A Little Bit Older

Another year is rapidly coming to a close. It'd been a fun, fast-moving and enjoyable; but most importantly productive!

It's probably a bit cliche, but I always look forward to reading year-end insights and predictions for the coming year. The predictions aren't always mind-blowing. I mean, come on, could anyone (not at Apple) have predicted the iPad? But it interests me to see what the industry pundits reflect on and predict.

Here are some recent posts I've enjoyed:

- Ani Gadre, eTouch CEO likes the growing collaboration the enterprise 2.0 marketplace is seeing, anticipates a greater blurring of the lines between knowledge management, collaboration and enterprise 2.0.
- Ron Miller, editor of Fierce Content Management, sees predictions as a necessary evil and does a closing report on his 2010 predictions. His 2011 predictions will come next week.
- Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group says research reveals corporate focus on integration, staffing, advertising and measurement in 2011.
- Deb Lavoy on CMS Wire believes we can't make predictions, "we can only set our direction and respond to what happens....developing our vision and making it come true."
- Read Write Web Enterprise reported on Gartner's 2011 predictions of strong growth for enterprise SaaS and social software.

There will be more predictions in the next week, I'm sure, and I'll read them with interest. One thing is for sure -- Enterprise 2.0 will continue becoming increasingly established as a viable area in which companies will invest in order to make better use of internal knowledge.

Here's to a happy, healthy and successful 2011! Cheers.

E2.0 Meets Human Resources @E2.0 Conference

I've been reading about the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara and a few perspectives emerged. From some people, it sounds like the show was the same old thing, while others either had a different experience or are just better able to capture the essence of what is new and different. Some round-up articles I like include Ron Miller's editorial in Fierce Content Management and Gil Yehuda's 'What You Should Learn..." blog post.

I have also enjoyed the feature that allows you to watch the keynotes online. There was a panel keynote session I found very interesting entitled, "HR Meets E2.0 and the Cloud." They almost lost me at the beginning of the session, as the discussion centered mostly around Facebook and Twitter. I get that these social networking sites are increasingly important for business, specifically recruiting as it pertains to this discussion, but they are on the line between enterprise and social and I don't consider them enterprise products. Anyway, it wasn't long before they got back on track (for me) and the discussion was very interesting.

It's always fascinating to hear end-users talk excitedly and openly about their internal processes and how they get to true enterprise software deployments that have a real impact on the company. And that's what I heard about in this session.

In fact, Kiera Smith from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the publishing company, made what I see as the most striking point of the discussion. She explained that if HR departments want to make changes, it is important to start viral - don't wait for top-down approvals to go ahead with an E2.0-based programs. Her department started with free software solutions in order to prove capability of the solutions and show C-level management that it was worthwhile and the company could truly benefit from them. She gained the confidence of the users and built up a user base and was then able to bring solutions into the firewall. It's an approach I talk to daily with prospective customers, but it carries weight coming from a company that succeeded this way.

Other panel members included Eric Lane from Intuit, Oliver Marks from Soros and ZDNet and Tony Treglia from T2 HR Consulting. They talked to onboarding and offboarding, knowledge transfer, employee retention, managing performance, guidelines and advice for other companies.

I'm paraphrasing a bit, but any worker has to be optimized early, said Intuit's Lane. There's a heavy focus on making somebody effective quickly to get value; and the employee will feel more engaged and productive. Marks added that collaboration silos within the E2.0 solution work great; employees are looking for clarity of purpose.

Treglia made an important point that some companies today do still block sites like Facebook and that traditionally, HR departments are slow to adopt to new mediums. One example: "We can use Facebook to post new jobs, but the site is blocked internally."

Companies will have to come to grips with situations like this and be prepared to change policies to meet the needs of the changing workforce, their knowledgebase and the places they go for inspiration. Marks explained that there's a huge collision between the social marketing world and enterprise when it comes to onboarding.

Lane stressed that every E2.0 technology has to work together edge-to-edge. He said they started with 10 on-premise systems and now has only 2 - the rest are in the cloud.

Happy World PaperFree Day!

Did you know that today, October 28, is World PaperFree Day?! AIIM has declared it so.

AIIM, if you don't already know, is a non-profit organization community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organizations find, control, and optimize their information. AIIM is asking people to do the following today:

1. Conscientiously make a point to not PRINT
2. Investigate a business process or technology that can cut the paper waste in your office
3. Participate in or Produce a local Paper Free Day event

In the video AIIM created, there are 8 key tips to use less paper in the long term. I'm going to focus on number 3: Use Web 2.0 technologies like wikis and blogs for internal communication and collaboration.

There are a number of key benefits to organizations and enterprises with going to wikis and blogs in an effort to use less paper, including:

• It saves money. There are so many affordable or even free web 2.0 options out there today, that the money spent on printing and reprinting customer materials and the like can be prohibitive.
• It saves time. Changes and collaboration take place in real time. With a wiki, you don't have to worry if someone got your file attachment via email.
• It's green. But don't take my word for it. “We’re in such a green environment now that when we’re able cost effectively cut out the printing and the shipping and save on all that paper, that’s a pretty big thing,” said DICE client services and head of marketing, Melissa Courville.
• More content, less noise. The content development and collaboration process is centralized in a wiki. So there's no need for 5 people to print, edit and then email around for everyone else to do the same.
• It's easier to maintain for the long term. The thought of moving all corporate documentation, or files, or whatever you're working with, into a wiki seems daunting and time-consuming. But it's not necessary to do it all at once. You can do it gradually, or as things come up, or hire an intern to scan and categorize everything and create quick wiki pages. whatever system you use to get it on there, the important part to remember is that once it's digital, it can live there forever - static or changing.
• Less emails. This ties in to many of the points above in this list. There is a movement for email-free lives. I'm not ready for that myself, but I do love the idea of less emails with bulky attachments that people have to print to compare versions, review or otherwise work with.
• It's the future.

I am prepared to live up to AIIM's three requests of me today. Are you?

Watch the video to hear more about AIIM's mission and the other 7 tips that will help you help your group or organization to use less paper.

It takes a village....or a community

There's a lot of talk these days about online communities. With the proliferation of social networks, these online communities are now so valuable for connecting with people we know or have known in our lives, people with whom we work and others we may not have ever met in person but with whom we share interests and other similarities.

It's a fun idea to think that someone in Idaho or Italy or Indiana can have the same challenge with a software or the exact same idea about how to do something better. And now, we can all share in that and learn from it.

That's a key reason we decided to make the SamePage online knowledgebase open to all users with the launch of our newest Community edition. Have you heard about it yet? SamePage Community is free and has many (but not all) of the features our customers love in the enterprise edition.

We think this is going to be a really valuable solution for small and mid-sized businesses, students, research groups, small groups within enterprises and others. Many groups like these struggle with some members of leaders not being confident about the benefits of an Enterprise 2.0 solution and all it can do for them. Now, they can try it with no risk at all. There's no time limit for use, so when they love, they can keep growing it and adding more users - expand it's use. And they can upgrade to the enterprise solution with full IT support at any time.

Highlights include:

• Ability to scale and grow as the group or organization does
• Operates from within the firewall, not from the cloud, providing customer full control of the deployment
• The same level of functionality available in the SamePage Enterprise Edition
• Ability to upgrade to the fully supported Enterprise Edition at any time
• Complete access to the SamePage knowledgebase, where users can discuss issues, bugs and other topics
• Free of cost

Our team is really excited about opening up our solution to many different users and groups. Try it! We think you'll like it.

No kidding! Web 2.0 in Grade School

I was really charmed by this video on Web 2.0 and other technology in schools.

These kids created a video that competed with more than 250 others from across the USA, and they won the $30,000 grand prize in the kindergarten to 5th grade group. The school won a well-deserved technology makeover from eInstruction for this entry.

I'm assuming the teacher wrote the lyrics, but it gets me right in the heart to hear them sing: "All the cool school projects that we do, they go right up on our class wiki."

Wikis + education = SO MANY POSSIBILITIES. And these kids are living proof. They are young, and they seem to get it. And their teacher so clearly understands the value of technology for her teaching, organization and each of those kids' futures.



As they sing, "Web 2.0 is where it's at." Phenomenal.

SamePage News

We are coming full force out of the summer (the fog and chill-filled summer in the Bay Area). I wanted to share some fun and recent news from SamePage.

First, Dan Gelinas of Security Systems News wrote an article about how our new customer, DICE Corp. is benefiting from SamePage and sharing key advantages with it's own customers. DICE develops large-scale software automation for the security and alarm industries and created DICEWise Wiki as a knowledge management tool. It deployed SamePage to tighten up operations, cut down on wasted paper and postage and deliver up-to-date efficiency to its central station clients while saving time and money.

Cliff Dice, president of DICE Corp. praised the leap forward SamePage provides.

“In the past we moved from having paper for manuals to digital copies on disc. Nowadays, with our software being cloud computing based—anybody can access it through a browser anywhere in the world—the need for training and documentation takes on a new dimension. With cloud-based computing environments, which are deployable anywhere, you have embedded documentation, which takes us to the wiki,” Dice said. “People think of documentation as a living, breathing thing now that they can modify and add to … You want your customers to be able to add to it … If you’re using my product now and you don’t know what a particular field is, you can go click on the arrow and it will deliver the webpage with the wiki embedded. And it builds in the whole knowledgebase.”

Read the rest of the DICE and SamePage article.

In other exciting news, SamePage was voted one of KMWorld's TrendSetting Products of 2010.

"We are pleased to add eTouch SamePage to our list of truly innovative products that are helping to drive the knowledge management market," said Hugh McKellar, editor of KMWORLD. "In our eighth year of awarding trend-setting products, our judging panel assessed even more products than previously. Each product selected demonstrated clearly identifiable technology breakthroughs that serve the vendors' full spectrum of constituencies, especially their customers."

All this good news is helping put our team in high gear as we move into the busy Fall. Watch this space for more.

Choosing Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Tools

I recently read and commented on an article on WebWorkerDaily about "5 Questions to Ask When Choosing Enterprise Collaboration Tools."

The article listed the following as relevant for both large and small organizations, as well as companies of different types:

1. 1- Where will your team be working?
2. 2- Does it offer room for your team to grow?
3. 3- How stable is the company that makes the application?
4. 4- How bleeding edge do you need to be?
5. 5- How does the pricing break down in the long-term?

(Read more in-depth descriptions of the above in the WWD article.)

These are all excellent questions and are vital to the decision-making process. There are many more to add that are important and relevant across industries and company size. I expanded it to a top 10 (not in order of priority) and then added one for good luck.

6. How well can the solution scale to support a larger user base? This is a key element for most companies, unless you are 200% sure you will never, ever grow (kind of a pessimistic viewpoint, don't you think?) Scalability is so important because any investment in a new tool costs the company time and money. You want to be sure you won't have to throw away all that effort when you add 20 employees or 200. A quality collaboration solution will have the ability to grow with the enterprise.

7. How secure is it? Obviously, you have security systems in place enterprise-wide that protect individual PCs and the company network. Collaboration tools often have the options to deploy on-premise (behind your company firewall) or in the cloud, SaaS style (web based). On-premise deployments would have the same security as your other tools and information. You want to be sure all can integrated securely. Plus, many IT people are concerned about security with web-based services. It is important that your collaboration tool provider has considered this and has in place a robust, enterprise-grade security system that prevents unauthorized access to sensitive information.

8. How easy is it for a non-technical user, as many enterprise workers are? Wiki syntax, HTML and so on are great for a behind the scenes discussion of how your collaboration tool works, but they are not the terms you average user needs or wants to be concerned with. WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get - is a confusing acronym, but the meaning behind it is what matters. Navigating through a new tool, adding materials and collaborating should be so easy even the least technical employee you have can do it. Confusing systems are barriers to participation, which defeats the very purpose of the collaboration tool purchase.

9. What is the quality and level of support after you purchase? Several other commenters to the WWD article made note of this, and it is a key element. With any collaboration and E2.0 tool, you will have questions and need support. There may be a priced package or some other type of support, but you need to know what you can expect from your solution provider after you sign on the dotted line.

10. How do the features match our objectives? Why are you buying this collaboration tool? What does your company hope to accomplish with it?It’s important to have some understanding of what you hope to accomplish with your tool so that you can match features to tasks. If document management is one of your key objectives, how does the tool organize pages, sections, etc.? Work it out to figure out what you need, otherwise anyone can sell you something you don't.

11. BONUS: Can I play with it before I buy? Look for solutions that aren’t afraid to let you trial for free during the consideration process. This is the best way to determine ease of use and determine whether all your employees - the tech-oriented ones and the non-techies (see #8 above) - can grasp the interface. WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get - is a good feature to look for. This is also a good time to see the features in action. Reading about dashboards and WebDAV is one thing, seeing how it actually works is another thing completely and will enable you to get a good feel for what you can expect to see on a daily basis with your own tool.

Are there more considerations integral to the process that I haven't mentioned here? Probably. What are some of yours?

TMCNet.com Interview about SamePage

My colleague, Venu Shastri, was recently interview by TMCNet.com. Here, he tells Rich Tehrani all about SamePage, key features and how companies can put it to use.

Read more about SamePage version 4.3 at http://etouch.net/company/press_releases.html.

What is WebDav and how can it help you?

So, as promised, here's more on the latest release of SamePage version 4.3. If you're not technical, you likely won't know the meaning of WebDAV aka Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning. Consider it a cool new tech term to show off with to your friends.

What's important is what WebDAV support does for SamePage 4.3 users. Basically, if you want to edit a Word, Excel or Powerpoint file attachment that is located in your wiki, you no longer need to open the attachment, download it to your system, edit, save and then upload to your wiki. What a relief, right?

Now, you can edit attachments without explicitly downloading them. You can get the same "one-click edit and save experience" for files that you are accustomed to with all other wiki pages. The changes you make are saved directly the server.

Aside from saving you some time, energy and effort, this creates a more simple environment for collaboration and document management. Especially for our customers and prospects looking for knowledge management solutions, this is really an important product enhancement.

Watch this SamePage video which talks about this feature. If you're not yet a customer, sign up for a 30-day free SamePage trial.

Love a New Release

I just love a new software release! I love to be able to tell people about it, play with the new functionalities and all of that. And so I've been patiently waiting until I could rave about...drum roll, please...SamePage version 4.3.

Now it's out and I've got free rein. For starters, I want to talk about the new Explorer view. Basically, navigating SamePage is now as easy and comfortable as working on a Windows-based computer. Users can easily navigate through projects and pages, locate items quickly and manage attachments seamlessly in a familiar user interface.

We have a lot of customers using SamePage as a knowledge management and document management tool, and it's great for that. Now, we can better meet the needs of customers using the enterprise 2.0 solution for knowledge management, including content and document management. With a wiki user interface just like a desktop, KM workers can more simply do their work.

Before we launched the update, I had a stimulating phone conversation with Dan Keldsen, co-founder of consulting firm Information Architected and ranked as one of the Most Influential Enterprise 2.0 Bloggers by SeekOmega.com. Dan is a KM expert and had this to say about our software:

"For KM to succeed today, you need a system that allows the employee to simply do their work, wherever they would normally do it, yet provides them inputs and outputs to make KM as easy as sending an e-mail or saving to their desktop. The aim should be for the simple Active Management of Knowledge, rather than the complete chaos of unmanaged content that so many companies have. If your tools force you into a single way of work, even if it's the 'Wiki Way,' you should consider a more fully integrated solution, such as SamePage 4.3."

If you can't get a feel for this based on my words, this video will help. (If you get an error message in the video below, go to SamPage's YouTube page.



I'll write more soon on the new features and functionalities of SamePage v. 4.3. Can't wait to find out more? Sign up for a free trial or let me know if you have any questions.

E20 Security & Privacy

A blogger I follow, Elsua.net, recently wrote a post, entitled: How Long Before We Start Taking More Seriously Both Privacy and Security in Enterprise 2.0?

It gave me pause and made me feel a bit disappointed, because I think a few vendors are giving the whole enterprise 2.0 market a bad name. The blog post references a competitor as one of the few companies that takes privacy and security seriously. Maybe the problem is that many Web 2.0 tools are marketing their wares to the enterprise market, but they haven't truly addressed the needs and concerns the enterprise market takes most seriously.

SamePage was designed at the outset to meed the needs of enterprises, and our development team always keeps these needs top of mind. Our software has levels of security at the instance, project and page levels. The security levels can be set for individuals and groups, as well as for different functions -- read, edit and comment.

Security also permeates other areas of SamePage. For example, our search function displays only the result sets to which an individual has access. If there's info in the wiki that you can't access because of security settings, then you won't see that come up in your search results.

We've done this because we've always understood and appreciated the need for enterprises to have secure content, while remaining at the same time mindful of the notion that E2.0 tools are meant to foster better participation.

In fact, I'll take it a step further and invite Luis Suarez of Elsua.net to trial SamePage and check out our privacy and security features for himself.

At the same time, I'm pleased that Luis is asking the hard questions and bring topics to light that will separate the weak from the chaff in the world of enterprise 2.0 software products. He's presenting at the Enterprise 2.0 conference event in mid-June and said:

"I do plan to ask the same questions again that we asked last year on what vendors are finally doing about both privacy and security. They are far too important to be left out, once again, for another year, and I think it is our responsibility, as social software internal evangelists to highlight across the board how critical it is to bring up this subject time and time again, so that, at some point, we may be able to have those issues addressed and sorted out once and for all."

What do you say, Luis?

Blog Love

If you haven't previously heard of Gil Yehuda or read his enterprise 2.0 blog, well, you're a little too late. Gil, an analyst and rainmaker in the space, has gone in-house with Yahoo! However, as a last hurrah, he wrote a blog post about some of the vendors he likes but hadn't had a chance to blog about. We'd been talking with Gil for a while about SamePage and finally got a little blog love.

Unfortunately, Gil ran out of time to talk with one of our customers. We had a couple of good ones in line. Fortunately, he had only nice things to say, and we appreciate it.

As Gil writes:

"....they [SamePage] don’t make a lot of noise – but they have goods. Their client-base seems to be those very big but shy companies who require top-notch security features (SamePage provides it), but refuse to allow their vendors from sharing their name on a client list."

Gil will be missed as an active contributor to the enterprise 2.0 market.

Wikis in HR

I recently read an interesting article in Personnel Today that outlined Enterprise 2.0 solutions for the benefit of corporate human resources.

Anyone in the Enterprise 2.0 milieu can instantly imagine the inherent value of wikis and other collaborative solutions for HR departments large and small.

This article, written by Jon Ingham, started with an intro: ´Social media often has a bad name in HR – something to be controlled or banned in the workplace.'

Fortunately, Ingham goes on to provide examples of how social media can actually improve collaboration based on his attendance at Enterprise Social Media conference in London. I’m thrilled to hear that more and more people are ‘getting it.’

I did a search for wikis + human resources and came across a blog - Steve Boese's HR Technology. Steve teaches a graduate course HR technology. Again, am glad to see that academia is joining the Web 2.0 bandwagon.

In 2008, Steve had given his students an assignment to create a wiki for the fictitious company he’d created for them. He wrote the work he received “hammered home the point for me that HR staffs, no matter how small, or seemingly technologically unprepared, can effectively utilize Wiki for numerous purposes. My students built the foundation for a decent small company intranet in about 6 weeks -- with no prior experience, all in their free time.”

I’m left thinking…hooray! When these grad students enter the workforce or expand their roles in the workforce, they will have a tremendous leg up on others.

They are a number of clear benefits of wikis to HR departments. First off, just think about what happens to individuals’ knowledge and information when they leave the company. It doesn’t matter if someone’s been fired or retires. In many companies, when someone leaves the company, valuable knowledge gets lost and isn’t often recovered.

Why? Because “email is where knowledge goes to die.” (from:http://twitter.com/bfrench)

Wikis keep data out of the email hole.

Ingham reported that Virgin Media, Santander, Axa, Asda and Pfizer are all using social media to engage and connect their employees. He writes: “For Helen Farrar, head of internal communications at Virgin Media, one of the main benefits of social media is moving "water cooler conversations" into the public arena. This helps the company engage its people in "an entirely different way" as well as gaining a good understanding of what people are thinking and feeling.”

Wikis are also tremendously beneficial for HR as a central repository for policies, procedures, documentation and employee communication. Internal newsletters can be a thing of the past – companies can post all relevant news and information to the wiki and push it to everyone. Letter from the president? Post it to the wiki, or put more stylishly -- Wikify it!

Plus, wikis can help put a face to a name – particularly useful for large, global companies or those with multiple offices where staffers don’t always get a chance to meet their colleagues.

Let's hope more HR people and others embrace the idea of wikis in HR!

Anonymous, But No Less Important

It seems I have been remiss about blogging recently. It’s not that it hasn’t been on my mind; it’s that I’ve been very busy, which is a very, very good thing.

I am proud to report that after setting a personal goal to get more customer feedback in 2010, I have accomplished it. We’ve just completed a customer case study with a US-based, publicly traded global brokerage and financial markets technology company that has been a SamePage customer since 2007.

It’s anonymous. That is, we can’t attach a company name to it. Unfortunately, that’s a common story in the world of software vendors. Customers may be pleased as punch with your solution. But if they publicly comment on that, they’ll have every vendor knocking down their door. So the high-profile customers often have no-comment policies.

So, we agreed to settle on an anonymous case study. And when we heard about how useful SamePage has been to this company, we’re thrilled we did. Because even though none of you know which company it is, we do. And there’s tremendous satisfaction knowing that this large, successful corporation is so happy with our solution. We’re busting at the seams to let you in on our little secret. But alas, we can’t.

The company’s manager of global development infrastructure proclaims that many people use the wiki every day and it is “extremely key to almost all of our development projects. We use it for collaboration on a daily basis.”

“We have lots of separate projects,” the manager added. “So we need what we think of as separate wikis. We have about 145 project wikis – not all of them are active, but they are so easy to create. SamePage really understood that need and offers great separation of projects. In our development process, project ‘owners’ set up wikis for individual projects or products.”

“We’d be lost without it,” he said.

Will you take a few minutes to read the case study? Read the rest: SamePage Financial-Technology Customer Case Study

New Year, Old Thank Yous

We've hit the ground running in 2010. There's good energy, excitement...a buzz in the air.

I always become reflective when we turn the page in the calendar to a new year. The other day, I started thinking about SamePage customers and how I always like to hear about how and why they're using our software. I want to know all about what their teams are able to accomplish with their online collaboration and knowledge management. It's not everyday that I hear about how our customers are using the enterprise wiki and what kind of specific successes they are having. But some SamePage customers have provided feedback to us in the past, including these below, and I thank them for it. I'm looking forward to hearing more.

"SamePage allows us to securely and efficiently share and discuss project information with our collaborators located across the US."

- Stan Burgos, Graduate Researcher, Caltech

"I can't imagine we could have made a better choice. This one did not take us a lot of effort to start up and work with. It's very well done; and works very well for us. We didn't do any training, but everybody can jump in and use the product with zero start-up time. It's that intuitive."

- Kevin Morningstar, Executive Director, SAITS, Cal Poly Pomona
Read a full case study about Cal Poly Pomona.

"We have been looking for an enterprise solution in the market to fulfill the collaboration requirements of our customer. SamePage met the criterion set by our client, i.e. to allow users gain access to information, resources, and enable them to collaborate, generate and share ideas and knowledge. SamePage's ease-of-use, intuitive interface and the WYSIWYG editing feature for the blog and wiki enabled user collaboration and ensured perpetual retention and extension of knowledge and experiences within the client's organization. The robust solution also allowed ease of deployment in a complex and high availability clustered infrastructure. Our working relationship with eTouch has been very good and the technical support is responsive and helpful in our journey in deploying SamePage for our client."

-Pee Yee Koo, Project Manager, Siemens

SamePage scores another touchdown!

Ovum recently published an enterprise 2.0 report, and it includes eTouch SamePage as a leading vendor. The report, entitled “Enterprise Collaboration 2.0: Connecting with the Global Opportunity” identifies the trends and market opportunities of enterprise collaboration and outlines some positive ideas for the future of the market. The best part - SamePage is included as a 'top specialist vendor.'

In the report summary, analyst Rhonda Ascierto writes:

“The market opportunity for enterprise collaboration is relatively immature within the broader spectrum of enterprise software. Despite factors that are inhibiting its adoption, the widespread use of enterprise collaboration seems inevitable and the potential upside for end-user organizations and vendors is substantial.”

The report also analyzes the market drivers and inhibitors that are driving demand for Enterprise Collaboration 2.0; details the future technology evolution of the enterprise collaboration and includes analysis of how software delivery models are shaping the market; and outlines go-to-market strategies of enterprise collaboration vendors.

You can read the full summary report at Datamonitor.com.