A view from the edge...

An Operating System Isn't Just for Christmas

2009-06-11T01:00:00.000-07:00

During a keynote address last week at Computex 2009 in Taipei, Microsoft’s Steve Guggenheimer (VP of Microsoft’s OEM Division) announced that Windows 7 will be Released To Manufacturing (RTM) in the second half of July this year, and that General Availability (GA) is planned for 22 October 2009. During the announcement, Mr. Guggenheimer also said: “we’ve received great feedback from our partners who are looking forward to offering Windows 7 to their customers in time for the holidays.”

Although Microsoft Windows has been around for well over 20 years (Windows 1.01 shipped in November 1985), Windows 7’s lineage only stretches back 16 years to October 1993 and the introduction of Windows NT 3.1. Despite Microsoft’s branding of its new operating system, Windows 7 is in fact Version 6.1 (the ‘ver’ command indicates that Release Candidate 1 is in fact Version 6.1.7100); just a point-release from Windows Vista, which shipped as Version 6.0 under the covers. However, the important thing to recognise is that Windows 7 is a ‘full release’ on from Windows XP, which shipped nearly eight years ago in October 2001 as Version 5.1.

Although Windows 7 is considered an incremental upgrade to Windows Vista and the consumer market, for most businesses and institutions Windows 7 will in fact be a major upgrade. With Windows XP now into the ‘Extended Support’ phase of Microsoft’s product support lifecycle, and Windows Vista failing to capture the interest of corporate IT managers, it falls to Windows 7 to pick up from where Windows XP left off. Unless, that is, Microsoft comes up with another desktop offering between now and April 2014 when Extend Support for Windows XP comes to an end.

The real business benefits for most organisations of an upgrade or migration to Windows 7 will come through the new applications and possibilities afforded by the operating system. For IT management and Compliance Officers, Windows 7 offers real opportunities to address operational issues and information security risks and threats.

From an IT department’s perspective, AppLocker (application control policies), BranchCache (think Content Delivery Network (CDN) for the enterprise), and DirectAccess (VPN-less access to corporate data, applications, and system) are the features to taker a closer look at; while BitLocker and BitLocker To Go address issues relating to the preservation of information confidentiality, integrity, and availability – especially where mobile workers are concerned.

Of all of the new technologies to ship with Windows 7, Windows XP Mode (XPM) is perhaps the most intriguing. Consisting of a virtual PC-based environment and a fully licensed copy of Windows XP Service Pack 3, XPM utilises processor-based virtualisation technology to run legacy applications directly on the Windows 7 desktop rather than through a separately hosted virtual machine. This is a significant step forward in the evolution of Microsoft Windows, as it effectively creates a bridge from the ‘old world’ of legacy Windows applications to the new world of whatever Microsoft decides to do next.

Although Microsoft is very much a purveyor of software to the enterprise market, its link with the consumer market is still as strong as ever. This being the case, Microsoft’s timetable for Windows 7 is, not surprisingly, very much attuned to consumer buying patterns. With the global recession and weak consumer spending hitting Microsoft and its ecosystem hard, Windows 7 has to be ‘ready’ in plenty of time for the Christmas holiday season. But is it fully-baked and ready for the enterprise market? Well, in my opinion I think it very nearly is. However, I would advise corporate IT managers to wait for the first Service Pack before embarking on any major roll-outs. In the meantime, organisations should thoroughly test and evaluate what is likely to become the PC operating system of the next decade.

IBM - Lotus Connections V2.0.1

2009-06-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Abstract

Lotus Connections is an enterprise social software offering from IBM that is designed to help organisations “work smarter” and more effectively by empowering individuals and teams. The features offered by Lotus Connections can enable those within a business or institution to keep track of people, ideas, and know-how. Corporate employees spend a great deal of time collaborating via e-mails, documents, spreadsheets and presentations; however, the social network that ties all of this ‘stuff’ together is missing from many collaboration platforms. Lotus Connections presents a suite of social software capabilities that have been pre-integrated to work together in a corporate setting. The look and feel of Lotus Connections is clearly being influenced by consumer-oriented social software sites, and given that all corporate employees are consumers, Butler Group thinks that this is no bad thing. IBM clearly recognises the fact that integration with popular information worker tools and platforms is essential for broad success and widespread adoption and has made this apparent by providing connectors not only for Lotus products, like Notes and Sametime, but also for Microsoft products, like SharePoint, Outlook, and Office. Organisations exploring the business value of enterprise social networking software should evaluate this very capable product.

Key Findings

Strength

A well-integrated set of enterprise social networking services.
Good integration with Microsoft Office and the Lotus range of collaboration solutions.
Can be deployed on a range of operating systems and databases.
The Blackberry client extends the solution to mobile employees.

Information

LotusLive Connections will provide an alternative route to market.

Weakness

Lacks a wiki feature (will be added in the next version of Lotus Connections).
Deeper integration with Microsoft SharePoint would increase the value of this offering.
64-bit versions not yet available for Linux or Windows server environments, but will be provided in the next version.

Look Ahead

Lotus Connections version 2.5 is expected in the second half of 2009. It will introduce a new wiki service, a personal file sharing service, new profile enhancements, and many new community features. It will also offer increased SharePoint integration; mobile support for iPhone/Nokia/Symbian/Web browser devices; and new profiles features, such as microblogging and news streams.

Read the full Technology Audit on the Butler Group Web site.

In Search of the Perfect Search Experience

2009-05-28T12:00:00.000-07:00

The information required for business decision-making and operational activities is contained within both structured and unstructured data sets, and these in turn are generally stored within siloed repositories and IT systems that are scattered across the enterprise. Furthermore, an increasing amount of actionable business information is now stored beyond the corporate firewall, either with partners and suppliers, or with customers and communities. Only through the application of Enterprise Search solutions can information workers ever expect to find all of the information required to complete a task and do their job; hence the continued arms-race amongst vendors competing in this very important arena.

It is no longer possible, if ever it was, for an individual to know where every piece of information is: that is why we have information systems. But in this ‘information age’ we are presented with something of a paradox, as although today we have access to more information than ever before, we often struggle to find that one piece of really useful information that we seek.

The market for Enterprise Search solutions has skyrocketed in recent years, as businesses and institutions seek to reduce the amount of wasted time and effort that is often part of ‘information work’. With over 70% of salaries now related to ‘information work’, one doesn’t have to be an accountant to work out that, if spent wisely, an investment in Enterprise Search technology can offer significant benefits to the business.

2006 was the year when Enterprise Search moved onto the corporate agenda, and ever since then vendors have been clamouring to get a piece of this valuable market. Autonomy, Endeca, Exalead, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle are just a few of the vendors with offerings in the Enterprise Search space, and new entrants with ancillary and niche offerings are appearing all the time.

2008 saw Microsoft increase its stake in the game when it bought Fast Search & Transfer, the Norwegian search vendor, for US$1.2 billion. Later the same year, IBM upgraded its own high-end product – OmniFind Enterprise Edition – to stay in the game, and Google announced an updated version of its Google Search Appliance.

In recent weeks we’ve seen pure-play companies Exalead and Endeca re-focus their strategies. French search company Exalead is gearing its CloudView offering more towards the Business Intelligence arena and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in an attempt to differentiate itself in the Enterprise Search market, and Endeca is also moving more towards the search-based applications end of the spectrum.

Even though the Enterprise Search sector is moving forward, its pace appears to be almost glacial when compared to the Web search market. Despite its continued reluctance to defile its pristine search results page, even Google recently introduced new search visualisation features. Named ‘Wonder Wheel’ and ‘Timeline’, these two new search options are designed to encourage users to look beyond the usual ‘Results 1-50 of about 1,280,000’ (the number of hits for ‘Enterprise Search’) by displaying search results in a more useful way.

However, if one wants to see real innovation in search interfaces and information visualisation then one should take a look at the likes of SearchMapr, KartOO, and Searchme. Alternatively, why not explore TouchGraph’s Google Browser to get a sense of how search results actually relate to one another?

One search engine we’re all going to hear about in the coming weeks is ‘Bing’ (unless Microsoft decides to call it something else). ‘Bing’ will undoubtedly introduce a new kind of search experience for the user, but will it be the experience that users want, and more importantly, will it transition well into the world of work just as Google’s did? We’ll have to wait and see on that one.

With these and other innovations on the horizon, I think we can safely say that the consumer-oriented search experience is on the move. But will this have any impact on the Enterprise Search market? Well, in my opinion, the answer is a resounding “Yes!”

Capscan Ltd. - Capscan Matchcode Version 6

2009-05-08T07:25:00.000-07:00

Abstract

Capscan’s Matchcode is an address management solution that accurately captures and cleanses address data against the Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF) and other international address files covering about 240 other postal territories worldwide. The solution operates in two modes: point of capture and batch mode. Matchcode can infer a complete and accurate address from partly accurate information at the point of data capture. In the data capture mode, the solution can be integrated with applications, such as CRM systems and legacy applications, through an API. The solution can also operate in the batch mode, cleansing existing address information, ensuring that the existing customer lists or databases contain only valid address data. Matchcode also offers other reference datasets, such as lifestyle codes and geographic co-ordinates. Additionally, the solution allows the address capture and cleansing function to be carried out as a Web service. Butler Group believes that any organisation with a large direct B2C or B2B outreach program would benefit from the Capscan solution.

Key Findings

Strength

Can be used to augment, clean, and enhance customer address data.
Offers batch, interactive, and programmatic modes of operation.
Integrates with SAP, Oracle Financials, Dynamics, etc.
Able to provide comprehensive address data from across 240 territories.

Information

Offers the Dun & Bradstreet database of 3.4 million UK-based businesses.
Currently offers a certified plug-in for SAP.

Weakness

Needs to develop a joined-up approach to its various offerings.
Needs to extend its presence outside the UK.

Look Ahead

Capscan has plans to provide management of multiple modules through a central dashboard.

Read the full Technology Audit on the Butler Group Web site.

Co-written with Karthik Balakrishnan and Somak Roy.

Corporate Intranets Revisited

2009-04-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

Corporate Intranets have been with us for well over a decade, and so as organisations consider all aspects of their business at this critical juncture, now is as good a time as any to revisit this highly important aspect of Information Management and corporate culture. There are many definitions of what an Intranet is, but in my view this is less important than what an Intranet does: to weave together people, process, and content in ways that significantly improves and augments the organisation’s productivity. Corporate Intranets also provide a common communications and collaboration platform, and this in turn supports the employee activities and business processes that make the business tick.

Intranets also provide the environment in which new ideas and innovation are fostered, and so it is vitally important that CIOs get this aspect of their information management strategy right – especially as around 70% of an organisations salary budget is now spent on information work. Corporate Intranets have expanded greatly over the years in terms of functionality, and for many organisations this digital fabric now extends to cover everyone within the enterprise. While general features, such as corporate directories and company news are core to every Intranet design, Butler Group has witnessed a growth in the number of applications targeting specific business functions. This clearly provides an opportunity to enhance performance in specific areas of the business, and also encourages adoption in those parts of the organisation that might not have otherwise embraced the concepts and ethos that underpin this hybrid system of channel and platform.

Intranets continue to be the initial touch point for finding information that really matters. Topping the list of ‘must have’ reference points is, of course, the corporate address book, but unlike the static and often out-of-date listings of yesteryear, today’s contact directories are dynamic, living, databases; replete with information about an individual’s skills, experience, and attributes. Moreover, this information is increasingly owned, managed, and maintained by the Intranet users themselves. The rise in popularity of consumer-oriented social networking sites has provided an opportunity for more forward-thinking organisations to reinvent their corporate Intranets in order to better leverage the social aspects of human nature. For these organisations, the corporate directory has become an on-ramp to Enterprise Social Network applications, such as profiles, blogs, shared bookmarks, and wikis.

By integrating Identity & Access Management (I&AM) facilities with the corporate portal, the enterprise directory can also serve as a service point for provisioning and delivery. Despite the hype and hullaballoo of the late 1990s, very few organisations have a single, unified directory; with metadirectory services the preferred option for many IT departments. Although this directory service remains a hidden aspect of the corporate Intranet, it is nevertheless a crucial component; as by identifying the user by name and by role, information and applications relevant to that individual’s role can be presented in a personalised way, cutting down on time spent looking for things. Nowhere is this more pertinent than in the area of Enterprise Search, with leading offerings now tailoring search results to match the information needs of the employee.

An increasing number of Intranet applications are now focused on specific business functions, with vendors offering many of these in template form or as out-of-the-box ‘business process solutions’. For example, Microsoft offers 40 application templates for Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0. These range from the rather mundane essentials, such as time recording, project tracking, and team work sites, to the more useful ‘Competitive Analysis Site’ for the Sales & Marketing department, or the ‘New Store Opening’ template for Retail organisations. Having a good range of Intranet features allows employees within the organisation to get on with the job they are paid to do, rather than having to deal with ancillary tasks that distract from productivity and efficiency.

The World Wide Web of today is a very people-centric ‘place’, and so organisations must recognise this change as they revisit their own Intranet strategies. In my experience, the Intranet-based Knowledge Management initiatives of the past failed as a result of inadequate employee participation, and yet individuals are clearly happy to contribute information, content, and know-how to consumer-centric sites for little, if indeed any, reward. The fact that so many social media Web sites exist suggests that if the right approach is taken, getting people to engage and contribute is no longer a problem. The more successful consumer-oriented Web sites have developed mechanisms that incorporate participant feedback, and this in turn sustains the information feedback loop, encourages reciprocity, and drives user adoption. However, introducing these mechanisms into the corporate setting is not as straightforward as one might think, as company culture often hinders such initiatives. To address some of these issues, vendors of specialist Enterprise Social Software solutions often employ a consultative approach to projects; engaging with business leaders rather than IT managers.

Having looked at a handful of Intranet exemplars recently, it is clear to see that Facebook-like social networking elements are most certainly on the increase, enriching employee profiles in ways that would have seemed unlikely only a couple of years ago. Indeed, we are now starting to see some organisations offer YouTube-like functionality as part of their Intranet design to facilitate greater expression and individuality, and so it looks as though the rulebook has almost certainly been thrown out of the window so far as the limitations of corporate portals and Intranets.

Enterprises can no longer ignore the gravitational pull of Web 2.0 technologies, concepts, and memes, as they are immense. However, there will always be those organisations that resist change, opting not to invest in this area as they fail to see the relevance or business value of this sea change to their organisations. The reasons for hesitation are many and varied, but cost is clearly an inhibitor for many businesses and institutions. This presents something of a concern, because the Web is central to so many aspects of business and commerce. Open Source software, and offerings like Windows SharePoint Services that ship as part of server operating systems, has lowered the Web 2.0 ‘ticket-to-entry’ software cost, but of course hardware costs, administrative resources, and operational management have always constituted a major part of IT budgets. Now, however, Internet economics and ‘cloud-based’ offerings look set to offer some organisations an alternative approach to on-premises solutions, although many issues and concerns have still to be addressed.

Collaboration facilities are a key component of corporate Intranets, and so with interest in ‘cloud-based’ collaboration solutions growing, we may well see some large organisations shifting their Intranet infrastructure to this new dimension in the not too distant future. It has been well over two years since Google entered the office productivity applications and collaboration space, and since then the company has entered the Software as a Service (SaaS) market with Google Apps for the Enterprise. Not to be outdone, both IBM and Microsoft have offerings based on the SaaS model too. It’s still too early to tell if large enterprises will move their corporate Intranets entirely on to the cloud, but my prediction is that many organisations will at least adopt a hybrid model, with some aspects of the Intranet (most likely the collaboration facilities) moving on to the SaaS model before the end of 2010.

The much maligned corporate portal continues to be the focal point of most Intranet strategies, with IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP dominating the high-end enterprise market. I consider the corporate portal market to be part of the much larger Enterprise Content Management (ECM) market, and so choosing the right technology stack is an important consideration for those organisations revisiting their Intranet strategies. However, conversations with Butler Group subscribers would suggest that technology selection, implementation, and integration issues only account for around a half of the effort relating to portal implementations, with organisational issues and company politics still dominating many enterprise Intranet projects. Indeed, it would seem that the bigger the company, the bigger the headache caused by company politics, and so I would advise large, geographically dispersed organisations to adopt a federated model when it comes to Intranet projects, as otherwise time, money, and effort will most surely be wasted.

Corporate Intranets continue to be the on-ramp to team and workgroup collaboration services, and here we see IBM Lotus and Microsoft-based offerings continuing to dominate the enterprise market. But things are starting to change, as ECM vendors start to leverage the Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRM) solutions they sold to enterprises as a result of increased industry and government regulation. EDRM technologies and products are an important element of the corporate Intranet, as they help organisations maintain compliance and improve efficiency. Moreover, because EDRM solutions also provide library services to business processes workflows, they have become an integral part of IT, and particularly Intranet, infrastructure.

For those organisations seeking inspiration, examples of well designed and highly functional Intranets can be seen across all business sectors and industries. The usability consulting firm, Nielsen Norman Group, recently published a report detailing the 10 best Intranets of 2009, and the companies listed in the report make for very interesting reading. Although the Intranets presented in the report generally represent large enterprises with vast collections of documents and a plethora of mission-critical applications, my view is that the lessons learned from these winning designs can be equally applied to smaller companies.

There is no blueprint for the perfect Intranet, but good examples of best practice can be found. In many instances, effectively structured and managed Intranets are now proving their worth, in that they are providing organisations with competitive advantage and are delivering a good return on investment. Given the marketing hype that often surrounds this particular market, it is important to realise that Intranets cannot be built in a day. Indeed, I would even go so far as to say that the construction of the corporate Intranet never ends. What is clear, however, is that Intranets can help people do their jobs better and more efficiently. A well designed and well run Intranet will help an organisation deliver continuous improvements in many areas, and so CIOs must revisit their Intranet strategies on a regular basis.

NEW WORLD OF WORK, NEW WORLD ECONOMY

2009-03-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

Corporate employees now spend more time collaborating via e-mails, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations than anything else, and as a result the number of digital assets which have to be stored, managed, shared, and protected each year is increasing. With a faltering economy and fierce competition across all markets and sectors, organisations must now ensure that their collaboration facilities are up-to-scratch, and that staff are employing these tools efficiently, effectively, and securely.

The continued proliferation of digital assets presents something of a challenge for all organisations, as whilst on the one hand businesses and institutions want to foster a culture of information sharing and reuse, on the other there is a growing need for greater levels of control, compliance, and information governance. Now more than ever before, business success and survival will depend upon an organisation’s ability to exploit the information assets it holds and the people it employs.

The ‘new world of work’ clearly relies as much upon unstructured information as it does on structured information, and so as we move through 2009, I expect to see more solution sets which address both of these realms with equal importance. However, weaving together transactional, operational, and ‘transactive’ (pertaining to ‘social memory’) information types is no easy matter, and delivering this both in a timely fashion and a useful format continues to present a very real challenge.

Moreover, information workers must carry out their tasks and duties in a complex and increasingly regulated world, and so CIOs must find new ways to empower the beleaguered workforce without transferring the burden to an already overstretched IT department.

An organisation’s executive management team must, of course, fully understand the corporate business model and the markets in which it competes in order to plot a safe course through the current economic storm; but in my view it is how people think, how they work, and how they are managed that will be the deciding factor. At a time when the ‘new world economy’ is changing everything, business leaders must focus on how to get the most out of their workforce, as this is undoubtedly where salvation lies for most organisations.

Cloud Computing on the Horizon

2009-03-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Attributed to Thomas J. Watson Sr. (1874-1956) while he was president of International Business Machines, this apocryphal quote could turn out to be true in a manner of speaking if one were to rephrase the statement thus: ‘I think there is a world market for maybe five computer clouds.’ But would five clouds be enough? And if so, what services would these clouds offer and how might an organisation benefit from using them rather than more traditional on-premises solutions?

Cloud computing is an evolving model that is best described in terms of business and IT functionality. Today, most business and IT system functions are delivered or supported by on-premises IT systems. These systems are comprised of servers, networking equipment, and storage hardware, and are generally housed in a computer room, data centre, or other facility that is managed, controlled, or contractually bound to the organisation in question. If we replace the word ‘cloud’ with the word ‘Internet’, then things start to become easier to understand. ‘Cloud computing’ is, in effect, ‘Internet computing’, i.e. a computing model that uses Internet-based technologies to deliver a range of services.

It is, I believe, important to differentiate cloud computing from other computing models that are often perceived to be synonymous or of a similar nature. In conversations with Butler Group subscribers, the terms Software as a Service (SaaS – see Software as a Service Architectures, March 2008), ‘grid’, and ‘utility computing’ often crop up when organisations are thinking longer-term and strategically about IT provision, and now I am starting to be asked about cloud computing too. To my mind, these computing models are all part of the same emerging market, just viewed from a different perspective and each forming a different element of the ‘new IT supply chain’.

Although vendors tend to phrase things in their own terms, grid computing is generally considered to be the application of multiple computer systems to a specific scientific or technical problem that could not otherwise be addressed. When we talk about grid computing, there is a general assumption that all of the computing resource is co-located; but in practice, grid computing systems can be highly distributed, such as the SETI@home project – a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers to Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) contained within radio telescope data.

While grid computing is suited to computing tasks that can be addressed through parallel computing techniques, the utility computing model takes the concept of metered public utilities – such as gas, electricity, water, telephone – and applies this to computing resources. Although for the customer there is no up-front cost to acquire IT infrastructure, organisations investigating this computing paradigm should be aware that they may have to pay a one-off ‘connection fee’, and maybe some kind of standing charge to cover a share of the fixed costs. Thereafter, the utility computing model follows the familiar ‘pay-for-what-you-use’ arrangement.

Those with long memories will recognise these computing models from the 1960s and 1970s, when time-sharing and ‘bureau’ services were common. Indeed, the early success of the Internet was partially due to the need to distribute computing tasks, and to share and optimise the use of resources. Today, these models continue to exist, albeit in a more open and affordable fashion. Not surprisingly, major hardware companies, such as CISCO, EMC, HP, IBM, and Sun Microsystems are all participating in the grid and utility computing markets at some level.

Cloud computing is evolving rapidly, as technologies mature and investments in computing infrastructure are put to work delivering new offerings and services. However, there has to be an economic factor or reason driving demand. Strange as it might seem to some, the current economic climate is probably the ideal catalyst for cloud computing, as organisations seek new ways to reduce cost while maintaining, or even improving, agility. Although organisations must be prudent and be able to manage risk well in the current climate, I believe that the cloud computing model does offer a glimpse of the way forward for the industry.

For the cloud to be generally useful it must, to some extent, be general purpose: it must provide a set of services that are broadly applicable and easy to consume. The most visible examples of the cloud computing model today are e-mail, ‘webtop’ productivity applications, hosting, and business application services. These have, by-and-large, been targeted at the consumer and small- and medium-sized businesses and can be grouped into the following categories: storage services, instantiation services, distribution services, security services, and application services.

A recent survey by Infosecurity Europe of 470 organisations revealed that 75% of them intend to reallocate or increase their budgets to secure cloud computing and SaaS over the coming year or so. However, in my own conversations and discussions with CIOs and senior IT managers, there is still strong concern relating to the availability and security aspects of SaaS models and service provided by the cloud. However, the constant challenge to do more with IT budgets is undoubtedly putting pressure on IT managers to try out cloud-based services, and so I expect we will see some growth in areas considered to be ‘quick-wins’, such as e-mail, collaboration services, and general business applications.

At the consumer-end of the market, Quality-of-Service (QoS), interoperability, governance, and service transfer all seem relatively unimportant at the moment, but in due course I fully expect regulation will have to play a part as users rely more heavily on the services offered by today’s providers. In the meantime, consumers and early business adopters should consider closely the Terms & Conditions of the services they use, and service providers should be transparent in the information they provide their customers.

In February, IBM revealed a series of products and services around its ‘Blue Cloud’ initiative. In addition to the cloud computing consulting services announced in 2008, IBM now offers a growing portfolio of services that promise better ease of use, economies of scale, and greater flexibility in sourcing and adapting to change. In a briefing to analysts, IBM talked about the technologies it sees as being central to cloud computing: virtualisation, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), SaaS, and ‘request-driven provisioning’ – a term synonymous with the company’s On Demand initiative.

IBM’s cloud offerings are based around IT infrastructure, applications, and processes, but unlike other providers, IBM is championing a hybrid approach for the enterprise: ‘Private Cloud’ and ‘Public Cloud’. Private cloud – or ‘internal sourcing’ as the company describes it, is where the organisation owns and manages the IT infrastructure, applications, and processes. However, unlike many of today’s IT services, these will be delivered, managed, and maintained in a highly virtualised, highly standardised, and highly automated manner (using IBM’s products, solutions, and services one would assume).

With access defined and controlled by the client organisation, one can see how a private cloud can accommodate greater levels of customisation, increased levels of security, and to some extent, higher levels of availability (due to locality and business-determined levels of redundancy). If one then adds to this through the use of the public cloud – or ‘external sourcing’ as IBM describes it, then organisations get to conserve capital while exploiting economies of scale. Organisations are also likely to benefit from increased flexibility as a result of supplier choice (just like the utility model) and standardisation.

IBM’s foray into the cloud space with Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced earlier this year just goes to show how disruptive the cloud computing model can be; enabling dissimilar entities to coexist and partner in new ways. In this particular case, IBM is bringing a range of products to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2); thereby enabling organisations to utilise their existing licences within the cloud.

In the words of AWS: “EC2 is a Web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make Web-scale computing easier for developers.” To use EC2, developers create, upload, and then instantiate an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing applications, libraries, data, and associated configuration settings. Alternatively, pre-configured templated images – such as those being offered by IBM – can be used. In terms of billing, organisations only pay for the resources that are consumed, such as ‘instance-hours’ or data transfer.

Amazon and IBM are just two names from an ever growing list of companies developing service offerings for the cloud. Others including Google with AppEngine, and Microsoft with Azure, but my reason for highlighting Amazon and IBM is that it provides an interesting insight into the kinds of partnerships and relationships that may form over the coming months.

Organisations will, of course, have to restructure their operations, both in terms of business and IT, in order to benefit from the cloud computing model. However, the resulting streamlining, combined with the conservation of capital, will provide many businesses and institutions with significant new opportunities. Open standards, service oriented architecture, service management, scalable systems, and excellence in data centre operations are likely to govern the success of cloud computing in the longer term, but for now the world’s largest IT companies are placing their bets on cloud computing being the next ‘big thing’.

SAP - SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Performance Management Solutions Release 7.0

2009-03-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

Abstract

SAP offers a replete portfolio of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solutions which encompass a range of applications targeting specific business functions and requirements. SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Performance Management Solutions Release 7.0 (EPM) is comprised of many products, solutions, and technologies, and represents the culmination of a series of acquisitions over a three-year period, with Business Objects being the most significant. SAP’s product line-up includes some best-in-class products and moving forward these will be underpinned by both the SAP NetWeaver and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) platforms. SAP’s aggressive acquisition trail has left the company with a plethora of products in its vast arsenal, and has also netted the company some new customers; however, some prospective purchasers of EPM will undoubtedly adopt a ‘wait-and-see’ approach as SAP moves towards its ‘next generation’ offering – EPM 8.0. Organisations with significant investments in SAP’s multiple BI products have been shown a clear roadmap, and so will be planning their migration strategies in line with SAP’s announcements regarding product direction and development. SAP must now convince its customers and investors that it is adding value with its plans for EPM 8.0, and not just undertaking an integration project. A formidable player in the BI market will soon re-emerge if the company delivers upon its stated intent.

Key Findings

Strength

SAP’s EPM suite offers depth as well as breadth.
Strong in both Performance Management applications and tools.

Information

Microsoft Office is used as a front end to many aspects of EPM.
The acquisition of Business Objects by SAP is starting to reshape the BI market.

Weakness

Extensive product rebranding and multiple acquisitions have complicated purchasing decisions.
SAP’s restructuring of its EPM portfolio could result in a significant ‘cost of change’ for some customers.

Look Ahead

SAP has set out a clear and unambiguous programme that will see its Performance Management offerings evolve towards a ‘next generation’ suite of solutions in the 2010 timeframe.

Read the full Technology Audit on the Butler Group Web site.

InterSystems - InterSystems DeepSee

2009-03-04T12:00:00.001-08:00

Abstract

InterSystems DeepSee™ is a Business Intelligence (BI) solution that enables the real-time analysis of transactional data, and is designed to be optimal for embedding within transactional applications. Business users in healthcare, government, financial services, telecommunications, retail, and logistics require analysis and alerting based on current data for real-time decision making. DeepSee has four modules that provide capabilities for building data models, analytical elements, dashboards, and connections to external data sources. DeepSee provides additional analytical functionality to both InterSystems Caché® and InterSystems Ensemble® – two of InterSystems’ long-established offerings. Caché is an object database; DeepSee data models are built using transactional data from Caché and therefore do not require a traditional data warehouse. Ensemble is an integration and development platform; DeepSee extends the orchestration capabilities of Ensemble, so that complex data analysis and decision making can be automated and embedded in applications. Although it is still early days for DeepSee, Butler Group believes that this solution is well positioned to meet the needs of the growing real-time BI market, and merits serious consideration from application developers and enterprises with an installed base of InterSystems technology.

Key Findings

Strength

Data models are built using transactional data from an object database, without the need for a data warehouse.
Provides modules for easily building data models, analytics, and dashboards.
The underlying object-oriented Caché database enables rapid querying of complex multidimensional data.
Bitmap indexing coupled with techniques such as compression further enhance querying performance.

Information

InterSystems has 1,300+ application partners.
Supports Windows, Linux, UNIX, Mac, and Open VMS platforms.

Weakness

The client interface is currently restricted to Internet Explorer.
Does not support advanced analytics, which might be a requirement in certain areas.

Look Ahead

Future DeepSee enhancements include support for additional Web browsers, integration of InterSystems Zen™ Ajax framework and Zen Reports™, extended APIs, and native support for MDX queries.

Read the full Technology Audit on the Butler Group Web site.

Information Builders - WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework v5

2009-03-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

Abstract

The WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework (PMF) is an application suite for enterprise metrics management and Business Intelligence (BI). Using PMF, business strategies can be measured and tracked and ‘owners’ are automatically linked to their business objectives. Built entirely on the WebFOCUS BI platform, PMF offers built-in multi-dimensional support. Organisations can benefit from PMF’s rapid start-up and simple customisation capabilities and need not be existing customers as the solution is also offered through an application-limited licence. This means that organisations committed to BI platforms from other vendors can adopt PMF without the need to first deploy WebFOCUS BI. Information Builders continues to excel in Operational Performance Management (metrics, dashboards, and scorecards), and in conjunction with partners is able to address Financial Performance Management too. Pervasive performance management is the mantra of Information Builders and to this end the company places significant emphasis on accessibility and usability. By utilising offline tools, such as interactive PDFs and HTML files, PMF can extend the reach and range of enterprise-wide Performance Management initiatives. An independent software vendor, Information Builders’ core products are the WebFOCUS BI platform and iWay integration software.

Key Findings

Strength

A relatively quick solution to implement and well suited to rapid customisation.
Very strong Operational Performance Management solution.
The PMF application bundle will appeal to medium-sized organisations.
Good use of Web 2.0 technologies and support for mobile/offline working.

Information

Commitment to the WebFOCUS BI stack is not a PMF prerequisite.

Weakness

Still building relationships with major System Integrators and developers.

Look Ahead

Future plans for PMF included integration with industry-specific offerings for Insurance, Healthcare, and Higher Education. New third-party partner solutions are expected for Supply Chain benchmark performance and Budgeting/Consolidation performance.

Read the full Technology Audit on the Butler Group Web site.

ABSTINENCE, WHEN IT COMES TO BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PROJECTS, IS NOT A GOOD IDEA

2009-02-26T12:00:00.000-08:00

The acquisition of Business Objects by SAP and Cognos by IBM has caused a great deal of turbulence in the Business Intelligence (BI) world, and this in turn is having an effect on the BI applications market. However, there is also another reason for the slow-down in this particular market: abstinence.

In a move to differentiate its wares and to extend the reach and range of its BI platforms, vendors in this space have spawned an adjacent market comprised of applications designed to help organisations run their businesses better. One of these application areas – ‘performance management’ – has gained significant momentum over the last four years, with BI (and non-BI) vendors investing heavily in order to secure their share of the market.

Performance management solutions are presented in many different guises: Enterprise Performance Management, Business Performance Management, and Business Performance Software, with Corporate Performance Management (CPM) being Butler Group’s preferred term.

In the current climate, one would have thought that the market for CPM solutions would be booming, as business leaders seek to control their companies and institutions better; but my impression at the moment is that organisations are being ultra cautious in all areas of IT spending, even though CPM should be viewed as a mission-critical business investment project.

Holding-off CPM projects for another year is not really an option in my opinion, as although many factors influence the performance of an organisation, none is more critical than the decisions business users make every day. CPM solutions help individuals make these decisions and enable organisations to answer three key business questions: “how are we doing?”, “why are we doing this?”, and “what should we be doing next?” In terms of CPM offerings, this equates to: score-carding, dashboards, and financial consolidation; reporting and analysis; and planning, budgeting, and forecasting.

Most organisations do of course have systems in place to measure and monitor aspects of business performance, but all too often these systems stop at the finance department. CPM extends this practice to other areas of the business, and provides operational managers and employees with actionable BI, i.e. information that is both relevant and timely.

The current trend towards IT abstinence, i.e. the conserving of expenditure relating to IT projects in order to build up capital or savings, may be damaging to an organisation’s prospects when the global economic slow-down reverses. Cancelling or postponing BI projects in particular can only weaken an organisation’s position with respect to the competition. Organisations must of course be prudent in the current economic climate, but CPM provides a way for organisations to illuminate the business as they search for the light at the end of the tunnel.

Freedom of Speech

2009-02-20T12:00:00.000-08:00

Speech recognition is generally defined as the ability of a machine or computer program to recognise and carry out voice commands or to take dictation. Speech recognition involves the ability to match a voice pattern against a provided or acquired vocabulary. In the early days of speech recognition, systems usually held a very limited vocabulary, as computing resources and the sophistication of the algorithms in use were not what they are today. Now, however, a large vocabulary (200,000+) is provided with most products, and the user can add extra words, phrases, or specialised vocabularies as required.

Research has been carried out for many years, and although commercial products were available, it was not until the 1990s that vendors started to really understand the way this technology could be applied to business processes, usage patterns, and niche requirements in greater detail. It is interesting to note how the cost of this technology has dropped over the years, beginning in 1990 when DragonDictate for DOS was US$9,000 for a single-user licence. By 1997 the price had fallen to around US$1,000, and today Amazon is selling the entry-level version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 for around US$60.

High prices and issues relating to accuracy and usability, i.e. long periods of system ‘training’, meant that the business adoption of desktop speech recognition got off to a very slow start. The market for PC and server-based speech recognition was around the US$60 million mark in 2007, with services bringing the market total up to around US$200 million. Sales were fairly flat before this point, as early adopters found that the technology did not meet their expectations, and hence failed to ‘cross the chasm’ into mainstream use; instead remaining a niche product in specialised markets. It is, perhaps, somewhat ironic to note that one of the key factors for recent sales increases is that of people adopting desktop speech recognition tools to ease computer-related ailments, such as RSI. Previously these solutions were used to help individuals with disabilities or accessibility issues to use a computer.

My own first contact with speech recognition technology came in the mid-1990s when I evaluated an early system from Marconi Speech & Information Systems. I can remember sitting in a quiet office wearing an expensive microphone headset and being asked to read out three digit numbers being displayed on a computer screen. Without any form or training or tuning the system recognised 19 out of 20 numbers – 95% accuracy. However, with the office door and window open this fell to 85% (and I worked in a relatively quiet office building). Even though the technology seemed like magic at the time, the system was a none-starter for the intended warehousing application we had envisaged, as delicate headsets and quiet conditions were quite incongruous with the hostile environment of the factory floor.

So herein is one of the persistent challenges for even today’s speech recognition systems: noise. In order to get reasonable accuracy with speech recognition software it is usually necessary to place the microphone in close proximity to the mouth by wearing a quality headset or using a handheld microphone, and so this immediately precludes the casual use of this technology. Having said that, we are now starting to see array microphones coming down in price (UK£145 excluding VAT), and in some cases appearing in notebook computers. With such devices, users can be located up to two feet away from the microphone and their voices can still be recognised. However, for even greater flexibility, my advice would be to consider an over-the-ear Bluetooth headset. For around UK£150 (excluding VAT), organisations can supply users with a lightweight, high-end, wireless headset that can be used with mobile phones, Internet telephony applications, and speech recognition software.

For some speech recognition scenarios, such as digital dictation, the user need not even be present when their voice is being processed. By recording their voice into a digital recording device (costing approximately UK£100), while either at their desk or on the move, users submit the digital dictation file and have this transcribed by a server, elsewhere, at another time. This does not mean, however, that today’s general purpose speech recognition software can be used to transcribe meetings or interviews, as most products tend to be speaker-dependent, i.e. they are trained to recognise the voice of a single user and cannot distinguish between individuals having a conversation.

The accuracy of speech recognition has improved significantly in recent years, with the market leader in the desktop arena, Nuance, claiming accuracy rates of up to 99% with its latest offering. However, in real life dictation situations, users should expect 3 to 4 errors per minute given the fact that the average person speaks around 130 words per minute. Industry specific vocabularies, and the ability to centrally manage a customer word list, also make applications based on this technology far more usable than was previously the case. The legal and medical professions are especially well catered for in this regard, as off-the-shelf products can be purchased with preconfigured vocabularies of over 30,000 legal specific terms and phrases. In the medical field, tailored speech recognition products are starting to be common place, and are often integrated with Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems.

‘Speech recognition’ is a somewhat generic term, and so it is not uncommon to hear vendors, system integrators, and solution providers using the following terms when describing voice- and speech-based offerings: Speech Synthesis, Intelligent Speech Interpretation, Telephony Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition, Speech Processing, and Voice Processing. The use of so many terms clearly highlights the sophistication of the market, and the range of offerings in this space. Any domain where there is a lot of jargon usually means that there is a services market out there too, and while the overall revenue for desktop speech recognition-based products looks likely to grow by over 20% in the five years, I expect the speech technology market as a whole to grow even more as the technology finds its way into more areas and products.

Despite Microsoft’s efforts in the desktop arena, it was Dragon NaturallySpeaking (sold by Nuance Communications) and ViaVoice from IBM that established speech recognition as a viable business tool. In 2003, IBM gave ScanSoft (which owned the competing product Dragon NaturallySpeaking) exclusive global distribution rights to ViaVoice for the desktop (IBM continues to offer Embedded ViaVoice for use in mobile devices and automotive products). Then, two years later, Nuance Communications merged with ScanSoft to form Nuance.

Despite the dominant position held by Nuance in the speech recognition market, there are several vendors participating in the three main desktop speech recognition markets of dictation, transcription, and command and control (see Figure 2). Dictation is probably the most visible market at present due to the marketing of products such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking. This real-time use of speech recognition has benefited significantly with the advent of faster processors and the introduction of new instruction set innovations by Intel and AMD.

The digital dictation industry has developed through advances in recording devices and is gradually replacing older tape-based recording systems. Now, with digital dictation, the process is much slicker: the dictator speaks into a digital recording device, PC, or even a smartphone; a digital audio file is created; and then this is transferred (if not already there) to a PC via a USB port or wireless connection. Once the file is stored on the computer it can easily be transcribed there and then, or put into a workflow system from where it can be sent via the network to be processed elsewhere. Philips Speech Recognition Systems (acquired by Nuance in September 2008 for €66 million) claims that it can scale to 15,000 users and 1,500 hours dictation throughput per day with its networked-based SpeechMagic offering, and the solution works in Citrix/Microsoft Terminal Server environments too.

Of course, the main challenge for vendors is persuading users that speech recognition has improved in terms of accuracy and latency. This presents a significant challenge for vendors, as they need to prove that speech recognition has matured, and that deployments will provide immediate value to the user rather than being a hindrance to productivity.

As with handwriting recognition, speech recognition technology is maturing rapidly, and software solutions are now industrial-grade. With a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of around 23% between 2008 and 2013 (source: Datamonitor), the desktop speech recognition market looks set to bring this technology to a wider audience. Although Nuance is the headline act of the speech recognition market today, there are other players in the game. IBM, Loquendo, and LumenVox are ingraining their speech recognition engines into the fabric of enterprise applications and IT infrastructures. The keyboard may well become a thing of the past in the years ahead.

dns - dns Managed Security Services

2009-02-12T12:00:00.001-08:00

Abstract

The dns Managed Security Services (dnsMSS) offering is comprised of: managed firewall and Virtual Private Network (VPN), Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) monitoring, e-mail security, vulnerability assessments, identity management, content security, strong authentication, and Security Information and Event (SIEM) monitoring. Security, authentication, and compliance management are expensive and specialised tasks that some organisations prefer to outsource to experts. dns configures and maintains security infrastructure, monitors assets and security threats, generates alerts based on its and the client organisation’s policy (and compliance requirements), and offers 24x7 remediation services through a group of security specialists. Data collection and correlation is performed through a purpose-built device installed within the client organisation’s perimeter that exchanges security information through an encrypted link with dns’ Secure Operations Centre. dns provides a dashboard that reports security threats and service summary in real time and a strong service engagement and governance model. Overall, an impressive and useful managed service offering that will appeal to organisations with challenging security requirements.

Key Findings

Strength

Supports compliance controls for PCI, ISO27001, Memo 22, and SOX.
Dashboard provides information on security threats and compliance status.
Comprehensive coverage of firewall, VPN, and Anti-X solutions and vendors.
Service includes two-factor authentication implementation and management.

Information

Over 70 clients and a service renewal rate of 100%.
Currently shifting focus to companies with 500-10,000 employees.

Weakness

Still low scale, operating in a market with larger potential competitors.
Support for authentication and Unified Threat Management solutions could improve.

Look Ahead

dns plans to improve the dashboard layout while continuing to extend support for security devices. dns is also currently developing its managed unified threat management service.

Read the full Technology Audit on the Butler Group Web site.

Recommind – MindServer Search 6.0

2009-02-12T12:00:00.000-08:00

Abstract

Information workers are becoming engulfed in an avalanche of data: becoming ‘digitally snow blind’ as they stare at endless screens of information, trying to decide which link or which search result will provide them with the information they need to do their job. Enterprise Search enables these users to quickly identity, filter, access, and use the information required to do their tasks. MindServer Enterprise Search combines sophisticated search technology with a simple user interface to provide the user with accurate search results that are relevant to their information requirements. Rules-based access enables organisations to customise results for each user or group of users, giving optimal relevancy for users as well as increased control over the display and ranking of information. MindServer Search addresses a range of business challenges and is especially suited to professional services/legal firms. Recommind is also focusing on pharmaceutical, financial, and consulting organisations. MindServer Search 6.0 introduces a range of enhancements that will appeal to sophisticated and casual users alike. The product supports searching for information both internal and external to the organisation by combining powerful full-text concept search technology with federated (or brokered) search, to surface information in many useful ways. Today, Recommind’s customer base is predominantly that of large US and European law firms and enterprises, but with a fast growing, enterprise-focused sales teams in the UK and US, key channel relationships with major ECM and storage vendors, and a developing partnership in Australia the vertical and international breadth of the client base is fast expanding.

Key Findings

Strength

Full-text concept searching improves end-user search productivity.
Smart filtering provides additional ways to explore search results.
Federated search capabilities extend the reach and range of MindServer.

Information

Recommind recently announced a strategic alliance with Open Text.
Proven integration points with leading Enterprise Content Management solutions.

Weakness

Strong market presence in the US legal market, but relatively weak in other geographies and business sectors.

Look Ahead

In 2009 and into 2010, Recommind intends to continue its 60-80% year-on-year growth rate by focusing on the large enterprise market, and more specifically those large enterprises in the pharmaceutical, financial, banking, professional services, healthcare, and energy sectors.

Read the full Technology Audit on the Butler Group Web site.

Safend - Safend Data Protection Solution

2009-02-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

Abstract

Safend’s Data Protection portfolio of endpoint software security products are designed to protect an organisation’s confidential information from loss and theft by monitoring, detecting, and restricting data transfers to or from Windows-based computers. Any and every digital file type is potentially susceptible to loss or theft as a result of either benign or malignant behaviour. Although Microsoft has introduced some functionality in Windows Vista to address information-security management issues, these facilities generally lack any kind of granularity or operational flexibility, and Windows XP still requires third-party products. Safend Protector, in conjunction with Safend Auditor, Safend Encryptor, and Safend Reporter, addresses a range of security challenges in a cohesive and integrated manner without introducing any unnecessary overhead for the IT department or end user. Safend’s products are for Microsoft Windows-based PCs only, and so organisations will have to look elsewhere for Mac OS X and Linux endpoint security solutions. All companies and institutions should evaluate Safend’s offerings. Those organisations operating under tight regulation and control will find the Safend Solution especially useful in meeting compliance requirements.

Key Findings

Strength

Tamper-resistant code ensures the strongest possible protection.
Extensive testing ensures high levels of interoperability with other applications.
Information security policies can be enforced at a very granular level.
Safend’s advanced technology is well supported by strong management features.

Information

Integrates well with enterprise VPN solutions.
Policies can be deployed through Microsoft Active Directory and Novell eDirectory.

Weakness

Only computers running Microsoft Windows are supported.
No support for 64-bit editions of Windows Vista.

Look Ahead

Safend Encryptor 2.1 will be introduced in Q1, 2009 and offers a Windows Single Sign On feature. In 2009, Safend will introduce Safend Inspector, which is a content-based inspection solution to prevent data leakage through e-mail, IM, Web, external storage, and printers.

Read the full Technology Audit on the Butler Group Web site.

Core Security Technologies - CORE IMPACT Pro v8

2009-01-29T12:00:00.000-08:00

Abstract

CORE IMPACT Pro is an automated penetration testing product that enables organisations to evaluate the security of their servers, desktop systems, end users’ systems, and Web applications by automating tasks that would traditionally require significant time, effort, and expertise to perform. The solution also tests the security infrastructure’s response to attacks on these vectors. The product is based around a proprietary kernel and Python interpreter which runs a wide range of vulnerability exploit scripts. The tool provides a GUI management console from which IT security personnel can configure, run, and analyse penetration tests. The product allows for automated and manual penetration testing and reporting. The offering utilises Crystal Reports for report generation, and a SQL Server Express internal database for storing test data and results. Butler group believes that regular penetration testing should form part of an organisation’s IT Governance and Information Security Management control set, and tools such as CORE IMPACT Pro provide organisations with a repeatable and efficient way of conducting regular security reviews. CORE IMPACT Pro should be of interest to all organisations – especially those operating in regulated markets and/or those likely to be targets of cyber attacks.

Key Findings

Strength

Easy to set up and use, relatively low learning curve.
Solution sold only to legitimate entities; ships with a digital watermark to avoid misuse.

Information

The laptop (or desktop) deployment method may prove limiting for distributed IT infrastructures where a master/slave architecture might perhaps work better.
The product is subscription based, and is regularly updated with vulnerability scripts and system exploits.

Weakness

The product would benefit from integration with application portfolio management solutions to aid business risk assessment.
Integration with IT Service Management/ITIL solutions would enhance this product from an IT management perspective.

Look Ahead

The company plans to unveil an enterprise security offering in the first half of 2010, with some enterprise features appearing in the second half of 2009.

Read the full Technology Audit on the Butler Group Web site.

2009 Trends to Watch - End User Computing

2009-01-23T12:00:00.000-08:00

Whether it was greed, stupidity, or just bad luck that beset some of the most respected companies in 2008, the fallout from these problems will undoubtedly continue to affect all industries and sectors for the foreseeable future. So, what does this mean for your organisation and, in particular, your information workers? Well, with ‘information work’ now consuming in excess of 70% of salaries in developed economies, I believe that the time has come to re-engineer or replace those end user information management systems that were conceived and designed for a different era.

In terms of information processing productivity gains, most businesses and institutions have now captured and automated those core business processes that are capable of being instantiated in computer software, and these organisations are now looking for additional ways to differentiate their products, services, and business models through smarter use of user-oriented information technologies. Moreover, because many CEOs are looking to reduce staffing costs while increasing productivity, the proportion of salaries spent on information work can only increase in my view, and so enterprise end user computing strategies now become of critical importance.

The ‘new world of work’ clearly relies as much on unstructured information as it does structured information, and so as we move through 2009 I expect to see more solution sets that address both of these realms with equal importance. However, weaving together transactional, operational, and ‘transactive’ (pertaining to ‘social memory’) information types is no easy matter, and delivering this in a timely fashion and in a useful format continues to present a real challenge, especially as the worlds of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Business Intelligence (BI) are still far from united. However, there is hope on the horizon in 2009, as recent acquisitions and mergers in the ECM/BI arena hold the promise of some compelling applications, particularly in the area of BI analytics and enterprise search. Indeed, it seems to me that this is the perfect place to start experimenting with enterprise mashups, as analytics and search both lend themselves very well to one-off or short-lived, time-sensitive, situational applications.

Information workers must carry out their tasks and duties in a complex and increasingly regulated world, and so CIOs must find new ways to empower the beleaguered workforce without transferring that burden to an already overstretched IT department. In most circumstances this means delivering more with less, and at a time when the ‘credit-crunch’ is affecting almost every business sector, this means that business leaders must act now rather than later. The business issues that are forcing IT management to re-evaluate their information worker strategies are, of course, many and varied; but a common thread in 2009 will be the management and exploitation of social and transactive information’, i.e. that associated with specific communities of interest, their interactions, and their ‘products’ or output.

Businesses are comprised of systems, processes, and people. In an ideal world, these should combine harmoniously and efficiently within the enterprise, but collision and contention are generally the order of the day with the unfortunate end user typically being caught in the middle. However, things are slowly starting to change. The continued evolution of the consumer-oriented Internet, with its Web 2.0 architectures and models, is starting to have an effect on corporate IT. While the last couple of years have seen some organisations experimenting with Web native ‘social software’ (such as blogs, wikis, and communities), 2009 will see established vendors accelerate their ‘Enterprise Web 2.0’ solutions to market and those Web native vendors will challenge with niche offerings. IBM and Microsoft will continue to dominate the corporate collaboration market during 2009, and as their respective offerings embrace the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, so I expect many organisations will start to examine these offerings more closely.

Although the Web 2.0 movement is ostensibly about the way in which software and information are used, one cannot ignore the changes that are taking place in the world of end-user devices. While the Apple iPhone may have been the ‘gadget’ of 2008, an altogether more interesting device type has been steadily gaining ground: the netbook. Initially targeted at the consumer market, these miniature laptops may well be cheap enough to be bought on a whim, but they are by no means ‘boy’s toys’. With prices hovering around the £300 mark, today’s netbooks pack enough connectivity, functionality, computing power, and battery life to keep the mobile and travelling information worker productive all day long.

Over 2 million netbooks were shipped across EMEA during the third quarter of 2008, and although most of these units were destined for the consumer market, many of them will end up connecting to corporate networks – probably via a 3G dongle or WiFi hotspot – at some point during 2009. Early netbooks were built around less demanding Linux distributions and were targeted at domestic, enthusiast, and educational markets, but now Windows XP-based models are selling like hot cakes. Less expensive than the traditional laptop, and generally more functional than the smartphone or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), Intel Atom-powered netbooks and ‘nettops’ (Intel’s term for desktop variants) look set to enter the enterprise during 2009.

The consumerisation of corporate IT will move up a gear in 2009, and so too will the competition amongst hardware vendors. End user computing and communication devices from established brands, such as Dell, HP, Nokia, and RIM, will come under increasing pressure from innovative new players and platforms, and of course Apple will want to build upon its iPhone success in 2009 too. However, while the attraction of cheaper and ‘cooler’ devices will undoubtedly appeal to those holding IT purchasing budgets and expense accounts, my advice is to consider the full cost of ownership and corporate compatibility of such devices, as this typically dwarfs the cost of hardware purchases or rentals.

One device all enterprises should consider in earnest this year is the device you can’t actually touch, i.e. the virtual PC. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) technology is maturing rapidly – perhaps more so than server virtualisation, but with so many architectures and approaches to choose from, organisations are in danger of adding even more complexity to their IT infrastructures than they have today. As always, Butler Group’s advice in this area is to conduct the relevant analysis and perform due diligence before committing to either a vendor or a VDI computing model.

Windows Vista became broadly available at the beginning of 2007, and a year later in February 2008 it got its first Service Pack. But despite the improved security, increased manageability, and enhanced feature-set of this operating system, large enterprises have, in the main, given Vista a wide berth. However, with ‘Mainstream Support’ of Windows XP coming to an end in April 2009 (‘Extended Support’ continues until 2014), IT managers must define some kind of corporate roadmap for their organisation’s end user computing environment, and so 2009 will see a lot of head scratching. With the Windows 7 Beta (the successor to Windows Vista) already in the public domain, my view is that Microsoft will launch its new operating system before the year is out. As Windows 7 is an incremental upgrade, IT managers with responsibility for end user computing environments and applications should give this release serious consideration, and evaluate the merits and business value it has to offer the organisation.

While it is undoubtedly an organisation’s transactional IT systems that provide the motive force required to compete within a given market, it is the business or institution’s information management and collaboration systems that enable that organisation to perform well by informed judgement, supporting decisions, and actuating strategies. Information management and collaboration technologies continue to be great levellers, as they enable smaller organisations to compete with much bigger companies and, when used effectively, enable larger enterprises to manage and maintain growth, scale, and agility.

Corporate employees now spend more time working on e-mails, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations than anything else, and as a result the number of digital assets that have to be stored, managed, and protected each year is going up and up. This continued proliferation presents something of a challenge for all organisations, as while on the one hand businesses and institutions want to foster a culture of information sharing and reuse, on the other there is a growing need for greater levels of control, compliance, and information governance. Over the next two to three years, business success and survival will depend on the organisation’s ability to exploit the information assets that it holds and the people it employs. With fierce competition across all markets and all sectors, organisations must now consider every tool and technology available.

Unlike 2008, which was the International Year of a root vegetable, i.e. the potato, 2009 is to be the International Year of Astronomy. Four hundred years ago, Galileo Galilei used one of his telescopes to see things that no one else had ever seen. Telescopes are still used today to look into the past as well as the future: astronomers use them to look back into the history of the universe, while military lookouts and commanders use them (in the form of binoculars) to gain advance warning of approaching foe and to see the lie of the land. Information technology is our modern-day equivalent of Galileo’s telescope. Used appropriately and expertly, IT allows the information worker to better understand his or her ‘business universe’. However, if used inappropriately and/or without due care, like looking at the sun through a telescope, then it can lead to temporary – or even permanent – ‘information blindness’. Make sure that 2009 is your Year of the Information Worker.

Weekend Clamour for Windows 7 Release

2009-01-14T12:00:00.000-08:00

Steve Ballmer picked up the baton from Bill Gates last week as he delivered his first keynote speech at the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Las Vegas. Attended by trade and industry professionals, CES is the showcase for all manner of consumer-oriented technology, and this year boasted some 2,700 exhibitors. In his speech, the Microsoft CEO talked about the state of the IT industry and the need for continued innovation. Mr. Ballmer concluded his presentation by informing the audience that the Beta version of Windows 7 – the successor to Windows Vista – would be made available for general public download at the end of the week, and indeed it was… well, kind of.

Microsoft officials initially stated that it would limit the number of Windows 7 Betadownloads to 2.5 million, but after a surge in demand brought Microsoft’s servers to a standstill over the weekend, the company announced that it would offer unlimited downloads of the new operating system until 24 January. The stampede for the Windows 7 Beta clearly caught Microsoft out, but it just goes to show how willing the faithful are to give Microsoft another chance after the disappointment of Windows Vista.

Organisations subscribing to TechNet Plus – Microsoft’s premium resource for IT professionals – have their own route to the Windows 7 Beta code, and so corporate IT departments need not rush to get their hands on the download just yet, but at some point an evaluation must take place.

Microsoft’s current desktop operating system – Windows Vista – became broadly available at the beginning of 2007, and a year later in February 2008 it got its first Service Pack. However, despite improved security, increased manageability, and an enhanced feature-set, large enterprises have, in the main, given Windows Vista a wide berth. But with ‘Mainstream Support’ of Windows XP coming to an end in April 2009 (‘Extended Support’ continues until 2014), IT managers must define some kind of corporate roadmap for their organisation’s end user computing environment, and so 2009 looks like it will be a year of contemplation and consideration for many.

Having downloaded the Beta for myself, I was pleasantly surprised with the installation experience, taking only 25 minutes or so from start to finish. There are even positive reports of users successfully installing the Windows 7 Beta on their MacBook Pros, and so I think we can positively state that Windows 7 looks in good shape for a formal release before year-end.

I’ve not conducted any meaningful testing yet, but I do have one negative comment to make relating to this new operating system, and that has to do with its name. If Microsoft decides to release this offering as Windows 7, then it must change the version number reported by the ‘ver’ command, as currently this returns the value 6.1.7000 (my Windows XP laptop reports 5.1.2600, and my wife’s Vista PC reports 6.0.6001). This must be fixed, as otherwise confusion will ensue.

With the Beta version of Windows 7 now in circulation, my view is that Microsoft will launch its new operating system before the year is out. As Windows 7 is an incremental upgrade, IT managers with responsibility for end user computing environments and applications should give this release serious consideration; evaluating the merits and business value it has to offer the organisation.

LogLogic - LogLogic Release 4.6

2009-01-05T12:00:00.000-08:00

Abstract

LogLogic 4.6 facilitates the collection, analysis, storage, sharing, and reporting of IT system log data thereby enabling it to be actively managed and secured. The introduction of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) regulations have focused attention on many aspects of IT, especially that relating to audit trails. Offered as a range of ‘black box’ appliances, LogLogic has developed this solution with low cost of ownership and ease of implementation and management in mind. Although not suited to every organisation, the appliance option enables IT managers to deploy the solution rapidly across most IT infrastructures. To complement its range of appliances, LogLogic has also developed specific reporting suites for PCI DSS and SOX compliance, as well as other areas of best practice, such as COBIT, ITIL, and ISO 27001 (formerly known as ISO 17799). LogLogic 4.6 should be of interest to any organisation wishing to extract insight and value from its IT system log data, and indeed any organisation struggling to demonstrate compliance or achieve auditor sign-off with SOX, PCI DSS, and other similar industry/government regulations.

Key Findings

Strength

Powerful search user interface enables users to analyse and inspect log files.
Able to be deployed into a distributed enterprise environment.
Role-Based Access Control to log file data through integration with Active Directory.
Backup, restore, and failover features improved with this release.
Good range of pre-defined reports suited to enterprise-regulatory compliance.

Information

Offerings for the enterprise market, mid-market, and Software-as-a-Service.
30 new features introduced with this version.

Weakness

Integration with enterprise backup solutions and Active Directory could be improved.

Look Ahead

Future developments are expected to focus on further integration with Active Directory and better support for enterprise backup solutions.

Read the full Technology Audit on the Butler Group Web site.

ISYS Search Software - ISYS Search Suite Version 9

2008-12-08T12:00:00.000-08:00

Abstract

The ISYS Enterprise Search Suite is comprised of ISYS:desktop, ISYS:web, and ISYS:sdk. Together these offerings address desktop search, Intranet search, and embedded search. The applications can be used together to enable search across individual PCs, file shares, Intranets, external Web sites, and third-party software applications. The solution has several features relevant to its target market, such as multiple querying mechanisms, eDiscovery capabilities, multi-lingual support, results navigation, and post-query processing capabilities. The target market for ISYS Enterprise Search Suite is mid-sized enterprises as well as government, public sector bodies, legal, and law enforcement agencies. The company’s technology has been licensed by a number of Enterprise Content Management vendors, and as such is widely used across all sectors and industries. Parametric search and ‘intelligence clouds’ may be of particular interest to product-specific, information-intensive, procurement-driven organisations.

Key Findings

Strength

Offers multiple query methods: command line, natural language, parametric and/or taxonomic navigation.
ISYS:sdk provides APIs for embedding ISYS Enterprise Search Suite’s functionality within third-party and in-house applications.
Flexible results navigation capabilities and powerful user interface.
Able to index and search across over 200 document formats in 60 languages.

Information

Very powerful search tool, but some users will find the learning curve quite steep.
ISYS:web offers out-of-the-box implementation, accelerating time to value.
ISYS maintains a number of OEM agreements with ECM vendors.

Weakness

The current version does not offer a background/throttled indexing facility.

Look Ahead

Development plans in the pipeline for ISYS include introducing an additional OEM search component as well as vertical applications aimed at their key segments. These are scheduled for 2009.

Read the full Technology Audit at the Butler Group Web site.

ENTERPRISE SEARCH SOLUTIONS TO LIGHTEN THE LOAD?

2008-12-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

Recommind, a provider of enterprise search solutions, recently announced a new offering designed to help organisations explore, preserve, and collect electronically stored information to prepare for and comply with litigation and regulatory investigations.

Data volumes are growing exponentially in many industries, with figures quoted by many organisations as anywhere between 30% and 80% per year reported. End users are either engulfed in ‘an avalanche’ of data, or are becoming ‘digitally snow blind’ as they stare at endless screens of information; trying to decide which link or which search result will provide them with the information they need to make that important business decision or to answer a customer query.

Furthermore, the ability to manage, locate, search, collect, and review data for e-discovery purposes – i.e. any process in which electronic data is sought, located, secured, and searched with the intent of using it as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case – continues to grow in importance, as organisations are asked to provide evidence of good corporate governance or company executives seek to defend their decisions in an increasingly litigious world. Although compliance continues to grab the headlines in the business world, organisations are finding that e-discovery is a far more difficult challenge. Research from the US suggests that in 2007 enterprises spent twice as much on electronic discovery than on Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance.

Another trend affecting organisations is that of demographics. Businesses and institutions are witnessing the departure of their most knowledgeable employees, i.e. the leading edge of the baby boomer generation, just when they need them most. Having worked through the recessions of the mid 1970s, early 1980s, and early 1990s, this important workforce demographic is withdrawing from the workplace and is taking the greatest part of their tacit knowledge and expertise with them. Enterprise social media, such as blogs and wikis, are one way of capturing that which might otherwise be lost, but enterprise search facilities enable organisations to remain competitive by uncovering the documented know-how of a generation.

With around 60% to 70% of salaries – and even more in some business sectors – spent on information work according to government figures, one can quickly gauge the business value of enterprise search solutions if they were to improve the effectiveness of information work by only 1%. Perhaps this is why no other information technology category has proved more popular than information search and retrieval solutions. Indeed, the ‘hottest’ company on the planet, Google, is testament to the fact that search has become an integral part of our daily lives, and so organisations must meet and exceed user expectations in this area, as well as meeting ever more complex business needs.

With the economic slowdown affecting more industries and sectors, organisations must do all they can to optimise information worker productivity while cutting cost from information intensive business processes. Moreover, with the threat of investigation or litigation ever present, organisations must consider the potential savings of enterprise search solutions against that of continuing with costly manual processes.

ORACLE RE-EMPHASISE ITS ENTERPRISE 2.0 CREDENTIALS

2008-11-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

Last week, a year on from staking a claim on the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ landscape, Oracle sought to re-emphasise its credentials by briefing analysts and customers on its progress to-date.

In some circles, the terms ‘Enterprise Web 2.0’ and ‘Enterprise 2.0’ are used interchangeably to describe the application of Web 2.0 ideas and technologies within the enterprise. However, I believe that a clear distinction exists between the use of these two terms, and that this differentiation is important to maintain going forward, as it enables more meaningful discussions to be had when examining the future role of IT within the business.

Building on the somewhat vague and yet particular usage of the term ‘Web 2.0’, ‘Enterprise Web 2.0’ describes a fresh, and some would say new, approach to the design and provision of business applications that incorporates aspects such as social networking, collaboration, and real-time communication. In addition, Enterprise Web 2.0 places more emphasis on the user’s ‘experience’ or ‘joy of use’ – something of a novelty in enterprise IT these days. By comparison, when I think about Enterprise 2.0, my mind is focusing on the composition and architecture of the IT ecosystem, and the associated business models that will support Enterprise Web 2.0 applications. Oracle’s decision to use the tag of Enterprise 2.0 sits comfortably with Butler Group’s terminology, as for the most part Oracle’s primary offerings sit at the infrastructure layer.

Viewed from the perspective of a potential customer, Oracle’s recent acquisition spree has left it with a number of overlapping products, solutions, and technologies in this area. Last week’s briefing therefore provided the company with an opportunity to reposition and re-emphasis its strategy.

Oracle has clearly been busy these past 12 months as evidenced by the release of several offerings that bring the power of Web 2.0 technologies to the enterprise. The company now offers a growing range of integrated tools and services for delivering ‘context-aware’ applications, effectively collaborating, and simplifying the management and archiving of unstructured content, i.e. the products and technologies previously associated with Plumtree, BEA, and Stellent, all of which have now been subsumed by Oracle.

Oracle WebCenter Suite (one of four portal offerings from Oracle) provides the foundation for the company’s Enterprise 2.0 strategy. This user interaction and portal platform can be used to support and integrate ad hoc and structured business processes, and is also suited to custom and packaged enterprise applications.

Oracle’s new collaboration platform – Oracle Beehive – is an open platform for integrated and secure collaboration, and marks Oracle’s third attempt to break into the enterprise collaboration market. Oracle recently acquired the intellectual property assets of California-based Tacit Software for an undisclosed sum to expand its collaboration platform, and so it will be interesting to see where this takes Oracle.

It is clearly a mistake to think that Web 2.0 is all about technology, and likewise Enterprise Web 2.0; but it is also a mistake to dismiss the technology altogether. Selecting and implementing enterprise social software solutions, next generation collaboration solutions, and Rich Internet Applications requires careful thought, consideration, and planning; and so organisations must now consider Oracle’s credentials and capabilities along with those of its competitors in this important new area.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH

2008-11-19T12:00:00.000-08:00

Nuance, the largest global speech recognition vendor, recently acquired Philips Speech Recognition Systems (PSRS) for €66 million (roughly US$96 million). The deal makes Nuance an up-and-coming player in the enterprise space, especially where speech technology is concerned. The acquisition of PSRS complements the company’s imaging solutions and its market-leading desktop speech recognition solution: Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Indeed, the company now appears to have somewhat cornered the market, as it also owns global distribution rights to ViaVoice – the product developed by IBM.

Speech-based transcription, dictation, and translation capabilities have improved markedly over the past decade due to refined algorithms, increased computational power, and general advancements in digital audio and recording equipment. As a result, desktop speech recognition technology now promises to enhance the productivity and effectiveness of the workforce not only in niche markets (including meeting disability needs under the Disability Discrimination Act in the UK or ‘Section 508’ in the US), but also in the more general areas of office/process automation and multimodal applications. In addition, speech recognition is appearing in automotive systems, customer service solutions, and in an increasing array of consumer products such as mobile phones ― Yahoo! Go version 3.0 for Nokia Series 60-based mobile devices offers the user a voice interface to search the Web, and Google is offering something similar for the Apple iPhone.

The accuracy of speech recognition has improved significantly in recent years, with the market leader in the desktop arena, Nuance, claiming accuracy rates of up to 99% with its latest offering. However, in real-life dictation situations, users should expect three to four errors per minute, given the fact that the average person speaks around 130 words per minute. Industry-specific vocabularies, and the ability to centrally manage a customer word list, also make applications based on this technology far more usable than was previously the case. The legal and medical professions are especially well catered for in this regard, as off-the-shelf products can be purchased with preconfigured vocabularies of over 30,000 legal-specific terms and phrases. In the medical field, tailored speech recognition products are starting to be commonplace, and are often integrated with Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems.

Despite Microsoft’s efforts in the desktop arena, it was Dragon NaturallySpeaking (sold by Nuance Communications) and ViaVoice from IBM that established speech recognition as a viable business tool. In 2003, IBM gave ScanSoft (which then owned the competing product Dragon NaturallySpeaking) exclusive global distribution rights to ViaVoice for the desktop (IBM continues to offer Embedded ViaVoice for use in mobile devices and automotive products) then, two years later, Nuance Communications merged with ScanSoft to form Nuance.

Moving from the desktop to become a component of enterprise IT infrastructures is always a challenge for vendors, but the acquisition of PSRS gives Nuance an invaluable ‘leg-up’. The brochure for PSRS SpeechMagic claims that the solution can scale to 15,000 users and 1,500 hours dictation throughput per day. Moreover, the solution works in Citrix/Microsoft Terminal Server environments, and so we could well see more speech technology-based solutions entering the workplace over the next couple of years as synergies appear from complementary offerings.

Although Nuance is the headline act of the speech recognition market today, there are other players in the game. IBM, Loquendo, and LumenVox are ingraining their speech recognition engines into the fabric of enterprise applications and IT infrastructures, and so Nuance will have to transform its view of the world if it is to compete against these vendors. One possible course of action would be for Nuance to offer its entry-level speech recognition technology free-of-charge to consumers, thereby priming the enterprise market as users take the technology into the workplace. As a result, the keyboard could well become a thing of the past as we move towards the era of the multimodal computer interface; one can never know.

MICROSOFT PLANS TO MOVE OFFICE TO THE CLOUD

2008-11-14T12:00:00.000-08:00

With the announcement of Office 14 for the Web at its recent Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft has fired a salvo across the bows of Adobe, Google, Zoho, and other desktop-apps wannabes, as it plans to offer users familiar tools that will allow them to create, edit, and collaborate online.

Office Web applications are lightweight, cross-platform, cross-browser, Web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and are intended to share the same general look and feel of their traditional desktop counterparts. Although there are several Web-based offerings on the market today from a variety of sources, Microsoft will be hoping that the familiarity, deployment options, and synergies with other Microsoft technologies will add to the general appeal of this particular ‘software plus services’ strategy.

A surprise member of Microsoft’s initial Office for the Web family is OneNote – a note-taking and information-management program. OneNote is designed to capture ideas, thoughts, and information on a digital free-form surface. With powerful and flexible information-sharing capabilities (including a peer-to-peer option), OneNote is good example of a social and collaborative application, and so the transition to the Web should work well. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft’s hitherto ‘non-social’ applications (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) take on the new collaborative capabilities slated for this release, as although Microsoft Word has been with us for well over 20 years (the DOS version was released in the early 1980s), it is still ostensibly a standalone, rather than a collaborative, application.

The delivery and commercial models for these new Web-based office applications are as expected: an ad-supported version for the consumer (via Office Live), and a hosted, i.e. cloud-based, subscription service for businesses. Enterprises will also be offered an on-premises option, using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server as the deployment platform.

Microsoft has also announced mobile versions of these applications. This would allow users to access their documents ‘on-the-hoof’ as it were via their mobile phones, thereby covering all three bases: desktop, browser, and mobile. Microsoft has yet to state whether the applications will be accessible through gaming consoles – an as yet untapped sector of the market in my opinion. By exploiting both Silverlight (Microsoft’s new Web and mobile runtime environment for Rich Internet Applications) and Ajax technologies, Microsoft says that its Office Web applications will be able to run on a variety of platforms and browsers.

From an end user point of view, one might expect an online version of Word, PowerPoint, or Excel to be very appealing; but as relatively few organisations have made the leap to Office 2007, the unfamiliar look and feel of Office 14 for the Web might work against Microsoft in the early days. Of course there is an argument to suggest that these Web-based offerings might, in fact, kick-start a general migration towards Office 14 from earlier versions, but this will be dependent upon Microsoft producing a palatable set of applications that look and feel more like the versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that most of us are used to.

Microsoft was always going to bring its Office applications to the Web, but the issue of ‘when’ was always going to be a commercial issue rather than a technical one. If we assume that Office accounts for around 20% of revenues (which were in excess of US$50 billion in 2007), then 2010 could be a very interesting year financially for Microsoft, as it seeks to drive US$10 billion worth of revenue from its Office-related software and services. With online advertising revenues faltering, and ‘cloud economics’ generally pointing towards lower profit margins, Microsoft’s days of ‘printing money’ might well be coming to an end.

IBM - Lotus Notes and Domino v8

2008-11-05T12:00:00.002-08:00

Abstract

The Eclipse-based IBM Lotus Notes and Domino v8 suite extends the familiar Notes solution set to an integrated collaboration platform, incorporating access to document creation, document management, project management, and custom composite applications. Composite applications can be developed by combining Eclipse and Notes applications as components; templates can be developed for business managers to drive business process; and the provisioning and management of the offering is all server-based. IBM has focused a great deal of attention on a smooth upgrade process. Different versions can coexist within an organisation and upgrades can skip versions between 6.5 and 8. Importantly, all existing Notes applications will work on version 8. IBM has introduced a new tabbed User Interface, and a slew of impressive e-mail management features. Overall, version 8 is a strong step forward, and existing customers will appreciate many of the improvements. Lotus Notes/Domino continues to be an impressive and feature-rich enterprise collaboration platform, and in Butler Group’s opinion this offering has the potential to boost productivity and enhance the end user collaboration experience if deployed alongside other Lotus products. The additional functionality offered by the Notes client increases the in-memory footprint of this application compared to previous versions. Version 8.5 is now entering its ‘beta’ phase, and so organisations should consider the additional features offered by this version before embarking on any upgrade or migration project.

Key Findings

Strength

Different versions of the product can co-exist and upgrades can be from 6.5 to 8.
Provides Domino Express and Lotus Foundation for SMEs.
Lotus Quickr Entry and Lotus Sametime Entry are included.
Components (Eclipse and Notes) can be combined to create composite applications.
UI integrates IM, document management, and project management into the same view even with a Web browser.

Information

Version 8.5 might be a more attractive option for organisations looking to switch from legacy e-mail systems.
Lotus Connections, a separately licensed product, provides enterprise social networking facilities, and is well worth considering alongside Lotus Notes and Domino.

Weakness

The standard Notes client has a big in-memory footprint, and might warrant hardware revamp. A ‘basic’ Notes 8 client installation caters to less powerful PCs.

Look Ahead

The planned enhancements for future versions include reduction in space taken by file attachments, Notes ID vault, and iPhone support. Full support for Active Directory is anticipated for 2009.

Read the full Technology Audit on the Butler Group CIO Knowledge Center.

THINKING ABOUT WEB 3.0

2008-10-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

The term ‘Web 2.0’ has been with us for some considerable time if one thinks about it in terms of ‘Internet years’, and so with some inevitability the phrase ‘Web 3.0’ is starting to be discussed by futurologists and industry observers. Views and opinions on the future shape of the World Wide Web already vary quite widely, with some describing it in technological terms, while others describe it in more commercial or social terms. Nobody knows for certain what the future Web will look like or will do, but an observable set of trends does provide us with some indication of direction and velocity.

The past does not necessarily help us predict the future where the Web is concerned, and so any view expressed is purely speculation at this point. Having said that, a search for ‘Web 3.0’ on Google results in 2,210,000 hits at the time of writing (compared with 89,700,000 hits for the term ‘Web 2.0’), and so obviously a significant number of people are thinking and talking about it. Indeed, Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, comes at the top of my Google search with the following definition: “Web 3.0 means seamless, anytime, anywhere business, entertainment and social networking over fast, reliable, and secure networks”.

As with Web 2.0, definitions and explanations of what Web 3.0 is, or will be, abound. The Web’s inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has his own views on Web 3.0, but the interesting thing for me are the principles and values he holds for the Web – whatever suffix is added to it. In an educational hearing before the United States House of Representatives, Mr. Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, summed up his view on the future of the World Wide Web by saying: “We [need to] ensure that both technological protocols and social conventions respect basic values. That [the] Web remains a universal platform, independent of any specific hardware device, software platform, language, culture, or disability. That the Web does not become controlled by a single company or a single country.”

Laudable though these values are, the future shape and nature of the Web is clearly going to be determined by the people who use it; so who are these people and what uses do they have in mind? To start with, the demographics of the Web are already changing rapidly, as hitherto disconnected peoples join the community. If we consider Great Britain, for example, where 65% of households have Internet access according to the Office for National Statistics, then the 34 million adults accessing the Web on a regular basis are dwarfed by the fast growing developing economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) where over 100 million (and growing fast) users now connect on a regular basis.

If one carries the comparison over into the mobile market then the difference in Web usage patterns are even more marked. The BRIC economies are expected to account for over 1.3 billion mobile subscribers by the end of 2008, and a substantial proportion of these will use their mobile devices to access the Web sites. If one drills down further to examine the most popular Web site categories, then games and general entertainment come top of the list for Russia, India, and China, whereas e-mail tops the list for the US, Europe, and Brazil. These differences suggest that future mobile Web developments may be centered more on media and entertainment than productivity and business-centric use-cases.

The Web, and the Internet upon which it depends, are changing the way we work, rest, and play; but even though this construct is a man-made one, our actual understanding of the nature of this phenomena is surprisingly poor. In many ways the Web is like a complex living organism, in that it consumes resources, grows, and even dies (i.e. bits of it get switched off), and is now deemed worthy of study in its own right. The goal of Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), an organisation established by MIT and the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, is to make possible and deliver the fundamental scientific advances necessary to inform the future design and use of the World Wide Web.

I hope that through WSRI’s work we will be better placed to engineer the Web’s future and to also ensure the social benefit to all of Web 3.0; but there is one thing you can almost certainly count on: Web 3.0 will be more disruptive than Web 2.0.

TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE

2008-09-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

Last month I came back from a business trip to the US to find that, unbeknown to me, my all-singing, all-dancing Nokia 95 had run-up a UK£60 data roaming charge with my mobile operator. As I could not account for this data usage, and as this was my personal mobile phone, I decided to investigate further…

Today’s high-end mobile phones are more like pocket computers than telephones, in that they connect to the Internet for e-mail, Web browsing, Instant Messaging, and more. Like a growing number of ‘smartphones’, my Nokia N95 has built-in Global Positioning System (GPS) functionality, which in conjunction with the Nokia Maps application (supplied with the phone), also generates Internet traffic as it communicates with a ‘positioning server’ (part of the Assisted GPS feature) and downloads mapping data.

Before I go any further, I must point out that I am generally quite happy with my mobile operator (Hutchinson 3G), and that I seldom have need to contact the customer service centre. On this occasion however, my ‘experience’ was less than satisfactory, and for no other reason than the fact that I was, and still am, unable to discuss my issue with all of the relevant departments (billing, technical support, and customer services) at the same time.

If my experiences are anything to go by, nine out of ten calls to a customer service centre usually result in a satisfactory outcome; but every now and then an issue arises that results in my call being passed from one department to another, with me having to act as the go-between or liaison person. While this particular issue relates to my mobile phone service, I’ve had similar experiences with my broadband provider, bank, and local authority.

Two heads are usually better than one when it comes to problem solving, as one person cannot be expected to have all of the knowledge to address every conceivable issue; and yet today’s customer service centres appear unable to facilitate this kind of interaction.

In this particular instance, the billing department had access to the call log, but could not tell me what application on my phone was connecting and sending/receiving data every minute for a six-hour period (56KB every minute for six hours = 20MB x UK£3.00 per MB = UK£60). The technical department had plenty of knowledge about my phone, but could not look at the call log/billing information, and was unable to tell me if the Assisted GPS feature on my phone was the culprit. The customer service centre did its best to orchestrate the different departments, but they did not really understand the nature of the problem, as they had not come across it before. And so we just seem to go round and round in circles.

Being a tech-savvy user, I checked the roaming charges that applied to my particular mobile service and tariff before I went on my trip, and as a result I did not use my phone to access the Web or e-mail. Also, with the help of a Freeware program (LogExport from compactbyte.com) I was able to examine in detail my mobile phone log for the trip, and so was able to uncover information that is typically obscured from most users.

Despite half a dozen calls to my mobile operator, this particular matter has yet to be resolved. In part this is due to the complex nature of today’s mobile phones, their applications, and billing arrangements; but it doesn’t help when you can’t talk to the right group of people. A seemingly complex problem can often be simplified when the right people get together, so surely customer contact centres must be able to facilitate this? As for mobile operators; well, they need to understand and appreciate that they’re now in the PC support, ISP, and media delivery business.

Partners in IT - IT Service Management Blueprint

2008-09-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Abstract

The IT Service Management (ITSM) Blueprint is a service suite comprising an assessment of the ITSM maturity, a set of ITIL-based processes, detailed tool configurations, workshop-based training, and post implementation monitoring. The service set is aimed at developing the business case, securing buy-in, and closely linking best practice methodology-based processes with solution configuration. A lot of organisations struggle with ITIL adoption because of challenges associated with establishing and communicating ROI, securing buy-in, and lack of internal expertise and management bandwidth to execute and manage the implementation. Partners in IT uses its considerable consulting experience to address each of the aforementioned concerns, with a particular focus on linking best practice processes with detailed tool configurations that facilitate automation of best practice adherence. In addition, Butler Group is impressed with the modular nature of services that allow a phased approach, and also the focus on workshops and related documentation that would be crucial for knowledge transfer. Overall, Butler Group believes that the offering is an attractive proposition for mid-sized enterprises, and should be engaged with controls that would be necessary for any consulting engagement: namely, tight scope definition and focus on knowledge transfer.

Key Findings

Strength

Provides detailed service lifecycle processes aligned with the ITIL v3.
Provides a fixed-price ITSM maturity review service.
The service suite is modular and can be engaged in a phased manner.
Detailed processes mapped to tool configurations facilitate compliance.

Information

Also provides ITSM support services, such as patch management and KPI monitoring.
In operation for 12 years, with 60 customers including a few in the Fortune 500.

Weakness

Coverage of vendors limited to HP and BMC, with a strong focus on HP.
The offering is largely confined to the UK and its scalability is linked to the number of consultants employed.

Look Ahead

The market for ITIL-based professional services is growing rapidly as IT departments mature and IT governance features more heavily in corporate strategies. Partners in IT will seek to grow its customer base in line with this burgeoning market over the coming months, and as ITIL v3 gains importance, so Partners in IT will align its service offerings more closely with this framework.

Read the full Technology Audit on the Butler Group Web site.

Inovis - Inovisworks – Business Community Management

2008-08-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

Abstract

Business Community Management (BCM) is a Business-to-Business (B2B) offering from Inovis, aimed at reducing the complexity of managing the supply chain. It is comprised of individually licensable components that can be delivered as traditional on-premises software, through Software as a Service (SaaS), or as a managed service through Inovisworks. Inovis BCM provides a secure communications layer to transport standardised electronic documents either as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) or in multiple other formats, and also provides real-time visibility into the trading partner network. The core underlying technology, and one of the most important components of the Inovisworks offering, is the Value Added Network (VAN) which provides electronic mailboxing services to facilitate communication between an organisation and its supply chain. The managed service is delivered through a high availability Multi-enterprise Expert Services Hub (MESH) platform designed to operate at 100% availability and is supported by fault tolerant data centres that are designed to operate at 99.995% availability. Large enterprises with complex supply chains should investigate this offering further.

Key Findings

Strength

Provide a real-time view of interactions within the supply chain.
Support for a wide variety of security and file transfer standards and protocols.
Support for a variety of document exchange formats as well as EDI.
Advanced analytics capabilities provided by modules within ‘Actionable Intelligence’.
Data centre designed to operate at 99.995% availability.

Information

Multiple delivery models for BCM.
Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) based offering.

Weakness

No user interface for mobile devices.

Look Ahead

Planned future enhancements include the addition of modules to the Actionable Intelligence layer.

Read the full Technology Audit on the Butler Group Web site.

PAPER-BASED COMPUTING MAY WELL BE THE FUTURE

2008-08-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

I’m a big fan of PDAs, laptops, and smartphones, but like most of you reading this article, I tend to use good old-fashioned pen and paper when taking notes in meetings. I’ve tried to adapt my meeting style to better suit digital devices, even trying out a tablet PC for a while, but I keep returning to pen and paper because of its form factor and convenience ... until now!

The problem with traditional pen and paper is that handwritten notes, stored in say an A4 notebook, are not readily searchable, and sharing them electronically with colleagues is not very easy either, unless one involves a cumbersome scanning processes. Furthermore, paper-based notes tend to get lost or damaged over time, and because we seldom create ‘backups’, important information can be lost for ever.

My own preference for the mighty quill has led me to consider various digital pen solutions over the last couple of years or so, but these have proved to be either too expensive or too impractical for my particular needs. With the technology tantalisingly close, I was hoping that the fast-paced consumer electronics market would deliver an innovative digital pen solution into my hands before the end of the decade, and I’m pleased to report that this has now happened.

The ‘Pulse’ smartpen from Livescribe uses a 32-bit, 150MHz, Samsung ARM 9 processor to capture and store cursive handwriting, drawings, and audio. Available only in the US and on the Windows platforms at present, the company is targeting students, journalists, and the general consumer market. The current offering ships with MyScript handwriting recognition technology from VisionObjects, so users can search notes easily and quickly. Livescribe has also developed a ‘community’ Web site which allows registered users to upload and share their captured content.

Based on a technology reference platform licensed from Anoto, a Swedish company specialising in digital pen and paper technology, Livescribe joins a small band of companies developing products and solutions in this area, with Logitech perhaps being the most active with its io2 Digital Pen. While it is Anoto’s technology that allows quick and reliable transmission of handwritten text from paper to digital media, it is the innovation from its partners that is attracting attention in both consumer and business markets.

Digital pen-and-paper solutions have been developed for vertical markets for a number of years. The technology has been put to use in warehouses and distribution centres, healthcare, education, and government markets (including public voting systems). Field-force automation solutions are another large market for this technology.

An increasing number of solution providers are adapting existing paper-based forms to take advantage of smartpen technology, and many of these utilise the reach and range of mobile phone networks to transmit information back to central systems. Livescribe itself is preparing to launch a multi-tiered toolset later this year, thereby turning the Pulse smartpen into a ‘paper-based computing platform’. Livescribe plans to ship the Livescribe Application Workshop, Content Development Kit (CDK), and Software Development Kit (SDK) by the end of 2008.

It sounds like a rather incongruous phrase, but paper-based computing may well be the future for a large volume of mobile and field-based computing. The quill appeared in 700 AD, the ballpoint pen in 1938 AD, so we’re probably due another evolutionary step right about now.

THINKING ABOUT ENTERPRISE 2.0 AND ENTERPRISE WEB 2.0

2008-08-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

The term ‘Enterprise 2.0’ has become the catch-all phrase that describes the wholesale shift in enterprise IT thinking. Driven by changing business needs and social factors, organisations are starting to do things differently. Speed, agility, mobility, reuse, and innovation are the transformative drivers that are forcing organisations to push aside old technologies, models, and architectures to make way for the new Web 2.0 world of service oriented, highly virtualised, truly commoditised, and eventually ‘utilitised’ systems and solutions.

Vendors and commentators have been appending the ‘2.0’ suffix to all manner of enterprise products and domains over the last year or so in an attempt to signify something new, innovative, and user-focused. The terms ‘BI 2.0’, ‘ERP 2.0’, and ‘CRM 2.0’ have all been used in some way or another to imply ‘next generation’ or ‘leading-edge’, but the term ‘Web 2.0’ remains the touchstone of the IT industry, and use of the term by the IT cognoscenti when discussing a product or service usually infers particular value or importance.

In some circles, the terms ‘Enterprise Web 2.0’ and ‘Enterprise 2.0’ are used interchangeably to describe the application of Web 2.0 ideas and technologies in the enterprise; however, Butler Group believes that a clear distinction exists between the use of these two terms, and that this differentiation is important to maintain, as it enables a more meaningful discussion to be had when examining the future role of IT within the business. We’ve been here once before, of course, with the words ‘Web’ and ‘Internet’ being used interchangeably, and this still causes confusion today when IT professionals have conversations with their business counterparts.

Building on the somewhat vague and yet particular usage of the term ‘Web 2.0’, ‘Enterprise Web 2.0’ describes a fresh, and some would say new, approach to application architectures and programming models. In addition, Enterprise Web 2.0 focuses a great deal of attention on the user’s ‘experience’ or ‘joy of use’ – something of a novelty in enterprise IT these days. However, when Butler Group talks about ‘Enterprise 2.0’, we are focusing on the architecture and composition of the IT infrastructure that will support Enterprise Web 2.0 applications.

Because we live in a world of attention grabbing headlines, marketing hype, and industry jargon, there is a tendency within the IT community to over simplify the language we use in order to get the message out to a broader audience or when speaking to the layman. Unfortunately, however, this often results in confusion and misunderstanding further down the line when we need to talk about the substance or detail of a particular matter relating to the business use of IT. Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise Web 2.0 and are going to crop up in a lot of conversations over the coming months, therefore Butler Group would argue for clarity over simplicity this time around, as Business 2.0 will depend on IT.

Coping With SharePoint - Part 2

2008-07-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Last month, in the first part of my ‘Coping with SharePoint’ article, I wrote about the rising popularity of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0, and also how this free offering from Microsoft differs from its portal product – Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. Prompted by discussions with organisations running WSS and MOSS, this article will look at SharePoint security; information ownership and stewardship issues; archiving and compliance requirements; deployment options; and the need for a nominal SharePoint exit strategy.

Although the SharePoint brand has been around for quite some time, the technologies on which WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 are built are quite different to early versions. Today, WSS sits atop ASP.NET 2.0, Internet Information Services (IIS), and Microsoft SQL Server. In addition, a set of functional software components called Web Parts are included, and the standard installation includes site templates for blogs, wikis, document workspaces, meeting workspaces, etc.*

While WSS is primarily used at team and departmental levels, MOSS is aimed squarely at the corporate portal market. Recognising the fact that WSS and MOSS are being used to store and disseminate critical business information, Microsoft has tightened up all of the server security components of its solution. However, IT managers should be mindful of the fact that SharePoint security can become complex, especially when server farms become involved; and so IT departments should consider the possible implications of this from the very beginning. In addition, it is not uncommon for global organisations to have multiple SharePoint domains, and so security issues must be considered from this vantage point if there is to be any cross-domain content access or integration.

As with any server infrastructure, SharePoint security must start at the physical level, with access to servers restricted to authorised staff only. At the team or project level, it is particularly tempting to site a SharePoint server either in the corner of the office or under a desk. Indeed, from personal experience I know that many project teams do this before switching the coffee machine on, as WSS is seen by many project managers as a replacement for the classic file server, and so will be part of the ‘standard setup’. However, as this is how server sprawl often starts, I would advise organisations to adopt a tough stance on such practices, by insisting that all servers are located in an appropriately controlled and managed location.

One aspect of SharePoint deployments that appears to be overlooked more than most is the role played by the underlying database engine. All data, including documents, lists, Web Parts, and content, is stored in a SQL Server database format. By storing the data in this repository, WSS and MOSS instantly inherit important availability, reliability, and performance options; but it is easy to forget that this back-end data store needs careful management.

Because WSS 3.0 can be installed and configured relatively easily using the Windows Internal Database, or the free-to-use SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, there is every possibility that an unmanaged WSS site will require DBMS administration support skills at some point. Unfortunately, however, DBAs will find that many of their enterprise SQL Server tools offer little or no use when dealing with the Windows Internal Database, and so IT managers must together assess the pros and cons of the various database options before going live with SharePoint.

Microsoft’s products are, generally speaking, relatively easy to install and configure, and SharePoint is no exception. While this is a boon to small organisations with little or no IT expertise, it also introduces risk to the business, as now important documents and lists are likely to be stored in a sophisticated system with little or no proactive administration. Large organisations can also be at risk, especially if branch offices and off-site project teams take it upon themselves to install WSS, and so IT managers must insist that all SharePoint instantiations are duly authorised before they go into any kind of production environment.

For those organisations considering Windows Server 2008, this operating system now supports a separate server role of WSS, and so this is likely to provide the most secure deployment option for new SharePoint deployments going forward. As a final note on SharePoint security, I would advise administrators to download and regularly run the Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System. Results from this tool will highlight inconsistencies, errors, and warnings based on Microsoft best practices, resulting in fewer problems in the long run.

In the days of network file shares and fragmented Intranets, information ownership and stewardship always presented challenges to large organisations. One would have thought, therefore, that deploying SharePoint would resolve these issues, providing as it does a central repository for unstructured information. It seems that problems do still persist in this area. The nature of the problem has changed however, as organisations now appear to be falling foul of ‘portal-blindness’ – a condition whereby the portal itself, rather than the content within the portal, dominates information management and collaboration projects.

This is not a problem specific to Microsoft’s portal offerings per se, but the signs of SharePoint server sprawl are there to see, and if this gives rise to multiple MOSS deployments, then corporate information managers could suddenly find themselves dealing with access and integration issues, as each part of the organisation initiates its own portal project. There is no simple answer to this particular challenge, but adopting an approach similar to that of the Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C) could help organisations, as it seems to be working for the Web at large.

When it comes to unstructured information management systems, archiving is nearly always the last thing to be considered – if indeed it is ever considered at all. This is ironic in a way, as the business case for many SharePoint investments is predicated on the storage and cost benefits associated with the removal of file attachments from e-mail messages. Compliance is closely linked with information archiving, and here again many organisations seem to have a blind-spot when it comes to SharePoint, with WSS being the primary area of neglect. Item-level backup and recovery, archiving, compliance, and auditing are all interrelated, and so IT and business managers should consider very carefully how they are going to manage information held in SharePoint in the longer term.

SharePoint information lifecycle management becomes even more critical when considering MOSS, as it is more of a platform than a product. MOSS offers Document Management, Records Management, and Web Content Management facilities, and so a sophisticated archiving and compliance strategy is required to mitigate business risk. Simply backing up the underlying SQL Server database does not constitute an effective archiving solution.

Regulated companies and institutions must prepare for investigative requests pertaining to documents, information, and data held within their SharePoint repositories. Although the search technology found within SharePoint can help to some extent, organisations should not rely solely on this. However, as relatively few organisations have a holistic archiving solution in place today, I foresee problems ahead for some organisations as they try to respond for information disclosure and discovery requests. Corporate compliance officers should investigate now the pros and cons of specialised SharePoint archiving products and compare them against those offerings which adopt a broader archiving approach.

If what you have read so far is curbing your enthusiasm for SharePoint, then perhaps you need to think a little more about the deployment options. Traditionally, portals and collaboration systems have been on-premise systems: installed, configured, and maintained by the organisation’s IT department in a corporate data centre. However, things are changing in this area, especially with the advent of Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Internet hosting, and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Although no distinct market appears yet to have formed, there is some evidence to suggest that MSPs are extending deeper into the Microsoft applications market. To date, most Microsoft-centric MSPs offerings have centred on infrastructure components and on systems such as Microsoft Exchange. However, as the market becomes crowded, leading players are looking to differentiate themselves by offering additional services around SharePoint. While not suited to every organisation, working with an MSP can deliver significant benefits without the usual tie-ins of a big outsourcing contract.

Internet hosting is another viable option, particularly when it comes to using WSS. Providers are packaging WSS 3.0 in a variety of formats and at different rates, and so choice is very much an attraction here. Indeed, with some providers offering an ‘Enterprise Plan’ (200 user accounts and 2 GB of storage) with five-nine availability at UK£35.95 per month, one would have to provide some solid business reasoning not to take up such an offer. Of course there are plenty of valid reasons for keeping SharePoint in house – data protection, business application integration, and compliance legislation to name but a few – but for mid-sized, fast growing organisations, SaaS and hosted services present a real attraction.

Whether or not an organisation decides to opt for SharePoint as a service or not, one final aspect must be considered: the SharePoint exit strategy. Exit strategies should be considered for various reasons – some technical, some political, some financial – but the fundamental reason relates to that of information lock-in. All too often, organisations find themselves locked-in to a particular product or solution at the data or information layer, and are unable to change technology or platform as a result. My advice, therefore, is to consider how the organisation might move from WSS or MOSS to an alternative offering, such as WebOffice, HyperOffice, ProjectSpaces or an open source Content Management System such as Alfresco.

If SharePoint meets your organisation’s requirements and hosting looks like an attractive option, then test your potential service provider by asking them for a full 90-day trial period with all of your data and information exported and returned in a useable format on a DVD at the end of it. You may well be disappointed with their response, but at least you will know where you stand.

*Microsoft has released 40 additional templates designed to address specific business needs and requirements. These range from Business Performance Reporting to Timecard Management.

THE BIG SWITCH

2008-06-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

In his new book (The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google), Nicholas Carr examines the technological transformation that is currently underway as software applications that were once stored on the PC move to the Web, or to the ‘cloud’ as some now call it. For many, the title of Carr’s book will trigger thoughts of a time for turning, shifting, and changing; but if one were to follow Carr’s electrical utility analogy presented in his book to its ultimate conclusion, then perhaps we should be thinking more of a device used for turning things on or off.

Business and consumer applications, and the information and data that goes with them, are moving towards the ‘cloud’; i.e. that place we all talk about, but can’t say for sure where it is. The cloud is, of course, comprised of a myriad of technologies and services from hundreds of companies and institutions, but for the most part, the average ‘man in the street’ (who is also the corporate employee sat at a desk) associates the concept of the cloud with companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!

With a market capitalisation of nearly US$500 billion between them, these companies have a huge influence on the shape and form of the Web, and on the lives of everybody who touches it; but as the saying goes, “with great power comes great responsibility”. Responsibility comes in many guises, but ‘leading by example’ is the one I want to talk about today.

As a private individual, I’ve been a user of Google’s e-mail service for quite some time now, and as a result, Google stores around 400MB of my ‘stuff’ in its data centres. While that might not sound like a lot of data, it actually constitutes an awful lot of information, and so here’s why I’m concerned. Google’s Terms of Service actually states that they could ‘switch-off’ my e-mail service without any notification, and that I might never see my ‘stuff’ again.

Google’s Terms of Service Web site states:

“4.3 As part of this continuing innovation, you acknowledge and agree that Google may stop (permanently or temporarily) providing the Services (or any features within the Services) to you or to users generally at Google’s sole discretion, without prior notice to you. You may stop using the Services at any time. You do not need to specifically inform Google when you stop using the Services.

4.4 You acknowledge and agree that if Google disables access to your account, you may be prevented from accessing the Services, your account details or any files or other content which is contained in your account.”

I have no reason for thinking that Google will pull the plug on Gmail this week or next, but with such a ‘big switch’ under its control, I think the time has come for Google to rethink its Terms of Service before it is forced to do so, either by governments or customers.

Google, along with Microsoft, Yahoo!, and others, carries huge sway over the way in which businesses and individuals perceive and use the Internet, and so the time has come for the company to start leading by example. Statistically*, around one-in-ten of us is using Google’s e-mail service (Microsoft and Yahoo! still dominate the Webmail market, with each having around 38% market share), and so by changing its T&Cs the company could actually show leadership while also grabbing a market opportunity.

*ComScore Media Metrix figures for February 2008.

CRANBERRY: SUPERFRUIT OR A POWERFUL, ENERGY-EFFICIENT, TOTALLY MANAGEABLE SMART CLIENT?

2008-06-12T12:00:00.000-07:00

Cranberry is a UK company that specialises in software and hardware solutions for the server-based computing market, and so it knows all too well the frustrations and ‘gotchas’ that hinder desktop and application virtualisation projects. Spurred on by the fact that organisations are still looking for a device that bridges the gap between the thin client and the traditional desktop PC, Cranberry has decided to build its own device: the Cranberry SC20 Smart Client.

The traditional corporate PC, with its Intel processor and Microsoft Windows operating system, provides the business user with an independent and yet server-integrated platform on which their tools, applications, and data reside. Unfortunately, however, the cost and effort required to maintain these ubiquitous systems frequently stretches budgets and threatens to overwhelm the already overburdened IT department. Issues of compatibility, security, reliability, and uniformity all conspire to undo the business benefits that this model of computing has to offer.

While moving line-of-business and personal productivity applications to the Web, or to server-based computing environments, certainly addresses many of the issues associated with the traditional desktop computing model, the provision, support, and maintenance of the desktop PC itself still presents a number of challenges, most of which are linked to the varied requirements of the end-user computing environment.

Server-based computing solutions, such as Microsoft Windows Terminal Services and Citrix Presentation Server, offer an alternative way of delivering the traditional Windows desktop, but this model tends to be quite restrictive, as IT departments have to test applications for compatibility and stability when running in this modified environment.

In an attempt to overcome the restrictions of server-based computing, application virtualisation and streaming products – from the likes of Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware – have evolved so that applications can be packaged in a way that permits them to run on Terminal Servers or any standard Windows operating system without actually being installed in the traditional sense, and as a result this generally eliminates any application conflicts that might otherwise arise.

Despite continued advancement in the area of desktop and applications virtualisation, plenty of ‘gotchas’ still remain, with physical peripherals and dealing with network connectivity issues. In an attempt to address issues, vendors of thin clients (or ‘access devices’ as some prefer to call them) have developed a range of devices. Between them, vendors such as HP, IGEL, and Wyse have developed products that offer a mix of features and functionality, and yet organisations that are moving towards server-based computing models still tend to deploy traditional PCs. Why is this?

When I asked an IT manager this very question he responded by saying, “Thin clients might look like PCs, but they’re not PCs.” He went on to explain that his IT department was very PC-centric in terms of its skills and experience, and that to adjust to a whole new computing model might be asking too much. Well, perhaps the Cranberry is just enough of a PC to warrant further analysis and consideration of server-based computing models and desktop virtualisation.

With its optimised Windows XP Embedded operating system and innovative use of modern chip technology, the Cranberry SC20 Smart Client addresses many of the fears, uncertainties, and doubts that surround the use of thin client devices. Users can connect digital cameras, PDAs, scanners, and other peripherals to the unit, and by supporting local, remote, and virtualised applications, the Cranberry is flexible enough to adapt to most business requirements. Unfortunately, however, the dull, grey, ugly design of this unit is out-of-step with the brand image the name implies, and so until the SC20 ships in a bright red shiny case that is reminiscent of the superfruit we all know, then end users (including image-conscious managers) will be inclined to think of such units as ‘technology demotion’ rather than the technological advancement they actually represent.

Coping With SharePoint - Part 1

2008-06-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Many of us now spend more time working on e-mails, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations than we do anything else, and as a result the number of digital assets that have to be stored, managed, and protected each year is going up and up. This continued proliferation presents something of a challenge for all organisations, as while on the one hand businesses and institutions want to foster a culture of information sharing and reuse, on the other there is a growing need for greater levels of control, compliance, and information governance.

An added complication is that today, more than ever before, business success depends on the organisation’s ability to exploit the information assets it holds and the people it employs. And so, with fierce competition across all markets and all sectors, organisations must now consider every tool and technology available in order to leverage that which they already have, especially when it comes to optimising the output of their most expensive resource: people. Of course, the simple provision of collaborative tools, knowledge management systems, and communication infrastructures does not necessarily make for a super-productive, hyper-efficient organisation; however, the mere fact that such facilities exist, and the workforce is being trained to use them, does in itself have value.

As businesses and organisations become interconnected through processes, systems, and networks, so the barriers that once separated organisations and their employees from one another must now give way and become more permeable. But while removing these obstacles it clearly presents many new opportunities and possibilities for forward-looking organisations. It also means that information workers have to change the way they do things, such as replacing the traditional ‘shared-drive’ with a more structured repository or digital workspace that is accessible to all those that need it.

So, having accepted the business value proposition of enterprise-wide collaboration, knowledge management, and communication, what should an organisation do next? The answer: install Microsoft SharePoint of course. I’m sure the reader will forgive this somewhat flippant comment, but according to the results of a Butler Group survey1 conducted amongst 140 large- and medium-sized enterprises, around two-thirds of organisations are now implementing, or have already implemented, SharePoint in some shape or form. Indeed, more recent studies suggest that the number of organisations deploying SharePoint technologies might be closer to 80% in some quarters.

While all would seem to agree that file-shares and e-mail inboxes do not constitute a sensible long-term home for the storage of corporate information and know how, prior to the arrival of SharePoint, only a small proportion of organisations had deployed any kind of Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) to cater for this fundamental business requirement.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I will admit to being a bit of a SharePoint fan, and in particular of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) – the version that ships for free as part of Windows Server. WSS (known as SharePoint Team Services in previous incarnations) is a core element of Microsoft’s SharePoint Server strategy, and the latest version – WSS 3.0 – provides good collaborative capabilities by supporting real-time presence and communication facilities, document workspaces, blogs, wikis, and local search facilities. Moreover, strong integration with Microsoft Office means that users are more inclined to store their documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in SharePoint document libraries than on their desktop or laptop hard drive – a significant factor when it comes to regaining control of corporate information assets.

Few business users realise that SharePoint actually describes a family of products, technologies, and services. WSS provides a core set of document management services, including versioning, check-in/check-out, metadata management, basic workflow, document policies, auditing, and role-based access control. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 – a separately costed item from Microsoft – builds on the WSS feature-set to provide organisations with a very capable portal solution. MOSS is suited to Intranets as well as corporate Web sites, and the search capabilities offered by this product are worthy of consideration. MOSS is Microsoft’s Web Content Management (WCM) offering, and it also provides a platform for Records Management (RM), Business Intelligence, and Forms-driven applications.

SharePoint has evolved over several iterations to become a pivotal technology for Microsoft, its partners, and its customers. But could this mass adoption of SharePoint bring with it a range of problems akin to those that many organisations currently have with their corporate e-mail systems? Well, there is certainly a growing concern amongst some IT and information management professionals that this benign collaboration solution and corporate portal could in fact grow into something of a monster if not managed and governed properly. Organisations should, therefore, pause for thought and consider their SharePoint strategies carefully, as failure to do so could introduce significant ownership costs along with debilitating information management headaches to boot.

As an advisory organisation, Butler Group receives a significant number of Subscriber enquiries relating to the deployment and use of SharePoint; and while every case tends to differ in detail, there are a number of themes and issues that seem to crop-up on a regular basis. While some of these issues are technology related, such as the integration of SharePoint with other systems or the comparison of the product’s search capabilities against those of competing offerings, others appear to be more philosophical, such as the choice between an on-premises installation of SharePoint versus a managed service or hosted solution.

Many organisations adopt WSS for their day-to-day team and departmental collaboration, and as it comes bundled with Windows Server 2003 at no additional charge, IT managers can suddenly find themselves inundated with requests for more and more sites. To lighten the provisioning load, Microsoft made it possible for end users to set up a collaborative workspace with the click-of-a-button; but if poorly managed, unwitting organisations can very quickly succumb to ‘SharePoint-sprawl’.

Perhaps the single most common theme amongst Butler Group Subscribers is that of information integration. Although WSS is fast becoming a de facto standard for ad hoc document and information management within many organisations, MOSS is still less common; and inevitably therefore, a situation arises when documents, lists, and other types of information stored within WSS need to be surfaced in other, non-Microsoft products; and this is where things can start to get a bit complicated.

Although this is not a technical article per se, I think it is worth listing some of the more straightforward integration options that are often overlooked by corporate developers2.

Links: SharePoint is built around ASP.NET, and as such links can be used in other Web systems or applications to connect to almost any item stored within WSS or MOSS.

E-mail: Although e-mails are usually sent to end users, e-mails can also be used to update processes running on different platforms.

RSS: Any SharePoint list (including document libraries, calendars, task lists, blogs, and wiki entries) can be exposed as an RSS feed, and these again can be consumed by other applications as well as end users.

IFrame: IFrames are HTML elements that enable one HTML page to be displayed inside another, and so this most basic of techniques can be used to integrate information at the presentation layer.

WSRP: For some reason, Microsoft does not provide an out-of-the-box Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) producer, but third-party products from the likes of NetUnity and Mainsoft enable SharePoint content to be consumed by other portals and applications.

Web Services: Although we are now entering the realm of the Web developer, the SharePoint SDK details the many functions exposed through Web Services over HTTP.

Search: Although WSS and MOSS have their own search facilities, any search engine can be configured to crawl SharePoint sites, thereby enabling search-centric applications to be written fairly easily.

WebDAV: Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) provides users (and other applications) with a mechanism for uploading and downloading SharePoint files. Although not a particularly fast file access protocol, WebDAV is a good way of integrating SharePoint with non-Microsoft Office applications, as it is supported by Mac OS X and Windows clients.

For those eager to populate their SharePoint sites with existing content, I’ll finish off part one of this article with another common enquiry relating to content migration and the bulk loading of content from shared network drives, personal folders, and legacy content management systems. The challenge of bulk loading documents and content is not unique to organisations deploying WSS or MOSS, as just about every portal or document management project will have this task to undertake.

It may be rather obvious, but asking users to load their own documents into WSS or MOSS is not really an option; nor is simple bulk-loading. To be of use, documents stored in either system must have some useful metadata; moreover, documents must also have appropriate Access Control Lists (ACLs) applied. Although there are a number of scripts and WebParts available via the SharePoint community to help with this aspect of deployment, project managers might like to consider some of the commercial offerings on the market from the likes of Alcero, Syntergy, Tzunami, and Vamosa. These offerings provide an opportunity to add valuable metadata to documents while preserving important ACLs, and they can also migrate content from a variety of sources, such as Exchange Public Folders, network file shares, Lotus Notes, and a range of proprietary content repositories.

The second part of this article will look at SharePoint security, information ownership and stewardship, archiving, and deployment options. I’ll also be asking organisations to consider their SharePoint exit strategies, and will take a quick look at some SharePoint alternatives.

1The State of the Corporate Collaboration Market, Butler Group Review, May 2006.

2More detail can be found on the SharePoint Product Group blog – “Integrating SharePoint with other portals and applications”.

ORGANISATIONS ARE WILLING TO PAY FOR VIRTUAL OFFICE SPACE

2008-05-22T12:00:00.000-07:00

Delegates attending last week’s Butler Group Information Management and Collaboration Symposium got a personal tour of ‘Project Wonderland’ – Sun Microsystems’ Java-based, virtual workplace. After the presentation I asked the audience if they would be willing to pay UK£9.99 per-user, per-month for this kind of facility, and around 75% of them said they would.

Like many organisations, Sun employs a distributed workforce, and on any given day around 50% of the organisation’s employees are out of the office. Indeed, when an employee does venture into the office, odds are that his or her colleagues are elsewhere, and so effectively everybody is remote.

E-mail, Instant Messaging, videoconferencing, portals, and electronic meeting rooms all offer ways for remote co-workers to connect, collaborate, and interact; but in truth they all fall short of the mark due to their low ‘emotional bandwidth’, as Sun calls it. This lack of social interaction presents a real and growing challenge for today’s business managers, because while employees tend to be more productive while working as individuals, the opposite is true when team working is required.

Having identified these challenges, engineers at Sun’s laboratories set out to look for some potential solutions. Virtual worlds, such as Linden Lab’s Second Life, were explored, and while such offerings looked promising, Sun’s engineers generally found them lacking in enterprise readiness. Those who have entered Second Life will know that this virtual world presents lots of opportunities for serendipitous social encounters. Indeed, unlike other on-line worlds, such as World of Warcraft for example, Second Life offers the visitor no real goal or particular aim, and so the social aspects of this environment are, as a result, somewhat heightened.

From Sun’s perspective however, Second Life had a number of limitations that prevented it from being used as a business tool (lack of person-to-person audio, in-world naming conventions, limited extensibility, and no way of doing real work), and so the company’s engineers decided to build their own virtual workplace.

Although still very much a work-in-progress, Wonderland supports live application and document sharing, a rich set of audio features, telephony integration, and, most importantly of all, ‘high emotional and social bandwidth’.

So, could Wonderland become the de facto collaboration platform of the next decade? Well, the potential is certainly there, and as it’s now an open source project, the technology presents plenty of opportunities for the innovative entrepreneur.

If Regus, the British office rental company, were to start renting virtual office space tomorrow morning (with a little help from Sun Microsystems perhaps), then I’m sure it would have plenty of interest by lunchtime! At UK£9.99 per-seat, per-month, it doesn’t take a super computer to work out that revenues of over UK£1 million are to be had for every 10,000 inhabitants of a virtual office block; and so with organisations looking for new ways to increase information worker productivity, perhaps the next office move we make will be a virtual one.