Randy Holloway at Microsoft

Facilitating Enterprise 2.0

RandyHolloway — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 04:49:00 GMT

Interesting post over at The Obvious on Enterprise 2.0. The “Enterprise 2.0″ concept takes so many different forms, but this post implies the use of lightweight collaboration tools (web-based of course) that can be managed (mostly) by the end users. Here’s an excerpt:

“The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?

DO NOTHING

And then your bright, thoughtful and energetic staff will do it for you. Trouble is they will do it outside your firewall on bulletin boards, instant message exchanges personal blogs and probably on islands in Second Life and you will have lost the ability to understand it, influence it, and integrate it into how you do business.

The second easiest way is to find ways of allowing this to happen inside the firewall which can be as simple as sticking in some low cost or free tools and then making sure your existing organisation can:

GET OUT OF THE WAY”

The challenge with this approach is that you can end up with a ton of tools that contain corporate data, some heavily used, others with limited benefit, and most of them flying under the radar screen of corporate IT.

I think this is why the “enterprise mash up” concept is the most compelling approach to Enterprise 2.0. You want the demand side of this equation (users) to be empowered to use/consume their tools in ways that the suppliers (corporate IT) never really envisioned. Otherwise you just have random wikis, blogs, discussion tools, and Pipes-style feeds tools that don’t necessarily provide benefits that are scalable and consistent with the information goals for the company.

Cross-posted from Unfiltered.

Enterprise/Web 2.0 over the past year

RandyHolloway — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 22:42:00 GMT

My interest in this new approach to enterprise software begain a while back. Harry Pierson and I talked over a year about about the convergence of Enterprise and Web 2.0. Since I work with customers that are focused on solving problems based on these technologies I decided to start a blog on this topic after Mix06 last year. During that time, I've spent a lof of time with customers focused on the deployment of MOSS and improving their ability to collaborate while integrating their LOB applications into those same tools.

Over the long term though, I found that I couldn't maintain the momentum on the blogging despite the interesting work that was ongoing. I kept up with Dion Hinchcliffe and others that were talking about this topic but was mostly silent on my end. As I'm ramping up on this subject again, I decided to dig up some of the old posts and reread them. This post from Harry is a good starting point for those that are new to thinking about this Enterprise/Web convergence and Microsoft's role. Harry has since changed jobs and I'm not sure that this is in his focus any longer, but at the time he had some very interesting ideas on this subject.

Composite applications with SharePoint and Office

RandyHolloway — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 22:09:00 GMT

Office Business Applications: Building Composite Applications Using the Microsoft Platform

SharePoint Community Portal

RandyHolloway — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 21:48:00 GMT

The SharePoint team has created a SharePoint Products and Technologies Community Portal that runs on SharePoint. The site aggregates many of the key Office Servers blogs and resources that are important to SharePoint developers and implementers. Like the SharePoint blogging site, I'm very glad to see this.

Product team blogs running on SharePoint

RandyHolloway — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 21:37:00 GMT

The MSDN and TechNet blogging infrastructure is based on Community Server (based on the old .Text code base). This has served the Microsoft blogging community well, but now that SharePoint supports blogs I know that a lot of people have been curious to see when we would start using SharePoint for Microsoft bloggers.

Today, Lawrence Liu from the SharePoint product team moved his blog over from TechNet to a new domain for SharePoint bloggers. His new site is located here. I'm not sure what the plans are for this infrastructure, but its a pretty cool idea. I've been waiting to see this and hope that we'll see more of our customer facing sites moving to SharePoint in the near future.

SharePoint Best Practices Analyzer Ships

RandyHolloway — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 20:52:00 GMT

Project 2007 Team Blog: "The Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System Best Practices Analyzer programmatically collects settings and values from data repositories such as MS SQL, registry, metabase and performance monitor. Once collected, a set of comprehensive ‘best practice’ rules are applied to the topology."

What is driving the convergence of Web and Enterprise software?

RandyHolloway — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 20:18:00 GMT

Dion Hinchcliffe really captures the key driver for this new paradigm for software in the enterprise in a recent article. (Hint: it isn't about doing cool, new things to emulate the leading technology companies) He writes, "The motivations for mashups are quite different inside of organizations, where application backlogs and demand for more software that will improve collaboration and productivity are often rampant. If this state of affairs is true, far from having too much software, most enterprises don't have enough to satisfy demand, despite the prevalence of mountains of existing enterprise systems, many of which are underutilized."

In this view, the demand for services and "composite" applications created by end-users is driving this shift. Just as users used to say "Why can't I just do this task as easily as I do it on my PC at home?" in the mid to late 1990's, users today are asking "Why doesn't this work the way my blog works?" or "Why can't we just use one of those free collaboration tools I saw on the web recently?" Enterprise IT can either respond by delivering tools that enable those scenarios for users or they can wait for users to sneak them in through the backdoor.

Defining Enterprise/Web Convergence

RandyHolloway — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 18:33:00 GMT

This morning I ran across a Wikipedia entry while reading Lessons Learned From Social Software Implementations by Mike Stopforth. In Wikipedia, Enterprise social software is defined as "social and networked modifications to company intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication. In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes structure prior to use, this generation of software tends to encourage use prior to providing structure." This is an interesting viewpoint, but probably too limiting to be useful.

First, "enterprise social software" is only part of this convergence of traditional enterprise software and the trends seen on the Web. Beyond social software, there are also the concepts of aggregation and attention that are critical to this new paradigm for enterprise software. On the Web today, it is becoming increasingly easy to aggregrate data from disparate sources to find the information you need. Most major Web sites and services support RSS. Many sites support custom "portal" functionality and preferences for news and alerts to enable users to define their experience. While search remains very important, aggregation and filtering of data is essentially bringing data to your attention rather than requiring that you search for it on your own.

The more formalized concept of attention data is being integrated into many applications. The Knowledge Network features of MOSS 2007 are a step towards attention data being integrated into Office and SharePoint. For instance, if you're working on a specific project you can be presented with relevant documents, people, and other resources that are related to that project. If you prefer communications and documents authored by your boss rather than your peers, you can be presented with that information first. If a certain business initiative in your company is more important to you than another based on your job role, your interests or your communications patterns, the data for that initiative will be more prevalent when you're interacting with applications supporting attention data.

These concepts have application in the enterprise and are clearly derived from and inspired by the current trends on the Web. And yet they're not "social software"- they don't promote social networking or focus on connections between people. In that sense, I think it is important to think beyond the scope of the MySpace phenomenon on the web when thinking about the next generation of enterprise software. Otherwise, many opportunities will be missed or dismissed as another "MySpace for my company" rather than a productive tool to help people better organize, find and use information.

SharePoint AJAX toolkit

RandyHolloway — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 17:53:00 GMT

One of the hallmarks of newer Web applications include AJAX-driven features that more seamlessly refresh data in the browser without requiring the use to click a link or refresh the page. Daniel Larson has released a SharePoint AJAX toolkit to integrate this kind of functionality into SharePoint. I hope to check this out soon.

Dion Hinchcliffe on Enterprise Web 2.0

RandyHolloway — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 17:10:00 GMT

To get an understanding of the trends for Enterprise software convering with trends on the Web, take a look at Dion's blog- Enterprise Web 2.0. I first ran across Dion at Mix06 last year. While many enterprise software development companies (e.g. Microsoft, IBM, SAP) are focusing on these Web trends, I think Dion does a good job at looking the grassroots efforts in this space and what smaller software vendors and the enterprise customers themselves are doing.

Role-Based Templates for SharePoint My Sites

RandyHolloway — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 16:46:00 GMT

One of the benefits of the SharePoint My Site is that a user can personalize the site to include data that is important for them to share with colleagues and other people in the organization. One of the challenges with a My Site though is that a "one size fits all" template doesn't really help to differentiate what people do and what their interests are for people trying to network within the organization.

While you can create your own templates for My Sites, the need for different content based on role calls for a jumpstart with more standard templates mapped to different roles and organizational functions being available out of the box. This would allow SharePoint administrators to more quickly extend and customize templates to meet the needs of their organization. Recently we announced the release of role-based templates to help accelerate the adoption of My Sites within an organization using SharePoint. I'm looking forward to seeing more of these standard templates which can help users to more easily organize their data and collaborate within their companies.

Federation Services and SharePoint 2007

RandyHolloway — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 16:28:00 GMT

SharePoint Team Blog: How to use ADFS to turn MOSS 2007 into a claims aware application

Considering the SharePoint My Site and Knowledge Network

RandyHolloway — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 16:02:00 GMT

People that are looking at MOSS and extending SharePoint to support social networking within their enterprise often look to the SharePoint My Site and people search within MOSS and compare it to Knowledge Network. So how do you really compare the two to understand which is best to meet your goals.

From the Knowledge Network blog last year: "Your MOSS My Site enables you to list your Colleagues and Office 2007 even provides a tool that suggests colleagues based on mining that information from email, IM, and DL memberships. KN provides a much more extensive Colleague recommendation solution based on the KN client.

MOSS My Site has no notion of people outside the organization. This is where KN can help. Not only does the KN client figure out who you know in the organization but it also captures external contacts that you have relationships with. So KN adds the concept of “External Contacts” to your My Site.

Finally, the My Site provides something called the “In Common” web part. This is a very cool feature. Any time you look at another person’s My Site, you will see things that you have in common such as Colleagues in common and DL memberships in common. Since KN helps you add a deep list of colleagues and keywords to your profile, the in common information you see when viewing other people’s My Sites is much richer."

From the KN team point of view, the My Site and KN are complementary. The challenge is that KN isn't yet available and once it is released it will be a "Technical Preview". For people looking to get started today, the My Site functions are going to be the best place to start with KN as a complement later on.

For more information, consider the Knowledge Network forum on TechNet.

Enterprise and Web Convergence- How does SharePoint fit in?

RandyHolloway — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 15:55:00 GMT

As part of my interest and work related to enterprise software development and the Web 2.0 momentum of the last couple of years I'm focused on MOSS 2007. SharePoint to me seems like the ultimate in Enterprise/Web 2.0 convergence. The ability to connect to structured data through SharePoint's Business Data Catalog and consume Web parts from other portals through WSRP are strong examples of enterprise capability. At the same time, support for RSS, blogs and wikis provide the technical foundation for publishing and data aggregation across a wide variety of scenarios. And other features including the My Site and Knowledge Network facilitate some of the social and collaborative elements that we look for in the Web today.

What is your opinion of how SharePoint 2007 bridges the gap between the state of the Web today and traditional enterprise applications?

LOBi and enterprise architecture- what are the implications?

RandyHolloway — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 20:22:00 GMT

John Westworth has posted about the Office Business Applications and Developer Portal and also talks a bit about LOBi, a set of services designed to make Office a better platform for business application integration. When it comes to LOBi, there are some interesting architectural implications to how you consider designing and building business applications that leverage Office as a front-end client.

While most service oriented systems/architectures focus on a core system or set of systems and the services that those systems need to expose, a LOBi-centric architecture will focus more on how those services might be consumed by the Office client and focus on how to design for optimal integration into the Office system tools. As companies other than Microsoft sign on to support LOBi, their approach to exposing services in their applications and their thinking about how to support clients like Office will likely shift in a significant way.

I'm looking forward to seeing more from our blogs on how LOBi will change the way people build applications based on Office, how customers using IBF will embrace LOBi, and what companies outside of Microsoft embrace the platform.