Making better products

For Microsoft, Sharepoint and MOSS 2007 have always been dear products, with a lot of sales and marketing activity happening on this front. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key product for Microsoft - it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and “social computing” capabilities (Microsoft’s idea for ‘web 2.0′, according to this page on Microsoft’s website).

Microsoft is going Web 2.0, and what better way than to go with Sharepoint. Some of my previous posts talk about MOSS 2007 and building Web 2.0 sites using MOSS.

Microsoft recently announced two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software  company Atlassian and RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The   partnerships link togther Microsoft’s SharePoint product with Atlassian’s wiki collaboration product Confluence and a new offering from Newsgator called ‘NewsGator Social Sites’, a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint.

The big picture which Microsoft is of course looking at is to sell SharePoint as a social collaboration platform rather than just an enterprise productivity platform by adding more Web 2.0 features such as collaboration, user generated content etc. The other IMHO is of course the limited out of the box functionality which Wikis, blogs and other web parts provide in MOSS 2007 and customizing these can take quite a hit on the timelines and cost of a project.

According to this source,  Microsoft has around 80 million users on SharePoint and is reported to be worth $800 M per year in revenue for the Redmond company. Atlassian has 4,100 Confluence enterprise customers. So this definitely seems to be a win win relationship and a great advantage for SharePoint users.

There is in fact a new connect launched by Atlassian which is available for download.

For over quite some time now, there has been a great interest in using Web 2.0 concepts withing the enterprise. The whole concept of Web 2.0 has been evolving and has gained iconic status in business and technical worlds alike.

Web 2.0 has many concepts associated with it - blogs, wikis, mashups, social networking, RSS, content tagging and many more. Most of these concepts are based on an user centric approach where the user is the focal point of action/attention. Enterprises are hence realizing that it makes a lot of sense to replicate these concepts within their organization to improve collaboration and communication and hence improve productivity.

However using Web 2.0 concepts within an enterprise requires a drastic mind shift within people. Information is now openly available, and people can easily express their views on the same. This will need to go hand in hand with a good change management and user education process.

Below is a diagram that I find very intuitive about Enterprise 2.0, courtesy Dion Hinchcliffe from ZDNET

The idea here is look at enterprise 2.0 from two prespectives - Internal facing and extrernal facing. Here’s my take on the most important faces of Enterprise 2.0

1. Collaboration 2.0 - An unoffical term for the collaboration strategies within the enterpise, this seems to be gaining a lot of traction within enterprises. The ability for multiple people to work on a document and then have preset workflows which get kicked in, are very useful and can play a key role in improving efficiency and productivity. SharePoint (or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) is a product which I think holds a lot of promise in this space and clearly there is a lot of traction around using MOSS 2007 within large enterprises and ISVs.
   Other collaboration tools which are popularly used within enterprises include Wikis, which hold a lot of promise for easy information sharing and editing.
2. Syndication/RSS feeds - This would enable everyone to keep in touch with items most important to them through notifications, feeds etc
3. Informal modes of communication  - This has led to the use og instant messaging services, SMS, etc for communication with the enterprise.
4. Rich User Experience (UX) - This is becoming ever so important in the Enterprise 2.0 era. The ability to engage users and have them get their work done easily is of primary importance. Some examples include Rich Internet applications built on AJAX, Flex, Flash, and Silverlight. Other concepts such as Office Business Applications (OBA) enable pulling in data from Line of business systems and surface them up in portals with a rich user experience.
5. Employee blogs - Blogs are an ideal channel for employees to showcase their ideas and also put up their questions, opinions etc. Blogs are also being used as marketing tools where companies primarily use their blogs/ employee blogs as showcase pieces or even to break some important news about product releases etc to the world.
6. Software as a Service (SaaS) - Desktop software is becoming passe` in the web 2.0 world and running softwares on the network (or cloud) is potentially one of the best software models which has a lot of potential.

This post is long pending. I have been fascinated by the new generation of composite applications which are very powerful and help in boosting productivity and operational efficiency. So let’s take this step by step.

What are OBAs ?

OBAs are basically a new breed of composite applications which enable information workers to work on their legacy systems and other systems in the backend with a Microsoft Office 2007 front end. These systems surface up the data from the Line of Business (LOB) applications and enable people to perform actions on them.

What is the need for OBAs ?

People typically perform significant additional work outside of the formal processes of a line-of-business (LOB) system as they collaborate with other people via phone and email, obtain information from multiple sources in the form of documents and spreadsheets, and switch between online and offline modes for meetings and business trips. OBAs help simplify this interaction by fitting within the informal processes that information workers actually follow. Organizations can use OBAs to build their won solutions, integrate with it and connect to an external line of Business (LOB) application so as to ensure that information is easily available and people can be more productive. This also rules out the need for getting resources trained on the Line of business applications.

Typical scenario for an OBA

Let’s look at a typical scenario where OBAs can be used and how they can help solve problems within the existing systems. The legacy systems are based on transactional processes that are necessary in order to accomplish specific tasks—for example, creating a Purchase Order. What is not effectively captured are the ad hoc, local people-driven processes that people do in order to accomplish a task like this. For instance – people have to collaborate with other members in their team to get required inputs from them for completing a purchase order. The purchase manager will also require to get information from suppliers and other requirements which need to be collated. Once he has completed the purchase order, he might also have to get it approved from his maanger. The exisitng systems do not support these activites and they are outside of the system.  So these systems are being used for merely storing the data and not for collaboration and decision making.

However using an OBA, the purchase manager can collaborate with other people in his team using a sharepoint team site, brainstorm on ideas using a wiki and then collate all this information easily as this available in one single place. He could also have ad hoc meetings and discussions if his MOSS portal is integrated with Live Communication Server, enabling him to start a chat conversation with any of his colleagues or suppliers. On completing the purchase order, he has a custom workflow which routes the document to his manager and once it is approved, he has it automatically sent to the suppliers. The business application simulates the actual way the work gets done rather than just being a repository for information.

If you are interested in browsing OBA solutions built by Microsoft Partners, check