Putting the "Enterprise" in Wiki, Blog and Social Software

I enjoyed reading "Why Enterprise Software Sucks" at Signal vs. Noise. It's to the point and does a nice job of building on Khoi Vinh's note "If it Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must be Enterprise Software." That said, it also diminishes the importance of IT as a decision maker and the party responsible for managing software.

The Software Sucks post says:

We have to make the money happy and the people happy. In our market they’re the same person. In the enterprise market they are often different people in different departments in different buildings who sit at different lunch tables.

It also reflects on pleasure of designing software for what they call the Fortune 5,000,000.

So, I agree, most enterprise software may indeed suck, and therein lies the opportunity to produce great software that makes the "people" happy and, at the same time, the "people that support the people."

Software can suck in the enterprise for a variety of reasons:

- Internally built applications are often built with a premium around solving an internally identified problem rather than creating a satisfying user experience for millions of people. Given the demands on IT, I can see how this happens, and can see the justification of it. Furthermore, as the applications age and IT "administrations" roll over, an ever changing approach to building applications internally can produce stratification in both how they work and how they look.

- Commercially built "enterprise process" applications are often built for high end problems (ERP, CRM, etc.) and, as a result may have low-end interfaces. Time and money are invested in algorithms, intelligence and optimization vs. the few people in the enterprise that actually have to operate the interface. I had this experience with a high end financials package.

- Commercially built "enterprise collaboration" applications all too often built with a premium on checking off all the features boxes, without attention to how those features come together both create an appealing experience, and solve real problems. Often, these applications (many blog and wiki type approaches included), inadvertently create information silos rather than information web. (see my earlier post: Collaboration Tools - Are Information Silos a Problem?

As Greg indicated, your intranet should Work like the Web, but do it an a manner that is sensitive to enterprise user and enterprise IT needs.

Since our beginning, we've designed Enterprise Wiki and Blog software that meets the needs of all stakeholders. This means great interface design, great data design, AND software that is easy to install, easy to manage, and fits easily in enterprise environments. This philosophy earned TeamPage the best rating (vs. competitors) in each class (Features, Ease of Use, Management, Scalability, Security and Value) in the InfoWorld Test Center Wiki Roundup review at the beginning of this year.

On one hand, we need to support the small business owner that just wants to install wiki software without worrying about also installing, configuring, managing, securing and updating a web server, a database server and other components. On the other hand, we need to fit with and scale to environments with hundreds of thousands of users and millions of records.

While at KMWorld two weeks ago, I was called to visit one of the world's leading manufacturers. They also have one of the world's biggest corporate directories (high hundreds of thousands of records). An IT manager called our HQ and wanted to ask a question about directory integration. I was only a few miles away at the time and decided to rent a car and zip over to his office after the show.

After years of using an open source wiki, they are faced with needs to permission filter and secure the content. They spent a lot of time and money trying to make the open source wiki work with their directory and permission environment, but have come up short.

They first tried one of our commercial Wiki competitors whose solution introduces certain administrative inconveniences, enough to encourage them to look for a better answer and find Traction. I arrived and after having a look at the situation, we connected his Traction server to their Active Directory server and optimized it within 20 minutes (maybe less).

"Enterprise" Wiki software has found its way, via the people, into many companies big and small. A failure to consider the needs of ALL "people" will shortchange the real users when push comes to shove and its time to grow the deployment from running "under the desk" to the data center.

While there is a lot of talk about Enterprise 2.0, most of it sounds a lot like Web 2.0 deployed in the enterprise without considering what's different in the enterprise. When bringing Web 2.0 into the enterprise, the following problems must be solved:

- Easy installation, so that pilot groups can quickly spawn new E2.0 systems anywhere from under the desk to the heart of the data center.

- Directory integration to gather users and groups from an Active Directory or LDAP directory.

- Time line driven audit trail for Edits, Page Names, and other meta data changes including when labels/tags are added or removed, when content is e-mailed out and so on.

- Permission controls by workspace which, at minimum, determine who can read, author, comment, and post directly vs. post drafts for moderation. For more on moderation, see our latest press release about Traction 3.8 and Collaboration at the Edge (with more to follow).

- Capability to provide some structure and UI scaffolding to aid adoption and familiarity, while providing easy tools to build on and modify that structure in order to meet a group's unique or changing needs. See my post Making Wikis Work in Business - Leading Users to the Water.

- Beyond Social Tagging, a capability to label (tag), link and comment across differently permissioned workspaces. This set of capabilities allows enterprises big and small to leverage content across spaces while providing for the ability to make certain workspaces more private because of legal, intellectual property, or cultural issues.

- Permission filtering for all views as well as tag clouds, search, and RSS feeds.

- Equal access, including a mobile device interface for users with small Treo or Blackberry style browsers.

- And, finally, Search that Does not Suck.

Many of these are hard problems to solve. But if Enterprise issues weren't challenging, then most enterprise software wouldn't suck!

Besides great UI and simple manageability, Enterprise Wikis, Enterprise Blogs, Enterprise Social Software - whatever you call it - has to deal with permissions, and do so without losing the network effect we observe in Web 2.0.

The Traction TeamPage platform uniquely addresses these, and many other, enterprise realities. It achieves this end while also providing just enough structure and scaffolding to encourage adoption, while also leaving room for emergence.

In his A Web that Works blog, David Rendall of NHS Orkney writes:

One of the areas in which Traction and Newsgator have got it so right is in understanding the specific needs of a corporate environment. When I first started using FeedDemon (version 1.3 I think?), I could immediately see the potential benefits for other people in my organisation. But having spent quite a while as a sysadmin, I could also see that it wouldn’t work in a broad rollout ...

... my next step was to find software which our staff could use to generate internal newsfeeds for people to use with NGES. I messed about with various (free and not-free) options. Again, there was a certain basic set of features which were absent from most products because they didn’t understand the large-orgnisation mindset:

• Account management integrated with internal network.
• Scalable to fairly large numbers of areas of interest, while keeping a common navigation system.
• Fine-grained delegation of rights.
• Low level of sysadmin involvement.
• End-users create the structure.

And that’s what led us to use Traction. Wordpress or whatever is great when you’re doing a wee externally-accessible blog, but when we tried to use it on a grander scale it was just too difficult to manage. Sharepoint is far too difficult for end-users to use, doesn’t scale well and requires an awful lot of admin effort. Traction, like NGES, just intuits what’s important for us. - Understanding the "corporate" mindset, David Rendall, Oct 4, 2007