Library clips

This post elaborates on wikis and office 2.o…how an online office may change your personal desktop to a personal website view.

Before you read on please read the previous two posts:
wiki and EDMS
wikis, EDMS and office 2.0

Access, permissions, collaborating, track changes, version history

We left off saying that with office 2.0, wordprocessing files would be webpages, not files…and the the wordprocessor application would be able to store version history and allow you to share your URL with people for communal editing. We also would hope for it to have all the benefits of red mark-up to track text changes.

Since version control and communal editing and access of a document (sharing) is done within the office 2.0 application, the EDMS (Electronic Document Management system) is no longer needed for this function
…so then what will an EDMS have that is unique compared to a folder directory.

I’m refering to fundamental features…like mentioned before an EDMS can store metadata, do full-text or fielded searching, do reporting, etc…

NOTE: we no longer need a share drive as the sharing is enabled in the application itself (EDMS or wiki)…and the document permissions are set by the document service itself eg. online spreadsheet.

Folders and files vs. Web pages and links

Since office 2.0 is online based, we don’t have to have the folder and files metaphor, usually if you are looking for the project ABC folder, navigate to this folder and click on it, instead what could happen is this folder can instead be a webpage (a wiki page), and this wiki page will contain links to the document URL’s (instead of files).

The wiki (I guess the c: drive or “My Documents”) that this wiki page is on can have a link to the sitemap this way you can click straight to a document (similar to MSWindows Explorer or a file tree in an EDMS).
The homepage can also list other wonderful things like blog content and favourite links, news…you see, now that it is a website and not a folder, you can take advantage of the web real estate and make it a project portal.

Anyway, each time you click on a new wiki page, it is like clicking into a folder, on that wiki page will be a list of links to all the documents.

Also since your folders are wiki pages, you can invite people to share a wiki page (you set the permissons, read-only, read/write, etc…). This means you are inviting someone into your c: drive, but we probably won’t have c: drives, it will just be inviting someone to see a part of your server space.

If you give people read/write access to one of your personal folders (wiki page), then they can edit this wiki page or even make a new wiki page (I guess you can’t restict making new pages)…people could add their own documents to the wiki page (folder).

Or perhaps they can just have read-only access to your wiki page, but they have read/write access to a document (eg. writely) listed in this wiki page…if they were to delete a document (which can also be a level of permissions, this would mean it will be deleted for good).

NOTE: the wiki is acting as a repository for documents, these documents are links…but the wiki also doubles up as a full-fledged website.

What I like about it is a wiki page is acting like a folder, that is holding links to office 2.0 URL’s, but besides acting like a folder is also a webpage which means you can dress it up with text and images.

My Documents 2.0

Lets put it another way what if a wiki was a replacement for “My Documents”, or as an alternative…instead of your “My Documents” containing folders and files, it could just be webpages linking to webpages.
That is, each folder would be a wiki page, and each file would be a link (eg. online spreadsheet) in the wiki page…this means your whole “My Documents” is one big wiki.

Like now there will be 2 ways to get to a webpage
eg. open your online spreadsheet document from the application itself…or open the wiki, navigate to your wiki page using the sitemap on your wiki homepage, and choose the online spreadsheet link.

So, everyone’s “My Documents” or server space is a wiki, the wiki pages are folders, the files are links (to office 2.0 documents) displayed in the wiki page.

Also to note is the same document can live in multiple folders (wiki pages) on your server space, ie. the same document can be linked to from any webpage…after all they are just URL’s (at the moment we use shortcuts to achieve this).

NOTE: some of your documents could even live in other peoples wikis, some of your wiki pages (folders) could be part of a group wiki, etc…re-mixing the desktop.

If I choose to share (turn on communal editing for a guest) one of my office 2.0 documents and also share the wiki page (folder) it is in, then I’m giving someone access to part of my server space where they can open a folder (wiki page) and edit a document (eg. online word document).
I’d have to be careful of the access I give others to my wiki page, I may not want them to add or delete documents (URL links). Even if they did delete a link to an online spreadsheet, it is not going to delete the original…I hope…perhaps only the owner can do this.
Besides adding/deleting a link in a wiki page (folder) they may also have access to edit the text or images in the wiki page…it’s not just a folder it is a web page.

In theory if everyone in the enterprise turned on their “My Documents wiki” to at least read-only and set it to invite all (public URL), then we could all connect our “My Documents”…an enterprise desktop webosphere.

NOTE: you could also have a permisson where a certain person won’t even know a document exists (this is lower than “read-only”, it is “no-see”), and of course these permissions can be set for different wiki pages for different people with different access levels.

NOTE: I wrote this post about a month ago and then this week something interesting happened, Jotspot 2.0 was released, and it indeed is more than just a wiki.
It also allows you to make pre-defined pages, such as shared spreadsheets and calendars, and also file sharing.

I was thinking of wiki pages as folders that are web pages (so inside the folder you can have text and images, perhaps describing the contents of the folder)…and on these wiki pages are links to office 2.0 documents.
But Jotspot 2.0 seems to have office 2.0 services such as online spreadsheets actually created within the wiki page…so now a wiki page is not just a web page, it can be a spreadsheet, a calendar entry, etc…

This is really an advancement, at the moment in an Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS) you can store, for eg, excel files, but you cannot create them, ie, the EDMS doesn’t have a built in spreadsheet creator.
It seems with JotSpot 2.0, the creation, storage, collaboration, version controlling, sharing is done within the one service…ie. you can create a spreadsheet in the same system you are storing it in

…an office 2.0 suite within a wiki.

[ADDED: I just a quick look at CentralDesktop, see the tour…it seems to be an EDMS, with some web 2.0 savvy features.]

[ADDED: I just heard that Zoho Writer has real-time collaborative editing…see others.]

[ADDED: It seems an online word processor can track changes, set permissions, set communal editing, document version history…and I guess what it also does is store the documents…ie. each user has a DMS within the service such as online word, online spreadsheets, online presentations, etc…
Now if the online word processor is installed at a server level then those documents that are set for at least read-only access will be available in one document management system for all users.

So a staff member could open up the online wordprocessor and see all documents that all users have chosen to share…the online wordprocessor stores the documents in its own DMS, instead of using Windows.

Same goes with online spreadsheets, online presentations, online (web) email, etc…if each service itself has its own DMS then there must be a way to simply join them up into a DMS suite. Since Zoho are setting up office 2.0, perhaps the DMS in each product could be joined into one DMS.

Then we could search/browse any document format, by any user in the one repository…OK I’ve hit a block, how are documents organised, my theory leads to everyone’s personal folders coming together into one mesh.
So the DMS only exists when we merge everyone’s personal folders containing documents, the DMS itself doesn’t create folders.

But then what if you work on a project with others, maybe all participants can use the same folder structure template in their personal area, so when their accounts are joined in the DMS there is a clean folder structure.]

Attensa has released a beta of Attensa for Outlook 1.5

- articles are ranked based on your reading behaviour (AttentionStream data)…this is the priority view
(some of the analysis is based on: time, frequency, clicked, ignored, deleted)
- the favourites view ranks feeds in order according to your reading behaviour
- the ususal date view
- read by feed or river of news
- slider that allows you to control how much contents you see for each post on your front page
- hot keys
- feed directory
- create search feeds from various engines
- handles enclosures (audio/video feeds eg. podcasts)
- tag feeds and posts
- synch with other attensa RSS Readers
- publish to your blog

Check out the screen shots.

For more on this check out the guide (mind you this is one of the best instruction guides I’ve read).

Other Players:
Newsgator, IntraVnews, blogbot (synchs with Bloglines), inclue!

Another release (coming soon) is the Attensa Feed Appliance…an enterprise RSS Server (set-up and manage RSS feed usage)

- RSS proxy server, integration with Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory
- Create feed sets for individuals or groups
- secure feeds (behind the firewall)
- Feeds are synchronized across the different Attensa RSS Readers via the Microsoft RSS Platform
(So if you use all the RSS Readers: the desktop viewer (attensa application), the online reader, the outlook reader and the mobile reader…all articles read, deleted, etc…will be updated and synched.)
- Stores all the feeds in one place (server), therefore each PC doesn’t have to have a version of the feed

Not sure if this is also an RSS creator, that is, enabling you to build RSS feeds for anything…plus manage, deploy, synchronise and track statistics via the RSS Server.

Also are any of these companies thinking about a user created feed directory, ala BB:Library.

RSS is shaping up to perhaps turn enterprise communications on its head:
- Pull stuff to yourself instead of email pushing
- RSSify anything eg. when a computer finishes a task, get it to RSS you
- anything you currently have an email alert for, RSSify it
- read updates in email on your desktop, on the web, on your mobile (all synched)
- reduce information overload via attention tracking in the background
- create a feed library (subscribe to OPML of feed sets)

Other Players:
Newsgator Enterprise Server
KnowNow Enterprise Syndication

More:
Attensa Goes Corporate: Enterprise RSS
Attensa for Outlook 1.5 Public Beta - RSS reader prioritizes RSS feeds based on what’s important to you
Attensa and KnowNow on RSS in the Enterprise Podcast
White Papers
Vendors: Vendors Experimenting with Delivery Model for Enterprise RSS Readers
Vendors: Attensa Mounts Enterprise Challenge to NewsGator with AES:RSS
Vendors: KnowNow Enterprise Syndication Server Reviewed by InfoWorld
Enterprise Success Story #1

coComment is now becoming the one and all tool for blogosphere comments.

Presently I use del.icio.us to tag comments I make elsewhere, I could also further organise these comments with tags eg. del.icio.us/username/mycomments+folksonomy

…I also re-syndicate the feed (del.icio.us/username/mycomments) onto my blog sidebar.

All this can be done with coComments, plus the social benefits are more explicit and focused as coComments is a specially designed bookmark/tagging system for blog comments, whereas del.icio.us is a generic social tagging system…also to note is that both these are folksonomies as anyone can tag the same URL (global tagging).

Basically it allows you to bookmark and tag the blog post you have commented on, and then discover others who have also commented on a blog post…or discover other commented blog posts with the same tag you used for some of your commented blog posts, or check out the comments a user is making in the blogosphere.

But it’s not just a bookmark collection another feature is that once you bookmark a blog post, you can see any new comments added to that blog post, this allows you to track the conversation, as a result of bookmarking it…it also offers a feed to track it in your RSS Reader.
This feature has recently been enhanced, because now it shows all subsequent comments to a blog post regardless if the commenter is registered with coComments…this is something that co.mments and Commentful had that was unique, but now it seems coComments has this and more…check it out.

Plus, now you don’t have to comment on a blog post in order to bookmark it in coComments, you can simply bookmark any blog post you like to track comments…in the end it is a comment tracker and a repository.

NOTE: If you are into just plain and simple tracking of any comments from a blog post, co.mments is a great tool, but if you want to do this and more, then coComments is your choice.

New features

Comment crawling
- now tracks every comment in a blog post

Enhanced tracking
- now enables you to track blog posts you haven’t participated in

Outside comments
- if a blog post doesn’t have a comments box, you can use coComments to leave a comment, of course your comment will only appear in the coComments service…this reminds me of Webride.

Filter by type
- organise your bookmarks by type eg. blogs, forums, etc…

Via:
CoComment Adds CoCoCrawler, YouTube Support
CoComment upgrades, now worth using

Similar:
commentful : track comments in one place

TechLifeWeb has a great post on using a del.icio.us tag RSS feed to collect mp3’s and then subscribe to this tag in your podcatcher…from the post:

“With a little bit of work up front you can set it up so all you have to do is save the link to the mp3 file in your del.icio.us account and it will transfer to your mp3 player the next time you sync it to your computer.”

Use whatever tag you like to save these audio files eg. “myaudio”, but when you recall them use this URL:

http://del.icio.us/yourdelicioususername/system:filetype:mp3+myaudio

The RSS feed from this URL has enclosures, meaning it turns it on as a podcasting feed…more from the post:

“The beauty here is the when you use the system:filetype:mp3 feature of del.icio.us, the rss feed is magically converted to include the mp3 files as enclosures. This is what your podcatcher needs to be able to go out and grab those mp3 files for you.”

You’ve done all the hard work. Next time you find an mp3 file, all you have to do is save the link to del.icio.us and tag it…when your client searches for new podcasts it will look to your del.icio.us account as well and grab any new links you’ve tagged. Sync and enjoy!”

The old hack is to run your del.icio.us tag feed through Feedburner to make it podcast enabled, see del.icio.us podcasts with Feedburner.

Similar:
del.icio.us system tags

There is a bit of blog conversation lately on expert locators…similar to a staff directory, but more so based on the yellow pages theme of finding people by interest/skill.
It is no doubt about the enterprise benefits from this tool (especially if it is kept current), but the main point of interest has been how are the skills/interests derived (organisational or social…more).

There are many tools to supplement this type of information rather than being lazy and broadcasting an email…”do you know anyone with this skill for this job”…we don’t need to ask if we already know, or we can simply find it ourselves, this is the idea at hand.
As the Horne Daniels Group states it goes beyond who knows who, or who is good at what, but who has experience with this subject matter in these circumstances, ie, subject expertise in context.

Firstly the more social an enterprise is the more we know who the experts are…like any type of socialising, the more you share and network the more you know about people. If km 2.0 tools are the norm staff will be sharing the type of information not normally teased out.
This will become part of our daily information just like reading the newspaper or company daily news, but now we will absorb daily news generated by all staff members (read internal blogs, social bookmarks, wiki’s…all bottom-up tools)…so besides knowing about the external world, or enterprise news according to managers, we will share and read internal news according to staff. How would you ever know there is a staff member in your “India” office who is a champion in wikis…unless that person had an enterprise soapbox (eg. blog, social bookmarks) we may never know.

As a result of this sharing culture, when it comes to locating an expert we may not even need to consult a directory as our daily staff news has made us aware of who’s good at what (I’m not doing away with the staff directory, I’m just emphasising that even before you get there you may already have a notion of who the experts are).

This is exactly the culture or attitude anecdote suggest:

“We all know that social networks are important for locating expertise. The sense I get, however, from people writing on this topic is that effort in building the connection is only needed at the time when the expertise is sought. This couldn’t be further than the truth. To be good at finding expertise you need to be connected before you need the expertise. If you are not the social butterfly you need to get out your butterfly net and find yourself one (or a whole collection). Join communities, know the connectors (here are some ways to finding connectors) and get good at noticing expertise.”…of course social network analysis is the most obvious tool in this scenario.

Another benefit of a sharing culture in an enterprise is that the perpetual transfer of information in a network results in people using it as knowledge, this is empowering (we always learnt when we were young that sharing was a good thing), more from Luis:

“Notice that I am talking about finding an answer and not giving an answer as I think that the main reason for that happening is because people not only want to get the answer they also want to build a relationship with that expert so that through nurturing and maintaining those relationships they themselves could become experts in those subjects at some point in time.

I feel that is where the whole power of expertise locators reside, not so much on finding the experts but actually on engaging and interacting with them so that you, too, could become one at some point in time and somehow you can free up the experts to deal with more complicated problems.”

I see the future of the staff directory similar to a service like ziki…all the staff members social interactions can be re-syndicated in the one profile space.
eg. all the blogs a staff member publishes or contributes to, social bookmarks and social bookmark groups, wikis they contribute to, etc…
And of course add the essentials like name, email, IM, background, interests/skills (self tags), projects worked on, countries lived in, companies worked for, etc…

NOTE: Another approach to assembling a profile or personal dashboard profile is if that dashboard is the same place you publish the content eg. PeopleAggregator (the blog, social bookmarks, photos are all modules in the one product). Personally I like to use the blog platform of my choice, same with bookmarks, etc…that’s why services like ziki, tagalag, peoplicious, and people feeds are great as you can create and connect up your own dashboard thanks to RSS.
What I do like about services like PeopleAggregator, MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, TagWorld is adapting it to a group feel eg. for communites of practice…and that’s exactly what you get out of complore, GROU.PS, and the killer Zimbio. All this is precicely what KM 2.0 newsmastering is all about, connecting it together…see more on KM 2.0.

Back to it…

In a people finder/social sharing network like Ziki (or the ultimate Ziki) if we are looking for an expert we could browse the aggregate community tag cloud, even limit this tag cloud to feed types such as, posts (blogs), social bookmarks, wikis, Reading Lists, etc…if we still can’t find an expert we can search the index of the whole community, and even limit this to a feed type.

I suppose a quicker way is to search in the skills/interests field which if like the future of ziki or the current fringe contacts prototype, is finding experts by the tags they have used to describe themselves or the tags others have used to describe them.
NOTE: At the moment in Ziki you can only tag yourself.

Another option is to browse/search groups by tag, just as you search individuals by tag.

Finding Experts

Thus far there are 3 points covered:

1. a knowledge sharing culture will open you up to experts on a daily basis
(the more daily sharing and socialising you do…the more people have an outlet to share thoughts, discussions, and collect stuff according to interests…the more you will know about them…it’s ingrained in your daily operations).

2. using social networks to induce and enable sharing provides a whole lot of information about people, this is stuff people are publishing, collecting, discussing, etc…
This information can be browsed by tag or searched to locate experts (we are finding experts via the internal sharing culture network of information).

Similar to this is mining a DMS (Document Management System) or email system and matching document subject values with the owners of the documents.

3. Yellow pages - staff directory by interest/skill…a system where people tag themselves and allow others to tag them creates a deeper perspective.

More detail…

Staff tagging themselves and each other is an explicit way of registering experts, it is a social version of a traditional staff directory.

As mentioned a bottom-up network of social sharing services will empower people and also allow you to get to know people and come to understand the skills/interest certain people have according to the content in their space…ingrained pre-emptive expertise.
One module of this would be social bookmarks, Cogenz is suggesting that finding experts is easy by browsing for tag names for that skill/interest, thus locating some users.

A system that extracts keywords from the DMS to generate a taxonomy, also extracts the names on those documents, so the names are also organised by topic. From the anecdote paper:

“…then extracting people’s names from the documents and associating them to particular categories. With this information one can find people who know about particular topics.

The advantage of this approach is that the expertise information is automatically created; it doesn’t require people to update their own expertise information (such as a persona page) and the results reflect what a person actually does rather than what they say they do.”

This can be extended to extracting keywords in social software, or even browsing user tags…similar to tag searching blogs, bookmarks, documents and email (tag your own), then find experts who are using these tags…I guess blogrolls or Reading Lists could also come into this equation.

This same paper also notes the traditional staff directory (fielded search), but the IBM Bluepages (aka Fringe Contacts) provides additional context:
“Upon finding a person one can then view that person’s reporting chain (who they report to and their boss’s boss and so on, all the way up to the CEO), their peers, and the person’s direct reports. This information is important in a large organisation because one regularly receive requests to assist and provide information from unfamiliar people. By understanding what part of the organisation they are from BluePages provides additional context to guide a response.”…here’s a screenshot.

Another way mentioned in the Horne Daniels Group Paper is:
“…to measure the number of hours billed by a particular practitioner on matters categorized by a firm’s subject matter taxonomy.”. Even to combine this with a self ranking system against a selection of topics.

Dave Pollard points to a expert locator product called Illumino…this allows you to create groups, you can then search the PC’s of the people in your group (via desktop search tools). If there is a winning match the requested person will get an automatic IM, they can then choose to send the requestor those files.

It also can search in emails of people in your group, if the subject term matches people names in the email fields or body text then the requested person again will get an automatic IM, and can then introduce the requestor to the expert.

This all sounds like the kind of thing an attention file would be handy for…find experts based on where their attention lies.
This can also extend to social attention…include what other people think of them (people tagging) and people that are similar to them based on SNA, data mining content such as, EDMS, emails and PC’s, and also similar people via searching and browsing social networks.

More

Qunu is a module that Ziki could add to it’s service…browse the people tag cloud (this is tags people apply to themselves) and it returns a list of experts for the subject matter, then all you do is IM that expert…instant help…see more.
Like most social systems it has ratings, related tags…all the right stuff to help you filter for the person for the job.

I guess a further idea is to document chat logs into a knowledge base, so you can browse for possible answers before asking an expert to chat.

If you think your an expert and have the time, make a button for your blog that will list up to 5 skills.

Also check out FAQQLY, a social network based around Question and Answer.
This service allows people to ask you questions (called FAQ), but it also allows you to ask questions (called Helps)…it also doubles up as a sharing system (called Shares)…ie. stuff I have to share like a book…kind of like a library.
Each user profile has tags describing themselves…you can search for experts by tag, or search for a user name.
For each user you can view their FAQ and perhaps find an answer to a similar question in the archives, you can add a comment to a question, or simply just ask a brand new question…give HELPS allows you to browse questions the user is asking…send a NOTE (you have your own email out/in box)…add a user as a Friend.

What I like about the self applied tags is that not only can people find you by tag, but they can then click that tag and view past answered questions by topic…without these categories/tags you wouldn’t be able to browse with some context (the way this works is that when you answer a question you assign it to a tag/s).
I’d like to see this aggregated…browse a tag and see all questions within this tag across all users.
There are feeds for both answered and unanswered questions, I’d like to see these for each user tag as well…and as I suggested above you could aggregate all questions from all users by tags, then we could follow questions within a tag across all users.

Only thing missing is IM like Qunu, and re-syndicated content like Ziki…I’d love to see a mashup of Ziki, Qunu and FAQQLY.

Related:
Creating Our Own Peer-to-Peer Expertise-Finder
Collaborative Tagging and Expertise in the Enterprise
Onomi: Social Bookmarking on a Corporate Intranet
Xpertweb
ZoomInfo

[ADDED 27/07/06: Using Peoplicious to create an “ad hoc” expert group, FAQQLY Groups]

[ADDED 16/08/06: How Can You Communicate the Corporate Benefits of Enterprise 2.0 Network Effects?]