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.