Michael Sampson

More on the "Three Levels": Destination vs. Aggregation

A few weeks ago I wrote about adding connections between the three levels of information management, essentially showing how Step Two's three level model sits in comparison to my 7 pillars reference architecture for collaboration. We need to extend the discussion by considering destination vs. aggregation.

Considering Destination
The idea of destination is that an intranet user clicks through to a certain page (or place) on their intranet, and reads the information that's there, or works with the system that is accessible from there. For example:
- you want to see the current state of a team project, so you click through and open the main page of the project. You see what's up, and create a task for a colleague to do.
- you want to read the latest news from your organization, so you go to the news page.
- you have to fill out a form on the intranet, so you click through to the appropriate place, and fill out the form!

In all cases, you go somewhere on the intranet -- you visit a place. And the place you visit is often linked to the place where the information is stored.

In terms of the three levels, then, you go to the corporate places when you want corporate information, you go to the team, department or divisional places when you want that information, and you work within your own places when you are working on your own stuff. There's a hard line between the various places.

Considering Aggregation
Under the idea of aggregation, information and happenings from across the three levels in the intranet are assembled and brought to the attention of the intranet user. The individual doesn't have to navigate to each individual place to see what's happening ... those changes flow to them. For example:
- you go to the search page and type "competitors" (you start by going to a destination). When the result set is returned, you subscribe for future updates to that search string, and these flow to you automatically.
- you visit the home page for your team project, and subscribe for updates. Whenever something changes, notification of that change comes to you, and maybe even the full text of the change ... so that you don't have to visit at all.
- you want to read the latest corporate news from your organization, so you subscribe for updates. These flow to you as they happen, negating the need to go searching for them.

In all of these cases, you have transitioned from going somewhere to find information or doing something, to having the intranet feed back the information that is of interest to you.

A couple of observations:
- RSS is a key enabler of this aggregation. It's time to give intranet users RSS clients, and to enable RSS on the intranet.
- RSS can be used for subscribing to specific "destination content" (eg, a specific news list or team site), or to "concept content" (eg, a search phase that crosses destinations, or a metadata value that is used across destinations). The difference is simple: the first gives all content from a particular place, and the second gives all content for a particular phrase, irrespective of place. To do this, you'll need an enterprise RSS server that finds content and serves up re-combined content, eg, the Attensa FeedServer.

So What?
Offering aggregation capabilities on the intranet means that users can stay connected to what's happening in the areas that impact or interest them, without requiring them to visit the appropriate destinations.

More importantly, the interests and navigation patterns of other users within the intranet can be used to reason out potentially interesting content to bring to the attention of specific users. In this way the social habits of intranet users as a collective can be used to benefit the individual.

Recommended Resource: Intranet Innovations 2008 (by Step Two Designs)

For the second year running, Step Two Designs have run the Intranet Innovations Awards programme, which seeks to recognize not innovative intranets as a whole, but rather individual innovative ideas and concepts. Last month Step Two released the report for the 2008 awards programme, and I have a copy ... and I recommend that if you are involved with intranets, SharePoint and collaboration, you should buy a copy for your place of work (US$189).

Trying to judge a complete intranet is a daunting task, but beyond the challenge of judging is the bigger challenge of readers being able to apply those ideas. With the road taken by Step Two, however, the reader of the report is able to read ideas that they could apply to their own intranets, or to have the ideas in the report spark off new ideas that would be helpful. I think the main benefit a reader gets from this report is the sense of what's considered 'world class', and thus a good plumb line for their own work.

I said above that if you were involved with "intranets, SharePoint and collaboration" you should buy a copy. Although the report is focused on "intranet" innovations, one of winners ... Transfield Services from Australia ... won for its entry about governance of SharePoint team sites for collaboration. If you are rolling out SharePoint team sites, you owe it your future to read Transfield's approach.

James Robertson of Step Two asked me for a review paragraph, and I sent him this:

"James Robertson and the team at Step Two Designs have discovered a fantastic approach to giving credit to people doing innovative work on their intranets, while simultaneously facilitating the sharing of innovative ideas with the wider intranets community. I have just read the 2008 edition of the Innovative Intranets Awards report, and I'm delighted to see the ideas that have been profiled this year. Given the stepwise increase in innovative ideas from 2007, I look forward to reading the 2009 report and observing how far we have collectively come. This report should be mandatory reading for every intranet team across the world."

Adding Connections Between the Three Levels of Information Management

Back in the late 1990s when I was running a Notes/Domino consulting house, I would often draw a multiple level information architecture model for clients on how to think about the Notes applications we were building for them. Some of the applications were focused on individual enablement, others on team or business unit enablement, and others for corporate wide information. A fourth and final layer (although we saw it as an underpinning layer) was the set of "back office" style system databases that provided common services to the suite of applications being built at the three levels. These covered both IBM-supplied applications (eg, Domino Directory) and special applications that my firm built (eg, an application directory that provided a smart way of integrating different applications). Anyway, the point was that we approached Notes architecture, development and deployment as series of scopes addressed to different audiences in the client organization.

With this history, it was fascinating for me come across James Robertson's Three Levels of Information Management (March 2005) briefing paper some years back. My first exposure to it was at a Brightstar conference in August 2006, and I have heard James talk about it a few times since then, the most recent of which was earlier this week at KMWorld.

One of the things that James talks about is "Managing the levels", and I have been thinking how to map my 7 Pillars reference model to his three levels model. Here are some of the things that I'm thinking about.

Connecting the Individual and Team Levels
There has to be tight ("seamless") integration between the team and individual levels. This means that the electronic environment that each user works in must support in-the-workflow integration between individual needs and team needs. The clearest example is team-aware calendaring. At the team-level, the members of the team must be able to see a calendar of meetings and events that are exclusively focused on their work. But at the individual level, each individual has a unique calendar that is a combination of their personal calendar and the collation of all of their team calendars. In order for calendaring in collaborative team spaces to work, the system must also support aggregation at the individual level.

For more on this, see Pillar 4 in the 7 Pillars model and for those using Outlook and SharePoint, see my SharePoint 7 Pillars analysis (tip: the free summary document has the complete pillar 4 analysis).

A second example is the area of task management. At an individual level, a user has a list of tasks that they are creating and managing. For each of the teams they are involved with, there are tasks that they will be working on, and perhaps even at the corporate level, there are tasks related to HR processes that they are working on. Somehow the system used for all of these levels needs to support integration between the various levels, so that each individual user can see the totality of the tasks they have to do, across all of the levels, in one single consolidated list. This is the essence of Pillar 6 in the 7 Pillars model.

Connecting Team and Corporate Level Information to the Individual Level
The concept of "What's changed that may impact me?" is a key question that drives a lot of our information-related activities. We read the newspaper to see "what's changed?" We watch the TV news, read blogs, follow Twitter, etc. for this same purpose. And it's my contention that this same fundamental idea needs to apply in our Intranet environments. There is a whole discussion that can be held about search and findability, but I see this as different. The main system interface that someone uses on a day-to-day basis should be the place where they receive alerts and notifications about "what's changed". And I think that the technology exists to some degree to make this work pretty well in the Intranet environment, covering all three layers.

Here's an example. I log into my computer in the morning, and open my personalized home page on the Intranet. In one part I see the meetings and events I am involved in today (a collation of my calendars), and the tasks that I am working on. It is likely that I will have some semblence of prior awareness of these meetings and tasks, either because I created them previously, or I have seen them previously. But the other main part of my screen should be the alerts about things that have changed that have meaning for me. Email is an immediate example (new conversation items or further items in existing conversations). New articles in my area of interest (perhaps brought to me by RSS or email). New postings in the team-level applications I'm involved in. Alerts about the people that I work with. And new announcements or policies that have been published to the corporate level.

In other words, in one place I get to see a snapshot overview of how my world has changed since I was last here. Specifically for SharePoint, James has concerns about My Site, but my sense is that this is the area where My Site can shine and give users something very helpful. And for other platforms, there are similar capabilities ... but the key is that each individual *must* have the ability to tailor and filter the information that displays on their personalized home page.

Redrawing the Three Levels
So if I had an ounce of graphic design ability, I would redraw the three levels to look something like this:

You will note that I have also added a fourth layer, and that's a reference to the wider Web.

Comments?
What are you doing at your place of work about these ideas?

Related
More The "Three Levels": Destination vs. Aggregation

WWPYCBW: Technology (September 22, 2008)

Huddle released a desktop client for its collaborative workspaces offering, based on Adobe AIR. For PC and Mac.

Microsoft's UC VP on Cisco's acquisition of Jabber: it's un-unified and a patchwork of stuff.

Lenovo released the x200t Tablet PC, with a 12.1 inch display and up to 4GB of RAM.

Research In Motion is working on better synchronization software for Mac BlackBerry users.

Cisco Acquired Jabber, Inc.

Cisco Systems announced on Friday a definitive agreement to acquire Jabber, Inc., the commercial entity that offers enterprise instant messaging and presence capabilities. Jabber, Inc. has been around for a long while (from 2000), and to my mind it had receded from view, even though it offered great technology--for instant messaging and presence yes, but more than that, for real-time information delivery.

This acquisition continues a strong move by Cisco to be a force de jour in the enterprise collaboration space. It has a lot covered ... telepresence, email and calendaring (with its very recent PostPath acquisition), collaborative workspaces (via what was Intranets.com), Web conferencing (via WebEx), and more.

I see two main next actions for Cisco. First is tight integration across its various collaboration offerings to give end users a seamless experience. Eg, there are calendaring capabilities across some of its pieces; tight integration for calendar roll-up and free-busy would be good.

Second is the purchase of an enterprise wiki vendor ... Socialtext or Traction Software perhaps? Although Cisco has the traditional bases covered, it is missing a wiki platform.

Microsoft and Lotus have been the two incumbents to beat in the enterprise market. Cisco is shaping up to be a formidable competitor--it already has strong relationships with enterprise IT, so it does not have to come to the table and establish its reputation.

See also:
- ReadWriteWeb
- eWeek
- Matt Asay, The Open Road
- Cisco Podcast

WWPYCBW: Technology (September 19, 2008)

Xythos is hosting a webinar on document scanning for business content management, on September 30.

Trampoline Systems launched SONAR Flightdeck 1.0, an enterprise social networking tool focused on expertise and relationship identification.

Microsoft Windows 7 is shaping up, and it makes use of the Office 2007 ribbon user interface. Ship date ... 2009?

CallWave announced FUZE, a web conferencing product that includes full support for small form factor mobile devices, eg, iPhone and Windows Mobile. See FUZE Meeting.

A range of new subnotebooks are coming, including ones from HP and Acer.

The Podcasting Kit for SharePoint is a Codeplex add-on for SharePoint that supports podcasting and video delivery within SharePoint.

OptimusBT is hosting a webinar about migrating Notes applications to SharePoint. It's on September 25.

Hosting of Lotus Notes by IBM is coming.

Michael from Socialtext writes about firms making a wiki the basis of their Intranet. The intranet is becoming a place for collaboration.

WWPYCBW: Technology (September 16, 2008)

Google Apps in the Enterprise
Craig writes that Google Apps can't offer a quantum leap in productivity for enterprise customers, hence the slow adoption. "Fourth, large enterprises are behemoths--enterprises aren't inclined to change and there's nothing compelling in Google Apps at the moment to make them change (and the attractive low price isn't enough). Word processors replaced typewriters not because they did the same thing, but because storing digital documents made revisions so much easier--word processors offered a quantum leap in productivity. Google Apps doesn't offer that productivity leap yet."

ProjjexMobile
Projjex released a mobile edition for the iPhone. " ... we’ve taken the core components of Projjex and re-designed them for the iPhone’s smaller format. With ProjjexMobile you can view the Dashboard and update the status of tasks and milestones, add time for yourself and your team, review time for yourself and your team, and add notes. You can even let ProjjexTime act as a stop-watch to calculate your task’s elapsed time! ProjjexMobile runs in the iPhone’s browser. It’s secure because it uses SSL to encrypt the transmission and it doesn’t store any data on the phone itself. All updates are immediately saved onto the secure Projjex servers."

Quick Links
- NovaMind released NovaMind Connect, a mindmap sharing site.
- Macalester has completed its transition to Google for email and calendaring. It shifted away from Oracle Collaboration Suite.
- Another University has decided to roll out Exchange Server 2007 to all students.
- Hostpoint in Switzerland is offering Open-Xchange hosting.

WWPYCBW: Technology (September 15, 2008)

IBM Bluehouse
IBM Bluehouse is an online meeting support tool, assisting with planning the meeting, holding the meeting, and doing the work after the meeting. "Bluehouse includes the ability to store files, so that all your files relating to a project or team objective are available in one place. It organizes all your contacts needed for that project or piece of work. There is even a chart feature, to help you visualize your data. And it offers something called “Activities” which appears to be the framework under which you keep track of comments from team members, files and otherwise organize a variety of information sources that you need to conduct your work."

Chandler Server 1.1
Chandler released Version 1.1 of Chandler Server. "This release contains two significant features and four bug fixes. Any user can now delete their own account and data by using the settings dialog. Interoperability with some CalDAV implementations including iCal 3 should be improved by support for the CTAG draft standard."

Mimi also talked about next steps for the Chandler Project. One of the main items is a re-architecting of the Chandler desktop client.

Quick Links
- Circle Dock for Windows XP and Vista: a new way to access shortcuts.
- Volker asks: What is the core strength of Lotus Notes?
- Carbon Fin is an outliner tool for the iPhone. Version 1.2 is coming soon.
- Peter recently presented about SharePoint and project management, and a link between AutoCAD and SharePoint.

WWPYCBW: Technology (September 12, 2008)

HyperOffice in Spanish
HyperOffice released a Spanish language version of its collaboration service. "Available in English for several years, the award-winning webware makes it easier for owners, employees, clients, partners and suppliers of growing businesses to collaborate, communicate, plan projects, share documents, schedule meetings and tasks, and manage information, anytime, from work, from home, while traveling."

Yammer for Enterprise Conversation
Yammer is a Twitter-variant for the enterprise, enabling people to share ambient information. "Teams can communicate as if they were all sitting in a room together, and can be freed from the archaic idea that they need to physically be in the same place to work together. Cut costs, go green, be more efficient, leverage as many buzzwords as you can shake a stick at. It would also be great for letting managers see what their team is doing at a glance, and getting new team members into the mix quickly." There are still things that Yammer needs to get right yet, such as security and directory integration. See Yammer.

AvePoint DocAve 5.0 for SharePoint
AvePoint released Version 5.0 of DocAve, its infrastructure management tool for SharePoint. "With groundbreaking new functionalities, a fully-integrated and streamlined user interface, and a fully-distributed, highly reliable architecture redesign, DocAve 5.0 represents the latest demonstration of AvePoint's on-going commitment to providing best-in-class, first-in-class products. With new modules for Lotus Notes migration to SharePoint and SharePoint deployment management, and potent enhancements to existing modules, 5.0 reaffirms DocAve's place as the industry's most comprehensive enterprise-class SharePoint infrastructure management solution array." Note that the Notes migration tool is for content only, not application logic.

Yuuguu with Linux
Yuuguu released Linux support for its screen sharing tool. "Free to download, Yuuguu is a new real-time collaborative technology that enables secure screen sharing, instant messaging and the ability to work on the same document together in real time. Yuuguu enables users to securely share their screen with anyone at any time on PC, Mac and Linux. The company’s powerful personal networking tool also allows you to see when colleagues or friends are online, and is the most flexible, simple and cost effective solution in the online collaboration market today."

Visto Mobile 6 with Social Networking
Visto announced Version 6 of its mobile offering, with new social networking tools. "Featuring an innovative “living address book,” VISTO Mobile 6 offers end users expanded push mobile email and mobile social networking capabilities. This living address book combines favorite contacts from multiple sources, including social networks, into a seamless user interface. VISTO Mobile 6 utilizes VISTO’s patented push and synchronization technology to keep users constantly up to date in real time on their messaging and social networking activities."

From SearchMobileComputing: "Park said that companies are recognizing the value of providing their mobile employees access to mobile social networking, particularly LinkedIn and Facebook, which can be valuable for connecting with business contacts." Matt Park is the director of product management at Visto.

Quick Links
- The power of social computing technologies: enhanced findability of things you would otherwise have missed.
- An 18.4-in laptop from Sony. It's not a Tablet though (sorry Eric).

WWPYCBW: Technology (September 10, 2008)

eB for SharePoint
Enterprise Informatics released eB for SharePoint, for governance and compliance within SharePoint. "Enterprise Informatics is a leading provider of enterprise information management solutions that enable organizations to reduce the cost of meeting compliance requirements, minimize business risk and optimize process efficiency. eB for SharePoint, in combination with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, enables CIOs and Compliance Officers to define and enforce a SharePoint governance and compliance policy through the identification, classification and management of information stored in SharePoint sites across the enterprise, and to do it in a way that does not compromise the ease-of-use and collaboration that makes Microsoft SharePoint so attractive .... eB for SharePoint enables centralized site provisioning, provides unique information modeling to identify and classify information, establishes relevant information relationships, and manages the information and related items through their lifecycle."

Mikogo for Screen Sharing
Mikogo released its free screen sharing tool, with remote control, presenter change, and application sharing capabilities. A new version is due soon, which adds whiteboarding, back monitoring, and meeting scheduling capabilities.

BlackBerry Flip
Research In Motion introduced a Flip phone form factor BlackBerry. "The new BlackBerry Pearl Flip provides flip phone fans with all the power of a BlackBerry smartphone in a fun and familiar design. One quick flip of the handset opens up a world of possibilities with the industry’s leading mobile messaging solution and a wide range of impressive Internet and multimedia capabilities, all in one powerful yet approachable smartphone. You can send a message to your friends or family, make a call, browse the web, snap a picture, watch a video or listen to your favorite song. It’s all in your control with a simple flip."

Quick Links
- The Ted Pattison Group is running a series of SharePoint workshops and seminars in the coming months.
- Apple introduced new iPods, iTunes 8, and the iPhone 2.1 firmware.