Not all users are bad, but they may not be paying attention

Yesterday, in the As the pendulum swings - Users vs. the Enterprise, I discussed how the balance between the needs of staff users and those of the enterprise that employs them has recently swung strongly to favor users as a result of consumerization.

My perspective was that of the enterprise. But even though users are currently in an advantageous position, they may still encounter issues. I found this when I left OpenText recently.

I had worked for over a decade in the same company. Outlook/Exchange was the standard email system during that whole period, and in recent years OpenText's own Exchange email archiving solution was implemented internally. I was comfortable that here was robust data protection, backup and archiving with long-term recovery capabilities that I could rely on without thinking. I kept all of my contacts in the system, and was readily able to access them through my laptop, Blackberry and iPad.

When I left the company, my access to the Exchange server was of course removed. That is when I discovered that I had lost all of my contacts, some ~4,000 in number. In hindsight it was obvious that I had become complacent and was not using the features of Outlook that would have stored my personal information locally. Fortunately, I was able to recover the contact vCards. All would not have been lost, as I use Linkedin for many contacts, but certainly not all.

But, I also connected my primary ISP email account (Yahoo) to Outlook so I could read both work and personal emails. Fortunately, I had configured the mail service to keep copies even after they were downloaded by Outlook, so I still had copies of the incoming emails, though not some of the outbound. There were a few other emails accounts that I use less often and did not bother to connect so these were unaffected.

I had kept my personal files separate from my work files on my company-supplied laptop, and my departure from the company occurred over time, so I was able to ensure I had preserved all of these on my personal computer. But had I been required to immediately return all of the company equipment, getting my personal files off the company equipment would have been hard or even impossible.

So, lesson learned. As I reconfigure my personal 'IT World', I will make it more robust and independent. It will have a redundant blend of local and Cloud storage. I learned that lesson with the dot.com bust when a number of resources I used disappeared without warning. In fact recently, both the Adjix and Unhub sites that I used regularly disappeared.

But I will also ensure that I can respect the compliance and efficiency needs of any company that I work with in the future.

The merger of personal and social in the information sphere in recent years has been much discussed. But it isn't just enterprises that have to deal with this, so must their staff.

Engaging Content. Whether to Embed or Link?

Showing a collection of PowerPoint slides pulled from an OpenText Content Server was the subject of a recent post. At that time, I used presentations from our Content World Users' conference of a year ago to show how a collection of related materials from a secure enterprise repository could be embedded in the post using OpenText Widget Services (OTWS).

Last week was the latest Content World 2011 conference, which provided me with a rich set of new materials to show Widget Services' capabilities. Note: All of these presentations are already available individually from OpenText Online Communities (login required)

Full screen collection – In my previous post the collection was embedded within the post. You could expand it if you chose. But there are times when you want to show full-screen off-the-bat. So here are a collection of presentations related to our eDOCS offering:

• Just click on this link to view the collection 
• Select one, get details, view it in a player, download it, or get the embed code to use elsewhere.

Collection embedded – Frankly I find the full screen version above more compelling, but there are times when you need to embed in context, much as you might embed a video from OpenText Video Services. So here is the same collection embedded here to illustrate that:






A single presentation in a player – In contrast, here is a single presentation, this time about Widget Services, opened in a viewer when you click this link.

Attacking ECM complexity

In my last post I discussed the inherent complexity that develops as ECM systems are used for an increasing range of business applications, and more importantly, as they are shaped by growing numbers of users and groups with differing perspectives. Another source of complexity is technology itself.

The term ‘Enterprise Content Management’ was developed to try to describe the result of the convergence of a wide range of previously distinct technologies – document scanning, records management, document management, workflow, collaboration, archiving, etc. This convergence was a result of technology and market maturation, and the fact that these technologies generally addressed common business needs and dealt with the key digital files (i.e. content) that have value to enterprises.

Enterprises need to treat content in standard ways and make it available to their users irrespective of technology. Since all of the component technologies cannot realistically be re-written, they must be made to work together. This need was the genesis of the Open Text ECM Suite released today.

On the face of it, adding more features increases complexity. However, sharing resources and services counters that. Making available a better tool also reduces the necessity of warping a simpler application to serve a requirement for which it is not suited.

ECM Suite not only provides a wider range of capabilities, but also updates the interfaces of some core elements, especially including the new version of Open Text Content Server – version 10. This version (of a product once called Livelink) includes a modernized interface, which is simpler. When you are trying to drive user adoption, simpler interfaces are better if they enable users to learn how to use a system quicker. But simplification can remove things that veteran users have come to rely on, and you need to guide them through the changes as I discussed previously.

I’m looking forward to the new things that are now enabled with the Suite. I’ll be embracing reduced technical complexity while accepting potentially greater operational complexity. Other people have other perspectives (video).

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Value for Knowledge Workers

Demonstrable value goes a long way to supporting the deployment of new software tools.

For structured business processes, return on investment (r.o.i.) is comparatively easy to estimate. Where unstructured or semi-structured digital content items (e.g. documents, spreadsheets, faxes, etc.) enable a given structured process (e.g. accounts receivable) their contribution to the overall value created is also typically quantifiable.

Where the process itself is unstructured the measurement of value is much harder. Perhaps the largest class of unstructured processes in a company fall in the category of knowledge work. The difficulties organizations have in understanding knowledge work is highlighted in an article just published in the McKinsey Quarterly entitled: "Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers".

• Aside: Unfortunately a subscription is required to read the full article – hopefully you have one.
  

The article starts with the proposition that few senior executives can answer the question: "Are you doing all that you can to enhance the productivity of your knowledge workers?" This is unfortunate because, "Organizations around the world struggle to crack the code for improving the effectiveness of managers, salespeople, scientists, and others whose jobs consist primarily of interactions—with other employees, customers, and suppliers—and complex decision making based on knowledge and judgment."

The authors, Eric Matson and Laurence Prusak, describe five common barriers that hinder knowledge workers in more than half of the interactions in surveyed companies:

1. Physical
   
2. Technical
   
3. Social or Cultural
   
4. Contextual, and
   
5. Temporal
   

Physical barriers include geographic and time zone separation between workers, and are typically linked to Technical challenges – where workers lack the necessary tools to overcome the physical barriers that separate them. As the article notes, there are a many software tools available that can help – these would include the various collaborative and social media tools, as well as the more classic document management applications that are encompassed in the broadest definitions of Enterprise Content Management (ECM).

Of course the availability of software tools does not guarantee that users will use them effectively; indeed, Social (e.g. organizational restrictions, opposing incentives and motivations) and Contextual barriers (e.g. not knowing who to consult or to trust) play a large part in hindering adoption.

The fifth barrier is Temporal. Time, or rather the perceived lack of it, is also a critical factor. In my experience knowledge workers do not consider time spent using social media and collaborative tools as important as other activities. Under time pressure they will stop using these tools if they need to spend more time on other activities they perceive as "real work".

What struck me in reading the article is that while an increasing proportion of staff in companies are knowledge workers, it is clear that what knowledge work is and how to best enable it to drive productivity gains is not clear. Given that, it is hardly surprising that people struggle to define the value of those software tools best able to support knowledge management.

The Myth of Real-time Collaborative Authoring

In the document management field there has been a succession of products designed to support users working on a document at the same time, even if they are in different locations. These products have failed. They have failed because people don't work on documents together very often.

I wonder where the belief in concurrent creation of documents came from. In the physical world you seldom see people saying, "Come to my office and we'll write a document together," so why expect users to want to do it virtually?

Documents may well be created to summarize a brainstorming session or record the minutes of a general meeting, but the designated author usually 'goes away' to somewhere quiet to write the first draft.

Even in the review phase, reviewers independently make comments, suggestions and edits at different times. The author then pulls these together to make a revised version. Email is no different, especially since emails of any length are essentially documents.

Sure the stepwise, asynchronous approach to content authoring and review takes place over a longer period, but it actually makes best use of each participant's time, and is therefore more efficient overall.

I started to think about this again with yesterday's announcement that Google Wave will not be further developed (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html). As the blog post says, Google Wave was, "...a web app for real time communication and collaboration". For the purposes of this discussion let's consider both collaboration and communication independently.

Collaboration in Authoring

A technical tour-de-force, Wave enabled users to see others changing content as they themselves changed it. Very cool, but actually disconcerting. I wouldn't have wanted you to have watched me author this blog post, for several reasons:

• I'm easily distracted and need to concentrate to develop some cohesive thoughts
  
• While writing I jump around adding sections, changing others, moving text blocks – it would be hard to follow and I'd have to explain what I was doing which would further slow me down and distract me
  
• I'm the World's worst typist
  

I'm probably no different than most people, at least regarding the first two points. And perhaps more lethal to the concept of concurrent authoring:

• You'd get bored – it takes far longer to author a document than read it, and you'd probably want to be doing something else while I work, preferring to comment on my finished work
  

And that's the crux of the matter – most people are busy, with many demands on their time, and collaborative authoring is just too inefficient.

Communication Delays are Good

While Wave was designed for collaboration, it was also intended for communication (see quotation above). Essentially email and instant messaging rolled into one. But I think there is a problem there too – most people actually don't want to use real-time communication!!

Many commentators have remarked on the tendency for young people to use their mobile phones for text messaging far more than as telephones. You'd think it would be easier to engage in a conversation by talk rather than typing, so why is texting preferred?

I think people prefer texting because it allows them to be engaged in many, independent conversations with different people. For this to work they need to be able to send and receive messages in real time, but also need an agreed expectation that replies may take several minutes. Awkward silences of several minutes on a phone aren't agreeable, and since voice isn't cached locally like a text message you have to listen to each voice channel concurrently – which isn't practical.

Interestingly while they are short, both mobile text messages and instant messages (IM) are generally only sent when they are completed. It is usually enough to see that the recipient is typing (i.e. with Instant Messaging) or to just assume that they are (i.e. with texting). All stumbles, pauses, and corrections are not sent – but they were with Google Wave.

Summary

With small pieces of content: true real-time communication is often undesirable, with near real-time being better.

With larger pieces of content: collaborative authoring is best done asynchronously.

Collaborative authoring seems to be something that IT professionals believe will lead to greater efficiencies, while end users don't have the time for it!

Taking the Pulse of your Business Content with microblogging

When many users first encounter microblogging they don't 'get it'.

Twitter is of course the classic and most widely known microblogging site, and its style has been taken up by many others such as Facebook in a broader set of social media approaches. A common initial reaction is something to the effect: "I don't care if your cat just threw up – in fact, I'd rather NOT know!!"

Once people start to microblog, they find many different ways that it can provide value, beyond answering the question: "What's happening?" that twitter poses. Commentators have described endless ways of using twitter such as: 5 marketing approaches, 10 diverse applications, 50 different topics, etc.

But how does microblogging add value within an organization? Most of the discussions about business value have been on better ways to reach outside an organization to customers and partners by breaking down barriers, increasing transparency and the like.

At first blush making the case for microblogging in the workplace might seem to be hard. People often comment that they are too busy to engage in 'chit-chat' while at work. But over the last couple of years the use cases that have real business value have become clearer.

For me there are two general styles of internal business microblogging:

1. User status updates – close to the twitter model, but with a distinctly different topic set
   
2. Content status updates – fairly unique to business and keyed to the fact that many work processes produce and manage content (i.e. documents and other business files as understood in content management)
   

At Open Text we recently released the Pulse module for Livelink 9.7.1 that adds microblogging capabilities to support both styles (available for free to customers from the Knowledge Center).

Status updates are pretty much what you'd expect – you can make a post about anything, although some of the most useful ones are:

• "I'm looking for..."
  
• "Anyone interested in..."
  
• "Have we..."
  

These have value because they help people to be more effective through better networking in an organization.

You can select specific users to follow and you can follow the stream from all users. We have a very similar Pulse capability in Open Text Social Workplace.

BUT, I think the real advance in Livelink/Content Server Pulse is to follow the status of content irrespective of location in a range of very powerful and comprehensive ways.

Sure you can post a link to content in twitter, and many microblogging services allow you to attach documents or other kinds of files to your posts. But the advance here is to have the act of adding or changing a piece of content anywhere in an ECM system create a status post. The feed is reporting a content action by another person. If I'm following Joe and he adds a new sales presentation anywhere I can see it in the status stream – provided of course I have permission in the repository to see the added content. All of the important support for compliance is maintained.

There are many ways to slice-and-dice: by following specific people or all people, and following changes in user status, content or both.

You can also 'pulse' specific content objects, so all changes and all comments about a piece of content are seen in the unique Pulse stream of that object. It's like a filtered window into the stream looking at just one object, even if the ECM system contains millions of documents.

And Pulsing is not just limited to files/documents, but is applied to containers like folders and places such as project workspaces and communities. You can imagine the power of an accumulated stream of all content and status activity related to a project!

Livelink has had a notification capability for many years, but it requires users to first identify existing documents and containers that they would like to follow. Pulse adds the human dimension – you can be notified of changes based on the people you follow and what they do with the content.

To honest I'm still 'figuring out' all of the ramifications and power of Livelink/Content Server Pulse but I'm very excited!
 
If you'd like to learn more:

• Initial description in the May 2010 issue of NewsLink
  
• Free Webinar Thursday 3 June 2010
  
• Software and documentation in the Knowledge Center
  
• And if you are an Open Text Online Communities member you'll be able to use Pulse very shortly (announcement)
  

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What’s in a name? Or do you mean what I think you do? Implications for enterprise content culture

Most people love a good rant, especially when it is well-founded, and I'm no different.

And so it was that I really enjoyed Laurence Hart's recent, self-admitted rant (http://wordofpie.com/2010/03/04/a-rant-against-cms/). In his Word-of-Pie blog, Laurence railed against his perceived miss-use of the term 'Content Management Systems' or CMS. It was topical, well-informed, and most importantly to me, resonated on several fronts.

In brief, Laurence's position is that:

"...All you Web CMS people need to give the term CMS back! It doesn't belong to you. A long time ago you took it while the broader content community was trying to futz with the term ECM [Enterprise Content Management]. By the time we realized what was happening, you had taken the term..."

His issue is that while web content management (WCM) is a valid description, it is too often abbreviated to content management (CMS), even though there are a wide range of content types beyond web pages. The common use of CMS is much narrower than is implied. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) was coined in part to describe all content that an enterprise might have.

I'm not interested in the semantic debate about what each term means and what is the correct term to use.

I am interested in what this discussion says about culture and the difficulty getting people in an enterprise to take a broad view of content.

There seem to be at least 'two solitudes' in content management – ECM and CMS.

It is interesting how specific technology applications shape and restrict expectations.

Last year my employer, Open Text, acquired Vignette (history), one of the oldest and most established CMS vendors. Most of Open Text heritage is from document and record management (Livelink and Hummingbird eDOCS for example), process management (IXOS) and collaboration; in other words ECM. We published a trilogy of books on ECM in 2003-2005. While some staff came from acquisitions prior to Vignette that had expertise in WCM (notably RedDot), they represented a comparatively small portion of the Company. The Vignette acquisition brought a much larger group of CMS-oriented staff to Open Text.

I think Open Text is richer for the breadth of perspectives, but we have had to work through the challenge to merge the different cultures. Note I'm not talking corporate cultures, as indeed the companies were quite similar, but rather the application culture of how best to manage content to meet all the needs of our enterprise customers. Each of us has tended to think mostly of some content types, some approaches to content management, and some business needs.

Take Open Text's own Intranet as an example. Open Text has been running an Intranet called 'Ollie' on Livelink technology since 1996. Fundamentally the Livelink model is one of web folders containing 'documents' of any type. This model works really well when individual and team work products to be shared are typically documents – so it's great in supporting teams and managing records. However, linked webpages are a much better vehicle to support the dissemination of centrally managed content, especially information from an organization to its staff. So last year we broadened our Intranet Systems to include a true WCM capability in parallel.

For some in Open Text, the internal use of WCM came none too soon, while for others it was a surprise! I had to make a video to 'educate' staff on why we had both approaches and how to choose the best system for their specific needs. It turned out to be easiest to provide context by talking about the parallel evolution of ECM and WCM technologies over the course of the last 15 to 20 years.

The application of social media in an enterprise has also challenged cultural expectations.

Those with a WCM background have generally talked about the advantages of working closely with customers through external websites. Most of their value propositions of breaking down barriers and being more transparent are absolute anathemas to those ECM practitioners who have focussed on internal process and records management for compliance.

Traditional document management approaches provide another example of cultural expectations nurtured by specific technology experiences.

As I mentioned above, Livelink used a web folder paradigm to organize content. It also had rich metadata capabilities, but users tend to think of these as supplementary or optional ways of organizing content. It is fair to say that most users tend to think first and foremost of folders – so it can be a challenge to collect metadata from them. In contrast, with our eDOCS content management system (from Hummingbird) there are no folders – everything is organized through metadata. eDOCS users find browsing folders can be frustrating. Going forward these alternate approaches are merged in our Open Text Content Server 2010 under our ECM Suite.

Defining effective taxonomies to organize content can be one of the biggest challenges for an enterprise.

Generally people in specific departments, and using specific systems, tend to define taxonomies that meet their immediate needs, but the taxonomies they create are generally too limited for wider use. Similarly, other groups create incompatible taxonomies often to address similar needs. These limitations ultimately contribute to failure. Creating new taxonomies seems to be a recurring theme in many enterprises as most are never broad enough, scalable or robust.

Ironically then, what a person means by 'content', the 'content taxonomy' they think is required for their organization, and their perception of the critical features of a 'content management system' are all highly subjective!

Predicting Sentiment in Advance

There are now a number of tools that monitor social networks looking at:

• Sentiment analysis – General sentiments related organizations and their brands
  
• Topic trend analysis – the relative frequency that topics are mentioned over time
  

Therefore, if I make blog post or tweet, my topic and sentiments will be captured by automated systems, analyzed and reported. There are some pretty sophisticated tools being used by Marketers, and while some are free, others are quite expensive. However, as a recent blog post noted: "A technology glitch demonstrates how fragile marketing measurement technology really is." That said, let's assume they'll get better or this Technorati glitch was atypical.

I can also manually get some trend information using Google trends for example looking at 'ECM' over time: http://trends.google.com/trends?q=%22ecm%22&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0. However, the information on ECM is too sparse, and there is too much 'contamination' with other definitions of ECM, such as Engine Control Management.

But I have to admit I don't use these tools. So I need a tool like all great advances that caters to laziness – or increased efficiency as I might prefer to characterize it! I need help. I need push rather than pull technology. It occurs to me that I wouldn't mind knowing how my proposed post relates to other posts already made. I'd get a report something like:

"Your post on 'ECM' would be the 47^th post on this topic so far this year. This topic is declining in frequency."

"Your 'negative' post on 'content system metadata' would align with 19% negative, 25% neutral and 63% positive posts on this topic."

Besides putting my proposed post in context, I wouldn't mind getting a sample of the most relevant posts so that I could potentially revise my post, add links, references, rebuttals, etc.

At some level this would be a form of assisted authoring. It wouldn't have to be limited to blog posts. I'd like to do the same for content authored in an enterprise context. The reality that many reports, white papers and similar work products of knowledge workers duplicate things already available, but people generally don't look. It's easier to start typing, imagining your work to be original, than to look first if it's already been done or if there is something close than you can build on.

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Google’s impact on enterprise content management

Without a doubt Google has had a huge impact on the enterprise perspective on content management (ECM).

The pluses and negatives were highlighted by two blog posts yesterday:

On the plus side, John Mancini of AIIM listed three, "fundamental assumptions about information management that affect the ECM industry," in his "Googlization of Content" post:

1. "Ease of use. The simple search box has become the central metaphor for how difficult we think it ought to be to find information, regardless of whether we are in the consumer world or behind the firewall. This has changed the expectations of how we expect ECM solutions to work and how difficult they are to learn.
   
2. Most everything they do is free...
   
3. They have changed how we think about the "cloud." Google has changed the nature of how we think about applications and how we think about where we store the information created by those applications. Sure, there are all sorts of security and retention and reliability issues to consider..."
   

On the negative side, Alan Pelz-Sharpe made a post today in CMS Watch titled, "Google – unsuitable for the enterprise". Alan introduced his piece by saying:

"For years now Google has played fast and loose with information confidentiality and privacy issues. As if further proof were needed, the PR disaster that is Buzz should be enough to firmly conclude that Google is not suitable for enterprise use-cases." He went on to say, "It is inconceivable that enterprise-focused vendors... would ever contemplate the reckless move that Google undertook in deliberately exposing customers' private information to all and sundry with Buzz."

Google is a hugely successful company, and they are extremely profitable. However, they are not a software company. Fundamentally they are an advertising placement company and everything they do is motivated by maximizing advertising revenue, whether directly or indirectly. 99% of their revenue comes from advertising that pays for every cool project they do and every service they offer.

While Google services to consumers have no monetary charge, they are not free:

• You agree to accept the presentation of advertisements when you use Google products and services; most people believe these to be easily ignored despite the evidence of their effectiveness.
  
• More importantly, you agree to offer provide information about your interests, friends, browsing and search habits as payment-in-kind. Mostly people sort of know this, but don't think about it. If you ask them whether they are concerned that Google has a record of every search they have ever performed, they start to get uncomfortable. I expect most of us have searched on terms, which taken out of context, would take a lot to 'explain.'
  

While most consumers in democracies are currently cavalier about issues of their own privacy, enterprises most certainly are not. Indeed, the need for careful management of intellectual property, agreements, revenue analyses and a host of other enterprise activities captured in content is precisely why they buy ECM systems.

The furor over Buzz points out that Google did things first and foremost to further its own corporate goals, which clash with those of other enterprises.

In contrast, Google's goals require it to align with user needs, especially for good interfaces. An easy-to-use interface encourages and sustains use. That ought to be obvious to everyone, but when the effects of the interface on usage are easily measureable and directly tied to revenue (as in the case of Google Search), it becomes blatantly and immediately evident. In contrast, the development of an interface for an enterprise software product may take place months or even years before the product is released. Even if detailed usability research is done with test users, and in-depth beta programs are employed, the quality and immediacy of the feedback is less.

Besides easy interfaces, enterprise content management users expect 'Google-like' search, and are disappointed. There are generally two reasons for this:

• Search results have to be further processed to determine if a user can be presented with each 'hit' based on their permissions
  
  • Typically 70-90% of the total computational time for enterprise search is taken up by permission checking
    
• Enterprises don't invest as much in search infrastructure as they should if the rapid delivery of search results was seen as critical
  

The second point is probably more important than people admit. In my experience significant computational resources are not allocated to Search by IT departments. I suspect that they look at average resource utilization, not peak performance and the time to deliver results to users. To deliver the typical half second or less response that Google considers to be essential, hundreds of servers may be involved. I am not aware of any Enterprise that allocates even the same order of magnitude of resources to content searching, so inevitably users experience dramatically slower response times.

In summary, the alignment of optimal user experiences with Google's need to place advertisements has advanced the standards of user interfaces and provided many 'free' services, but the clash of Google's corporate goals with the goals of other corporations has shown that the enterprise content has value that is not likely to be traded.

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The ‘Second Coming’ of Renditions - Video

Long time ECM veterans will remember the concept of document rendition – a transformed alternative. I think we'll see renditions again.

A rendition is essentially another form of a specific version of a document. There are two common types of renditions based on format and content:

1. The same information content as the original document, but a different file format
   

• For example, a spreadsheet file can be renditioned as a PDF
  

1. The same file format as the original document, but different content
   

• For example, a MS PowerPoint Document written in English can have a rendition that is also a PowerPoint file, but whose content has been translated into French
  

Renditions for limited bandwidth in the 90's

In the 1990's, one of the common use cases was to deal with the limited bandwidth available at the time. It often took a long time to download and open a document just to see if it contained what you were looking for. Accordingly, Open Text Livelink automatically made HTML renditions of many common formats such as MS Word that were much smaller files and so could be downloaded much faster for quick review.

I remember presenting the use case to customers: "If you want to look quickly at a file without opening the full thing..." Back then bandwidth was so limited it made sense. Now it seldom does, although there are specific use-cases like renditions that contain added content like secured signatures that still have value.

Bandwidth issues are back

Bandwidth is becoming limiting again – not for 'simple' text documents, but for rich media files such as videos. In fact bandwidth issues are so acute that the shape of the Internet has changed radically in the last few years. The explosive growth of video sharing has lead to the rise of Content Delivery or Distribution Networks (CDN) such as Akamai Technologies, Limelight Networks, CDNetworks and Amazon CloudFront to enable effective distribution.

Akamai recently claimed they handle around 20% or the Internet traffic by volume – most of this traffic is rich media which must be delivered very quickly as users expect pages to load extremely quickly even if they contain a video. A recent Forrester report says the expected threshold to load has become two seconds.

For video files to be useful to end users they have to start to play almost instantly. This is usually achieved by:

• 
  
  Locating a copy in close network proximity to the end user
  • CDNs use many distributed sites around the 'edge of the Cloud' to ensure that is at least one site close to an end user preloaded with files that are expected to be required
    
• Reducing the size of the video through transcoding and compression
  
• Streaming – starting to play before all of the content is received
  

The increasing use of mobile devices with narrow and unstable bandwidth connections, and different format requirements creates further hurdles to serving users rapidly.

Enterprise needs

So what about the enterprise or corporate user? Trained by the web, he/she expects to click on a link and have a video start playing within two seconds. But most internal ECM systems (e.g. for document management) are designed to download a complete file before it is available to the end user.

A story – Here's a scenario I experienced recently. A Finance department prepared a new expense form. To show staff how to use it they prepared a five minute video. The trouble was that their WMV format video was over 300MB. For most staff in a global company, especially remote staff, downloading a 300MB file to view it is just not practical. What Finance needed was to be able to upload the video, and have the system take care of making a rendition that was transcoded and compressed, made stream-able and hosted on a CDN.

There are just too many manual steps and too many options for most newcomers to video creation. Systems should take care of most of those steps. And one excellent way to execute several steps is to have the ECM system create a rendition of a deposited video that contains embed code to start a player and stream video from a CDN. The consumer users can then simply click on the object name in their ECM system and a streamed video starts to play almost instantly – as they have come to expect with sites such as YouTube.

So renditions have a place in the new enterprise again to deal with bandwidth limitations!


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The biggest changes sneak up on you

Content management (ECM) systems can track everything that a user does. Usually this capability is seen in the context of compliance – you can answer the 'who did what' and 'when did they do it' questions. You can also track changes in what users did over time. And so it is that a colleague was able to track how my behaviour has been changing without me noticing it by reporting on how many documents I deposit.

• A bit of background: I use a number of Open Text Content Server systems. One of these, nicknamed Ollie, is used to support to support content-centric business processes within Open Text. I have authored many documents, mostly in MS Office formats over the course of my nine years with the company.
  

The 'aha' moment: So when my colleague made a social networking post that he had found that I had deposited almost 700 documents in Ollie, I wasn't surprise. I was surprised though when he pointed out that I hadn't added any documents in the last month! Zero! None!

This of course got me to think: "What had I been doing?"

He asked if I'd mostly moved to social networking-style tools. But no, I've been using collaborative tools of one form or another fairly consistently, and indeed heavily, over the last decade. What I realized as that I have almost entirely shifted to using wikis in place of documents.

• A bit more explanation is in order. Content Server (formerly Livelink) is a full-featured ECM system. You can add documents of any type, including of course MS Office files. You can also directly author in wikis. On the collaborative/social networking side you can also post to a range of collaborative tools such as forums, discussions, news channels, blogs, etc., and with more recent additions instant messages, status posts, etc. So a user has a range of content and social tools in the same system to use – they can select whatever they feel most suited to the business task at hand. Given these choices you can then track user preference changes over time by analyzing audited events.
  

On further reflection it shouldn't have been surprising. Once I used to have the Word and PowerPoint applications open all the time. I would typically send documents to colleagues as email attachments or via links to copies in Ollie.

Now I create wiki pages and then rely on automated notifications and RSS for others to learn about them, and of course push awareness by targeted emails. I very seldom open Word to author content, and when I do I get frustrated because all of the embedded code makes it hard for me to reuse the content (unless I force Word to the blog posting mode as I'm doing now).

That's another thing – I repurpose content to multiple channels much more than I used to. I don't simply author 'free-standing' documents and then deposit and email them. I often use the same content in several blogs and/or wikis.

And now I'm starting to create short videos where once I'd have authored a document...

None of this is surprising in an abstract sense. Pundits have been saying that there are huge changes underway and as someone who works in a company at the forefront of how content is managed in organizations, I've been aware of it and promoted it. I just hadn't realized how much my own behaviour has changed; otherwise I wouldn't have been surprised that I didn't deposit a single document in Ollie last month!


Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

The tale of two coffees – or why altruism doesn’t work in ECM

Our facilities management has been changing how coffee is provided, and judging by the posts on our internal social network, they have been failing miserably.

On the face of it, the new system should be much better – freshly brewed coffee in a range of blends and flavours. It replaced a system using single pouches of reconstituted, dried coffee that most people felt was tolerable at best.

So where's the problem? The new system depends on altruism. The coffee must first be brewed in several large batches that are then saved in thermal carafes to hold the brewed coffee without burning it. There are five or six blends, and therefore an equal number of carafes in every small office kitchen.

In the ideal use case, a 'user' comes to a kitchen, selects the blend they would like and dispenses a steaming mug-full. If they see that a given carafe is almost empty they set it under the coffee machine, select the right blend, push various buttons and then ideally wait ten minutes until it is completely brewed, or at least expect another colleague to finish the process and move the carafe back to its stand.

Of course anyone reading this knows what actually happens. You come to get a coffee, find several carafes empty, take some coffee from one of the only carafes with some left, and then find it is lukewarm. To rectify this situation you would need to brew up at least three or four large carafes, but you're already in a foul mood so you just walk away in disgust. After all, you have an important business meeting in one minute and the company isn't paying you to make coffee for everyone!

There have been attempts to rectify this. I've seen helpful Post-it notes saying, "Brewed at 1:35pm" – which at 4:00pm tells me I don't want to even try the half-empty carafe! Packages of the correct blend are kept next to the carafes to make sure people can find the right one – as if that was the only reason they hadn't re-filled an empty carafe before!

So it's pretty clear un-recognized altruism doesn't work in the workplace. That's as true for coffee-making as it is for managing content.

ECM implementations that depend on users to do more than they need to do to discharge a task don't work. Enforcement efforts only work until people find an alternative, which is becoming increasingly easy to do with the availability of free Cloud resources.

But self-promotion works, which is recognized in successful social networking implementations. So look to social networking as a way to get people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do in your ECM systems! After all, why else would I be writing this piece on my personal time?!

Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

Instant Messaging: dating or working?

Instant Messaging (IM) is becoming more common in enterprises, although the latest statistics I have seen suggest not as much yet as some people expect.

Personally I use IM in a work context almost every day. I hadn't given much thought on how I use it, other than realizing:

1. I am a lousy typist who needs an autocorrect feature in my IM client, and
   
2. Often IM is a preamble to a telephone call as I mostly work in a home office. My IM posts often go as follows: "hi > are you free? > can I call?"
   

So when I saw the results of a survey on the right and the wrong way of using IM in dating, it made me reconsider how I use IM at work.

The OKCupid.com survey results were published in my local newspaper, The Globe and Mail – in case you were thinking I've been using that dating service!

The worst greetings are "hi", "hey" or "hello" – I mostly say "hi"...

Far better are questions such as "how's it going?", "what's up?", or even "hola"!

In a dating context I can see how a question would more likely lead to a follow-up. But in a business context, would it be better to say, "How's it going?", "Are you busy?" or "Can you spare a minute?" than opening with a "hi?" Maybe "hi" is fine if you've established a working relationship already, i.e. got past first contact.

Interestingly in dating use of netspeak (e.g. lol, bfn, imo, etc.) is not a good idea on first contact. The recommendation is to, "ditch the slang" for the proper language and to make sure you proofread, since it suggests that you consider the interaction important.

I think that same care very much speaks to being 'professional' at work as well, although with close colleagues with whom you chat a lot netspeak almost becomes a way to indicate that you are an expert IM user, not just a work-only user.

Mini-IM essays are a turn-off in dating, and I think likewise in work chats.

Your personal picture is critical in dating IM of course. I think it's even true for work IM. I see a larger proportion of people using real pictures of themselves in work IM settings rather than the cartoons, avatars or seemingly random graphics typically used in consumer IM and social networks. At work it's very important for people to recognize you so they can link their online perceptions of you with what they find when you meet face-to-face.

In my experience when you first interact with a colleague through telephone and conference calls with no pictures, you build a mental image of them that often conflicts dramatically with the reality you find when you first meet them in person.

There are a lot of parallels to being an effective IM user in the workplace and when dating, but of course you do have to be careful not to be seen as flirting when you compose a work instant message!! The content of the messages is what makes the difference, but both work and dating are more serious than some other social situations, so share some common rules.

My electron-free work diet

People complain about email at work: "I'm drowning in email! It takes me two hours to clear my email before I can get to work!" they say.

Some people have even declared that they are giving up email for good.

But I think they are cheating – they are not really giving up the activities for which they use email, they are just finding another 'technology drug' – something newer, better and arguably more effective. After all people need to do their jobs. The proportion of knowledge workers is increasing steadily, and you just can't be a knowledge worker without using electronic aids. Whether they admit it or not, email (or some other electronic technology) is now essential to executing their job if they prioritize email activities according to business value.

I would hazard a guess that hardly anyone who has given up email has gone back to writing or typing their business correspondence. They are using instant messaging, social networking, video conferencing, shared blogs or something I've yet to hear of to do what they used to do in email.

But working in business there is a risk in adopting a new technology before your colleagues – no one may listen to you and you will become irrelevant, and in business it is never a good idea to be irrelevant! It's good to be seen a trail blazer as long as you are also seen to be more effective.

I was stuck by this the other day when I needed to contact a colleague who is the most active user an internal social network in our company. I sent him an email, just as I would do for anyone else in our company, but just for good measure I sent him a direct message on the social network, asking him to check his email. He replied to say it was a good thing that I had messaged him, as his email client was turned off!

So if you were really serious you would swear off all electronic technologies to conduct work. Martin's electron free-diet declares that:

"If it plugs in for electricity or to send information, you can't use it!"

I allow for artificial lighting where required, as long as it doesn't plug in for power or to send information. The same goes for heating and elevators.

I have no intention of adopting this diet as long as I want to keep a paying job.

Really this is a thought experiment to define what we consider to be content in the context of enterprise content management (ECM).

I think Content is what knowledge workers create using the electronic tools so vital to the conduct of modern business. Content is the currency of business processes.

The traditional ECM perspectives have document management origins that tend to make most content descriptions document-centric, and even when the scope is expanded to include a much wider range of file types, there is still a focus on lifecycle management from capture to archiving. I was struck by this reviewing the entries in the recent Infonomics Weekly
ECM in Sixty Seconds Video Challenge. There were great entries that said very much what I would have said if I had my act together in time to enter.

Now I'm beginning to feel that the trouble with enterprise content management as a description is that it emphasizes content, the enterprise and management too much!

I'm leaning towards thinking ECM is more about helping workers be more efficient at doing their work and ensuring that their work product has value because it makes a difference.

The Pushmi-Pullyu of Enterprise 2.0 Social Networking

The new software segment of social networking for enterprises developed because organizations, especially companies and government, recognize that their staff may want to use tools like Facebook and twitter, but are concerned about the associated security and compliance risks.

It is strange then that most of these Enterprise 2.0 social networking applications have subsequently developed integrations with those same consumer Web 2.0 tools that were of concern in the first place!

I wonder why this is?

One explanation is that developers of enterprise social network tools are getting caught up emulating what is going on with consumer tools:

• Each is trying to be the preferred site by enabling users to do everything from their site. As consumers 'flit' between social networking services looking for the next big thing, it's hard to keep them without adding new features – either by building analogs to proven tools, or partnering and integrating with the leaders. Meanwhile, aggregation services allow users to post to many social sites at once, or the receive feeds from many sites – thereby allowing users to avoid visiting the sites at all. Watching this it must be hard not to do the same!
  

But aren't enterprise 2.0 software vendors missing the point? Enterprises that buy into the value proposition of 'social networking without the risks,' are not likely to open their door to the tools they rejected, even just to help their staff unidirectionally monitor the latest external posts.

On the flip side, in most cases there can be no surety that staff are not finding a way to use those consumer tools at work, despite whatever policy or technology-blocking approaches are taken. There are just too many sites, too many tools available and such rapid change, and outright bans lead to circumvention. Then of course staff will be using the tools in their personal lives.

So where does this leave us?

At some level much of the new style of social networking is an effort to replace email as a communications medium. For some time email management tools have been available to help companies achieve compliance. These tools usually capture and index all enterprise communications in a manner that supports both controlled destruction and future discovery.

• Email management for compliance is an outgrowth of traditional content management for compliance. In many ways emails are special content types – usually with less content, more versions (especially including multiple branches or threads) and fewer controls on access (especially because of email forwarding).
  

In the same manner, social networking tools allow users to create even larger numbers of smaller pieces of content, often with more versioning, and with especially complex relationships that define context and therefore meaning.

• For example what I say in through IM or microblogs can only be understood in context, whereas emails and especially documents are larger, more complete and often able to be understood largely in isolation.
  

While organizations once blocked staff from using email to mitigate risks, email access is now nearly universal in the workplace – but it is managed. Certain tools are selected and sanctioned and staff must use those.

I believe that in the same manner, enterprises will inevitably permit selected social networking tools (some enterprise and some consumer) once appropriate control technologies are applied to assure lifecycle management for compliance.

So Enterprise 2.0 vendors don't need to enable interface integration with consumer web 2.0 tools, but rather capture and control integration with enterprise records repositories.

Meeting the needs of both the enterprise and staff

It seems that for many people the enterprise goal of corporate compliance is seen to be at odds with the goals of users. I think that's wrong!

This was brought home to me by the surprised reaction of observers at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston to Open Text's new Social Media offering.

In recent years the primary driver for implementation of enterprise content management (ECM) systems in organizations has been regulatory compliance. Organizations need to manage critical records in a consistent manner over time, as required by relevant laws and regulations.

Ensuring that staff (the 'users' of enterprise systems) are aware of requirements and use the implemented systems is often a challenge. Well designed ECM systems can ensure organizational compliance while requiring little change in behaviour as users create and deposit content – but it can take real effort.

As Web 2.0 has shown, users want simple applications, that can be learned quickly, and work smoothly. Increasingly they want these applications to be available for mobile devices as well as desktop computers.

Staff want to interact effectively with their colleagues. Social networking tools are seen as a way to achieve this in enterprises. As I described in an earlier post, this approach is, "people-centered not document-centered." It is also becoming independent of device and therefore location.

It was therefore a pleasant surprise to some observers that Open Text, as one of the largest ECM vendors, with a long history of content management, would come out with a people-centered application that runs on mobile devices like Blackberries and iPhones, in addition to the expected personal computers. And most importantly, this application enables users to exchange content with established content repositories.

In commenting on the Enterprise 2.0 conference, Gil Yehuda, for example, said:

"Open Text impressed many people with their new enterprise social media and collaboration tools. With a solid enterprise-class suite of tools, Open Text was one of the few ECM/Portal players to make a showing and a splash at the conference. Whereas many E2.0 vendors target low-tech SMBs, only some vendors have the depth of credentials to handle Enterprise 2.0 (with a capital "E") with its many hairy concerns."

Nice sentiments – my thanks to Gil – but I think we would all agree that technical integration supporting both enterprise-driven content-centricity, and user needs for mobile networking, is but a first step as we rebalance the needs of enterprises and their staff. I expect we'll soon see considerable advances in implementation practices.

There has been much discussion about how compliance requires that all communications by staff be managed as potential corporate records, but a recent AIIM study has shown that most organizations have yet to tackle the problem. It seems that many assume that the way to do so is to 'stuff' transactions from email, IM, social networking, etc. into a content store. The problem is that these people-centered communications will generally not map to content-centric hierarchies. In some cases the only indexing field that can be used is the date of creation. As a result it is necessary to rely on full text search for later discovery, which is then followed with painful, manual recreation of context. Imagine trying to determine who said what and when – from a collection of stored emails that mention a specified term! And email is relatively easy compared to instant messages (IM) and 140 character tweets, since email communications are generally more comprehensive and richer in derivable context.

If you accept that social networking has its own, distinct organizational principles, then compliance applied to social networking must take a different tack. How users interact with each other and the network of communication links that they establish are the most important contextual elements – the medium is the message. Helping users make the connections easily automatically creates context. That context must then be preserved if the saved communications are to be reliable and meaningful from a compliance perspective.

So enabling users to network more effectively actually supports compliance in a developing paradigm!

Immature Complexity

I'm working with a colleague on a project that integrates structured content and processes (in SFA/CRM and ERP) with unstructured content (ECM).

We are coming at this unified need from very different perspectives – he from a background in telecom process support (what Geoffrey Moore in 'Dealing with Darwin' would describe as a Volume Operations model), and me from content management in a software company (what Moore would describe as a Complex Systems).

As always, such interactions serve to challenge your assumptions, helping you to broaden your perspective.

He understood that we need to capture content created during interactions with customers and had made provision for it in his plans.

I kept saying, "But unstructured content represents more than 80-90% of the information," as most of ECM practioners routinely claim – I don't think he believed me in a tangible way…

Then I shared some research I did four years ago. I looked at how many pieces of content we typically collect before a first sale to a customer. At that time (2005), the number was an average of 88 objects. Since that time we've gotten better – we collect more. As part of the same research I also looked at content associated with customers of many years standing – in the case of one conglomerate we had over 28,000 content objects! Again, that has continued to grow.

And it's not just content volume, but a growing variety of formats and subjects.

I believe my colleague was stunned, which of course led to a discussion of how we can best manage such volumes. I can go one for some time about best practices in ECM deployment – content architecture, governance, user training, permissions, controls, etc.

But I came away from this discussion with a reinforced feeling that ECM is hard. If it was easy this software sector would be more advanced – it would be like ERP is, not as it was 15-20 years ago. The enterprise content management sector is relatively immature because it is tackling a harder problem – unstructured is more of a problem to manage than structured – and there's more of it.

Although some content types are becoming at least semi-structured, and so are arguably easier to manage, the growth in completely unstructured and diverse content types far outpaces it.

So the immaturity of ECM is a reflection of its complexity. Meanwhile the value of ECM continues to grow, but we still have a way to go before all information professionals really understand it, although with maturity comes understanding…

Nothing original, but I enjoyed re-examining my assumptions and testing them against the perspectives of others from a different background.

Obtaining and Using Key User Adoption Metrics for Enterprise Communities

Online communities are an appealing but challenging topic for enterprises. Most organizations feel they will increasingly use social networking tools, but are uncertain how best to proceed.

Proving business benefit and responding to deployment challenges can be a difficult, but these activities must be grounded on objective data, so obtaining key metrics is essential. However, often community and social networking applications intended for enterprise deployment lack the necessary query and reporting tools to support business champions and system administrators.

Recently we launched a Success Metrics community on Open Text Online Communities for those who have deployed Open Text Communities of Practice (CoP). Members of that community have access to reporting tools and templates specifically designed to provide community metrics.

My colleague Agnes Kolkiewicz just made the following blog post in that community (see Metrics Blog):

Many of you have mentioned that you are struggling with user adoption within your communities. As I believe that the success of any software project (and particularly where document management and collaboration are concerned) is largely dependent on user adoption, I believe it would be within the scope of this community to include some best practices on user adoption. To support this, I will start a "user adoption best practices" wiki in the community with the hope that all of you can add to it as we progress. Metrics and user adoption, especially in the case of collaborative or social media software go hand-in-hand. The more that substantive content is added and the higher the participation and log-in rates, the more value your system will bring to the organization, but you need to be able to measure that progress and growth in participation: Measuring log-in and participation ratios will enable you to determine how your efforts to improve user adoption are progressing. These ratios will also enable you to identify "peak times" in participation - this way you can likely pinpoint what had caused the surge in participation and aim to recreate the event. By measuring these ratios on a regular basis, you will also be able to demonstrate at a later date how the system has improved over time and set a foundation on which the overall value of the system can be determined. Metrics are applicable throughout a project lifecycle. This applies to any software project but it can easily get out of hand where large enterprise deployments are concerned. This is why most analysts recommend that you start off with smaller deployments and apply metrics to measure progress. Once successfully deployed, you can then use the success of this project, and any ROI realized, to champion the solution as a "success story" throughout your enterprise to further promote user adoption in subsequent projects. You should start looking at metrics in the pre-project phase taking into consideration what your objectives are for the software project at hand: these objectives will help you identify metrics as well as KPIs for the deployment. The developed metrics should then be measured throughout the lifecycle of your software deployment until the software is no longer used by your organization. In many cases, the same metrics that were used to evaluate the overall health of your system will also form the foundation for any later cost-benefit or ROI calculation. Where no metrics are kept during deployment, it is much more difficult to "go back in time" and determine how the project has progressed over time and identify realized improvements as there is no benchmark for comparison. We have tried to overcome this obstacle by creating some reports that allow you to measure certain aspects of your deployment at a specified date, but that hasn't been always possible. A rule of thumb here is to start thinking of metrics as an integral part of any project you undertake. I would encourage everyone to use metrics throughout your project lifecycles – please keep in mind that metrics not only help you prove an ROI, but also help guide your project as it progresses by enabling you to measure progress and identify areas that work well and those that need improvement. In the case of document management or collaborative software, user adoption goes a long way in helping ensure the "success" of your project.

Don’t interrupt, I’m writing a new business document

Bud Porter-Roth posted an article (The SharePoint Myth) which describes why technology solutions to address enterprise content management (ECM) often fail. He points out that if you don't understand the role of People and Process, then any new Technology (he cites SharePoint as an example) is bound to fail for the same reasons as similar technologies before it have.

Bud gives three reasons why people don't use document systems:

1. Employees create their own file structure that they only use for their work because they don't like the way the team file share is organized.

2. Workers recreate in whole or part many documents they know exist, but couldn't find.

3. Nobody trusts the information they do find on the file share because they can't tell if it is the latest version of that information.

But I think there is a fourth reason, somewhat related to #2. People routinely prefer to repeat work. Often this is not because they can't find past work, they simply don't look for it – they are unaware, uninterested, or believe it would have no value. They are confident they can do something better and more current!

I see people starting new projects and initiatives to address old issues over and over. While some staff are aware of similar past efforts which are often well documented, even if those documents are stored and readily available, people seldom review them for lessons learned.

Could you be a culprit? If your boss asks you to write a report, do you look to see what was done before, or just hit Google and start writing? This seems like a common People issue in all companies to me.

People can work for days writing and reviewing a report or similar document. Despite this effort, the final product may be read, or even just scanned, by one or just a few people. The effort devoted to production is many times greater than the effort others devote to comprehension. Despite this, report writing is seen by many as 'real work' – something that traditional email, and more especially modern social network tools, simply interrupt and frustrate.

When you do something at work you want it to be effective – it needs to make a difference to have worth. In any given situation, do people consider first if writing new documents is always the most important or effective at impacting an organization? And if documents are so effective, why don't others accord them enduring value and read them, when they are first finished or some time later?

On being our own worst enemy

Sometimes you know you need something different and you ask for it. Then when you get it, you ask why it isn't like what you expected – based on your experience with what you already had…

I'm seeing this in new enterprise content management (ECM) products, especially around social media applied to Enterprise 2.0 concepts.

While ECM now covers a wide range of technologies, at its core many of the concepts come from document management. Those concepts are mature and consequently well-embedded.

Many, but not all ECM systems follow a 'folder' paradigm – Livelink is one such ECM system – and of course Windows and Mac OS has used folders for many years. Most people just expect folders.

In the case of Livelink, as collaborative tools like Forums, Blogs, Wikis, etc. were added it was 'logical' that these be offered in the context of folders (and other Livelink folder-like container types like Workspaces and Communities). In Livelink you can add a Blog to any Folder for example, if you have the appropriate rights.

This approach works well when the collaborative discussion is centered on related content.

For example, a set of product specification documents are reasonably grouped with a product discussion in a Project workspace.

In fact traditional knowledge management (KM) approaches emphasised the importance of providing context to documents – grouping the documents and the related discussions about them while they are used and when they are subsequently archived achieves this.

While Livelink collaborative objects must be placed in Folders, tools are also provided to find them irrespective of location. You can list all Blogs, Communities, etc. on one page, but in my experience almost no one uses these features – the expectation and habit of navigation to a folder location is just too strong! And when you give users a range of different approaches, they generally only follow one well worn path.

Social media comes at the problem very differently – it is people-centered
not
document-centered. You listen to what people are saying, and then create a social network based on who you want to listen to and the discussion topics you want to hear about. So users and topics become the organizing elements instead of folders. Topics are often multi-faceted and un-predictable, so are quite different from the parent-child taxonomy type of classic folders.

Sure you can add documents to the discussion, and you can link to other documents, but fundamentally you are saying, "I'm talking about this document," irrespective of its location. In fact a document is still best managed according to a document management paradigm in a repository.

Very shortly Open Text will be releasing Open Text Social Media – a solution designed to support social networks in an enterprise, both internally in the social workplace, as well as externally in the social marketplace of a company's partners and customers. The user interface is simplified in a 2.0 style, and focuses on what a user needs to network socially. It does not have the full set of document-centric options – and therein lays the rub.

Most people who have seen Open Text Social Media love it! It's easy to learn and easy to use. The key to that ease is simplicity – that means there can't be too many options and the ones that there are revolve around social network activities.

So it's interesting to watch people start asking for folders/hierarchical classification and a whole raft of document management features – they love the new stuff, but want the familiar as well. If we gave them what they asked for, then they'd loose the initial benefits.

But we haven't forgotten the document management world. Open Text Social Media allows you to talk about documents in other repositories like Livelink, while they remain where they are in an organized hierarchy, with appropriate permissions, lifecycle controls, metadata, records management, etc.

In the real world of the business or government enterprise, it's necessary to balance the what you want of 'candy' with the what's good for you of 'aspirin' (see video below).

Two paradigms. Two approaches. Designed co-existence!