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.

Year in Review

Just the other day, I was in a meeting with eTouch CEO Ani Gadre and some other teammates. We were talking about what a challenging year it's been in many ways, but how much the wiki and enterprise 2.0 industries have grown - new companies, products and game-changing ideas. Even amidst the global crises, incredible things and innovation have happened.

Ani gave me some of his thoughts. You can read the rest on his eTouch blog.

"The term 'enterprise 2.0' has become more widely used and accepted as a valuable business tool. Today, enterprise 2.0 is about companies truly encouraging and foster collaborative environments, whether through integrative wikis or Twitter-like tools for the workplace or even giving remote workers better access to corporate intranets."

"I remain quite optimistic about the business outlook for 2010," he added. "There are companies in a variety of industries starting out with enterprise 2.0 projects or deployments. We will continue to offer them services that meet their needs and product features that help them stay ahead of the game."

"We're excited about the potential for SamePage in the new year."

I will certainly raise a glass and make a New Year's toast to that.

Wishing everyone a joyous holiday season and a new year full of happiness, good health and success.