Samwers.
Alando, their first business in 1999, was an auction site which sold to Ebay for $50m within four months of its founding. In the mid-2000s, they backed MyVideo, a German site similar to YouTube, and StudiVZ, a German Facebook copycat sold for $100m.
In the last few months, they launched Wimdu, a private rentals marketplace akin to Airbnb, the US site that is attracting a $1bn valuation.
But their European Founders Fund has also made canny investments in the American “originals”, including Facebook and Linkedin.
Groupon faces an ongoing attack of the clones. Everyone from Facebook, Amazon and Google to Time Out magazine and a thousand tiny start-ups have seen its 1,357 per cent revenue growth (year on year for the first quarter) and tried to take a bit of it. Groupon says many have thrived by picking up the deals from merchants it has turned down. In such a competitive environment, having a little of the Samwers’ expertise in-house may be no bad thing.
Oliver and Marc Samwer founded CityDeal in Berlin in late 2009, a year after Groupon, sending out its first discount e-mail in January last year.
By May 2010, CityDeal had already attracted 1.9m subscribers in 80 local markets. Groupon, which had recently been valued at $1.3bn, swooped, buying the six-month-old company for a rumoured $100m. It was Groupon’s first move outside the US.
Groupon’s S-1 IPO filing reveals that CityDeal was bought largely in Groupon stock. It went on to make a further eight international acquisitions last year, for which it recorded a $204.2m charge, relating to the issue of shares to buy Citydeal and other related expenses.
The deal has worked out well, instantly giving Groupon a presence in major markets such as London, Berlin and Paris. Groupon now has operations in 38 countries, which – coupled with growth at home – added 79.7m million new subscribers in the year to March 31, 2011. International revenues went from zero to $265m during 2010, reaching $347m in the first quarter of 2011.
The Samwers are still very much involved in Groupon. Their Rocket Internet holding company owns 10 per cent of Groupon’s Chinese joint venture with Tencent, the internet giant, and Yunfeng, a local VC fund.
They also own around 10 per cent of Groupon voting shares and give over half their time to unpaid “consulting” services, for which Oliver Samwer received $0.1m in expenses and travel compensation last year, while Marc collected “less than $0.1m”
However, the Samwer brothers may already be looking to their next venture.
Groupon’s S-1 shows that its consulting agreements with them expire in October. In addition, “entities affiliated with CityDeal Management UG” have already redeemed shares worth $170m prior to the IPO.
With its Chinese venture already hitting stormy waters, Groupon warns of the Samwers’ looming departure: “We can make no assurances that the loss of their services will not disrupt our international operations or have an adverse effect on our ability to grow our international business.”
Tags: groupon, IPO, samwer brothers
Posted in Commerce, Digital media, Europe, Internet, Social, Tech | Permalink
June 3, 2011 9:20 am by Tim Bradshaw
Groupon’s swift international expansion has been “critical” to its vertiginous growth rate. In the first quarter of 2011, 54 per cent of its revenue came from outside the US.
Maintaining that growth will be a vital part of its pitch to potential investors ahead of its initial public offering.
A trio of German internet entrepreneurs have played a key role for Groupon overseas: the Samwer brothers.
Groupon’s acquisition of CityDeal, the Samwers’ daily deals service, last year marked the beginning of its push beyond America.
Oliver, Marc and Alexander Samwer are often accused of taking the best Silicon Valley ideas – from EBay to Airbnb – and launching them in Europe. And as the founders of Jamba, they must shoulder at least some of the blame for the Crazy Frog ringtone craze.
But even if there is some truth to the copycat allegations, it’s an approach to business which has proven very, very profitable for the Samwers.
Alando, their first business in 1999, was an auction site which sold to Ebay for $50m within four months of its founding. In the mid-2000s, they backed MyVideo, a German site similar to YouTube, and StudiVZ, a German Facebook copycat sold for $100m.
In the last few months, they launched Wimdu, a private rentals marketplace akin to Airbnb, the US site that is attracting a $1bn valuation.
But their European Founders Fund has also made canny investments in the American “originals”, including Facebook and Linkedin.
Groupon faces an ongoing attack of the clones. Everyone from Facebook, Amazon and Google to Time Out magazine and a thousand tiny start-ups have seen its 1,357 per cent revenue growth (year on year for the first quarter) and tried to take a bit of it. Groupon says many have thrived by picking up the deals from merchants it has turned down. In such a competitive environment, having a little of the Samwers’ expertise in-house may be no bad thing.
Oliver and Marc Samwer founded CityDeal in Berlin in late 2009, a year after Groupon, sending out its first discount e-mail in January last year.
By May 2010, CityDeal had already attracted 1.9m subscribers in 80 local markets. Groupon, which had recently been valued at $1.3bn, swooped, buying the six-month-old company for a rumoured $100m. It was Groupon’s first move outside the US.
Groupon’s S-1 IPO filing reveals that CityDeal was bought largely in Groupon stock. It went on to make a further eight international acquisitions last year, for which it recorded a $204.2m charge, relating to the issue of shares to buy Citydeal and other related expenses.
The deal has worked out well, instantly giving Groupon a presence in major markets such as London, Berlin and Paris. Groupon now has operations in 38 countries, which – coupled with growth at home – added 79.7m million new subscribers in the year to March 31, 2011. International revenues went from zero to $265m during 2010, reaching $347m in the first quarter of 2011.
The Samwers are still very much involved in Groupon. Their Rocket Internet holding company owns 10 per cent of Groupon’s Chinese joint venture with Tencent, the internet giant, and Yunfeng, a local VC fund.
They also own around 10 per cent of Groupon voting shares and give over half their time to unpaid “consulting” services, for which Oliver Samwer received $0.1m in expenses and travel compensation last year, while Marc collected “less than $0.1m”
However, the Samwer brothers may already be looking to their next venture.
Groupon’s S-1 shows that its consulting agreements with them expire in October. In addition, “entities affiliated with CityDeal Management UG” have already redeemed shares worth $170m prior to the IPO.
With its Chinese venture already hitting stormy waters, Groupon warns of the Samwers’ looming departure: “We can make no assurances that the loss of their services will not disrupt our international operations or have an adverse effect on our ability to grow our international business.”
Tags: groupon, IPO, samwer brothers
Posted in Commerce, Digital media, Europe, Internet, Social, Tech | Permalink
Online computing: The crowded cloud
Online computing: The crowded cloud
By Richard Waters, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and Joseph Menn
Published: June 3 2011 22:30 | Last updated: June 3 2011 22:30
You want to send the photograph you’ve just taken to a relative but find you don’t know how to get it off your phone. You have work to finish at home this weekend – but the file you need is inaccessible, stuck on the hard drive in the office. That track you want to play in the car? It’s on the iPod, which you’ve left at home.
Such frustrations are increasingly a feature of everyday life. As the devices on which to view, work on or listen to digital data proliferate, a chasm has opened up between their liberating possibilities and the practical realities. Organising a growing mountain of personal information and media has become, in many instances, a chore.
Much personal information already lives online, whether on social networks such as Facebook, or on e-mail services such as Gmail and Hotmail. But the full potential of an online existence – a life spent in “the cloud”, to use the technology industry’s latest terminology – remains unfulfilled.
It is into this half-formed world that Steve Jobs, the consumer tech industry’s most closely watched taste maker, is about to step. On Monday, the Apple chief executive will appear at the US company’s annual developer conference to show off the latest software advances. Among them: the iCloud.
The details, as with all Apple announcements, are subject to intense speculation in the tech and media industries. The iPod, iPhone and iPad have transformed the company’s fortunes in the past decade. Expectations are now high that Mr Jobs will apply his knack for creating highly intuitive consumer technology to the problems of managing digital information across multiple devices.
Even before Mr Jobs takes the stage in San Francisco, at least one important element is clear. All four major music labels have signed up to iCloud, to allow customers of Apple’s iTunes store to listen to digital music they already own directly over the internet rather than downloading it to each of their devices separately.
The iCloud brand, however, has already stirred up bigger expectations than this. Many in the industry hope Mr Jobs will confer Apple’s seal of approval on an approach to online computing that other tech companies have pushed far more aggressively, though with mixed success.
“Apple adopting the word ‘cloud’ as central to what they are doing is very helpful to us,” says Steve Perlman, a former Apple executive and now head of an online gaming company.
The move will also sharpen growing competition between a handful of internet companies racing to stake out the medium. Eric Schmidt, Google chairman, said this week that a “Gang of Four” was setting the pace, with Apple, Amazon and Facebook joining the search company in redefining how consumers use digital technology.
Yet despite Mr Jobs’ outsized influence in consumer technology, he is anything but a leader when it comes to the cloud. Services such as Spotify in Europe and Pandora in the US have set the pace by enabling listeners to stream music, listening over the internet without downloading.
Apple has also fallen behind in bringing video to the web. US-based services such as Netflix and Hulu have proved more successful in getting movies and television shows to a large online audience.
In other services, too, Apple is lagging behind. From Facebook’s dominance of social networking to Google’s online document, photo-sharing and Gmail services, consumers have learnt to entrust large amounts of personal data to other online companies.
According to advocates, the next phase of the consumer cloud has an overpowering appeal: the convenience that comes from making all types of digital content available on any device. This attraction has so far outweighed concerns about the potential risks to privacy and security arising from letting personal data flow far beyond the user’s own hard drive.
“No one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I wish I had more stuff in the cloud,’ ” says Brian Hall, general manager of Microsoft’s Windows Live and Internet Explorer businesses. “But if you tell them they can [gain access to] it on all their PCs and phones, then they get it.”
The concept may be simple but it is proving hard to make user-friendly. The crucial thing, says Mr Hall, is to make it easy to “synch” or move data from personal devices into the cloud; connect it with other services a consumer uses; and to make it all accessible from any device. “No one has done that well yet,” says Mr Hall.
Apple has struggled to find a big market for MobileMe, its attempt at synching data between devices. But there is hope in tech circles that Mr Jobs, who has succeeded before in making consumer tech intuitive and easy to use, will again show the way.
The impact is likely to be seen first in media, where content owners feel iTunes accounts that number in excess of 200m give Apple more influence over digital consumers than any rival.
The media industry is poised between hope and anxiety about the cloud, which could herald the latest sweeping change to their customers’ behaviour. On the one hand, executives see it as one of the first products of the digital age with the power to enhance their revenues rather than disrupt them.
“There are only so many movies you can store on your laptop,” said Bob Iger, Disney’s chief executive, this week. “If we give people the ability to buy a lot more because they can store a lot more ... I think that’s fantastic.”
Sir Howard Stringer, his counterpart at Japanese consumer electronics group Sony, displayed similar optimism last month, telling reporters: “All the big American companies, whether it be Amazon or Apple or Microsoft, recognise that that’s the delivery system that the customer wants.”
More media content companies see the cloud as an opportunity rather than a threat, says Chris Vollmer of the management consultancy Booz & Company. The large cheques Netflix has written for content, the prospect of new distribution markets, and signs cloud services limit piracy have all raised the industry’s hopes, he says.
. . .
The risks of the cloud cast a shadow on industry optimism, however. Sony and users of the network attached to its PlayStation console discovered the threats to security in April, when a hacking attack forced the company to suspend the service.
Furthermore, the full impact of this approach to computing on how consumers will gain access to media, and crucially how they will want to pay – if at all – is as yet only fuzzily understood. One risk, some in the industry say, is that it will accelerate the trend for consumers to rent rather than buy media and entertainment products and services. This has hurt sellers of CDs, DVDs and other physical media. Another big question facing media companies is the influence of a handful of online platform companies over their ability to reach – and charge – their customers.
For now, the scramble by these platforms for content has handed power to the media companies, though. The land grab under way in cloud computing “bodes well” for content owners’ pricing power, says Anthony DiClemente, an analyst at Barclays Capital.
One indication is the music industry’s warm reaction to Apple’s pending cloud music service, which has already prompted Amazon and Google to rush out similar services of their own, though they have yet to gain approval from the music industry. Labels and publishers hope to use Apple’s terms, which will give them 70 per cent of iCloud’s music revenues, as a template in negotiations with Amazon and Google.
Shahid Khan of MediaMorph, an industry consultancy, predicts content owners will preserve the upper hand in the cloud, and that platform owners face the bigger problem in making money. Google’s record of alienating content owners would harm its prospects, while the sums Amazon and Netflix must pay for content would make their ambitions “challenging”, he said. Only Apple, with its powerful ecosystem of iPhones, iPads and other devices, was likely to retain its bargaining power.
“Near term, especially in music, Apple sits in a Walmart-like position in terms of its digital retail market leadership,” says Mr Vollmer.
Yet even if this proves correct, Apple still faces a profound challenge to its way of doing business: the desire of consumers to access their media and personal data on any device – whether or not it bears an Apple logo.
And media companies show little willingness to let technology companies use their products to lock consumers into their services. Interoperability between online services is important, said Disney’s Mr Iger, so that consumers will be able to move their libraries from one cloud to another without difficulty.
“If someone wanted to corner a market, and a connected platform, in the long term I think it would be impractical,” says Mr Perlman, whose OnLive games service is one of many upstarts that are gambling on being able to get unrestricted access to consumers on all manner of devices.
As in other areas of consumer technology, however, it would not do to underestimate Apple.
Additional reporting by David Gelles
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
By Richard Waters, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and Joseph Menn
Published: June 3 2011 22:30 | Last updated: June 3 2011 22:30
You want to send the photograph you’ve just taken to a relative but find you don’t know how to get it off your phone. You have work to finish at home this weekend – but the file you need is inaccessible, stuck on the hard drive in the office. That track you want to play in the car? It’s on the iPod, which you’ve left at home.
Such frustrations are increasingly a feature of everyday life. As the devices on which to view, work on or listen to digital data proliferate, a chasm has opened up between their liberating possibilities and the practical realities. Organising a growing mountain of personal information and media has become, in many instances, a chore.
Much personal information already lives online, whether on social networks such as Facebook, or on e-mail services such as Gmail and Hotmail. But the full potential of an online existence – a life spent in “the cloud”, to use the technology industry’s latest terminology – remains unfulfilled.
It is into this half-formed world that Steve Jobs, the consumer tech industry’s most closely watched taste maker, is about to step. On Monday, the Apple chief executive will appear at the US company’s annual developer conference to show off the latest software advances. Among them: the iCloud.
The details, as with all Apple announcements, are subject to intense speculation in the tech and media industries. The iPod, iPhone and iPad have transformed the company’s fortunes in the past decade. Expectations are now high that Mr Jobs will apply his knack for creating highly intuitive consumer technology to the problems of managing digital information across multiple devices.
Even before Mr Jobs takes the stage in San Francisco, at least one important element is clear. All four major music labels have signed up to iCloud, to allow customers of Apple’s iTunes store to listen to digital music they already own directly over the internet rather than downloading it to each of their devices separately.
The iCloud brand, however, has already stirred up bigger expectations than this. Many in the industry hope Mr Jobs will confer Apple’s seal of approval on an approach to online computing that other tech companies have pushed far more aggressively, though with mixed success.
“Apple adopting the word ‘cloud’ as central to what they are doing is very helpful to us,” says Steve Perlman, a former Apple executive and now head of an online gaming company.
The move will also sharpen growing competition between a handful of internet companies racing to stake out the medium. Eric Schmidt, Google chairman, said this week that a “Gang of Four” was setting the pace, with Apple, Amazon and Facebook joining the search company in redefining how consumers use digital technology.
Yet despite Mr Jobs’ outsized influence in consumer technology, he is anything but a leader when it comes to the cloud. Services such as Spotify in Europe and Pandora in the US have set the pace by enabling listeners to stream music, listening over the internet without downloading.
Apple has also fallen behind in bringing video to the web. US-based services such as Netflix and Hulu have proved more successful in getting movies and television shows to a large online audience.
In other services, too, Apple is lagging behind. From Facebook’s dominance of social networking to Google’s online document, photo-sharing and Gmail services, consumers have learnt to entrust large amounts of personal data to other online companies.
According to advocates, the next phase of the consumer cloud has an overpowering appeal: the convenience that comes from making all types of digital content available on any device. This attraction has so far outweighed concerns about the potential risks to privacy and security arising from letting personal data flow far beyond the user’s own hard drive.
“No one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I wish I had more stuff in the cloud,’ ” says Brian Hall, general manager of Microsoft’s Windows Live and Internet Explorer businesses. “But if you tell them they can [gain access to] it on all their PCs and phones, then they get it.”
The concept may be simple but it is proving hard to make user-friendly. The crucial thing, says Mr Hall, is to make it easy to “synch” or move data from personal devices into the cloud; connect it with other services a consumer uses; and to make it all accessible from any device. “No one has done that well yet,” says Mr Hall.
Apple has struggled to find a big market for MobileMe, its attempt at synching data between devices. But there is hope in tech circles that Mr Jobs, who has succeeded before in making consumer tech intuitive and easy to use, will again show the way.
The impact is likely to be seen first in media, where content owners feel iTunes accounts that number in excess of 200m give Apple more influence over digital consumers than any rival.
The media industry is poised between hope and anxiety about the cloud, which could herald the latest sweeping change to their customers’ behaviour. On the one hand, executives see it as one of the first products of the digital age with the power to enhance their revenues rather than disrupt them.
“There are only so many movies you can store on your laptop,” said Bob Iger, Disney’s chief executive, this week. “If we give people the ability to buy a lot more because they can store a lot more ... I think that’s fantastic.”
Sir Howard Stringer, his counterpart at Japanese consumer electronics group Sony, displayed similar optimism last month, telling reporters: “All the big American companies, whether it be Amazon or Apple or Microsoft, recognise that that’s the delivery system that the customer wants.”
More media content companies see the cloud as an opportunity rather than a threat, says Chris Vollmer of the management consultancy Booz & Company. The large cheques Netflix has written for content, the prospect of new distribution markets, and signs cloud services limit piracy have all raised the industry’s hopes, he says.
. . .
The risks of the cloud cast a shadow on industry optimism, however. Sony and users of the network attached to its PlayStation console discovered the threats to security in April, when a hacking attack forced the company to suspend the service.
Furthermore, the full impact of this approach to computing on how consumers will gain access to media, and crucially how they will want to pay – if at all – is as yet only fuzzily understood. One risk, some in the industry say, is that it will accelerate the trend for consumers to rent rather than buy media and entertainment products and services. This has hurt sellers of CDs, DVDs and other physical media. Another big question facing media companies is the influence of a handful of online platform companies over their ability to reach – and charge – their customers.
For now, the scramble by these platforms for content has handed power to the media companies, though. The land grab under way in cloud computing “bodes well” for content owners’ pricing power, says Anthony DiClemente, an analyst at Barclays Capital.
One indication is the music industry’s warm reaction to Apple’s pending cloud music service, which has already prompted Amazon and Google to rush out similar services of their own, though they have yet to gain approval from the music industry. Labels and publishers hope to use Apple’s terms, which will give them 70 per cent of iCloud’s music revenues, as a template in negotiations with Amazon and Google.
Shahid Khan of MediaMorph, an industry consultancy, predicts content owners will preserve the upper hand in the cloud, and that platform owners face the bigger problem in making money. Google’s record of alienating content owners would harm its prospects, while the sums Amazon and Netflix must pay for content would make their ambitions “challenging”, he said. Only Apple, with its powerful ecosystem of iPhones, iPads and other devices, was likely to retain its bargaining power.
“Near term, especially in music, Apple sits in a Walmart-like position in terms of its digital retail market leadership,” says Mr Vollmer.
Yet even if this proves correct, Apple still faces a profound challenge to its way of doing business: the desire of consumers to access their media and personal data on any device – whether or not it bears an Apple logo.
And media companies show little willingness to let technology companies use their products to lock consumers into their services. Interoperability between online services is important, said Disney’s Mr Iger, so that consumers will be able to move their libraries from one cloud to another without difficulty.
“If someone wanted to corner a market, and a connected platform, in the long term I think it would be impractical,” says Mr Perlman, whose OnLive games service is one of many upstarts that are gambling on being able to get unrestricted access to consumers on all manner of devices.
As in other areas of consumer technology, however, it would not do to underestimate Apple.
Additional reporting by David Gelles
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Windesheim Flevoland kiest voor Winvision en Newsgator
Gepubliceerd: 31-05-2011
Persbericht van: Winvision
Nieuwegein, 31 mei 2011 - Windesheim Flevoland, de nieuwe hogeschool in Almere en Lelystad, start het nieuwe studiejaar in september 2011 als eerste onderwijsinstelling in Nederland met Newsgator, een social media-toepassing binnen de SharePoint2010-omgeving van de instelling. Winvision, ICT-dienstverlener gespecialiseerd in Microsoft Technologie, is bij Windesheim Flevoland samen met de hogeschool verantwoordelijk voor de implementatie van dit interactieve leer- en samenwerkplatform.
Persbericht van: Winvision
Nieuwegein, 31 mei 2011 - Windesheim Flevoland, de nieuwe hogeschool in Almere en Lelystad, start het nieuwe studiejaar in september 2011 als eerste onderwijsinstelling in Nederland met Newsgator, een social media-toepassing binnen de SharePoint2010-omgeving van de instelling. Winvision, ICT-dienstverlener gespecialiseerd in Microsoft Technologie, is bij Windesheim Flevoland samen met de hogeschool verantwoordelijk voor de implementatie van dit interactieve leer- en samenwerkplatform.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
The “Post-PC” Era: It’s Real, But It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does
Computing is changing. The news last week showed that loud and clear, as Microsoft bet big on Skype’s voice and video technology and Google announced partnerships with Samsung and Acer to build laptops running its Chrome operating system. These developments point to a future where computing form factors, interfaces, and operating systems diversify beyond even what we have today. The “Post-PC Era” is underway, but its definition is not self-evident.
First, some history. “Post-PC” has been a buzzword in the past few months, since Steve Jobs announced at the iPad 2 launch event that Apple now gets a majority of its revenue from “post-PC devices,” including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad—a major milestone for a company that was originally named “Apple Computer.” The phrase was also part of the public discourse in 2004, when IBM sold its PC unit and former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz told The New York Timesthat “We've been in the post-PC era for four years now,” noting that wireless mobile handset sales had already far surpassed PC sales around the world. In fact, the “post-PC” concept is more than a decade old: In 1999, MIT research scientist David Clark gave a talk called “The Post PC Internet,” describing a future point at which objects like wristwatches and eyeglasses would be Internet-connected computing devices.
So what does “post-PC” mean, anyway? It doesn’t mean that the PC is dead: Forrester Research forecasts that even in the US, a mature market, consumer laptop sales will grow at a CAGR of 8% between 2010 and 2015, and desktop sales will decline only slightly. Even in 2015, when 82 million US consumers will own a tablet, more US consumers will own laptops (140 million). But, as Forrester explains in a new report out today, it does mean that computing is shifting from:
•Stationary to ubiquitous. Contrast the experience of computing on a desktop PC, in one place with a clear start and finish time, to that of the anytime/anywhere computing done on a smartphone or tablet. Ubiquitous computing is also more context-aware computing, aided by sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes, and geolocators in smartphones and tablets.
•Formal to casual. In contrast to PC interactions with a formal start and finish time marked by booting up and shutting down, instant-on/always-on computing on smartphones and tablets fills in-between moments like standing in line or watching TV.
•Arms-length to intimate. With desktops, computing is literally an arms-length activity. With portable form factors like laptops, netbooks, and tablets, computers become something consumers keep close to their body, and they use them in intimate places: The No. 1 place all three devices are used in the home is the living room, followed by an adult’s bedroom.
•Abstracted to physical. The mouse/keyboard paradigm relies on an abstracted interaction with content. Touchscreens like those on smartphones and tablets enable direct physical manipulation of content in two-dimensional space. Cameras with facial recognition, voice sensors, and motion sensors like those on the Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360 permit an even wider range of physical interaction with devices, where a user’s body and voice become the controller.
There are a host of technological innovations that make the post-PC era possible. Form-factor diversity enables computing in more contexts. Flash memory eliminates computing downtime. Wi-Fi and mobile broadband networks permit continuous connectivity. And cloud services support computing across multiple devices.
These technological innovations fuel social change, and vice versa. As people conduct more of their lives online—shopping, banking, entertainment—we require more computing in more places. The rise of social networking requires real-time connectivity to manage our relationships. And eroding work-life boundaries means that consumers demand devices that can do double-duty in their work and personal lives.
So where is this all going? In the post-PC era, the “PC” is alive and well, but it morphs to support computing experiences that are increasingly ubiquitous, casual, intimate, and physical. The new MacBook Air and Samsung Series 9 demonstrate PCs going in this direction. In the post-PC era, PCs are joined by smartphones and tablets, as well as future devices like wearables and surfaces. Imagine computing via a heads-up display embedded in your eyeglasses or contact lenses or learning about breaking news updates from a change in your electronics-embedded clothing. The products that will win have yet to be determined, but the underlying technological and social changes that will drive the post-PC forward are already here.
Recommend this post
Add a new comment
Related Forrester Research
What The Post-PC Era Really Means
Sarah Rotman Epps' Recent Tweets
An unimpressive launch for much-hyped Next Issue Media: apps on a device few people own, hidden in the VCAST store http://t.co/sn2bBVX — 15 hours 58 min agofrom Tweet Button@kyledaustin they'd be ill advised to do so :)
— 8:45 PM May 17from Twitter for iPadMy take on HP's Earnings And The Post-PC Era | Forrester Blogs http://bit.ly/mLMcvo — 2:01 PM May 17from TweetMemeSee all
First, some history. “Post-PC” has been a buzzword in the past few months, since Steve Jobs announced at the iPad 2 launch event that Apple now gets a majority of its revenue from “post-PC devices,” including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad—a major milestone for a company that was originally named “Apple Computer.” The phrase was also part of the public discourse in 2004, when IBM sold its PC unit and former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz told The New York Timesthat “We've been in the post-PC era for four years now,” noting that wireless mobile handset sales had already far surpassed PC sales around the world. In fact, the “post-PC” concept is more than a decade old: In 1999, MIT research scientist David Clark gave a talk called “The Post PC Internet,” describing a future point at which objects like wristwatches and eyeglasses would be Internet-connected computing devices.
So what does “post-PC” mean, anyway? It doesn’t mean that the PC is dead: Forrester Research forecasts that even in the US, a mature market, consumer laptop sales will grow at a CAGR of 8% between 2010 and 2015, and desktop sales will decline only slightly. Even in 2015, when 82 million US consumers will own a tablet, more US consumers will own laptops (140 million). But, as Forrester explains in a new report out today, it does mean that computing is shifting from:
•Stationary to ubiquitous. Contrast the experience of computing on a desktop PC, in one place with a clear start and finish time, to that of the anytime/anywhere computing done on a smartphone or tablet. Ubiquitous computing is also more context-aware computing, aided by sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes, and geolocators in smartphones and tablets.
•Formal to casual. In contrast to PC interactions with a formal start and finish time marked by booting up and shutting down, instant-on/always-on computing on smartphones and tablets fills in-between moments like standing in line or watching TV.
•Arms-length to intimate. With desktops, computing is literally an arms-length activity. With portable form factors like laptops, netbooks, and tablets, computers become something consumers keep close to their body, and they use them in intimate places: The No. 1 place all three devices are used in the home is the living room, followed by an adult’s bedroom.
•Abstracted to physical. The mouse/keyboard paradigm relies on an abstracted interaction with content. Touchscreens like those on smartphones and tablets enable direct physical manipulation of content in two-dimensional space. Cameras with facial recognition, voice sensors, and motion sensors like those on the Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360 permit an even wider range of physical interaction with devices, where a user’s body and voice become the controller.
There are a host of technological innovations that make the post-PC era possible. Form-factor diversity enables computing in more contexts. Flash memory eliminates computing downtime. Wi-Fi and mobile broadband networks permit continuous connectivity. And cloud services support computing across multiple devices.
These technological innovations fuel social change, and vice versa. As people conduct more of their lives online—shopping, banking, entertainment—we require more computing in more places. The rise of social networking requires real-time connectivity to manage our relationships. And eroding work-life boundaries means that consumers demand devices that can do double-duty in their work and personal lives.
So where is this all going? In the post-PC era, the “PC” is alive and well, but it morphs to support computing experiences that are increasingly ubiquitous, casual, intimate, and physical. The new MacBook Air and Samsung Series 9 demonstrate PCs going in this direction. In the post-PC era, PCs are joined by smartphones and tablets, as well as future devices like wearables and surfaces. Imagine computing via a heads-up display embedded in your eyeglasses or contact lenses or learning about breaking news updates from a change in your electronics-embedded clothing. The products that will win have yet to be determined, but the underlying technological and social changes that will drive the post-PC forward are already here.
Recommend this post
Add a new comment
Related Forrester Research
What The Post-PC Era Really Means
Sarah Rotman Epps' Recent Tweets
An unimpressive launch for much-hyped Next Issue Media: apps on a device few people own, hidden in the VCAST store http://t.co/sn2bBVX — 15 hours 58 min agofrom Tweet Button@kyledaustin they'd be ill advised to do so :)
— 8:45 PM May 17from Twitter for iPadMy take on HP's Earnings And The Post-PC Era | Forrester Blogs http://bit.ly/mLMcvo — 2:01 PM May 17from TweetMemeSee all
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
10 More Things You Never Knew You Could Do On LinkedIn
There's a lot of buzz surrounding LinkedIn's IPO this week.
And with good reason. LinkedIn isn't just incredibly valuable on paper. There are also a ton of great features that users can take advantage of.
We put together 10 more of our favorite tips and tricks for LinkedIn. Give them a shot.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/more-ways-to-make-the-most-out-of-linkedin-2011-5##ixzz1MmrNUDsY
And with good reason. LinkedIn isn't just incredibly valuable on paper. There are also a ton of great features that users can take advantage of.
We put together 10 more of our favorite tips and tricks for LinkedIn. Give them a shot.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/more-ways-to-make-the-most-out-of-linkedin-2011-5##ixzz1MmrNUDsY
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
In the clouds with Office 365
Posted by John Stokdyk on Mon, 16/05/2011 - 12:27
Microsoft Office 365 is an evolution of Office 2010 Web Apps that makes four key Office products available via the net: Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote, plus access to the Microsoft SharePoint web portal system and Exchange.
Where Office Live was more of a personal Cloud that gave you access to the Office tools, Office 365 is a corporate environment that, within the beta system at least, will let you cater for and collaborate with up to 25 colleagues.
The Exchange option is particularly interesting if you’re a small company using a standard POP internet service. Exchange gives you the ability to administer and archive all company email in one place and to synchronise diaries and tasks between team members. This is a boon if you haven’t got it, but will require much more careful management if you’ve already made the move to Microsoft Exchange, but want to link into Office 365 too. For example, will you have to decide which acts as the “master” system, and which the slave that synchs into it?
With so many facilities on offer, Office 365 looks like it might be capable of supporting an entire company’s administrative technology needs. However, our IT support crew might get a little touchy about some of the things it lets you do. For their sake, I won’t try to take over administration of our email system. Instead this introductory article will explore what exactly is available and how it works during the initial encounters to give members an idea about whether it’s worth exploring for their own uses.
More coverage on detailed projects and processes you can achieve with Office 365 will follow in the coming months.
As I mentioned to FirstTab, we’ve been keeping a close eye on Windows Live developments in recent years. But I came up against a technical roadblock in Windows Live when I tried to share my hefty Fantasy Football player analyser with colleagues; it was too big to display in a browser Window.
The big test for Office 365 would be to see whether it could cope with this real-world scenario, and if it could support cross-platform access from my partner’s Mac, or from BlackBerry and iPhone devices. It was brilliant to be able to log in from a Mac (using Apple's Safari browser, even) and create a Word document. Unfortunately, when it came to the 33Mb football KPI dashboard, the Office 365 Web App was just as uncomfortable handling it as Office Live.
My first encounter was fraught with a few other frustrations. After going through all the hoops to get a WindowsLive ID and access Windows Office Live in the past, the universal passport doesn’t work with the Office 365, so there’s a new ID and password to remember, plus a new domain the system creates for you @onmicrosoft.com.
What it offers
Home: a base for uploading and sharing documents with up to 25 colleagues; this page is also where they will need to connect their desktop apps to Office 365.
Access to Office Web Apps, including Outlook to manage your email and calendar.
Team Site: a website hosted by Microsoft SharePoint, but incorporating similar design and management tools as the Windows Live web-hosting service.
Lync Online, a unified communciations environment that lets you send and receive instant messages (IM), run peer-to-peer audio and video sessions, and display presence information about team members.
Admin section: for adding and managing users, and accessing Microsoft support resources when you need them.
The Web Apps have fewer menu tabs and options tha the usual desktop Office programs. Excel just has File, Home, and Insert tabs, so there is no access to pivot table tools or macros. If you want full access, there is an "Open in Office" option for each application.
To get full integration with your desktop apps, you need to download and run an Office 365 set up program. If you already have the Office suite installed, this step adds a minor element of duplication but once you have configured the SharePoint component to work with Office 365 it will let you access and work on the documents in your shared web portal.
However, after agreeing to the licence terms, the first stage of the installation started to upgrade my desktop version of Office. Remembering Simon Hurst’s experiences with the beta version of Office 2007, which wiped out his existing Outlook in-tray when he installed it, I decided this was as far as I could take my test drive without consulting the IT support team and the Office 365 user forums.
If you do want your on-premise and on-line Exchange email systems to co-exist, Office 365 has a Custom Plan wizard to help create a custom pilot scenario and deployment plan, so you can test your deployment strategy with a small number of users before rolling it out fully.
My intitial experiences confirmed something that was evident from the outset: if you’re setting out to build an IT infrastructure for your organisation from scratch, Office 365 has a lot going for it. While it will also provide the means to integrate your existing desktop Office programs, documents and email into a Cloud environment, you’ll need to do some careful research and planning to manage the process smoothly.
The Cloud movement has revved up significantly in the past few months, particularly with Google threatening to unleash its operating system-free Chromebook machine, which dispenses with all the administrative overheads. Microsoft has got a stranglehold on desktop users, and Office 365 is designed to keep things that way. If you’re comfortable with the Microsoft conventions, processes and interfaces, it’s a very generously featured suite that should make you more productive on the move, but it remains a monolith that demands your undivided attention.
The nature of fast moving Cloud developments is that there’s always an even better, cleverer and faster solution just around the corner. To put it in the terms we used to use for business and practice applications, Office 365 is very much an “suite” that promises to take care of everything for you. But it’s going against the emerging trend for users to opt for “best of breed” Cloud applications.
Find out more about Office 365 yourself - sign up for the beta test version here.
Microsoft Office 365 is an evolution of Office 2010 Web Apps that makes four key Office products available via the net: Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote, plus access to the Microsoft SharePoint web portal system and Exchange.
Where Office Live was more of a personal Cloud that gave you access to the Office tools, Office 365 is a corporate environment that, within the beta system at least, will let you cater for and collaborate with up to 25 colleagues.
The Exchange option is particularly interesting if you’re a small company using a standard POP internet service. Exchange gives you the ability to administer and archive all company email in one place and to synchronise diaries and tasks between team members. This is a boon if you haven’t got it, but will require much more careful management if you’ve already made the move to Microsoft Exchange, but want to link into Office 365 too. For example, will you have to decide which acts as the “master” system, and which the slave that synchs into it?
With so many facilities on offer, Office 365 looks like it might be capable of supporting an entire company’s administrative technology needs. However, our IT support crew might get a little touchy about some of the things it lets you do. For their sake, I won’t try to take over administration of our email system. Instead this introductory article will explore what exactly is available and how it works during the initial encounters to give members an idea about whether it’s worth exploring for their own uses.
More coverage on detailed projects and processes you can achieve with Office 365 will follow in the coming months.
As I mentioned to FirstTab, we’ve been keeping a close eye on Windows Live developments in recent years. But I came up against a technical roadblock in Windows Live when I tried to share my hefty Fantasy Football player analyser with colleagues; it was too big to display in a browser Window.
The big test for Office 365 would be to see whether it could cope with this real-world scenario, and if it could support cross-platform access from my partner’s Mac, or from BlackBerry and iPhone devices. It was brilliant to be able to log in from a Mac (using Apple's Safari browser, even) and create a Word document. Unfortunately, when it came to the 33Mb football KPI dashboard, the Office 365 Web App was just as uncomfortable handling it as Office Live.
My first encounter was fraught with a few other frustrations. After going through all the hoops to get a WindowsLive ID and access Windows Office Live in the past, the universal passport doesn’t work with the Office 365, so there’s a new ID and password to remember, plus a new domain the system creates for you @onmicrosoft.com.
What it offers
Home: a base for uploading and sharing documents with up to 25 colleagues; this page is also where they will need to connect their desktop apps to Office 365.
Access to Office Web Apps, including Outlook to manage your email and calendar.
Team Site: a website hosted by Microsoft SharePoint, but incorporating similar design and management tools as the Windows Live web-hosting service.
Lync Online, a unified communciations environment that lets you send and receive instant messages (IM), run peer-to-peer audio and video sessions, and display presence information about team members.
Admin section: for adding and managing users, and accessing Microsoft support resources when you need them.
The Web Apps have fewer menu tabs and options tha the usual desktop Office programs. Excel just has File, Home, and Insert tabs, so there is no access to pivot table tools or macros. If you want full access, there is an "Open in Office" option for each application.
To get full integration with your desktop apps, you need to download and run an Office 365 set up program. If you already have the Office suite installed, this step adds a minor element of duplication but once you have configured the SharePoint component to work with Office 365 it will let you access and work on the documents in your shared web portal.
However, after agreeing to the licence terms, the first stage of the installation started to upgrade my desktop version of Office. Remembering Simon Hurst’s experiences with the beta version of Office 2007, which wiped out his existing Outlook in-tray when he installed it, I decided this was as far as I could take my test drive without consulting the IT support team and the Office 365 user forums.
If you do want your on-premise and on-line Exchange email systems to co-exist, Office 365 has a Custom Plan wizard to help create a custom pilot scenario and deployment plan, so you can test your deployment strategy with a small number of users before rolling it out fully.
My intitial experiences confirmed something that was evident from the outset: if you’re setting out to build an IT infrastructure for your organisation from scratch, Office 365 has a lot going for it. While it will also provide the means to integrate your existing desktop Office programs, documents and email into a Cloud environment, you’ll need to do some careful research and planning to manage the process smoothly.
The Cloud movement has revved up significantly in the past few months, particularly with Google threatening to unleash its operating system-free Chromebook machine, which dispenses with all the administrative overheads. Microsoft has got a stranglehold on desktop users, and Office 365 is designed to keep things that way. If you’re comfortable with the Microsoft conventions, processes and interfaces, it’s a very generously featured suite that should make you more productive on the move, but it remains a monolith that demands your undivided attention.
The nature of fast moving Cloud developments is that there’s always an even better, cleverer and faster solution just around the corner. To put it in the terms we used to use for business and practice applications, Office 365 is very much an “suite” that promises to take care of everything for you. But it’s going against the emerging trend for users to opt for “best of breed” Cloud applications.
Find out more about Office 365 yourself - sign up for the beta test version here.
Social By Design
Social By Design
By David A. Kelly
Businesses make social computing work with Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g.
For world-class companies, social networking and enterprise social computing aren’t a diversion. They are now part of the fabric of enterprise computing enabling the new social enterprise.
Take the case of London, England-based infrastructure group Balfour Beatty, with 50,000 employees in more than 1,200 different locations across 80 countries. For Balfour Beatty, social computing and Enterprise 2.0 technologies aren’t about the latest tabloid gossip; they’re about connecting employees, partners, customers, and projects more effectively, efficiently, and productively.
“Social computing services with Oracle WebCenter are all about being able to service the client more effectively by better coordinating our divisions and our people,” says Lee Wheelhouse, knowledge sharing and collaboration solution manager at Balfour Beatty. “Oracle WebCenter isn’t just a technology project for us. It’s a key strategic initiative for our company.”
Not surprisingly, Balfour Beatty isn’t the only company taking a second look at how to integrate social media into the enterprise.
“Enterprise 2.0 is really focused on the idea of taking all the tools that were developed for consumers, such as blogs, wikis, and so on, and using them in an enterprise environment,” says Brad Shimmin, principal analyst for collaboration platforms at Current Analysis, an analyst firm based in Sterling, Virginia.
“It’s not just about repeating the social networking functionality that exists in the consumer space with sites like Twitter and Facebook,” says Shimmin. “It’s about creating similar opportunities for collaboration and engagement within the context of an enterprise application. The new social computing capabilities of Oracle WebCenter Suite allow the platform to behave less like a one-way street where you’re an ERP [enterprise resource planning] user merely gathering data, and more like a conversation with your peers or other people in the context of a business process.”
In effect, the social enterprise is about engaging customers, users, and partners in two-way communications.
“There’s really a shift from the traditional portal market, where users were accessing multiple applications through multiple interfaces, to one that’s more of a rich Web experience—providing a modern, common user interface with Web 2.0 and social capabilities and richer integrations to back-office applications—that’s all seamless and transparent inside the application,” says Andy MacMillan, vice president of product management for Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle. “That’s exactly what the latest release of Oracle WebCenter Suite provides.”
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g Updates
The latest release of Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g provides a range of new capabilities focused on enabling organizations to leverage and seamlessly integrate social computing and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities into a converged platform for internal and external applications and services. A few of the key enhancements to Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g are
Enterprise mashups. Enhanced user interface options allow developers to use development tools such as Oracle JDeveloper to create applications and data controls and allow business users to employ Oracle Composer to assemble and leverage them.
Content management. The new release provides new levels of security for content as well as workflow capabilities and direct access to Oracle Universal Content Management.
Personalization. Users can now leverage the WebCenter Personalization Server feature in Oracle WebCenter Suite to control dynamic delivery of content, information, and experience through personalized views.
Search and discovery. Oracle WebCenter Suite now provides direct Oracle Secure Enterprise Search crawlers for all Oracle WebCenter Suite content.
Analytics and management. New Web analytics services and dashboards allow users fine-grained visibility into processes and data. Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g also now supports direct integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g.
Over the past few years, Shimmin has watched how these traditionally consumer-oriented technologies have affected portal and collaborative solutions such as Oracle WebCenter Suite.
An Integrated Approach to Enabling the Social Enterprise: Oracle WebCenter Suite
Oracle WebCenter Suite is the modern user experience platform for the enterprise and the Web, enabling organizations to evolve portals, composite applications, extranet sites, and more by delivering a dynamic, seamless user experience.
“Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a user experience that’s really the blending of traditional Web applications with social computing capabilities,” says MacMillan. “We have customers that want to engage their customers and partners by combining traditional application data with things like wikis, blogs, and activity streams. So now we provide those social components as part of Oracle WebCenter Suite.”
Oracle WebCenter Suite’s user interface is based on the common user experience architecture that’s shared across Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware products, and more. “If developers are using Oracle Application Development Framework, then they’re automatically using the common user experience architecture, which means that any components they’re developing can be brought natively into Oracle WebCenter Suite,” says MacMillan.
Shimmin considers Oracle WebCenter Suite as something like a Swiss Army knife—it has all different types of tools and technologies built in to handle all different types of social enterprise scenarios.
Snapshots
Balfour Beatty
Location: London, England
Revenue: £10 billion in 2010
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g, Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Application Development Framework, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle Identity Management
“Oracle WebCenter is the type of solution that, whatever needs you have, whether it’s internal or external facing, whether it’s fairly basic like content management or something that requires custom development, [Oracle] WebCenter has the required technology built into it,” says Shimmin. “Oracle WebCenter has always been good at enabling organizations to make portals and expose information in a secure and governable way. But over the past few versions, Oracle’s been able to take the best technologies from its Sun and BEA acquisitions and draw them together to make Oracle WebCenter more flexible and better suited for external- as well as internal-facing scenarios such as customer relationship management and call center applications.”
Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0 Solution
Balfour Beatty is putting Oracle WebCenter Suite’s combination of traditional IT capabilities and new Web-focused features to good use.
“One of the reasons why Oracle WebCenter and our Enterprise 2.0 strategy are so important to us is because of the size and scale of Balfour Beatty and the depth and breadth of our expertise,” says Wheelhouse. “Our customers have an expectation that we can share our in-depth knowledge seamlessly across our business and around the world. Oracle WebCenter is beginning to help us do that more effectively.”
From an IT perspective, Balfour Beatty is composed of federated and very autonomous business units around the world, each with its own IT capability for things such as infrastructure and desktop support. Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0, social media-enabled Oracle WebCenter Suite portal has been designed to securely connect its employees across geographic and operating company boundaries and will allow them to collaborate, search, and share best practices in a business-oriented environment. It’s a good example of how and why organizations are adding social media to their mix of enterprise solutions.
“The challenge for us was to provide a platform that can span all our business units,” says Wheelhouse. “We needed a scalable, user-friendly solution that could interface with local systems to share information, while enabling greater collaboration and information sharing across geographic and operational boundaries. That’s where Oracle WebCenter comes in. Oracle WebCenter will be our global, scalable Enterprise 2.0 solution.”
Enterprise Requirements
Integration with back-office solutions was critical for Balfour Beatty’s global portal. Back-office systems are great at handling and supporting clearly defined business processes like procurements and HR processes, but social applications are something more creative and somewhat less predictable.
“We see Oracle WebCenter eventually giving us the best of both worlds in that we can support core business processes and functionality from back-office systems, and at the same time we can implement collaboration and social media interaction,” says Wheelhouse. “As a company that’s founded on expertise, we need to enable our people to reach out to knowledge experts, and that’s a creative process that requires the right type of social networks. The power of Enterprise 2.0 is connecting people that wouldn’t normally find each other.”
A key reason Balfour Beatty chose Oracle WebCenter Suite as its Enterprise 2.0 solution was the product’s ability to integrate traditional applications and business processes with social media, social computing, and Web-oriented requirements.
“The vision for us is to be able to break out of traditional business processes and into a collaborative, social environment to solve problems, and then go back into the business process with the results,” says Wheelhouse. “But it needs to be done in a seamless way.”
Another important aspect to integrating social media capabilities is ensuring that they meet enterprise standards for security and compliance. “For our purposes, the social media content created in Oracle WebCenter could be just as important as the corporate records, so it is subject to the same security policies, retention policies, and management policies,” says Wheelhouse.
User experience and the user interface were also critical to Balfour Beatty. “We wanted to create something that didn’t involve lots of training, wasn’t complex, and was effective,” says Wheelhouse. “What’s good about Oracle WebCenter is its flexibility and its ability to let us create a compelling, intuitive user interface for our solution.”
Next Steps
LEARN more about Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g Webcast
Oracle Portal, User Experience, and Enterprise 2.0 Resource Library
But Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0 solution isn’t just about social connections and business processes. It’s also an effective way to reduce costs and increase productivity.
“Social media portals are a great way of communicating group and divisional initiatives and news, and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities are a great way of filtering all that information,” says Wheelhouse. “There are a lot of ways in which social media can make communications a lot more targeted and enable us to share technical expertise and innovation.”
The Dawn of the Social Enterprise
When it comes to portals and connecting with customers, the future doesn’t look like the past.
“It’s a very different landscape than it was just a couple years ago,” says Current Analysis’ Shimmin.
And although many things will change in the technology landscape over the next few years, one thing is certain: most companies will integrate social networking and social computing capabilities into their enterprise IT strategy.
“In the last two years, we’ve seen the reshaping of portals to be much more capable, much more social, and much more collaborative environments for serving enterprise IT,” says Shimmin. “They’re no longer simply a space where you have pull-down menus to access HR documents. They still do that, but now they also have integrated, collaborative, social networking functions that allow companies to develop stronger customer relationships, optimize employee interactions, and gain greater insight into market trends.”
Systems of Engagement
Organizations have had transactional systems of record for decades. From accounting to sales to human resources, enterprise applications that can keep detailed records of transactions have been refined and perfected.
But business—especially today’s business—isn’t just about individual purchases or transactions. It’s not just about what’s being sold to customers. Today’s business is about the people doing business, how they communicate, and what they need next to do their jobs.
That’s where enterprise social computing and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities come in, along with solutions like Oracle WebCenter Suite.
“It’s really about connecting the people aspect and the engagement aspect of what organizations are already doing in their transactional systems,” says Andy MacMillan, vice president of product management for Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle. “I think with enterprise social media, that there’s an opportunity to drive both business productivity and business innovation.”
In effect, organizations are moving beyond their traditional systems of record to systems of engagement. These systems not only keep track of what’s purchased and when but also where the customer came from and why, and what else—or who else—in the organization should be connected with him to derive the maximal value.
“There’s a convergence of transactional systems and systems of engagement that can help organizations have a complete view of the customer and their points of interaction with an organization,” says MacMillan.
“There’s a strong benefit to line-of-business and process owners engaging people beyond the process and beyond the individual application transactions,” says MacMillan. “And that’s what Oracle WebCenter Suite is really designed to do.”
David A. Kelly (davidakelly.com) is a business, technology, and travel writer who lives in West Newton, Massachusetts.
By David A. Kelly
Businesses make social computing work with Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g.
For world-class companies, social networking and enterprise social computing aren’t a diversion. They are now part of the fabric of enterprise computing enabling the new social enterprise.
Take the case of London, England-based infrastructure group Balfour Beatty, with 50,000 employees in more than 1,200 different locations across 80 countries. For Balfour Beatty, social computing and Enterprise 2.0 technologies aren’t about the latest tabloid gossip; they’re about connecting employees, partners, customers, and projects more effectively, efficiently, and productively.
“Social computing services with Oracle WebCenter are all about being able to service the client more effectively by better coordinating our divisions and our people,” says Lee Wheelhouse, knowledge sharing and collaboration solution manager at Balfour Beatty. “Oracle WebCenter isn’t just a technology project for us. It’s a key strategic initiative for our company.”
Not surprisingly, Balfour Beatty isn’t the only company taking a second look at how to integrate social media into the enterprise.
“Enterprise 2.0 is really focused on the idea of taking all the tools that were developed for consumers, such as blogs, wikis, and so on, and using them in an enterprise environment,” says Brad Shimmin, principal analyst for collaboration platforms at Current Analysis, an analyst firm based in Sterling, Virginia.
“It’s not just about repeating the social networking functionality that exists in the consumer space with sites like Twitter and Facebook,” says Shimmin. “It’s about creating similar opportunities for collaboration and engagement within the context of an enterprise application. The new social computing capabilities of Oracle WebCenter Suite allow the platform to behave less like a one-way street where you’re an ERP [enterprise resource planning] user merely gathering data, and more like a conversation with your peers or other people in the context of a business process.”
In effect, the social enterprise is about engaging customers, users, and partners in two-way communications.
“There’s really a shift from the traditional portal market, where users were accessing multiple applications through multiple interfaces, to one that’s more of a rich Web experience—providing a modern, common user interface with Web 2.0 and social capabilities and richer integrations to back-office applications—that’s all seamless and transparent inside the application,” says Andy MacMillan, vice president of product management for Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle. “That’s exactly what the latest release of Oracle WebCenter Suite provides.”
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g Updates
The latest release of Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g provides a range of new capabilities focused on enabling organizations to leverage and seamlessly integrate social computing and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities into a converged platform for internal and external applications and services. A few of the key enhancements to Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g are
Enterprise mashups. Enhanced user interface options allow developers to use development tools such as Oracle JDeveloper to create applications and data controls and allow business users to employ Oracle Composer to assemble and leverage them.
Content management. The new release provides new levels of security for content as well as workflow capabilities and direct access to Oracle Universal Content Management.
Personalization. Users can now leverage the WebCenter Personalization Server feature in Oracle WebCenter Suite to control dynamic delivery of content, information, and experience through personalized views.
Search and discovery. Oracle WebCenter Suite now provides direct Oracle Secure Enterprise Search crawlers for all Oracle WebCenter Suite content.
Analytics and management. New Web analytics services and dashboards allow users fine-grained visibility into processes and data. Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g also now supports direct integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g.
Over the past few years, Shimmin has watched how these traditionally consumer-oriented technologies have affected portal and collaborative solutions such as Oracle WebCenter Suite.
An Integrated Approach to Enabling the Social Enterprise: Oracle WebCenter Suite
Oracle WebCenter Suite is the modern user experience platform for the enterprise and the Web, enabling organizations to evolve portals, composite applications, extranet sites, and more by delivering a dynamic, seamless user experience.
“Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a user experience that’s really the blending of traditional Web applications with social computing capabilities,” says MacMillan. “We have customers that want to engage their customers and partners by combining traditional application data with things like wikis, blogs, and activity streams. So now we provide those social components as part of Oracle WebCenter Suite.”
Oracle WebCenter Suite’s user interface is based on the common user experience architecture that’s shared across Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware products, and more. “If developers are using Oracle Application Development Framework, then they’re automatically using the common user experience architecture, which means that any components they’re developing can be brought natively into Oracle WebCenter Suite,” says MacMillan.
Shimmin considers Oracle WebCenter Suite as something like a Swiss Army knife—it has all different types of tools and technologies built in to handle all different types of social enterprise scenarios.
Snapshots
Balfour Beatty
Location: London, England
Revenue: £10 billion in 2010
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g, Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Application Development Framework, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle Identity Management
“Oracle WebCenter is the type of solution that, whatever needs you have, whether it’s internal or external facing, whether it’s fairly basic like content management or something that requires custom development, [Oracle] WebCenter has the required technology built into it,” says Shimmin. “Oracle WebCenter has always been good at enabling organizations to make portals and expose information in a secure and governable way. But over the past few versions, Oracle’s been able to take the best technologies from its Sun and BEA acquisitions and draw them together to make Oracle WebCenter more flexible and better suited for external- as well as internal-facing scenarios such as customer relationship management and call center applications.”
Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0 Solution
Balfour Beatty is putting Oracle WebCenter Suite’s combination of traditional IT capabilities and new Web-focused features to good use.
“One of the reasons why Oracle WebCenter and our Enterprise 2.0 strategy are so important to us is because of the size and scale of Balfour Beatty and the depth and breadth of our expertise,” says Wheelhouse. “Our customers have an expectation that we can share our in-depth knowledge seamlessly across our business and around the world. Oracle WebCenter is beginning to help us do that more effectively.”
From an IT perspective, Balfour Beatty is composed of federated and very autonomous business units around the world, each with its own IT capability for things such as infrastructure and desktop support. Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0, social media-enabled Oracle WebCenter Suite portal has been designed to securely connect its employees across geographic and operating company boundaries and will allow them to collaborate, search, and share best practices in a business-oriented environment. It’s a good example of how and why organizations are adding social media to their mix of enterprise solutions.
“The challenge for us was to provide a platform that can span all our business units,” says Wheelhouse. “We needed a scalable, user-friendly solution that could interface with local systems to share information, while enabling greater collaboration and information sharing across geographic and operational boundaries. That’s where Oracle WebCenter comes in. Oracle WebCenter will be our global, scalable Enterprise 2.0 solution.”
Enterprise Requirements
Integration with back-office solutions was critical for Balfour Beatty’s global portal. Back-office systems are great at handling and supporting clearly defined business processes like procurements and HR processes, but social applications are something more creative and somewhat less predictable.
“We see Oracle WebCenter eventually giving us the best of both worlds in that we can support core business processes and functionality from back-office systems, and at the same time we can implement collaboration and social media interaction,” says Wheelhouse. “As a company that’s founded on expertise, we need to enable our people to reach out to knowledge experts, and that’s a creative process that requires the right type of social networks. The power of Enterprise 2.0 is connecting people that wouldn’t normally find each other.”
A key reason Balfour Beatty chose Oracle WebCenter Suite as its Enterprise 2.0 solution was the product’s ability to integrate traditional applications and business processes with social media, social computing, and Web-oriented requirements.
“The vision for us is to be able to break out of traditional business processes and into a collaborative, social environment to solve problems, and then go back into the business process with the results,” says Wheelhouse. “But it needs to be done in a seamless way.”
Another important aspect to integrating social media capabilities is ensuring that they meet enterprise standards for security and compliance. “For our purposes, the social media content created in Oracle WebCenter could be just as important as the corporate records, so it is subject to the same security policies, retention policies, and management policies,” says Wheelhouse.
User experience and the user interface were also critical to Balfour Beatty. “We wanted to create something that didn’t involve lots of training, wasn’t complex, and was effective,” says Wheelhouse. “What’s good about Oracle WebCenter is its flexibility and its ability to let us create a compelling, intuitive user interface for our solution.”
Next Steps
LEARN more about Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g Webcast
Oracle Portal, User Experience, and Enterprise 2.0 Resource Library
But Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0 solution isn’t just about social connections and business processes. It’s also an effective way to reduce costs and increase productivity.
“Social media portals are a great way of communicating group and divisional initiatives and news, and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities are a great way of filtering all that information,” says Wheelhouse. “There are a lot of ways in which social media can make communications a lot more targeted and enable us to share technical expertise and innovation.”
The Dawn of the Social Enterprise
When it comes to portals and connecting with customers, the future doesn’t look like the past.
“It’s a very different landscape than it was just a couple years ago,” says Current Analysis’ Shimmin.
And although many things will change in the technology landscape over the next few years, one thing is certain: most companies will integrate social networking and social computing capabilities into their enterprise IT strategy.
“In the last two years, we’ve seen the reshaping of portals to be much more capable, much more social, and much more collaborative environments for serving enterprise IT,” says Shimmin. “They’re no longer simply a space where you have pull-down menus to access HR documents. They still do that, but now they also have integrated, collaborative, social networking functions that allow companies to develop stronger customer relationships, optimize employee interactions, and gain greater insight into market trends.”
Systems of Engagement
Organizations have had transactional systems of record for decades. From accounting to sales to human resources, enterprise applications that can keep detailed records of transactions have been refined and perfected.
But business—especially today’s business—isn’t just about individual purchases or transactions. It’s not just about what’s being sold to customers. Today’s business is about the people doing business, how they communicate, and what they need next to do their jobs.
That’s where enterprise social computing and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities come in, along with solutions like Oracle WebCenter Suite.
“It’s really about connecting the people aspect and the engagement aspect of what organizations are already doing in their transactional systems,” says Andy MacMillan, vice president of product management for Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle. “I think with enterprise social media, that there’s an opportunity to drive both business productivity and business innovation.”
In effect, organizations are moving beyond their traditional systems of record to systems of engagement. These systems not only keep track of what’s purchased and when but also where the customer came from and why, and what else—or who else—in the organization should be connected with him to derive the maximal value.
“There’s a convergence of transactional systems and systems of engagement that can help organizations have a complete view of the customer and their points of interaction with an organization,” says MacMillan.
“There’s a strong benefit to line-of-business and process owners engaging people beyond the process and beyond the individual application transactions,” says MacMillan. “And that’s what Oracle WebCenter Suite is really designed to do.”
David A. Kelly (davidakelly.com) is a business, technology, and travel writer who lives in West Newton, Massachusetts.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Social media: The personal at work can be a disruptive mix
Social media: The personal at work can be a disruptive mix
By David Gelles
Published: April 20 2011 10:07 | Last updated: April 20 2011 10:07
There are some companies that encourage employees to have a healthy work-life balance. A happy worker, so goes the thinking, is a productive worker.
Yet, with the rise of social media, there is more personal information about individuals available on the web than ever before.
As a result, the lines between work, and the rest of life have never been more blurred.
This muddling of professional and personal identities can be disruptive in the workplace.
“Social media have had an enormous impact on businesses, from a product perspective and also, in some cases, from a performance management perspective,” says Sue Murphy, association manager, of the US National Human Resources Association.
At the most basic level, the HR department needs to make sure employees are not spending all day on social networking sites and frittering their work hours away tweeting and playing games.
“The amount of time people are spending on the internet at work has increased, so from a performance management perspective we need to be more diligent,” says Ms Murphy.
Even if social media facilities are not being abused in their overuse at work, there is a question over when and whether even sparing use could be deemed inappropriate.
Stories of employees and managers misusing social media on the job have become common.
But for the first time, authorities are getting involved in deciding whether workers or bosses are in the right. Last month, the US National Labor Relations Board weighed in after an employee was fired for a Facebook posting deemed tasteless by management.
Michael Patrick O’Brien, an employment attorney with law firm Jones Waldo, says this incident was a wake-up call for employers.
“Get legal advice before you fire someone because he or she has posted comments online or communicated with co-workers about working conditions,” he says, adding it was important for companies to “update social media policies”.
Social media can also prove an asset, and a liability for recruitment. Increasingly, says Ms Murphy, companies are posting job listings on social sites such as LinkedIn, instead of on job sites such as Monster.com.
“It’s helping to cut their recruiting costs, and to find more suitable candidates,” says Ms Murphy, adding that Craigslist, the online classified advertising site, is not an ideal recruiting venue. “There are some negative sides with some of the Craigslist postings.”
But encouraging employees to use social media to share a job listing among friends and social networks can be useful. “It helps you get your message out,” she says.
“There are millions of people on Facebook and Twitter every day. When I started in HR, you would place an ad on Wednesday, it would be in the paper on Thursday, and it would be a week before you had CVs,” says Ms Murphy. “Now it only takes seconds.”
But again, with so much data publicly available, there is a risk employers will focus on personal information when they make hiring decisions, whether it is relevant to work or not.
“The downside of using social media from a networking perspective is that we don’t have guidelines for regulating what employers are getting from these social sites,” says Ms Murphy.
“If there are photos of them partying, or if they see people that seem to be obese, they are making decisions based on what they see on these sites, which leaves the door open to discriminatory practices.”
Even after employees leave the organisation, social media can be integral to an ongoing relationship with the company.
“Employers use it to track their alumni in the press,” says Martin Murtland, managing director at for PR and Corporate Communications at Dow Jones, speaking about proprietary software that monitors mentions of individuals and companies across media channels.
“If there’s someone you’re particularly interested in, this is a way to see what they’re saying about the company.”
Yet, without guidelines, social media in the workplace can go awry. “You have to be careful about maintaining ... neutrality,” says Ms Murphy.
She recounts an incident where a supervisor went on to Facebook, downloaded a picture of a male employee who was out with a friend, then sent it out to colleagues saying “look at these two gay boys”.
Nothing was done to the supervisor, much to the chagrin of the employee. “His supervisor created a hostile work environment,” she says.
The use of common sense is important in HR policies on social media.
“Be smart with what you’re saying, be aware of who you’re reaching, and if you’re going to go looking, be prepared for what you’re going to find,” says Ms Murphy.
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© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2011.
By David Gelles
Published: April 20 2011 10:07 | Last updated: April 20 2011 10:07
There are some companies that encourage employees to have a healthy work-life balance. A happy worker, so goes the thinking, is a productive worker.
Yet, with the rise of social media, there is more personal information about individuals available on the web than ever before.
As a result, the lines between work, and the rest of life have never been more blurred.
This muddling of professional and personal identities can be disruptive in the workplace.
“Social media have had an enormous impact on businesses, from a product perspective and also, in some cases, from a performance management perspective,” says Sue Murphy, association manager, of the US National Human Resources Association.
At the most basic level, the HR department needs to make sure employees are not spending all day on social networking sites and frittering their work hours away tweeting and playing games.
“The amount of time people are spending on the internet at work has increased, so from a performance management perspective we need to be more diligent,” says Ms Murphy.
Even if social media facilities are not being abused in their overuse at work, there is a question over when and whether even sparing use could be deemed inappropriate.
Stories of employees and managers misusing social media on the job have become common.
But for the first time, authorities are getting involved in deciding whether workers or bosses are in the right. Last month, the US National Labor Relations Board weighed in after an employee was fired for a Facebook posting deemed tasteless by management.
Michael Patrick O’Brien, an employment attorney with law firm Jones Waldo, says this incident was a wake-up call for employers.
“Get legal advice before you fire someone because he or she has posted comments online or communicated with co-workers about working conditions,” he says, adding it was important for companies to “update social media policies”.
Social media can also prove an asset, and a liability for recruitment. Increasingly, says Ms Murphy, companies are posting job listings on social sites such as LinkedIn, instead of on job sites such as Monster.com.
“It’s helping to cut their recruiting costs, and to find more suitable candidates,” says Ms Murphy, adding that Craigslist, the online classified advertising site, is not an ideal recruiting venue. “There are some negative sides with some of the Craigslist postings.”
But encouraging employees to use social media to share a job listing among friends and social networks can be useful. “It helps you get your message out,” she says.
“There are millions of people on Facebook and Twitter every day. When I started in HR, you would place an ad on Wednesday, it would be in the paper on Thursday, and it would be a week before you had CVs,” says Ms Murphy. “Now it only takes seconds.”
But again, with so much data publicly available, there is a risk employers will focus on personal information when they make hiring decisions, whether it is relevant to work or not.
“The downside of using social media from a networking perspective is that we don’t have guidelines for regulating what employers are getting from these social sites,” says Ms Murphy.
“If there are photos of them partying, or if they see people that seem to be obese, they are making decisions based on what they see on these sites, which leaves the door open to discriminatory practices.”
Even after employees leave the organisation, social media can be integral to an ongoing relationship with the company.
“Employers use it to track their alumni in the press,” says Martin Murtland, managing director at for PR and Corporate Communications at Dow Jones, speaking about proprietary software that monitors mentions of individuals and companies across media channels.
“If there’s someone you’re particularly interested in, this is a way to see what they’re saying about the company.”
Yet, without guidelines, social media in the workplace can go awry. “You have to be careful about maintaining ... neutrality,” says Ms Murphy.
She recounts an incident where a supervisor went on to Facebook, downloaded a picture of a male employee who was out with a friend, then sent it out to colleagues saying “look at these two gay boys”.
Nothing was done to the supervisor, much to the chagrin of the employee. “His supervisor created a hostile work environment,” she says.
The use of common sense is important in HR policies on social media.
“Be smart with what you’re saying, be aware of who you’re reaching, and if you’re going to go looking, be prepared for what you’re going to find,” says Ms Murphy.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
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Friday, April 15, 2011
Google to go plus-one better than Facebook
Google to go plus-one better than Facebook
By Richard Waters
Published: April 13 2011 21:05 | Last updated: April 13 2011 21:05
Five years ago, Yahoo! had a plan for beating Google at its own game. It would encourage members of its huge online audience to vote for web pages they liked by “tagging” them. Out of this outpouring would come a more personal and social web, one that was filtered by Yahoo’s users rather than Google’s algorithms.
Fast forward to the present, and there’s a distinctly similar echo in what Google has come up with in its own latest attempt to counter a certain fast-growing social networking site.
Facebook’s “Like” buttons may have sprouted across the web over the past year, but if Google has its way we will all soon be “plus-one-ing” – the inelegant new phrase that describes its move into social, whereby we can click on the “+1” buttons due to appear on its search results and, eventually, other web pages.
The comparison with the now-struggling Yahoo, and the sight of Google copying one of Facebook’s more successful moves, raises the uncomfortable feeling that the search group is running out of ideas.
When Larry Page marked his elevation to chief executive this month with the blunt message to Googlers that a large part of their bonuses will be tied to the company’s success in social, it only added to a sense that urgency is turning to panic.
But it would be a mistake to write Google off. It has some prime assets already in place for its social push and it undeniably has the staying power. Also, it has more in common with Facebook than the usual “search algorithm v social network” contrast suggests. Both see themselves as utilities on the web, with a mission to help a large slice of the world’s population communicate and connect with things they’re interested in.
If Facebook’s key asset is its “social graph” – the web of its users’ personal connections – then Google has its own, implicit networks of relationships to mine. By tapping your most frequent Gmail connections, your list of friends on its Chat service and your phonebook on one of its Android devices, it has plenty of ways to divine your social relationships. It can supplement that by drawing on connections from services like Twitter.
Until now, Google’s main problem has been that it just hasn’t found anything very compelling to do with this information.
That’s where the “+1” voting system comes in. Smartly, it got a low-key launch (lessons learnt here from the debacle around Buzz, the rudimentary social networking service that attracted criticism last year over its handling of privacy). Websites will have good reasons to display the +1 buttons: votes will feed into Google’s search system and could help their rankings.
More of an issue is what users will get out of clicking those buttons – there is no social networking site to collect all those preferences and display them to friends. But as Google starts to show what your contacts have “plus-owned” in the search results you see, the draw could strengthen.
There are other pieces that need to fall into place. Google needs more users to set up profiles and add personal information about themselves, as they do on Facebook. Then, the value of having a Google profile should start to become more apparent.
To feed this virtuous circle, Google needs to find many more things for users to share. Inevitably, that will mean finding a way to draw in an equivalent of the Facebook status update – something that Buzz has so far failed to do.
An acquisition of Twitter still makes sense, which would bring a new brand and an extra dimension in much the way YouTube did. It would have the added benefit of marrying a company which has become a byword for the failure to find an effective business model, with one that is sitting on a geyser of cash.
Larry Page’s “social bonus” kicks in for Googlers in the final quarter of this year. That might be a little early to see real results from the latest social push, but the message he has sent is not unreasonable: Google does not need to build a new social network from scratch and is closer than it may look to seeing some results.
None of this is to belittle the severity of the challenge. Simply welding social behaviour on to an existing web service – as Apple has proved by trying to attach its Ping music network to iTunes – does not work unless users see some compelling benefits.
Google has plenty of ways to make that mistake. Properties like YouTube, Android and the Chrome browser could become powerful platforms for promoting and spreading its social services. But force-feeding users with Facebook alternatives they don’t want or need is a recipe for disaster – as seen with the privacy row around Buzz.
The question is not whether Google “gets” social – it is whether it is as attuned to, and respectful of, its users’ interests as it claims.
Richard Waters is the FT’s West Coast managing editor
richard.waters@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
By Richard Waters
Published: April 13 2011 21:05 | Last updated: April 13 2011 21:05
Five years ago, Yahoo! had a plan for beating Google at its own game. It would encourage members of its huge online audience to vote for web pages they liked by “tagging” them. Out of this outpouring would come a more personal and social web, one that was filtered by Yahoo’s users rather than Google’s algorithms.
Fast forward to the present, and there’s a distinctly similar echo in what Google has come up with in its own latest attempt to counter a certain fast-growing social networking site.
Facebook’s “Like” buttons may have sprouted across the web over the past year, but if Google has its way we will all soon be “plus-one-ing” – the inelegant new phrase that describes its move into social, whereby we can click on the “+1” buttons due to appear on its search results and, eventually, other web pages.
The comparison with the now-struggling Yahoo, and the sight of Google copying one of Facebook’s more successful moves, raises the uncomfortable feeling that the search group is running out of ideas.
When Larry Page marked his elevation to chief executive this month with the blunt message to Googlers that a large part of their bonuses will be tied to the company’s success in social, it only added to a sense that urgency is turning to panic.
But it would be a mistake to write Google off. It has some prime assets already in place for its social push and it undeniably has the staying power. Also, it has more in common with Facebook than the usual “search algorithm v social network” contrast suggests. Both see themselves as utilities on the web, with a mission to help a large slice of the world’s population communicate and connect with things they’re interested in.
If Facebook’s key asset is its “social graph” – the web of its users’ personal connections – then Google has its own, implicit networks of relationships to mine. By tapping your most frequent Gmail connections, your list of friends on its Chat service and your phonebook on one of its Android devices, it has plenty of ways to divine your social relationships. It can supplement that by drawing on connections from services like Twitter.
Until now, Google’s main problem has been that it just hasn’t found anything very compelling to do with this information.
That’s where the “+1” voting system comes in. Smartly, it got a low-key launch (lessons learnt here from the debacle around Buzz, the rudimentary social networking service that attracted criticism last year over its handling of privacy). Websites will have good reasons to display the +1 buttons: votes will feed into Google’s search system and could help their rankings.
More of an issue is what users will get out of clicking those buttons – there is no social networking site to collect all those preferences and display them to friends. But as Google starts to show what your contacts have “plus-owned” in the search results you see, the draw could strengthen.
There are other pieces that need to fall into place. Google needs more users to set up profiles and add personal information about themselves, as they do on Facebook. Then, the value of having a Google profile should start to become more apparent.
To feed this virtuous circle, Google needs to find many more things for users to share. Inevitably, that will mean finding a way to draw in an equivalent of the Facebook status update – something that Buzz has so far failed to do.
An acquisition of Twitter still makes sense, which would bring a new brand and an extra dimension in much the way YouTube did. It would have the added benefit of marrying a company which has become a byword for the failure to find an effective business model, with one that is sitting on a geyser of cash.
Larry Page’s “social bonus” kicks in for Googlers in the final quarter of this year. That might be a little early to see real results from the latest social push, but the message he has sent is not unreasonable: Google does not need to build a new social network from scratch and is closer than it may look to seeing some results.
None of this is to belittle the severity of the challenge. Simply welding social behaviour on to an existing web service – as Apple has proved by trying to attach its Ping music network to iTunes – does not work unless users see some compelling benefits.
Google has plenty of ways to make that mistake. Properties like YouTube, Android and the Chrome browser could become powerful platforms for promoting and spreading its social services. But force-feeding users with Facebook alternatives they don’t want or need is a recipe for disaster – as seen with the privacy row around Buzz.
The question is not whether Google “gets” social – it is whether it is as attuned to, and respectful of, its users’ interests as it claims.
Richard Waters is the FT’s West Coast managing editor
richard.waters@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
‘It is a service, not a technology’
‘It is a service, not a technology’
By Charles Batchelor
Published: March 15 2011 16:22 | Last updated: March 15 2011 16:22
Chief executives and finance directors are understandably cautious when the IT industry waxes enthusiastic about the next “breakthrough”.
What are they to make of cloud computing, the latest big technology idea to come to mainstream business attention?
Simply put, cloud computing is the use of off-site servers, routers and databases that are not “owned” by the business, to handle all, or large parts, of a company’s computing needs.
Instead of managing requirements in-house, with all the costs and hassle involved, a company will outsource operations such as e-mails, enterprise resource planning and data storage.
Factories used to generate their own power on-site, but now routinely buy in electricity and gas.
Cloud enthusiasts believe that, in future, companies will buy computer capacity in the same way.
Executives may be unfamiliar with the cloud but many will have been using it for years without realising it.
E-mail providers such as Google, social networking sites including Facebook, and Flickr, an online photo and video-sharing service, are all run from global data centres, many of which are owned by companies such as Amazon and Microsoft.
The e-mails or photographs that appear to be stored on your desk- or laptop are actually held remotely.
The term “cloud” comes from the technical diagrams used to represent telecommunications and computer systems, which traditionally enclosed networks within cloud shapes.
Cloud computing represents a development of previous arrangements such as “managed services”, where a company handed the operation of its IT network to an outside supplier.
It also piggybacks on “virtualisation” technology, which allows users to get more out of their network by squeezing several applications on to a single server.
“Research has shown that [in-house] data centres do not use more than 20 per cent of their capacity,” says Michael Kogeler, director of cloud strategy at Microsoft International.
It was the idea of putting all that unused capacity to work and the growth of the internet that led to the birth of cloud computing.
“The cloud is a service, not a technology,” explains Rupert Chapman, a cloud specialist at PA Consulting. “You only pay for what you use” and access the computer power over the internet.
Cloud computing is sometimes seen as of particular benefit to small and medium-sized businesses that lack the resources to set up their own IT departments but it is also used by large companies.
It allows businesses of all sizes to acquire computer capacity to launch products and services quickly.
There is little or no capital expenditure involved and costs are based on transactions completed or volume of data stored and should be lower than if managed in-house.
Because the capacity of the cloud is, in theory, unlimited, companies can store far more data and handle far more transactions than might be possible on their in-house system.
They can also back up data on a remote site for security. Because data are not kept in house, they can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, so are available to executives on the move.
Going to the cloud for capacity also means the IT department is not constantly updating servers and software to keep up with technology.
A large cloud provider can also devote more resources to maintaining the security of the network.
“From customers’ perspective there are three ways to use the cloud,” says Mr Chapman.
“They can use it to dip their toe in the water to test an application. If it meets their needs, they can bring it in-house and run it on their own machines. The test environment has traditionally been expensive but one client achieved an 80 per cent cost saving.
“Alternatively, customers can use the cloud on a selective basis for particular services. A market information organisation used a customer relationship management system to suck in just the customer information they needed.”
Finally, companies can take a “transformational” approach, opting to use the cloud for most of their applications, retaining direct control only of those that make a real difference to their organisation. Relatively few companies do this as yet, says Mr Chapman, because they often have a big investment in their legacy systems or are tied into managed service contracts.
Problems companies should watch out for include legal ownership of data, security and the risk of getting locked in to a service provider.
An appropriate contract should resolve ownership issues. Security should be better at a dedicated cloud provider, but hackers have attacked networks and sensitive data should be encrypted in transit and storage. The contract should also allow a customer to change providers easily.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..
By Charles Batchelor
Published: March 15 2011 16:22 | Last updated: March 15 2011 16:22
Chief executives and finance directors are understandably cautious when the IT industry waxes enthusiastic about the next “breakthrough”.
What are they to make of cloud computing, the latest big technology idea to come to mainstream business attention?
Simply put, cloud computing is the use of off-site servers, routers and databases that are not “owned” by the business, to handle all, or large parts, of a company’s computing needs.
Instead of managing requirements in-house, with all the costs and hassle involved, a company will outsource operations such as e-mails, enterprise resource planning and data storage.
Factories used to generate their own power on-site, but now routinely buy in electricity and gas.
Cloud enthusiasts believe that, in future, companies will buy computer capacity in the same way.
Executives may be unfamiliar with the cloud but many will have been using it for years without realising it.
E-mail providers such as Google, social networking sites including Facebook, and Flickr, an online photo and video-sharing service, are all run from global data centres, many of which are owned by companies such as Amazon and Microsoft.
The e-mails or photographs that appear to be stored on your desk- or laptop are actually held remotely.
The term “cloud” comes from the technical diagrams used to represent telecommunications and computer systems, which traditionally enclosed networks within cloud shapes.
Cloud computing represents a development of previous arrangements such as “managed services”, where a company handed the operation of its IT network to an outside supplier.
It also piggybacks on “virtualisation” technology, which allows users to get more out of their network by squeezing several applications on to a single server.
“Research has shown that [in-house] data centres do not use more than 20 per cent of their capacity,” says Michael Kogeler, director of cloud strategy at Microsoft International.
It was the idea of putting all that unused capacity to work and the growth of the internet that led to the birth of cloud computing.
“The cloud is a service, not a technology,” explains Rupert Chapman, a cloud specialist at PA Consulting. “You only pay for what you use” and access the computer power over the internet.
Cloud computing is sometimes seen as of particular benefit to small and medium-sized businesses that lack the resources to set up their own IT departments but it is also used by large companies.
It allows businesses of all sizes to acquire computer capacity to launch products and services quickly.
There is little or no capital expenditure involved and costs are based on transactions completed or volume of data stored and should be lower than if managed in-house.
Because the capacity of the cloud is, in theory, unlimited, companies can store far more data and handle far more transactions than might be possible on their in-house system.
They can also back up data on a remote site for security. Because data are not kept in house, they can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, so are available to executives on the move.
Going to the cloud for capacity also means the IT department is not constantly updating servers and software to keep up with technology.
A large cloud provider can also devote more resources to maintaining the security of the network.
“From customers’ perspective there are three ways to use the cloud,” says Mr Chapman.
“They can use it to dip their toe in the water to test an application. If it meets their needs, they can bring it in-house and run it on their own machines. The test environment has traditionally been expensive but one client achieved an 80 per cent cost saving.
“Alternatively, customers can use the cloud on a selective basis for particular services. A market information organisation used a customer relationship management system to suck in just the customer information they needed.”
Finally, companies can take a “transformational” approach, opting to use the cloud for most of their applications, retaining direct control only of those that make a real difference to their organisation. Relatively few companies do this as yet, says Mr Chapman, because they often have a big investment in their legacy systems or are tied into managed service contracts.
Problems companies should watch out for include legal ownership of data, security and the risk of getting locked in to a service provider.
An appropriate contract should resolve ownership issues. Security should be better at a dedicated cloud provider, but hackers have attacked networks and sensitive data should be encrypted in transit and storage. The contract should also allow a customer to change providers easily.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..
Social media: The worst thing is to ignore your customers
Social media: The worst thing is to ignore your customers
By Jane Bird
Published: March 15 2011 16:22 | Last updated: March 15 2011 16:22
Comment on a product or service using Twitter or Facebook and within minutes your words could have been read by thousands.
This benefits business when the comment is favourable, but customer complaints can rapidly acquire huge momentum.
Many companies are using social networks, blogs and other online forums both to keep in touch with customers and as a vehicle for sales and marketing.
The challenge is to handle the vast volume of messages that can result.
When you start to participate in social networks, you open the floodgates to what your customers want to say, says Graham Murphy, senior community developer at Grooveshark, an online music service. “It can be a blessing or a curse.”
Grooveshark has benefited from networks, which have helped build registered users to almost 8m with negligible advertising.
It is certainly a disadvantage that people can so loudly voice a negative opinion, says Mr Murphy.
“But there’s the opportunity to flip it in our favour. If we solve a billing issue in 20 minutes, they’ll post something great about us. Suddenly we look better than we did before.”
When Grooveshark has server problems, it is alerted in minutes by its followers – 200,000 on Facebook and 50,000 on Twitter.
“Their voice gives valuable insight into our website.”
The company uses software from California-based Assistly to aggregate all messages it receives into one inbox, where they can be prioritised and acted on swiftly, generating a “virtuous circle” of positive comments.
Alex Bard, Assistly’s chief executive, says the aim is to help companies turn customer service into sales and marketing. “If customers are going to gang up on you, they’ll do it anyway,” he says.
“Customers are a core asset that you can learn from, creating a better relationship. The worst thing you can do is ignore them, and the best is to respond.”
Mr Bard encourages companies using Assistly software to let a broad range of employees participate in customer dialogues, rather than just the service team. “This gives engineers or product developers insights that help them make better decisions.”
The real prize is to get customers to recommend you to their friends, says Gail Goodman, chief executive of Massachusetts-based Constant Contact.
It provides polling, monitoring and tracking tools that help companies set up surveys on social networks and understand which postings generate most discussions and traffic.
Dingo, a pet food distributor, used the software to extend its fan base from 350 to a target 5,000 in three days last August, by asking fans to get their friends to sign up. It offered a $20 coupon for everyone if the target could be reached. A further promotion brought fan numbers to 25,000 by the end of February.
“Forty per cent of US households have dogs, so we knew we had a big opportunity, and dog-owners often know other dog-owners,” says Mike Halloran, online marketing manager. “We wanted existing fans to tell their friends about us.”
Brands are working out rules about how far they can go, because people do not want to be advertised to, says Ms Goodman. “Your page will be dormant and deserted very fast if you do this. You need to be engaging, fun and provocative – create a destination for conversation, not a push-marketing venue.”
This is no small challenge, because consumers are busy and there is huge competition for their time online, she says.
Grooveshark’s Mr Murphy sees social media as a way to “personify” the company.
Its Facebook and Twitter postings tend to focus on third-party products, service updates, or blog posts, for example, about the company’s presence at a festival. “We did a post on our campaign to help victims of the BP oil spill in the Gulf, and one to promote an artist we are interested in,” he says.
His company won’t take payment for a posting. “We want to be objective and informative rather than self-promoting, so that people have a positive feeling about us and tell their friends,” he says.
One problem with using social networks for sales and marketing messages is that they accumulate quickly and are often ignored. More than three items posted a day could be seen as a “spam blast”, says Mr Murphy, and will drive followers away.
Mr Halloran favours e-mail for sales and marketing promotions, but says Twitter is ideal when you want things to be instant.
“The nice thing about Twitter is that messages tend to be looked at a bit more quickly and regularly and in-boxes are less cluttered.”
Dingo plans to use Twitter for customer service, so people can send questions and receive rapid replies.
“A dog might have just stained a carpet and the customer wants to know how to remove the mark,” says Mr Halloran.
“If we post a solution to this on Twitter it will be seen by many people and picked up in search engines such as Google and Bing long afterwards.
“We are looking at anything where posting answers creates ‘breadcrumb trails’ that link back to us.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..
By Jane Bird
Published: March 15 2011 16:22 | Last updated: March 15 2011 16:22
Comment on a product or service using Twitter or Facebook and within minutes your words could have been read by thousands.
This benefits business when the comment is favourable, but customer complaints can rapidly acquire huge momentum.
Many companies are using social networks, blogs and other online forums both to keep in touch with customers and as a vehicle for sales and marketing.
The challenge is to handle the vast volume of messages that can result.
When you start to participate in social networks, you open the floodgates to what your customers want to say, says Graham Murphy, senior community developer at Grooveshark, an online music service. “It can be a blessing or a curse.”
Grooveshark has benefited from networks, which have helped build registered users to almost 8m with negligible advertising.
It is certainly a disadvantage that people can so loudly voice a negative opinion, says Mr Murphy.
“But there’s the opportunity to flip it in our favour. If we solve a billing issue in 20 minutes, they’ll post something great about us. Suddenly we look better than we did before.”
When Grooveshark has server problems, it is alerted in minutes by its followers – 200,000 on Facebook and 50,000 on Twitter.
“Their voice gives valuable insight into our website.”
The company uses software from California-based Assistly to aggregate all messages it receives into one inbox, where they can be prioritised and acted on swiftly, generating a “virtuous circle” of positive comments.
Alex Bard, Assistly’s chief executive, says the aim is to help companies turn customer service into sales and marketing. “If customers are going to gang up on you, they’ll do it anyway,” he says.
“Customers are a core asset that you can learn from, creating a better relationship. The worst thing you can do is ignore them, and the best is to respond.”
Mr Bard encourages companies using Assistly software to let a broad range of employees participate in customer dialogues, rather than just the service team. “This gives engineers or product developers insights that help them make better decisions.”
The real prize is to get customers to recommend you to their friends, says Gail Goodman, chief executive of Massachusetts-based Constant Contact.
It provides polling, monitoring and tracking tools that help companies set up surveys on social networks and understand which postings generate most discussions and traffic.
Dingo, a pet food distributor, used the software to extend its fan base from 350 to a target 5,000 in three days last August, by asking fans to get their friends to sign up. It offered a $20 coupon for everyone if the target could be reached. A further promotion brought fan numbers to 25,000 by the end of February.
“Forty per cent of US households have dogs, so we knew we had a big opportunity, and dog-owners often know other dog-owners,” says Mike Halloran, online marketing manager. “We wanted existing fans to tell their friends about us.”
Brands are working out rules about how far they can go, because people do not want to be advertised to, says Ms Goodman. “Your page will be dormant and deserted very fast if you do this. You need to be engaging, fun and provocative – create a destination for conversation, not a push-marketing venue.”
This is no small challenge, because consumers are busy and there is huge competition for their time online, she says.
Grooveshark’s Mr Murphy sees social media as a way to “personify” the company.
Its Facebook and Twitter postings tend to focus on third-party products, service updates, or blog posts, for example, about the company’s presence at a festival. “We did a post on our campaign to help victims of the BP oil spill in the Gulf, and one to promote an artist we are interested in,” he says.
His company won’t take payment for a posting. “We want to be objective and informative rather than self-promoting, so that people have a positive feeling about us and tell their friends,” he says.
One problem with using social networks for sales and marketing messages is that they accumulate quickly and are often ignored. More than three items posted a day could be seen as a “spam blast”, says Mr Murphy, and will drive followers away.
Mr Halloran favours e-mail for sales and marketing promotions, but says Twitter is ideal when you want things to be instant.
“The nice thing about Twitter is that messages tend to be looked at a bit more quickly and regularly and in-boxes are less cluttered.”
Dingo plans to use Twitter for customer service, so people can send questions and receive rapid replies.
“A dog might have just stained a carpet and the customer wants to know how to remove the mark,” says Mr Halloran.
“If we post a solution to this on Twitter it will be seen by many people and picked up in search engines such as Google and Bing long afterwards.
“We are looking at anything where posting answers creates ‘breadcrumb trails’ that link back to us.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..
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