Yuval Ararat

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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:

  1. Create New Object
  2. 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.

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.

Enterprise collaboration

When Enterprises are faced with the need to maintain knowledge the jolt action is to call the Knowledge Manager, get some practices in place and buy some expensive Collaboration environment with all the bells and whistles and send emails to all employees with incentives to put information on it, usually some form of a long term competition.

This is great! but only if you get the people on board after the competition is over. most cases you get a half updated system with some information there.

But how do you solve the problem oh lord of the data? he has no answers.

I call darwin! lo and behold people do transfer knowledge in the current environment, they use some mediators like email groups or some other web tools that existed or were in place long ago. some time it could be missing all together and then you need to see how the individual gets his share of the guru. the idea is first to observe the company, it made it up to here some how.

From this point you have some pattern of behaviour, some form of information flow patterns that match the culture of the company.

Here we have another jolt, lets mechanise it and use some tool that they will need to use to do the same form of pattern but through the tool. this will destroy the pattern and will eventually create a new pattern so the whole observation period will be repeated.

The trick is to eavesdrop, do the FBI thing and tap the phone. yes it is easier said then done and it will be some times even impossible.

When it is possible, for example when most of the communication is done via email groups we need a way to capture and retain the groups content, representing the threads in a meaningful way and indexing the content in an extensive manner.

This method of eavesdropping will keep the information flow intact and create a knowledge base containing the real live companies information.

If we have not eavesdropped we would create an interference, assuming all communication is done by email and we mandate a requirement of adding a certain email manually (i know we can automate most of this and even capture it but i am making an example) you will get slippedge and thus only partial information will be stored in the email.

But if we want to entice people to stop using word and email as their main way of transferring information and move them to a collaborative environment, some place where you post your documents and have wiki pages that enable you to edit information as a group, what will be the means to drive the workers to that place?

In my experience it takes time to change the habit unless you create a physical limitation for the other communication way, lets say you block word documents on internal emails, and give the same security that a personal email gives.

Solution should always keep the same capabilities that make it the preferred choice or else it is doomed to be useless, if the security in personal email is not kept in our document management system no one will use it as they will feel expose.

The way to judge the solution is the same as any software solution which is purchased to enhance the organisation, we need to look at the benefits each feature brings to the organisation and not who has more, matching these behaviors and features to the organisation’s will produce the best result. If you can POC the solutions from the companies then do that for a couple of months and even do a face-off between the final candidates.

Social Media is proving to be a useful tool to companies when interacting with the world, make it a great tool for internal communication.

enterprise focused startups?

I find myself gazing at the headline above and thinking, man this is impossible!

Why would i have such a thought? i am suppose to be positive! bright future! look at the full glass! but alas, i giggle at the thought. its not that i think this space is not potentially loaded. its just that enterprises way of carrying business will probably kill any cash starving startup, signing a contract and paying isnt always the top priority and they know it. Enterprise conglomerates use big companies because they know they wont be able to do business with a startup unless it is a small running business with some cashflow.

The cases i hear about tend to be in the Social space where its all experimental and there are only now some companies that are marching in with social offerings. look at the collaboration space and the story of Atlassian. it took them quite a long time to make the big jump to the real enterprise size companies.

But i see it more as a david and goliath story where they need to work together, not rock each other to death, and david’s agility gives a great value to the goliath needs. its just a matter of trust, will goliath ever trust david to survive the starvation and the hardships of the way? if you can only make goliath believe in you…

Even Larry Dignan is under the impression that the startups for enterprises are not the best bet from the IT personal in the enterprise

But a lot of the stuff you’ve seen this week either has little enterprise use, is too raw or would get you fired if you seriously pitched buying anything from said startup.

Any thought on how to become the next Yammer?