The Workplace Blog

I was given a tour of Social Text’s enterprise wiki software yesterday. Social Text has “optimized” open source wiki software for the enterprise by bringing more structure and ease of use to wikis. For example, it is far easier to upload and view a document in Social Text than it is in Mediawiki an open source alternative.

But what really caught my interest was not the upload functionality but rather the weblog functionality which displays groups of wiki pages belonging to a specific category in a weblog format organized by date. This is a great way to get a meta view of all the content pertaining to a specific subject Two other interesting features, you can post to the wiki by emailing content to an email address and you can instant message members by clicking on their im screen names handles within social text. Their im handles are faded out if they are offline. View the other functionality included.

In a keynote address at Convergence, an annual conference for users of Microsoft Corp.’s business software, Bill Gates discussed how Microsoft is working on a “missing piece of software” - one that would use rules to determine how to respond to people trying to contact an individual. The software would use the caller’s identity to determine how best to answer the call or email. He also talked about the coming together of the structured worlds of financial and human resources applications with elements of the internet world, such as mashups.

Here at Avenue A | Razorfish, we’re excited about these trends and have already started developing solutions for our clients that merge the structured applications world with that of the web and improve employee productivity.

Delta Airlines found the perfect killer application to fuel adoption of their enterprise wide intranet DeltaNet - the itineray bidding system according to Line56 magazine. Delta Airlines move the bidding system which allows pilots and flight attendees to custom design their iteneray to the intranet. And by making it accessible via mobile devices, they not only saved costs but also built trust with their employees. To quote a Delta executive, the intranet became “a targeted, effective, and reliable communication experience” for all Delta employees.

Delta Airlines made the intranet the most reliable source for workplace information but by also developing the communal aspects of the intranet they captured their employees’ attention. Employee message boards that relate both to workplace issues (such as the airlines efforts to improve turn time for employees) and casual information sharing (vacation experiences and recommendations) have made the Delta work environment better.

Even though Delta airlines was going through bankruptcy they saw that investing in their intranet would be a worthwhile endeveavor. Demonstrating ROI by saving CMS licenses and streamlining communcation processes, managers were able to make a case for the redesign quite easily. Over the long term, the intranet team expects to demonstrate ROI via knowledge management, employee productivity and employee morale.

An Enterprise Portals Report by CMS Watch finds enterprise portal technology buyers struggling with adoption, as diverse portal products target different use-cases, and customers grapple with immature tools, persistent performance bottlenecks, implementation delays, cost overruns, and poor usability. 13 enterprise portal products were evaluated and over 60 interviews were conducted for the report.

The report also found that several portal products will be ugraded this year resulting in new opportunities and new costs for customers. Interestingly, the report also touched on open source and how it is increasingly been seen as an alternative to mainstream commercial portal solutions.

James Surowiecki, the author of the wisdom of crowds, spoke at our client summit last week. If you haven’t had the opportunity to read his book I highly recommend it. Ironically enough, Chris Sun, one of our technology architects, just launched CrowdIQ. It’s a great way to create your own prediction market online, quickly and easily.

One of the sessions at the mix.06 conference covered web services and the multitude of options available. Everything from REST, POX, RSS, SOAP, and WS-* is available through the windows communication framework (WCF). This provides a wide set of choices when building applications. From REST - WS-*, each approach has increasing overhead. Building a REST call is a lot less work than building a SOAP call. SOAP allows the addition of great metadata to your service, but if you aren’t using it, why incur the overhead. Go here for the overview of the session From HTML to Services.

At MIX.06 Microsoft was encouraging folks to download and start using their new AJAX framework. Leveraging the XMLHTTP call that Microsoft invented they are taking AJAX to the next level. Microsoft also took this opportunity to remind us that their first AJAX implementation, Web Outlook, was available years before Google Maps! Check it out here Microsofts Atlas.

The Intranet Review Toolkit provides a comprehensive set of guidelines for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of corporate intranets. It contains a substantial set of heuristics, allowing a detailed intranet review to be conducted that focuses on a wide range of functionality, design and strategy. Download a free copy. It was produced by James Robertson and supported by the Information Architecture Institute.

Linux on the server side continues to grow. “Gartner Inc. forecasts server shipments to reach 2.4 million units in 2010, up from 1.4 million units in 2005, boosting revenue from $6.5 billion to $11.5 billion.” We have seen it be much faster to get a box running fedora up and running than a box where we need to get a license. Network Computing has the story on the linux growth.