This is a report of my first 24hrs with the Samsung Galaxy S2. i have moved to it from the iPhone 4 yesterday.
My first impression from its build quality was that it is a sturdy phone and a nice hardware to hold, yes apple fans nicer to hold then the iPhone 4.
It does not feel like a huge phone and you dont feel the difference until you put the phone next to the iphone.
It’s screen is nicer and brighter.
The software is less intuitive, and this is the biggest complaint i have about android OS, you have 2 panels to hold your applications and they are both kinda confusing, there is no task management that is so intuitive as the iOS double button.
i can go on but i feel its useless and was done so many times.
The phone is crisp and quick as should be expected. screen rotation and software rendering is quick and nice and it all works great.
Things that are big issues to me are the Wireless and the Bluetooth.
Wireless is just a joke. i have 3-4 bars sitting on the router, a room next i get 1-2 and less then 10m its out of reception. iphone/ipad/laptop go to the other side of the house or about 15m away no problem. sorry but this does not count as wireless. oh and i am not the only one complaining about it, got a few more in the brotherhood.
Bluetooth is also an issue, i connect it to the TRX speaker system at home and it just stops working after 5-10 minutes but does not disconnect. The issue is that it wont go out of the connection and keep playing on the internal speaker, it thinks it is connected and you need to disconnect and then reconnect. only if you leave the bluetooth zone you get the phone to disconnect and resume play on the internal speaker.
I hope that samsung will be able to change some software to solve the wireless issues or else this phone success will be trumped quickly.
As for the move from iOS to Android. i will give it a few more days and put my thoughts on this blog.
OpenText Website Management (reddot) social communities howto
My first howto in the OpenText world, after almost 4 years in the asylum. nice.
Social communities on the Website Management offers a great assortment of features that is enabling you to support User Generated content.
But the standard feature dont show you how you can integrate a comment section under your articles.
That is part due to the way this implementation came to be.
The core of this implementation is the Vignette Community Application, a stand alone interface to forums, blogs, wikis, ideas and media spaces. this core assumes the full functionality in a page and thus is not interfaced in a way that you easily figure out where are the components. Its sole brother (by core at least) is the Vignette Community Services which took the integration, rather then standalone, from his brother and is a set of components easily integrated into your environment.
Because both have the same core, the Social communities will support every call you can think off. that is the great news.
So how do you go about and create the comments region under the article of yours.
Lets start with the piping.
You will need to create HTTP connectors to the following XAPI calls:
- Create New Object
- Delete Objects
Before i will start with the code lets look at the way we will implement the creation of comments.
Assuming we want comments on pages in the CMS that have an ID, without it you cannot differentiate the pages, we will need to create a remote object to represent the page.
The remote object is capable of uniquely identifying the comments, the Remote object is the ID of the Comments parent in our case though it can be responsible to more.
We will start with creating a new HTTP connector for the creation of the remote object.
Create a new HTTP connector group for your site.
Click on Prepared Operations.
Then create a new operation using the star (Add a new data group) at the top left of the screen.
Give the group a name – “remoteobject.create”
add the URL postix – “CreateNewObject”
Method should be “Post”
Go to the Request Parameters and add the following.
- extObjType
- extObjRealm
- extObjSystemType
- extObjSystemID
- extObjContext
- extObjID
- name
- type
Do the same to the delete operation
Give the group a name – “remoteobject.delete”
add the URL postix – “DeleteObjects”
Method should be “Post”
In this case you only need to point the objectID (x.x.x) for it to be deleted.
Now we have the ability to create the basic item that is capable of holding comments, ratings etc.
This method will enable you to later expand with creation of comments and ratings on the remote object.
The best place to figure out the required parameters is in the developer guide for the Vignette Community Application and the XML API Documentation
Enterprise 2.0 and Digital Curation
Large organisation adopting social mediums, who thrive while sharing before the social tools, tend to become avid representatives of the Enterprise 2.0 and social workplace, those companies usually harvest value out of the social workplace and introduction of a digital means to extend their natural work process.
One of the best example is Deloitte and the Yammer love affair, Accountancy consultants share information to survive, they are a co-organism that just got extended with the services of yammer.
Wouldn’t it be great if this was the case for any company? presenting the tools, educating the people and bang we hit the gold vein of the social workplace era.
Sadly this isn’t the case, we have to understand that we are not at the stage where companies are ruled by the social generation. Employees do not fully understand the value of information sharing, and in some cases regard information sharing as a loss of job security.
Pondering about this for a while i though, how can we then promote the use of the social workplace in organisations?
One of the methods is to expose the non users to the users, making the public know about the small groups of people who produce value from the social workplace.
There are probably multiple ways of doing so and i cant even imagine all of them but the one i think will create create value and help in exposing the network is Digital Curation.
Digital Curation is similar to the curation of the art in the museum, a selection of the best “Content”, based on predefined criteria representing the company business and culture, are selected and maintained in a shared location. These items are catalogued (Tags, Categories etc.) and indexed for quick find.
This curated content is transmitted through common medium in the organisation with the aim to expose and educate.
What i envision is the exposure of the company through email to a curated valuable set of snippets and links from the social workplace.
This will get some inquisitive people the small push to discover what was going on.
It will expose the tools without the fluff, only the stuff.
But most importantly it will give the value to the people and the best reaction can be a conversion due to a mishap, “If only i had this info yesterday” type. A person who relises the work related value of the Enterprise 2.0 is going to be hooked and become the best advocator.
This is not to replace an appropriate education to the system but more to enhance that with sharing the current experience on this new tool, teasing people to join the crowd.
If we can change the peoples perceived value of the new tool then it will get its proper place.
But this is the side benefit of curation, the main benefit is that curation will enable a timeline representation of the value from the network and will enable the curator to then report of the value increase or decrease as it appears in the network.
This monitoring of the social workplace and the deeper metrics it represent will enable a better monitoring on the networks value production.
Social Tools adoption in Enterprise 2.0
In response to Step Two Designs blog post by James Robertson.
After replying to the post as follows i have a few additions to the culture change and the tools.
James i completely agree with you on the subject, as Marcella stated “Tools are tools” and that is what they are designed to do, Server us.
As i have noticed, during the long hours of IBF24, we have a will to push the organisation forward using the intranet but have forgot to experiment.
The culture today is build build build and the expectation of most of the organisations is to get results by what they envision will be the correct tool.
I disagree, pushing tools as experiments rather then de-facto new standard is a missing link in the chain. some organisations will generate value out a tool like yammer and some not. some need a good set of wikie’s and some can do like IKEA and only use it for the internal company jargon.
But how can you tell if a new technology will solve a problem that might not even exist?
I Like Richards idea of bottom-up social activity without top-down, if you give the people the ability to put social tools and let them push it a bit to see the traction they get, when they are adopted widely you need to integrate them to the fabric. this approach will be similar to the natural approach you have in business, from many startups only a few mature to big businesses.
Jams has responded with the following
@Yuval, truth be told, I get frustrated constant “pilots” of tools like Yammer, blogs and wikis. There’s a difference between true experimentation, and deployments that little-or-no chance of success. Harsh words I know! But there’s plenty of experience to draw on now about how to be successful at these things, so I’m saddened by organisations repeating the same mistakes over and over again…
The idea behing bottom up is less an experiment but more of a culture change driven from the employee’s rather then the governing the solution. the worst kind of governing is the one you describe, the constant pilot with no end in sight, this situation is inacceptable regardless of the amount of information available.
The culture of an organisation is usually set and alive, it will be a hard task to just suggest a new behaviour and make it the new culture, no prise in the world ever made that change happen.
The best solution is, in my opinion, to enable the employees to choose solutions and implement them in their department, set a time and goal to get this done and used and from there suggest it to the rest of the organisation if this was successful. if this never clicked you can trash it with minimal organisational noise and minimal implementation.
The selection should be guided by management as a controlling entity in the process and not as a deciding entity thus enabling the employees to choose and commit to the solution.
A solution choice should make sense, and by sense i mean be selected based on more the just features. a selection of a tool should be based on its implementations. lessons are important to explore but they also dont necessarily paint the right picture of the product as it has 2 sides to that tango.
On the other side of the trench (the far side) you will have the dropped solution.
When employee get dropped a social network or a social workspace and told “use this” you will get varying results with many projects going astray. so we know that this develops antagonism and under utilisation, unless the product meets the needs and culture of the company and it then turns to success.
To sum the whole thing up
You can’t change corporate culture using social tools but you can give tools aiding the corporate culture and business.
Great Intranets
After a day in ibf24 from ibf I was chugging along until Jonathan Phillips contacted me through Twitter. we had a nice discussion about the implementation of intranets, is the budget the main factor in determining if the project will be a success or are there more factors.
My take was that it is not just budget; although budget does set the tone and can influence the size it is still not the deciding factor. You can do amazing things on the smallest budget if you keep the focus of the goals and implement them rigorously, for example i will take WWF intranet, which is a combination of Google Apps and a CMS.
During the 24 hrs which i partaken in only a few (10) of them we were exposed to many intranets of organisations, it was like having a door open to the heart of other organisations and check to see how they are doing things. the good thing about this was you got to see some shoe string operations with amazing implementations when it comes to the adaptability of the intranet to the users and some major brands with intranets that seem to be inactive or lonely.
During our discussion Jonathan also pointed me to his blogpost describing the characteristic of a successful intranet and asked me to respond.
This is my response to Jonathan’s post.
I will start with the definition of Great, i believe it lacks the context and thus encompasses things that are cultural and things that are technological.
Important and significant is only a valid point if the intranet is doing its job in delivering the content in a manner that is useful and engaging. When this happens you get a site that is important and significant to the company, only if users use it it is important and this is a product not a goal.
This logic applies to Wonderful, First Rate, very good, remarkable and consequential, this is not something you can target when implementing a service nor when maintaining it. It could be of extraordinary powers, very admirable, unusual and considerable in degree, power, intensity. these things can be planed but usually cost much if the system we are replacing is great and likeable.
For references I will list the Characteristics Jonathan pointed
1. An open, multi-way communication vehicle: Top Down, Bottom Up, Peer-to-Peer
2. A facilitator of enterprise collaboration
3. An executor of business transactions
4. A tool that positively impacts every job in your company
5. A gateway to business knowledge
6. A digital reflection of the values of the company
7. Serves to build enterprise community
8. Transparent governance, management and strategy
9. An engaging space
10. Available where your employees need it
I agree with all of the other items, they are the corner stone of the intranet in my opinion, but the one thing i want to talk about here is how do you achieve this.
There is an illusion that all these characteristics relate to a single entity and thus translate this to a single product to solve the problem.
This is nice if you have a very limited team with a non-diverse need. If that is the case you can probably suffice with a good WordPress implementation and be done with it.
Most cases are not this easy and require a more complex environment to facilitate the users needs.
The question is of how we assemble this ménage of solutions? Do we turn to an all encompassing solution that has the potential to flop and make the whole intranet look like a joke? do we assemble it with products?
Who makes the decision of what product to implement and how do we know which one is the best for our users?
In my experience, the implementations I have found to be most successful were experiments in their youth. They were implemented from a need of a certain group and then spread to the organisation.
I also like to look at the economy of products in the organisation, much like a startup some products in the intranet get a lot of traction and some don’t. this economy environment lets you choose the solutions that match the crowd.
As oppose to core solutions that are there for a predefined business process our intranet is a service for the users in order to get the core business process done more effectively.
Since these are not mandatory system and they come to support the processes we have the privilege of experimenting and failing, the experiments should be like little staretups in the intranet, if they get to pitch and show value they stay if they don’t they go.
The merit of a solutions value should be based on the “Value to the user”/Cost if it is greater then 1 we are winning if it is smaller we are losing. in my personal opinion 1 is a great equilibrium for some applications.
The process i am suggesting is this:
1. Check to see what groups are using today and figure out if they are pleased or not. there could be some wiki’s and other tools lurking in the groups.
2. Let the groups experiment with the tools on the market and choose the ones to be tested.
3. Put analytic tools on the solutions tested to get the usage and let the users start working with the tools.
4. Check after a period of time what tools were used most.
5. Check to see how they helped and if they stand the merit of exposure to the whole intranet.
6. If they do seem like a good candidate to solve an unsolved problem in the organisation merge them into the intranet.
7. Check the value, rinse and repeat
This way like Lego blocks you will pick the matching tools for your people and not force them to use the technology that looked cool in the sales pitch.
if the tools are SaaS, like Yammer, then use them yourself and try to get people to send emails to you with the success stories from those tools.
On another note, this method holds some problems in it that will be present whenever we dont go with the single entity approach, it lacks the integration between solutions. this is the one thing that is a requirement on the developers to tailor the integration and find the solution for interoperability when there is no standard available.
This will be the biggest hurdle but it is still not as big as picking the wrong software for your users, some of the SaaS give a great solution as they integrate to the dashboard’s and websites easily.
Oh just something from the ibf24 twitter feed, intranet in 3 months is not a valid response, 3 months for the WCM might be ok but development of the product does not stop here.
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